MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shoo | 2025-12-08 22:10:52+00:00
hypothesis: expected upvotes = views of comment thread * probability your comment is read given someone reads the comment thread * probability of upvote given someone read your comment

If you make a "great" comment but the comment thread isn't popular, no/few upvotes

If you make a "great" comment in a really popular thread but it's buried down the comment tree where others are less likely to see it, no/few upvotes

Let's define by "great" comment we mean one that readers of that comment upvote at a high rate.

You'll likely get more votes by making a pretty good comment relatively early in a popular comment thread, at a time of the day when many people are reading HN, rather than an absolutely fantastic comment in some thread that hardly any one reads.

There's path dependence -- if there's two equally "great" comments contributed to a thread, and one is made 30 minutes earlier, it's likely that the earlier one accrues a bunch of votes and sub-threads, secures the best real estate at the top of the thread, and ends up with many more votes than the other one.

These may make it harder to identify if the content or topic is having much impact on the accrued votes.

Could perhaps normalise for that by adding metrics for the number of votes that the submission got, or the total number of votes of all comments in the thread, then see if that can explain some of the variation. Measuring the duration between when the comment thread opened and when the comment was posted could be interesting too.

i hope after enough corrections for topic popularity, time of day, how fast you commented, it becomes clear that your best topic is fire truck efficiency, and we can look forward to frequent comments about fire truck efficiency going forward
by etempleton | 2025-12-08 22:10:53+00:00
I think generally it is a complaint against the soullessness of corporatism versus ownership that actually cares about delivering a good product and treating their customers and employees right.

Greed is very high right now. And you can see that in the behavior of all types of companies. Historically when greed is high like this you eventually end up with a Lehman Bros or Enron situation that causes a painful market place correction.
by ralferoo | 2025-12-08 22:11:01+00:00
There's lots of questionable stuff on this page. I particularly objected to this which clearly isn't true in most English speech:

"Word spacing is crucial for the written form because it illustrates the sound of speech where audible gaps or pauses take place."

If I were reading it aloud, even for a presentation, the spaces between morphemes would be more like this:

"Wordspacing iscru'cial forthewri'ttenform be'cause itill'ustrates thesoun'dofspeech where audiblegaps or pauses takeplace."

where a ' is a shorted pause than a space. The length of the ' isn't really long enough to be called out as a pause, but it's definitely longer than between words which frequently run directly into the next.

Spacing is important, but it's as an aid to parsing a written sentence at speed, and almost nothing to do with showing the pauses between morphemes.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-08 22:11:32+00:00
Most Americans don't follow Eurovision.

In fact, ties to Europe are increasingly fringe - either alt-right "White Christendom" types or "I support Scandinavian socialism" types (yes ik Scandinavia is not socialist).

A major reason cooperative Atlanticism emerged instead of a more hardline psudeo-colonial approach like the US took in Japan, SK, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, and Thailand during the 1950s-90s was because some of the most important foreign policy decisionmakers in mid-late 20th century America were 1.5 or 2nd Generation immigrants from Europe - think Kissinger (born and raised in Germany), Albright (born and raised in Czechia+Britan), or Brzezinski (born and raised in Poland+USSR) - and had some amount of sympathy for individual Europeans as a result.

In the 2010s and onwards, most Americans (and especially those of us who worked on the Hill) either never had blood ties or have extremely distant blood ties to Europe.

From a soft power perspective in the US, Asia and Latin American has a stronger foothold compared to much of Europe - Korean fashion like bucket hats are becoming common, Anime has become mainstream, and Reggaton and Latin Pop like that composed by Bad Bunny or Luis Fosi (Despacito) has become mainstream.

And when European nations take a hard-right turn (eg. an AfD, RN, or Reform victory), when Democrats eventually return to power, we'd shun Europe as well because racism is still alive and well in plenty of Europe, and South Asian and Arab Americans are overrepresented in policymaking roles in both parties, and those of us who enter the space are very aware of how our ethnic peers are treated across the pond. There's a reason our parents immigrated here instead of London or Frankfurt. And that resentment bleeds into ambivalence/indifference about Europe.
by hobs | 2025-12-08 22:11:34+00:00
I helped a company that is build averse move off of Fivetran to Debezium and some of their own internal tooling for the same workload they are paying 40k less a month (yeah they just raised their prices again).

Now, that's not exactly the same thing, but their paucity of skills made them terrified to do something like this before, they had little confidence they could pull it off and their exec team would just scoff and tell them to work on other revenue generating activities.

Now the confidence of Claude is hard to shake off of them which is not exactly the way I wanted the pendulum to swing, but its almost 500k yearly back in their pockets.
by Agingcoder | 2025-12-08 22:11:49+00:00
They can actually - I thought they couldn’t , but the latest ones can, much to my surprise.

I changed my mind after playing with cursor 2 ( cursor 1 had lasted all of 10 mins), which actually wrote a full blown app with documentation, tests , coverage, ci/cd, etc. I was able to have it find a bug I encountered when using the app - it literally ran the code, inserted extra logs, grepped the logs , found the bug and fixed it.
by kulahan | 2025-12-08 22:11:52+00:00
I'm glad your dad got better, it had nothing to do with his diet and fasting. It's no different than Steve Jobs stubbornly becoming a fruititarian to treat his cancer. If his immune system had fought it off, then fruit would be a cancer cure and all his doctors would be idiots.

Youtube/Internet experts are one of the largest propagators of medical misinformation and are actively harming people every day, and if I've ever been in favor of restricting free speech, it's giving out medical advice without a license. If we can restrict giving legal advice, and everyone understands how painfully stupid you'd have to be to represent yourself in court without a law degree, then we can restrict giving medical advice, and hopefully people can realize how painfully stupid you'd have to be to manage your own medical treatments without a medical degree.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-08 22:12:14+00:00
Intellij knows my Frob class does not have a static Blurb method, yet will still allow an LLM to generate a code completion of "frob.blurb()"

It's insanity. This one stupid issue has cost me significant productivity. I got so much benefit from being able to hit "Tab" every few lines, but now I instead have to press whatever button combos or interactions cause the suggestion to go away, and then type what would have been suggested previously.

We had really good code completion that never made this kind of mistake for 20 years. Apparently we are going to throw that all away because """AI"""?

Just utter fucking insanity.
by pcl | 2025-12-08 22:12:14+00:00
When I moved to SF, someone told me that the three most important things you can do for earthquake safety are:

- make sure nothing can fall on you when you're in bed (no mounted artwork above the headboard; no lamps etc on side tables that are high enough to fall on you)

- make sure you have footwear in your bedroom, so you can be mobile if there's broken glass everywhere

- store extra drinking water somewhere (I used a 6-gallon carboy that I periodically refilled)

Probably there are other good things to do, but all those made a lot of sense to me. Most of us spend more time in bed than in any other fixed location, so making sure the bed is a safe place rings true. And water is life.
by nonameiguess | 2025-12-08 22:12:29+00:00
I don't really build software any more and have moved into other parts of the business. But I'm still a huge user of software and I'd just echo all the other comments asking if it's so easy to get all these great tools built and shipped, where are they? I can see that YouTube is flooded with auto-generated content. I can see that blogspam has skyrocketed beyond belief. I can see that the number of phishing texts and voicemails I get every day has gone through the roof. I don't see any flood of new CNCF incubating projects. I don't see that holy grail entire OS comparable to Linux but written in Rust. I don't see the other holy grail new web browser that can compete with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It's possible people are shipping more of the stripped down Jira clones designed for a team of ten that gets 60 customers and stops receiving updates after 2 years but that's not the kind of software that would be visible to me.

If you're replacing spreadsheets with a single-purpose web UI with proper access control and concurrent editing that doesn't need Sharepoint or Google Workspaces, fine, but if you're telling me that's going to revolutionize the entire industry and economy and justify trillions of dollars in new data centers, I don't think so. I think you need to actually compete with Sharepoint and Google Workspaces. Supposedly, Google and Microsoft claim to be using LLMs internally more than ever, but they're publicly traded companies. If it's having some huge impact, surely we'll see their margins skyrocket when they have no more labor costs, right?
by njuw | 2025-12-08 22:12:45+00:00
> The persistence stuff is kinda new and it's not a surprise that there are limitations and bugs.

It's not really that new. The precursor to JetStream was NATS Streaming Server [1], which was first tagged almost 10 years ago [2].

[1] https://github.com/nats-io/nats-streaming-server

[2] https://github.com/nats-io/nats-streaming-server/releases/ta...
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-08 22:13:22+00:00
Op seemed to be freaked out about unknowns.

So my solution would be to look at historical data for earth quakes in his area so he knows basically what to expect.. that way when it starts shaking, he doesn't think "omg how big will this be?" And instead can know "ok this will be between 2.9 and 3.5 like the last 500 quakes in this area for 50+ years. Thank God no one has ever died in this area from an earthquake"

And then he can also know that he is prepared for even a much bigger quake in his area before... Because he prepared something.

This is obvious stuff. In case the guy I wrote to didn't know, now he does. If he wants to dwell in his neuroticism he can.
by kulahan | 2025-12-08 22:13:48+00:00
You are certainly reading something into my question that isn't there. I'm genuinely ignorant. I thought you were saying that predictions of a strong aftershock following an M8.8 were dumb, but the same thing following an M7.6 were smart. Is that not the case?

Again, sorry if this seemed antagonistic or something, I really am just unsure of what you were saying.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-08 22:14:03+00:00
Hypocrisy: You're just claiming a different community of native speakers are wrong.

For some of the samples on that site, it'd question whether they even have majority-support as "correct" when brought to people's conscious attention, as opposed to simply being a popular mistake they don't object-to. (Do any polls exist? The nature of the content evades easy search-terms.)
by dangus | 2025-12-08 22:14:39+00:00
Interesting, Google’s price comparison made it look like free tiers didn’t get that.

I did try to use annual pricing with annual discounts wherever I could, some services don’t really list it explicitly.

I will admit Microsoft’s pricing doesn’t really look as good if you’re not sharing the storage, and they get demerit for not providing a free tier for most of the apps at all.
by parliament32 | 2025-12-08 22:14:53+00:00
Something I could use some clarification on:

> Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investment spent on locating more copper simply does not produce a return.

How do we "know" there isn't any major formations we haven't found yet? I find it hard to believe we've prospected every possible area.. or are deposits more predictable than it seems?
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-08 22:15:01+00:00
That depends on the size of the toast, appearance and frequency. We (an MSP) used a Windows toast notification[1] to encourage people initiate the Win10 > Win11 upgrade at their own convenient time (before it gets forced down on them) - and we got a pretty high uptake. The overall feedback from both the project team and users were good: the toast was unmissable, the text explanation was clear, and the big banner image was eye catching.

https://www.imab.dk/windows-10-toast-notification-script/
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-12-08 22:15:17+00:00
> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.

I'm not sure about this. The tests I've gotten out in a few hours are the kind I'd approve if another dev sent then but haven't really ended up finding meaningful issues.
by fwip | 2025-12-08 22:15:54+00:00
Is there a way to control the mechanics of the animation? I poked around a bit and didn't see a way to configure what was sent down the arrows or how often - just some theming options.

For example, if you're visualizing a user flow, you might want rules about when new "objects" are sent down the pipe (example node rule: wait until received one item from each input), or how fast they travel, etc.
by npoc | 2025-12-08 22:15:56+00:00
Fiat currency: Why would I hold a currency that another nation sucks the value out of by printing it? Even the dollar has half its value stolen every decade.

Gold stock above ground doubles every 40ish years, halving it's value each time. Think how difficult it is to safely move and assay billions of dollars worth.

The reason nations aren't publicly using bitcoin as a reserve is that it's still only the year 2025
by bitwize | 2025-12-08 22:16:08+00:00
Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I don't actually see the huge productivity gains from LLM-assisted software development. Work is leaning on us to use AI—not requiring it yet, but we're at DEFCON 3, borderline 2 (DEFCON 1 being a Shopify situation). My team's experience is that it needs LOTS of handholding and manual fixing to produce even something basic that's remotely fit for production use.

I closed a comment from ~2.5y ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36594800) with this sentence: "I'm not sure that incorporating LLMs into programming is (yet) not just an infinite generator of messes for humans to clean up." My experience with it is convincing me that that's just what it is. When the bills come due, the VC money dries up, and the AI providers start jacking up their prices... there's probably going to be a boom market for humans to clean up AI messes.
by wrxd | 2025-12-08 22:16:21+00:00
That’s cool, and unexpected from a corporate blog.

Ma favourite e-reader setup still is the Kobo + Booklore combination. Editing a configuration file on the device I can have it connect to my Booklore library that adds my own ebooks seamlessly on top of the one I can get from the Kobo store.

I haven’t setup Tailscale on it yet but it’s possible.
by HaZeust | 2025-12-08 22:16:28+00:00
>"I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler."

There's a lot more on the line for first-world nations, financially and functionally. Also, you'll notice I conceded that point in the last sentence in that same paragraph: "And that's one of the less intuitive methods for bypassing current election systems."

>"Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web."

I'm not actually that concerned about midterms, I'm concerned about the macro implications of the existing electoral process (and theory, but that's a separate discussion) when we have better tooling for decentralized transparency/accountability and leverage - both for an individual and the collective - than we did during its ratification. I'm concerned its ripe for abuse with a passionate actor in general (that may or may not include individuals within our current administration), and your dismissal isn't too assuring.

>"its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)"

A lot of initiatives are trying to fix deterministic identification in digital formats now, some with good intentions and others with not.

>"transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal."

This isn’t actually true; transparency always rests on some power structure that both has access to the relevant information and can punish non-disclosure. That power doesn’t have to be a single superior authority, though. You can design systems where transparency is enforced laterally - a network of entities with roughly symmetric power, each able to observe and sanction the others, so that the tension between them produces real transparency and accountability.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-12-08 22:16:38+00:00
When I did IT work for my university, I was in charge of a big plotter printer that the science students used to print posters with summaries of their research for conferences. The only format I ever got was PowerPoint. Based on the number of search results for "powerpoint research poster template", it looks like this PowerPoint is still the format of choice.

I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-08 22:17:09+00:00
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.

You're completely right about this. But how does the Venn diagram look for features between different Office versions and for customer needs? Another commenter here said that Office 98 is good enough for most users, and I have to agree.

What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office? Is Copilot it?

I've managed a very information-intensive career so far without using MS Office. Apple's iWork software is perfectly fine. And I'm not avoiding Office out of any principle. If I needed or wanted it, I'd be happy to pay for it.
by sdoering | 2025-12-08 22:17:33+00:00
I happily got rid of a legacy application (lost the pitch, another agency now must deal with the shit) I inherited as a somewhat technically savvy person about a year ago.

It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patterns, bad shit and code that would have had Hitchcock running.

I think we would be shocked to see what kind of human slop out there is running in production. The scale might change, but at least in this example, if I had rebuilt the app purely by vibe coding the code quality and the security of the code would actually have improved. Even with the lowest vibe coding effort thinkable.

I am not in any way condoning (is this the right word) bad practices, or shipping vibe code into prod without very, very thorough review. Far from it. I am just trying to provide a counter point to the narrative, that at least in the medium sized business I got to know in my time consulting/working in agencies, I have seen quite a metric ton of slop, that would make coding agents shiver.
by kenjackson | 2025-12-08 22:18:27+00:00
I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes.

I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large code bases. One of the things we did in grad school was to go through gcc and contribute something to it. Man, that code was so complex and compilers are one of my specialties (at the time). I think having an LLM with me would have made the task 100x easier.
by brachkow | 2025-12-08 22:18:30+00:00
This is very important point, that people from US and EU oversee.

I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.

Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.
by chemotaxis | 2025-12-08 22:20:20+00:00
The best part is that this article is almost certainly AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted too.

Before people get angry with me... there's plenty of small tells, starting with section headings, a lot of linguistic choices, and low information density... but more importantly, the author openly says she writes using LLMs: https://www.sh-reya.com/blog/ai-writing/#how-i-write-with-ll...
by weakfish | 2025-12-08 22:20:27+00:00
IME on a Pulumi for IaC team, writing infra in a real language (TypeScript) is MILES better than- you can do conditions, have typed outputs, etc and not have it be a bastardized imperative YAML mess.

YAML is fine for data, but inevitably stuff like workflows end up tacking on imperative features to a declarative language.
by dlubarov | 2025-12-08 22:20:51+00:00
In Zcash a quantum attacker could include invalid transactions with forged proofs, but I'm not sure they could actually break Zcash's privacy properties?

I'd need to review the design details more to say for sure, but e.g. from what I recall Pedersen hashes are used in the commitment tree, but not for nullifiers. Those use blake hashes (which are plausibly post-quantum secure), IIRC.

There's also the underlying prover layer, but many proof systems actually have information-theoretic zero-knowledge properties (assuming a suitable source of randomness), even if their soundness guarantees are based on assumptions like DLP.