skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read the Wheel of Time just before the TV show came out.

The community around WoT was easily the kindest, most welcoming, helpful that I've found around any book series (maybe any work of fiction).

Sad to see they didn't get the TV series they deserved.
"The agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9m social security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits.

The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9m."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-social...
This reminds me of that scene in Don't Look Up where the planet puts all of their hopes in an eclectic oligarch's dumb plan to blow up the asteroid about to obliterate the planet, and it fails miserably. There is no chance any of this bodes well for many people not directly standing to profit directly from this pillaging of the federal government, and I'm not sure there is a way to recover from whatever is being done here. GG, I guess.
Bibi wants to curry favor with Trump. Of course he’s going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.

The ADL doesn’t want to get sued out of existence so… of course they going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.

This is the same chilling effect that Trump suing ABC and ABC settling so yeah nobody feels comfortable enough to speak truth to power because nobody has the money or the army to back it up

But those of us with ears to hear and eyes to see know what we saw. He might not want to exterminate Jews but he knows what MAGA likes and he like they loves the power a fascist dictator like Hitler wielded
A bellwether. I wonder if China will want to export their culture like Hollywood, or if they will be content to keep to themselves.
Pelosi is the top grifter. Instead of spending her last years with her kids she stays “employed” in order to keep her and her families crimes under wraps. She will die in office, there will be great fan fair of how amazing she was, followed by countless breaking stories of her and her families corruption of over half a century.
I wonder if this is a prelude to make obsidian open-source.
Would be pretty great.
Another way of saying this is, "Riot.im/Element.io corporation has taken over the reference protocol development from the matrix foundation (now defunct in that aspect, *1) . Now that matrix is controlled by Element.io corporation the remaining Matrix foundation does not have the resources to continue bridges. And Element.io decided that early bridges to bootstrap/steal users from other messenging networks are no longer needed and so will not help the matrix foundation with them or spend any resources to maintain them themselves."

ref 1: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit... , https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/
I mean, dairy cattle also have the issue of keeping the female pregnant and then taking the baby anyway. And then, once they are done producing milk, what do you do with a giant animal?

Same with chickens that lose the ability to produce eggs.
You are not paying attention if you believe that a crack team consisting of the world's richest man and half a dozen tween interns physically invading government offices and dismantling entire departments fast enough to make your head spin is anything other than "ill intent".
Bezos can finally realize his dream and the project he has been training for since retiring from CEO...

The name is Bond, James Bond
> Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent

Eh, they are going in like a bunch of bloodhounds smelling blood.

Musk killed USAID because he had a personal axe to grind.
I think that is part of the point. "As hire As. Bs hire Cs." A-tier folks want to work with the best, B-tier folks want to work with lackeys that will do their bidding. It's pretty clear there's no A-tier folks in charge at the moment.
It's not uncommon for some agency leaders to be replaced - particularly those dealing with policy-oriented matters, like say the FTC. But that doesn't apply to the rank-and-file because of various civil service reforms which are designed to provide continuity between administrations and avoid partisan flip-flopping of large numbers of employees. They were also designed to avoid corruption or the "selling" of government positions to those favored by the president, which was common back in the 1800s. Trump is taking us back towards greater corruption while disguising his acts in a cloak of "rooting out corruption".
> All that being said, AI is not for every software engineer. I’ve seen about a 50-50 success rate of engineers entering this field. The most important determiner is a specific flavor of technical humility.

Oh, give me an f-ing break and spare me the self-congratulation.
I hope this doesn't destroy their financing.
I would hate to see them go down, it's a wonderful piece of software.
Graham's Hierarchy, in "How to Disagree": https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
The crisis coming for our national parks, explained in two charts
Except Diamonds.
I work on simulations in a satellite company and have been looking for a way to move out of c++. Thank you very much, will explore this.
I was talking about tor + mullvad where you first connect to tor then mullvad instead of obscura for connecting to a website where mullvad is allowed and tor is blocked like google(google's basically useless in tor thousands of captcha and then sorry mate we can't)

so I would argue that tor + mullvad is still a worse opsec than tor and it still has roughly the same / slightly worse speed with tor.

but I would also argue that tor + mullvad is a better model than obscura + mullvad for opsec but not for speed.

TLDR: Don't use tor with vpn's unless you are forced to (like website block , because then you are kind of forced to reduce your opsec a little bit)
Similarly, in general the best interviews I've ever been part of (either giving or being) turn into discussions where people's experience, opinions, and stories get aired (going both ways). You eventually get a good sense of each other and things get more relaxed when you both realize that you know what you're talking about (this is harder for Jr roles, though).

Being peppered with questions very rarely gives any insight.
> Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords.

That's only true for a subset of programming languages, and it requires you to already know how to program in at least another language of the same family. Knowing Java will not help you with Haskell, but it will help you with C#.

I have to deal with students using AI to cheat on homework and exams, and I can't allow them to not even learn the basic concepts.

They could convince you with buzzwords, get hired, and then feed all problems to the AI until it reaches a point where the codebase is too big for the context, and then all their prompt “engineering” experience is basically useless.

That is the future I am trying to prevent.

Until the AI can code a full system like SAP, or an Operating System, or a Photoshop clone, by itself, we need some people in the loop, and the more knowledgeable the people, the better.
> Stone is an incredibly efficient thermal material which is why animals and humans have lived in caves for thousands of years.

Most stone makes for a pretty bad insulator. But the ground, in aggregate, is a great insulator and has very very large thermal mass. So you can go in a hole that’s more than a few feet underground, and the temperature is fairly constant.
C is undeniably a legendary programming language, but it's time to move beyond the constraints of the C abstract machine, which was heavily shaped by the PDP-11 due to Unix's origins on that architecture. C feels outdated for modern computing needs.

It lacks features like lambda calculus, closures, and coroutines—powerful and proven paradigms that are essential in modern programming languages. These limitations make it harder to fully embrace contemporary programming practices.

The dominance of C and its descendants has forced our systems to remain tied to its design, holding back progress. Intel tried to introduce hardware assisted garbage collection, which unfortunately failed miserably because C doesn't need it, and we are still having to cope with garbage collection entirely in software.

While I’m not suggesting we abandon C entirely (I still use it, like when writing C FFI for some projects), we need to explore new possibilities and move beyond C to better align with modern architectures and programming needs.
> You can say that about all forms of hiring process

Yes, but there's a significant difference between spending a few hours on a take-home assignment and dropping your current employment to spend 4 weeks potentially in another city working full time.
Okay so you care, do you think politicians who are now pretending to be concerned for privacy reasons care? Think the average american realizes that they have never cared about privacy and they look like clowns pretending like all the sudden they do.
We both wish, the president of america is running a crypto-scam.
Hmmm... they link to the AGPL and state it's under that. In a conflict between the two, the website extras, and the AGPL requirements, which would win?

I personally think the AGPL would win, but it's not something I'd be willing to enter a legal battle over.
Sounds like this was bound to happen sooner or later. Why was this fool allowed to wire that much money out of the bank - he was only caught when he asked someone outside of the bank to literally give him 12 million dollars.
The ancestors of chickens used to eat our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years, so I have no issues with eating them as much as I want.
Great point!

A couple of weeks ago I went over the handlebars on my bicycle and broke my collarbone, needed 5 stitches on my forehead, got a little road rash on my hip, and an avulsion (?) fracture on one finger resulting in mallet finger. I'm 54 and have noticed that I'm healing much more slowly than I remember healing when I was a teenager.

Mostly, things are going smoothly and the only thing I'm really worried about is the mallet finger. I've been told to keep it in a splint for 8 weeks and if I accidentally bend it a little before then any healing will have to start over and I might end up needing surgery for it.

If anybody here has had mallet finger, I'd love to hear how it went for you.
I understand you're frustrated because of who and what. Do you have any direct evidence they are stealing data? I see a lot of these responses that are emotional but at a factual basis it doesn't appear that way. Just as raw un restricted read/write access is constantly alleged, but we have in turn found out that isn't the case.

I really think we're getting to a point where people are too hyper emotional and sensational about most topics which further limits real discussion and response.

As for the idea of nickle and dimming, everything adds up and they're no where near done yet. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and we need a lot of it. Nearly every person that has run for president in modern years has stated they would go after excess spending and fraud, yet none follow through. This time someone is. If years of doing nothing gets us further down the debt rabbit hole, what harm is being done?
Agreed. Show the check numbers, mailing dates, bank transfers, etc. If there's actually really tens of billions flowing out to dead people monthly... demonstrate that. Should NOT be hard at all.
I’m not sure - big tech is reversing their DEI narrative since the Trump election/ inauguration.
Well, I'm working on a project now where we would absolutely have needed to recruit at least one additional entry-level dev if we didn't instead have an LLM to generate a few thousand lines of python to orchestrate some basic DB interactions. It's not complicated stuff, but it is time consuming.

I'd rate its output as not great, but adequate for the purpose, so long as robustly supervised. (much like an inexperienced human.)

I don't know if this anecdote qualifies as the "close analysis" you're looking for, but it seems instructive to me since it allows me to say with absolute certainty that an LLM is doing the job of at least one person. (And I'm confident it would be more than one if I were working on a bigger project.)
Top 5 faves as a kid

anything 6502 SBC -- hex code / assembly, later BASIC, etc.
Timex Sinclair -- disabled screen for run so CPU could save screen code cycles
TRS-80 CoCo -- poke 65535,65536, 65537 -- clock 1x, overclock 2x, 3x
TI99/4a -- sprites + cartridges + accessible
PC Jr + Turbo Pascal -- first compiler in
what you write is true, but very concerning.

in theory, laws and policies are crafted by elected officials or experts, and bureaucrats are just the executors. but in reality, bureaucracies interpret, refine, and sometimes even reshape these rules through policy implementation. this is where a lot of inefficiency, red tape, and unintended consequences creep in.
“Human drivers are struggling”

Yet teslas are still selling like hot cakes. If there were actual humans struggling we’d see an obvious decrease in sales.
Spoiler alert: Bond died.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ama...
I have used their RUPS tool for a while, and it's been great for inspecting the underlying PDF structure.
I mean to use their time to pursue their passions and interests, not cleaning up the kitchen or making the bed or doing laundry...
> You might also want to look at https://vr-compare.com/ to help find headsets.

Thanks so much for that, finally a complete overview of all possible options :+1:
We are trusting Donald Trumps judgement to execute on the promises he made to get elected. Nothing is perfect, and I think this whole thing is probably happening too early.
It's because this particular advisor has the full backing of the duly-elected President. It's absolutely wild to me that HN refuses to acknowledge this fact. This idea that the civil servants should defy the President (and his advisor) is substantiating the deep state critiques from the right.
I think they have nothing but ill intent. Everything they've said and done so far just screams it.
It seems that neither user interest nor commercial interests are enough to keep protocol development going.

It’s kind of sad.
What's even more impressive is that they've done this with an 80M USD budget.

It is probably the movie with the highest ROI ever at ~25x (and counting).
> it just literally matched grep trans or something.

Do you have a source for this opinion presented as a fact?
Show HN: Newsfeed for Busy Web Developers
Good points. My next concern would be the churn inherent in such a system.
Every two years, the entire House and 1/3 of the Senate is re-elected. That doesn't give much time for a bureaucrat to gain experience before needed to concentrate on the re-election of their benefactor (I use that word purposefully here, because the US did away with patronage for career bureaucrats in the executive in the late 19th century - no such rules exist in the legislative).
It's very efficient. You don't need to spend all that time marshalling arguments before a court. You need a decision made, the President makes it based on his mood, and you're off.

It is widely noted that dictatorships are extremely efficient. Hamlet complained about "the law's delay" 400 years ago.

There are many who would prefer a less efficient system.
A very important statement is in the peer review file that everyone should read:

"The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices. The work is published for introducing a device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes."

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
And you can't develop one of those "deployments" without all the other ones being present?

That just seems like super-terrible engineering, but I can believe it. Gotta be "web-scale".
Regulated?? The entire point of DOGE is to be unregulated. They are ignoring existing regulations (read: laws), and specifically targeting regulatory and oversight bodies for destruction. Wake up!
Study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... | https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.57538
Your ideology and desire to demonize the billionares and the rulers and whatnot is limiting you here. There's only a few of them. They literally don't have sufficient brain power to think up all the stupid crap that goes on on the micro level that adds up to the macro problem.

The upper middle/professional class is the problem (this is a theme, there's a reason that every time there a real good bloody revolution in history they do poorly). They have pushed ideas that are grounded in sound principles (diversity and inclusivity are good, the proliferation of high tech communication is good, sustainable environmental practice are good) to the point of absurdity and recoil from the general public. They take these causes of the moment and run with them to absurd levels because that is a reliable way to make a quick buck with the way we've structured our society.

It's like telling a rookie engineer the priority to lighten the part and he shaves so much mass that it will obviously, even to him too readily in real world conditions despite passing in the simulation. He justifies it in his own mind in various ways but at the end of the day the reality is he DGAF. He got his bonus for hitting the metric and moved on. The upper middle class is that rookie engineer. The upper middle class decision makers got that bonus for increasing DEI (in a bad way that makes people hate it), making the production greener (if you don't measure what's offshored) and so on and so on. And of course such behavior comes around to cast shade upon those goals even if the goals are noble. Eventually management says "stop lightening things" in the same way that the populist leaders say things like "no more DEI crap". Such moves aren't the right answer per-say, and even they know it. But they do stop the bleeding enough to not be a serious existential problem for a little while until a new fad comes around.

I don't know how you get a whole society of people to give a crap generally and give a crap about the big picture impact of what they're doing. If I did then surely enough other people would and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Yeah that's what I thought. You couldn't rebutle any of it.
Apple knows you would upgrade to a Pro Max model if it was between that and switching to Android.

Apple owes small phone enjoyers nothing and they will drag you into paying more for a phone you don't want because you are helpless.
But you did see the videos? You still trust a right wing politician, who stands to profit immensely from Trump and Musk in power, more than your own eyes? That's wild
“High end” was meant as shorthand for FAANG …high comp, not necessarily high tech complexity.

You are correct about the deficiencies of the whiteboard interview. It is not a sane way to hire an individual. It makes sense as a way to hire someone in the top 20% from a large unfiltered pool. So wrt high/low, that’s what FAANG companies have to do, and for many nontechnical companies they outsource this work or emulate FAANG practices for no good reason.

My point was that there are very few places that don’t do this.
What feature on HN requires a premium membership?
It's a bit of a straw man. I might get labelled as part of that group. But in reality, I have nothing to hide given a search warrant of my digital data, issued by a court in accordance to tight privacy-respecting laws. And I am happy the bandwidth-limited court can issue these against me, and against everyone around me, as opposed to no data ever being available for anyone.

That's quite different to Musk's minions taking a DB dump onto a USB stick.
Netanyahu a fascist war criminal
and ADL a back pocketed political party paid by elite right-wing evangelists.

Of course they'll claim not.
Exactly. That’s why I said avoid. Even if you think the AGPL prevails.

You already know that the licensor has his own, idiosyncratic interpretation. He either misunderstands the AGPL (probably clause 7 par 3 b), or he’s trying to deceive you. Both cases can easily lead to hostilities.
Seems to be more than just bean counting. Rings of Power was showered with money, so there are properties Amazon is willing to spend lavish amounts of money on. They also boosted the budget when they took over The Expanse, though there's plenty of disagreement over if that netted a better result or not.
*And
Don’t call HP support AND don’t buy HP products.
I miss one option from the list of non-solutions the author presents there - ditch the idiotic whiteboard/"coding exercise" interview style. Voila, the AI (non)problem solved!

This sort of comp-sci style exam with quizzes and what not maybe somewhat helps when hiring junior with zero experience fresh out of school.

But why are people with 20+ years of easily verifiable experience (picking up a phone and asking for references is still a thing!) being asked to invert trees and implement stuff like quicksort or some contrived BS assignment the interviewer uses to boost their own ego but with zero relevance to the day to day job they will be doing?

Why are we still wasting time with this? Why is always the default the assumption there that the applicants are all crooked hochstaplers that are lying on their resumes?

99% of jobs come with probationary period anyway where the person can be fired on the spot without justification or any strings attached. That should be more than enough time to see whether the person knows their stuff or not after having passed one or two rounds of oral interviews.

It is good enough for literally every other job - except for software engineering. What makes us the special snowflakes that people are being asked to put up with this crap?
I was disappointed when Amazon canceled their plans to bring the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, to TV. After seeing the page-to-screen translation of Wheel of Time I think that it was just as well.
> Germ theory is settled science. Is it theoretically possible that we'll overturn it? Sure.

You need to understand that every single theory will be improved upon in the future. That means they will change and it's impossible to predict if these improvements will have consequences in different contexts where people incorrectly claim the science is settled.

> It's unproductive to constantly re-litigate questions like "is germ theory true" or "is global warming real"

Can you think of any cases where the science had nearly full consensus and it was useful to re-litigate? Galileo isn't the only example. I can think of many.
This is also the MO of startups.

Look at AirBnB, Uber, Lyft.

All illegal businesses that had enough capital to burn through lawsuits and keep operations going until they were too big to fail and whipped the snot out of city and state legal counsels.
Ha! The thought of Amazon splurging for aeron chairs for it's workforce made me chuckle
one hiring manager told me they dont do code challenges. they said, "why would someone take a job they couldnt do?"

isnt it that simple?
Gotta hype up the investors somehow
When can one say loudly, "America is third world corrupt"?
Yeah but the analogy goes, if Michelangelo could snap his fingers to remove the first 80% of material on a chunk of marble, he could focus on the details and get more done, or have more time to perfect.

Generative AI is best at things it has been trained on the most, so the most repetitive, rote, boilerplate, tasks become much quicker.
Assuming they have a read only copy to the data, how would having access to just data require rebuilding the systems?
I appreciate that nature, but not when the stakes are _this_ high.