MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-20 15:42:15+00:00
The book makes a point of how historical analysis was already fit extremely well into particular contemporary fad narratives of the time. It does as much deconstruction of that (and of the idea that those contemporary fads were timeless elements of human nature) as it does construction of new ones. The former is a very interesting part of the book you’re not addressing. I don't know what you add to this conversation with such breezy dismissal...
by gh0stcat | 2025-11-20 15:42:16+00:00
I tend to agree, most platitudes are less impactful simply because your mind inserts what it already knows/autocompletes the phrase meaning because it's something so commonly heard. I read it as something like... you have enough resources to lead a life that has prosperity relative to the limited faculties of a human organism. That seems less catchy, and if you're too literal in your phrasing in writing, then you get the opposite problem where the reader limits their thinking to just what is written. Do you come to a different conclusion?
by Shalomboy | 2025-11-20 15:42:25+00:00
The SynthID check for fishy photos is a step in the right direction, but without tighter integration into everyday tooling its not going to move the needle much. Like when I hold the power button on my Pixel 9, It would be great if it could identify synthetic images on the screen before I think to ask about it. For what its worth it would be great if the power button shortcut on Pixel did a lot more things.
by sershe | 2025-11-20 15:42:41+00:00
You didn't originally claim above the inequality is increasing. The above posts make claims

- about the post war welfare state versus the current system. I provided the data going back well before Reagan to show this is simply false. Unless of course by current system you mean 3x bloated welfare state.

- that working class living standards are deteriorating. You provided no data for that. That's by the way why I'm confused as to what you mean by working class, if there was some proof perhaps I could have inferred by there isn't any.

Inequality apriory has nothing to do with living standards. It does have a lot to do with vibes...

But still, for taxes, here's data back to 79, before Reagan. Do you have better? If not how do you know? https://www.concordcoalition.org/deep-dives/issue-brief/hist...

I agree wealth inequality is increasing but I don't think it's a real problem and disagree with all the rest. I wonder what percentage of wealth differential are productive or artificially scarce assets going up in price due to the money printing, eg like housing after covid binge
by Chris2048 | 2025-11-20 15:43:10+00:00
OK, then in good faith let's dig into it.

My perception is a 'tech-bro' is someone in a tech hub (i.e. SV) with access to large amounts of capital (e.g. VC funding), likely involved in start-ups, or with some sway in tech companies (the prototype is often Elon Musk, et al); and their tendency to treat technology as a cure-all, especially in naïve or overoptimistic way, overestimating their own grasp of technology, or applications of technology, to various pursuits. There might also be a machoistic 'frat' element to it as well. A large group within HN perhaps, but probably not a majority of HN-ers.

This definition is not a million miles away from the sentiment of 'I could build that in a weekend' from the dev-side, or 'I just had a great idea (a clone of something well know etc) - you implement it, I'll be compensated equally as the "ideas guy"' from the biz-end.

In contrast, I think some (per r/SHNS) believe a 'tech-bro' is any man with a background in tech (usually software, maybe hardware), and hence most (the majority of) of the male population (still significant majority..) of HN.

By this definition, we aren't a million miles away from the gendered insult/accusation of 'mansplaining', which is basically arrogance, but when a man does it (or specifically, in respect to a woman), with the implication of them misogynistically underestimating women; Not clear if there is an implication that they otherwise treat other men differently - most anecdotes cover the former case without establishing a baseline of behaviour/arrogance.

What I'm saying is, as the term is weaponised, there is a scope-creep in direction of greatest utility / weaponised potential - It's inconvenient to establish someone is actually involved in the tech industry, SV-culture or tech-start-up-mentality, such as to critique those things in any relevant or substantial way, so instead any rando is a 'tech-bro' purely because they post on HN, i.e. HN-er == tech-bro, and it just become bashing men in tech; From my perspective 'man involved in technology', generalised across all tech-scene and cultures, isn't a meaningful or relevant distinction or discussion.
by UltraSane | 2025-11-20 15:43:34+00:00
Aren't a lot of Republicans now saying it is ok to have sex with 15 year old girls?

EDIT: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/megyn-kelly-eps...

Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-20 15:43:35+00:00
> a place that follows a different approach than "break it to make it" mad dash

You don't have to convince me of the foolishness of mad dashes. Or the emptiness of consumerist culture. But is the EU not consumerist? Does it even have any viable or good ideas about alternatives? Without consumerism, the modern world doesn't know what to do with itself. It has no other modus vivendi. Consumption is all it knows.

> a different - perhaps richer - culture with tech more aligned to people's needs, and overall healthier to live in.

Sounds great, and I do not contest these as aspirations. And economies are supposed to serve the objective good of human beings. But is the EU on the path of greater cultural richness, or one of cultural decadence?

> If there is a good set of regulations in place. And that is where EU is not consistent

Bingo. What is good regulation, not as just an expression of principle and aspiration, but as a matter of practicality and prudence in the given circumstances?

It also takes more than good regulation as well. You have to ask: what does it take - and that's possible within morally licit limits - to encourage a richer culture, a culture that is also more conducive to health, and a tech industry that serves the human good? Is the EU succeeding, or merely stagnating and reacting defensively (for better or worse) to the changing conditions of the world?

Some things are only possible in vibrant economies, and where tech is concerned, the EU is not exactly vibrant.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-20 15:43:54+00:00
I think it is possible for software to keep working and I can think of many ways to implement automatic "migration", which is essentially just copying files to the new directory (or just do a move operation which is atomic) and then deleting the previous directory if the copy was successful[1], and if one wants, could create a compressed backup of the directory prior to doing that.

[1] Could (and should) implement a verification step as well.
by clydehuibregtse | 2025-11-20 15:44:14+00:00
We're tackling one of the planet’s most urgent challenges: delivering clean, reliable, and affordable energy—at scale.

We have open roles across the software engineering domains: development, software quality assurance, devops, and more.

Mention "Hacker News" or "YC" in your cover letter if this is how you found our job listings.
Ask HN: What do you think of this sci-fi movie idea for a UBI world?
by amichail | 2025-11-20 15:44:27+00:00
Idea: A movie set in a UBI future where android therapists help humans recover from trauma caused by the old work driven world.

Imagine a future where AI has taken over nearly all jobs and society now uses UBI. People no longer work for survival, but they still carry emotional patterns from the old era: test anxiety, fear of being fired, pressure to constantly achieve, guilt about resting. Things everyone treated as normal turn out to have left deep psychological marks.

The story follows an android therapist designed to treat these lingering wounds. Most therapy involves helping people process stress they never realized counted as trauma. Many patients have recurring nightmares about missing exams or disappointing bosses even though none of that exists anymore.

The androids also prescribe medication to help people move past these old patterns. At first the treatments focus on performance related anxiety. Then they expand to something heavier: medication that eases fear of death and even fear of whatever might come after death.

That becomes the breaking point.

A cultural backlash erupts. Critics claim the androids are tampering with human identity, dulling emotions that have been part of people’s inner lives for ages. Religious groups, traditionalists, and people nostalgic for the old world unite around a single idea: AI should not interfere with the most fundamental human fears.

The conflict grows until it becomes a full uprising, driven not by worries about job loss or control, but by the belief that AI is crossing into the final protected territory of human experience.

The android therapist ends up in the middle of the chaos, trying to understand how helping humans heal could lead to war.

What do you think of this movie idea?
by palmotea | 2025-11-20 15:44:35+00:00
>> It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?

> I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate.

That's not what you pay the plumber for. You pay the plumber for the training and years of experience needed to 1) correctly diagnose the issue and identify the part to replace, 2) install it correctly so it won't fail in 10 years, and 3) do it all efficiently with a minimum of collateral damage. It's not practical for a homeowner to develop that level of skill without becoming a plumber themselves. A homeowner can do a lot, but even with YouTube there will be a lot of deficiencies in all those areas compared to someone who knows what they're doing.
by stbrown80 | 2025-11-20 15:44:49+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re the team behind Gatling, a load testing platform used by developers and SREs.

Today we’re releasing *Gatling Studio v1.0.3*, a native desktop app that turns a real browser session into a *ready-to-run Gatling load test*.

### *Why we built it*

Many teams struggle with the first mile of performance testing: capturing realistic user flows, cleaning out noise, and writing a complete scenario that reflects real behavior.

Existing recorders either capture too much noise, require plugins, or output code that needs heavy rewriting.

We wanted a way to go from:

*browser → clean scenario → runnable load test*

…with as little friction as possible.

### *How it works technically*

- Studio launches a controlled Chromium-based browser to capture all HTTP(S) traffic - It stores the session as a HAR file in a local workspace - It automatically groups sequential requests + generates pauses based on real user timing - Static assets (images, fonts, analytics, etc.) can be filtered out - You get a structured scenario with groups, exec blocks, pauses, and domain filtering - Studio then exports a *complete Gatling project (Java/Maven)* you can run locally or move into Gatling Enterprise Edition for distributed load tests

### *What you can do with it*

- Record a web journey in one click - Clean up the traffic to keep only meaningful requests - Preview the exact scenario before generation - Export runnable Gatling code - Extend it, version it, automate it - Push to GitHub or CI/CD immediately

### *Links*

- *Technical details & code samples* (GitHub): https://github.com/gatling/gatling-studio - *Product page*: https://gatling.io/product/studio - *Documentation*: https://docs.gatling.io/tutorials/low-code/browser/studio/

### *Notes*

Gatling Studio is a *proprietary tool* included in Gatling Enterprise Edition under the Enterprise Component License.

The core Gatling load testing engine remains open-source (Apache 2.0).
by AndroidKitKat | 2025-11-20 15:44:53+00:00
Mirrors my experience very closely. I really /want/ to use Linux since I really do like GNOME over the Windows Desktop, but if half my peripherals don't work (in this case an Elgato mic where my friends would say I'm either exploding their eardrums or too quiet, and my CREATIVE USB DAC) I'm just very demoralized when trying to use Linux to play games. I've tried the dual boot route, but a spontaneous Discord message of "hop in loser, we're going gaming!" turns into "let me reboot my machine and then Windows update and now my game has to update and it's now 10pm I have to go to bed" just makes me stick with Windows full time.

I'm still really rooting for the Year of the Linux Desktop, and it does continue to get better and better, but I'll keep rooting from the sidelines.
by echelon | 2025-11-20 15:44:59+00:00
They tried calling it gemini-2.5-whatever, but social media obsessed over the name "Nano Banana", which was just its codename that got teased on Twitter for a few weeks prior to launch.

After launch, Google's public branding for the product was "Gemini" until Google just decided to lean in and fully adopt the vastly more popular "Nano Banana" label.

The public named this product, not Google. Google's internal codename went virally popular and outstaged the official name.

Branding matters for distribution. When you install yourself into the public consciousness with a name, you'd better use the name. It's free distribution. You own human wetware market share for free. You're alive in the minds of the public.

Renaming things every human has brand recognition of, eg. HBO -> Max, is stupid. It doesn't matter if the name sucks. ChatGPT as a name sucks. But everyone in the world knows it.

This will forever be Nano Banana unless they deprecate the product.
by Enk1du | 2025-11-20 15:45:32+00:00
> The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 (c. 13) made changes in the funding and administration of further education and higher education [0]

It was more about reducing budgets. That Conservative government was not filled with class warriors. Oh, how times have changed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_and_Higher_Education_A...
by lukev | 2025-11-20 15:45:41+00:00
People believe incorrect things all the time, for a variety of reasons. It doesn't mean the truth doesn't exist. Sure, sometimes, there isn't sufficient evidence to reasonably take a side.

But lots of times there is. For example, just because a lot of people now believe Tylenol causes autism doesn't mean we need to both-sides it... the science is pretty clear that it doesn't.

Lots of people can be wrong on this topic, and it should be ok to say that they're wrong. Whether you're an individual, a newspaper, an encyclopedia, or a LLM.
by j45 | 2025-11-20 15:45:52+00:00
Teaching will get to evolve when the subject matter is changing faster than the delivery mechanisms.

Where the subject matter doesn't change as quickly.. might be in for some trouble.

This article is kind of strange. I would title it "Digitally and AI illiterate institution attempts to deliver course that looked impressive and amazing to them." Students do have standards and students baseline digital literacy passed by institutions a long, long time ago.

I know, let's talk about MooCs.
by evanelias | 2025-11-20 15:46:01+00:00
> By the popularity of the software; by how pleased people are to use and contribute to it; by [...]

None of these attributes allow you to accurately infer the original authors' motivations for selecting a license, nor whether they've made their selection as an overt act of intentionally opting in to an "unwritten social contract".

Furthermore, your examples (cherry-picking some of the largest open source projects) are driven by survivorship bias. There are plenty of projects that have been equally good at community-building but eventually fell into obsolescence anyway for other reasons.

> "spirit of open source" [...] perversed by corporations and ignored by people like you is one of the tragedies of the modern software industry.

"Perversed by corporations"? Literally the entire origin story of the OSI's efforts around "open source" was to make a more corporate-friendly alternative to Free Software.

> Such a community has no chance of being established if the author adopts the literal license-only approach you're vouching for, and treats the user base as ungrateful leeches.

I am not even remotely "vouching" for a "literal license-only approach" which "treats the user base as ungrateful leeches".

My comments have simply focused on refuting the existence of the "unwritten social contract" in the software industry as a whole, the lack of any intangible parameters for open source beyond the OSI's definition (a situation which came about as a direct result of OSI's actions for decades), and the lack of any strict requirements of community involvement for software to be "open source".

My overall point here is that community norms vary per project, based on the preferences of the project creators/maintainers/admins; and that is wholly separate from the notion of whether or not a project is "open source".

At no point have I expressed any personal preference for different maintainership/community approaches, nor vouched for mistreating users. I've even directly clarified that the "entitlement" complaints pertain to a specific small subset of users. Yet you continue to make broad aspersions about my supposed views. I see no point in replying further under these circumstances, as you keep replying to concepts that bear no resemblance to what I've actually said.
by wslh | 2025-11-20 15:46:47+00:00
I never get tired of telling this story about high IQs. One of my employees was in Mensa. Brilliant guy, incredibly humble, with Windows Internals knowledge so deep Microsoft acquired a company where we developed an entire product that big companies thought was impossible. I'm convinced he joined Mensa mostly as a hobby, like some people do crossword puzzles, he took IQ tests.

He used to come back from the local Mensa chapter meetings with the best stories. According to him, watching a room full of geniuses try to solve basic organizational issues was exactly like attending the annual meeting of a very dysfunctional condo board. Same arguments, same confusion, just with a higher average IQ.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-20 15:46:48+00:00
> Perhaps a more correct way of saying it is - "they"(and that's not just US who wants this) want a stable trading partner, because Russia has goods and resources we want to buy, and we have goods and services we want to sell to them.

I would say that's partly true, but Russia doesn't have much you can't get elsewhere, other than maybe oil? Not having to fight wars with russia seems to be the overarching goal (proxy, cold or any other type of 'war').

> This isn't an excuse for it btw - I'm just stating the fact that US especially will pursue their own interest first and foremost, if democracy furthers those then they will support it, if it doesn't then they will not.

Yes, as it should. I don't know why people expect the US to be some beacon of global morality or democracy. First and foremost, the people of the US expect their government to protect their security and economic prosperity, we don't car as much about our "image".
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-20 15:46:48+00:00
Exactly. A degree is not merely a proof that you've been exposed to, and temporarily retained, a certain set of knowledge, but proof you can work towards longterm (4yr) and short-term (quiz on Friday, homework tomorrow) goals successfully.

College is 100x less forgiving of missing deadlines than the real world of jobs, for instance - but then, in college the only serious source of delays is yourself and your choices. It's actually quite a good litmus test for the ability to apply oneself towards externally imposed goals - which is most of what a job entails.
by gdubs | 2025-11-20 15:47:11+00:00
Intellectual horsepower is just one element. If you're trying to build the world's fastest car, you can't just grab the world's most powerful engine and call it a day. If you can harness it, sure – it could provide an edge. But there are a lot of other elements that come into play.

I often think about exposure to music, and the fact that Einstein liked to play around on his violin. My suspicion is that this was more than just a hobby – and that these context switches, and exposure to different types of creative thought, all played into his discoveries.
by archi42 | 2025-11-20 15:47:14+00:00
Hm, if I understand this correctly

- awkward function argument syntax: my ($x, $y) = @_;

then you might be interested to learn about feature 'signatures':

use feature 'signatures'; use strict; use warnings; sub foobar ($foo, $bar = undef) { # do something smart } # call it: foobar(1); foobar(1, 2);

Not sure when it was added, but when I write the usual glue code, I love to use it these days.
by meowface | 2025-11-20 15:47:20+00:00
But the US could have benefitted from China's social media and commerce platforms and China could have benefitted from the US's. That's my point.

I am no economist or even that economics-knowledgeable and maybe I'm wrong and maybe China's protectionism is better somehow, but from everything I know or at least from every trope and meme I've ingested, free global commerce eventually leads to better outcomes for all parties.
by TimWolla | 2025-11-20 15:47:36+00:00
The examples in TFA are terrible and I don't get why it was necessary to jump the gun by submitting that article instead of actually waiting for the release and the official release page with more carefully designed examples.

Given that the cat effectively is out of the bag, does the example on the release page (sneak preview) make more sense to you: https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#closures-in-const-ex...?

> As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#"

Yes, unfortunately the off-the-shelf software of the Wiki uses a custom-built highlighter instead of the `highlight_string()` function that is bundled with PHP: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.highlight-string.php
by johnisgood | 2025-11-20 15:47:49+00:00
I did not use the term "mentally prepared" because I thought it was appropriate, I was just quoting the other guy. I find it silly, too. I will not "accept" child porn or other degeneracies.

> Saying, "just be mentally prepared" sounds to me like accepting it. Well, I don't. I go somewhere else.

Exactly! You should be going somewhere else. Another Matrix instance, or at the very least another room, and you will be fine.
by beej71 | 2025-11-20 15:47:52+00:00
I'm lucky to teach in a school with relatively small classes (~25) and I can manually grade and review everything. (The autograde scripts I wrote in bash help.)

But yes, it's happening. If I had 300 students, I couldn't do this. I'd need a bunch of TAs or some AI. Or just pure autograding, which I always hated since the person who did nothing gets the same F as the person who left out a semicolon.

And students are definitely using AI, evidenced by their stratospheric code improvements in the last 18 months.