MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-18 10:59:03+00:00
There are kinds of questions that you can ask to signal your seniority and matureness. There are other kinds of questions that, should you ask them, will leave people wondering what the hell have you been doing for the past N years and why they're paying you senior-level salary.

A lot of early signs of problems, such as critical information becoming tribal knowledge instead of being documented, are revealed when asking the second kind of questions.
by MrSkelter | 2025-12-18 10:59:20+00:00
This is a uniquely American obsession.

I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world.

(Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White).

Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols.

The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating.

LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois.

America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing.

It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak.

I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to.

Look it (as my relatives confounding say)

LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.
by sipofwater | 2025-12-18 11:01:00+00:00
NFS server on an Android smartphone without root access, "Testing: Termux, proot-distro, Network File System (NFS): https://gist.github.com/NoteAfterNote/e1719f4029b91918d99621... (gist.github.com/NoteAfterNote/e1719f4029b91918d996216939d5bff2)
by cowboylowrez | 2025-12-18 11:01:09+00:00
The thing is, market share reports don't show evidence that Mozilla is doing really important work. From reading the comments here, firefox's literal reason for existing is ad blocking and "not chrome". Compatibility with websites is on the decline, websites breaking on firefox are on the increase. Rust is one of the few positives that I can see yet Mozilla has transferred trademarks and "infrastructure assets" to a new rust foundation of some sort that seems to mean that they're now independent of Mozilla.

The internet market makers think that ad blocking is antisocial, so in fact mozilla's firefox only reason for being is that its not the internets favorite browser which is a hell of a mission statement to offer, but thats as generous an assessment as I can make with those fellows, hell I still use firefox out of habit but I always keep a chrome install for the times firefox just doesn't work, but even then I'm just lazy and even when running firefox I've never installed an ad blocker which seems to increasingly be firefox's reason for existence.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-18 11:01:21+00:00
I think the quote itself indicates something of pre-internet outlook, where one's world was more localized. From that perspective, "good time"/"bad time" is more tied to one's geography ( and by extention, tribe ) more than anything else. If true, then "bad time" is simply war, famine, pestilence from more common set of maladies. And if the outlook is more local, the saying does start to make a lot of sense, because our constraints define how we approach life in general. Not to search very far, depression crash made a generation of Americans very wary of trading stocks.
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-18 11:01:26+00:00
Years ago, there was a job agency advertising an IT banking job in the Caribbean. Every week. For years. Apparently it was just a way for them to harvest CVs. 'Sorry you didn't make the interview for that job, but can I interest you in a role creating TPS reports for a company in Slough?'.

Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.
by sipofwater | 2025-12-18 11:01:29+00:00
* Kodi has an NFS client, "Downloads for Android": https://kodi.tv/download/android/

* VLC for Android, Android TV and ChromeOS, "Network browsing for distant filesystems (SMB, FTP, SFTP, NFS...) and servers (UPnP, DLNA)": https://github.com/videolan/vlc-android , https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html

* "NFS Clients VLC & KODI on Android TV": https://www.hallergard.com/Blog/NFS_Android.html
by sipofwater | 2025-12-18 11:01:45+00:00
* "exportfs Command: Tutorial & Examples" "Manage and display NFS exported file systems on a Linux server": https://cleveruptime.com/docs/commands/exportfs

* "NFS Security: Identifying and Exploiting Misconfigurations": https://www.hvs-consulting.de/en/blog/nfs-security-identifyi... (www.hvs-consulting.de/en/blog/nfs-security-identifying-and-exploiting-misconfigurations)
by bookofjoe | 2025-12-18 11:02:51+00:00
Ah, I narrowly focused on my setup, which since inception in 2007 has consisted of my heavy plasma tv sitting atop the bespoke mount — extremely stable and overbuilt — that came with it atop a solid wood low console table.

Indeed, if the TV were to tip onto a young child it could cause serious injury; no such youngsters here.

As I think more about this, I realize I've never wall-mounted a TV nor would I ever do so: I just prefer them on stands.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-18 11:03:00+00:00
> You do know that /etc/hosts is a file you can edit, right?

Yes. What does it have to do with HTTPS?

> You hopefully also know that you can create your own certificate authority or self signed certificates and add them to your CA store.

Sorta, kinda. Does it actually work with third-party apps? Does it work with mobile systems? If not, then it's not a valid solution, because it doesn't allow me to run my stuff in my own networks without interfacing with the global Internet and social and political systems backing its cryptographic infrastructure.
by kalaksi | 2025-12-18 11:03:04+00:00
After reading some comments: this probably goes without saying, but one should be very careful what to expose to the internet. Sounds like the analytics-service maybe could have been available only over VPN (or similar, like mTLS etc.)

And for basic web sites, it's much better if it requires no back-end.

Every service exposed increases risk and requires additional vigilance to maintain. Which means more effort.
by Laremere | 2025-12-18 11:03:07+00:00
The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.

However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.

It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
by godelski | 2025-12-18 11:03:15+00:00
> However, I think it's high time to reconsider what scientific review is supposed to be

I've been arguing for years we should publish to platforms like OpenReview and that basically we check for plagiarism and obvious errors but otherwise publish.

The old days the bottleneck was the physical sending out of papers. Now that's cheap. So make comments public. We're all on the same side. The people that will leave reviews are more likely to actually be invested in the topic rather than doing review as purely a service. It's not perfect but no system will be and we currently waste lots of time chasing reviewers
by sipofwater | 2025-12-18 11:03:22+00:00
* "[GUIDE] How to share directories on the phone running Android via NFS as non-root user" by bnsmb: https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-how-to-share-directories-on-th... (xdaforums.com/t/guide-how-to-share-directories-on-the-phone-running-android-via-nfs-as-non-root-user.4756743/) via "Testing: Termux, proot-distro, Network File System (NFS)" at https://gist.github.com/NoteAfterNote/e1719f4029b91918d99621... (gist.github.com/NoteAfterNote/e1719f4029b91918d996216939d5bff2)

* bnsmb: http://bnsmb.de , https://github.com/bnsmb , http://bnsmb.de/My_HowTos_for_Android.html , http://bnsmb.de/My_HowTos_for_Android_open_details.html
by davenci | 2025-12-18 11:03:39+00:00
That makes sense. And I guess distribution/marketing is an ever moving target in which those being the most clever and willing to put in the time and energy wins regardless of AI getting better?

Like, say AI makes distribution and marketing easier, now it’s easier for everyone, but they still compete for the same clients. So while your signal is getting stronger, so is the noise (the signal of all the other competitors). So those who put in the hours and smartness to «invent» a more clever marketing strategy are the ones able to break through the noise and reach the clients?

In other words, distribution/marketing is the bottleneck and the target is ever moving?
by estearum | 2025-12-18 11:03:54+00:00
I responded below already but since writing that, I've come up with a few more great bad reasons not to bring a drug to market (sorry for the parseability of that one...)

Best bad reason: it would cannibalize an inferior drug currently in your portfolio that's still under patent protection.

I think this behavior is at the far "evil" end of the spectrum of behaviors that drug developers systematically engage in (which I believe is far more banal + less evil than what they're accused of), but it does happen and it's a really nasty

Where it gets especially nasty is when companies buy drugs in development or pre-development from other companies in order to squash (or at least delay) a potentially competitive asset before it reaches the market.

---

Another great bad reason, but mostly applies to devices/procedures: the device/procedure is fantastic but for various structural reasons outside of the control of the device/procedure developer, there is insufficient incentive for healthcare providers to actually deploy said device/procedure.

A trivial example would be a pacemaker that requires fewer leads than the competitors and has fewer complications. Great for patients, but potentially totally uninteresting to the electrophysiologists who install it and would get paid less due to the less complex procedure.

---

Best good reasons all fall under: making a therapy is unfathomably difficult and most efforts are destined to fail OR (separately) proving a therapy works is unfathomably expensive and most efforts can't produce a positive ROI after that process.
Ask HN: What's the minimal WordPress security hardening you'd trust?
by mirza_rizvi | 2025-12-18 11:04:31+00:00
I’m trying to understand what actually matters in WordPress security beyond checkbox features.

Constraints: shared hosting, non-technical site owners, must not break plugins/themes, low overhead.

If you had to pick the top 5 controls in a WP security plugin (or server-side), what would you choose and why?

Bonus: what features are mostly noise (false positives, bloat, fear-UX), and what’s surprisingly effective?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-18 11:05:41+00:00
<< Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.

Maybe? I am giving my kid a lot of comfort, because I see how almost everything is stacked against her future. If the unrealistic expectations exist, it is from our ruling class that we simply accept it:D

just sayin'
by andy99 | 2025-12-18 11:05:57+00:00
If there is regulation, it should be about monopolies in general and not trying to micromanage hiring. Companies behave this way because they are in a position to do so. In a real competitive environment they wouldn’t. Poorly thought through band-aid rules don’t change that, in fact they would almost certainly favour the big monopolies with the worst hiring practices who have big HR departments that can handle and game compliance.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-18 11:06:08+00:00
Id suggest FB & co also uses location tracking & proximity to expand their social graph continuosly? Most people just dont care about these privacy settings, and if you have a vast number of users, it doesnt matter if ther are 10% "techsavy people" because the mass is just big enough to create profiles on which you then easily can compute/guess other connections & joints in the social graph.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-18 11:07:46+00:00
> Distribution has always been monetized. What margin did a retailer take for putting your boxed software on the shelf? How about that magazine ad? Google search? And so on. Get over the idea that a platform should give you their distribution for free.

As 'amelius said below, there used to be more platforms. This matters, because it made for a different balance of power. Especially with retailers - the producers typically had leverage over distributors, not the other way around.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-18 11:07:51+00:00
It's a shame that the AI branch is the software engineering industry is so determined to make us look like compete fools.

WHY ARE THEY STILL TALKING ABOUT ADDING LINES OF CODE IF THEY KNOW HOW SOFTWARE COMPLEXITY SCALES.

I could not put it more simply: you don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. Too many asinine things have been done like this line-of-code-counting BS for me to not see I it as attempted fraud.

Something we know for sure is that the most productive engineers are usually neutral or negative on lines of code. Bad ones who are costing your business money by cranking out debt: those amp up you number of lines
by lm28469 | 2025-12-18 11:08:00+00:00
But again you can get all of that and double your salary by working for a US company from europe... All my friends are doing that and are paid 120k+ which no local company would ever pay, that's like exec level salary in most regular local companies.

70k really isn't that much, that's 3500/month net in france or germany, you can already remove 1000-1500 for rent alone if you live in a western EU capital
by integralid | 2025-12-18 11:08:31+00:00
As a bright eyed young engineer I worked for a year in FAANG and loved it[1]. Free lunches, all that scale, opportunities to learn, kool-aid, and at that point i truly believed the company cared about making the world a better place [2]. So regarding:

>there is nothing to be won by working for them

As you can see above, not everyone sees it like that. And HR is working hard to pretend you're a big deal and not just a cog. People who read HN are a bit of a bubble in being disillusioned.

>I'd never hire a FAANG employee

Uhh, ok?

[1] but I had enough pride to quit after a year when they pulled off something I was not OK with.

[2] to be fair, I think at that time most employees did
by pedrozieg | 2025-12-18 11:08:42+00:00
Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people clicking what looks interesting.

The only repeatable “strategy” I’ve seen work is: write things that would be interesting even if HN didn’t exist, and let other people submit them. Trying to treat HN as a distribution channel (carefully timed posts, optimized titles, orchestrated upvotes) reliably backfires because the software + mods are explicitly optimized against that. If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity, the dynamics suddenly make a lot more sense.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-18 11:08:48+00:00
> Sorry, as someone in this field, this is bullshit. It is in mice.

Nice to hear an expert opinion. Let's hope your comment goes back to black. I have a lot of question!

> This is a nothing burger.

Is it enough for a bread-mayo-bread sandwich? Lettuce?

IIUC the bacteria makes the cancer disappear for two weeks, until they end the study and kill the mice. (IIUC this is timeline is usual for very early studies.) They tried other bacterias and one of them made the cancer disappear for a few days, so I'm worried about the long time efficiency of this method.

Is injecting the bacterias a second time as efficient as the first time, or the inmune system kills the bacteria before they hurt the cancer?

What happen in case of metastasis? Each one must be injected with the bacterias or they will jump and make all of them disappear?

Does the bacteria infect other organs and kill you? Is there a good antibiotic in case the bacteria cause problems?

They used cancers that were 200mm3 (i.e. like a sphere of 7mm = 1/4 inch). What happens in bigger cancers? Does bigger cancer have better irrigation and make it more difficult for the bacteria to survive? What happens to tiny hidden metastasis (that probably still have good enough irrigation)?
by mentalgear | 2025-12-18 11:08:51+00:00
> What I quickly learned is that whatever I do in the first hour after waking up will set the tone for the entire day. If I read social media, my head will fill with nonsense I truly don't give a shit about, and will develop into a thirst for quick dopamine which escalates as the day rolls by. Any action, really, will set me in a particular direction and then it's too late to do anything about it. The only thing that has been working for me is to be completely intolerant of any distractions in the morning. Until noon, my phone is silenced. My email client is closed. Social media is blocked on all my devices.

Very true.
by poofsoda | 2025-12-18 11:09:31+00:00
A common strategy is to first establish precedent by successfully suing smaller / less deep-pocketed entities, and then using that victory to compel more resourced organizations to comply. When SFC brought this lawsuit, Vizio was an independent company and much smaller than Amazon. Of course, its purchase by Walmart in 2024 changes that a bit—but before then, easier for SFC to face Vizio’s legal team than Amazon’s.
by asimovDev | 2025-12-18 11:09:33+00:00
Nice! I used to use it when doing BBB 5/3/1. Sadly I stalled and got depressed.

Recently started GZCLP after getting sad at how bad I started to look with no activity

My one complaint was that there weren’t more sophisticated training regiments. I didn’t work 5/2 weeks so I just went to the gym every other day and I just clicked whatever in the app when working out, while I would prefer to track my days. Otherwise solid app, thanks for the hard work.
by latexr | 2025-12-18 11:09:59+00:00
> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?

The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.

He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
by Someone | 2025-12-18 11:10:14+00:00
Yes, you can. The problem with testing is that a candidate treatment may make things worse for patients, not that it may improve things.

If your treatment works, that’s an improvement of what you had before. Once you know that, you can treat all patients. For some, that will be too late, but without your tests, it would be too late for them, too.

If your treatment doesn’t do anything at all, it keeps things the same, but the patients in the test group likely will have had some inconveniences (having to visit a doctor, getting an injection, etc), so you shouldn’t do the test.

If your treatment makes things worse, you of course shouldn’t do the test.

Problem is that you typically only can only know in hindsight which of these applies.

So, you think carefully on whether a treatment could fall in category 3, and, if so, first do it on a group of patients who consent to be Guinea pigs and, often, are already terminally ill, as any negative outcomes will cause less harm to such patients.

Then, as soon as during the test your stats tell the drug does or doesn’t work, you stop the test and either treat all patients or stop treating the test subjects.
by keeda | 2025-12-18 11:10:26+00:00
The folks at Stanford in this video have a somewhat similar dataset, and they account for "code churn" i.e. reworking AI output: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbDDYKRFjhk -- I think they do so by tracking if the same lines of code are changed in subsequent commits. Maybe something to consider.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-18 11:11:16+00:00
> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.

Is that surprising? All of that sounds fully consistent to me when parents suffocate their kids with expectations and activities instead of meeting their actual needs.

They feel like they're suffocating them because they are, they feel inadequate because deep down they know it's wrong, and kids feel like they're not getting enough space because they aren't.
by BDPW | 2025-12-18 11:11:27+00:00
I hope I'm wrong but I haven't seen anything like this in practice. I would imagine we have the same problem as before where we could use it as an extra filter but the amount of shit that comes out makes the process not actually any more accurate, just faster.

Having seen from close-up how these reviews go, I get why people use tools like this unfortunately. it doesn't make me very hopeful for the near future of reviewing.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-18 11:11:59+00:00
The problem is that "enterprise-grade intelligence", by its very nature, doesn't want to be trapped in a pipe feeding apps - it subsumes apps, reducing them to mere background tool calls.

The perfect "killer app" for AI would kill most software products and SaaS as we know them. The code doing the useful part would still be there, but stripped off branding, customer funnels and other traps, upsell channels, etc. As a user, I'd be more than happy to see it (at least as long as the AI frontend part was well-developed for power users); obviously, product owners hate this.