skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.

Can't tell whether you're serious or being sarcastic. A 10% conversion rate for a free product would be the most successful marketing campaign in history. Typical rates are in the low single digits, and that includes goods/services that people have no choice but to pay money for (eg. drop shipped goods from china or SaaS products).
Should be Positive / Neutral / Negative and anything beyond that described in text.

Reasoning: number ratings are subjective. My 4/5 is not the same as yours... or even the same as mine 2 years ago.
it is already pretty good and far better than svn, mercurial
> 1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent modern services from the private sector?

I couldn't even login to ssa.gov before it was integrated with login.gov. Every year or two I'd give it a shot, it told me my account was locked, I had to visit a Social Security office to get it unlocked. I tried that once; the local office wasn't able to help. Fast forward a few years and the login process has been delegated to login.gov. I was able to prove my identity in the normal way (asked a bunch of questions from my credit report) and finally login.

So let's start with: it works.

But it's at least as good as any SSO that I use elsewhere (Okta, Apple, Google). It supports multiple factors (security key, passkey, TOTP, etc), something that, e.g., Fidelity only barely offers.

Besides that, it's visually appealing, having a nice modern look.
Agreed in general that 10 and even 5 is too much, and that 4 is a good compromise. Though personally I prefer thumbs up and thumbs down, plus a separate starring option. The first two signify “would I recommend this to anyone else” while the latter means “this has something interesting I’d like to revisit at a later date”. Something losing its star rating is par for the course, but the recommendation status is less likely to change (though it can happen). And yes, it is possible to give something a thumbs down and favourite it, e.g. when you don’t think something is particularly good or competent but it still had something which you recognise as meaningful to yourself specifically.

I don’t think this system is right for everyone, but I like it. Depending on the platform I may even use a rating system of 1, which represents the starring and everything else is just read/watched.
Exactly what I was wondering... isn't this more regulatory capture by billionaires?
> Try bucketing clock time vs. blunders or castling analysis or opening vs. ELO on 1 billion PGNs

No one uses PGN for that. Strawmen are easy to defeat.

Heck, I can crush your example by simply using a proper binary format, fixed length records, and reading flat files directly into memory, all for about 1 hour of coding to transcode your format into something designed for analysis.

Better yet, compare your examples to any of the current best chess DB formats. They all support all your query examples a massively more. And are properly designed, tested and improved over decades of actual use, by professionals and researchers alike.

People have been doing billion+ chess game analyses for well over a decade. Chess.com added 1 billion games in Feb alone two years ago , they just passed 100 billion games total in Jan, they regularly run all sorts of analyses on all the games, and provide datasets and services to researchers for similar work.

It's hard to improve on what you do not understand. If you spent some time understanding the space you may be able to improve on it. Until then a lone wolf, unaware of what is in the space, will simply de-invent a worse wheel.
Completely agree, but if the right things align: low bullshit, good team, worthwhile work, compensation fair to effort and outcomes, 60 hours can be very manageable for a period.
Agreed, this should've been the Chromium mention instead of Brave (crypto, ads, that CEO...)
> This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.

What a wild take!

Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed:

"Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo

"Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/25/elon-mu...

And the latest from today:

"Some government employees are instructed — again — to not respond to 5 things email as Musk doubles down"

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/5-things-email-nati...
They're there. Looks like our search needs some improvement. We'll add a dedicated search results page too.

https://kaguya.io/books/pandemic-6
https://kaguya.io/books/the-rift-1
Imperialism and expansionism is often rooted in the idea that the peoples of different countries and their respective governments have different merit or value, and one should rule over the other.

Once you start talking about hierarchies among nations and ethnicities, you are starting to establish connections with other concepts that relate to one type of people being exceptional and entitled to rule over others: nationalism and racism.

Imperialism, nationalism and racism are deeply interconnected: if all peoples had similar value or merit there should be no need to change borders because what's outside your borders is similar to what's inside your borders.

The way imperialists talk by highlighting how exceptional your nation and people are or can be, and contrasting against other nations and peoples. And how expanding and ruling others would further improve things.
I'd also like to recommend https://literal.club/ as a Goodreads alternative.
Never rejoin under somebody that's already fired you. They are being forced to do it and will fire you again at the first chance.

Only go back if the management has changed. In this case, that means "If doge is gone".
I really wish they would do to Firefox what they did to Thunderbird, which is to spin it off into its own thing so it can stand independently. I want to support Firefox, but I do not feel comfortable donating to the Mozilla foundation.

Firefox should just do a Wikipedia style beg button once a year and be transparent on where the money is being spent.
Show HN: Coding for Nothing – The Ultimate Soundtrack for Tech Interviews
Hey HN,

I've been coding for decades, and over time, I've seen developer culture shift into an obsession with grinding LeetCode, doing random side projects for no real purpose, and engaging in pointless technical acrobatics just for the sake of it. So, I decided to channel that energy into Coding for Nothing, a satirical project that turns this absurdity into a parody music band for burnt-out devs.

What is Coding for Nothing?

It's a satirical website and project dedicated to capturing the surreal grind of modern developer life. Imagine a rock band, but instead of singing about love and rebellion, we belt out songs about CI/CD pipelines, AI taking your job, and the existential dread of yet another JavaScript framework. It's a musical and cultural critique wrapped in absurdity.

Why Did I Make This?

Burnout is real. Many of us have spent hours solving competitive coding problems that have little real-world application.

Tech interviews have turned into performance theater, rather than an actual measure of skills.

Side projects and open-source contributions are becoming the de facto requirement for employment, even if they have no practical utility.

I wanted to create something fun that resonates with devs who feel this grind but still love coding.

How to Try It Out

You can check out the site here: https://codingfornothing.com

We have quite a few tracks up already. You can listen without signing up or doing anything annoying.

If you're a musician and want to contribute, we welcome collaboration.

This is a satire, but it’s also a conversation starter. I’d love to hear from other devs, what’s the most absurd coding-related thing you’ve done just because it was "expected"?

Looking forward to your feedback!

By the way, everything on the website, including the content, music, and even most of this post was generated using AI tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, Suno, and DeepSeek, if you have a job for us, please let us know!.

The machines are coding (and rocking) for nothing too! Like and subscribe?
That hasn't stopped anyone yet, and even if it did, it will apply to all browsers.
> We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business

I would say that those 3 vaguely worded things pretty much cover them to use consumer data in any way they want.
The reason it's sad to me is because there is so much more to explore, to be stimulated by, to be able to apply in a way that makes you think out of the box.

Maybe a lot of people don't care about that, and I guess everybody has their threshold, where as long as they know the minimum required to do their job they can stay in that comfort zone typing the same commands over and over.
Yes, their rights have 2 parts in their paragraph:

1. The data processed described in the Privacy Notice,

2. A nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox.

The 2nd is not the data they talk about in the 1st (a.k.a the Privacy Notice). The data they describe in the Privacy Notice in the 1st are not the data they have "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" in the 2nd. Don't mix 2 or these together.
The funny but tragic thing is why would you even try to do it that way rather than skip past all this nonsense by building a new separate equitable system that is dictator-proof.

Why not literally leave them in the dust, rather than negotiate with terrorists or try to change their mind?

The more they try to push back, the more we'll fix it to be resilient to it, and despite the resources and threats at their disposal we have to realize we actually have more.
That's not necessary called corruption.

These veteran private vendors just happened to know the road leading to a signature vs new competitors who are still learning the ropes.

The more important piece here is that the government ends up not owning anything because it farms out everything to the private, including Government land, critical govt function.

If you think that everything will be done correctly and the critical function won't get abused well then um.... You're looking at things unfold in real time.

It's interesting that:

In the US, people want to protect themselves from the government.

In the EU, people want the government to protect them.

Very profound mindset that leads to the difference in attitudes.
I know of a company that missed its yearly Microsoft Exchange Online payment. After four month Microsoft cut of their email. Which one could argue is also a "public notice" because emails bounced. (That did the trick and the company paid immediately.)

You are telling me:

1. Microsoft should have tried to find a different way to contact and reach out.

2. That you would have moved your eMail/Groupware to someone else because of that.

To each their own.
I’d like to point out a difference.

Earthquake to marsquake is going from an inclusive term to a specific term of dubious utility.

Geolocation on other worlds is a misnomer and could be replaced by a more inclusive term.

I leave as an exercise to the reader the burden and value of any such change.
S3 isn't a spec. You'll never be 100% compatible with a third party product with ad hoc behavior. Companies do what they can as a migration aid, but at the edges there will always be bugs like this (which I'm gathering is really an issue with boto being inflexible about unexpected details and not so much "incompatible" behavior by GCS).

Again, this isn't an open source product. It's not like there's a universal agreement that coordination and compatibility are ideals to be respected, nor a public place for discussion and development. Google is trying to make GCS as S3 compatible as possible, but obviously they prioritize their paying customers (who seem not to have reported this issue). Amazon does not want GCS to be boto-compatible at all, really.
Is efficiency of the company the wrong metric in this case? Wouldn’t we rather have a market and prices reflect what it can bare rather than an open tab?
> You keep them accountable by calling them out in public

This is performative. Mozilla is accountable to a small circle of donors, and they mostly see Firefox as a monetisation vector.
Current guidance from the SSA login flow is to not use Login.gov if you already have an ID.me account. Identity provider transitions are fraught with peril, and I hesitate to provide guidance that potentially locks you out of the SSA website without any recourse or customer service. Therefore, for the time being, my guidance is to keep using your ID.me idp and login until an official update is provided. I will take a note to provide an update if updated guidance becomes available to me through any channel.
What Game Is Jeff Bezos Playing?
https://archive.is/bQg7q
Hah, okay well let's see where this goes!

I do actually support capitalism, though my opinion is that I only really support it in theory and that the few decades I've been alive have had too much market intervention to really be considered capitalism.

I generally would trust a free market to optimize well enough, much like I would trust "the mob" in a democracy to decide its own fate well enough.

I fall very must on the side of individual liberty. That means people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't impede other's rights to do the same. It also means, though, trusting that the outcome of such a system is going to be roughly optimized and should nearly always be better than a centrally planned solution.

In the context of housing prices, neighborhoods or cities rising and falling, etc I see that as a good thing and as a sign that markets are reflecting general sentiment among consumers. We learn from why we think one market is now more favorable and respond by shifting other markets to better match that demand.

Where Adam Smith really loses me is in monetary policy. Arguments of a world before money looking like someone with bread and in need of chicken wandering around to find someone with chicken and needing bread is just ridiculous. Societies without money, or with a very loose concept of money, were likely to be much smaller groups of people (think the Dunbar number) that worked to take care of each other. You may have had someone that made bread for the community and you just went and got some when you needed it. Everything didn't revolve around IOU transactions among unfamiliar parties because you were familiar. Money is way Kore useful as a medium when you don't really know or don't really trust the other party.
My kids are both girls. If I had boys I'd be really concerned about the lack of positive role models. You have... what exactly? Andrew Tate? Elon Musk? I'd take 2012 Elon Musk as a role model, not so much 2020s Elon Musk. Most of the men out there who are well known, might pose as role models, and would appeal to the kids are radiating this kind of fragile fake masculinity and behave like dumb thirteen year old boys or shock jocks. Following them is a great way to make oneself utterly repulsive to women, and unemployable in a lot of areas.

I'm sure I could look around, but the problem is that whatever I'd find probably wouldn't appeal to the kids. There seem to be at least positive-ish female role models with appeals to young people, and a variety of them with a variety of viewpoints and that model a variety of life paths. I don't see that with male ones.
Does converting to HTML first and then to PDF help?
Rumors said that GPT4.5 is an order of magnitude larger. Around 12 trillion parameters total (compared to GPT4's 1.2 trillion). It's almost certainly MoE as well, just a scaled up version. That would explain the cost. OpenAI also said that this is what they originally developed as "Omni" - the model supposed to succeed GPT4 but which fell behind expectations. So they renamed it 4.5 and shoehorned it in to remain in the news among all those competitor releases.
There's definitely software roles in european Defence industries. The SAAB Gripen is basically a huge amounts of embedded systems strapped on a Mach 2 jet engine with wings.

Same goes for the SAAB Kockums submarines. Not to mention the radar systems.

But you would need to be a citizen to get security clearance.
And vast. IME, people often underestimate what it can do. For example, if you need to store IP addresses in a DB, you can use the stdlib library ipaddress to validate them, then store them as an INT, casting it back to dotted-quad with Python if needed.

Also, of course, Postgres has a native inet type, which performs validation and other operations, storing a v4 in 7 bytes – not quite as good as 4 bytes for an INT, but much better than the maximum 16 bytes to store a dotted-quad as a VARCHAR. But if you’ve got MySQL (or anything else without a native type), this is a solid way to save space – and more importantly, memory – that can add up over hundreds of millions of rows (session information for a large SaaS product, for example).
Of course if you route everything through the public internet layer, you are not doing anything good to your business security measures. That shouln't be a considered option, not even the last one in the list.

You can use a Direct Connect [1] option if you want a dedicated connection between your data center and AWS. Its more secure, but more hard-to-maintain and a bit more costly than VPN option.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-vpc-conne...
Yeah thanks, actually I've left Linux for Mac OS, and while I do have Linux (and Windows) notebooks for specific needs I have no plans to return to it as my main machine. The reason is simply that I couldn't stand witnessing mainstream Linux desktop regressing into dysfunctionality for me (as in causing physical pain), and I'm sick of developers fetishizing de-facto proprietary containers, programming languages, system frameworks, or ideologies instead of creating apps I would actually want to use.
Thanks for explaining this so clearly!
I'm going to try this next time :)
> but not sure if closed source is viable

The evidence points in the exact opposite direction.

Open source implies free. And free means getting fucked with ads. I trust a product I pay for versus one reliant on getting bailed out by Google.
Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office
Does anyone use Fossil source control? I've always been interested by it, but it just seems to stay under the radar. I'm curious if there's a functional reason for that, or if github just got to be good enough.
What are you even talking about?

I've never saw anyone claim that doing UB in Rust is okay because its wrapped in an unsafe block?

If anything I've saw the exact opposite of this, cases of UB in libraries is considered a bug almost always, vs in C or C++ where "its the users fault for doing the thing wrong".

I notice you spreading an awful lot of bs about rust lately, not sure what the deal is but its pretty childish and lame, not to mention objectively wrong.
alabastervlog says "Many actions the administration has taken are illegal. "

Not to pick on albastervlog specifically but HN is filling with posts like the one above, stating "this is illegal, that is illegal", posted by non-lawyers who have no idea whatsoever what is, and what is not, truly illegal.

Why state something is illegal when the statement is false or ambiguous at best? What does it contribute?

Why not instead state the simpler truth: "I don't like that!" or "I disagree with that!" and then get on with the rest of an argument?

This forum is losing relevance b/c posters have

- forgotten about manners and

- forgotten about the logical fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
This is the same gotcha as "If you like government so much why don't YOU pay more taxes?"

Nobody refuses free government help even if they hate the government, just as no one pays extra taxes even if they love the government. The point is always to distribute their belief more widely so that everyone has to live with it.
for me there are 3 levels:

- books i wish i hadn't lost time with

- books i've read and were probably ok

- books i would give/recommend
The uniparty is absolutely real, but it can be defeated through the exercise of democratic power. To be clear, I don't mean voting. Voting is the thing you do at the end of the democratic process once your power is asserted and coordinated decision-making needs to be done.

What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1].

The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy.

You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages.

Here's some examples of how that could work:

- Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

- Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit.

- Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle.

- If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds.

What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can.

[0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends.

[1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord.

[2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running.

[3] "Working class but in denial about it"
This is how pricing on human labour works. Nobody expects an employee that costs twice as much to produce twice the output for any given task. All that is expected is that they can do a narrow set of things, that another person can't.
In theory I guess, but hasn’t all this gov spending essentially been hidden? If doge finding are true? (And in which now I guess it is public)
Good point, but presently I feel like nothing is safe.