MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2026-02-18 22:21:13+00:00
It's intentional, to force you to engage a salesperson, and that salesperson knows all the jargon and unnecessary variations and how to size clothing that fits you. Once you have a positive transaction like that, it gives the company the opportunity to get a very loyal customer out of you, and it's the more pricey and "exclusive" brands. 100% emotional manipulation - they piss you off on purpose so they can seem like a hero and set you up with clothing that feels and looks good, but the specific fit will only match their numbers, and maybe even only their numbers for that season. How about ensuring that you can match someone who wears XL with an L right after holiday season, or hit them with an XL in the fall to set them up for a change during the holidays, etc.

The schemes are ruthless and never end, and it's all arbitrary fashion. In some ways, it's a lot easier being a guy.
by benbreen | 2026-02-18 22:21:20+00:00
Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code.

However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains.

Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader).

The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way.

Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that.

I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen).
by wat10000 | 2026-02-18 22:21:32+00:00
Only with an excessively literal interpretation.

If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.

Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.
by 1necornbuilder | 2026-02-18 22:21:47+00:00
The "cognitive debt" framing resonates, but from an unexpected direction.
I'm not a developer. I've never written a line of code. I built enterprise software — a live computer vision system monitoring industrial cranes, deployed on Google Cloud Run, generating $600K+ in contracts — entirely by chatting with Claude. No IDE, no terminal muscle memory to lose.
For me, there is no cognitive debt in the code. There's no ground truth I'm losing touch with, because I never had it. The ground truth I bring is domain knowledge: fifteen years of understanding what an industrial operator actually needs to see on a screen at 3am.
What Breen describes as "junk food" — the dopamine hit of watching Claude build a new feature — is, for domain experts like me, the first time in history we could participate in building at all. The gap that existed wasn't "developer loses touch with code." It was "person closest to the problem could never build the solution."
But his core point about writing holds, even here. The thinking that produces good software requirements — the careful articulation of what needs to be built and why — that remains irreducibly human. My most important contributions to my own codebase aren't commits. They're the precise questions I ask.
Maybe cognitive debt is domain-specific. Developers accumulate it. Domain experts spend it.
by lavezzi | 2026-02-18 22:22:07+00:00
> Yet he didn't feel the need to hide the plane he received from the Saudis, or the gold bars he got from tech companies.

You are willfully obtuse if you believe these are equivocal examples.

And not that it matters, but the plane in question was 'gifted' from the Qatari royal family, not 'the Saudis'.
by AstroBen | 2026-02-18 22:22:21+00:00
This type of cadence.

You know the one.

Choppy. Fast. Saying nothing at all.

It's not just boring and disjointed. It's full-on slop via human-adjacent mimicry.

Let’s get very clear, very grounded, and very unsentimental for a moment.

The contrast to good writing is brutal, and not in a poetic way. In a teeth-on-edge, stomach-dropping way. The dissonance is violent.

Here's the raw truth:

It’s not wisdom.
It’s not professional.
It’s not even particularly original.

You are very right to be angry. Brands picking soulless drivel over real human creatives.

And now we finish with a pseudo-deep confirmation of your bias.

---

Before long everyone will be used to it and it'll evoke the same eugh response

Sometimes standing out or wuality writing doesn't actually matter. Let AI do that part
by EdNutting | 2026-02-18 22:23:03+00:00
> You are comparing

Following the lead of everyone else... But if you like I could compare chip design to a selected narrow niche of software that helps me make my point? It doesn't matter. The point is that "hardware doesn't pay" isn't universally true, in the same way "software pays well" is also an untrue universal statement. See my other comments for more nuance or dive into salary guides. One of my comments listed some starting points.

> How many hardware jobs are in the finance/fintech sector?

Quite a few in absolute terms. Not many in relative terms. Pick the view that matches what you wanted to hear.

High Frequency Trading uses FPGAs and custom-ASICs extensively. They're even building their own fully custom data centres (from the soil testing to the chips to the software - in some cases, all done in-house). It's a secretive industry though, by nature, so you'd have to go digging to find out what Jump Trading, XTX Markets, Optiver, etc. are up to -- in London, Bristol, Cambridge, Amsterdam - to name but a few cities with these jobs. I know because I have friends doing them :-).

> Or [...] advise students

Yeah I would love that! But it hasn't really been working as a mechanism for a long time now. Most such people I come across have no awareness of semiconductors. At UK universities, we don't have department-specific expert career advice services, so they're useless. Parents are rarely familiar with the field (as per the general population). Professionals have minimal to no contact with students, especially anyone under 18. Professors/advisors are the best bet but that's really only going to capture students that were _already_ showing an interest.

To be honest, I think having a few more popular US/UK/EU YouTube channels doing any kind of FPGA-based or silicon-based hardware design (i.e. not just RPi or PCB stuff) would help hugely. I've not worked out how a content strategy in this space that I think will work - yet!
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-18 22:23:06+00:00
My state had a reading competition that listed books by ISBN, which was a real challenge for students to track down. Each library had different editions and even different cover art, so if you “found” the book you might not recognise it on the shelf, etc…

I worked on the library systems and one of my innovations was to use the ISBN mapping database of WorldCat to find books with identical content but different ISBNs to help kids find the books on the list.

Over ten years that one SQL join in the code made the kids read an extra million books they wouldn’t have otherwise.

My biggest “bang for buck” in my career!
by ElectroBuffoon | 2026-02-18 22:23:08+00:00
We already have the tech, in multiple forms. First, tagging:

ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...

PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...

POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...

Second, all ISPs could offer in their basic service something like DNS4EU modes, just like they offered email and web space decades ago (optional, nobody was forced to use them).

DNS4EU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS4EU#Public_resolver

Parents would only need to configure the account to "child". Laws could force companies to properly tag their pages and sites. And privacy would be preserved.

Instead we have to keep on fighting the Crypto Wars. The childs are just a decoy, the target is destroying basic rights.

Clipper chip war, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip#Backlash
by yndoendo | 2026-02-18 22:23:10+00:00
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater. [0] It is very dry but goes into detail of the culture of the era from late 1920s to end of WWII.

One aspect he highlights at the end is that Fascism was not rejected by the current and former citizens, those that migrated, of Germany. In their mind it was incorrectly implemented. A number of Zionist that migrated from Germany to Palestine were supporters of Fascism. It was not until mid to late 1960s when people start realize and admitted Fascism was bad.

I personally will never fund Elon Musk. Anyone that says empathy is bad is a bad person at heart. Empathy is intelligence and those that lack it lack strong intelligence. There is no way to put yourself in the position others have gone through without empathy.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/128/3/1512/728...
by lukeh | 2026-02-18 22:23:19+00:00
Also things like support for GSS-API pre-authentication mechanisms (so, you can use an arbitrary security mechanism such as EAP to authenticate yourself to the KDC), the new SAnon mechanism, pulling in some changes from Apple's fork, replacing builtin crypto with OpenSSL, etc. Lack of release has been typical OSS lack of resources: no one is paid to work on Heimdal full time.
by nickff | 2026-02-18 22:23:43+00:00
Many countries have similar controls; they're often represented as being anti-money-laundering, and anti-terrorism, but they are also used to control capital outflows, and improve tax compliance. I have never seen any evidence that this sort of control actually works to prevent money laundering or terrorist financing, but it does seem to help governments reduce monetary outflows and audit for tax compliance (when they bother to actually read what they receive).
by TMWNN | 2026-02-18 22:23:48+00:00
>Women's sizing is so dumb. They could just provide inches or cm like they do for the men, but for some reason (well for marketing reasons, as discussed extensively in the article), they use these random sizes and numbers that aren't consistent and change over time.

Relevant: TIL that while male rowers are classified as "lightweight" or "heavyweight", larger female rowers are called "openweight" instead of "heavyweight".
<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/32p2ka/til_th...>
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-18 22:23:53+00:00
> There's an argument that his work and the work of his contemporaries was a critical point in the flooding of the collective consciousness with what we would consider propaganda

I would rather say that Bernays was a keen observer and understood mass behavior and the potential of mass media like no one else in his time. Soren Kierkegaard has written about the role of public opinion and mass media in the 19th and had a rather pessimistic outlook on it. You have stuff like the Dreyfuss Affair where mass media already played a role in polarizing people and playing into the ressentiments of the people. There were signs that people were overwhelmed by mass media even before Bernays. I would say that Bernays observed these things and used those observations to develop systematic methods for influencing the masses. The problem was already there, Bernays just exploited it systematically.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2026-02-18 22:24:02+00:00
Uuuuh kinda? It's late '10's premium TV that's really more of a telenovela aimed for specific audience with a diminished level of self-awareness (not the one that's serving a sentence). HCF is kinda like that - very good if you're into the whole fantasy of tech entrepreneurship of the 80's/90's, but kinda corny when you think about it.
by digitallogic | 2026-02-18 22:24:11+00:00
I had an advanced algorithms professor who was brilliant but not always put together. Eg - he didn't always dress himself correctly. Think, two different shoes or a button shirt mis-buttoned so there was an extra hole at the top.

He came in one day and wrote this problem on the board, and asked if anyone could solve it in O(n log n). No one did, he seemed really disappointed. The TA came in afterwards, and someone asked why we were going over this specific problem. Would it be on the final? The TA said "You professor gave you this problem because he went to a conference recently, and this was announced to great fanfare as a new unsolved problem. For the last two weeks, he's been asking anyone who will listen if they can solve this problem."
by guelo | 2026-02-18 22:24:11+00:00
Trump is implementing multi decade right wing fantasies in many fronts. The idea that we can't achieve anything is limiting yourself when you're in a political arena. To win, like Trump, when you get power you have to attack on many fronts, cultural, capital, legal, and approach it as a zero sum scorched earth war where norms are another obstacle in your way.
by hamdingers | 2026-02-18 22:24:17+00:00
There's no LLM in the loop at all, so any attempt to solve it by reasoning with an LLM is missing the point. They're not even "ignoring" assistance as sibling supposes. There simply is no reasoning here.

This is what you should imagine when your site is being scraped:

def crawl(url):
r = requests.get(url).text
store(text)
for link in re.findall(r'https?://[^\s<>"\']+', r):
crawl(link)
by tranq_cassowary | 2026-02-18 22:24:21+00:00
Phones, to just give one example, at least have fine-grained run-time permission controls while on Linux apps can just access anything the user can, except if you use something like Flatpak which gives you sandboxing but the quality of that sandboxing is still worse than Android 4.4 KitKat. How can you protect your sensitive info without such permission controls that gate access to your personal data?

Note that this is just one example, there are also other problems with traditional desktop OSes and a large portion of desktop hardware.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-18 22:25:38+00:00
In the "THe VILLaIN aRC oF VANiTY SiZINg" section, vanity sizing is framed as marketing strategy which is successful because of the psychology around that - linking out to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10577... for more detail.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time the most profitable marketing strategy is unrelated to aligning with what's optimal for the consumer.
by epistasis | 2026-02-18 22:26:01+00:00
The US can't even get countries to enter trade agreements anymore, because it's throwing around threats of large tariffs and annexation of others' lands. The world could drop the dollar as the reserve currency, something that was gradually happening but is now accelerating.

If the US starts trying to force other countries into climate action without taking into account its own contributions, the US will likely cut out of the global economy, and become far poorer as the rest of the world surpasses its wealth through vigorous trade.

The US was the sole remaining superpower, but has recently decided to only occupy a much weaker position with a mere "sphere of influence" and ceding leadership in other parts of the world to others. The US is signalling to allies in Europe that it will no longer lead, that the prior world is over and the US is bugging out, meaning Europe will gain far more influence.

The more that the US attacks others without providing any leadership, the less that the US will be able to take from the world. Up until recently, the US's position of massive economic strength was largely due to it's dominant position among nations and the goodwill that others had towards it. Turning the climate problem into a blame game on other countries would further weaken the US's position and options.
by legitster | 2026-02-18 22:26:07+00:00
> Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now

I mean, this is the clear and obvious one. Nuclear theoretically should be much, much cheaper than it is if it were not for the regulatory costs thrust upon it.

It also harrows out people who are legitimately concerned from "moralist concern junkies". You'd think climate change being a global existential crisis would make people open to nuclear energy or more drastic measures like geo-engineering, but the frequency with which people refuse to compromise undercuts the their legitimacy.
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-18 22:26:31+00:00
This feels almost like a made up issue - like, "we want to considered victims so lets make up something to whine about"

A few concrete issues:

(1) they complain there are no international standards - And? Why should Japan, who's average size be much smaller than the USA be required to use USA standards? Their population doesn't need to care about people outside of Japan. You could say they should relabel the clothing, all that would do is raise the price and effectively make poor people poorer.

(2) they show people "Americans" get heavier - That might be reality but maybe being reminded you're wearing extra large is a good thing? Like you really are "overweight" and that's unhealthy. You can choose to ignore that but the rest of us aren't required re-label you as something you're not

(3) They graph high-fashion like LV and show they don't have large sizes. So what? Ferrari doesn't make cheap cars. I'm not required to make product that suits you. If you don't like what I'm offering, pick some other company's products. I don't like donuts, I don't go to a donut store and demand they offer pizza. Nor do I go to jeans store and demand they carry suits.

(4) they complain about vanity sizes - why is this an issue? Try the clothing on. If it fits buy it, if not don't. That's what I do because duh!, different people and companies follow different patterns. Some fit, some don't.

If you want to fix any of these - feel free to start your own clothing brand. Clearly you believe the market isn't being served. If so, put your money where your mouth is rather than requiring others to risk theirs
by pheggs | 2026-02-18 22:26:40+00:00
Yeah I am not saying don't use rust. But the average amount of dependencies used by a dependency makes a big difference in my opinion. The reality is, most people will use wast amounts of dependencies - especially in vibe coded environments, where LLMs try to save a few tokens.

The problem exists in C/C++ too, but the depth of dependencies are much smaller though, making the attack surface smaller, and damage gets spread to fewer products.

If I personally had to choose between a product written in C without dependencies to run on openbsd versus the same product written in rust with a few dependencies I would probably choose the C implementation. Even if there is a memory bug, if the underlying system is right they are extremely difficult/expensive to exploit. Abusing a supply chain on the other hand is very easy
by autoexec | 2026-02-18 22:26:55+00:00
> What would be an acceptable revenue model?

They could start with the one they've refused for ages even though many have asked for it. Let people directly donate to fund the development of firefox (as opposed to just giving mozilla money to funnel into any number of their other projects). They could even make money selling merch if they didn't tank the brand. Firefox could have a very nice niche to fill as a privacy focused browser for power users who desire customization and security, but sadly they don't seem interested in being that. For whatever reason they'd rather spend a fortune buying adtech from facebook employees and be a chrome clone that pushes ads and sells user data, and that isn't going to inspire support from users.

That said, I'm not convinced that every open source project needs to be profit generating. Many projects are hugely successful without resorting to ads. What makes it possible for VLC or even Arch Linux to thrive without advertising that couldn't work just as well for firefox? The solution is certainly not to turn Firefox into a project that their users no longer want to support or use at all, but that seems to be where they are headed by selling out their userbase.
by endofreach | 2026-02-18 22:27:18+00:00
i am sorry, but this might not be imposter syndrome. others might work on more advanced stuff than you and might be more experienced in their domain. that is not imposter syndrome.

but either way, don‘t worry. it won‘t take long after birth of your child, until your outlook on most things will change profoundly. just ignore it for a while. your life until now was the intro. the real part is yet to come.

best wishes to you and your family. love yourself and keep enough room to be the father you want to be. everything else will fall into place. good luck.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-18 22:27:51+00:00
Banning coal is a complete no-brainer at this point. Has been for quite a while. Never mind climate change, it's horribly polluting. The only reason it's still remotely economically viable is because the people who burn coal don't bear the costs of their pollution. If they actually had to compensate people for all the cancer, lung disease, poisoned ground water, contaminated seafood, and other such problems they cause, coal would vanish.

It's already to the point where the ridiculous coal fans who infest our government are forcing coal power plants to remain open when their operators want to close them because they're no longer profitable to operate.
by zephen | 2026-02-18 22:27:54+00:00
I have to say, I suffer from both problems, just not simultaneously.

Depending on what I am searching for, and how important it is to me to verify the accuracy and provenance of the result, I might stop at the AI, or might find, as you have, that there is no there there.

But, no matter what, the AI is essentially reducing the ability of primary sources to monetize their work. In the case where the search stops at the AI, obviously no traffic (except for incessant LLM polling) goes to the primary source.

And in the case you describe, identical traffic (your search) is routed to multiple sources, so if one of them actually was the source of something you were interested in, they effectively wind up sharing revenue with other sources, because the value of every one of your clicks is reduced by how often you click.
by oliwarner | 2026-02-18 22:28:13+00:00
I can, but it's a little backwards that a handful of antis can flag political posts upvoted by dozens of other HN users, with the rarest of interventions by mods.

It would make more sense to just allow users who don't like politics to not see politics. They get to keep their heads in the sand, we get to stay miserable, and the world will keep spinning.