MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jodrellblank | 2026-01-30 03:26:32+00:00
> "calling for bootstraps to solve depression et al. is wild to see. So many anecdotes and grand statements saying that it’s all nonsense."

That's not what I was doing in my other comments that you replied to. If you have a knot, and imagine all the possible things you can do with your hands and body and tools in the universe and notice that to a first approximation none of them will untie the knot. Not hitting it with a spoon, not stroking your chin, not jazz hands, way more than 99.999% of possible movements will not untie it. Some of the things which won't work also include pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, "not being weak", "toughing it out". "just get over it". All those are no more effective than any other of the 99.999...% of things which won't work.

The things which will work are in a tiny space of things involving fingernails, needles, knot-eye-hand-feedback-loop and some understanding of rope and tangles. Or fire.

Just because fire will have a useful effect doesn't mean the knot is caused by an imbalance of fire and so you should keep burning your fingers for the rest of your life as "the cure" for knots. The way to untangle a knot is to develop the focused, pointed, targeted skills of untangling knots. And (I argue) the way to untangle negative thoughts is not by powering through them, toughing them out, positive mental attitude, fortitude, being strong, manifestation, dreaming big, just getting over it, or crowbarring your mood up with sledgehammer drugs to an 80-billion neuron network for the rest of your life, or anything else of the millions of other concepts one could do or imagine doing - except the focused, pointed, feedback-loop skills of untangling negative thoughts wielded by a particularly good therapist or by yourself.

Whether you develop such a thing by therapy training, meditation, prayer, Stoicism, biofeedback systems, luck, intuition... I suspect there are multiple ways which are effective that can be developed through multiple approaches, but not many. And "I tried thinking my bad thoughts away and it didn't work so it must be genetic" is not one of them.
by keeda | 2026-01-30 03:26:34+00:00
Interestingly, this observation holds even when you scale AI use up from individuals to organizations, only at that level it amplifies your organization's overal development trajectory. The DORA 2025 and the DX developer survey reports find that teams with strong quality control practices enjoy higher velocity, whereas teams with weak or no processes suffer elevated issues and outages.

It makes sense considering that these practices could be thought of as "institutionalized skills."
by femto | 2026-01-30 03:26:56+00:00
The performance of a human is inherently limited by biology, and the road rules are written with this in mind. Machines don't have this inherent limitation, so the rules for machines should be much stronger.

I think there is an argument for incentivising the technology to be pushed to its absolute limits by making the machine 100% liable. It's not to say the accident rate has to be zero in practice, but it has to be so low that any remaining accidents can be economically covered by insurance.
by al_borland | 2026-01-30 03:27:02+00:00
> I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing

Why? What is so important about these things that you felt the need to do this after getting rid of them?

Move from push to pull everywhere you can. Don't sign up for email notifications from a website, subscribe to their RSS feed, if you really want to follow the site. Then you choose when you get those updates.

When a website emails me marketing material, I find it offensive. I don't care if it's a good deal, I don't want it on principle. You need to draw a hard line and have boundaries.

What needs an actual notification that will interrupt you, vs just being in an inbox that you can look at when you want?

I turned text notifications off from one of my best friends, because he never sends me anything meaningful that needs immediate response. I just look at whatever he sent when I'm bored. Be ruthless.

Each time a notification pops up, ask yourself if it's more important than your friend's birthday, because that noise is what caused you to miss the notification you cared about.
by KomoD | 2026-01-30 03:27:26+00:00
> and have it dump to s3 so I can paste around links to screenshots everywhere for work.

I wanted something like this too but I modified Flameshot so I don't need a bash script in-between.

Flameshot already has a feature to upload to Imgur so I modified that and also added some small things (like randomized file names, some new config options).
by jjk166 | 2026-01-30 03:28:03+00:00
If nothing else, it's not the only hail mary you could potentially go out on. Would you give up the potential of being part of a trial for a drug that has actually done the work and demonstrated real promise in various pre-trial tests just to take a gamble on this alternative which hasn't even had the initial test replicated yet?

Further there is the potential for a false negative. If they don't understand enough about how the drug would work in humans, they may trial inappropriate doses or delivery methods. If those don't help or make things worse, it could be mistaken for the drug being ineffective and lead to the whole line of inquiry being abandoned. Then not only do you die, but countless others are potentially harmed by an effective version not being developed.

Finally, cancer treatments aren't just for the terminal. Drugs which primarily help during the early stages by necessity need to be trialed on people who still have a chance, maybe even a decent one, going with other, well established treatment options.
by jjav | 2026-01-30 03:28:06+00:00
> I've read studies saying that most drivers don't brake at max effort, even to avoid a collision.

Ha! It is unbelievable how difficult it is to make someone brake hard. You'd think it's the easiest thing possible in the age of ABS - just press hard as you can.

I have a lot of experience on this, I used to teach car control both to teens and adults. One of the frequent exercises was seemingly very simple: Drive at Xmph until this spot, then brake at maximum power.

The vast majority of people can't do it on the first or second try, they'll just meekly press on the brake like they're coasting to a stop. After more coaching that hard means hard, they start to get it, but it takes many many tries.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-30 03:29:09+00:00
We can nitpick terminology all day but at the end of the day for you to assert that this is purely about perspective is patently absurd and I’m not going to let you distract from that fact. There are medical realities that impact people. There are external factors. There’s more to depression then recalibrating “how bad things actually are.”
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-30 03:30:09+00:00
If everybody doesn't participate equally in the general strike, then it's basically burning down your own neighborhood to protest something that happened on the other side of town.

If everybody does participate, then it amounts to burning down the whole city.

It's such a dumb idea that it's almost indistinguishable from an attempt at subversion by the actual parties/powers being protested. Announcing such an effort 3 days ahead of time is just icing on the proverbial cake.
by ProAm | 2026-01-30 03:30:37+00:00
Still relies on an actual driver.

“The event occurred when the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under six mph before contact was made,” a statement from Waymo explains.
by marssaxman | 2026-01-30 03:31:25+00:00
Where I live, wash/dry/fold service costs ~$3/lb including pickup & delivery, so depending on how many clothes you wear in a week you'd be looking at 5-10 years before that robot even starts to pay for itself - without even accounting for the cost of the laundry machines it'll need to use or the water and power to run them. Laundry machines are expected to last 10-15 years; will the robot last so long?
by siavosh | 2026-01-30 03:32:35+00:00
It’s interesting—playing devil’s advocate on the purse example, I’m not sure I’d actually call that meaningful. It’s certainly a kind and thoughtful gift, but meaningful?

What if meaning isn’t only about the relationship or the recipient’s satisfaction, but also about what the gift costs the giver in terms of personal value? In the yard-sale case, the purse may be rare to the mom, but it’s essentially cheap and disposable to the giver. Nothing important was surrendered.

By contrast, giving something you personally prize—or investing yourself in a way that reflects what you value—seems to carry a different kind of meaning. I’m not claiming effort alone creates meaning, but that the giver’s valuation of what’s given might be a missing dimension in this framework
by zdc1 | 2026-01-30 03:32:59+00:00
And for better or worse it feels like the errors are being "pushed down" into smaller, more subtle spaces.

I asked ChatGPT a question about a made up character in a made up work and it came back with "I don’t actually have a reliable answer for that". Perfect.

On the other hand, I can ask it about varnishing a piece of wood and it will give a lovely table with options, tradeoffs, and Good/Ok/Bad ratings for each option, except the ratings can be a little off the mark. Same thing when asking what thickness cable is required to carry 15A in AU electrical work. Depending on the journey and line of questioning, you would either get 2.5mm^2 or 4mm^2.

Not wrong enough to kill someone, but wrong enough that you're forced to use it as a research tool rather than a trusted expert/guru.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-30 03:33:05+00:00
Oh man. I remember this time several years ago when my feudal lord was put in charge of this desert planet. Horrible place. Dry. Hot. Big local worm fauna that would bite you in half. The locals were a bit stand-offish, but solid in a fight and somewhat friendly once you got to know them. The local imperial rep kept telling me how few of the locals lived in the outer desert. Not many. Just a few.

For reasons I can't remember, I decided to go on a camping trip out in the deep desert. I had made friends with some of the locals and I guess I figured it would be a good way to get to know the local culture.

I met a few of the townies out on the desert rocks. And then a few more. Eventually I realized I had met a lot more. There were A LOT more locals than the imperial rep was telling people.

A lot of population numbers are fake. Amen, brother.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-30 03:34:09+00:00
It's insane that you can argue this in a world where facebook continues to be state of the art (and it's not even close) on semantic segmentation. Those SAM models they produce deliver more value than a hypothetical competitive llama5 model coming out tomorrow.

I'm banning my wife from ever buying any Alexander Wang clothing, because his leadership is so poor in comparison that he's going to also devalue the name-collision fashion brand that he shares a name with. That's how bad his leadership is going to be in comparison to Yann. Scale AI was only successful for the same reason Langchain was. Easy to be a big fish in a pond with no other fishes.
by kjellsbells | 2026-01-30 03:35:18+00:00
No. I think it's easy to underestimate what an incredible superpower native English fluency is, and the lengths that immigrants will go to ensure that their children are fluent in it. That alone stops monolingual enclaves persisting.

The net (and the UK has decades of experience in this, eg with the South Asian immigrants that arrived in the 1950s-1970s) is that while the first generation may only get to decent levels of English, their children are bilingual or monolingual in English, not monolingual in their ancestral tongue.

Occasionally you will get someone with a political axe to grind who visits an area with a lot of immigrants, doesnt hear a lot of English, and posits that there are ethnic monolingual enclaves where they cannot go. I think this is more likely to be a failure of understanding.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-30 03:35:39+00:00
> own separate implementation of DirectWrite for some god forsaken reason.

That reason I sort of understand: The Cold War that DirectX can't be bothered to support WinRT directly is fascinating from outside, and also just really, really stupid. DirectX is ancient COM. WinRT is essentially modern COM 3.0. But if DirectX supported WinRT's version of COM then "Oh No, those idiot and dirty C# and JS developers could use it directly" and where would the games industry be without excuses to force college graduates to use only the one true C++ like Stroustrup intended? /facepalm

For a library called DirectX they seem to really love being IndirectX. Someone in the Windows Division should have forced them onto the right path sooner, but Windows is too busy being in either the Azure or AI divisions these days to actually care about being a consistent OS and DirectX slipped into being protected by Xbox in ways that are backwards to how things were meant to work. (Xbox was supposed to be the way to encourage more software developed with DirectX not to protect more software developers from using DirectX directly.) That xkcd comic of Microsoft being a bunch of disconnected orgs in a Mexican standoff seems to apply here (directly).
by anyfoo | 2026-01-30 03:36:03+00:00
Huh? 1 frame tricks are the top shelf of speedrunning moves, definitely breaking how the games are designed to be played by orders of magnitudes.

Speedrunners use 1 frame tricks in more modern games as well. It is considered extremely hard even amongst the already insane speedrunning community, no matter whether the game is SMB, Odyssey, or anything recent.
by lyu07282 | 2026-01-30 03:36:49+00:00
So you read this:

> the cops showed up, held the guys

> they showed them their letter that they were authorized

> the cops called the references on the letter

> Then the Sheriff showed up and insisted they be arrested...

and your response is:

> Per the legal system, arrested is probably safe course of action until they could verify the authenticity of the letter.

?
by xelxebar | 2026-01-30 03:37:35+00:00
The snapshot system in gefs is really quite nice.

By default, you get snapshots every minute for the last hour, every hour for the last day, and every day into perpetuity. This is configurable. You can set as many cadences as you wish, with the ability to configure their frequency and lifetimes.

Actually, snapshots are like btrfs volumes in many ways, meaning they can be mounted, read from, and written to as desired. This allows the filesystem root to just be another snapshot with a default backup cadence as described above.

The gefs(4) manpage [0] has more info for those interested. It's a short and sweet read. The source [1], is under 12k lines of well-written code, comments and whitespace included. The author is also extremely responsive to issues and a pleasure to talk shop with.

Anyway, given the parsimony of the OS and the small community size, I find 9front to be a really nice incubator for playing around with new ideas.

[0]:https://man.9front.org/4/gefs
[1]:https://git.9front.org/plan9front/9front/front/sys/src/cmd/g...
by someothherguyy | 2026-01-30 03:37:49+00:00
> I could cry with joy because I could finally understand emotionally why people like the Christmas season.

SSRIs are known to induce a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_affective_state

I seriously messed up my life early on by not being able to recognize the difference between being happy and manic.

One of those manic symptoms was often feeling like crying out of joy, and another was feeling way more cognitively capable that I was.
by zabzonk | 2026-01-30 03:38:04+00:00
I wrote a lot of F77 code way back when, including an 8080 simulator similar to that written by Gates and Allen used to build their BASIC for Altair. I don't know what language they wrote theirs in, but mine was pretty readable, just a bit late. And it was very portable - Dec10, VAX, IBM VM/CMS with almost no changes.

I think F77 was a pretty well designed language, given the legacy stuff it had to support.
by whalesalad | 2026-01-30 03:38:42+00:00
my phone is on silent 24x7. it never makes a sound, ever. the only notifications I get are for email, slack dm's, bad weather, security camera, sms. no other app gets notif permissions.

i run adguard home (pihole, etc works too) for network-wide adblocking at the dns layer. this makes the internet tolerable ... without adblocking it's truly a heinous place.

on ios I use 'hush' extension to try and supress cookie popups etc but tbh I am not sure if it works that well, or maybe it is misconfigured.

these in-page nuisances are next on my list for sure: i don't ever want to see a "login with google?" context menu appear with all my listed accounts in the upper right. i never want to see another cookie popup, especially the ones that look like a raid configuration wizard from 2007 with 10 checkboxes and half the settings below the fold. in the browser you can completely disable the ability for a website to ask to send you notifications.

honestly the goal just needs to be a conscious effort to defend your attention. eliminate everything that is not serving you in that regard. go overboard, worst case you need to re-integrate some things you miss or need. but i genuinely think the #1 thing in the world right now to defend is attention and distraction.
by bix6 | 2026-01-30 03:38:48+00:00
Wow almost no tool recs :/

I’m planning to demo superhuman for email but I really don’t want another sub so hopefully it’s not worth it.

I’ve got nothing for texts.

Phone makes unknowns say why they’re calling so I can pickup non spam.

Only core apps stay downloaded and very few get notification ability.

There’s some extension for your PS on cookies, think I saw it here the other day and forgot about it. Maybe this? I haven’t tried it though: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdj...
by leftouterjoins | 2026-01-30 03:38:58+00:00
I have been doing full stack web dev since 2003 and iOS apps since 2008. I do not write code anymore. At my day job I don't think I get more done over time because the code is rarely ever the bottleneck at that place. I do have more time to experiment and try things and say yes more to asks from colleagues.

Outside of work, I have just launched an iOS app I've wanted to build but has been outside my current skillset. I was able to "vibecode" this app in about 4-5 months.

The application has a tiny bit of moat because it involves a ML model (also vibecoded) trained on my own data set.

When I say vibecoded, I never reviewed or read code in detail. I really only ever saw snippets claude code shows here and there. I asked a lot of questions, much more than asking it to make changes. I only gave it high-level architectural guidance like "use MVVC", etc. I did a lot of manual testing and reading logs.

I won't name the app out of fear of shilling my vibeslop, or whatever, check my profile for the domain in an email address if you want to know more.
by directevolve | 2026-01-30 03:40:19+00:00
Will the modal developer of 2030 be much like a dev today?

Writing software was a craft. You learned to take a problem and turn it into precise, reliable rules in a special syntax.

If AI takes off, we'll see a new field emerging of AI-oriented architecture and project management. The skills will be different.

How do you deploy a massive compute budget effectively to steer software design when agents are writing the code and you're the only one responsible for the entire project because the company fired all the other engineers (or never hired them) to spend the money on AI instead?

Are there ways of factoring a software project that mitigate the problems of AI? For example, since AI has a hard time in high-context, novel situations but can crank out massive volumes of code almost for free, can you afford to spend more time factoring the project into low-context, heavily documented components that the AI can stitch together easily?

How do you get sufficient reliability in the critical components?

How do you manage a software project when no human understands the code base?

How do you insure and mitigate the risks of AI-designed products? Can you use insurance and lower prices if AI-designed software is riskier? Can we quantify and put a dollar value on the risk of AI-designed software compared to human-designed?

What would be the most useful tools for making large AI-generated codebases inspectable?

When I think about these questions, a lot of them sound like things an manager or analyst might do. They don't sound like the "craft of code." Even if 1 developer in 2030 can do the work of 10 today, that doesn't mean the typical dev today is going to turn into that 10x engineer. It might just be a very different skillset.
by jjpones | 2026-01-30 03:41:01+00:00
When college taught you x,y,z best practices I take it they also defended them with the reasons why right? Why not to cross layers, why x pattern works for y problem. It's good to have confidence in those patterns, especially if you understand them and you must take ownership of your opinion of them. But now other people are going to have their own opinions and you're going to need to parse why they came to those conclusions and a lot of it will boil down to "this was how it was done before and it worked." At this point you might not have the power to override their decisions without making things difficult for you, so just try to follow suit.

For now you need to build and ship whatever lets you keep your job and income going, but keep studying to understand how things should be despite what work will have you do. Keep deepening your understanding of SWE and form opinions on them for when its your turn to make decisions.
by marssaxman | 2026-01-30 03:42:35+00:00
It doesn't matter what most Americans want because most urban land is zoned in such a way that single-family houses are all that is legal to build. The extremely high prices of housing units in central urban areas suggest that demand for dense cities, public transit, and shared spaces greatly exceeds the supply, which is artificially restricted.

Here in Seattle, you can basically see the zoning boundaries as you drive around the city, because development always goes right up to the edge, as hard as it can. Without the arbitrary limits imposed by the zoning code, there would be a whole lot more condos built (and lived in), and those edges would be a lot softer.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-30 03:42:35+00:00
More context is that he was promoted under Noem in her old job too, just before the Presidential election.

> On Tuesday, Gov. Kristi Noem announced Gottumukkala's appointment as CIO. In a statement, she said he will prioritize the state’s citizens, their data and government service delivery.

https://www.govtech.com/workforce/south-dakota-governor-appo...
by mathisfun123 | 2026-01-30 03:44:24+00:00
> Big tech has decided on Rust for future infrastructure projects. C++ will get QoL improvements…

when people say this do they have like any perspective? there are probably more cpp projects started in one week (in big tech) than rust projects in a whole year. case in point: at my FAANG we have probably like O(10) rust projects and hundreds of cpp projects.