MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-15 17:02:58+00:00
Ah, another Dunning-kruger-bait post (someone who doesn't know what they're talking about who writes a blog post very confidently, and it's read and upvoted by people who also don't know what they're talking about). Very good.

The immediate pooh-poohing of Waterfall is the big tell here. If they don't give you an example of an actual Waterfall project they've worked on, or can't elucidate why it wasn't just that one project or organization that made Waterfall bad, they're likely parroting myths or a single anecdotal experience. And that bad experience was likely based on not understanding it to begin with (Waterfall in particular is the subject of many myths and lies). I've had terrible Agile experiences. Does that make Agile terrible?

In my experience, Agile has a tendency to succeed despite itself. Since you don't do planning, you just write one bit at a time. But of course eventually this doesn't work, so you spend more time rearchitecting, rewriting, and fixing things. But hey, look, you made something useful! ....it still isn't making the company any money yet, but it's a thing you can see, so everyone feels better. You can largely do this work by yourself, so you can move fast; until you need something controlled by someone else, at which point you show up at the 11th hour, and dump a demand on their desk that must be finished immediately. Often these recipients have no choice, because the organization needs the thing you're slapping together, and they're "being a blocker". And those recipients then can't accomplish what they need to, because they haven't been given any documentation to know what to do. Bugs, rushed deadlines (or worse, no deadlines), dead-cats-over-the-wall, wasted effort, dysfunction. Is this the only way to do Agile? Of course not. But it's easy for me to paint the entire model this way, based on my experience.

There does not exist a project management method which is inherently bad. I repeat: No formal project management method is bad. Methods are simply frameworks by which you organize and execute work. You will not be successful just because you used a framework. You still have to do the organizing and execute the work in a not-terrible-way. You have a lot of wiggle room about how things are done, and that is what determines the outcome. You can do things quickly or slow, skillfully or shoddily, half-assed or competently, individually or collaboratively. It's how you take each step, not which step you take.

As long as humans at at the reigns, it doesn't matter what method you use. The same project, with the same method, can either go to shit, or turn out great. The difference between the two is how you use the methods. You have to do the work, and do it well. In organizations, with other humans, that's often very difficult, because it means you depend on something outside of your control. So leadership, skill, and a collaborative, positive culture, are critical to getting things done.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-15 17:04:17+00:00
> If you want to teach kids about anti-racism, it seems much better for broad development and less controversial to focus on multiculturalism, with say fiction from all over the world and a variety of perspectives, then like “anti-racist baby”

The chronic library complainers and book banners do not perceive a difference between these options, and capitulating to their demands merely allows them to gripe about something else.

I volunteer at my local library, and these malcontents are the worst part of the job.
by hippo22 | 2025-11-15 17:04:59+00:00
Those fees don’t seem unreasonably high to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bailiff was operating at a loss given the time it takes to take possession and bring the goods to auction.

It’s in the public’s interest to have mechanisms to quickly process insolvency in a way that attempts to fairly value property. Auctions solve that. If debtors don’t like the outcome, then they should sell the good themselves before it comes to that. Having others sell your property for you is always going to incur an additional cost.
by sigseg1v | 2025-11-15 17:05:01+00:00
I'm using teams at work and it's a laggy buggy mess, even with fairly beefy machines (eg. 64GB RAM, nvme ssd, workstation gpu). By this I mean when you click on a button or hover over something on the UI there is frequently more than 5 seconds for it to respond (eg. stuff like hovering over a button, it should show a hover state, but that won't appear unless you park the mouse over it for several seconds).

We have 5-6 different "endpoint protection" and security related pieces of software running on our machines at all times. We also have enterprise SSO via SAML2 which is constantly logging us out, saying we aren't logged in, re-prompting over and over to enrol the machine into some management policy which then hangs the program if you click yes, and makes you re-authenticate (eg redo login and MFA) if you click no.

It frequently just hangs when you click join on a call. Sometimes when you are talking it stops responding but other people can still hear and see you, which is annoying because if you un-mute or take over the screen in a large company meeting, but then get stuck with mic on or presenting, everyone can awkwardly keep watching you while you can't stop doing either of those for 45-60 seconds.

Many of these problems are probably just due to the machines being hampered by huge amounts of instrumentation/monitoring/interception, but teams is much worse than other electron apps. For example, Slack and vscode do not exhibit these problems on the same machine.
by slaughtr | 2025-11-15 17:05:24+00:00
I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty.

I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
by senshan | 2025-11-15 17:05:31+00:00
If the goal is to protect minors, then alcohol may be a better model:

a) Alcohol is considered harmful for minors, hence

b) It is unlawful for minors to posses and consume alcohol;

c) It is unlawful to sell alcohol to minors;

Similarly:

1) Internet may potentially contain harmful material, hence:

2) It is unlawful for minors access Internet;

3) It is unlawful to sell or provide to minors access to Internet or any devices or services that facilitate access to Internet

Easy-peasy
by tekacs | 2025-11-15 17:05:35+00:00
Posting this (didn't find a previous post of it), because between...

- This - Android requiring developer verification (partially reverted) - Apple using TPM to lock you out of data on your own machine [1] - Apple's slowly tightening security regime on macOS [2] - I'll keep the list short but many more recent items from Apple and Google especially - less so Microsoft I think?

I've been noticing case-after-case of Big Tech security teams with good intentions locking down access points into software. It keeps malware authors out, but... it also keeps out developers, and also those who'd ship software that'd break into their lock-in.

Want to script Chrome for your users? Out. Want to import from or read their ChatGPT chats? Out. Want to ship them an app that does something Apple/Google-unapproved? Or that talks to or inspects other apps? Out.

It feels like Big Tech security teams are locking down software for yesterday's world – whilst each of them keeps and uses their own access – at a time when the opportunity to tinker with our computers is at an all-time-high.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45663810

[2]: If you'd told me in the early 2000s that I'd have to send every binary that'll run on someone else's computer to Apple first for it to not scare-screen them... at least SmartScreen/Chrome's approach are statistical and hash-based rather than having to receive a full copy of every such binary.
by phillipcarter | 2025-11-15 17:06:28+00:00
I don't think it's about dreaming to be Google. K8s is pretty easy to set up now with a hosted cloud platform if you start with it, and helm takes care of pretty much all your infra needs. Migrating to K8s is what's awful. From there, the docs have most everything you need to know and there's an abundance of helpful information online that covers most problems you'll run into.
by terminalshort | 2025-11-15 17:06:33+00:00
Maybe the stats are bullshit and maybe they're not, but I don't care. It's beside the point. Cats want to go outside so you should let them, or don't have them in places where they can't like very dense urban areas. Would you spend your whole life indoors if it gave you another 10 years? I think not. Somehow people who would never accept this for themselves have no problem doing it to their cats.
Is it possible to have an LLM always give a consistent output?
by twosdai | 2025-11-15 17:06:39+00:00
Is there any LLM who's focus is this? EG:

1. Given the same exact tokens, 2. Always return the same tokens.

EG: I give the LLM the following tokens:

"What color is the sky?"

it always would return a message like:

"It's Purple!"

and never change. I understand this not a normal usecase or in many cases desired for an LLM, but I am curious if anyone is working on this in an academic paper, or if there is a private organization which is doing something along these lines.
by bArray | 2025-11-15 17:06:55+00:00
Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by just a few weeks).

They shipped a box and allowed me to swap out a hard drive for a spare (I had study data on there), I then used the box to ship the laptop to them. A few weeks later the laptop gets shipped back with a parts replacement list, which was essentially every single PCB in the laptop and I asked them to replace the keyboard too because one key was sticking. Brand new parts in a slightly cracked chassis.

If Dell still has customer service like that, it's double thumbs up from me.

I'm currently using a Lenovo laptop which has been solid so far. I do want my next laptop to be open to repairability (even if I have to create it myself).
by tenthirtyam | 2025-11-15 17:07:06+00:00
> raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate

Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to.

We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
by salawat | 2025-11-15 17:07:58+00:00
Even if you aren't malignant, or evil, then stupid is the only option left, because you've observed the structure of the problem space, understood the new problems and vulnerabilities and points of abuse introduced, accepted their existential nature, and then simply turned off your brain and ceased to continue processing to the inevitable conclusion. You can be evil/malignant. You can be stupid. If you choose to be stupid, none of us can separate you from the evil/malignant camp.

So if it makes you feel better. Cool. I don't see you as an evil mustache twirling person, but you're still a systemic threat from your refusal to take into account the threat these tools represent in terms of being weaponized by the first tyranny minded group of individuals to wander in.

There's differences of priorities that I have no compunctions having a spirited discussion around. What I refuse to engage in is argumentation with people intent on pissing on my shoes and trying to claim it's raining, or trying to get me to fit the Procrustean bed that makes them feel safer at my expense.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-15 17:08:47+00:00
I don't really get why this is surprising or actually particularly worrying.

30 arrests a day for something in a population of seventy million people, a large proportion of whom are online in some way, is not that much.

And it's not 30 arrests per day for saying things the government don't like or that are politically incorrect, is it? It's mostly for things that rise to the level of threats or harassment or cause alarm.

On the one hand it's a new conduit for threatening conduct, and on the other hand, it's probably replacing some.

I'd note something that comes up when this number is mentioned often enlightens the context: that people often use this figure to say "that's more than in Iran or Russia", as if the number itself is actually meaningful. Nobody's going to arrest you in Russia for abusing transgender people; nobody's going to arrest you in Iran for encouraging the punishment of promiscuity or gay people. In either case they might turn a blind eye if you threaten the lives of those people. But the things they would arrest you for — criticising the government or the war — you know not to even say out loud when not among friends. Because the punishment is not the mild inconvenience you would get in the UK.

There are bigger problems in the UK with misunderstanding policing of speech in the real, physical world: the Palestine Action stuff is being much more obviously mishandled. I think it's much more important to focus on getting the government to handle that more logically and sanely.
by rramadass | 2025-11-15 17:09:02+00:00
> "?- 1=1." is Prolog code. Executing Prolog code is reasoning. Therefore that is reasoning. Q.E.D.

This is the dumbest thing i have read yet on HN. You are absolutely clueless about this topic and are merely arguing for argument's sake.

> If "executing Prolog code" is reasoning, then what? I say it isn't useful to call it reasoning (in the context of this thread) because it's too broad to be a helpful definition, basically everything is reasoning, and almost nothing is not.

What does this even mean? It has already been pointed out that Prolog does a specific type of formalized reasoning which is well understood. The fact that there are other formalized models to tackle subdomains of "Commonsense Reasoning" does not detract from the above. That is why folks are trying to marry Prolog (predicate logic) to LLMs (mainly statistical approaches) to get the best of both worlds.

User "YeGoblynQueenne" was being polite in his comments but for some reason you willfully don't want to understand and have come up with ridiculous examples and comments which only reflect badly on you.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-11-15 17:09:52+00:00
> I can send multiple queries over a single TCP connection and receive multiple responses over the same single TCP single connection, out of order. No blocking.

You're missing the point. You have one TCP connection, and the sever sends you response1 and then response2. Now if response1 gets lost or delayed due to network conditions, you must wait for response1 to be retransmitted before you can read response2. That is blocking, no way around it. It has nothing to do with advertising(?), and the other protocols mentioned don't have this drawback.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-15 17:10:13+00:00
I have insane admiration for and quite a serious amount of jealousy of people who are able to sail through life with with every setback sailing right past them, leaving no trace or mark.

I've noticed it more in people who had a comfortable upringing and no money worries. Oh dear, dinner is burnt? No worries just order takeout! Lost your passport a few days before a holiday - no sweat, just pay the fast track processing fee. Car broken down? Just jump in a taxi. Coffee ruined your top? Just buy another one. Etc. Money often means far fewer worries in life, and kids must definitely notice and feel that.

As you can probably guess, I grew up relatively poor. Every day/week something would be causing my parents stress, often related to money. No amount of grounding themselves or belly breathing would have alleviated the stress.

I know the article is about smaller things, many of which of money can't fix, but I do wonder if growing up in a low-stress environment (largely because of no money issues) instills something that enables you to not sweat the minor things in life
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-15 17:10:42+00:00
> I'm pretty sure that I won't do anything in a go program that would cause the other team members much trouble

Alas there are plenty of people who do[0] - for some reason Go takes architecture astronaut brain and wacks it up to 11 and god help you if you have one or more of those on your team.

[0] flashbacks to the interface calling an interface calling an interface calling an interface I dealt with last year - NONE OF WHICH WERE NEEDED because it was a bloody hardcoded value in the end.
by hearsathought | 2025-11-15 17:10:45+00:00
> Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."

Burnout isn't exhaustion. Burnout doesn't drain your body, it drains your mind. You could get burnout from comfortably sitting all day long. Exhaustion from doing something you love is exhilarating. Burnout from doing something you hate is mentally draining.

Burnout is a symptom of disillusionment. Disillusionment causes burnout. It's not physical. It's all mental.
by thomasahle | 2025-11-15 17:11:01+00:00
What a weird way to write the harmonic average.

----

Write v_i = Var[X_i]. John writes

t_i = \frac{\prod_{j\ne i} v_j}{\sum_{k=1}^n \prod_{j\ne k} v_j}.

But if you multiply top and bottom by (1 / \prod_{m=1}^n v_m), you just get

t_i = \frac{1/v_i}{\sum_{k=1}^n 1/v_k}.

No need to compute elementary symmetric polynomials.

If you plug those optimal (t_i) back into the variance, you get

\min Var[\sum t_i X_i] = 1/(\sum_{k=1}^n 1/v_k) = H/n,

where `H = n / (\sum_{k=1}^n 1/v_k)` is the Harmonic Mean of the variances.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-15 17:11:42+00:00
> If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.

No. We cannot agree on that.

> it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

Then what is? Survival? People would accept anything if their betters kept their bellies full?

I see your point, I just want humans to be better than that. I want to be better than that. It's not about priorities, it's about basic human dignity. Without dignity, we're reduced to beasts.

People's moral fortitude is tested by crisis. Will they give up their principles or will they stick to them? If you ram two aircraft into the twin towers, will the USA remain the land of the free, or will it turn into a surveillance police state that violates the basic rights and dignity of its own population on a daily basis?

I see people fail this test all the time. I see entire nations fail this test. As such, my own beliefs that people are reasonable and principled are being tested. Is it worth it to have principles, to try to reach an ideal state of society, or is it all about money, force and power in an amoral world? My beliefs are trending towards the latter.
by retrac | 2025-11-15 17:12:05+00:00
I am deaf but not completely deaf. Some sounds I can hear and a lot of the sounds that are loud enough to come to my attention are annoying. Often not the same sounds that annoy other people, too.

I'm reminded of a conversation with my friend who is fully Deaf from birth and a signer. Hearing people are a foreign culture for him. It's tricky to navigate the hearing world sometimes, when you don't know what what noises things make and how they are perceived. (Stacking metal or ceramic dishes is an almost silent experience for me, for example.)

He noted that the sounds hearing people complain about seem related to control. Thunder? Not a problem. Natural and nothing you can do about it. The beep of a truck backing up? That's due to a person. It could be controlled. Rain? Not a problem. Sprinkler system? That's ultimately due to a person. It could be controlled. Microwave beep? Could have been controlled; you're supposed to hit the stop button at 0:01. Dog barking? Annoying because again, supposed to be controlled. Wild birds cawing at the crack of dawn? Filtered out and ignored. (Mostly, some people do complain about those.)

Realizing you don't actually have control and that the other person might not actually have control is surprisingly relaxing, I've found. I suppose that's closely related to the "radical acceptance" of the article.
by criley2 | 2025-11-15 17:13:27+00:00
>Your entire argument is that 900 people out of 350,000,000 people in the US having to pay more tax is going to drive the US into the ground.

Talk about a low-faith strawman! Let me eviscerate this garbage argument.

The 900 billionaires in America control around $7.8 trillion USD in assets (US yearly GDP is over $30 trillion, for reference)

Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending.

Pack it up boys, we completely solved wealth inequality and will be a glorious european nation with our $78 billion dollars! If we applied that to nationalized healthcare (estimated cost $3 trillion per year) we just paid for 2% of the healthcare system!

Or maybe we just redistribute that $78 billion. That's $588 dollars per US household per year. Problem = solved.

Great argument.
by ndiddy | 2025-11-15 17:13:30+00:00
Someone asked the archive.is owner why he does this in the past. It's because of similar situations to this one where someone who wants to get archive.is taken down uploads illegal content, requests archive.is to save it, and immediately reports archive.is to their country's legal authorities. His solution to this is using the EDNS information to serve requests from the closest IP abroad, so any takedown procedure requires international cooperation and therefore enough bureaucratic overhead that he gets notified and has time to take the content down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650

I also find the "we don't want to leak a requester's IP" explanation for blocking EDNS to be suspect. The way DNS works is that you ask for the IP address for a domain name, you get the IP, and then you connect to it. With Cloudflare's DNS, the server doesn't know your IP when you do the DNS lookup, but that doesn't matter because you're connecting to the server anyway so they'll still get your IP. Even if you're worried about other people sniffing network traffic, the hostname you're visiting still gets revealed in plaintext during the SNI handshake. What Cloudflare blocking EDNS does do is make it much harder for competing CDNs to efficiently serve content using DNS based routing. They have to use Anycast instead, which has a higher barrier to entry.
by ajross | 2025-11-15 17:13:31+00:00
So... that was exactly the point upthread. You're making a semantic argument over the proper definition for the word "real" when applied to autonomous vehicle systems. Nothing in this argument is actionable in any way. You can't conjure real dead kids, so you need to describe hypothetical ones. That's... yeah.

Nonetheless, our cars drive us around anyway. Neither they, nor us, actually care about hypothetical steamrollered kids.