skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why Smart People Still Make Bad Decisions
We like to think that intelligence protects us from bad decisions, but time and time again, we see brilliant minds making terrible calls—whether in business, investing, or even everyday life. Why?

It turns out that intelligence often works against good decision-making. Here’s why:

Overconfidence Bias – The smarter you are, the easier it is to rationalise bad decisions and believe you’re right, even when you’re not.
Paralysis by Analysis – Highly analytical minds tend to overthink, leading to missed opportunities while waiting for the "perfect" choice.
Cognitive Rigidity – Intelligence can make you too attached to your mental models, making it harder to accept when reality doesn’t fit.
Emotional Blind Spots – Many bad decisions aren’t about logic but emotions—something intelligence alone doesn’t solve.
I’ve seen this play out in tech, business, and even personal life. A friend of mine spent years developing a product no one wanted because he convinced himself he was seeing something the market didn’t. Another example? Some of the most successful traders aren’t the smartest—they’re just the best at adapting to new information.

What do you think? Have you ever outsmarted yourself into a bad decision? How do you guard against it?

About me:

I’m Rafael, a senior web developer with 17+ years of experience working remotely for US and European companies. I build scalable web apps, optimize system architecture, and integrate AI-powered solutions. If you’re looking for a contractor, check out my work here:

https://rdsdigitalsolutions.com/
Not necessarily, see my other comment. If they were involved in, say, a contract selection to integrate with AccuWeather's other data sources and models then they could be restricted from working at AccuWeather or in what they can do at AccuWeather. It looks like a quid pro quo if you're involved in contract selection and get hired by that same company. Introducing the delay reduces that appearance, it also makes a real quid pro quo less likely.

If they were a meteorologist conducting analysis and improving models, they could get hired on without difficulty. If they were the developer tasked with doing that integration after the contract was awarded, it also shouldn't be an issue to get hired by AccuWeather.
France has a vertical integration too.
https://www.framatome.com/en/
Why can’t it? Stating that America should prioritize itself is a direct and unapologetic stance. Brevity is not a lack of thought—it’s efficient communication. Dismissing a position because it’s concise rather than engaging with its merits is a weak argument. I recognize that some dislike this perspective and will seize any opportunity to undermine it, but that doesn’t make it any less valid.
> There’s no point in designing a new engine if it doesn’t significantly improve on the state of the art

Oh but there is. I would love to see more European alternatives to US designs even at 5% less efficiency and power. Surely it can’t be that expensive to create an engine in 2025 similar to the state of the art 2005, when you have all the hindsight plus unlimited access to the original design?

Events of this week show that this will be very important.
Am I missing something here? How could a hellish residency—with all the stress and sleep deprivation that implies—possibly improve patient outcome?

Apart from the bad real-time cognitive effects, long-term memory retention is dependent on regular, sustained sleep.
I am! I've always enjoyed tutoring junior coders. I'm not that advanced either, and I tend to focus more on the conceptual than practical side of things, so it gives me an excellent lever to improve myself as well.
None of that matters. Nobody cares if a variable is named "mungus" or "chungus", as long as the code is idiomatic and functions equivalently.

1:1 Source recovery is never the goal of decompilation, or reverse engineering in general. You just want functionally equivalent, idiomatic code.
The coup happened before 2014, when Yanukovich took over the supreme court and reverted the country's constitution.
Security isn’t binary, it’s about layers and probabilities.

A client that attests play integrity is less likely to be an attacker than one that isn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to use an attested device in an attack, or that all non-attested devices are malicious.

A good heuristic is that if you find yourself using absolutes and dramatic, insulting language… you do not have a valuable insight about security.
It's simple to include, but there's no denying that the 101-level economics models steer you away from thinking about inequality harder than Vin Diesel in a car chase.

Carefully omitting the fact that the economic notion of value is wealth-weighted (and you can march enough elephants through this loophole to wage a class war), drawing attention away from "rich people getting paid for being rich" dynamics by dividing out wealth wherever possible, inviting you to use averages where "rich get richer" hides "poor get poorer" -- it's a masterclass in propaganda. I have literally never in my life seen a more artful tapestry of deception than Econ 101.
> when the reality seems to be that only the US was ever willing to do it,

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that they are solely funding the rest of the world.

Lots of countries provide a lot more per capita than the US [1] in foreign aid.

Someone like Germany provide 3x, Sweden 6x.

So even the pre-Trump level wasn't something to be particular proud of.

[1] https://www.wristband.com/content/which-countries-provide-re...
Not an expert, but the donating (and/or bloodletting) is scheduled frequently enough to keep their iron from deviating too high above normal, and someone receiving a transfusion is typically going to be low on blood. Put 'em together, and I'd be surprised if a hemochromatosis transfusion could be a problem for anyone who doesn't themselves have hemochromatosis.

But yeah, this does seem like a really mutually beneficial arrangement. They need to lose some blood either way, might as well put it to use.
I usually agree with you but 1) they provide the full text of the memo where the NYT didn't and 2) they bring up a different angle that the NYT didn't address: the final paragraph of the memo: No punting — we can’t keep building nanny products. Our products are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds. We need capable products and [to] trust our users.“ That is potentially an edge for them although how they manage any outrage from inappropriate Gemini responses is still a question.
> but if it’s not a 1:1 then deobfuscate is the wrong word for sure

"if it's not" is so troubling
The numbers you mention don't match what I see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...
Recent posts

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Anil Dash - understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture

https://www.anildash.com//2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-captur...
You argue for unquestionable warmongering? Are you sure it's a good idea? What can possibly go wrong? What if it turns against you?
> If something goes up more than inflation - it is a good investment

It’s not that simple. First, risk is a also factor. But a real estate investor is not just looking for capital gains. They are looking at rent yields against costs (taxes, insurance, maintenance, interest).

Real estate can be a good investment even without appreciation in real terms. And that is a good thing.

Real estate investors play an important role in society. Without landlords, it would be impossible to rent a home. So anyone without the ability to purchase a home would have to rely on friends and family or charity, or sleep in the street.
I never said they were pushovers. Just that they were weaker than people thought.

It is clear that Europe would have more difficulty going it alone, since it does not dispose of the intelligence assets that the US has. Spy satellites, SIGINT planes, logistics, etc. Having to go it alone would clearly also impact the morale and thus the political will. But if Putin would decide to invade for example Poland, there is no doubt how he would fare.

But from an industrial and economics point of view there is no comparing. Contrary to what mr Trump has been saying, Europe has paid for more than half of the expenses so far. The overall defense budget of Europe was 217B$ in 2019 and has been steadily increasing to 258B$ in 2021 [1]. For 2024 it is at 326B$ [2]

Compare that with Russia that had a 184B$ budget this year [3]. And that is whilst being on a war footing.

Also. Let's not forget that the US, together with the EU (and Russia) offered security guarantees to Ukraine, in return for them giving their nukes to Russia (since that was making everyone anxious). Our support for them is not some sort of "gift" out of the goodness of our hearts. It is a solemn promise that we made, in return for our peace of mind. Surely the US is not the sort of country that does not honor it's commitments, but backs down when the going gets tough?

[1] : https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/EUU/eur...

[2] : https://eda.europa.eu/news-and-events/news/2024/12/04/eu-def...

[3] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
The more traditional way to use it is to chew on leaves, which is a far less intense and slower way to use it. Probably the approach you'd take if you wanted to get something useful out of the experience.
Isn’t play integrity based on PKI and hardware root of trust? How does a rooted device fake the signed ROM / bootloader / etc?
Cooking can be fun. Take a simple recipe and refine it until you are an artisan. I made little pizzas at work. It was fun but I upped my game significantly. I only needed a toaster oven, a rolling pin, store bought dough. But used high quality ingredients.

The fun for me was in the refinement to perfection.
There was a lot of discrimination that benefited those not being discriminated against too
Russian and Ukrainian men would stop dying if Russia withdrew its military from Ukraine.
Inequality exists on a spectrum and there is something in between Gini coefficients of zero and one.

If anything, I think economists have grossly underestimated how large increasing levels of inequality have had such a corrosive effect on our social cohesion and political systems, and that obviously does have a huge impact on eventual economic outcomes. This societal/political breakdown is not something that economists usually model well.
I think I tracked it down to the table in the article adding a scroll bar for the entire page. This scrollbar fights with the code blocks scrollbar. I will try to refactor the table to fit in a phone width somehow.
Didn’t SF try all those things?
And I would beware any professed expert who has such a oversimplified heuristic of what makes a good engineer.

> Whether a LLM coding model demonstrates understanding of unnecessary comments might be interesting

I think it would be an interesting experiment, that sounds like a great idea for you to pursue. Make sure to sample a wide variety of models, and include a caveat that LLMs are not a source of truth regarding such matters, as they are simply providing probabilistic text completions based on prior training data.
People who make their money producing luxury goods or developing real-estate may disagree. As might all the people who work in the supply chains for those activities.
I don’t think an open apartheid state that regularly supports the illegal dispossession of homes from civilians for a project of religious conquest can be considered to be liberal or modern or functional. But I suppose if I didn’t think Palestinians existed or were deserving of human rights then I could arrive at your same conclusion.

Personally I’d rather visit Jordan or Lebanon than Israel any day of the week.
funny how their original prime directive was to fix expert sex change, and they were so successful they caused experts-exchange to (somewhat) improve their game, and at the same time needed to enshitify SO to hit VC-fueled objectives that had nothing to do with building the best place for developers to ask questions and get durable answers.
That depends on what sanctions Russia remains under. If same as today, then Ukraine might benefit, otherwise probably not.
“You all read it wrong, we’re not evil really. We pinky promise. Don’t look behind the curtain.”
This feels very much like the work of someone with ‘just enough knowledge to be dangerous’.

At no point in this process does the author seem to stop and inspect the results to see if they actually amount to what he’s asking for. Claiming that this output represents a decompilation of the obfuscated target seems to require at least demonstrating that the resulting code produces an artifact that does the same thing.

Further, the claim that “Using the above technique you can clean-room any software in existence in hours or less.” is horrifyingly naive. This would in no way be considered a ‘clean room’ implementation of the supplied artifact. It’s explicitly a derived work based on detailed study of the published, copyrighted artifact.

Please step away from the LLM before you hurt someone.
How much of surgery is based on dexterity vs knowledge/attention-to-detail? I sort of assumed that most operations are basic plumbing (A connects to B) while there are a few specialized domains that require exquisite deftness.
It sounds fun but reminds me of my recent foray into cassette culture where I rediscovered that while I love everything about cassettes and making them, I had forgotten they sound like crap haha.

I’m currently into making CDs.
Exactly, all the dense places that are desirable are the most expensive on the planet.
You should speak with your lawyers for concerns about licensing.

I'd note that the installation media was not modified (the DVD ISO provided by Microsoft was used unmodified), only the preinstallation media was modified (governed by ADK license).

As an individual installing onto one machine already licensed, I'm not really worried here.
Mozilla had $1,006,854,000 invested at end of 2023. Drawing 5% of that annually for developer salaries would pay a lot of Firefox developer salaries, even with no incoming cash whatsoever. I'd like to believe a world exists between "Firefox is a volunteer-only effort" and "Mozilla CEO is yet another sociopath robber baron".

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
Let's skip the statement that Musk being the head to both DOGE (a public agency) & X (a private company) somehow makes it acceptable for one to have access to the other's sensitive data, the downloader project could be unrelated to their DOGE work.
Simon Wardley in his stragegy maps is splitting the people working on a product into 3 categories - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-builders - kind-of-continuous-spectrum - as of their desires / attitudes / skills. And a product, in its respective phases from invention to commodity, needs different skills and attitudes. Those very well match with the scaling-to-be-done. And everyone, at certain time, in certain aspect, is one of those.

e.g. i prefer working as Pioneer and maybe Settler, and very little as town planner. Except for certain things, i reach directly into regular-planning-tooling instead of hacking-something-on-a-knee.

[0] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...
All true, but glosses over a lot of nuance and wide variety of contexts, particularly B2B.

We’re likely going to switch to Cognito because maintaining OIDC auth has been a pretty big cost for a small company. IdP configurability in particular is painful both technically and in customer support.

One downside to Cognito/etc though is while they’ll handle the tech side (Okta notwithstanding), it’s still up to you to troubleshoot and configure and integrate correctly. Lots of opportunities to “solve” the security risks, but hurt customer and user experience in the process.
DeepSeek Develops Linux File-System for Better AI Training Inference Performance
OG Quora feels a lot like ChatGPT: some wierd mix of good info with a lot of garbage, all delivered with 100% confidence. The difference is ChatGPT still makes it relatively easy to ask a question and view the results.
Treating all wages as expenses seems fine to me. But have you noticed that large companies just stop growing at some point and it doesn't matter how much money you pour at them?

That is, unless they use the extra capital to buy legally-enforced monopolies, or bribe regulators out of their way.

And no, enshitification is a thing because people want those companies to grow and grow, and keep growing. Some times even after they have the majority of humanity as customers.
> Way more depression than anyone is aware is clinical depression.

I don't know what you wanted to say here. Clinical depression is typically used as an explicit emphasis to either emphasise that it is professionally diagnosed (as opposed to layman observations), or to emphasise that it is depression so bad it requires hospitalization (such as people who are so depressed they literally can't get out of bed for days on end).

But you seem to be using this term to mean "depression symptoms caused by other diseases"?
Buses are terrible because they get stuck in the traffic they're competing with. If the bus is the same speed as the cars, people are more likely to take a car.

This can be fixed - dedicated bus lanes mitigate this nicely - but doing so is politically unpopular. And frankly, if you have the political will then you should just build trains. They're more reliable, cheaper in the long run, and have higher capacity.

The main advantage of buses is that they're a great stopgap, and are good for niche/dynamic routes.
Attempts to eliminate this have even failed in solid blue states -- Prop 6 in California failed 53-47 last election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_California_Proposition_6
Yes, Obama also bears a lot of the blame for this. If US reacted properly back in 2014 (or at any later point before 2022), the 2022 invasion wouldn't have happened.
You don’t need acid for that. Just imagination. That was my first entertainment as a child.

But LSD and related psychedelics are uniquely able to help one reconnect with that part of themselves.
The poor have no money individually, but in aggregate they have some. $1 from a million poor people makes one millionaire.

IMO the main thing they extract from the working poor is time - what they're stealing is the excess value between their labor and the value is creates, and technology has made it easy to do this at a massive scale. So it's less $1 from each person, it's 8 hours per day from a million people makes 1 person a billionaire.
Sure, but for the purposes of decompilation, does it matter if a variable name is exact versus merely being a good description of its function? The issue isn’t an idealized “let’s get the source including meaningless whitespace”, it’s “let’s construct source that can be used interchangeably with the original”.

For that purpose there is no reason LLMs can’t be as good as the best humans.
For the past 3 years one of the top answer has always been advertising, rambling on about an absurd story with whacky characters.

Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.
Anyone grab a copy of the repos before jomanw set their account to private?
Its been a nice 25 years, Mozilla browser(s). So long, just another old guard leaving for new pastures here.
I don't know if anyone is really arguing for state enforced equality. Just that in a capitalist system money naturally accumulates at the top and slowly regresses into a socialist like centrally planned economy as fewer and fewer people have meaningful wealth to allocate. A little inequality is good because there's a reward mechanism for allocating resources better but a lot of inequality locks
up the economy. And the only thing to really do is tax it and recirculate it back to
the bottom.
Oh! Well sure SSRIs are over-prescribed and shouldn't be a "front line" treatment. I agree with that. That, to me, is a very different question.

What we call "depression" seems to be a complex bundle of brain mess. We group by symptom but unfortunately need to treat by cause and they are not 1:1. So SSRIs are a tool "we" have on a population level - but each individual depressed person is their own situation.

Remember that "better than a placebo" is a population-level measure. Individual people will find a SSRI helpful or hindering as they go. I think you are mixing...policy ("we shouldn't assume this works for everyone") with drug efficacy ("SSRIs don't help more than a sugar pill"). How each persons' depression works is different and up-regulating serotonin is helpful to some subset of people. We don't know why and it's not the whole population, but talking about them in this way is not helpful in my mind.
You can still pay for a master and print the vinyl yourself. A 10 track album might cost an extra £10 per track for a vinyl master, but each print of a record is 3x that.
There's tons of land on the east coast too, just far away from people and amenities. See: rural WV, PA, VA, etc.
I'm still hoping for something to come out of Servo.

I honestly think we need to shift our trusted computing base off of C/C++. There's no way a ragtag bunch of volunteers puts enough effort into security when every minor mistake is a disaster :-(
The assertion that America's wars cost us $30 trillion is not accurate. As of 2012, the national debt stood at approximately $16 trillion, with a significant portion resulting from domestic spending and the financial crisis, not solely military engagements. Our debt is not that large because of the wars, are they contributors of course, are they the long pole in the tent, not even close.

America is under no obligation to provide endless support to Ukraine. The notion that it's our duty to act as the world's arsenal is misguided. While assistance can be strategic, perpetually fueling a conflict without a clear path to peace is neither noble nor wise. It's time to prioritize diplomatic solutions over an indefinite cycle of military aid.
My take doesn't conform to HN leanings on this:

Zelensky messed up here. He and his country are a position of need. Ukraine needs the US, not the other way around. In that position, you don't walk into the Oval Office arms crossed, eyes rolling, head shaking with your demands. You come in with the understanding the US has given you over $300 billion in aid, the US is offering a minerals rights deal that benefits your country economically and binds the US and Ukraine closer economically, politically and most likely militarily (the US protects its interests abroad). Given that, you come in with a thankful attitude seeing that this deal is the beginning, not the end of the solution to your problems. It's a very good beginning.
You'll have disagreements with the President for sure. You air those out behind close doors, not in the house of your guests/benefactors for all the world to see. This is basic diplomacy.

This deal is very good for Ukraine. It's in Zelensky's court to salvage the damage he's caused. The Ukrainian people depend on it.
I think Austin, TX is just a great proof point for this over the past 5 or so years. We built a ton of housing over the past 5 years, and last I read rents have fallen 22% and house prices have also gone down considerably (though they were so insane during the pandemic I still think they've got a way to go).

I may consider myself liberal, but general housing policy by most liberal leaders has been a total disaster and should be recognized as such.