MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by watwut | 2025-12-15 16:25:58+00:00
> Hard questions (only those slightly interested got these correct): Examine the tone of the conversation between $A and $B in $chapter, first from the PoV of $A and then from the PoV of $B. List the differences, if any, in the tone that $A intended his instructions to be received and the tone that $B actually understood it as.

I always got As on these ... but the primary reason was that I was good at bullshitting. They are super easy when you are good at bullshitting. The trick is not to care that your answer sounds royally stupid. Then you will get A.

And all you need is to check those dialogs when writing the test. If you are expecting me to remember those dialogs, then we are back to the expectation that I basically memorized the book.

> Very hard questions (for those who got +90% on their English grades): In the story arc for $A it can be claimed that the author intended to mirror the arc for Cordelia from King Lear. Make an argument for or against this claim.

Again, I got As ... but they were solidly in the "kind of test that convinces you literature is stupid class" kind of questions. Unless there is some kind of actual interesting insight to be had, this question just shows how empty the whole exercise is.
by grvdrm | 2025-12-15 16:26:38+00:00
Said another way: extra touch might mean more accountable thinking.

Higher touch: "I am responsbile for creating this report. It better be right" Automated touch: "I sent you the report, it's right because it's automated"

Mistakes possible either way. But I like higher-touch in many situations.

Curious if you have links to examples you mention?
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-15 16:27:02+00:00
> Sorry but a living being that either had or has a penis will never be female and therefore is automatically uninteresting to me as a straight man.

I don't know why you think your sexual preference is of anyone else's concern except for people who would, before considering it, look at you as a potential sexual partner.

> Gender identity is a buzz word without meaning.

It (like both sex and ascribed gender) is a name for a very real phenomenon, whether or not that phenomenon is important in your world in which, apparently, the only thing that matters about other people is whether they fall in or out of your preferred set of sexual targets.

Like, I get that your identity as "straight" and your particular definition of what that entails is important to you, but I don't see why you get so intensely upset about a fictional concept of a society where people (whose self-image must not be as caught up in genital anatomy as yours for the existence of this choice to matter) have a choice that they don't in our present reality which would, if exercised, put them outside of your sexual preference (I mean, I would assume that the vast majority of those whou would choose it would, either because of their starting sex, or other reasons, already be outside of that set, anyway.)
by butlike | 2025-12-15 16:27:04+00:00
> When 2,3-butanediol (2,3-BDO) is produced through microbial fermentation, common byproducts include ethanol, acetoin (acetylmethyl-carbinol), lactic acid, acetic acid, formic acid, succinic acid, CO2, and H2, depending on the microorganism and fermentation conditions, with acetoin and diacetyl being key intermediates in the pathway.

The intermediate diacetyl appears to have a potentially major side effect which, at scale, may make it a non-starter.

> Inhalation of vapors can cause bronchiolitis obliterans, a severe and irreversible lung disease, leading to coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath, notes CDPH
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-15 16:27:09+00:00
Yeah but sports aren't essential to society, and it really doesn't matter who wins, beyond fanning the flames of tribalism and religious proxy battles and advertising endorsements and gambling and hooliganism.

But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society.

Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them.

Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-15 16:27:54+00:00
I’m with you on this one. Some of my projects are flooded with sus traffic from Brazil. I don’t believe there are a million eager Brazilian hackers targeting me in particular. It’s pretty clear from analysis that they’re all residential hosts running proxies, knowingly or otherwise.

The more concise word for this is “botnet”. Computers participating in one should be quarantined until they stop.
by hennell | 2025-12-15 16:28:02+00:00
This is what I don't get with a lot of the AI based saas projects - what is your value add? If you can build it with AI then (in theory) your customer can also build it with ai, so why do they need you? In the SaaS world you don't because the cost of development and maintenance just doesn't scale well, but if you're 99% a wrapper around an AI, your 'business' feels easily replicable to me.

But that does leave a weird gap where SaaSes that took a lot of time to make but can now be handled by an Ai won't survive either. If the business stays hand-coded it costs too much to be viable, if it moves to Ai it looses any advantage over doing it youself.
by cyp0633 | 2025-12-15 16:28:13+00:00
US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire.

From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.

You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.
by Uehreka | 2025-12-15 16:28:17+00:00
Not doing subscriptions for an app that has ongoing server costs is going to bite you, you may want to reconsider that.

Your biggest issue is going to be that language learning for adults is largely an unsolved problem. I know people with 1000+ day streaks on Duolingo who are nonetheless not fluent, and from everything I’ve read, it seems clear that spaced-repetition techniques are not sufficient (and possibly not necessary) to achieve fluency. Most people say you need immersion, which is difficult for an app to provide (research other people who have tried, you probably wouldn’t be the first and can save a lot of time, effort and heartbreak by learning from other people’s failures).
by mhurron | 2025-12-15 16:28:19+00:00
> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?

Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it.

'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-15 16:28:26+00:00
I'm stoked about this release too...

From what I can tell, the 'Metal' offering runs on nodes with directly attached NVMe rather than network-attached storage. That means there isn't a per-customer IOPS cap – they actually market it as 'unlimited I/O' because you hit CPU before saturating the disk. The new $50 M-class clusters are essentially smaller versions of those nodes with adjustable CPU and RAM in AWS and GCP .

RE: EC2 shapes, it's not a shared EBS volume but a dedicated instance with local storage. BUT you'll still want to monitor capacity since the storage doesn't autoscale.

ALSO this pricing makes high-throughput Postgres accessible for indie projects, which is pretty neat.
by henning | 2025-12-15 16:28:36+00:00
UUIDs make enumeration attacks harder and also prevent situations where seeing a high valid ID value lets you estimate how much money a private company is earning if they charge based on the object the ID is associated with. If you can sample enough object ID values and see when the IDs were created, you could reverse engineer their ARR chart and see whether they're growing or not which many companies want to avoid.
by tossandthrow | 2025-12-15 16:29:00+00:00
It does not make sense.

One inherits free money - and pay inheritance tax of it. In order for capital to be free, capital gains tax needs to be paid.

And the general idea to protect against "double taxation" is meaningless. All money are constantly being taxed again and again.

Regardless. Inequality in itself is really bad, and Americans do feel the consequences.
by wslh | 2025-12-15 16:29:14+00:00
This is a two-edged discussion. On one extreme, there’s an interesting Marxist idea that value creation is largely the product of historical and social forces, not just individual effort. However, I don’t think it’s fair to single out AI, or any billionaire to fit that narrative while ignoring other factors, such as the idea that nations should not exist since they can be thought in the same terms.

On the other side, Jeff Bezos is clearly an outlier. Even if we agree that ecommerce would have existed without him, we don’t know whether someone else would have created the same scale of value.
by actionfromafar | 2025-12-15 16:29:29+00:00
Ah those vectors..

I loved them too. During that era I got to try some kind of flight simulator on a Silicon Graphics. Smoooth shapes, extremely high resolution, must have been lots of tiny triangles, and nice shading. I remember thinking, this is the future, can’t wait to get this in personal computers!

Nah, instead almost two decades of muddy lores textures on lopoly models.

I guess now we are finally there, with raytracing in games. But I would still like to see the nontextured aesthetic make a comeback.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-15 16:29:40+00:00
>people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities

Does it not?

"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1/...
by solaire_oa | 2025-12-15 16:29:42+00:00
First, I'll second that I've applied agentic LLMs to an open source project to fix bugs and forcibly coerce it to act in ways that the maintainer may or may not approve of. It has been remarkablely effective, so long as I'm willing to apply patches or maintain a fork of the project (trivial, since this particular open-source project is abandoned anyway).

That said, the act of doing this- using LLMs to dominate somebody's legitimately intelligent and unique work- feels not only discourteous, but worse, like it's a short-term solution.

I'm convinced that it's a short-term solution NOT because I don't think that LLMs can continuously maintain these projects, but because open-source itself is going to be clawed back. The raison d'être of open-source is personal pride, hiring, collaboration, enjoyment, trust, etc. These motivations make less sense in an LLM-fueled world.

My prediction is that useful and well maintained open-source projects like we're hijacking will become fewer and far between.
by anarazel | 2025-12-15 16:29:46+00:00
> First, although I work at Oxide, please don't think I speak for Oxide. None of this happened at Oxide. It informed some of the choices we made at Oxide and we've talked about that publicly. I try to remember to include the caveat that this information is very dated (and I made that edit immediately after my initial comment above).

I said oxide, because it's come up so frequently and at such length on the oxide podcast... Without that I probably wouldn't have commented here. It's one thing to comment on bad experiences, but at this point it feels like more like bashing. And I feel like an open source focused company should treat other folks working on open source with a bit more, idk, respect (not quite the right word, but I can't come up with a better one right now).

I probably shouldn't have commented on this here. But I read the message after just having spent a Sunday morning looking into a problem and I guess that made more thin skinned than usual.

> For most of that time (and several years earlier), the community members we reached out to were very dismissive, saying either these weren't problems, or they were known problems and we were wrong for not avoiding them, etc.

I agree that the wider community sometimes has/had the issue of excusing away postgres problems. While I try to avoid doing that, I certainly have fallen prey to that myself.

Leaving fandom like stuff aside, there's an aspect of having been told over and over we're doing xyz wrong and things would never work that way, and succeeding (to some degree) regardless. While ignoring some common wisdom has been advantageous, I think there's also plenty where we just have been high on our own supply.

> What remains is me feeling triggered when it feels like users' pain is being casually dismissed.

Was that done in this thread?
by simonask | 2025-12-15 16:29:57+00:00
Comparing type systems is difficult, but the general experience is that it is significantly easier to encode logic invariants in Rust than in C++.

Some of the things you can do, often with a wild amount of boilerplate (tagged unions, niches, etc.), and some of the things are fundamentally impossible (movable non-null owning references).

C++ templates are more powerful than Rust generics, but the available tools in Rust are more sophisticated.
by zug_zug | 2025-12-15 16:30:02+00:00
Because of its high toxicity, the European Union withdrew paraquat from its market in July 2007 [1]

So it's clearly poisonous to humans in high doses, I guess the argument is that perhaps the smaller doses exposed to farmers may not lead to sufficient ingestion to cause harm. The parkinsons seems like pretty clear evidence against that.

> If it simply hasn't been approved in other countries, one can't use that information to infer about its safety.

I don't know why you're trying to defend this with counterfactuals/hypotheticals instead of just googling. Feels like you're bending over backward here.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3657034/
by ghaff | 2025-12-15 16:30:57+00:00
Discrete tools are fairly easy. On the other hand, I think a lot of people here would laugh at the "text book" for the introductory FORTRAN course I took at said school.

Of course, you were struggling with fairly primitive tools at the time as well. Made a typo? Time to beg the grad students running the facility for some more compute cycles.

Although it's out of print I don't immediately see a full copy online. https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...
by jijijijij | 2025-12-15 16:31:12+00:00
Yeah, it's an ignorant and arrogant take on the legal system.

In most places the law is exercised pragmatically, interpreted by presumed intention. That's why legal precedent is important. You likely won't convince any judge being anal about the wording (maybe if the law gets applied for the first time). You can derail anything semantically. Furthermore, despite apparent belief, laws are frequently formulated in such a way that a particular wider term is extended to help interpretation. Eg. "It is prohibited to use a VPN in a way capable and intended to obscure one's physical internet access point identification". (Not a lawyer, not a native speaker, don't get anal with this wording, either.) I very much doubt any legally binding document would even use the term 'VPN' primarily to describe the technical means for anonymization, but rather describe it functionally.
by WebToolsCaE | 2025-12-15 16:31:19+00:00
You can make online courses using mind maps by placing the main course topic at the center of a map, breaking it into connected branches for each concept, and attaching lessons, videos, and exercises directly to each node. Learners navigate the course by exploring the map instead of following a fixed lesson order. Tools like Pathmind allow you to build, publish, and share online courses entirely inside interactive mind maps.
by apercu | 2025-12-15 16:32:47+00:00
> I’m starting to wonder if this approach is fundamentally at odds with today’s market.

I don't want to project, but outside of video gaming, I'm seeing people in my personal networks pull back from digital more and more - not because these tools and apps aren't useful, but because they are so hostile.

So you might be ahead of your time. That said, businesses cost money to run so you need to assess your churn if you aren't going to have a subscription model.
by kqr | 2025-12-15 16:33:01+00:00
Let's just say a family member has a very important and somewhat secretive job. The most classified meetings don't happen in our home, of course, but for a state adversary even small clues can be what's needed.

(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)
by andai | 2025-12-15 16:33:02+00:00
At one university I went to, the head of the CS department was quoted as saying "[We don't need to care about the job market,] Our job is to create researchers."

I thought that was pretty strange at the time because like 5% of the students end up going into research. So that was basically like him saying I'm totally cool with our educational program being misaligned for 95% percent of our customers...

Maybe it makes sense for the big picture though. If all the breakthroughs come from those 5%, it might benefit everyone to optimize for them. (I don't expect they would have called the program particularly optimized either though ;)
by AlanYx | 2025-12-15 16:33:42+00:00
I think there is room for non-gamified learning apps depending on the field and how it's intended to be used. A good example is the field of early reading instruction. The best two apps right now IMHO are Reading.com and Mentava, and they take radically different approaches. Mentava is pretty gamified and kids can use it on its own, whereas Reading.com is basically a computer implementation of Siegfried Engelmann's instructional approach. Has to be used with a parent accompaniment, and most of the onscreen widgets are just there to facilitate co-teaching. Both apps are good and seem to be landing with their target markets, obviously the simpler one is aiming at a lower price point.

Poor gamification is a bigger risk than non-gamification done well IMHO. That's where a lot of children's learning apps have failed in the past.
by neogodless | 2025-12-15 16:34:14+00:00
https://kagi.com/search?q=Pesticide

> Pesticides are substances that are used to control pests. They include herbicides, insecticides, nematicides, fungicides, and many others (see table). The most common of these are herbicides, which account for approximately 50% of all pesticide use globally.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide

You're trying to be pedantic, but you're actually wrong. If you think about it, from the perspective of anyone trying to raise crops, weeds are pests. (They are pests to lots of non-farmers, too.)

Similarly...

> A pest is any organism harmful to humans or human concerns. The term is particularly used for creatures that damage crops, livestock, and forestry or cause a nuisance to people, especially in their homes.

> Plants may be considered pests, for example, if they are invasive species or weeds.
by nine_k | 2025-12-15 16:34:33+00:00
Nobody forces you to use a real Unix timestamp. BTW the original Unix timestamp is 32 bits (expiring in 2038), and now everyone is switching to 64-bit time_t. What 48 bits?

All you need is a guaranteed non-decreasing 48-bit number. A clock is one way to generate it, but I don't see why a UUIDv7 would become invalid if your clock is biased, runs too fast, too slow, or whatever. I would not count on the first 48 bits being a "real" timestamp.
by shagie | 2025-12-15 16:34:33+00:00
It's been around for nearly a decade.

Taxing Robots : Easier Said Than Done (2017) https://www.ctf.ca/EN/EN/Newsletters/Canadian_Tax_Focus/2017...

Robots, technological change and taxation (2017) https://www.taxjournal.com/articles/robots-technological-cha...

Why robots should be taxed if they take people's jobs (2017) https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/22/robots-tax-...
by palmotea | 2025-12-15 16:34:34+00:00
> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.

In practice, capitalism itself doesn't really promote competition, but rather competition is an externally-enforced situation required to keep capitalism from going off the rails. IMHO, capitalism naturally evolves towards monopoly (otherwise antitrust laws would be unnecessary).
by desro | 2025-12-15 16:34:37+00:00
I was able to find the references (including photos of the mentioned forearms) on PubMed and the RIMJ after a quick search. Paraquat is nasty stuff.

- [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33769492/

- [1] http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima... (via https://rimedicalsociety.org/rhode-island-medical-journal/)

- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
by New_Person | 2025-12-15 16:35:10+00:00
OP here.

I spent the last week analyzing a proprietary dataset of 49,315 delisted US stocks to understand "survivorship bias" from a microstructure perspective. Standard backtests usually ignore these companies, but I wanted to see what the order book looks like right before a firm goes to zero.

I built a pipeline to index 84GB of minute-level OHLCV data and cluster the failures using K-Means.

Key Finding: "Type III: The Zombie Churn." Stocks that have already lost 90%+ of their value, but volume explodes to 48x normal levels while price stays flat. It looks like a distinct signature of retail bag-holding vs. institutional exit.

The repo has the indexer script, the clustering logic, and the "Death Metrics" CSV for the top 1,000 failures (including Lehman Brothers and Enron).

Happy to answer questions about the parquet engineering or the metrics used!
by krautburglar | 2025-12-15 16:35:29+00:00
Many medical preparations are oil rather than water soluble. Seed oils tend to be the cheapest choice, and probably still have trace amounts of pesticides/herbicides/fungicide--even after processing. Under such conditions, one must wonder how many of our modern neurodegenerative conditions are iatrogenic. Genetics may load the chamber, but environment pulls the trigger.
by codyb | 2025-12-15 16:35:31+00:00
Immersion's best in my experience... and you can create immersion

Things I do more and more often as time goes in Spanish

- Subtitles in Spanish always on whenever possible

- Audio (music (just bought some Bad Bunny), television, sports broadcasts)

- Order in Spanish

- Interfaces in Spanish (computers, televisions, phones)

- Text friends

- Consume news

- Read wikipedia when I need information

- Take notes for work and life

- Play videogames

It really starts compounding, my goal is to stop using the Anki decks entirely in 2026. At that point I should be able to start learning whatever my next goal is in Spanish so that I can continue using my Spanish while working on... cooking or whatever it is I want to focus in on next
by prisenco | 2025-12-15 16:35:36+00:00
The Space Jam website from 1996 still renders perfectly almost 30 years later.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

Those (document.layers and document.all) were both vendor-specific, neither were part of the w3c. I don't recommend ever writing vendor-specific code.

The w3c and standards have generally won so it's easier than ever to write to the standard.