MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-22 19:24:59+00:00
Safety-nets for big companies so they can't fail, shared ownership for rich shareholders. Dog-eat-dog market forces, rugged individualism and bootstraps for the poor. Don't you think it's weird that the things communist Americans want, are the things Wealthy Capitalist Americans get, while telling the poor "those things don't work"? Central Planning sounds like a stupid idea, but why are all the big companies planned from a central HQ if everyone agrees that local planning is better?

> "in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts"

Just curious, there wasn't any interference from outside during these 'failures' was there? Any trade embargoes? Any military intervention? Any assassinations? Any deliberate destabilizing? Any puppet governments?

> "if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries"

There's 1.3 - 1.9 million people in American prisons now. 4.9 million who have been in prison. 19 million with felony convictions. Prisons are for-profit, and prisoners are used for forced labour, either paid nothing or paid less than minimum wage. The US ICE is disappearing people off the streets. The US president is targeting people who criticize him accusing them of treason (punishable by death)[1], recently writing """Chuck Schumer said trip was ‘a total dud’, even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!""".

Why is "Communism" the cause of gulags but "Capitalism" isn't the cause of mass incarceration, forced labour, and the government covering up how many people die while imprisoned? Why does this American "communism can't work, has never worked, and reminder Communism == mass graves" style comment always feel like a loud pledge of allegiance trying to make it clear to the powers that be that you aren't criticizing them, begging them not to disappear you? Are you not even allowed to entertain a different idea? To consider that even if any given Communism actually can't work and is crappy to live under, that what you're saying is more like a religious recital than something sensible?

[1] https://time.com/7290536/miles-taylor-president-trump-treaso...
by jp57 | 2025-12-22 19:25:40+00:00
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.

Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"

It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.

This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.

This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.

The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
by cm2187 | 2025-12-22 19:26:21+00:00
> - I think you would be wrong to understand that. How on earth did you reach that conclusion?

from the video only showing cams of public places (parking lots, parks and streets). And also it seems that this is how Flock markets itself on its website.

> - I think he is demonstrating the creepy opportinities. Did he share any of that information? I think anyone with bad intent probably probably not make a video explaining what they did.

I am not saying the author is creepy, I am saying face search engines and personal information available publicly are creepy. But nothing to do with Flock.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 19:26:26+00:00
Maybe, I mostly gave that disclaimer to say that it actually doesn't matter much. Even if it's worse, that's still better, because it's over there.

But yes, generally, I assume virtually every developed country (and some of the kind of developed countries) have a more just and competent legal system than the US.

The US is an interesting beast, because when you compare it to the entire world on a bunch of stuff, it doesn't seem so bad. But when you compare to countries that have, like, clean running water, then it really falls flat in a lot of ways. This allows apologists to basically justify anything the US does, because somebody, somewhere, is doing it much worse. Hey guys, look at Uganda, they're genociding gay people!
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-22 19:26:28+00:00
Can you change the corporate culture of the companies that pay top of market any more than you can change gravity?

Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”.

But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money.

I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 19:26:29+00:00
Everyone has their own theories for what can/will trigger the "year of the Linux desktop."

The reality now is that desktop computing in general is becoming niche. Sure, maybe pre-installs well help, but personally I don't think so. More and more regular people get their computing done on their phone, or maybe a tablet. Why? Because the majority of people aren't creating things with computers, they are just consuming.

For those that do still need "desktop" level/general purpose computing, OS doesn't matter as much as app compatibility. Steam is helping this along in regard to gaming, but what about everything else? macOS wins here over Linux, and will be more likely to pick up any stragglers.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-22 19:26:30+00:00
You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up?

What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:

Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".

(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)

Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".

Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".

Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.

Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.

Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.

Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.

And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.

Make gun obsession weird again.
by zephen | 2025-12-22 19:26:46+00:00
Upvoted because this is true, but we need to establish coping mechanisms for this.

For example:

"Sorry, yes, I know the report is due tomorrow, but I don't have time to review it again because I wasted 2 hours on the first version."

or

"I found these three problems on the first page and stopped reading."

What else?
by tonymet | 2025-12-22 19:27:01+00:00
I’m baffled by the state of law enforcement. On one hand we are spending loads on surveillance, but on the other we refuse to enforce violent, property & drugs-abuse crimes. Gross violent offenders are being allowed to walk. So what is the point of all the CCTV ?

As major investors in Flock, being aware of the long term law enforcement strategy, I’m guessing ycombinator can comment on what all of this investment is for.
by eddyg | 2025-12-22 19:27:14+00:00
Be aware that there are members of the NTP pool with less-than-honorable intentions and you don't get to pick-and-choose. Yes, they all should provide the time, but they also get your IP address.

For example: unlike the IPv4 space, the IPv6 space is too big too scan, so a number of "researchers" (if you want to call them that) put v6-capable NTP servers in the NTP pool to gather information about active v6 blocks to scan/target.
by vunderba | 2025-12-22 19:27:30+00:00
Great article minimaxir. Couple points I should make.

From the article:

> the infamous Make me into Studio Ghibli prompt

I've done a fair amount of style transfer testing with NB and NB Pro.

We’ll probably never know whether Google has added deliberate roadblocks or if it’s simply not well represented in the training data, but if you’re at all familiar with Ghibli’s work (Nausicaä, Mononoke, Porco Rosso), the resulting profile image scans more like a relatively vaguely anime-esque illustration than anything even remotely resembling Miyazaki’s style. You’d never be able to pick this image out of a lineup and say it’s a Ghibli drawing.

Even trying to prompt with clear stylistic references doesn’t help. For example, here’s some early promotional artwork from the NES Legend of Zelda: it’s highly stylized and very distinctive. The resultant images (while nice and clean looking) bear none of the hallmarks of the originals.

https://imgur.com/a/failed-style-transfer-nb-pro-o3htsKn

As far as grid generation goes, I've actually experimented with this for creating sprite sheets. I found that in many cases, NB Pro performed even better if you provided it with a blank 1024×1024 image that already had evenly spaced gridlines, and then used it in an image-to-image mode to fill in the squares with the respective sprites.

https://imgpb.com/rJqARJw
by itsgrimetime | 2025-12-22 19:27:58+00:00
Yep - this has worked well for me too. I do it a little differently:

I have a /review-sessions command & a "parse-sessions" skill that tells Claude how to parse the session logs from ~/.claude/projects/, then it classifies the issues and proposes new skills, changes to CLAUDE.md, etc. based on what common issues it saw.

I've tried something similar to DISCOVERIES.md (a structured "knowledge base" of assumptions that were proven wrong, things that were tried, etc.) but haven't had luck keeping this from getting filled with obvious things (that the code itself describes) or slightly-incorrect things, or just too large in general.
by Lerc | 2025-12-22 19:28:05+00:00
I have seen a number of write ups where I think the only logical explanation is that they are not conveying what literally happened but spinning narrative to express their point.

There was an article the other day where the writer said something along the lines of it suddenly occurred to them that others might read content they had access to. They described thenselves as a security researcher. I couldn't imagine a security researcher having that occur to them, I would think that it is a concept continually present in their concept of what data is. I am not a security researcher and it certainly something I'm fairly constently aware of.

Similarly I'm not convinced the "shouldn't this plan be better" question is in good faith either. Perhaps it just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the operation being performed by a model, but my intuition is that they never expected it to be very good and are feigning surprise that it is not.
by nullc | 2025-12-22 19:29:04+00:00
Surveillance technology doesn't stop property crime, so it isn't a tradeoff question.

The necessary and sufficient steps to stop property crime are:

1. Secure the stuff.

2. Take repeat criminals off the street.

Against random 'crime of opportunity' with new parties nothing but proactive security is particularly effective because even if you catch the person after the fact the damage is already done. The incentive to commit a crime comes from the combination of the opportunity and the deterrence-- and not everyone is responsive to deterrence so controlling the opportunity is critical.

Against repeated or organized criminals nothing but taking them out of society is very effective. Because they are repeated extensive surveillance is not required-- eventually they'll be caught even if not in the first instance. If you fail to take them off the streets no amount of surveillance will ever help, as they'll keep doing it again and again.

Many repeat criminals are driven by mental illness, stupidity, emotional regulation, or sometimes desperation. They're committing crimes at all because for whatever reason they're already not responding to all the incentives not to. Adding more incentives not to has a minor effect at most.

The conspiratorially minded might wonder if the failure to enforce and incarcerate for property crime in places like California isn't part of a plot to manufacture consent for totalitarian surveillance. But sadly, life isn't a movie plot-- it would be easier to fight against a plot rather than just collective failure and incompetence. In any case, many many people have had the experience of having video or know exactly who the criminal is only to have police, prosecutors, or the court do absolutely nothing about it. But even when they do-- it pretty much never undoes the harm of the crime.
by jrmg | 2025-12-22 19:29:44+00:00
I’d bet you already have a mode that would’ve prevented what happened to the cat. From NYT reporting on the actual incident:

A human driver, she believes, would have stopped and asked if everything was OK after seeing a concerned person kneeling in front of their car and peering underneath.

“I didn’t know if I should reach out and hit one of the cameras or scream,” she said of the perilous moment. “I sort of froze, honestly. It was disorienting that Waymo was pulling away with me so close to it.”
by poemxo | 2025-12-22 19:29:54+00:00
How do you know the coworker didn't bully the LLM for 20 minutes to get the desired output? It isn't often trivial to one-shot a task unless it's very basic and you don't care about details.

Asking for the prompt is also far more hostile than your coworker providing LLM-assisted word docs.
by alphazard | 2025-12-22 19:29:55+00:00
> but you can establish trust with managers.

This is technically true, but metaphorically false.
Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR, with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc.
Especially when those people present the relationship with a faux version of the same naivety that they intend to prey upon.

The only people you can trust at a company, are people who have demonstrated that they value your relationship more than the company's relationship.
That's not impossible, but if they really need the salary, then the odds are stacked against you.

It's certainly nice to pretend that everyone is nice and trustworthy.
In fact, most people will hold it against you if you don't sufficiently pretend to be trusting.
Universal insincerity is part of the human condition.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-22 19:30:15+00:00
I got to work one morning recently, got a message that our MDM required me to change my password, logged into the MDM, turned off that obsolete option, and announced to the company via Slack that we're not doing that anymore.

Every now and again I ponder if I'm happy where I'm at careerwise, and then something like this reminds me that I have the authority to make these decisions, and I decide that yeah, I like being me.
by zephen | 2025-12-22 19:30:21+00:00
I get that.

But, as discussed in some other threads, the leverage provided by the LLM allows the miscreant to inundate you with slop by only pressing a few buttons.

And rejection is work. So they can produce more slop, requiring more rejections, faster than you can read the slop.

This is what's new. You reject it, they feed your rejection back into the LLM, and hand you something 5 minutes later with so many formatting changes that diff is unhelpful, and enough subtle substantive changes embedded in it that if you don't read the entire thing, you might have missed something important.
by BurningFrog | 2025-12-22 19:30:21+00:00
China hasn't become a Western capitalist democracy, but it has changed enormously for the better from the genocidal tyranny of the Mao era, and my guess is that it will keep changing.

One "first principles" way to think about it is that money is power, and as the Chinese middle class grows bigger and richer, it will have more and more of the power. I expect it will want similar things as the middle class in other countries.

This may take any number of decades, which unfortunately makes this a hard theory to falsify.
by fundad | 2025-12-22 19:30:30+00:00
Feather meal is used in animal feed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather_meal

Manure is also fed to cows.

https://extension.missouri.edu/publications/g2077

"Poultry litter can be used as a feedstuff... There are currently no federal or Missouri regulations governing the use of poultry litter as a feedstuff"
by exceptione | 2025-12-22 19:30:40+00:00
> United States best interest

That is the mind hack. People will always assume that the administration has the United States best interest in mind. If people can drop that assumption, they might make a beginning with understanding the firehose of seemingly erratic policy.

The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
by the__alchemist | 2025-12-22 19:31:35+00:00
I have what I thought was a broad knowledge base of rust an experience in it over many domains, but I haven't heard of most of those. Have been getting by with `&`, and `&mut` only from those tables!

Incidentally, I think this is one of Rust's best features, and I sorely miss it in Python, JS and other languages. They keep me guessing whether a function will mutate the parent structure, or a local copy in those languages!

Incidentally, I recently posted in another thread here how I just discovered the 'named loop/scope feature, and how I thought it was great, but took a while to discover. A reply was along the effect of "That's not new; it's a common feature". Maybe I don't really know rust, but a dialect of it...
by sgillen | 2025-12-22 19:31:37+00:00
We don't use NTP, but for robotics, stereo camera synchronization we often want the two frames to be within ~10us of eachother. For sensor fusion we then also need a lidar on PTP time to be translated to the same clock domain as cameras, for which we also need <~10us.

We actually disable NTP entirely (run it once per day or at boot) to avoid clocks jumping while recording data.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-22 19:32:26+00:00
ACA was supposed to be the solution.

I think nobody believes that now. Healthcare is broken. It’s time to make things better, not patch the termite infected boat one more time.

Remember the bold spirit of ‘we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it’? If you think ACA is better than what preceded it, then you favor bold steps.
by maxglute | 2025-12-22 19:32:38+00:00
TBH UK never had the chance because PRC saw through their games. TLDR UK wanted to maintain influence post handover for their investments, but like most other colonies on the fading empire they had no leverage, i.e. negotiate to turn HK into self administered territory (like Singapore)... along with UN decolonization rules meant engineering pathway for HK independence. PRC keked and said fuck off and promptly removed HK from UN list of non-self governing territories. There's a reason UK/Patton had to jam in HK liberalisation efforts last minute to increase UK influence post handover and not before... because if they did it before, i.e. pre 90s there would be so much anti colonial and pro CCP sympathies that political freedom in HK could be contrary to British interests. HK was just another Suez, symptom of UK weakness, not any one man.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-22 19:32:41+00:00
In the US for the past 5+ years Xfinity/Comcast, Charter, and whatever CenturyLink is called these days have all heavily pushed the "self-install kit" option vs traditional tech install each time I've moved.

Worked 4/5 times (all with cable), only time it failed was because I had apparently subscribed to a DSL plan from CenturyLink without realizing and they needed to wire up the extra lines upstream for the "modern" version of DSL to work in my apartment. After insisting multiple times that the self-install kit was 100% plug-n-play at my new address despite my intense skepticism since I really needed reliable internet from Day 1 during COVID remote work.

I was seriously missing Comcast/cable by the time that 1 yr contract was up, the devil you know and all...
by devmor | 2025-12-22 19:33:34+00:00
> I'm not going to blame the vibe-coding wave entirely.

As one vibe-coding's most fervent critics, I don't blame it at all. Amateur devs have been doing this for a decade and change with Firebase and other hosted datastores.

I got one of my first small jobs as a contractor because of an Android app doing this back in 2012!
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-22 19:33:35+00:00
> In the EF Core and Automapper type of cases, I consider it an anti-pattern that something outside the class is taking a dependency on a private member of the class in the first place, so the compiler is really doing you a favor by hiding away the private backing field more obscurely.

It's another variation of the "parse don't validate" dance. Just because you can do model validation in property setters doesn't always mean it is the best place to do model validation. If you are trying to bypass the setter in a DB Model, then you may have data in your database that doesn't validate, you just want to "parse" it and move on.

It is similar with auto-mapping scenarios, with the complication that automapping was originally meant to be the Validation step in some workflows and code architectures. I think that's personally why AutoMapper and other similar libraries have had a code smell to me as where those tools are often used are "parsing boundaries" more than they should be "validation boundaries" and the coupling between validation logic and AutoMapper logic to me starts to feel like a big ball of spaghetti to me versus a dedicated validation layer that is only concerned with validation not also doing a lot of heavy lifting in copying data around.