MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kg | 2025-12-21 05:45:50+00:00
"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."

Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.

I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
by vel0city | 2025-12-21 05:46:06+00:00
Revisionist history you're pushing here. I'm well versed about the native tribes in the area, definitely more than the average North Texan. A very interesting history, don't get me wrong. They didn't develop cities like anything you'd think of as a city today. Small roaming developments of maybe a few hundred people tops mostly. So when we're discussing "urban design" it's pretty irrelevant. That some branch of a nomadic tribe might have used my neighborhood as a hunting ground 15,000 years ago has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.

The Caddos would be the closest to making cities in the area, but the people living around there date back over a thousand years these larger communities we might call towns were still mostly small enclaves that didn't last more than a few hundred years at the longest mostly. And they were mostly a pretty recent, being a few thousand years newer of a civilization than Greece et. al., as they appeared well after 1,000CE

Meanwhile Athens and what not can easily be seen as an actual city even 2000BCE.
by true_religion | 2025-12-21 05:46:26+00:00
You can often have services available for VIPs, and be down for the public.

Unless there's a misconfiguration, usually apps are always visible internally to staff, so there's an existing methodology to follow to make them visible to VIPs.

But sometimes none of that is necessary. I've seen at a 1B market cap company, a failure case where the solution was manual execution by customer success reps while the computers were down. It was slower, but not many people complained that their reports took 10 minutes to arrive after being parsed by Eye Ball Mk 1s, instead of the 1 minute of wait time they were used to.
by hermannj314 | 2025-12-21 05:47:38+00:00
People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.

Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
by Gtex555 | 2025-12-21 05:48:12+00:00
Fair, but people will watch a random youtuber doing a video essay for the first time on an old topic like sbmm or AI in games and enjoy it yet find a 500 million dollar movie boring. I feel that your answer it correct, but there is something deeper than just para friendships to explain these other cases and I'm guilty of it too (watching a random youtubers video essay).
by hattmall | 2025-12-21 05:49:19+00:00
No. I don't know a lot of people that don't wear seatbelts, but they all smoke weed. All of my friends that died in car wrecks weren't wearing seat belts and would have definitely tested positive for THC.

I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.

The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.
by tacitusarc | 2025-12-21 05:49:48+00:00
My problem with the OpenAI models (GPT5.2 in particular) recently is an extreme aversion to doing more than the smallest step in a task before asking for using input. Even if I explicitly instruct it to continue without input until the task is complete, it ignores the instruction.

I cannot imagine GPT5.2 working on a task for more than 2 minutes, let alone 4 hours. I’m curious if you’ve run into this and figured out a way around it?
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-21 05:49:48+00:00
This has terrified me. In the past I’ve received items, then got apologies from Amazon for them not being delivered.

I could have easily gotten a refund, but there was no way for me to say “I received the product!”

So bizarre.

I’m used to dedicating time to dealing with being screwed by random companies. But this doesn’t fit that description- so I don’t go too far out of my way.
by yongjik | 2025-12-21 05:50:19+00:00
Have been in California for 10+ years and I've never seen anyone describing California's electricity infra as reliable. It shows the same kind of failure that's too familiar to many Americans: a vital service is managed by a corporation that has no incentive for better services, and market forces do not work due to the nature of the service. (If the power at your home in SF goes out all the time, it's not like you can find another provider - the best you can do is move to, say, Nevada, which is not realistic for most people.)
by bblb | 2025-12-21 05:51:35+00:00
>their version of windows seems to require an ipv4 adddess on an interface

Could be DirectAccess. Microsoft's earlier built-in VPN solution before Always On VPN. DirectAccess works only with IPv4 inbound so you can't use IPv6 only stack. Under the hood it uses a combination of v4-v6 transition and translation protocols, but it still requires the Windows client machines to have IPv4 addresses.

If you can run PowerShell commands on the laptop and if "Get-DnsClientNrptPolicy" returns some DirectAccessDnsServers then it's DA laptop.
by Gtex555 | 2025-12-21 05:52:49+00:00
This I can understand and if you look at the body of my post I talk about understanding if youtube was a selector of quality content, but people will watch hours of slop on youtube that is neither authentic or niche and that's what I want to get to the heart of. I fall victim to this too, I watch hours of youtube (long form) which in retrospect I accept as garbage, but will refuse to watch the the new hot netflix show that cost 100 million with some of the top writers and actors in the world, that's what I'm trying to understand.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-21 05:53:26+00:00
For most mathematicians, most of the time, the mathematics they personally do is, in relation to different mathematical foundations, like architecture is to atoms.

Architects know and care that they are building things made of atoms. And then ... pretty much don't think about atoms because the objects and relationships they are working on are abstractions well above the fine details of atoms.

And having designed many structures with architectural methods, and seeing those buildings built and stand, it doesn't worry them to hear physicists arguing that maybe atoms are different than they thought. They figure, their experience with architecture and its artifacts has proven to be reliable, so there is no realistic threat of some new quantum theory undermining their work.

On infrequent situations, where their work needs to deal with some special property of some material, they don't have any issue dipping down any number of levels of abstraction. But as a practical matter, that is infrequent for most math.
by ygra | 2025-12-21 05:54:26+00:00
The formulae are indeed stored in the same format, regardless of language. For rendering and parsing in the UI they use translated function names and the field separator (commma in English, but semicolon in many other languages because decimal numbers use a comma there).

It does irk me a bit (though not as much as the translated VBA back in the day). But that's probably because I know English, I often look for solutions to my problems in English, not in my native language, and then would have to mentally translate that back. But that's perhaps a burden for programmers more than for typical users.

A few thoughts:

• it's been that way for decades, at this point. So changing it would annoy a lot of users

• the problem with comma and semicolon would remain unless you want entering numbers normally and within a formula to be different. I'm not sure that's good in a product built around numbers (and often numbers that should be written and formatted like any other number in that country).

• making it configurable might work, but that then requires more testing, although sometimes it's not clear how much testing Microsoft is still doing, so that might not be much of a point. But adding options also has UX limits and not just in the length of the settings screen.
by smurda | 2025-12-21 05:55:28+00:00
Squares don’t create activity — activity creates squares. In other words, “People do not use city parks and squares because they are parks and squares, but because of the uses to which adjoining streets put them.” -The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.
by rented_mule | 2025-12-21 05:56:03+00:00
A few years ago, I moved from San Francisco to a rural area. Smelling weed in SF was not at all unusual. One summer night in the rural area, I smelled it coming through open windows for the first time. I wondered which house it was coming from and how it still smelled so strong after traveling a hundred feet or more. Then I spotted the actual skunk in our yard.
by simonw | 2025-12-21 05:56:42+00:00
That's fair.

Something I'm really interested right now is the balance in terms of the struggle required to learn something.

I firmly believe that there are things where the only way to learn how to do them is to go through the struggle. Writing essays for example - I don't think you can shortcut learning to write well by having an LLM do that for you, even though actually learning to write is a painful and tiresome progress.

But programming... I've seen so many people who quit learning to program because the struggle was too much. Those first six months of struggling with missing semicolons are absolutely miserable!

I've spoken to a ton of people over the past year who always wanted to learn to program but never managed to carve out that miserable six months... and now they're building software, because LLMs have shaved down that learning curve.
by weitendorf | 2025-12-21 05:56:51+00:00
You do learn how to control claude code and architect/orient things around getting it to deliver what you want. That's a skill that is both new and possibly going to be part of how we work for a long time (but also overlaps with the work tech leads and managers do).

My proto+sqlite+mesh project recently hit the point where it's too big for Claude to maintain a consistent "mental model" of how eg search and the db schemas are supposed to be structured, kept taking hacky workarounds by going directly to a db at the storage layer instead of the API layer, etc. so I hit an insane amount of churn trying to get it to implement some of the features needed to get it production ready.

Here's the whackamole/insanity documented in git commit history: https://github.com/accretional/collector/compare/main...feat...

But now I know some new tricks and intuition for avoiding this situation going forward. Because I do understand the mental model behind what this is supposed to look like at its core, and I need to maintain some kind of human-friendly guard rails, I'm adding integration tests in a different repo and a README/project "constitution" that claude can't change but is accountable for maintaining, and configuring it to keep them in context while working on my project.

Kind of a microcosm of startups' reluctance to institute employee handbook/kpis/PRDs followed by resignation that they might truly be useful coordination tools.
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-21 05:56:58+00:00
To give some statistical context, as of 2023, about 16.11% of people in the US have used cannabis in the past year; per that same dataset, about 16.53% of Ohio residents. [1] Given that Ohio’s usage metrics align closely with the national mean, I think it's fair to use the state as a proxy for broader domestic trends.

Per more Pew Research data, also from 2023, Ohio seems to have an average, if not a less than average, concentration of cannabis dispensaries, compared to other states where CBD products were legal. Montgomery County, OH is located in the bottom-left quarter of Ohio, and sits in a region with lower dispensary density than many comparable U.S. districts. [2]

Given that usage metrics mirror the national mean despite a lower-than-average retail presence, I think this dataset is a pretty fair "middle america" benchmark.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/723822/cannabis-use-with... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/29/most-amer...
by ofrzeta | 2025-12-21 05:57:27+00:00
> it reminds me of when I was 8 and everyone at school used as many swear words as possible

+1 I've experienced this at conferences, too, where fellow Germans in their English talks excessively use words like shit, fuck or bullshit. Maybe it's also due to exposure to English/American culture through media where everyone talks like this in movies and songs.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-21 05:59:02+00:00
Disclaimer: I used to work for an employee-owned nuclear energy services consultancy c. 90's comprised of mostly ex-GE NE and Mitsubishi engineers.

While I'm fine with very scrupulous megaproject nuclear sites who have many layers of checks and security processes, I'm not fine with "emperor's new clothes" throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater slapdash, unsecured SMRs in residential and urban areas managed by a startup lacking the deep bench of technical and institutional knowledge. Safety regs are written in blood.

I just don't see the ROI when an equivalent investment in pumped energy storage, hydrothermal, wind, and solar doesn't come with the same baggage that I'm afraid the current regulatory and political environment isn't interested in respecting and protecting a culture of safety.

SMRs designed, owned, and managed by industry titans never got a chance because of public relations in the day, but I think that train has sailed in the current technology and economic environment. (The AI bubble can't burst soon enough, because billionaires are driving inflation of utilities and imposing undue externalities on datacenter neighbors.)
by simonw | 2025-12-21 05:59:17+00:00
I think it's very easy to harm your learning by leaning into LLMs.

What I don't believe is that it HAS to be like this. Maybe it's my natural optimism showing through here, but I'm confident it's possible to accelerate rather than slow down your learning progress with LLMs, if you're thoughtful about how you apply them.

An open question for me is how feasible it is to teach people how to teach themselves effectively using this new technology.

I have a core belief that everything is learnable, if people are motivated to learn. I have no idea how to help instill that motivation in people who don't yet have it though!
by mmooss | 2025-12-21 05:59:53+00:00
I meant to address that when I wrote about property rights: Only the wealthy can afford what you describe; that system effectively restricts such expression to them.

Also, if I pay you to advertise on your building, that's only two of us deciding: from the public's point of view, it's no better than unilateral. (Or you could put your own advertisement, such as your business name, on your building.)
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-12-21 06:00:01+00:00
Upvoted!

I’ve applied this same rule when reading news or watching tv - if your immediate reaction is shock, surprise, or anger, think of a list of organisations who would monetarily benefit [1] from that article or show etc.

Nobody does a news story for the fun of it unless it genuinely IS news, but it’s been shown [2] that over 70% is PR pieces trying to make you think one way or another.

[1] money talks, and bullshit walks

[2] Australia’s Media Watch ran a piece about this a few years ago
by defrost | 2025-12-21 06:01:48+00:00
> Revisionist history you're pushing here.

Which part of the Texas history link is incorrect?

Civilisation is civilisation . it comes with and without attributes such as cities and agriculture .. the point made is that the timelines in Texas strecth back 13,000 years.

> has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.

Their urban development consisted of light footprints, seasonal migration in worn patterns, walking, etc.

That can be contrasted with how contemporary US citizens live, how the Dutch live, how varies other people still live today.
by hattmall | 2025-12-21 06:03:40+00:00
Except that's why it isn't insurance at all, because people DO know. That's the idea of pre-existing conditions. People with pre-existing conditions don't need health insurance. They need healthcare. The whole healthcare masquerading as insurance is the problem.

>a whole bunch of money moves from the ACA to Medicaid

Not really, Medicaid pays very low rates for treatments. The "ACA" money just goes to insurance companies which are incentivized to pay high rates for everything because their profit is set as a percent of their expenditures by the ACA.

> Under the old system, if you were in the 5% you probably died.

This is also not accurate at all either, you just had to pay more money. You could still get insurance with pre-existing conditions, it just wasn't cheap. ACA plans though are now ~10-15x more than older plans and the deductibles are way higher with much worse coverage.

>This has been an expensive year, nearly 9k in insurance premiums and I hit the stop-loss at nearly 9k. Thus 18k out of pocket that would have been Medicaid spending under your system.

I don't understand this, are you saying you paid 9K in premiums and then hit your MAX OOP at 9K as well?

I'm not sure why you are translating that cost directly to Medicaid, but realistically your insurance actually paid more than the 9K right? But Medicaid simply wouldn't pay out nearly as much. But even then I'm not saying it would be cheap. It would just be far more logical than the ridiculous system set up to preserve insurance company profits. Medicare for all would be even better.
by B-Con | 2025-12-21 06:04:22+00:00
For me, I despise having different abstractions get crossed.

I expect my media app, ie. YouTube, to know what I watch from the media app. YouTube knows about YouTube.

My operating system, ie. Roku, should not know about what's happening inside a given app. ie. Roku does not know about YouTube.

When they start crossing layers, that greatly upsets me.
by vel0city | 2025-12-21 06:04:56+00:00
This is a discussion about urbanism, not just broadly "civilization". Nomadic tribes didn't live in urban environments.

The city I live in practically didn't exist until very modern times. The fact some people used to to hunt around here 16,000 years ago has little impact to the modern way the city was laid out and designed or the people who mostly live here today.

There's practically zero way to draw the roots of this town back to some group that camped here 16,000 years ago. Any form of lineage of civilization was lost a looooong time ago. Extremely few people would even draw their roots back to the Caddo, who are far more recent than anyone you're suggesting here.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-21 06:04:58+00:00
As a Camp Fire climate refugee and week+-long PG&E PSPSes running on generators, hello from hill country TX. While we have ERCOT that is only slightly better and Enron-style market pricing, energy production infrastructure has actually caught up so long as not too many gigadatacenters are built to automate spamming Youtube with fake cat videos.
by utopiah | 2025-12-21 06:05:06+00:00
Is it so weird? See Multiple discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery and Zeitgeist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist namely that there might, or might not, be objective knowledge out there describing properly an objective World but we as a specie do chip at it with itself over time. When a new discovery in any field is made it propagates through our social network and tools we have for it, e.g. cafes, scientific journal, Web. As soon as something is discovered most of us connected enough get the new tool or perspective, update our Worldview and chip it at it again. IMHO this way it seems pretty normal that things hitherto unknown, no matter for how long, become knowable to seemingly independent discovers.
by sans_souse | 2025-12-21 06:05:23+00:00
Anyone reading thru these and filtering out the promotion spam should consider taking a look thru. All his Amazon orders, which mostly are uninteresting sure, but scattered in there are books and eBook purchases dealing with some relevant and interesting-in-context topics.

Also, interesting that this one got by him (unopened, unread, filtered from inbox) and the timing of it being near his final arrest (coincidence, but still) https://www.jmail.world/eml/0b80588f551f3d097695f1c9507b6572
by johnfn | 2025-12-21 06:05:57+00:00
But how much of that time is truly spent on learning relevant knowledge, and how much of it is just (now) useless errata? Take vector search for an example. Pre-GPT, I would spend like an hour chasing down a typo, like specifying 1023 instead of 1024 or something. This sort of problem is now trivially solved in minutes by a LLM that fully understands the API surface area. So what exactly do I lose by not spending that hour chasing it down? It has nothing to do with learning vector search better, and an LLM can do it better and faster than I can.
by culi | 2025-12-21 06:06:46+00:00
it's also not possible for Safari to be the new IE because they don't have 95% marketshare. And IE's unique problem was that they pushed features that only they supported. Safari's problem is it doesn't support certain features

Also the thing is that there are plenty of features supported by Safari and Firefox that Chrome is slacking on. Nobody every complains about those features though because nobody would try to use a feature not supported by Chrome in the first place
by tonyhart7 | 2025-12-21 06:07:41+00:00
"all scripts and memory to look back. But otherwise it's hard. Clicking few buttons in hoster panel is much easier."

so we need open source way to do that, coolify/dokploy comes to mind and it exactly do that way

I would say 80% of your point wouldnt be hit at certain scale, as most application grows and therefore outgrow your tech stack. you would replace them anyway at some point