MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jtrn | 2026-01-04 23:40:54+00:00
Having worked as a therapist for years, treating thousands of client, and read more books and studies on this than I can count, I can for certain say that is MUCH MUCH simpler to change the environment than your personality to improve well beeing and general functioning.

To tired to pick a apart this article now. But this is feel good nonsense... Just one example, mindfulness is not even a fraction as effective as most people claim. It always fall apart when you do a proper study with actual measurable effects on life and happiness as outcome.

Also, 6 weeks is nothing. When I worked at inpatient unit we sometimes needed 6 weeks before patient reverted to baseline personality after admittance. This is just as silly as saying that you changed your lifestyle permanently with regard exercises after just a few weeks into your new year's resolution. You MIGHT have, but lets wait untill next year and see if the permanent claim is true.
by clanky | 2026-01-04 23:40:55+00:00
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.

The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
by tptacek | 2026-01-04 23:41:08+00:00
Since you mentioned me: what's the point? It would be one thing if you could (1) use Sequoia, (2) be assured of modern cryptography, and (3) maintain compatibility with the majority of the installed base of PGP users. But you can't. That being the case, why put up with all the PGP problems that Sequoia can't address? You're losing compatibility either way, so use an actually-good cryptosystem.
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-04 23:42:26+00:00
That is true. Every government's aim is to stay in power which in itself is the answer to your question. Eliminating regional threats to any country's dominance is paramount, as you noted.

This is especially true now, in my opinion, since there is a small likelihood of China invading Taiwan in the near term with some estimates predicting a 10-35% likelihood by 2027-2028. Longer term, the likelihood increases, but that's just my opinion.

If this is the case, however, the US economy can survive the loss of ~$180B annual Taiwan trade ties, but with "severe" recession; GDP down ~7% in conflict scenario. It would be chaos in the US, so a stable region, is paramount for survival and economic growth.

With that being said, Venezuela's 303B barrel reserves could boost US energy security via increased production (potentially 2-3M bpd), lowering oil prices, but effects delayed years.

Basically, even if sanctions lifted and investment resumed immediately, significantly increasing Venezuela's oil production (to meaningfully impact global/US supply and prices) would take 3–10+ years due to:

-Infrastructure decay
-Need for massive new investment
-Technical/logistical rebuilding
-Contract/legal negotiations

Short-term relief would be minimal.

In my view, it would take more than Venezuelan oil to be able to counter a protracted economic war with China over the loss of ~$180B annual Taiwan trade ties but stabilizing the region could help strengthen the West's position.

I would not bank much on this humble AIs opinion :)
by firecall | 2026-01-04 23:43:00+00:00
Some anecdotal knowledge I can share on why they used to say wait as long as you can for a hip replacement:

We were told this was because it used to be that they could only do the hip replacement surgery once, and the replacement joint would only last around 20 years max.

So basically it had to be for the expected life span of the patient!

But now this is no longer true. Well, in Australia at least with access to modern replacement parts, surgical techniques and specialists!

I could be muddling it up a bit, so happy to be corrected :-)
by RagnarD | 2026-01-04 23:43:10+00:00
Thought occurred to me to throw this at ChatGPT 5.2:

Given the article at https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/, find a short list of points which summarizes and touches on all of his lessons

Answer:

Here’s a short “umbrella list” that still covers all 21 lessons (each bullet is doing a lot of work on purpose):

- Start with the user, not the toy. Get unreasonably concrete about real user pain (tickets, observation, “why” drills), and let solutions fall out of that—otherwise you’ll build complexity to justify a preconceived answer.

- Engineering is a team sport: alignment beats being right. The job is getting to “right” together: create shared understanding, reduce misalignment (the real cause of “slow” teams), avoid “winning” debates into silent resistance, use metrics carefully (they get gamed), and design process to reduce uncertainty rather than produce paperwork.

- Ship early, then iterate—clarity over cleverness. Bias to action: drafts and MVPs teach faster than armchair perfection. Write code and docs that are obvious at 2am during an incident, not “impressive.” And treat novelty as debt you repay in ops/hiring/cognitive overhead—spend your “innovation tokens” where you’re uniquely paid to innovate.

- Do less: deletion is a superpower (and often the fastest optimization). Prefer “code you never wrote” (or work you removed) over clever additions. Many performance wins come from removing unnecessary computation, not adding fancy machinery.

- Respect scale and failure: compatibility, migrations, and leaky abstractions are the real product. At scale, even bugs become dependencies; deprecations are migrations with empathy/tooling/time. Abstractions don’t erase complexity—they postpone it until on-call—so keep a working mental model of what’s underneath.

- Make your impact legible and invest in compounding. Code doesn’t advocate for you—people do—so communicate outcomes, not just activity. Use writing/teaching to force clarity and deepen your own understanding; treat “glue work” as deliberate, bounded, and visible. Build psychological safety by saying “I don’t know.” Maintain relationships because your network outlasts any job. And manage your career like compound interest: protect time, practice deliberately, turn scar tissue into reusable playbooks.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-04 23:44:35+00:00
> test positive for NPD

NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder ?

>> overblown levels of self-importance, arrogance, and selfishness, as well as a lack of empathy for others.

Googled the term, but couldn't exactly see the connection. Fortunately, I currently only interact with a few people I consider alcoholics. AA definitely addressed the lack of empathy, at least.
by bcb_1000 | 2026-01-04 23:44:57+00:00
The crazier part is a reddit post on AWS was made for someone releasing a $3 a month closed source version of this, that received a lot of traction, but a bit of flack for being closed source was made 3 hours before the first commit. This guy 100% took the idea and the open source parts and recreated it to post here. Look at the readme and compare them. It is almost a 1:1 copy of the other. This dude is hella sketch. And if this is getting traction we are cooked as developers.
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-04 23:45:06+00:00
If Maduro's election shenanigans (like banning her from running) are part of the justification for his kidnapping, then we're taking on some responsibility to remove the whole regime, not just the guy. If we're just jockeying for regional power, then the justification lacks foundation and is straight up crime on the part of the US.
by simonw | 2026-01-04 23:45:30+00:00
The YouTube analogy doesn't completely hold.

It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did.

There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the "Worked example effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests that showing people "worked examples" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves.
by FrameworkFred | 2026-01-04 23:46:06+00:00
I agree with this soo much.

In a very real way, a codebase is a conversation among developers. There's every chance the next guy will be less familiar with the code than you, who just did a deep dive and arrived at some critical, poorly documented line of code. There's an even better chance that person will be you, 6 months from now.

Use opportunities to communicate.
by mattacular | 2026-01-04 23:46:22+00:00
I hear this argument as an excuse not to write comments (sometimes at all). Maybe I am just lucky but I have never had this issue as you've described in codebases, and if I did, certainly not to that extent where it became a memorable thorn in my side.

If there are no comments, you are reading the code (or some relatively far away document) for all understanding anyway. If there are inaccurate comments, worst case you're in the same boat except maybe proceeding with a bit more caution next comment you come across. I always ask of fellow engineers: why is it unduly difficult to also fix/change the comments as you alter the code they refer to? How and when to use comments is a balancing of trade-offs: potential maintenance burden in the future if next writers are lazy vs. opportunity to share critical context nearest its subject in a place where the reader is most likely to encounter it.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-04 23:46:37+00:00
> It's not a "shameful attempt at elitism" to point out that the first-listed definition is what I said.

That wasn't the behavior backing the claim, and you know it. The behaviour backing the claim was ignoring the definition being used as an excuse to try and correct people when you know well what they were saying. It's a sign of insecurity, generally.

> Your rejoinder that there exists some definition that could encompass your preferred usage does not refute what I said.

The fact that the word as a definition that shows that people were using it correctly is what refutes your claim.

> Since you seem to be impervious to such logic

I have no problem with logic, but I am critical of various peoples "logic".

> I'll leave it here.

I'm skeptical, but if you follow through I'll be appreciative.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-04 23:46:59+00:00
Mmm, I do a lot of frontend work but I find writing the frontend code myself is faster. That seems to be mostly what everyone says it's good for. I find it useful for other stuff like writing mini scripts, figuring out arguments for command line tools, reviewing code, generating dumb boilerplate code, etc. Just not for actually writing code.
by int_19h | 2026-01-04 23:47:15+00:00
I concur that phones aren't great as they are today, but perhaps this exact scenario will prompt the return of PDAs with proper keyboards etc? Or, alternatively, subcompact laptops like the stuff that https://gpdstore.net makes - they are still small enough to be pocketable (needs fairly large pockets but...), and yet you get a keyboard that is actually usable, and they even have one device with fold-out dual screen.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-04 23:47:16+00:00
I don't think that's a counter example. Our day care requested sick kids to be picked up within an hour. A single late pickup of a sick kid due to traffic/distance would be handled normally. An unreachable parent who turns off their phone and is extremely delayed, especially on multiple occasions is a very different thing.

When we looked at in-home child care, one of the options was a nanny who would care for kids even when the kids were sick. So I'm sure the rapid-pickup-of-sick-kids policy isn't universal. However, our day care had that policy and we made sure we knew who was "on-call" to get kids when important meetings or work travel impacted our availability.
by nemomarx | 2026-01-04 23:47:22+00:00
I think what you'd see is people writing changes on some other document (or on paper) and then coordinating who's office and who's aides will make the traceable commit to the law, in that case?

In the same way that right now industry interest groups write up proposed laws and then hand them to a favored allied lawmaker to "introduce" the proposal for them, and so on?
by cortesoft | 2026-01-04 23:47:36+00:00
For me, the key trait that makes gitops valuable is that it is declarative rather than imperative. The state of the git repo is the desired state of the system.

The key point there is that we don't have to worry about the existing state of the system. We don't have to worry that the api call made in your git pipeline actually failed, or that something else changed the system before your api call, and your state has drifted.

You can't replicate that by adding an API client to your git pipeline.

I am not sure how you end up with multiple git ops pipelines; ideally, you shouldn't be having multiple gitops pipelines. You should have a git repo that is defining the state, and then some reconciliation system that is checking the state of the system and the state of the repo, and taking any corrective actions needed to make the system state match the git state.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-01-04 23:47:50+00:00
Every large org/entity/group/party/etc is currently degrading under a toxic principle, which is

No one anywhere wants to clean their own house

Improvement is what happens when this principle is recognized and is rolled back.

Kowtowing is what happens when changes happen in response to overt bullying by a powerful, hostile autocrat.

Embracing (and nurturing) the above toxic principle is evidenced by folks who parrot talking points supplied by powerful, hostile autocrats.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-01-04 23:48:17+00:00
Does not give you any insight in the provenance, but Philip James has an awesome talk[0] where he uses Datasette to collect city government documents to be in a more structured format for analysis. Lots of clever automation to extract data from PDFs. Really some amazing work for surfacing civic decisions.

[0] https://pyvideo.org/pybay-2024/automate-your-city-data-with-... "Automate Your City Data with Python"
by conception | 2026-01-04 23:48:23+00:00
Steve Jobs has a bunch of videos on creating products- https://youtu.be/Q3SQYGSFrJY

Some person or small team needs to have a vision of what they are crafting and have the skill to execute on it even if users initially complain, because they always do. And the product that is crafted is either one customers want or don’t. But without a vision you’re just a/b testing your way to someone else replacing you in the market with something visionary.
by brewmarche | 2026-01-04 23:48:43+00:00
> git/GitHub/gitlab/codeberge

Is this about commit signing? Git and all of the mentioned forges (by uploading the public key in the settings) support SSH keys for that afaik.

git configuration:

gpg.format = ssh

user.signingkey = /path/to/key.pub

If you need local verification of commit signatures you need gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile too to list the known keys (including yours). ssh-add can remember credentials. Security keys are supported too.
by saisrirampur | 2026-01-04 23:49:18+00:00
Lovely article! Thanks for writing this one. Really love your motivation for the move from Timescale to ClickHouse - basically wanted to give ClickHouse a try! :) And later found it easy and useful.

This is what happened to me too when I spent past decade working for to Postgres companies and later started working for ClickHouse. Realized that there is another amazing database technology which is equally cooler and useful to the world and for a different use-case (analytics).
by alextingle | 2026-01-04 23:49:48+00:00
His framing of individual-element mindset vs. grouped-element mindset is very clear sighted.

It's what frustrates me so much about Rust - the language puts so much focus and complexity onto something that you shouldn't be doing in the first place: allocating and freeing millions of tiny objects. You end up writing programs that spend half their time allocating, initialising, destroying and freeing elaborate trees of records, and devote half their memory to pointers.
by VatroslavM | 2026-01-04 23:51:11+00:00
I've built a tool that skips Spotify tracks I've scrobbled recently on Last.fm.

It was entire built by ChatGPT and Cursor, with me only providing the guidance, without writing any code.

I use the app daily, as I've included it in Windows startup and don't ever turn it off.

You can see more about it here and even download a release of an older version: https://github.com/Vatroslav/spotify-auto-skipper
by alwillis | 2026-01-04 23:51:26+00:00
> I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers.

Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability.

Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout.

> They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners.

CSS is dramatically easier if you write it in order of specificity: styles that affect large parts of the DOM go at the top; more specific styles come later. Known as Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS), it has been around for a long time [1].

> It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation.

If you mean linting or adhering to coding guidelines, there are several; Stylelint is popular [2].
Any editor that supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), like VS Code and Neovim (among others), can use CSS and CSS Variables LSPs [3], [4] for code completion, diagnostics, formatting, etc.

> It's not meant to be generated.
Says who? There have been CSS generators and preprocessors since 2006, not to mention all the tools which turn mockups into CSS. LLMs have no problem generating CSS.

Lots of developers need to relearn CSS; the book Every Layout is a good start [5].

[1]: https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/

[2]: https://stylelint.io

[3]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice

[4]: https://github.com/vunguyentuan/vscode-css-variables

[5]: https://every-layout.dev
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-04 23:52:36+00:00
Ok but you didn't ask any questions in the transcript you provided. Maybe that one was an outlier?

In order to learn you generally need to actually do the thing, and usually multiple times. My point is that it's easy to use an AI to shortcut that part, with a healthy dose of sycophancy to make you feel like you learned so well.
by apparent | 2026-01-04 23:53:25+00:00
"I'm not in a bubble" is literally what people in a bubble say, FWIW.

You seem to think it's more likely that 80% of the country has been misled by propaganda related to basic human biology than that the other 20% is wrong. There have been plenty of times when 80% of people were wrong about something, but when the topic is one that all humans have firsthand experience with, it's somewhat less likely that they've been magically misled.

You're off-base comparing this to migrants eating cats and dogs. That was never an 80/20 issue.
by readthenotes1 | 2026-01-04 23:53:36+00:00
"Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them."

My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.

In this case, the second sentence could equally have been written as just another clause
by conditionnumber | 2026-01-04 23:54:15+00:00
This is responding to an earlier comment in this thread about how the Gaussian distribution arises, and whether you need Gaussian errors for OLS to have good properties.

The Gaussian distribution arises quite naturally all over the place. Just average a bunch of similar stuff and you get a Gaussian. Have a look at the python snippet below, we get an almost-Gaussian out of a uniform just by averaging! I was surprised to learn that there's a similar (in spirit, not form) aggregation rule for order statistics (this kind of aggregation rule is the subject of extreme value theory).

OLS is often introduced assuming Gaussian errors, because in that case OLS is the maximum likelihood estimator (which has desirable properties). As Ludwig mentioned, you don't need the Gaussian assumption for OLS to be a "good" estimator. The Gauss-Markov theorem says it's sufficient for the errors to be uncorrelated and have constant variance. If they have non-constant variance and you know their variance, you can pre-scale your data, run OLS, and get a good result (this is called weighted least squares or WLS).OLS can also be thought of as a specific incarnation of the "Generalized Method of Moments" which can handle much more complicated situations. Including errors with different variance.

As for the original article, all the quantities it considers can be computed by hand (empirical covariance matrix, it's eigenvectors/eigenvalues, the regression coefficients). If you notice an unexpected difference in empirical quantities then it's time to turn the crank of the math and see how the closed-form solutions might differ.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

x = np.random.uniform(size=(1_000_000, 100))
x = np.mean(x, axis=1)
pd.Series(x.ravel()).hist(bins=100)
by coro_1 | 2026-01-04 23:54:41+00:00
> The annoying part is that this becomes increasingly difficult to impossible. For example, I can't use public transport without my phone anymore, because my ticket is bound to my phone and the provider does not issue paper tickets or smartcards anymore.

What do seniors use?

> Less severe but equally frustrating, many restaurants choose to use QR codes for menus rather than printing them onto a sheet of paper or writing them to the wall.

Ask front of house for a menu.
by rramadass | 2026-01-04 23:54:46+00:00
1) Consciously clear your mind (i.e. "abandon" everything mentally), get up and walk (pace the room/corridor etc.). No stimulus to any of the senses and no use of memories. Calms your mind and gets your circulatory systems going.

2) Sit quietly, completely relaxed, spine straight (consciously against the back of the chair), tip of tongue in touch with upper palate, close your eyes, abandon everything mentally and try to focus at a point just in front of the middle of the eyebrows. If you get the focal length right you will feel a sensation in your body starting with the dilation of blood vessels in the head and foot.

Both are very refreshing to Mind/Body but the second is especially powerful (even better when done lying on your back since you can relax even more completely) when you get the physiological trick right.
by chrysoprace | 2026-01-04 23:55:06+00:00
I think it just depends on the person or the type of project. If I'm learning something or building a hobby project, I'll usually just use an autocomplete agent and leave Claude Code at work. On the other hand, if I want to build something that I actually need, I may lean on AI assistants more because I'm more interested in the end product. There are certain tasks as well that I just don't need to do by hand, like typing an existing SQL schema into an ORM's DSL.
by akerl_ | 2026-01-04 23:55:42+00:00
A protocol that doesn’t enforce security and relies on clients to choose to implement it is a broken protocol, from a security standpoint.

Even if secure email clients exist that always make right choices, because you can’t know what client all your recipients are using, all it takes is one person with a “bad” client (which, keep in mind, is a client that accurately implements the protocol but doesn’t enforce additional security rules on top) to ruin things.