MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NonZeroSumJames | 2026-01-05 01:41:32+00:00
OP here: I'm not sure I advocate for "rewarding pointless, Sisyphean tasks", I even identify as a Utilitarian within the post. Effortocracy points to effort as a good predictor of future capabilities (when selecting from candidates for college acceptances or jobs). If person A and B have both achieved the same results, but person B has done so in the face of a much more difficult situation than person A, this is a good predictor that person B is likely to outperform person A in future. You can imagine this as a two lines on a graph: A beginning at 10 and B beginning at 5, at some point of time in the future when different levels of linear development lands both at 15, this means person B has been consistently improving at twice the rate of person A, which is likely to continue.

The same is true of moral character, which as the post points out is a better predictor of future behaviour than an absolute measure of prior contribution.

But the main takeaway is not how we assess people in the world as it is, but how do we set up the world in a way where everyone's efforts lead to their optimal potential merit, which is incentivised by rewarding effort at each step. Part of effort is also thinking about the effectiveness of your efforts, but also many efforts might be seen as pointless and futile until they are not, scientists who contributed to the Covid vaccine had been doing seemingly pointless work for decades until it finally became relevant to MRNA vaccines.

And on the other hand, it is entirely possible to put fairly low effort into profitable ventures that are detrimental to society—porn, alcohol, sugary foods and get rewarded for it. An effortocracy would seek to tweak the incentives differently.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2026-01-05 01:42:37+00:00
Yep. On a keyboard with 8 thumb cluster keys per side, and custom 35g switches to lower the force needed to actuate, that helped a lot, but still not enough to be pain-free. Unfortunately once the damage is done on certain joints you can only do so much short of not using those fingers at all. 30 years of hammering keys pretty hard eventually catch up to you.
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-05 01:42:38+00:00
To put this in perspective: KDE is in this situation Qt, they were lucky to negotiate a good contract to keep Qt licensed to KDE favorably, and most importantly, open source on their terms.

Without that deal, KDE would be at Qt's behest as they changed licensing, pricing, etc over time.

Getting into that situation again with Microsoft as a non-profit would be foolish.
by eth0up | 2026-01-05 01:42:54+00:00
"Is anyone else going through the same?"

Not even remotely close, but I'm certainly not thriving in any identifiable way. I'm just leaving a comment in hope that things improve. I ain't there (UK) no more, but if I werzle, I'd say:

Best wishes from Pill.

Good luck and keep pushing! There's something out there, for sure.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-05 01:42:58+00:00
14 fhd is 157 ppi
24 4k is 184 ppi

This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one.

If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal.

>So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.

This is because it's scrolling a fixed number of lines which occupy more space at 300% zoom notably this applies pretty much only to people running high DPI screens at 100% because if one zoomed to 300% otherwise the letter T would be the size of the last joint on your thumb and legally blind folks could read it. It doesn't apply to setting the scale factor to 200% nor the setting for Firefox's internal scale factor which is independent from the desktop supports fractional scaling in 0.05 steps and can be configured in about:config

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx
by cedws | 2026-01-05 01:43:43+00:00
I’m less positive about GitOps. GitOps is a lie. I’ve never seen software that actually manages to adhere to the ‘repo is the state’ principle. Inevitably you push something, it doesn’t work, now you have to do something out of band or revert to get it working again. Sometimes you revert and it’s still not fixed…

Looking at you Argo CD.
by nomilk | 2026-01-05 01:43:48+00:00
He did not want nor opt in to OneDrive. One day, 20 years of his files appeared on OneDrive. He was annoyed that Microsoft had uploaded his files into the cloud without his permission. He did not want his files in OneDrive so he went into OneDrive and deleted them. Doing so removed his files from OneDrive, but, to his despair, also deleted the files from his computer (so he lost 20 years of work, files, personal records etc).

He writes books for a living so presumably his files are of some importance to him. His rage is quite palpable (from the second tweet in the thread):

> Whoever designed and pushed this literally deserves pain in their life. I cannot imagine how much fucking misery and distress they brought into the world. If you are out there, fuck you. Personally, one human to another, fuck you. If I could physically hurt you, I would.

Keep in mind this is coming from an extremely measured, empathetic and thoughtful individual; not someone quick to anger or likely to rant on social media.
by avadodin | 2026-01-05 01:44:45+00:00
Pigs –being omnivorous– can acquire parasites that are harmful to humans at a higher rate than herbivorous ungulates.

That was as true 1000 years ago as it is today.

Cooking and salting the meat both greatly reduce incidence.

It is possible that cultures which avoided pork altogether lacked adaptations against the parasites at the genetic level or simply that somebody among them noticed the relationship with illness whilst missing the link with undercooked meat.
by dent9 | 2026-01-05 01:44:58+00:00
its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times

I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily.
by tison | 2026-01-05 01:45:24+00:00
I think they are almost compatible.

`thiserror` helps you define the error type. That error type can then be used with `anyhow` or `exn`. Actually, we have been using thiserror + exn for a long time, and it works well. While later we realize that `struct ModuleError(String)` can easily implement Error without thiserror, we remove thiserror dependency for conciseness.

`exn` can use `anyhow::Error` as its inner Error. However, one may use `Exn::as_error` to retrieve the outermost error layer to populate anyhow.

I ever consider `impl std::error::Error` for `exn::Exn,` but it would lose some information, especially if the error has multiple children.

`error-stack` did that at the cost of no more source:

* https://docs.rs/error-stack/0.6.0/src/error_stack/report.rs....

* https://docs.rs/error-stack/0.6.0/src/error_stack/error.rs.h...
by skybrian | 2026-01-05 01:46:03+00:00
An alternative might be to start up a VM on exe.dev. Supposedly, mobile access works out of the box [1].

I've not tried that myself since I've only been using it from my laptop, but I do prefer chatting with their coding agent in a browser tab to using Claude Code in a terminal window.

[1] https://commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-time-software/
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-05 01:46:11+00:00
Are you familiar with Cambridge Analytica? After a well-known 2018 scandal, we've decided as a society that we don't want social media platforms to allow this kind of large-scale extraction of other people's information. I'm sure you mean well, but you shouldn't build this list and Linkedin is right to prevent you from doing it.
by epistasis | 2026-01-05 01:46:56+00:00
A cafe near my specializes in pu-erh tea, and has a strict 'no electronic devices' policy. Very conducive to that sort of sitting challenge, or meditative practices in general.

When feeling too busy, I always make time to go to a sit at my local Vipassana center, spending an hour sitting actually frees up so much more time in my life that it's well worth it. Gandhi definitely had it right when he said "I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one"
by Ukv | 2026-01-05 01:47:05+00:00
> This has been debunked.

What in particular has been debunked, and by what?

> If it was co-opted, then why [...]

I wouldn't say it was "co-opted" - as far as I'm aware it originated as and still mostly is an alt-right slogan.

> [...] then why did 49% of blacks take a neutral to supportive view of the phrase in the poll? Explain that.

Those unaware of the statement's usage, and those who choose to interpret the poll question as asking only about the statement's direct literal meaning, would likely answer supportive of the statement.

A better-designed poll could separate out those two issues, asking about both the statement's literal meaning and what it implies, but instead it's kind of mushed together dependant on how the respondent chose to interpret the question.
by caminante | 2026-01-05 01:47:51+00:00
You brought up POOR, white Appalachia. Therefore, controlling for wealth is reasonable. Other factors are presumably controlled for too.

If you want to bring up generational trauma, then it sounds to me like you're making the argument to leave a neighborhood based on skin color. Yet, I don't know how to reconcile that with your criteria that racism is about intent regardless of risk.
by accelbred | 2026-01-05 01:48:02+00:00
The code I have in C is often code that does't fit in Rusts safety model. Dealing with ffi is annoying because slices have no defined layout. `dyn` is limited compared to what I can do with a manual vtable. I have seriously attempted porting my personal stuff to Rust, but theres enough papercuts that I go back to C. I want the parts of Rust I find to be helpful without those parts I don't.
by nis0s | 2026-01-05 01:48:32+00:00
I just worry about people abusing the term moral injury in the same way that they abuse other terms related to mental health issues, like trauma or PTSD.

For clarity, this is a reasonable checklist for putting traumatic experiences in context https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/assessment/te-measures/...

Or this one for adverse life events, https://sparqtools.org/mobility-measure/adverse-childhood-ex...

Everyone is different in how they cope, but that doesn’t invalidate the need to have useful measures to contextualize difficult experiences.
by maximinus_thrax | 2026-01-05 01:49:16+00:00
> The top people are all who kissed each others ass and looked out only for their cohort (e.g. people who were in same positions as them in early 2013). So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.

After more than 20 years in big tech, I agree, this is basically it. Your work can only get you so far. If it makes you feel any better, you can reframe politics as 'people systems' and work on optimizing the relationships in the system. Or whatever. But the gist of it is to find a powerful group and try to become a member of that group.
by godelski | 2026-01-05 01:49:38+00:00
> That's so meta it applies to everything though.

Fair... but I think you're also over generalizing.

Think about how these models are trained. They are initially trained as text completion machines, right? Then to turn them to chatbots we optimize for human preferential output, given that there is no mathematical metric for "output in the form of a conversation that's natural for humans".

The whole point of LLMs is to follow your instructions. That's how they're trained. An LLM will never laugh at your question, ignore it, or any thing that humans may naturally do unless they are explicitly trained for that response (e.g. safety[0])

So that's where the generalization of the more meta comment breaks down. Humans learning to converse aren't optimizing for for the preference of the person they're talking to. They don't just follow orders, and if we do we call them things like robots or NPCs.

I go to a business advisor because of their expertise and because I have trust in them that they aren't going to butter me up. But if I go to buy a used car that salesman is going to try to get me. The way they do that may in fact be to make me think they aren't buttering me up.

Are they being sycophantic? Possibly. There are "yes men". But generally I'd say no. Sycophancy is on the extreme end, despite many of its features being common and normal. The LLM is trained to be a "yes man" and will always be a "yes man".

tldr:

Denpok from Silicon Valley is a sycophant and his sycophancy leads to him feigning non-sycophancy in this scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeEpbtHDPw

[0] This is also why jailbreaking is not that complicated. Safety mechanisms are more like patches and they're in an unsteady equilibrium. They are explicitly trained to be sycophantic.
by NonZeroSumJames | 2026-01-05 01:49:47+00:00
Some of us would be advocating for this, but at present there are many who refer to taxes as theft because they take money from wealthy "deserving" people and give it to poor "undeserving" people.

If we took the moral value away from meritocracy-as-indicated-by-wealth as it is, not giving it the bait-and-switch moral weight of a "well-directed efforts" Effortocracy, it would be less of an uphill political battle to level the playing field for those with great potential to contribute to society but who are currently locked out by poverty or other accidents of birth.
by andretti1977 | 2026-01-05 01:50:14+00:00
You misread my comment: when I referred to mobster I was talking about the US “liberating” other countries and not to NATO.

So this is the response to your question.

Anyhow NATO is still under US great influence so in a way or another is acting as an extension of US.

There is nothing bad in joining a coalition but please don’t tell me NATO is not acting as a branch of US when exercising US influence.

Now go back to the point: US liberated Venezuela, yes for sure and it didn’t do for oil or other political interests and it won’t force it’s interests upon those of Venezuelans nor it will put people in command that are neutral and are not puppets in the hands of the US…come on how can you believe the bullshit of war to export democracy and freedom, how?
by retrac | 2026-01-05 01:50:25+00:00
You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.

eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.

Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."

Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.

Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.

But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.

To the mind not natural Yoda's speech is.
by Lucasoato | 2026-01-05 01:50:52+00:00
> For those who had friends in high school—and I'm not being glib here, this is a genuine demographic distinction—40k is a game where two or more players invest roughly $1,000 to build an army of small plastic figures. You then trim excess plastic with a craft knife (cutting yourself at least twice, this is mandatory), prime them, paint them over the course of several months, and then carefully transport them to an LGS (local game shop) in foam-lined cases that cost more than some people's luggage.

> Another fellow dork will then play you on a game board roughly the size of a door, covered in fake terrain that someone spent 40 hours making to look like a bombed-out cathedral. You will both have rulebooks with you containing as many pages as the Bible and roughly as open to interpretation. Wars have been started over less contentious texts.
Scorg Marketplace – Player-to-Player Trading for Star Citizen Items
by legitcoders | 2026-01-05 01:50:55+00:00
We just launched a marketplace for Star Citizen players to buy and sell in-game items (components, weapons, etc.) with aUEC pricing.

The marketplace is part of SCORG (https://scorg.org), a platform for Star Citizen organization management. We built it because existing marketplaces lacked proper component specifications and modern UX.

Live at: https://scorg.org/marketplace

Would love feedback from the community, especially on the specification system and any features you'd find useful for trading in-game items.
by shmeeed | 2026-01-05 01:51:01+00:00
Whoa. At around 21:30 he mentions Raph Koster. I'm 99.9% sure I read that name for the first time in my life... yesterday over at the Digital Antiquarian's blog in a story of how Ultima Online came to be.

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon sure is creepy like that.
by williamcotton | 2026-01-05 01:51:17+00:00
> if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software

If software becomes cheaper to make it amortizes at a higher rate, ie, it becomes less valuable at a faster clip. This means more ephemeral software with a shorter shelf-life. What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable?

I’ve been using Photoshop since the 90s and without having watched the features expand over the years I don’t think I would find the tool useful for someone without a lot of experience.

This being said, short-lived and highly targeted, less feature-full software for image creation and manipulation catered to the individual and specific to an immediate task seems advantageous.

Dynamism applied not to the code but to the products themselves.

Or something like that.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2026-01-05 01:51:20+00:00
Yeah, polls are limited in a variety of ways. The election results at least represent when someone took some amount of effort to vote.

2024 eligible voters: 244,666,890

2024 ballots cast: 156,766,239. 64% of eligible voters cast a vote

Trump votes: 77,284,118. 49.2% of votes cast, 31.6% of eligible voters

Harris votes: 74,999,166. 47.8% of votes cast, 30.6% of eligible voters

Trump got 1% more of the eligible voting population to go through the effort of casting a vote. That's not nothing, and it put him in office, but it's not a landslide that grants him an unquestionable public mandate.
by dent9 | 2026-01-05 01:51:24+00:00
> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?

This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.

So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.
by epistasis | 2026-01-05 01:51:26+00:00
I was felt that for much of my life. Time without stimulation was, if not scary, at least a bit panic inducing. Learning to sit without stimulation, without any distractions from my worries, led to being able to realize that "hey, I'm OK, I don't even need those worries." Which led to handling the underlying pressures and stresses MUCH better, without panic, without stress, with a full clear mind. I could apply my full intellect to things that before were hard to deal with. It felt like a super power when I first started practicing sitting.
by kerpal | 2026-01-05 01:51:45+00:00
Good screw them. They put a god damn button on the keyboard for their crap AI. Everyone just uses the smartest AI and has zero loyalty to your garbage AI. Look how quickly Meta abandoned open-source AI when they got behind.

Windows 11 is bloated, loaded with telemetry, won't stop nagging you about OneDrive and Office365 and now mandates sign-in with a Microsoft account while forcing 400+ million devices to not have security updates.

I'm willing to bet most of Microsoft's engineers are using Claude, not their own garbage.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-05 01:51:55+00:00
Pretty much the same age, generation and story. I also remember Traveller and Car Wars, and when 40K was first released as Rogue Trader (and when GW said that they were keeping plastic mini prices comparable to lead minis because the injection moulding equipment was really expensive, but once they'd paid that off they'd be reducing the price of plastic minis dramatically. hahahhahahhahhahah).

I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.

If you remember the first generation of plastic gobbos and dwarves in the Warhammer (not 40K) beginner box released back in the early 90's, where they obviously had two-part moulds and there were no underhangs anywhere on the models, then my FDM versions were more shit than those.

The author is spot-on about the hobby, and about the business model, and about 3D printing's place in it.

But have a go, it's a fun challenge for a 3D printer enthusiast :)
by fashton28 | 2026-01-05 01:52:01+00:00
Hey everyone! To kick off the new year, I wanted to build something that would genuinely improve my organization, so I decided to create a terminal-based task manager. Now that it’s finished, I can honestly say it’s my dream setup. It supports multiple workspaces and includes Vim motions, and I figured it’d be fun to let others try it out too. Feel free to check out the GitHub repo below
Ask HN: Have you been falsely accused of AI-generated content?
by bmaupin | 2026-01-05 01:52:24+00:00
I was accused for the first time of my writing looking AI-generated. I tend to be overly verbose and use a lot of ordered and unordered lists. On top of that I'm used to documentation systems like Confluence with "info" and "note" macros so I'll often sprinkle in a limited set of emoji for emphasis when I'm writing elsewhere.

In this case the accusation was insignificant; it's for a stack exchange answer that could be deleted and my life wouldn't be negatively impacted at all. But now I can't help but wonder for the first time if the AI witch hunt is going to potentially have real consequences for some people. Has anyone experienced this in any meaningful way?
by tison | 2026-01-05 01:52:49+00:00
FWIW, here is a general discussion about error handling in Rust and my comment to compare it with Go's/Java's flavor: https://github.com/apache/datasketches-rust/issues/27#issuec...

That said, I can live with "if err != nil", but every type has a zero value is quite a headache to handle: you would fight with nil, typed nil, and zero value.

For example, you need something like:

type NullString struct {
String string
Valid bool // Valid is true if String is not NULL
}

.. to handle a nullable value while `Valid = false && String = something` is by defined invalid but .. quite hard to explain. (Go has no sum type in this aspect)