MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jppope | 2025-11-22 23:37:57+00:00
Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it.

The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits of the job, are in the journey not the destination - if you're even into that stuff... i.e. having your music impact lives.

I wish sooooo much that people could read these things so when I go to a dinner party or random event, some GenPop person knew that JK Rowling makes billions of dollars but your average published writer loses money publishing a book. Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.

Good on charli xcx for writing this and for writing period.
by voxl | 2025-11-22 23:38:07+00:00
Of course, I agree. But in the context of education if you reject the above (which MANY people on HN do) then you're delusional. There is nothing nice I have to say about it, and I know how dearly the HN crowd loves to clutch their pearls about the tone. It is akin to believing the world is flat, a broken ideology that should not be entertained.

Once you accept the simple facts as above, then you can finally explore the consequences.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-22 23:41:24+00:00
> If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

"The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)

With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.

> Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-22 23:41:55+00:00
> I don't see how it's final thesis relates to its argument at all

> Because it relies on reducing social connections, i ts , not sustainable" isn't a logical argument.

It seems like the author uses a different understanding of the term "social connections between human beings", which might be better described with "physical or virtual effect on actually existing commoners". "Social" as in "society", not as in "relationship"; "connection" as in "relation between things" aka. "is a", "has a", not as "social bonding" or "transmission channel".

I think a financial transaction or a contract counts as a social connection here.
by somat | 2025-11-22 23:42:07+00:00
The whole point of markdown, really it's whole value preposition is that it has nice looking plain text. And don't get me wrong that is a hell of a value to many people, myself included. Yes it is a terrible markup language, And I would encourage anyone doing serious document work to use a language that provides better semantic structure. But I would also argue that all projects that try to add these structures to markdown are missing the point and destroying it by making the plain text ugly.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-22 23:42:22+00:00
Yeah I think although he acknowledges how biased the Firefox forum poster sample is, I think he is vastly underestimating just how biased.

If Firefox is reduced to just nerds who post in forums it's totally dead. Maybe it's at that point already.

Tbh I still use Chrome because Firefox's performance just isn't as good. I wish it weren't so but there we go.
by CaliforniaKarl | 2025-11-22 23:42:28+00:00
In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription.

There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.

I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
by listenallyall | 2025-11-22 23:43:28+00:00
Terrible take. Of course they want middle-income customers, that's a big part of why they raised prices, because they thought middle-income would absorb them. And they arent entirely wrong - those drive-thru lines are still miles long at peak times, mostly parents getting an entire family's dinner. However middle-income is still price sensitive and notice when $30 becomes $50+. Executives talk about appealing to "value-oriented" consumers (i.e. almost everybody).

"traffic among higher-income customers continues to grow across the fast-food sector, increasing “nearly double digits” in the quarter, he (Kempczinski) said" -https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/05/mcdonalds...

It's actually Wendy's right now suffering, vs rivals McD and BK: "Wendy's (WEN) same-restaurant sales, or sales of restaurants open at least 15 months, declined from a year ago for a third straight quarter, while those of rivals McDonald's Corp. (MCD) and Restaurant Brands International Inc.'s (QSR) Burger King increased over the past two quarters."

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251107156/wen...
by random3 | 2025-11-22 23:43:59+00:00
IF $1900 is the bounty, it means it doesn't hurt enough.

I remember going for the highest paying bounty in the Ethereum VM several years ago (I think it was ~$400 DAI/SAI). I did it because I wanted to force myself to learn the internals and to see for myself if the bounty system works. I think I spent a few weeks debugging and ended up splitting the bounty.

As long as the user-facing issues are disconnected from the technical issues, it's going to be hard to get the true value.
by programjames | 2025-11-22 23:44:08+00:00
And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.
by crabmusket | 2025-11-22 23:45:17+00:00
More drive-by criticism of your commits, meant in a sincere attitude of helping you learn.

As best I can tell, lots of your commits seem to be including several unrelated changes.

This means commit messages become longer as they have to explain more things, and they also end up explaining the diff so that you can fit more on one page.

I'd suggest getting in the habit of making coherent commits with one change each. Some changes will be trivial, and the diff will be self explanatory. Then you can save your writing effort for commits that are challenging.

On the other hand, if I'm wrong and many changes to have to get bundled, then the commit message would be a good place to explain why.

I wrote more on the "primitives" and what I think of as the "physics" of commits here: https://crabmusket.net/2024/thoughts-on-git-commits-branches...
by straydusk | 2025-11-22 23:46:28+00:00
Thanks for the response! I have wired it up...it's using gpt-5-mini. I just have API-level usage limits - I figured if it hit those, I could worry about how to adjust costs, rate limit, etc.

The jumping through steps is not intended - that's a regression.

I agree on plan mode - this one is just a lot more featured. I should include some samples to demonstrate that. Here's an example, if you're interested, of the prompt plan output - https://github.com/benjaminshoemaker/data_graph_gap_report/b...
by anthk | 2025-11-22 23:47:55+00:00
I just use this script in a terminal. It needs curl, lame and minimodem. Easy and quick on any GNU/Linux or BSD distro, or WSL2:

#!/bin/sh curl -s http://internet-tty.net:8000/ITTY \ | lame --decode --quiet --mp3input - - \ | minimodem --rx rtty -f - -a --print-filter -i
by imiric | 2025-11-22 23:50:14+00:00
You're right, but that begs the question: does a type system really require such complexity?

I'm aware that type theory is a field in and of itself, with a lot of history and breadth, but do developers really need deep levels of type flexibility for a language to be useful and for the compiler to be helpful?

I think TypeScript encourages "overtyping" to the detriment of legibility and comprehension, even though it is technically gradually typed. Because it is so advanced and Turing complete itself, a lot of brain cycles and discussion is spent on implementing and understanding type definitions. And you're definitely right that it being verbose also doesn't help.

So it's always a bittersweet experience using it. On one hand it's great that we have mostly moved on from dynamically typed JavaScript, but on the other, I wish we had settled on a saner preprocessor / compiler / type system.
by btilly | 2025-11-22 23:50:18+00:00
You do you. If you believe that you are helpless in the face of the temptation of advertising, you should avoid advertising.

But it would be nice if you worked on your listening skills as well.

You gave a list of major evils that consuming advertising leads to. I don't suffer from those evils. Or at least if I do, then I must also in serious denial to be unaware of it.

You also seem to think that I said that I am unaffected by advertising, and it doesn't lead to me spending money. This is a bizarre conclusion given that I said that I am affected by advertising, and I gave an example of where it did lead to me spending money.

But the critical difference is this. You treat advertising as an assault on your mind. Whose job is to enable evil corporations to steal your money. I view advertising as a discovery method. The world is full of innovators coming up with things that they think others may want. They then use advertising as a way to let people know that there is a thing that they may want. I rarely want it. But I'm willing to waste a bit of time on the pitch.

And on the rare occasions that I do get something, I actually enjoy it regularly. That cup I mentioned? I just made tea for my wife, and served it to her in that cup.

We are different people. I have a very different relationship to advertising than you do. The fact that it is different, doesn't mean that I'm wrong to be me.
by Yokohiii | 2025-11-22 23:50:19+00:00
https://github.com/arpxspace/smartcommit/commit/cc677f7bd210...

This is just a complete braindead commit. Without looking at the code I could probably take 5 minutes to make sense of the commit message, being intrigued something interesting or important is happening. The message is massively over the top, it has way more text then actual code changes. It wastes time.

I am not against AI as a helper in various places. But if possible it should be an opt-in tool if deemed useful. If someone wants to get a summary about a non trivial commit, that can be useful. Even better if the committer writes about the intentions and reasons for the commit, so an AI could match those with the actual code. Don't reiterate whats happening in a patch. Give the meta that isn't there or less obvious. Please.
by js2 | 2025-11-22 23:50:53+00:00
I'd rather have that commit message than one that doesn't explain anything, but it's a bit verbose to my taste because I don't really care how he discovered the issue. I really just need to know what and why.

So let me link to my favorite author of consistently excellent commit messages, Jeff King on the git project itself:

https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=peff

To pick just one, here's a well explained single-line code change. It's subtle, so besides the excellent commit messages, he also adds a comment and a couple tests:

https://github.com/git/git/commit/1940a02dc1122d15706a7051ee...

Another example with an even greater ratio of explanation (10 paragraphs) to code (partial line change):

https://github.com/git/git/commit/8f32a5a6c050766bfa2827869e...
by hammock | 2025-11-22 23:50:55+00:00
Since women’s lib, men’s wages have been flat while women’s has climbed. See the first chart here: https://www.businessinsider.com/gender-wage-pay-gap-charts-2...

The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.
by grafmax | 2025-11-22 23:51:18+00:00
Here’s an example of actual research not your claims which seem to be fabricated from whatever you can free associate:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716220981864

What’s the homeless rate in the luxury enclaves you mention? I couldnt find reliable numbers. Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship - such enclaves can have their own housing dynamics (such as small populations and vacation homes) which don’t negate the larger trend we see when we examine many locales such as large cities and so on. So no, cherry picked counter examples don’t negate the larger statistical relationship between homelessness and inequality.

And attributing homelessness to “enablement policies” is another hot take. It’s just as plausible that enablement policies are enacted as a response to homelessness not a cause.

But at least now we seem to be beyond blaming homelessness on individual traits.
by stubish | 2025-11-22 23:51:36+00:00
I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis. There won't be research backing from Australia as the Nuclear agenda one party is pushing is essentially a cover story for replacing antique coal plants with gas plants. A genuine Nuclear plan for Australia would include realistic timelines and budgets, and use of other renewables to replace coal plants that are failing today while meeting climate targets. And meeting climate targets is important, because if we don't care about them then coal and gas will remain cheaper than Nuclear for Australia due to having large reserves.
by int_19h | 2025-11-22 23:52:10+00:00
This is true outside politics, as well. Or rather, more precisely, any organization has some amount of internal politics, and the larger and more bureaucratic it is, the more politics dominates over utilitarianism. Nation-states and their governments are on the far end of that spectrum, obviously, but it also applies equally to large corporations etc.

And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.

And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.
by themafia | 2025-11-22 23:53:11+00:00
> But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop

There are parts of the web like that but your assertion seems to rely on this being universally true. It clearly and obviously isn't.

> Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings.

Are they "decisively" choosing it if it's turned on by default? If it were actually opt-in then we could measure this. As it is I don't think you have any data to rely on when making this assertion.

> Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage

The same web search companies that own AI models they're trying to sell? Do you not suspect there could be a few confounding variables in this analysis?

> except that automatic translation is really nice

Which we already had and has nothing to do with language models masquerading as "AI".

> is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.

An alternative to what? Tab renaming? Bad article summaries? Weak search engine algorithms?
by probabletrain | 2025-11-22 23:53:48+00:00
I think there’s a difference between what’s expected/acceptable for library code vs application code. Types like this might be hard to understand, but they create very pleasant APIs for library consumers. I’ve generally found it very rare that I’ve felt the need to reach for more complex types like this in application code, however.

RXJS’s pipe function has a pretty complex type for its signature, but as a user of the library it ‘just works’ in exactly the type-safe way I’d expect, without me having to understand the complexity of the type.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-22 23:54:32+00:00
> We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.

That perception of prisons and mental wards is fundamentally broken IMHO. Perhaps that's how it's run in most of the US, but the base principal is reeducation and reform, not punishment.

The core idea is to lock people away because keeping them around is a net negative, and bringing them back to society so they can reintegrate.

Which is modeled after the educational system, because prisons is supposed to be reeducation, if you want to draw parallels.

> Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years

Did any country do that or intent to ? We had strict lockdowns and it was for weeks at most, with social interactions still allowed but at reduced scope (limiting the contact radius to a minimum of 10~15km or so)

China famously was more heavy handed and the most it lasted was two month.

> so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.

Humans are complex, and it rarely works the way we envision it, especially when it comes to social phenomenons. Think about the opposite natural experiment: people who can't go home and stay in a shelter and have to interact with hundreds of people for weeks. This is also an extremely traumatic event that countries with frequent natural disasters are working hard at solving.
by int_19h | 2025-11-22 23:54:57+00:00
I'm reminded of a certain philosopher...

> A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-22 23:57:39+00:00
I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry.

I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.

Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.
by muzani | 2025-11-22 23:57:58+00:00
Funny enough, back when I worked with a Southeast Asian team, we all spoke English. Native languages were Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Mandarin, Ukrainian and so on. But most people wouldn't be able to speak these languages, so we mostly used English.

The customer was often Indonesian and would write bug reports in the language. The non-Indo speakers would just run them through Google translate and comment what they understood and those who were native speakers would correct them if they were mistaken. Especially when there's sarcasm or some cultural context.

There were a few who only spoke the Chinese dialects, and we'd use an intermediary in meetings, and AI/Google translate on text and code. This was also a good use of AI - it was fluent in whatever language, Java or Mandarin and could piece them together well.

Anyway, yeah, it's workable. Nobody knows all the languages. In engineering, there's more empathy for this, especially from the multilinguals.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-23 00:00:03+00:00
> You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.

That is well known and I am sure the author is aware of it. The problem they are describing is not whether HTML is technically allowed inside Markdown. It's that when you are writing Markdown, you are writing Markdown, not HTML, and that comes with some problems.

> It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't.

In theory, yes. In practice, using Markdown becomes much less appealing once you start dropping raw HTML all over the place. The whole point of choosing Markdown is that you do not want to spend your time typing <p>, <a>, <li> and the rest. You want to write in Markdown, with only occasional HTML when absolutely necessary.

That is exactly where the author's complaints become relevant. If the solution to Markdown's limitations is routinely switching to HTML, then the argument becomes circular. If you are expected to write HTML to address the author's complaints, why bother with Markdown at all? If the answer is just "write HTML", then you may as well skip Markdown in the first place.
by fragmede | 2025-11-23 00:00:15+00:00
Basic logic here: the things you’re defending only work when the people who make them possible aren’t getting knocked out by uncontrolled spread.

Kids don’t get an education if teachers and staff are sick. Businesses don’t serve communities if workers are out in waves. Families don’t stay afloat if workplaces shut down because too many people are ill.

You can absolutely critique the execution and the results. Plenty of it was messy. But pretending that doing nothing was somehow pro social ignores the obvious: collective safety is what keeps all those freedoms functioning in the first place.
by ifh-hn | 2025-11-23 00:01:12+00:00
Stupid question but what happens to fingerprinting if you just disabled JavaScript? Sure it breaks websites, but that's what I do with ubo advanced, which I also use to block webrtc, etc. (I really miss umatrix for this purpose). Am I fingerprinted because a site can't run JavaScript? If I use a VPN too?