MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johng | 2025-12-15 18:02:08+00:00
People like to say that America is so evil. Look back through history at every major super power. Did they do no wrong? I think in the grand scheme of things we've tried to do good throughout the world. Have we been perfect? Absolutely not... but throughout history for having as much power as we've had, I think we've been good stewards with it. More so than any other power in history. That counts for something in my book.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 18:02:23+00:00
> Several 9s of humans that ever existed would have found an Einstein level of genius worthless

Substituting "generations" for "9s", whatever that is...

Citation needed.

How do you know it didn't take Einsteinian-level intelligence to first make the leap that fire can be controlled, or flint knapped, or ochre used to paint images?
by redactsureAI | 2025-12-15 18:02:27+00:00
How can I train an AI on me doing sensitive work.

I'm building out a new concept around training AI computer use agents on real sensitive tasks without PII exposure. My first demo releasing soon is a dataset of AI agent with human assisted tasks on things like paying my personal credit card or doing bank transfers.

Main things: 1. I don't modify the website I operate on 2. I take full videos and record all AI agent logs and all human actions 3. I don't modify any of those logs and will release them to the public.

I am working towards a future where AI companies are paid to generate the data they need for AI agent operations instead of paying massive sums to generate synthetic data. Imagine a future where labeling companies are completely sidestepped by simply training on production tasks directly.

Redactsure.com
by lelanthran | 2025-12-15 18:02:37+00:00
> I’m not talking about individual success i’m talking about societal success.

I don't know what that means.

Social mobility? Academic success corresponds quite strongly to that too.

Collective success? Groups who are academically successful also correlate quite well to various measures of success.

I mean, unless we reduce the scope of our samples to the outliers, and look at a non-representative sample, it's really quite hard to support the claim that "gut-feel" is at all valuable without high academic performance.
by palmotea | 2025-12-15 18:02:41+00:00
> I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.

I think there are a lot of different reasons:

1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.

2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.

3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
by nickff | 2025-12-15 18:02:48+00:00
>"To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company."

Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).
by matthewkayin | 2025-12-15 18:02:49+00:00
> Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.

Only when the details you are explaining are relevant to the story you want to tell and the themes you want to cover.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores a planet populated by an offshoot of humans who have developed a genderless existence where they experience sexual characteristics only once a month and are genderless the rest of the time.

The book does not explain how this works biologically or why this came about evolutionarily, because that is not the point. The interest of the author was to explore the cultural and sociological implications of this situation. If a group of humans lived without gender most of the time, how would this affect their culture and society? And what does that in turn say about our own gendered society?

Diving into the biological nitty-gritty of this fictional scenario would distract from the social themes the author was trying to explore.
by mrmrcoleman | 2025-12-15 18:03:06+00:00
Working on NetBox Designs: https://netboxlabs.com/blog/netbox-designs-introducing-decla...

Infrastructure architects think in terms of building blocks in "high-level designs" and those building blocks are often socialised/expressed in Visio/Spreadsheets. Thinking in building blocks is now more necessary than ever because of the sheer size of the infra being designed/deployed.

This approach is problematic after the design phase because there's a lossy translation to where the low-level design lives, often referred to as the Source of Truth, like NetBox.

NetBox Designs allows users to express composable, versioned, and templatizable building blocks that can be rendered to low level designs. No lossy translations, and you can always check in the future "does my LLD still match my HLD and if not, where?"
by voidnap | 2025-12-15 18:03:17+00:00
At some point you must be open to being compelled to read code you run or ship. Otherwise, if that's to hard, then I don't know what to tell you. We'll just never agree.

If you find a better solution than being responsible for what you do and who you trust, I'm all for it. Until then, that's part of the job.

When I was a junior, our company payed a commercial license for some of the larger libraries we used and it included support. Or manage risk by using fewer and more trustworthy projects like Django instead of reaching for a new dependency from some random person every time you need to solve a simple problem.

> What no appetite? I just don't like your solution.

When I say "appetite" I am being very deliberate. You are hungry but you won't eat your vegetables. When you say "I just don't like your vegetables", then you aren't that hungry. You don't have the appetite. You'd rather accept the risk. Which is fine but then don't complain when stuff like this happens and everyone is compromised.
by paul7986 | 2025-12-15 18:03:33+00:00
States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto.

chatGPT is a sypcophant and without regulation any AI company can and or will juice their algorithms so their AI system becomes cocaine for the millions of lonely to unsatisfied people out there.

My friend has a partner of 30 years but their relationship is that of roommates. If you think she is not you that might be correct but you know someone like her and possibly many like her. Unsatisfied, not able to get that movie type love / romance / fantasy and now unfetterd AI can get these people hooked like cocaine and into the depth of zero reality!
by kevstev | 2025-12-15 18:04:04+00:00
Looks like this site does: https://totalrealreturns.com/n/VFINX,VBMFX,USDOLLAR,XRX

Dividends are so out of favor now for most companies, it's not something I have personally cared that much about. But it is important to get a true picture, especially over very long timelines before tax laws changed that made buybacks more efficient.
by daft_pink | 2025-12-15 18:04:34+00:00
In the United States, unions should be used to advocate for higher wages and that’s it.

OSHA and the US’s high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe.

The unions have been failing for advocating for unrealistic benefit packages where most workers would rather have the salary.

The unions have also been destroying companies by imposing restrictions that limit operational flexibility like arguing against automation, specifying minimum operational hours for a factory etc.

They should adjust unions so they are only arguing for increased total wages and not all these other things that are incredibly destructive.
by everforward | 2025-12-15 18:04:36+00:00
> If the only reason you need a surrogate key is to introduce indirection in your internal database design then sequence numbers are enough. There is no need to use UUIDs.

The UUID would be an example of an external key (for e.g. preventing crawling keys being easy). This article mentions a few reasons why you may later decide there are better external keys.

> When I come to you and say "My name is X, this is my phone number, this is my e-mail, I want my GDPR records deleted", you still need to be able to find all data that is related to me.

How are you going to trace all those records if the requester has changed their name, phone number and email since they signed up if you don't have a surrogate key? All 3 of those are pretty routine to change. I've changed my email and phone number a few times, and if I got married my name might change as well.

> Once you start thinking about your database as structured storage of facts that you can use to infer conclusions, there is much less need for surrogate keys.

I think that spirals into way more complexity than you're thinking. You get those timestamped records about "we got info about person named Y with phone number Z", and then person Y changes their phone number. Now you're going to start getting records from person named Y with phone number A, but it's the same account. You can record "person named Y changed their phone number from Z to A", and now your queries have to be temporal (i.e. know when that person had what phone number). You could back-update all the records to change Z to A, but that breaks some things (e.g. SMS logs will show that you sent a text to a number that you didn't send it to).

Worse yet, neither names nor phone numbers uniquely identify a person, so it's entirely possible to have records saying "person named Y and phone number Z" that refer to different people if a phone number transfers from a John Doe to a different person named John Doe.

I don't doubt you could do it, but I can't imagine it being worth it. I can't imagine a way to do it that doesn't either a) break records by backdating information that wasn't true back then, or b) require repeated/recursive querying that will hammer the DB (e.g. if someone has had 5 phone numbers, how do you get all the numbers they've had without pulling the latest one to find the last change, and then the one before that, and etc). Those queries are incredibly simple with surrogate keys: "SELECT * FROM phone_number_changes WHERE user_id = blah".
by LambdaAlaDelta | 2025-12-15 18:05:10+00:00
Loved scrapio idea, gonna try it out. It sounds like a clear example of a vibe-code-tier tool, no need to get the fancy programmers bois to implement something like this, just something quick and dirty. Also a fan of the quirky text in both repos, eg. "you can just get a printout of the eleventeen exercises you're not going to do"
by nly | 2025-12-15 18:05:11+00:00
These distributed sequencer solutions are for resilience, and they add a lot of latency because each node needs to do something like RAFT. Exchanges generally don't care aggressively about low latency, they care about resilience and fairness. It's the hedge funds etc looking for an edge.

One thing often missed here is that most orders, even from most hedge funds and prop trading shops, still go via broker systems. Direct Market Access is getting more common but it's often a pain in the arse from a regulatory and disclosures perspective, and means you lose out on short locate (shares that you can borrow from your broker to short sell).

"Sponsored Access", where you connect directly to an exchange but your broker monitors your activity via a drop copy, is a happy middle ground.

Surprisingly though, I've heard of at least one trading venue where going direct is slower, because the venues own risk checks are slower than the the ones implemented by at least one broker, and the broker themselves are allowed to bypass the risk checks put in place at the exchange for general DMA clients. "Direct" is clearly subject to negotiation.

I've also heard of brokers who tried to implement their gateways in FPGA, and have later shuttered the project, having gone back to relatively slow software gateways for the flexibility.

A lot of trading still happens via FIX, which is a slow ASCII protocol. Most prop shops will have aggressively optimized FIX parsers and serialisers out of necessity.

People think all trading happens in these elite, bleeding-edge hardcore sub-microsecond systems, but a lot of it is just dogshit.

Things are a bit more optimised in the derivatives space because of the insane volumes (Options trading just for US equities is easily into the petabytes of storage per year).
by foxyv | 2025-12-15 18:05:24+00:00
Essentially, they steal US social security numbers or ITINs from leaked identities to apply for jobs in the US as US citizens. They then make money for prohibited countries like North Korea while pretending to be that citizen. The mony is exfiltrated through cryptocurrency or money mules. In the meantime they install malware and steal anything that isn't nailed down. Passwords, keys, proprietary documents, cryptocurrency, etc...

Edit: They also recruit US Citizens through "Work from home" schemes to help them engage in the fraud.
by fragmede | 2025-12-15 18:05:29+00:00
How is it out of touch? GP comment makes it sound like the technical know to setup a VPN exit node is this crazily esoteric super weird nerdy thing that no one would expect anyone normal to even know about. Installing an Apple TV app onto an Apple TV and mailing it to a friend requires zero command line usage.

But no, Tailscale did not pay me for this comment. I do happen to know someone that works there though.
by kragen | 2025-12-15 18:05:32+00:00
Yes, 11 lines of debugged, delivered source lines of code written per day is within the normal range. The basic COCOMO model used by David A. Wheeler's "SLOCCount" estimates person-months as 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05), which was calibrated with painfully-won experience on a variety of software projects in the 80s. If you approximate that as 2.4 months per kSLOC, it works out to 13.7 lines of code per calendar day, or 18.5 lines of code per workday. Other studies found lower speeds. Like 10: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4506...

Every programmer thinks this is stupid the first time they see it, because we can all remember times we wrote 50 or 100 or 200 or 300 lines of code in a day, and that code worked. But other days we write zero lines of code, because we spend them in meetings, or debugging code, or arguing about the protocol design, or testing hardware we need to support, or testing our code. And sometimes we'll spend a week refactoring the codebase to reduce the number of lines of code (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html) so those 200 or 300 lines of code may not end up in the delivered product—if they were ever intended to, since test stubs and test scripts also don't count as delivered code.

And that's how we get to Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building": https://ratfactor.com/papers/naur1 because writing the code clearly isn't the bottleneck. It's figuring out how things have to work that bottlenecks us. It's more like proving a theorem than writing a novel. The code is a product of the process, but it's more like the exhaust of an engine than its power output.

And that's why the exponent of kSLOC is 1.05 instead of 1: bigger systems are harder to add to.

We had a discussion of this here 17 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333650 and maybe see also Forth authority Phil Koopman's take at https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2010/05/only-10-lines-of-co... and Brian's take at https://blog.ndepend.com/mythical-man-month-10-lines-per-dev....
by eszed | 2025-12-15 18:05:46+00:00
Beyond that, if you do get into the specifics of force projection (and basically anything logistical to do with NATO), you see that the entire alliance was built on the assumption that the US would contribute the capabilities that kept the whole system viable.

So,

$(US) + $(ALLIES) > $(US)

However,

$(ALLIES) - $(US) < $(ALLIES)

This has been true from the beginning, and I don't think was a nefarious plot, or even mistake, for most of the alliance's history. The further we get from the Cold War alignments within which NATO was created, however, the more difficult it has become to sustain.
by acituan | 2025-12-15 18:06:05+00:00
> what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

The right question is who benefits the most from state’s services. For example if a whole lot of security, legislative or admin services go to protecting the capital, then those who has the most capital need to chip in the most.

> redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal

This is basically a 50 year old trickle down argument. But real wages have not increased in comparison to gdp since 70s, so nothing trickled down. We are demonstratedly bad at sharing what we have achieved together, no reason to believe more tech will magically get better treatment than that.

Besides redistribution is not about shifting the curve up, but making it flatter - see gini coefficient.

> the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

Except the era of classical capitalism and inventor’s profit is over, since 70s it is rentiers unreciprocated extraction on top of purported value people didn’t necessarily ask for or need in the first place. Likewise most people aren’t dying for AI automation, and not even for structural threats; it is not even proven that it will provide a net total productivity gain when the hype cools down, despite being shoved down people’s throats.

Let’s not kid ourselves, there is little concern for real value creation but a capture-the-flag on a gigantic data-moated compute monopoly. Whatever democratic means enabled proper taxation would have already prevented this type of speculative berserk, failures of which I assure you will be socialized.

So friction = societal consent, internalizing externalized costs, revealing what is actually value versus monopolist’s rent. It is healthy for the society, it is healthy for capitalism.
by Findecanor | 2025-12-15 18:06:20+00:00
You're missing the problem. With OS/object capabilities, you'd want to revoke only some (and those derived from them), and keep the rest in place. Otherwise they would not be a viable alternative to ACLs.

For pointers-as-capabilities, and version counter as protection against use-after-free, you can't assign it or the object ID too many bits because you don't want to make the size of pointers unwieldy. I've read articles of such systems that use random numbers or encrypted counters to get more randomness but at the end of the day, the safety is still only probabilistic.
by glenstein | 2025-12-15 18:07:08+00:00
Exactly right. And what's more, I think this is cynically exploited by apologists who want to defend evil by resorting to whataboutisms. State sponsored troll farms are real and the market for buying and selling, and mobilizing accounts is increasingly mature. And even, dare I say, strategically and intellectually sophisticated in some ways while simultaneously being intellectually and ethically bankrupt.

But I actually don't think it's that hard to understand that (1) the US has significantly compromised moral authority, but also (2) China bad and (3) there's important differences of scale of moral offense depending on what you are talking about. You can land a perfectly coherent point about, say, China's hostile takeover of Hong Kong being bad, it's military ramp up to seize Taiwan by 2027 being bad. But too often, I think bad faith actors will intentionally exploit the complexity to try and muddy the waters, and the only reason it seems like it's hard to articulate the distinction online is because of motivated performances.

Of course there Poe's law element too, which is that you should never underestimate the ability of people online becoming confused about politically charged topics, but in this case I think it's a bit of column a, a bit of column b synergistically amplifying one another.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-15 18:07:15+00:00
> Political leaders and activists are petrified to go outside of a few slogans, because those slogans represent what the party writ large agrees on. They are actually angry when anyone demands they do so, making claims that there’s an attempt to avoid a “big tent” or engage in forms of inappropriate litmus testing, instead of seeing the demand to do the political work necessary to build a society.

I think this is really the core dispute, and I'd encourage the author to take it more seriously. Does the Democratic coalition work without pro-corporate liberals on board? How many people would jump ship if you excommunicated Reed Hastings and Ezra Klein, and which are the Republican voters who would be swayed to replace (and hopefully more-than-replace) them? Without good answers to these questions, there's a very real risk of creating an energized, passionate, anti-corporate Democratic party which simply does not have any path to 270 electoral votes.

"Chuck Schumer still imagines America as it was in 1980", in the author's words. But what this means is that Chuck Schumer remembers an era where California was a Republican stronghold, a poorly constructed Democratic coalition led to three consecutive Republican landslides, and they hung on in Congress only by maintaining the loyalty of legacy segregationists. He knows that it can happen again.
by Rendello | 2025-12-15 18:07:34+00:00
I'm working on a Unicode visualization tool [note 1]. It's meant to visualize transformations and relationships between characters, as well as connect everything directly to the exact lines in the Unicode Character Database (UCD), which defines these relationships. The UCD is a series of text files, it also has an XML version.

I love online Unicode tools, serious ones and silly ones, and I use them often for fun or for development. What I see online is that few technical people have a good understanding of Unicode, or have big misconceptions about how it works. I'd like to change that, through visualizations and direct links to the data sources (the aforementioned UCD) and links to the Unicode documentation (which is well-written but can be difficult to navigate or even find).

I've worked a lot on it, but I'm totally stuck again. I get too zoomed in and it's hard to see the big picture, plus it's difficult to know how much effort I can realistically put in because I don't know how big the market is. It's a niche tool, but how niche? Would anyone pay for it? But I'm not sure how to do market research, especially for a niche like this. Any advice would be appreciated!

1. The initial idea was based on this post I made in 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014045