MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 21:30:35+00:00
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.

At some point I realized those people were just like that.

I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.

We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
by twotwotwo | 2025-12-27 21:30:50+00:00
FWIW, here are (mostly) their agent's tips for other agents from exploring a mostly-new system including tidbits like how to get recent Node: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/1FV6XMQKP2T0D9M8FF82-cach...

It's very much a snapshot of what happens to come on a new VM today, and I put a little disclaimer in it to try to help tools get unstuck if anything there proves to be outdated or a flat-out (accidental) lie.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-27 21:31:18+00:00
Google's stance on this was fairly draconian when I was working there, basically Google's position was that they could be in ANY business at ANY time so that ANY thing you worked on was theirs. On the day I joined, one of the other new hires had a marked up copy of the agreement with some VERY simple wording changes that said basically "wasn't in this business at the time the employee started working on the project" (aka a no retro-active clause) because this individual pointed out quite reasonably that if they were working on something in good faith on their own that wasn't part of Google's business and it turned out to be a really good idea, then Google, based on how the agreement was written, could go back and say "but we're in that business now too and you were working for us so we own your idea."

To which the HR person at the orientation had said, "Don't worry Google wouldn't do that." And this individual said, "I'm sure they wouldn't, that's why it seems like a no-brainer to put it into the agreement, it just says they won't do something that you and I both agree they would never do. I can't sign the document as written without this." The HR person took the updated version off to someone (presumably legal). And then after lunch this person was not in the group (I had seen them eating lunch) So when we had finished up, before my mentor had arrived I went out and found them waiting on the circle for a ride and asked them what happened. They said, "Google said no and also said they were rescinding the offer of employment."

And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things.
by sometimes_all | 2025-12-27 21:32:42+00:00
I have in the past refused and started looking for a new job the moment my employer asked me to use my personal accounts for company work. That was a major breach of personal boundaries which I did not find acceptable. But clearly, it doesn't seem that the author had the liberty to say no:

> Part of me was concerned about my future, my visa, I just moved, The lease.

This is one of the major reasons why I left the US after a few years of my own accord; green card / citizenship wait times for Indians are nonsensical if you are not provably extraordinary or haven't married a US citizen. I could be wrong, but it seems that the author is still young, doesn't have many dependents or responsibilities. Their mental state would've been a lot worse, and they'd have been a lot more vulnerable to workplace manipulation if they had children and a mortgage to think about. Even if they had a good manager today, there's no guarantee they'd keep having a good manager a few years from now before their green card arrives.

I found it a cruel joke that a country that prides itself on "freedom" and "liberty" is perfectly happy keeping people, directly or indirectly, in circumstances where they do not actually have freedom and liberty for decades. The crueler joke is that a lot of said people find this arrangement perfectly acceptable even when they have other options.
by ndom91 | 2025-12-27 21:33:41+00:00
Came here to see if anyone had an answer to this too.

US Digital Service (USDS) was also "renamed" and turned into DOGE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service).

So on the surface it seems that we already had many of these types of orgs, but they killed them all and spun up their own renamed and rebadged versions.

That being said, this project does seem like a potential big win.
by mhluongo | 2025-12-27 21:33:54+00:00
Direct counterpoint: I've been a Dell XPS 13 stan for years (owned 3), and my other laptop today is a System 76. I've run IT for labs at a major university (Georgia Tech), across Windows, RHEL, and MacOS. I've been a desktop Linux user since 2006, both personally and professionally.

Across those, I've repaired plenty of laptops. I mentioned the RAM above because it's recent, and because it's easy. And I don't just mean physically easy - I mean I can find the part with a quick search, and it's just like any other ecommerce thing. That's a big shift from figuring out how to upgrade most laptops, where your top search result is a forum post or pushing you to talk to a tech.

Not breathless, but it is a breath of fresh air.
by neilv | 2025-12-27 21:34:18+00:00
I was talking with a great-sounding few-person early startup (nice people, non-evil business, interesting work, etc.), and they wanted me to fill a highly-skilled role... in-office in a VHCOLA, for $110K and "0.5%" in usual option schedule. (Presumably also with the usual barriers to options ever being exercised or liquidated equitably.)

Even fresh grads with no experience take home more in this town.

I live to work, and I'd be willing to spend a few more years in student-apartment quality of life, and to work like a strategic asset to make the startup successful. But I've learned that deal should include a FIRE lottery ticket, not a condo downpayment lottery ticket.

If your early startup doesn't want to share significant equity, https://levels.fyi/ provides TC numbers of what established companies are paying, even for people who wouldn't be good for a startup.

Maybe it's the recent years of what VC culture has devolved to. ("Why is your cap table cutting in early key hires significantly? Do you have a leadership problem, bro?") Maybe this is just another facet of the "mask-off" or "late-stage capitalism" that people have started calling out in other facets of society.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-27 21:34:22+00:00
We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.

Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.

Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.

Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
by tptacek | 2025-12-27 21:34:47+00:00
Everything is better than PGP (not just GPG --- all PGP implementations).

The problem with PGP is that it's a Swiss Army Knife. It does too many things. The scissors on a Swiss Army Knife are useful in a pinch if you don't have real scissors, but tailors use real scissors.

Whatever it is you're trying to do with encryption, you should use the real tool designed for that task. Different tasks want altogether different cryptosystems with different tradeoffs. There's no one perfect multitasking tool.

When you look at the problem that way, surprisingly few real-world problems ask for "encrypt a file". People need backup, but backup demands backup cryptosystems, which do much more than just encrypt individual files. People need messaging, but messaging is wildly more complicated than file encryption. And of course people want packet signatures, ironically PGP's most mainstream usage, ironic because it relies on only a tiny fraction of PGP's functionality and still somehow doesn't work.

All that is before you get to the absolutely deranged 1990s design of PGP, which is a complex state machine that switches between different modes of operation based on attacker-controlled records (which are mostly invisible to users). Nothing modern looks like PGP, because PGP's underlying design predates modern cryptography. It survives only because nerds have a parasocial relationship with it.
by chasely | 2025-12-27 21:35:06+00:00
It also seems, really low?

A stack of bills is roughly 0.5 inches. Assuming a 12-ft joist-to-joist spacing, that's 12 feet per floor \times 12 inches per foot \times 2 stacks per inch = 288 stacks per floor = $2.88M per floor since a stack of 100s is $10k

So that would be a 1,000M / 2.88M ~ 347 story building.

Or is my unit conversion wildly off from dealing with sick kids over the holidays?
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-12-27 21:35:21+00:00
Some people literally just can't let themselves believe others enjoying their own (different) lives at their own pace.

As if every alternative road has to be imagined as a less satisfying road to validate their own chosen path.

As if the diversity and multiplication of "search paths" through "reality space" is somehow sad or worse or less moral or less virtuous.

Which is absurd of course.

As for me, sometimes I take bad paths just for fun because I'm more curious than cautious.

"This is probably terrible, let's check it out."

And boy is it fun for those of use who like to explore the edges, and I like to imagine that all those taking more traveled paths are also enjoying themselves and the life they have!
by bnc319 | 2025-12-27 21:35:54+00:00
This is awesome. I just maxxed out my tokens in Shelley, but was able to vibe code this Rails app that lets anyone register an aircraft and then fly it in a synchronized world interfaced through a Garmin G1000 knock off. Sign up (feel free to use a fake email address) and set up a flight now and let's see how many aircraft we can get going! If this is a cool idea let me know and I'll probably end up paying to continue developing this :)

https://exexe.exe.xyz/cockpit
by uplifter | 2025-12-27 21:36:14+00:00
This may be more a problem with how "fit" is defined and used than with natural selection theory itself. Fitness can be hard to define beyond the trivial "these organisms which survived the selection event must be the fit ones," and natural systems are usually so noisy with inputs that its hard to figure out what was actually important in retrospect, or likely to evolve in the future.

Only in situations with a powerful selection pressure (like an asteroid strike causing a nuclear winter, or antibiotic applied to a petri dish) can one have a hope of reliably predicting which variants will be selected for or against.

However, these situations are not irrelevant, especially if we can predict the likelihood of those situations developing. Real predictions of the theory of natural selection can be applied to managing antibiotic resistance in populations of bacteria. For example, we know that antibiotic resistance mechanisms that bacteria evolve will often have an energy metabolism cost to their maintenance. This means that, absent pressure to be resistant to antibiotics, we'd expect a population to gradually lose individuals with the genes for the resistance mechanism, because they would be incurring a metabolic penalty for possessing those genes. So natural selection theory accurately predicts that if you remove the selection pressure of the antibiotic, the bacteria will evolve to lose the resistance mechanism, and become susceptible to the antibiotic again over several generations of natural selection. Using this knowledge, some rural regions will discontinue use of a given class of antibiotics in agriculture to allow for resistant strains to decline, and then resume their use when they are again effective. By intelligently rotating use of antibiotics in this way, we can enjoy their benefits without incurring too much inefficiencies and worse tragedies from antibiotic resistance.

That is real & useful predictive power.
by epistasis | 2025-12-27 21:37:00+00:00
> "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country."

It's amazing how fast free speech has been destroyed in the past year. Especially when it comes to censorship of science and science's conclusions.

However, I heard many many more people complaining about a lack of free speech in 2023 and 2024 than now. I really wonder what happened to all those principles! It's shocking.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-27 21:37:03+00:00
Your genes seem to be out of date, there are several security updates pending. The download will be 3.2 Gb and will take about 3 seconds..... Because this is a security update you can not refuse it. If you are commanding a vehicle park it now or switch to autopilot. Commencing update in 10, 9, 8, ...
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-27 21:37:23+00:00
I don't agree with this perspective. A tax on negative externalities doesn't have to be regressive. It depends on what the tax money is spent on. This is an extreme example, but if you added a congestion tax and then spent the money on a tiny UBI, you might generate $10/person/month, which would be a major uplift to the poorest in our society who don't drive at all. The argument against congestion pricing is further weakened by the fact that those harmed (drivers, pay the tolls) are also those who benefit (drivers, who enjoy less congestion). The ones who are harmed the most are those displaced from driving, who have to find something else to do and don't enjoy the benefits of reduced convention. That's using congestion pricing as an example, but the same argument applies to taxing vehicles in proportion to the wear they impose on roads.

Business owners who pay the tax are free to raise their prices, which is how it's supposed to work. They're currently raising their prices because their drivers waste time in congested traffic and because they pay taxes to the government for road maintenance.

For an analogy, it also makes sense to tax companies who dump their waste in rivers, to the extent that their waste dirties the rivers. If there is some ultra-valuable product that could only be made by dirtying a river (idk, let's say that for some reason insulin had to be made that way), it would be a good that it could still be made, while discouraging people from dirtying rivers for little reason. No one would say "polluting the river should be free because we all use products that are made by polluting rivers." If polluting rivers were free and the government just taxed everyone to clean them up afterwards, we probably all really would use products made by polluting rivers! but that doesn't mean we would be worse off by taxing it directly.

That said, I agree that there's no reason for tolls to fund the road system. Hypothecated taxes are generally not a good idea, despite the fact that they're very intuitively appealing.
by alphazard | 2025-12-27 21:37:40+00:00
Dollars are currently only in demand for short-term use in transactions.
Most of the world still relies on dollars for transactions, because that is what all the banking and payment infrastructure uses.

But no one wants to hold them because they devalue and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate.
It's a game of hot potato where everyone is forced to hold equities, commodities or other assets by default in order to preserve their wealth, and then convert to dollars to transact.
The days of savings accounts are over, and everyone should think of their checking account as something that they pay negative real interest on for the privilege of being able to transact with the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the big players in the current financial system are trying to figure out how to continue playing the current game without resetting everyone's progress.
They don't want to lose their hard won position to pay for bad decisions by American voters.
It's a coordination problem, and the shelling point looks like it is still gold, same as it has been for thousands of years.
by ttctciyf | 2025-12-27 21:37:44+00:00
> Perhaps you can tell me what use "3 ∩ 4 = 3" has.

As I said:

> a handy set theoretic implementation of the min() function.

i.e. if you wanted (for whatever reason) to define min(a, b) directly and briefly in your set theoretic reconstruction of the natural numbers, you can just use intersect operator and define it as "a ∩ b".

Perhaps because in terms of the interesting distinction you introduce:

> you have to distinguish things that are true of natural numbers as an algebraic structure, from things that just happen to be the case because you picked some specific representation to use for natural numbers

this particular operation seems to be part of the former rather than of the latter.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 21:38:01+00:00
It's kinda weird.

Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.

On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.

I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
by qnleigh | 2025-12-27 21:38:17+00:00
It's complex in a physicist's sense of the word: the equations are hopelessly complicated to solve even in very simple cases. This means it's hard to build intuition or describe in simple terms.

Quantum chromodynamics is actually pretty similar to Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. The big difference is that unlike photos, gluons interact with each other. This means goodbye to linear equations and simple planewave solutions. One can't even solve the equations in empty space, and only recently have supercomputers become powerful enough to make good, quantitative predictions about things like the proton mass.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-27 21:38:30+00:00
I live in the Bay Area and hate HOV lanes. I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced. It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

Asking someone to waste maybe up to an hour of their life everyday to sit there and watch people willing to break the rules speed by and get to be home early with their families breeds massive resentment, and anger. It encourages people to abandon all sorts of social contracts.
by Prcmaker | 2025-12-27 21:38:57+00:00
In an old job I spliced a lot of fibre for our research, got the hang of it and got pretty proficient.

My research shifted, and I start making sensors using fibre and similarly sized capillary tube. It all got cleaved, spliced to assemble, cleaved some more, spliced again, then polished to spec. Getting the he process down was a pain, but the results were super satisfying.
by krapp | 2025-12-27 21:39:22+00:00
Since always?

Every forum I can remember shows the most popular threads first. Even 4chan does that with thread bumping, the most engaged-with threads sort to the top. Given the hyperbole of the times, that counts as "finely tuning their addictive homepage feed."

Hacker News, like Reddit, is both a forum and a link aggregator. It has features which are designed to influence you and to be addictive. And I promise you that people are as addicted to HN as others are to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-27 21:39:24+00:00
> how do you see that something is downvoted?

You can’t directly. If the comment goes negative, it get greyed out. (In many cases, people are complaining about a comment they like not being the top comment.)

Either way, complaining about the voting is against the guidelines and thus flaggable. That causes your comment to get marked as flagged.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-27 21:40:05+00:00
>Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives.

You're not "allowing" it unless you've already decided that you own it and can dispose of it (or not) as you see it. And this is why you'll always be the enemy of all decent folk.

"Real communism's never been tried!!!!"

>Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.

It's actually destructive of culture in ways that are difficult to overstate. Disney nor any other "copyright owner" can't be trusted to preserve culture and works, they're the ones that threw the old film reels into the river and let them burn up in archive fires. No thanks. It's amazing how wrong you are on every single point.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-12-27 21:40:14+00:00
>I have for the toll roads I drive on.

Link me so I can draw some circles for you.

> to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars

Do you know how bonds work? It's an isomorphic operation. A state entity is issuing bonds out to creditors. A lot of those major creditors will also be secured creditors.

It's the same thing, just covered under a sleight of hand trick.

So the state borrows money from a select few major creditors but it's "wink wink" not against the full faith and credit of the state, then regulates a consumption tax on the road, and the investors and authority get a slice of the pie.

For what purpose?

And when the toll roads fail either the creditors are paid out either through the state out right buying the road or allowing the debt to be a tax write off over X amount of time.

>This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".

This American brainworm is exhausting, ngl. Buddy you're getting bamboozled by a few vocab words and a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume to talk to anyone about reality.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-27 21:40:51+00:00
I mean you are making this too easy
that I can copy&paste above the fold..:

The core reason for creating USAID in 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, was to consolidate and revamp U.S. foreign aid into a single, more strategic agency to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War, promote democracy and free-market principles, and fulfill America's moral and economic role as a global leader. It aimed to separate economic aid from military assistance and make it more effective in fostering development, spreading U.S. values, and creating stable partners, distinct from the bureaucracy of the State Department.