MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-12-21 01:47:56+00:00
I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about it in terms of “privilege.” It’s not about being lucky enough to be born into privilege, but not being unlucky enough to be born into structural dysfunction.

If you compare income mobility between parents and adult children in the U.S. versus Denmark, it looks quite similar for the top 80%. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012.... Someone raised in the second lowest income quantile in the U.S. has about the same chance of ending up in the top income quantile as someone in Denmark. It’s the bottom 20% where Americans are twice as likely to get stuck there in comparison to people in Denmark.
by daft_pink | 2025-12-21 01:48:23+00:00
I feel this doesn’t really address whether we are losing something privacy or security related by not having NAT. I think my main devices are always updated Mac iPhone or iPad and can handle it, but do I really want my thermostat or doorbell or lock or garage door opener or light switch directly accessible on the Internet or is the nat serving a useful purpose? I don’t feel like this is addressed in this article.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-12-21 01:49:08+00:00
If it is irrelevant to my life then it is easy, i shouldnt be funding it. I actually disagree. Physics progressing is very relevant to my life because physics progress drives huge positive societal change. That physics is stuck on string theory and that string theory has gotten us nowhere is why i dont have much cheaper energy, much faster computers, much faster travel, paradigm shifting medical options, etc. that a bunch of wankers captured a whole class of cuahy university job for whole careers has directly harmed me through lack of progress. I dont have to understand the theory to know whats going on. I only have to ser thr lack of progress for decades to know the right way to spend my money is to diversify until something moves forward.
by ajkjk | 2025-12-21 01:50:05+00:00
The string theory model is structured from the start to reproduce existing theories as a consequence, so the problem here is a lack of understanding on your part rather than a mistake in the theory. I do suspect that most people who are working on this stuff (or any stuff for that matter) don't think very hard about the basic phenomenological claims to the point where they can explain them well.

In particular your model of electric fields isn't very good. An electric field's flux around a volume reveals the presence of a particle in that volume. That's not because the field, a bunch of vectors in space, "happens" to integrate to something nonzero if there's a particle in that volume: it's because in some sense the presence of a field with a nonzero flux and the presence of a charged particle are the same thing; the particle is the existence of a divergence in the field within that volume.

Moreover in QFT (and this part is handwavey as I only learned enough to vaguely understand this, but it's better than nothing) the presence of the "field" ends up looking like the sum of what you get if you integrate over every possible way of a emitting or receiving a photon at that point; the accumulated integrals destructively interfere in such a way as to produce a value which reflects where the particles are. So very roughly idea of a field existing at a point and having a "value" is like saying: there are a bunch of things out there that I (a charged particle) can detect by exchanging photons, and the accumulated effect, when you consider all the different quantum superpositions of ways of doing that, is a single vector which induces a force on me. Other fields add up to more complicated objects than vectors.

Once you look at things like that, there should be no objection to how strings and electrons might interact. Whatever's going on at that string level averages out over larger timespans to just look like electron field. Not dissimilar from how all the individual charges in an atom average out to look like a single charge (but are perhaps detectable if you get up really close, in dipole and higher moments, or in how the atom deforms / reacts to nearby charges).

It might help to be aware of the concept of a topological defect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_defect; there's a great explainer article somewhere that I can't seem to find) as a reductive picture of what a particle "is". I've heard this doesn't work for fermions for some technical reason, but in any case it's very useful as an illustration of the sort of thing that a particle "can be": a vortex in a material can act like a particle and even exhibit attractive/repulsive forces. So I picture the string theory model as answering the question: what kind of substrate could produce vortexes and other "defects" that act like the particles we see? Dunno if that's accurate but it seems like a natural question to me, anyway.
by Hizonner | 2025-12-21 01:51:02+00:00
Take their Haskell implementation. If I compile it unoptimized (with a slight change to hardwire the iteration count at one billion instead of reading it from a file), I get bored waiting for it to finish after several minutes of clock time. If I compile it with "-O3", it runs in 4.75 seconds (it's an old machine).

Suppose I remove the strictness annotations (3 exclamation points, in places that aren't obvious to a naive programmer coming from almost any other language). If I then compile it unoptimized, it gets up to over 30GB of resident memory before I get bored (it's an old machine with a lot of memory). It would probably die with an out of memory error if I tried to run it to completion. However, if I compile that same modified code optimized, the compiler infers the strictness and the program runs in exactly the same time as it does with the annotations there. BUT it's far from obvious to the casual observer when the compiler can make those inferences and when it can't.

I had ChatGPT rewrite the Haskell code to use unboxed numeric types. It ran in 1.5 seconds (the C version takes 1.27). The rewrite mostly consists of sprinkling "#" liberally throughout the code, but also requires using a few specialized functions. I had ChatGPT do it because I have never used unboxed types, and you could argue that they're not common idiom. However, anybody who actually wrote that kind of numerical code in Haskell on a regular basis would use unboxed types as a matter of course.

So which one is the right time?
by jeffbee | 2025-12-21 01:51:35+00:00
The author's experience is trivial, so it indicates nothing. Anybody can set up a rack of postgresql servers and say it's great in year 2. All the hardware is under warranty and it still works anyway. There haven't been any major releases. The platform software is still "LTS". Nobody has needed to renegotiate the datacenter lease yet. So experience in year 2 tells you nothing.
by wredcoll | 2025-12-21 01:53:29+00:00
> We have world-leading criminality rates. Given that, the only alternatives are world-leading incarceration, or just letting criminals roam around making law-abiders' lives worse.

Somehow every part of this paragraph just keeps getting less correct.

America doesn't have "world-leading" criminality by literally any metric you care to choose.

Even if it did, also having world leading incarceration rates might make a rational, scientific type fellow wonder about how those could both be true!

Also, those are not in fact the only alternatives. It's not even difficult to think of more than those two. Have you even tried?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-21 01:53:54+00:00
Be that as it may, it's a generic phrase, as evinced by its prior usage in other fields like intelligence and journalism. Lacking a trademark, OSI has zero authority to word-police everyone else. No amount of plugging their ears and chanting lalalala will change the fact that OSI does not own exclusive rights to the phrase "open source." Not with respect to software, not with respect to anything else.

The author of the project in this article is perfectly within their rights to use the term, and the rest of us know very well what they mean by it.
by minikomi | 2025-12-21 01:54:42+00:00
1.▲ Show HN: A songwriting DAW built entirely inside an Org-mode buffer(emacs.org) 432 points | 2 hours ago | 89 comments 2.▲ Why I'm still using Soulseek to trade prompt-engineered MIDI files 156 points | 4 hours ago | 42 comments

I admit I hastily tried clicking before realizing these were fake
by bko | 2025-12-21 01:55:23+00:00
Ah as long as Brookings Institute tells me it's a myth, I'll ignore the people selling basic toiletries right outside of drug stores, or bike messengers riding with suspicious taped up bikes that are poorly suited for heavy city use, or the videos of people coming in as a group, loading the bags and making off in get-away cars. Ignore what's in front of you, or the fact that nearly a third of shoplifting can be tracked down to ~300 people. These people maybe just have really big families to feed!

But you might ask why are stores closing? Why is deodorant behind lock and key?

> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities.

Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.

Don't believe what's right in front of your eyes.

Nothing to see.
by baubino | 2025-12-21 01:56:14+00:00
On youtube, people are watching other people’s lives, often in place of living their own fully. I don’t think it’s a matter of big-budget movie vs youtube, but of fiction vs reality content. The general public isn’t interested in fictional stories anymore; they’re interested in something that seems like real life (even if that “reality” is as fictionalized as a big budget movie).
by saghm | 2025-12-21 01:56:28+00:00
Sure, I never claimed that relational databases were the first ones. I was confused because they were trying to explain a specific timeline different from the article, but only mentioned a single time period that didn't seem likely to be what they intended, and I thought it might make sense to clarify what that time period was. I'm sure this isn't the case for everyone, but at least to me, it's surprising not to be explicit in the information they were trying to claim the article glossed over.
by uberman | 2025-12-21 01:56:32+00:00
Claude regularly looses it's mind when refactoring or generating code. I'm talking about failures to the point where files are unrecoverable except to fall back to the head of main. I see this even with opus 4.5 every day. I can't imagine anyone "not writing code anymore" and still able to pass a code review if they are just committing what Claude vibe coded. If you feel good about the code Claude wrote for you to the extent that you are just going to commit it with your name on it, power to you. If you did so and you worked for me and the result was a failed deployment and you could not justify it other than you committed what Claude wrote then I would simply fire you.
by ok_computer | 2025-12-21 01:56:59+00:00
Non-scientific anecdote here but I feel like the lawlessness is due to lack of enforcement for traffic violations vs an uptick in weed usage. Possibly covid scrambled our brains and promotes aggressive impulsive behavior. Maybe cops are afraid to pull people over because they might inadvertently shoot them and become a national news story. Maybe the adoption of big trucks makes people feel invincible (two distinct trucks on my drive have cut in line at a left turn lane with a red arrow and crossed 2 lanes opposing traffic at different lights, what would possess someone to do that(?))

Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.
by saghm | 2025-12-21 01:58:34+00:00
The parent comment was pretty explicit in what types of databases it was talking about:

> I should add that the bond between relational databases and spinning rust goes back further.

It's certainly possible I failed to infer the point they were trying to make, but personally I would find it confusing for them to only mention one type of database (relational) and one time period (the 60s) if they actually meant a different type of database or a different time period in their central point of there being a relationship with, in their words, relational databases and spinning rust, in a specific time period other than what the article describes.
by kergonath | 2025-12-21 01:58:47+00:00
> which is about the most harmful drug ever for every system in your body

I am not saying that alcohol is good for you or anything, but that is not even wrong. It’s trivial to find drugs that kill you or nuke your liver if you get a few milligrams.

> also has a relatively small margin between lethality and and recreational doses.

Unless by "recreational dose" you mean a whole bottle of 40% ABV spirits, not really. And even then. IIRC the lethal dose is around 7g/kg, which is more than a pint of pure ethanol for someone weighting 70kg, or twice the amount of alcohol in the bottle. This is not a particularly small margin of error, particularly considering that the hypotheses were conservative.

It is possible to kill oneself with alcohol. It is nowhere near the dose commonly taken for recreative purposes.
by mr_tristan | 2025-12-21 01:59:47+00:00
I wonder if at a certain point, someone learns about compounding, and just sticks with it, building generational wealth. And poof, the wealth just keeps growing as long as the descendants don’t make errors.

We seem to love creating stories about why so-and-so is rich, but, I suspect the most common answer is “time, patience, and no major bad luck”.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-21 02:00:15+00:00
Anecdote time:

I wanted to do a pause of 1 second in Chez Scheme, but I din't know the spell. I tried Google and Gemini gave me an example. It didn't work because the parameter were in the reverse order (seconds vs nanoseconds). So after looking at the manual and trying both orders, I got the result I wanted. (And reduced the time to .2 seconds, because 1 second was too long.)

In an hypothetical case that it were a SO question, I don't see why my answer would not be good.
by spudlyo | 2025-12-21 02:00:18+00:00
I can't speak to everyone's motivation, but for me YouTube, and only YouTube has the kind of fascinating niche content that I want to watch. Often that content is created by random people who have a passion and zero profit motive, which makes it more authentic and charming. Sometimes it's an elderly Mexican grandmother explaining how she makes Chilaquiles[0], or maybe it's someone explaining why the Great Reform Act of 1832 was necessary[1], or perhaps it's a professor doing a deep-dive the history of the Vulgate and the life of Jerome[2], or maybe it's a YouTube series[3] that dives into a huge rabbit-hole (pun intended) on restoring a weird 1980s minicomputer -- whatever interests you that moment, someone is likely passionate and knowledgeable about it, and has made a video on it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mQx1zzBpuU

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_9PGNHd5Zs

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF98_HnYHjQ

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ1HwuYBuss&list=PLnw98JPyOb...
by a_bonobo | 2025-12-21 02:00:44+00:00
I work on a few HPC systems with unusual, kinda custom-rolled architectures. A whole bunch of Python and R packages fail to compile on these systems. There's no publicly accessible documentation for these HPC systems, nor for these custom architectures. ChatGPT and Claude so far have given me only wrong advice on how to get around these compilation errors and there's not much on Google for these errors, but HPC staff usually knew what to do.
by saghm | 2025-12-21 02:03:21+00:00
I'm not sure I understand how the toolbar can solve this problem. Unless I'm misunderstanding, I'd have to reopen the page every time when I click on the icons in the toolbar, in addition to not being able to interact with them in the same way as other tabs (e.g. using the keyboard to jump between them rather than needing to click). It's probable that the developer intent is closer to what you're describing, but I still maintain that what I'm looking for would be more useful for than the toolbar and that I don't personally have any use for what you're describing.

Maybe the difference here is that I don't ever have more than maybe a dozen tabs open total (including the half dozen pinned ones). To me, it seems more that you're using tabs for what browser history was designed for, and that you're using pinned tabs in a way that doesn't make sense unless you are using tabs in that way.
Day 2 of Building ScrapeForge
by Vishwas-Batra | 2025-12-21 02:05:18+00:00
ScrapeForge build log. Day 2.

Spent the day researching legal considerations and concluded that a proper Terms of Service will be required after backend features are finalized.

Initialized the repository and completed basic project setup.

Key takeaway: define legal boundaries early and operate within them.

Feedback welcome.
by belorn | 2025-12-21 02:05:29+00:00
My preferred way to wade through a political research topic like this is to look at the aviation industry. If a pilot can not use a medical substance, then it is very likely that there is some thing there. Pilots are generally fairly high investment, and they are also fairly international in research and standards. All nations with an airforce tend also be interested in such research, regardless of current political flavor.

From glancing at it, it seems that TCH impair pilots ability. Here is such study (done with flight sims). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1849400/

"The results support our preliminary study and suggest that very complex human/machine performance can be impaired as long as 24h after smoking a moderate social dose of marijuana, and that the user may be unaware of the drug's influence. "
by mopsi | 2025-12-21 02:05:54+00:00
... says the Russian war propaganda.

In the real world, NATO is a highly exclusive club, which is very reluctant to accept new members and extend its mutual defence clause to them. Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO after Russia had already begun violating their sovereign territory, but NATO allies caved to Russian pressure and denied membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. Russia then used this opportunity to invade them without triggering the full arsenal of NATO.

Russia is not a cornered cat, but a nuclear-armed colonial empire that has expanded through war and conquest for centuries, growing from a small city-state into the largest country in the world, exterminating countless native ethnicities in the process:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Te...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia
by sltr | 2025-12-21 02:09:35+00:00
Probably not an attack. The plane had a history of issues leading up to the crash. I think the saying "never attribute to malice what is attributable to incompetence" applies here.

The point of the article is to exonerate the pilots and expose a broader issue of honesty and transparency from Boeing and regulators that is covering up a systematic defect in Boeing aircraft design. The shared electrical bus renders other redundancies ineffective. The fact that the RAT has recently deployed 37 times uncommanded means another electrical failure at takeoff is a matter of time.

When you ask "why" 5 five times, it's never an individual. That's a big part of safety culture. Otherwise people cover their rears and don't divulge information that would save lives.

Aside: Isn't it wild that due to a software bug, Boeing directs airlines to reboot their 787-8s every 51 days?
by wand3r | 2025-12-21 02:09:39+00:00
The board approved his pay package 2 times. The share price when the initial operating milestones were set was roughly $21 and he was able to raise the share price to >$450. Regardless of anyone's opinion on Elon Musk, the pay package was obviously valid. His performance was directly incentivized by tying it to business outcomes which at the time were considered completely impossible. The board approved this twice. This is politicized garbage. I am not a lawyer but it says the initial denial of his package were for procedural violations and undue influence. However, this is the case in all founder run companies. It seems pretty straight forward and fair, they set absurd milestones and quotas which, in the event they were met, would mean the company would be in tremendous and unthinkable financial position. All shareholders were handsomely rewarded.
by jsight | 2025-12-21 02:09:43+00:00
Honestly that last paragraph is absolutely true. In general, you shouldn't have to do anything.

If your website is hard for an AI like Claude Sonnet 4.5 to use today, then it probably is hard for a lot of your users to use too.

The exceptions would be sites that intentionally try to make the user's life harder by attempting to stifle the user's AI agent's usability.
by jchw | 2025-12-21 02:10:04+00:00
On that note, from the TCP layer it should just look like an ICMP blackhole, which makes me wonder if enabling `net.ipv4.tcp_mtu_probing` will magically make TCP connections under Wireguard work even with the MTU set wrong. I'd try it, but unfortunately with a similar configuration I am unable to get the fragmentation behavior I was getting before; which makes me wonder if it was my UniFi Security Gateway that actually didn't like the fragmented packets.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-21 02:11:21+00:00
I also suspect that’s the most common path to single-digit millionaire in the US. My parents were the first generation on either side to attend college and the steady economic progress across 5 generations is impossible to miss.

Teaching the next generation(s) about how to invest (in self and in markets), not spend time nor money to frivolous excess, and delaying gratification are other critical parts of sustainability of family wealth. I think those were as big a factor as any other in the 5 generations from my kids back to their great-great-grandparents.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-21 02:12:04+00:00
But what's the base of your metric ?

I feel you're thinking about system wide downtime with everything timing out consistently, which would be detected by the generic database server vitals and basic logs.

But what if the timeouts are sparse and only 10 or 20% more than usual from the DB POV, but it affects half of your registration services' requests ? You need it logged application side so the aggregation layer has any chance of catching it.

On writing to ERROR or not, the hresholds should be whatever your dev and oncall teams decides. Nobody outside of them will care, I feel it's like arguing which drawer the socks should go.

I was in an org where any single error below CRITICAL was ignored by the oncall team , and everything below that only triggered alerts on aggregation or special conditions. Pragmatically, we ended up slicing it as ERROR=goes to the APM, anything below=no aggregation, just available when a human wants to look at it for whatever reason. I'd expect most orgs to come with that kind of split, where the levels are hooked to processes, and not some base meaning.
by uberman | 2025-12-21 02:12:53+00:00
You know and stated the truth already.

You left due to a personal conflict. The more you want to twist this into something it is not like a growth opportunity the more of the context of the lie you must maintain. Eventually the maintenance of the lie will catch up to you and will affect they way you interview,

You left because of a personnel matter and if you used the time following your leaving to actually do something else then say so. If you did not then say you have taken the time for your self. If you actually saw the opportunity to prepare for government IT job and leveraged it say so. If you try to say "hey I had a great job but quit to prepare for a job in government" then as a recruiting manager of course I would call bullshit and start to probe.