MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amiga386 | 2025-11-20 02:26:30+00:00
Yes, this is a very odd take. There are many other things in Legasov's tapes but not the miniseries, that very much get to the heart of the Soviet system of government. Where in the article is there space to discuss points like these?

> The fault of Anatoly Pavlovich Alexandrov is that he, albeit reluctantly, consented. He was against it, objected to it together with the experts, but then went on to meet the stubborn requirements of State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Energy, that stations can be built without containments.

> Sidorenko Viktor Alekseyevich, the director of the Department of Nuclear Reactors at our institute, the author of this doctoral dissertation and this book, was expelled from the institute. He had to leave the institute. Because his own colleagues didn’t understand him. But why didn’t they understand him? Because his colleagues got bonuses from the Ministry; because the institute was part of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Do you understand? They see the director, who is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and their [own] salary is lousy. If he doesn’t get a bonus of 100 roubles, he will survive. But I get only 180 and for me, a bonus of 100 roubles is important. If I “squeal” about the cost of these containments, then I will not get a bonus. If I say something wrong, I will not be published and my dissertation will fail.
by tptacek | 2025-11-20 02:27:06+00:00
Mazin has talked about "Voices From Chernobyl" more than any other source.

I used as many sources as I could find. I was looking at research articles in scientific journals; I was looking at governmental reports; I was looking at books written by former Soviet scientists who were at Chernobyl; I was reading books by Western historians who had looked at Chernobyl. I watched documentaries; I read first-person documents.

And then there was Voices From Chernobyl, which is unique. What Svetlana Alexievich did there, I think, was capture an aspect of history we rarely see, which is the story of the people who you wouldn’t otherwise even know existed. We look at history from the point of view of the big movers, the big players, and she looks at history through the eyes of human beings. They’re all equal to her: Whether they are generals or party leaders or peasants, it doesn’t matter. And I thought that was just beautiful. It really inspired me.

So again this idea that anything not in the Legasov tapes was invented --- no. The show is a fictionalized retelling, but no, that criticism doesn't stand.
by brailsafe | 2025-11-20 02:27:58+00:00
> If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it.

Worth what? I probably agree, the greenfield rote mechanical tasks of putting together something like a basic interface, somewhat thorough unit tests, or a basic state container that maps to a complicated typed endpoint are things I'd procrastinate on or would otherwise drain my energy before I get started.

But that real tangible value does need to have an agreeable *price* and *cost* depending on the context. For me, that price ceiling depends on how often and to what extent it's able to contribute to generating maximum overall value, but in terms of personal economic value (the proportion of my fixed time I'm spending on which work), if it's on an upward trend of practical utility, that means I'm actually increasing the proportion of dull tasks I'm spending my time on... potentially.

Kind of like how having a car makes it so comfortable and easy and ostensibly fast to get somewhere for an individual—theoretically freeing up time to do all kinds of other activities—that some people justify endless amounts of debt to acquire them, allowing the parameters of where they're willing to live to shift further and further to the point where nearly all of their free time, energy, and money is spent on driving, all of their kids depend on driving, and society accepts it as an unavoidable necessity; all the deaths, environmental damage, side-effects of decreased physical activity and increased stress along for the ride. Likewise how various chat platforms tried to make communication so friction-less that I actually now want to exchange messages with people far less than ever before, effectively a foot gun

Maybe America is once again demolishing its cities so they can plow through a freeway, and before we know it, every city will be Dallas, and every road will be like commuting between San Jose to anywhere else—metaphorically of course, but also literally in the case of infrastructure build— when will it be too late to realize that we should have just accepted the tiny bit of hardship of walking to the grocery store.

------

All of that might be a bit excessive lol, but I guess we'll find out
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-20 02:29:03+00:00
How much incompetence do we accept or tolerate, before we deem it negligence? If someone adds a consent popup or similar thing to a website, usually knowing, that there is a reason why this must be done, and that this reason is GDPR, it seems quite incompetent to not know the first bit about what is required, and not doing their due diligence to read up on it when not one doesn't know.

Perhaps it would change things for the better, if this special kind of people were at least temporarily removed from the job, until they have gained basic knowledge about their job and how it affects other people.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-20 02:29:10+00:00
Copilot in Visual Studio is so hit or miss that frequently it's not worth using.

Today I asked it to add a constant as an argument to every call to a specific method in a unit test. The result was pure slop: The prompts leaked out into the proposed diff, and there was just a list of every method call, not placed where the method calls were in the unit test.

Just get the darn stuff to work before you shove it into every corner of my life.
by ghurtado | 2025-11-20 02:29:21+00:00
Seriously.

To pretend that you need the advanced capabilities of an AI in order to trick older people by email is somewhere between ludicrous and clickbait.

My father in law just bought a car online this weekend on accident. And nobody was even trying to trick him.

There's a reason the Nigerian prince type stories are so low effort: you really don't need much more sophistication than that.
by madanc1 | 2025-11-20 02:30:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I built *Koko*, a free AI tool that helps you compare the credit cards you already own, decide which to use for a purchase, and evaluate a new card’s value — no login, no personal data.

Today you can: - Summarize major U.S. credit cards - Compare a new card versus your existing ones - View reasoning behind each recommendation

Coming next: - Optional user profiles & OAuth - Saved cards & scenario planning - Smarter AI logic for multi-card users

App: https://www.kokofinance.net (Feedback button on every page)

I’d love feedback on: clarity of the logic, usefulness of comparisons, and any confusing UX.

Thanks for checking it out! — Madan
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-20 02:31:36+00:00
There is a huge difference between a president using the “bully pulpit” and threatening to take away a network’s broadcast license because they said something he didn’t like. That was a road too far for even Ted Cruz who criticized both Trump and the FCC.

A democratic president also didn’t accept personal bribes from companies to allow a merger to go through (Paramount) or accept bribes from other companies that were afraid of retaliation - Meta, Google, Twitter and Disney.

The current administration has carved out outs for companies that bend a knee when it comes to tarriffs. This is the worse case of false whataboutism yet.
by mroche | 2025-11-20 02:31:53+00:00
> If you had multiple shows in production, I would expect that standards be set to use the same platforms and versions across the board.

Considering productions span years, not months, artists would never get to use newer tools if studios operated that way. And it really only works if shows share similar end dates, which is not the reality we live in. Productions can start and end at any point in another show's schedule, and newer tools can offer features that upcoming productions can take advantage of. Each show will freeze their stacks, of course, but a studio could be juggling multiple stacks simultaneously each with their own dependency variants (see the VFX Reference Platform).

https://vfxplatform.com

> Also, if the company is more than a boutique shop, I would hope it would be at a level and budget that the Python performance bottlenecks would be well addressed with competent internal pipeline and production engineering teams.

That would be the ideal, something that can be difficult to achieve in practice. You'll find small teams of quality engineers overwhelmed with the sheer volume of work, and other larger teams with less experience who don't have enough senior folks to guide them. The industry is far from perfect, but it does generally work.

> But then again, if the company is more than a boutique shop, they would just pay for the Maya licensing. :-)

And back to reality XD

That being said a number of studios have been reducing their Autodesk spend over the past few years because it's honestly a sick joke the way the M&E division is run. It's a free several hundred million a year revenue earner, but they foist the CAD business operations onto it and the products suffer. Houdini's getting really close, but if another AIO can cover effectively everything in a way that each team sees is better, you will start to see the ramp up of migrations occur. Realistically this comes down to the rigging and animation departments more than any other. But Maya will never go away completely as it'll still need to be used for referring to and opening older projects from productions that used it, beyond just converting assets to a different format. USD is pretty much that intermediary anyways, it's the training and migration effort that becomes the final roadblock.
by nebula8804 | 2025-11-20 02:32:33+00:00
Well I am not saying that it is automatically good, I said Let them cook ie. Lets see how things turn out, the journey will certainly be interesting.

I will concede that I default to the positive view that generations will find a way to figure things out for themselves.

For example Gen-Z seems to be growing up with a lot of anxiety caused by screen time + a mean towards more demanding expectations growing up.

This is leading towards a greater acceptance towards 'disconnecting' from all tech as they age and a greater acceptance for treating hallicugunans as a form of medicine that makes sense for some people and not as a thing to fear. And these people are only in their 20s. Who knows what they will eventually turn out as.
by gosub100 | 2025-11-20 02:32:45+00:00
That's a false assumption that the man page even has the info you need. There are channels to write bugs against code, but almost nothing to file bugs against man pages. That's not even a concept to most people, that it's a bug when you apply a use case (say, to apply eui-64 to SLAAC in IPv6 in order to generate a consistent address) and cannot find the information using the man page. If you filed a bug that the man pages failed you nobody would fix it because it's not sexy, glamorous work. Its easier to tell someone to RTFM.

In this case, you would have to already know about the existence of eui-64 to know that is what you want. I've seen this many times, you have to know what the thing is already, or know what the answer is to your problem, in order to find it in the man page.

Total waste of my time. I don't care if it's free or was created by volunteers, that isn't absolution of criticism when it represents something and fails to deliver it.
by nabogh | 2025-11-20 02:33:33+00:00
Hey Omar! I met you briefly in Grenoble many years ago. I hope you're doing well.

I only recently watched this series and found it very entertaining. But I never expected it to be very accurate. It's definitely been dramatized for TV. I definitely didn't get an anti-nuclear sentiment from the show, I mostly think they were trying to portray a negative view of Soviet Bureaucracy.
by xethos | 2025-11-20 02:34:23+00:00
@Arathorn would be an objectively better person to discuss this, but the Redditor isn't completely off the mark: metadata is (currently) not nearly as well-guarded on Matrix compared to Signal.

However, work is ongoing to improve the situation; more importantly, Matrix is a different threat model (in my opinion), and allows for different trade-offs.

When I use Signal, I have to trust Signal's servers and their admin team. With Matrix, we get to keep trust circles smaller (friends and family on smaller servers, where we already trust the people running them). We have no hard requirement to federate either - if I want something just for people I know, we leak less data than Signal does to the outside world. We also get to host Matrix servers in areas we're comfortable with, whether that's our living room, or any nation that isn't America.

Matrix isn't perfect, but I appreciate how quickly they're improving, and the areas they're focusing on.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-20 02:35:24+00:00
I don't think GDPR is the problem that makes science and technology succeed more elsewhere or fail more in the EU. There are far, far bigger problems, that are at play here. For starters we have a war still ongoing in the east. Economic power houses have had utterly corrupt governments for decades. Standardization of many things is difficult with so many separate nations. Education systems are questionable. All of these will play a larger role than GDPR.
by llbbdd | 2025-11-20 02:35:47+00:00
> Does often seem to be serious

Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
by zinekeller | 2025-11-20 02:36:32+00:00
> What's interesting is how YT has gradually shifted from being that neutral hosting service and into the media distributor role.

The correct answer here, rather disappointingly, is that they were never neutral. Google Videos (the one that Google actually launched) arguably is a neutral service, but YouTube was always designed to be a social media (even if that term is not as well-known at the time as it is now). It even had five star ratings, which as the style for its time. It is always closer to Instagram rather than Dropbox (although that's an anachronistic comparison since that YouTube was the first of the three).
by thatSteveFan | 2025-11-20 02:36:53+00:00
Not the parent, but wanting the rare case to be fast is definitely not a HFT exclusive thing.

I write software packet processors for a living, and it's common to have requirements stated as "process X packets per second, no matter what", ie youre judged by the worst case kind of packets. Also common is optimization of 99.9th percentile latency.

There's also just cases like if (being ddosed) or if (overloaded) where you definitely want the rare case to be faster.

As to point 1, there's.... a significant doubt as to whether these actually change performance. I have never personally managed to confirm a performance gain from them, and not for lack of trying. CPUs also seem to not give them a ton of weight, and will probably override you if they see a way more common other path.
by mvkel | 2025-11-20 02:38:20+00:00
Sure, but in any case you're going to cherry-pick inaccuracies, wouldn't it be fair to balance them with the "remarkably accurate recreations," according to historians[0]? Especially since it's couched as a historical drama, not a documentary.

Should we debate the accuracy of Marvel movies?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190610100414/https://www.cbsne...
by YouAreMammon | 2025-11-20 02:40:09+00:00
For starters, most attorneys won't allow their clients to utter a single word to law enforcement or on the court record.

Your proposal is that the client has to have enough of a grasp on the legal strategy related to self-incrimination that they could challenge and disregard their attorneys advice, in order to save themselves from something the attorney misinterpreted.

I personally think that's way too much to ask of a defendant. You even see the accused who are lawyers themselves just hire other lawyers and promptly stfu. Counsel always decides and implements the strategy.
by ghurtado | 2025-11-20 02:40:10+00:00
Very good guess: it was actually exactly that. Carvana shopping for a used car.

He clicked on something and got charged the downpayment of the car to his CC. He got his money back, but I'll never not be surprised by what some older people can manage to do online left to their own devices.

To you and I, it seems impossible. For Larry, it's just Saturday.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-20 02:40:17+00:00
Uh, no, not in the same way. You have absolutely zero proof that you NEED to fuck users up the ass to make the service work.

Many services worked without the ass fucking. We did it for a very long time.

> but most people prefer free with ads to paid without ads.

No, you can't actually say this, because part of the deal is that nobody actually knows HOW or WHAT they are giving up for this free service.

Things like GPDR or consent, again, do not outlaw the actual thing. Ads are still legal, personalized ads are still legal, tracking is still legal. It just forces you to ask consumers. If what you're saying is true, then GPDR is fantastic!! All the users should click 'accept all cookies', because that's what they actually want right?

Unless, wait, you think... maybe that's not what they want? And they're only agreeing to the current situation because they don't know what they're agreeing to? Hmm... what a conundrum!
by shadowpho | 2025-11-20 02:40:36+00:00
N100/n150/n97 have similar performance. Power seems to be 6-12w at idle depending. Ram limited to 16GB usually. Low number of pcie lanes (NAS are limited). Cost used to be $100, but now it went up to $120+.

From amd side I have 4700u and 5700u, similar idle power (12w), similar cost ($200 with 32gb of ram, now more expensive). A lot more capable then n100, at a cost.

I use a whole bunch of mini pc in my lab, they are so much cheaper to run electricity wise (and cost)
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-20 02:41:29+00:00
This post is great!

It successfully argues that LLMs are limited in usefulness without access to ground truth.

But that’s not the whole story!

Giving LLMs an ability to check their assertions, eg. by emitting and executing code to see if reality matches their word-vomit, or being able to research online - I wish the author had discussed how much of a game changer that is.

Yes I know I’m “only” talking about agents - “LLMs with tools and a goal, running in a loop”..

But adding ground truth takes you out of the loop. That’s super powerful. Make it so the LLM can ask something other than you to point out that that extra R in strawberry that they missed. In code we have code-writing agents but other industries can benefit from the same idea. Maybe a creative writer agent can be given a grammar checker for example.

It helps the thing do more on its own, and you’ll trust its output a lot more so you can use it for more things.

Yes - plain LLMs are stream-of-consciousness machines and basically emit bullshit, but that bullshit is often only minor corrections away from becoming highly useful autonomously emitted output.

They just need to validate against consensus reality to become insanely more useful than they are alone.
by chrisweekly | 2025-11-20 02:42:01+00:00
Frankly that is a pretty thoughtless response. Even if your anecdote were broadly applicable, it still doesn't logically follow that an employer giving lots of interviews somehow translates on the applicant side into "a better resume would get you interviews". In fact, the hiring process has become incredibly dysfunctional. The best conceivable resume is still unlikely even to be read by a human hiring manager when it's just one of literally thousands of others for the same role.
by nebula8804 | 2025-11-20 02:42:18+00:00
Yes I know of someone who willingly gave up their US citizenship for tax reasons but has EU, Israeli, and a bunch of other citizenships. They get to live a good life in the Netherlands + traveling the world while the US tears itself apart and then when it is time to retire in 30-40 years, the country will be ripe of the picking..they will buy their citizenship back through one of the multiple buy your way into the US visa programs...and retire in Montana.
by FridgeSeal | 2025-11-20 02:43:02+00:00
My biggest issue with “users choosing to stick with it” is the inordinate number of users in corporate environments who simply won’t be given a choice.

They’ll be given some garbage W11 laptop by IT, which will be irrevocably infested with whatever garbage MS wants, and there will be _nothing_ they can do about it. I can see it happening in real time with my partners work computer.
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-11-20 02:43:13+00:00
Nobody is saying "don't teach math to high schoolers." My point is that this whole admissions rant appears to be entirely about admission to "elite" schools no longer being fully determined by SAT scores (or whatever--I've never been completely clear on what people are actually arguing for), when anyone good enough at math to get a really high SAT score can easily gain admission to a ton of universities with great math departments. As for the real "gifted" kids, there will always be some middle schoolers taking calculus etc. with or without a structured gifted & talented program. The majority of people in these programs are not so far beyond their peers as you seem to think, and my experience in math departments has been that there's a pretty even mix of kids with precocious math backgrounds and people who developed their skills at a later point.
by danielvaughn | 2025-11-20 02:43:23+00:00
I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus.

It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV.

If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.