skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Asking a question to a coworker and having him copy paste from chatgpt has to be the worst thing about being a programmer in 2025.

If I'm asking you something it's because I want to discuss it, not because I couldn't be bothered to google it myself. Do people really not realize that?
> So if someone is 60+ year old, chances are that most of his work has never been open source

Somewhat ageist? I'm 72 and have produced a number of FOSS tools.
One of the hardest hit sectors by e-commerce was naturally electronics. I've noticed now trying to buy anything desktop-related such as components or accessories is sometimes nearly impossible without using the likes of Amazon or Newegg, or being gouged by the likes of BestBuy.

In the early 2000s it was easy to find at least half a dozen local electronics stores selling the goods you needed and nowadays there is only MicroCenter or your state may have their own smaller chain (i.e. Central Computers).
there is some truth in that, but only some.. The adage that the media forms the message could hardly be more apt here. In the days of world sailing trade ships and financial arrangements, so many parts of the mechanisms were starkly different. The weaknesses and anti-patterns in the trade practice are very different then and now. right? Digital ledgers with public verification enable different weaknesses and anti-patterns, from the start.
And maybe it's the richest 10% who have a subscription to the WSJ and can afford to read this article... It's paywalled and it looks like the WSJ is blocking archive tools.

The subtitle says "The highest-earning 10% of Americans have increased their spending far beyond inflation. Everyone else hasn’t." The underlying assumption is that increased spending powers the economy. Low income people are much more likely to spend an extra dollar that they get (see the top-left figure on p 50 of [1]). So, what should we do? Do redistribution down to the low-income people, who will spend it, and that consumption will end up in the pockets of high-income people in the form of increased share price of assets held by high income people. Sure, we could do too much redistribution, but the US would benefit from more.

[1] https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue95/Roth95.pdf
I was underwhelmed. It just seemed like a summary of my highest comments. It is scary how quickly a site can categorize you though. Like you know the current American admin are using AI to identify their non supporters.
Great bug story!
This is an actual panopticon?
Scrolling is sort of a strawman here, so I’ll focus on blinking and css features and the need to reinvent these.

First, not all css features are consistent enough from the side you usually tend to approach things, due to various backgrounds and thinking modes. Css is notoriously overcomplicated, nuanced and ad-hoc applicable, and tendency to neglect it is its own self-imposed problem.

Second, there’s no law that dictated some true way to do things. People use instruments they know, and if these work, there’s no need to go and find true ways.

Overall, there’s no difference if you do something in js that css can do, apart from hurting someone’s feelings. All the difference you see is in multi-megabyte tracking scripts, not in js-dom chain per se. The difference betwen css and js ways is barely measurable when you start actually testing it. But js is more powerful in expression and familiar to a developer (except for 60fps+ animations and such).

I say this as a non-frontend dev who makes dashboards and other report/control pages for myself, so opinions may vary. But I’ve never seen a higher resource consumption from avoiding css. To my understanding, literally all sites I ever visited can be implemented in a straightforward way in js and will never “take more resources” and will work as fast as just html. Because it’s literally how any non-C GUI app works on desktops. An interpreted jit-able language controlling some widgets. It’s nothing new or unusual or bizarre. In fact, css is also a language, even if declarative, and keyframes structures and other calc()s also get interpreted many times per second, even if not using a full-blown vm.

In my opinion, people’s web bloat ideas are all over the place and miss the basics comletely, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990724 , and tend to blame wrong parts.
In other languages you would know which date you were dealing with based on the type regardless of the function you were in. In Clojure, you have to either name the variable date-string or find which API it came from, which means tracing the call stack
It was, but the explosion of free hosted blogs quickly led to linkbacks being 90% scam sites instead of genuine responses.
> I’m placing my trust in the open source community

You’re right, security is a matter of degrees not absolutes, but open source software requires considerably less trust than closed source. Right?

PCC applies this principle by making the binaries it runs public and auditable by you or anyone in the security community. (In some cases the source code as well.) The craziness is in the architecture that provides cryptographic proof to clients that the server they’re connecting to is running an audited binary and running on secure hardware. It even does TLS termination at the shard level so you can have high confidence that if the binary isn’t connecting to anything your data will be unreadable by any other server in the org.

So it goes way beyond trusting what the whitepaper says. Data center hardware deployments are audited by a third party that signs the servers in a key ceremony. That ultimately undergirds the cryptographic attestation that servers provide to clients that everything has been audited. And it’s also the element that tighter supply chain control helps shore up.

If you’re new to security the architecture documentation I linked to is a very friendly read and a good intro to some of these threats, countermeasures and rationales.
Disclosure of personal information to DOGE “is irreparable harm,” judge rules
Point taken, thanks for pointing that out.
What upsets me about AI is that the proof-of-value in basically articulate prose has gone to zero. I can still write better than AI, but I’m not sure the remaining margin matters, socially speaking.

That said, AI is less than 2 percent of what has enshittified the internet. It’s a factor, but corporatization and algorithmic optimization have already done plenty of damage even without LLMs in the mix.
It's literally what happened. Twitter is more real than "real politics" now
You're surprised at everyone but yourself?
>We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.

many here see it way (me too, though i'm well aware that many times whenever i was critical of Musk, he happened to be right, and in this case - Musk is naturally not anti-science guy, so i'd guess there must be some other reason for him doing that which i'm just not able to see).

I wonder whether somebody from the opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions. In particular what is the expected state near, mid, and longterm and how the current actions are supposed to result in it. It would be great to have it with some ballpark estimates.
Note that they define algorithm 2 (see figure of said name) as Exchange Sort, which is distinct from the algorithm they present
More than 4 years. At least the way it seems right now. The democrats have no viable strategy or someone with a cult of personality that can unite all the factional groups.
>Apple level of polish.

Absurd claim given the untenable OS release cadence under Tim Cook.

"But better than M$" is still undeserving of the lofty implication from "level of polish".
“Something must be done, and this is something.” Usually a joke, but now this is how the U.S. federal government works.

The whole idea behind the layoffs is a belief that the feds are wildly overstaffed, with tons of easy obvious staff cuts to make. That was never the reality, and now we’re all about to learn that the hard way.
Who is the dictator here? Obviously the states that run these schools will raise taxes to fund the state schools, no?
Calling your elected representatives daily is more effective. The app 5 calls makes it easy.
Don’t worry, they’ll be printing more to buy off the idiots who actually believe this.
I, for one, prefer the rotary dial.
Lowtax tried to enlighten us in 2006, but we weren't ready to listen :( https://i.imgur.com/Fox9wMc.jpeg
> Watching each other's kids at home creates extra free time.

Not a thing if no one has free time because everyone has to work.

> Having an extra hand and different set of tools when working on home projects is a net gain which means you can be better off while helping each other etc.

Again, who has the money to have tools? Who has the money to work on home projects? Have you seen the cost of construction materials lately?
Eh, consent is a little nebulous in this context. Sure in interpersonal relationships, consent is important. But on a societal scale there are plenty of ways in which consent is violated. I don't consent to breathing toxic fumes from other people's cars. Should we make cars illegal? I don't consent to having to wear clothes all the time, is it unethical that I have to wear clothes?

Also, the money they are taking is produced by and guaranteed by the US government. Is it really "your" money? Without the US government that money is worthless.
How is it saving money if the cost is just shifted elsewhere? Why does it matter where the work is done except for empty ideological signaling?
It's very funny! But it's also clear that it only used a small subset of my comments to generate everything. Still thanks for sharing!
You gotta love these guys, they're really pushing the open source frontier for all of us, thanks for sharing
Was it the moist maker?
Oh my god dude, who do you think is the major subsidizer of private industry research?
"if you can't afford to leave your kids (with daycare or a carer) "

- some lawnmower parents won't even their kids with close relatives

- many apparently bought into the "nuclear family" (parent[s] + kids) and not the extended family. About the extended family, or the replacement by a close neighborhood group, parents are on their own - - and that's a recipe for disaster.
The metric you're looking for is called Energy Return on Energy Invested, or EROEI -- how many units of energy do you need to put into all that concrete, rebar, and transportation in order to stand up the turbine vs. how many units of energy do you get out of the turbine over its lifetime.

Those who have studied it found that wind is around 4-20. Solar PV is something like 8-30. A Saudi oil well is in the 40's IIRC, and a fracking well is in the low single digits. In the US, we don't have saudi oil wells (and some would say the saudi's haven't had a proper saudi oil well since the early 2000's...), so given the options left on the table and stopping short of some materials breakthroughs that need to happen to make thorium work, wind is pretty competitive relative to what we have left here at the bottom of the metaphorical energy barrel.

Now, if we're just trying to be wowed by looking at construction photos, we can also look at photos of the miles of pipework needed in the acres of an oil refinery, but that's not really going to tell us anything about the actual numbers either...
US innovation is looking at how it can extract as much profit as it can in the next quarter.
I've enjoyed both books but Uncle Bob is something you grow out of. He was a bit of a cult figure at the time. Trying to actually follow the guidelines in Clean Code taught me a lot about "over-decomposition" and, ultimately, how not to write code. It reminds me it's possible to take aesthetics so far the results become ugly. Fussing over a proliferation of small functions that do only one thing is a kind of madness. Each individual function eventually does zero things. You are left sifting through the ashes of your program wondering "Where did I go wrong?"

On the meta level, these exchanges, while mildly interesting, have the vibe of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I'm reminded of the old saying: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." If you want to write good code, read good code. Develop a taste that makes sense to you. I don't think I'll ever read a book about code composition again.
The regulators ain’t regulating. That’s their main job, not innovation.
Is that because y'all couldn't think of ways to spend time with one another that didn't cost money? Seems like a fairly tenuous friendship...
> Not being able to afford things or social media or pretty much anything that gets the blame for the “loneliness pandemic” isn’t unique to the US.

No, I think not being able to afford things contributing to a loneliness pandemic is also visible in other cultures where people are expected to work a ton for not enough money like South Korea.
This seems like a top signal to me. Some form of institution rot going on?
Does it have applications in modeling decision-making?
It’s not far away from dying. I would argue that it’s already too late. The trump administration has shown that it can seize the power to control spending which is constitutionally an exclusive power if congress and courts can’t and won’t do anything about it. We are past a constitutional crisis, republicans had a theory of a unitary executive and prove they can stream roll other branches. Now trump and others are talking about a third term. They play it off as a joke but that’s how they have succeeded in moving the goal posts already.
One method of commenting that has paid off for me the most was inserting links to:

1. the online documentation of the function being called

2. the instruction documentation for an instruction being generated, inserting

3. the issue that the code fixes

4. the specification of what the function is trying to implement

Then I fixed my text editor to enable click on those links.
OK but where is the speaking clock but for msft teams.
Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to?
I've recently gotten into podcasts over the past few months and I just finished my binge listening spree of Acquired with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.

Was curious to know what podcasts y'all are listening to and why.
That area will then be handled by Huawai, which developed the 5G spec. The US no longer has much of a telecommunications technology industry.[1]

[1] https://itif.org/publications/2021/11/08/mapping-internation...
I didn’t say I was in favor of axing all govt positions and grants, dude.
It's easier than ever to make friends. When you switch from a demand mindset to a supply mindset, the opportunities present themselves.

Think of it this way, all those lonely people out there are just waiting for someone to reach out and do something with? It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

I'm able to get out on average 10hrs/week just socializing without much effort by just putting myself out there and making events happen when and how I want them. If there's no existing group that interests you, chances are that if you make what you want, other people will be interested too.
Writing things down reveals the lapses in one's own knowledge, and those gaps are opportunities to learn something new.

It saddens me a lot that people are now relying on AI to fill the gaps in their knowledge.

Humans got where they are thanks to their innate curiosity. If you take that away from us, we become no different from animals.
Elon Musk admits email to government workers was a ruse
Though hath sinned against the 2nd law of thermodynamics!

1,000 gallons of heating oil have ~41 MWh of chemical potential energy (if using the HHV). Those 41 MWh are not directly comparable to 7MWh of electricity. While the units (MWh) are the same, they are measuring two completely different things.

They have as much in common as an American dollar and a Jamaican dollar; yes they're both "dollars", but they refer to different things.

Repent and sin no more.
New Zealander here, really thrilled to see our national medical testing service (primarily blood tests) in here. I've sent a note to them to make sure they're aware of this.

Also I feel like I took the wrong path, trying to be a serious and responsible software developer - seems like all the money is in throwing shit together and making wild claims about it.
Bearing in mind that this administration won the election and a lot of what they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on, I'm not sure democracy is at risk.

One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening.

This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to regret their vote, yes they likely didn't understand what they were voting for, but that's the flaw in democracy we're aware of.

Is this what everyone wants? Clearly not. But democracy is about majority rule, not consensus.

When an election is canceled then one can talk about democracy dying.

But right now, Americans are just getting what the majority voted for. They may not necessarily like it, but they voted for it. And the lack of reaction by Republicans in congress suggests that they feel the best way to be reelected is to go along with it.

Like if or not, the "democracy" part is working well.
Downplaying it as a ruse is like describing a mugging as a property dispute.

Musk (1) impersonated a manager to (2) declare a fraudulent employment policy in order to (3) threaten employees and create a hostile working environment with the goal of (4) constructive dismissal.

P.S. Item #1 may not apply depending on on some other court cases, where the Trump administration is refusing to say exactly WTF Musk's role actually is, probably because no matter which mutually-exclusive thing they pick they've still broken the law.
> Spends hours crafting the perfect anti-doom-scrolling strategy only to immediately doom-scroll through HN comments about doom scrolling.

Spot on!

> Has an M2 Max with 64GB RAM but probably still complains when Chrome opens more than 5 tabs.

Not true, I have 40 tabs open!

> Created a tool to generate portfolios in 5 minutes but spent 5 hours explaining how to optimize YouTube settings. Priorities!

Ouch! Brutal and funny at the same time.

Thank you for making this!
I’ve tried building a static react blog and hosting it on vercel and while it was easy to set up there was just too much styling and configuration to sort through that by the time it came to writing i was pretty much unmotivated. Markdown seems to be the key here, going to try spinning one up tomorrow. Cheers.
At some point having trained and certified Apple engineers overseeing this sort of thing gives far more confidence than random startup #1345134 who promises they hired the best college drop outs that they could find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

Edit: you can use a democratic process to kill off democracy. In the end democracy is dead, and it doesn't really matter anymore why.
Why isn’t the H20 under export control?
I also fixed the disassembler to also add a clickable link to the instruction spec page for each instruction.
This was discussed by Taleb as “I’d rather my surgeon be ugly and not look like George Clooney.”
Even if only a purely speculative, theoretical concept, it's still a misnomer to use it as substitue for anomy.
You got called out, responded, but didn’t really address the point. Looks like the original claim was overstated.
Open AI™ (with a space)
Sibling’s explanation is a great starting point! If you understand annual, weekly, and daily compounding, continuous compounding is the limit of what happens when the time you compound over becomes ever shorter. It’s not obvious without calculus, but it’s a well-defined function.
Trump I have no explanation for except corruption.

But Musk and DOGE, there is a simple explanation. Musk has learned that you take a chainsaw to sacred cows, then fix the 10% that were really bad mistakes, and that is the easiest way to cut through bureaucracy. So he's trying that, at scale.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like he'll notice most of his bad mistakes. Because it is at scale, and his attention doesn't go that far.
> for those who truly care about privacy

Is this the new "No true Scotsman" test on HN?
Imagine that instead of compounding the interest every day, you wanted to calculate it every nanosecond. And then, every billionth of a nanosecond. If you keep dividing that until it’s an infinite number of infinitely small compounding, you get a super simple equation:

interest = e^(years*rate)

10% interest for 5 years?

e^(5*.1) = 1.649

3% for 8 years?

e^(8*.03) = 1.271

You can plug any numbers into that and get the end result in 1 step.
My previous speculation on events that will move Nvidia's stock in the next 6 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42883218

tldr: I expected Chinese firms to have put in huge Nvidia orders ASAP before Trump's buddies convince him of a full Nvidia ban in China.
Thank you for the really great response! It answered my main question:

> The craziness is in the architecture that provides cryptographic proof to clients that the server they’re connecting to is running an audited binary and running on secure hardware.

I definitely missed this concept when skimming the links before posting my comment - very very cool!

> open source software requires considerably less trust than closed source. Right?

Of course… but at the same time, I think the difference in the degree of trust I am placing in say, Signal’s end to end encryption and Apple’s (claims of) end-to-end encryption is not as large as it might cursorily seem. Would I be more surprised to read in the news that Apple had secretly embedded some back door than I would be reading in the news that malicious actor managed to push some hidden exploit through to Signal in an otherwise innocent PR? I’m genuinely not sure which would surprise me more, or which event would be more probable, so can I really make any claim as to which is more secure, given the current knowledge I have? Obviously I could think more deeply about this, but superficially, both are requiring pretty large amounts of trust from me - which I don’t think is misplaced in either… though I do personally trust something like signal more at the end of the day based on… what, intuition? A gut feeling?
When Neal Stephenson himself characterizes something as a lengthy digression, I wonder how it compares to the three-page description of the milk-sodden texture of Captain Crunch.
For my current situation, which is essentially a career field switch, I try to balance the possibility of running into someone like you in an interview (which I think would suit my situation best) and getting to the interview to begin with. I essentially work outside of the development industry, but develop internal tools/automate tasks in other tech areas.

I sometimes feel like I would have the leg up in the arena of understanding the business needs, methodologies to get there, etc- but am afraid I'm getting skipped for not sprinkling enough stack-terms and not having much experience with the need to scale across a large user base.

I appreciate your comment and will continue to learn everything I can about an org prior to discussions. Very helpful, Thank you!
One other:

- restaurants that are going to fail but have not done so quite yet

That covers a lot of restaurants. It's a business sector with a lot of churn. Many mediocre establishments hold on for a few years before they close.