MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kergonath | 2026-02-05 23:19:01+00:00
I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing exactly the same thing right now.

Amusingly, when he writes

> Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.

I wonder what he’d think of the Stasi, which had a network of informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.

Also, when he wrote

> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.

Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don’t know when someone is looking was chilling. I’m not sure that would be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.

And, finally:

> George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in
a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.

Science fiction does not forecast. FFS. Even him surely could not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute totalitarian government with just enough technology to be dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on 1984 for not being sciencey enough.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-05 23:19:22+00:00
In the 1300s you could be broke but if you had the blue blood you still had power.

People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.

There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
by jhbadger | 2026-02-05 23:19:28+00:00
But that "pragmatism" as you put it is exactly my point. A true ideologue would have realized the revolutionaries in Kronstadt had created a system more in line with the ideals of the revolution than what he had created and woouldn't have set the army out to destroy them. nor would he have introduced the NEP (basically a limited re-introduction of capitalism to save the faltering Soviet economy). In the end, the important thing to Lenin was Lenin -- not any ideology.
by sksisksbbs | 2026-02-05 23:19:34+00:00
> The bottle neck has gone from writing code to reading code.

This has always been the bottleneck. Reviewing code is much harder and gets worse results than writing it, which is why reviewing AI code is not very efficient. The time required to understand code far outstrips the time to type it.

Most devs don’t do thorough reviews. Check the variable names seem ok, make sure there’s no obvious typos, ask for a comment and call it good. For a trusted teammate this is actually ok and why they’re so valuable! For an AI, it’s a slot machine and trusting it is equivalent to letting your coworkers/users do your job so you can personally move faster.
by meowface | 2026-02-05 23:20:03+00:00
I feel the same, but, also, within like three years this might look very different. Maybe you'll give the full end-to-end goal upfront and it just polls you when it needs clarification or wants to suggest alternatives, and it self-manages cleanly self-delegating.

Or maybe something quite different but where these early era agentic tooling strategies become either unneeded or even actively detrimental.
by benjiro | 2026-02-05 23:20:16+00:00
The problem is that Postgres uses something like 24B overhead per row. That is not a issue with small Tables, but when your having a few billion around, each byte starts to add up fast. Then you a need link tables that explode that number even more, etc ... It really eats a ton of data.

At some point you end up with binary columns and custom encoded values, to save space by reducing row count. Kind of doing away with the benefits of a DB.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-05 23:20:53+00:00
In 2024, the Competition Commission of India had imposed Rs. 213 Crore penalty on Meta, for sharing WhatsApp users' data with its parent company to monetise it through advertisements.

> As Solicitor General Tushar Mehta criticised the “exploitative" policy for sharing user data for commercial purposes, Chief Justice Surya Kant responded: “If you can’t follow our Constitution, then leave India. We won’t allow the privacy of any citizen to be compromised. You can’t play with privacy… we will not allow you to share a single digit of our data". Solicitor General Mehta and counsel for the Competition Commission of India (CCI) said that user data was being commercially exploited, even if encrypted, and that the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act must be considered to protect metadata and ensure user consent, India Today reported.

> As the tech giants claimed informed consent, the SC said that millions of users, including street vendors and rural citizens, cannot understand complex privacy policies ... The court also emphasised that behavioural and commercial exploitation of user data, including targeted advertising based on chat trends, violates users’ rights. The bench took note of instances where users received targeted ads for medicines shortly after private chats with doctors, raising questions about the extent of data monetisation.

Source: https://www.news18.com/india/leave-india-if-you-cant-follow-...
by FarmerPotato | 2026-02-05 23:21:31+00:00
But Flock DOES follow you around, in the sense that you can't really escape being observed by a series of ALPRs on a highway network.

Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.

Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.
by technion | 2026-02-05 23:21:59+00:00
Easy answer here - nearly every LOB app we have uses MSSQL.

I've had engineers want to talk about syncing it to MySQL using some custom plumbing so that they can build a reporting infra around their MySQL stack, but it's just another layer of complexity over having code just use Microsoft's reporting services.

I'll add, having finance people with Excel really like being able to pull data directly from MSSQL, they do not like hearing about a technican's python app.
by zefr-sre | 2026-02-05 23:22:02+00:00
Zefr | Los Angeles, CA (Marina del Rey) | Staff or Principal Site Reliability Engineer | Full-time | On-site 2-3x per week | Staff: $190,000 - $210,000, Principal $210,000 - $235,000

Company

Zefr is the leading global technology company enabling responsible marketing in walled garden social environments. Zefr’s solutions empower brands to manage their content adjacency on scaled platforms such as YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Snap. Through its patented AI technology, Zefr offers brands and agencies more accurate and transparent solutions for social walled gardens.

Role

Staff or Principal Site Reliability Engineer

You

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Zefr, you’ll apply your expertise in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, Observability, and core SRE concepts, to deliver high-quality, reliable, and scalable solutions.

We’re looking for someone to combine their technical expertise with strong leadership and a passion for continuous improvement and innovation. Zefr wants a candidate that champions reliability as a product feature, and can translate complex technical concepts into strategy. This is a role where you'll shape how we build and operate systems at scale.

Tech Stack

Clouds - GCP, AWS

Kubernetes - GKE, EKS

GitOps - ArgoCD, Github Actions

Languages - Python/React/Node.js

Observability - Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry, Chronosphere

Staff: <https://zefr.com/about-us/careers?ashby_jid=bcfa5b44-6623-4e...>

Principal: <https://zefr.com/about-us/careers?ashby_jid=54ecc7d8-6c8b-46...>
by Hizonner | 2026-02-05 23:22:09+00:00
Difficulty: the "populace" is everywhere.

If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.

If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.

And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
by netsharc | 2026-02-05 23:22:25+00:00
I doubt the PDF would be very interesting. There are enough clues in the human-readable parts: it's an invite to a benefit event in New York (filename calls it DBC12) that's scheduled on December 10, 2012, 8pm... Good old-fashioned searching could probably uncover what DBC12 was, although maybe not, it probably wasn't a public event.

The recipient is also named in there...
by epistasis | 2026-02-05 23:22:28+00:00
Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy insecurity from the oil crisis of the time.

We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.

Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought that was mostly a leftist problem.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-05 23:22:35+00:00
This is a social problem. So long as people want to see Orwellian enforcement on their preferred petty issues (examples abound on HN and elsewhere) this type of activity will ping pong around enforcement subjects likely only growing and ratcheting tighter. Until people get so sick of it on the 11/12 issues they don't like, they're willing to give up the dream of Orwellian enforcement on the thing they do care about.
by Amorymeltzer | 2026-02-05 23:23:07+00:00
This reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube series, Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong. They were short little videos where a guy had a toy dinosaur and he would explain why the toy was incorrect. Short, easy to understand, fun, and I learned a lot. Highly recommend to anyone of any age.

Playlist of the original videos: <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaCDmykyjVw_B983AQ2iG...>, there's a channel now <https://www.youtube.com/@YourDinosaursAreWrong> which has newer episodes (can't vouch for, haven't seen) (playlist with old and (some of the) new: <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnpbQOy7TfC179wPmhHZr...>)
by rtpg | 2026-02-05 23:23:21+00:00
> in many cases, sometimes you just want (relative) simplicity, both in terms of complexity and deployment, and should use something like SQLite.

So many times when trying to just go for simplicity with SQLite it takes me like one working day until I run up against enough annoyances to where resolving those is more work than setting up the "set up and forget" postgres instance.

Granted, this is for personal stuff... but "Postgres packaged for low maintenance" is present in a lot of OS package managers! Even for smaller data analysis work SQLite perf leads _loads_ to be desired (once had QGIS struggling with a sqlite DB... pg made everything mostly instant. Indices etc... but stuff I _couldn't easily get with sqlite_)

If SQLite works for you that's great, I do think it's worth it for people to _try_ to do simple pg setups to understand just how painful it is to use pg (for me: not that high)
by everforward | 2026-02-05 23:23:39+00:00
There are absolutely things wrong with that, because React was designed to solve problems that don't exist in a TUI.

React fixes issues with the DOM being too slow to fully re-render the entire webpage every time a piece of state changes. That doesn't apply in a TUI, you can re-render TUIs faster than the monitor can refresh. There's no need to selectively re-render parts of the UI, you can just re-render the entire thing every time something changes without even stressing out the CPU.

It brings in a bunch of complexity that doesn't solve any real issues beyond the devs being more familiar with React than a TUI library.
by goda90 | 2026-02-05 23:23:43+00:00
This really illustrates how important it is to switch to renewable energy. I know it's not an easy task for impoverished communities to get the startup capital to install solar+batteries, especially one in such a politically tumultuous position, but that really is a path to stability for so many people around the world.

A YouTuber known for talking about dishwashers and Christmas lights recently put out a long rant about how ridiculous it is that humanity still leans so much on single use fuels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
by D-Machine | 2026-02-05 23:23:50+00:00
It's been a long time since I looked at this stuff, but I do recall there was at least a bit of research looking at e.g. cross-cultural differences in the factor structure and correlates of Five-Factor Model measurements. From what I remember, and a quick scan of some of the leading abstracts on a quick Google scholar search, the results are as you might expect: there are some similarities and parts that replicate, and other parts that don't [1].

I think when it comes to things like psychopathology though, there is not much research and/or similarity, especially relative to East Asian cultures (where the Western academic perspective is that there is/was generally a taboo on discussing feelings and things in the way we do in the West). The classic (maybe slightly offensive) example I remember here was "Western psychologization vs. Eastern somatization" [2].

The research in these areas is generally pretty poor. Meehl and Smedslund were actually intelligent and philosophically competent, deep thinkers, and so recognized the importance of conceptual analysis and semantics in psychology. Most contemporary social and personality psychology is quite shallow and incompetent by comparison.

Psychopathology research too has these days generally moved away from Meehl's careful taxometric approaches, with the bad consequences that complete mush concepts like "depression" are just accepted as good scientific concepts, despite pretty monstrous issues with their semantics and structure [3].

[1] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=five-...

[2] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=weste...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
by tombert | 2026-02-05 23:23:57+00:00
Sorry, I meant to add more but got distracted and I can't edit now.

I'm in my mid 30's. I'm happy enough where I am now; my biggest issue has historically been focus and apathy more than understanding concepts, much to the frustration of my teachers in high school. I was that frustrating kid who clearly understood the concepts perfectly fine, and was even fairly active during class, but I wouldn't do my homework so the teachers would be forced to give me bad grades.

I obviously don't blame the teachers for this, they're doing what they have to, but I do sometimes think that the system is a bit too one-size-fits-all, even still. I took advanced classes in high school, I got very high ACT scores (36 in English, 34 in math), but I still have always had middling academic performance because the teachers would be stuck giving me crappy grades.

For reasons slightly involving skill but mostly involving luck, I managed to cobble together a successful software career even after dropping out of college the first time around, worked without a degree for almost a decade, and eventually worked as a practicing software engineer at the senior level at BigCos. I have a bachelors now, and even a masters, and some graduate PhD work (though I didn't finish that, too time consuming while working full time), but these all came after I had established a decent career.

I think that being a little clever [1] certainly helped me through this, but what I think helped me more than anything was the fact that a) I had a geeky hobby of learning how to program when I was fourteen or fifteen that never really went away and that I was able to fall back on and b) dropping out in 2012, which just happened to be the year that pretty much everyone got a smartphone and consequently there was a huge demand for programmers and they were willing to overlook a lack of credentials.

My life has turned out fine; not perfect but certainly better than most people on this planet or even this country so it's hardly worth complaining over. I do wish I had taken school more seriously as a teenager because then I would likely be able to have move into a more mathy-theory-based role, which I seem to be unable to do as of right now [2]; it feels like I'm playing a game of catchup, which isn't impossible but it definitely is harder than if I were able to focus on school full time.

Dunno why I decided to dump my life story at you. Just one of those days I guess.

[1] Though as I said in the sibling comment, probably not nearly as clever as the tested IQ suggests.

[2] No matter how many I apply to, it seems. It doesn't help that every researchey role now is for AI/ML theory which is cool but pretty far from my expertise or the kinds of math I've studied or have any expertise on.
by mothballed | 2026-02-05 23:24:33+00:00
Yes of course. But like it or not, people think Holocaust as soon as you say concentration camps, even though the words are far more broad. That's why many of us are hesitant to say it.

There have been other words like this. For instance "negro" just means black but if you say it everyone assumes you are referring to slaves or slave-like individuals or referring to a black person as inferior.
by efreak | 2026-02-05 23:24:38+00:00
Sure, you can change the license, but the old license still applies to the code as it was before you changed it. Assuming you're using a legit open source license the first time around, nothing changes regarding how you can make use of the old code; all they can do is make it harder to find (close the repo) or harder to make use of (squashing/flattening the commits to make it impossible to get the correct historical version), both of which are trivially bypassed by using a third party fork or source release.
by pyrolistical | 2026-02-05 23:24:51+00:00
It decodes to binary pdf and there are only so many valid encodings. So this is how I would solve it.

1. Get an open source pdf decoder

2. Decode bytes up to first ambiguous char

3. See if next bits are valid with an 1, if not it’s an l

4. Might need to backtrack if both 1 and l were valid

By being able to quickly try each char in the middle of the decoding process you cut out the start time. This makes it feasible to test all permutations automatically and linearly
by realityfactchex | 2026-02-05 23:25:26+00:00
>> the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists...can be repeated with users having...years using this version.

> Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up

I would love to see more recent and similarly thoughtful work on the exact same subject. If I find more, I'll try to remember to come back here and comment. Definitely, I am interested in the clearest evidence regarding whether either paradigm is "actually" more usable, and not just the result of some confounding variable(s).

With a null hypothesis that the classic toolbar is no better than the ribbon, I just wanted to see some data (instead of assuming that what users have now has to be more efficient for those users just because it's what the market-leading product has been giving users for about two decades).
by wahern | 2026-02-05 23:25:46+00:00
It should be much easier than that. You should should be able to serially test if each edit decodes to a sane PDF structure, reducing the cost similar to how you can crack passwords when the server doesn't use a constant-time memcmp. Are PDFs typically compressed by default? If so that makes it even easier given built-in checksums. But it's just not something you can do by throwing data at existing tools. You'll need to build a testing harness with instrumentation deep in the bowels of the decoders. This kind of work is the polar opposite of what AI code generators or naive scripting can accomplish.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-05 23:26:10+00:00
I am all-daily user (multiple claude max accounts). this fits my mental model mostly but not model I had before but developed with daily use. my job revolves around two core things:

1. data analysis / visualization / …

2. “is this possible? can this even be done?”

for #1 - I don’t do much anymore, for #2 I mostly do it still all “by hand” not for the lack of serious trying. so “it can do #1 1000x better than me cause it is generally solved problem(s) it is trained on while it can’t effectively do #2 otherwise” fits perfectly
by rvz | 2026-02-05 23:26:30+00:00
> Too right - this goes for the arrogant geeks at the within the orgs of LLM producers who still havent displaced call center workers with their technology.

Some have shares in these AI companies and need to off-load them either on secondaries or IPO.

These are the clear incentives to show performative results to give the impression that you can replace accountants with AI without any of the risks involved.
by xp84 | 2026-02-05 23:26:46+00:00
Problem is "Nazi" = "Anyone who disagrees with me" in most Left-friendly spaces today. For instance: https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/was-charlie-kirk-a...

None of his views had anything to do with Naziism but failure to fall in line with all of the Left's current positions makes one "a Nazi" to them. And yes, much the same way as right-wing extremists like to paint all 'liberals' as "gun grabbing Marxists." The difference is you can find a lot more liberals who would happily glorify Marx than you can find Americans of any party who would glorify the Nazi regime or its acts.

In case it's unclear, I do not support Nazis either.
by stock_toaster | 2026-02-05 23:27:03+00:00
memcached is multithreaded, so it scales up better per node.

memcached clients also frequently uses ketama consistent hashing, so it is much easier to do load/clustering, being much simpler than redis clustering (sentinel, etc).

Mcrouter[1] is also great for scaling memcached.

dragonfly, garnet, and pogocache are other alternatives too.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/mcrouter
by godelski | 2026-02-05 23:27:04+00:00
> basically his entire fortune

Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich.

If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.

But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...