MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bender | 2025-12-18 17:43:49+00:00
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience.

It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.

Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.
by II2II | 2025-12-18 17:43:53+00:00
Then you better be prepared to pay for it, and still expect cases where things go wrong.

The problem with having support dealing with problems like this is that fraudsters will figure out how to manipulate it, while honest people will still encounter these problems. The easier you make it for honest people to resolve these disputes, the easier you will make it for fraudsters since it would involve yet another avenue for them to exploit. Plus the whole process will become more expensive, which someone has to pay for.
by breppp | 2025-12-18 17:43:59+00:00
Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Buckley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Anderson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.%E2%80%93Iran_naval_i... https://www.iranintl.com/en/202408126589

Because that's their entire MO for their existence I can produce an endless stream of this really
by tuyiown | 2025-12-18 17:44:29+00:00
Because nothing can beat productivity of a motivated team building code that they are proud of. The mental energy spent becomes the highest reward. As for profit, it _compounds_ as for every other business.

The fact that this is lost as a common knowledge whereas shiny examples arises regularly is very telling.

But it is not liked in business because reproducing it requires competence in the industry, and finance deep pockets don’t believe in competence anymore.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-18 17:44:55+00:00
> (target 80% resource utilization, funny things happen after that — things I don’t quite understand).

The closer you get to 100% resource utilization the more regular your workload has to become. If you can queue requests and latency isn't a problem, no problem, but then you have a batch process and not a live one (obviously not for games).

The reason is because live work doesn't come in regular beats, it comes in clusters that scale in a fractal way. If your long term mean is one request per second what actually happens is you get five requests in one second, three seconds with one request each, one second with two requests, and five seconds with 0 requests (you get my point). "fractal burstiness"

You have to have free resources to handle the spikes at all scales.

Also very many systems suffer from the processing time for a single request increasing as overall system loads increase. "queuing latency blowup"

So what happens? You get a spike, get behind, and never ever catch up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_congestion#Congestive_...
by qingcharles | 2025-12-18 17:45:14+00:00
They certainly can say no in a lot of states, but that is often very much against the best interests of the prisoner because almost all work programs shorten your sentence.

I knew one guy who was doing a 30 day jail sentence for some misdemeanor and was told they would reduce it to 14 days if he worked in the kitchen. He took the job and lost most of his thumb in a very unsafe meat slicer. This put his 17 year career with UPS in jeopardy since the nerve damage made it hard for him to handle things.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-18 17:45:20+00:00
It could be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation and we don't have enough context. My company has spent the last few years really going 1000% on the capitalization of software expenses, and now we have to include a whole slew of unrelated attributes in every last Jira ticket. Then the "engineering team" (there is only one of these, somehow, in a 5K employee company) decrees all sorts of requirements about how we test our software and document it, again using custom Jira attributes to enforce. Developers get a little pissy about being messed with by MBAs and non-engineer "engineers" trying to tell them how to do their job. (as an aside, for anybody who is on the giving end of such requirements, I have to tell you that people working the tickets will happily lie on all of that stuff just to get past it as quickly as possible, so I hope you're not relying on it for accuracy)

But putting the ticket number in the commit ... that's basically automatic, I don't know why it should be that big a concern. The branch itself gets created with the ticket number and everything follows from that, there's no extra effort.
by podlp | 2025-12-18 17:45:29+00:00
I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues.

https://podlp.com
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 17:45:55+00:00
I cheated the Gallery. The art is by one of Tonda's big inspirations, and whereas Tonda thinks he's great I think he's terrible and should knock it off. After maybe an hour I got one answer myself, looked up the rest, continued playing. I consider two of them reasonable puzzles, one is a bit crap and the final one is the worst thing in Blue Prince which overall is an excellent game.

The excellent thing about Blue Prince is that it isn't afraid to keep giving you more clues. I've seen people go "Bridge. Bride. I see what's happening - I will write these down" on day one. But I've also seen people walk into Study, look at the chart and go "Huh. I wonder what that's about" and walk out without any flicker of understanding. Those latter people will, hopefully, one day read the Letter in Herbert's private chest freezer, and maybe that's enough.

The Gallery puzzle isn't actually an exception to that, but it's very close. There is one small clue, and two bigger one, and then it's you versus the artist. The small clue is in a document you've never read because you need all those keys†. That document is just another set of clues, sorry, you don't even get another credits rolls. There is only one Credits Roll in the whole game and it's for reaching 46 the first time on a save, even though that's nowhere near all of the game. There's a deliberate fake out, later, but no other actual credit rolls and no explicit end, just the game starts to point out that you can just stop playing at first in subtle ways but gradually quite blatantly. It is just a game, go do something else.

† Technically you could just guess an answer, but this is after all a puzzle game so where's the fun in that?
by lern_too_spel | 2025-12-18 17:46:00+00:00
> So now you can actually go and openly say things like "I'm racist" and mean it, and there's still plenty of people who don't see a problem with that.

My point is that the people (Fuentes supporters) that he said see no problem with that are racists themselves, or why would they be Fuentes supporters? That's his whole schtick. They don't see a problem with him saying racist things, so why would they see a problem with him directly admitting he is a racist? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/conservative-writer-says...
by llm_nerd | 2025-12-18 17:46:03+00:00
"the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest."

Kind of depressing how it has become such a trope of blaming juniors for every ill or bad habit. In all likelihood the reader of this comment has a number of terrible habits, working on teams with terrible habits, and juniors play zero part in it.

And, I mean, on that theme developers have been doing this for as long as we've had large teams. I've worked at a large number of teams where there was the fundamental principal that QA / UA holds responsibility. That they are responsible for tests, and they are responsible for bad code making it through to the product / solution. Developers -- grizzled, excellent-CV devs -- would toss over garbage code and call it a day.
by rayiner | 2025-12-18 17:46:49+00:00
There is no such thing as someone who is "independent" and not "partisan." The federal bureaucracy is neither--it is comprised of people who, just like everyone else, are motivated by their own ideology and self-interest. Insulating those people from the elected President doesn't make them non-partisan. It just prevents the electorate from replacing those people with members of whichever party is currently favored.

You're correct that the founders were skeptical of direct democracy, but their solution to that was representative government and constitutional protections for private property. The people don't get to decide what to do, but they do get to decide who gets to decide what to do.
by cakealert | 2025-12-18 17:46:56+00:00
> I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).

Then you would be the exception, not the rule.

And if you find yourself attached to any ideology, then you are also wrong about yourself. Subscribing to any ideology is by definition lying to yourself.

Being able to place yourself into the shoes of others is something evolution spent 1000s of generations hardwiring into us, I'm very confident in my reading of the situation.
by aeturnum | 2025-12-18 17:47:15+00:00
The situation is pretty dystopian, but as you point out I think most people upset about it are not willing to face the realities of the "80/20" (more like 99/1) split of fraud v.s. legitimate mistakes. Patrick McKenzie has a good article about the tiers of bank support[1] that makes the point that even though the experience of tiered support often sucks, it's essential to making these financial products widely available. Without the dystopian support structure you couldn't have things like widely available credit.

Most megacorps do suck - and also it's probably true that the lack of customer support is necessary to offer the products they offer at popular price points. People just don't wrap their heads around the scales involved, generally because the exact numbers are proprietary.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
by nis0s | 2025-12-18 17:47:18+00:00
Here’s the study, I think

https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2025-035.pdf

It would be better if they made it mandatory for everyone to respond to follow-up surveys, as the response rate differed enough to be called out as a study limitation.

One interesting thing to note is that the study didn’t find that basic income support increased the chances of becoming employed, or receiving basic income support reduced crime. I am also not sure how to extrapolate study results from Finnish people to people in other cultures.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 17:47:41+00:00
If it's only a link to a newsletter, sure. And "signing" a comment breaks a norm here. But if it's otherwise a good comment, seems like a poor use of "flag"; one of the rare instances where maybe you want to leave a short, polite note ("don't sign off with links to your newsletter, we don't sign things here").

Flagging deprives everyone else of the comment, and is especially hostile if there's already a thread sprouting from that comment.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-18 17:47:44+00:00
> and if it goes on the books then the mortgage on the property gets reevaluated and the then the merry-go-round comes to a screeching halt, because most commercial property is mortgaged up to the eyeballs.

No, the leverage isn't the problem. The article is very explicit about this: the bank makes a $16M loan at interest of $640K / year, and the building operator is so good for that loan that he pays it off indefinitely out of his personal funds. The operator doesn't want to be foreclosed on, because that leaves him worse off (assuming the market eventually picks back up), and the bank doesn't want to foreclose, because that leaves it much worse off (whether the market picks back up or not).

The reason for the pretense is that lowering the rent legally requires the bank to foreclose despite foreclosure being terrible for the bank.
by benced | 2025-12-18 17:47:58+00:00
This legislation has high costs and while it seems fair to impose them on the Apples and Googles of the world, this gets weirder with smaller services that might have trouble complying. My podcast player, Overcast (overcast.fm), is one guy. Should he be subject to this? It seems like that business might not be able to exist if he was.

You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.
by orwin | 2025-12-18 17:48:36+00:00
Are you calling for a US invasion of Venezuela because it would be overall less violent, in an utilitarian point of view?

Because I don't think it can work. The last time it was tried, we got Libya. Militaries have too much power nowadays, you can't invade and do a regime change without death and suffering for years until you have a strong and local insurgent force on the ground that you trust will leave the power once the coup is done. And Venezuela's rebelsare weak, poorly organised, and very few.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-18 17:49:01+00:00
>I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country.

Based on my experience, the UK approach is to not even bother and try and collect fines from owners of foreign registered vehicles. They do sell them to some private company that has been sending me scary letters for 10 years soon.
by zipy124 | 2025-12-18 17:49:09+00:00
This is because of the fact that APC's are flat fees (usually given in US dollars, british pounds and euros only) and therefore there is no regional pricing. Most online markets have diffferent prices, for instance video games on steam are often much cheaper in brazil, for instance looking at battlefield 6's price on steam it is £40 in brazil but £60 in the UK [1]. Nature communications for instance has an APC of £5290, or $7k. This is 4 months of salary for a post doc in brazil, but only one and a half months in the UK. Given the number of articles submitted by brazillan researchers is much lower than from north america, europe and china it makes sense for the journals to simply waive fees for these countries, as opposed to keeping up with currency conversion and purchasing parity. It is usually relatively easy to use the waivers also.

Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.

[1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/
by Someone1234 | 2025-12-18 17:49:16+00:00
Considering it was created during a major moral panic after the movie "War Games" came out, by a bunch of politicians who knew nothing about computers (aside from, again, watching the movie War Games).

As a direct result, anything and everything can be a crime (e.g. violating a private company's Terms & Conditions), and the punishments are completely disproportionate to the actual criminality.

See the AT&T/iPad data leak, where AT&T were leaking private information on the internet with no security checks at all. Someone found it, told the press, who in turn told AT&T, but the FBI still investigated it as a "crime", raided their home, charged them with "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization." AT&T go no punishment at all.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-18 17:49:38+00:00
> "Here's a successful formula, but takes some time."

Have you looked at the very first sentence of the OP's submission? Their investors are not going to wait around for any of that. The OP all but outright says they want a "lever" that they can use repeatedly that pops a marketing submission to the HN front page as a gauge of interest to satisfy investors and secure funding. That isn't reliably possible even for longtime HN users with a solid posting history and high karma (and thank heavens for that or HN would be a very different place).
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-18 17:49:48+00:00
Unemployment benefit is to help you while you are out of job _involuntarily_ and while you look for a job, not to subsidise your lifestyle or aspiration to find your dream job. It's not about "patriarchal bureaucracy", whatever that might mean.

There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.

> This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI

No, this was testing a sort of UBI vs traditional unemployment benefits based on the two groups:

"The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment."

That's unemployment benefits.

Again, it is obvious that the group who got money with no strings attached felt better, this does not tell us anything. It sounds like a contrived study that aims to prove that "UBI is better".

> your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)",

It's not trivial, it is the key metric. Granted, you could combine it with the "quality" of the new job that would also be useful, but since this is all to help people while they are looking for a job any studies and experiments must measure the impact on that otherwise there are missing the point.

Frankly I don't understand this cultish attachment to UBI its proponents tend to have.
by bah_humbug | 2025-12-18 17:50:06+00:00
> resolvconf(8) is a shell script which does not validate its input. A lack of quoting meant that shell commands pass as input to resolvconf(8) may be executed.

The fix consists of implementing an XXX present since the code was added:

/* * XXX validate that domain name only contains valid characters * for two reasons: 1) correctness, 2) we do not want to pass * possible malicious, unescaped characters like `` to a script * or program that could be exploited that way. */

https://www.freebsd.org/security/patches/SA-25:12/rtsold.pat...
by sovietmudkipz | 2025-12-18 17:50:58+00:00
Yes! It’s a great project. I’m super happy they have a coherent local development story. I kinda abandoned using it though when I said “keeeep it simple” and stopped using containers/k8s. I think I needed to journey through understanding why multiplayer game services like Agones/gamelift/photon were set up like they were. I read through Multiplayer Game Programming: Architecting Networked Games by Joshua Glazer and Sanjay Madhav really helped (not to mention allowed me to better understand GDC talks over multiplayer topics much better).

This all probably speaks to my odd prioritization: I want to understand and use. I’ve had to step back and realize part of the fun I have in pursuing these projects is the research.
by hankmh | 2025-12-18 17:50:59+00:00
That seems like a lot!

My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out.

But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well.

Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about.

I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-18 17:51:06+00:00
Isn't this in contradiction to your blog post from yesterday though? It's impossible to prove a complex project made in 4.5 hours works. It might have passed 9000 tests, but surely there are always going to be edge cases. I personally wouldn't be comfortable claiming I've proved it works and saying the job is done even, if the LLM did the whole thing and all existing tests passed, until I played with it for several months. And even then I would assume I would need to rely on bug reports coming in because it's running on lots of different systems. I honestly don't know if software is ever really finished.

My takeaway from your blog post yesterday was that with a robust enough testing system the LLM can do the entire thing while I do Christmas with the family.

(Before all the AI fans come in here. I'm not criticizing AI.)
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-18 17:51:08+00:00
A lot of people look at safety critical development standards to try and copy process bits for quality. In reality, 90% of the quality benefits come from sitting down to think about the software and its role in the overall system. You don't need all the fancy methodologies and expensive tools. It's also the main benefit you get from formal methods.

I've found that a quality process that starts with "you need to comprehensively understand what you're engineering" is almost universally a non-starter for anyone not already using these things. Putting together an exhaustive list of all the ways code interacts with the outside world is hard. If a few engineers actually manage it, they're rarely empowered to make meaningful decisions on whether the consequences of failures are acceptable or fix things if they're not.
by Nizoss | 2025-12-18 17:51:11+00:00
If you write your tests the Test-Driven Development way in that they first fail before production changes are introduced, you will be able to trust them a lot more. Especially if they are well-written tests that test behavior or contracts, not implementation details. I find that dependency injection helps a lot with this. I try to avoid mocking and complex dependencies as much as possible. This also allows me to easily refactor the code without having to worry about breaking anything if all the tests still pass.

When it comes to agentic coding. I created an open source tool that enforces those practices. The agent gets blocked by a hook if it tries to do anything that violates those principles. I think it helps a lot if I may say so myself.

https://github.com/nizos/tdd-guard

Edit: I realize now that I misunderstood your comment. I was quick to respond.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-18 17:51:30+00:00
I want a tech shift to allow this concept. Ownership will require me to physically maintain my own data, or at least have the ability to do so. I really want personal cloud capabilities so that services like iTunes and others are required to be able to use my own personal, and completely independently maintained, storage. That way I could either self host or contract out but then Apple would loose their vendor lock-in and services like iTunes would be forced to play nicer. The core problem is the iCloud lock-in/bundling. If I were looking at anti-trust breakup I would start with this idea, forcing alternative cloud storage options.