MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thmsths | 2025-04-24 15:58:13+00:00
That's an interesting tidbit. Every time there is a suggestion we switch to reusable glass bottles instead of plastic, someone raises the issue of the extra weight of the bottle which will lead to greater carbon emissions during transport.

But if, as you say the largest emission comes from manufacturing the plastic bottle, not the transport of the bottle AND the content; then it seems possible to lower the carbon footprint by switching to glass (on top of the other advantages like reducing landfill use/litterring/environmental pollution).
by kijin | 2025-04-24 15:58:42+00:00
Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.

There's no point in asking first, whether employers should be loyal to their employers or vice versa. The important question is whether they are good to one another. If they are, you might also find loyalty among them, but that's not where the focus should be.

Someone who gets obsessed with loyalty too much, I think, is likely to have sinister intentions. They probably want you to be loyal to them but don't plan on being good to you.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-24 15:58:46+00:00
In the process of finding out what customers or a PM/PO wants, developers ask clarifying questions given an ambiguous start. An AI could be made to also ask these questions. It may do this reasonably better than some engineers by having access to a ton of questions in its training data.

By using an AI, you might be making a reasonable guess that your problem has been solved before, but maybe not the exact details. This is true for a lot of technical tasks as I don't need to reinvent database access from first principles for every project. I google ORMs or something in my particular language and consider the options.

Even if the AI doesn't give you a direct solution, it's still a prompt for your brain as if you were in a conversation.
by creata | 2025-04-24 15:59:35+00:00
It doesn't diminish most of your points, but getting PyTorch to work on Arch Linux is as easy as installing the `python-pytorch-opt-rocm` package. Similar with Ollama: `ollama-rocm`. So if you just want to use PyTorch, and don't need the very latest version, I wouldn't say the dev experience with Nvidia is much better.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-04-24 15:59:38+00:00
As a Brit, the concept of "My lawyer" is slightly unfamiliar. The average Brit doesn't "have a lawyer"; they would only find a lawyer if they had a specific need, eg being accused of a crime or wanting to write a contract etc.

And yet as far as I can tell, most middle class Americans seem to refer to "their lawyer". Do you pay a monthly fee? Are they a criminal defence lawyer, or something broader? How often do you talk to them? How do you find them?
by drcongo | 2025-04-24 15:59:46+00:00
stavros is one of my favourite posters on HN, and the writing on his site is full of beautiful turns of phrase like that.

> The Timeframe is a beautiful, battery-powered, high-resolution e-ink device that sits on my desk and reminds me of the inexorable grind that saps my creativity and drains me of the will to live.

From https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

edit: Ever since I read the Timeframe article I've been itching to do the same thing myself, but I suck at these things so worry that I'm just going to end up with more piles of electronic parts in my cupboard of broken dreams.
by bdcravens | 2025-04-24 16:00:00+00:00
Most of the 3D printing model repositories offer financial incentives for model creators, as they are usually owned by manufacturers who want to own as much of the ecosystem as possible. (Makerworld, Printables, etc)

Widespread AI generation obviously enables abuse of those incentives, so it'll be interesting to see how they adjust to this. (It's already a small problem, with modelers using AI renderings that are deceptive in terms of quality)
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 16:00:01+00:00
That Samsung exec that died suddenly recently at 63 from cardiac arrest[0]?

You wonder: yeah, this guy made a fortune, but did he get to enjoy his life? If he had just stepped back and said, "I'm going to take a break and take it easy" on his 60th, would he still be alive?

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/24/tech/samsung-co-ceo-han-jong-...
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-24 16:00:03+00:00
>You shouldn’t bet your life that a mega-corp has absolute and utter loyalty to you.

But your mega corp doesn't have loyalty to you. They have loyalty to their shareholders, and you are a means to that end. The shareholders are the spouse, and you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present. If a little flattery gets them a better price, then they flatter. If their spouse's interests change, you'll never see them again.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-24 16:00:42+00:00
> $20 “developer edition” license which “unlocks their API”. I expected this upgrade to give me API access so I could retrieve the image that’s displayed of my device, but that’s not actually the case, and you need a $50 “virtual device” license for that.

I cannot find a mention of the developer edition. I own a TRMNL and use the api for free (I assume because I have a device) and then they offer a lifetime $50 license to use their backend with your own device. I think that's fair.

Also, I don't quite understand their back ordering information. I ordered mine and got it less than a week later even though they said it was back ordered.
by scumola | 2025-04-24 16:00:54+00:00
Things like "What is today's date" used to be enough (would usually return the date that the model was trained).

I recently did things like current events, but LLMs that can search the internet can do those now. i.e. Is the pope alive or dead?

Nowadays, multi-step reasoning is the key, but the Chinese LLM (I forget the name of it) can do that pretty well. Multi-step reasoning is much better at doing algebra or simple math, so questions like "what is bigger, 5.11 or 5.5?"
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-24 16:01:04+00:00
Very interesting.

NATS is really a great platform but I was always had my reservations regarding its viability as an open source project.

The end of the era of abundance in tech is really having an impact on open source.

The problem here is while one would obviously side with the CNCF taking action and fighting for the trademark, it doesn't really matter at the end. Either there are people willing to maintain the code or it will die as an open source project.
by tholdem | 2025-04-24 16:01:36+00:00
Sandboxing should be built in and by default, not DIY and glued on, like with apparmor and firejail.

"Your car does not come with a seatbelt? Seatbelt parts are easy to order online and assembled on any car, it's your fault for not using one."

> Also the very same npm backdoors have already hit android apps. What can sandboxing do if you backdoor a dependency of your banking app?

The whole point of sandboxing is that one compromised app can not compromise the whole system and other apps. Compromised dependency on my banking app on Android or iOS only compromises that banking app and nothing else.
by rancar2 | 2025-04-24 16:01:45+00:00
Thanks for sharing this update with the world and including it on the local ui too.

Feature request: enable the tuning of when Instant SQL is run and displayed. The erroring out with flashing updates at nearly every keystoke while expanding on a query is distracting for me personally (my brain goes into troubleshooting vs thinking mode). I like the feature (so I will keep it on by default), but I’d like to have a few modes for it depending on my working context (specifically tuning of update frequency at separation characters [space, comma], end of statement [semicolon/newline], and injections [paste/autocomplete]).
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-24 16:01:48+00:00
Project Managers will tell you that "getting to a place" is the goal

Then you get to the place and they say "now load all of the things in the garage into the truck"

But oops. You didn't bring a truck, because all they told you was "please be at this address at this time", with no mention of needing a truck

My point is that the purpose of commercial programming is not usually just to get to the goal

Often the purpose of commercial programming is to create a foundation that can be extended to meet other goals later, that you may not even be remotely aware of right now

If your foundation is a vibe coded mess that no one understands, you are going to wind up screwed

And yes, part of being a good programmer includes being aware of this
by rcMgD2BwE72F | 2025-04-24 16:02:51+00:00
>Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".

With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."
by Thoreandan | 2025-04-24 16:03:10+00:00
I'd always wanted to see a physical copy of the $5,000.00 'Deluxe Distribution' -

https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_23....

> The FSF Deluxe Distribution contains the binaries and sources to hundreds of different programs including GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger, the complete MIT X Window System, and the GNU utilities.

> You may choose one of these machines and operating systems: HP 9000 series 200, 300, 700, or 800 (4.3 BSD or HP-UX); RS/6000 (AIX); Sony NEWS 68k (4.3 BSD or NewsOS 4); Sun 3, 4, or SPARC (SunOS 4 or Solaris). If your machine or system is not listed, or if a specific program has not been ported to that machine, please call the FSF office at the phone number below or send e-mail to gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu.

> The manuals included are one each of the Bison, Calc, Gawk, GNU C Compiler, GNU C Library, GNU Debugger, Flex, GNU Emacs Lisp Reference, Make, Texinfo, and Termcap manuals; six copies of the manual for GNU Emacs; and a packet of reference cards each for GNU Emacs, Calc, the GNU Debugger, Bison, and Flex.

> In addition to the printed and on-line documentation, every Deluxe Distribution includes a CD-ROM (in ISO 9660 format with Rock Ridge extensions) that contains sources of our software.

I wonder how many (if any?) were sold, it'd be an excellent museum piece.
by CrimsonRain | 2025-04-24 16:03:14+00:00
You are just bad with prompting or working with very obscure language/framework or bad coding pattern or all of it. I had a talk with a seasoned engineer who has been coding for 50 years and has created many amazing things over lifetime about him having really bad results with AI tools I suggested for him. When I use AI for the same purposes in the same repo he's working on, it works nicely. When he does it, results are always not what he wants. It comes down to a combination of him not understanding how to guide the LLMs to correct direction and using a language/framework (he's not familiar with) he can't judge the LLMs output. It is really important to know what you want, be able to describe it in short points (but important points). Points that you know ai will mess up if you don't specify. And also be able to figure out which direction the ai is heading with the solution and correct it EARLY rather than later. Not overloading context/memory with unnecessary things. Focusing on key areas to improve and much more. I'm using AI to get solutions done that I can definitely do myself but it'll take a certain amount of time to hunt down all documentation, API/lib calls etc. With AI, 1/10th time is enough.

I've had massive success with java, js/TS, html css, go, rust, python, bitbucket pipelines/GitHub actions, cdk, docker compose, SQL, flutter/dart, swift etc.
by gen220 | 2025-04-24 16:03:23+00:00
I think you and the person you're replying to agree.

We won't get a New Deal Coalition Part 2 without our own Dust Bowl (climate-change/industrial-agronomy-induced disasters, and the massive disruption to peoples way of lives that accompanied it) and Great Depression to conclusively demonstrate that industrialized, financialized oligarchy "doesn't work".

The two-party system was just as much captured by "free market" idolatry pre-FDR as they are today. There was nearly three decades of socialistic organizing in response to crisis in the 1890s-1920s before we finally had those principles manifest in one of the two major political parties in the executive branch, with FDR in 1932.

We're barely into the nascency of our own century's progressive era. If history's any guide, it'll probably take decades and it will get much, much worse before it gets better. :/

I re-read Grapes of Wrath recently, and it was an uncanny feeling: like I was reading something that was both near-future Sci-Fi and a memory-holed but relatively-recent history.
by AndroidMTK | 2025-04-24 16:03:25+00:00
Para poder desbloquear el bootloader de los teléfonos móviles y tabletas Motorola primero debemos dirigirnos a la pagina web oficial del soporte, sección Unlocking the Bootloader Motorola (enlace directo) y seguidamente nos desplazamos hasta el final de la página para hacer clic en «PROCEED ANYWAY» e iniciar sesión con nuestra ID de Motorola, google o facebook.
by JamesLeonis | 2025-04-24 16:03:49+00:00
> The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.

I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.

Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...

[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...

[3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...
by kstrauser | 2025-04-24 16:04:18+00:00
Hey, it's my day to be the Mastodon Guy! But for real, small, federated social media is so freaking pleasant compared to Facebook and friends. No, the kid from my 8th grade soccer team isn't on it, nor is my next door neighbor, or my kid's nanny from 3 moves ago, but that's fine. Sure, I wish more of the authors I like to follow were on there, and it's not a great way to call out megacorp support teams when something breaks horribly, but I'm completely OK with that tradeoff.

What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated.

I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish. That doesn't mean all social media is dead.

[0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do. That's the way it should be.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 16:04:26+00:00
> but any sort of career pause, especially in this environment, seems to be a huge risk.

My experience is on the contrary. My largest gains in income have always come after a break. I'm making 2x what I made in 2020 after taking almost a year off to work on some side projects and startups (a YC submission)[0]. Then in 2023, decided to take another 8 months off to work on other side projects[1]

But I also used those times to make the things I wanted to make; what I learned along the way is that oftentimes the biggest barrier to getting a better offer is actually the lack of free time and patience. If you can create time for yourself and put that time to good use, you will come out of it better for it as long as you apply that time productively.

I've always guided junior engineers I've worked with to save as much as they can because that is what will give them opportunity and freedom. You need to be able to have free time to cram leetcode, for example, or build up a portfolio, or wait out bad offers.

[0] https://www.thinktastic.com/#/

[1] https://turas.app (I had to get this one out of my system and a partner and I tried to see if we could make this one sustainable)
by rsynnott | 2025-04-24 16:04:32+00:00
You can only promise people self-driving cars and Mars and so on, while actually giving them a somewhat worse Twitter and breaking the government, before they eventually get sick of you, I suppose.

Like, I'm sure there are still die-hard Musk superfans out there, but you've got to imagine that a lot of his followers eventually became disillusioned.

I've noticed this happening on HN with other stuff to some extent; way back in the day HN was one of the most Bitcoin-enthusiastic places out there, but that tide eventually turned. Same for NFTs. Arguably you can now see it starting to happen for AI.
by kermatt | 2025-04-24 16:05:16+00:00
The term loyalty is dangerous for an employee.

Having seen companies of all sizes lay people off for the exact same reason - Returns did not match expectations - my personal perspective is to treat all employers the same.

No company with a balance sheet is loyal to employees. Keeping that idea in mind, and thus on an equal perspective, is healthy for both sides. "It's just business" is good advice and not just in movies.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-24 16:05:28+00:00
Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?

It's always been this way, more or less.

If you look back at the ultra-wealthy in any age, you'll find just these sorts of people. It's in 20th-century literature. It's in classic literature. It's in the Bible. It's probably in ancient Greek literature, but I'm not well-versed there.

At least in the early part of the last century, there was some hope. A number of ultra-wealthy people decided that instead of building a faster steam engine or racing to pump more oil, they'd engage in benefiting society as an alternative penis-measuring contest.

They were happy to pour the equivalent of today's billions into projects like paying artists to spend 30 years documenting the fading culture of the American Indian, or funding scientific expeditions to improve our understanding of ancient history.

Today's billionaires are, instead, trying to one-up each other on getting 12-year-old girls addicted to their apps.

Yay, progress.
by jais32 | 2025-04-24 16:05:41+00:00
I wrote a blog post on scaling our chat infrastructure! Review my code because no one on our team had time to

Just kidding but if you’re building real-time communication tools, especially in healthcare, this post breaks down the architectural decisions, bugs we had to fix, and lessons learned along the way.

And if you’re an engineer who wants to work on meaningful problems with a tight-knit, mission-driven team, we’re hiring!
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-04-24 16:06:45+00:00
This is also upper-bounded by the law; Ohio only issues one class D-5 liquor license (license to sell beer, wine, and spirits) per 2000 residents, which roughly maxes it out at ~5950 bars (in practice this looks to be rounded up on a per-town basis, making this an underestimate). An Ohio with the population of South Korea would only be allowed ~25000 bars.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-04-24 16:06:58+00:00
I worked at a FAANG company that was not Meta. I'm not going to defend everything they did, but the culture was set up in such a way that people at all levels of the organization considered how their decisions would impact customers, and they had some sense of obligation to question harmful decisions.

Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
by hshshshshsh | 2025-04-24 16:07:14+00:00
This is one of the things that make me suspect we live in a simulation or something.

Companies are legal entities. They don't even have an existence but a lot of people live just to work for random legal entity and cherish the accomplishments. They care more about the legal entity than their own life.

And the stuff in LinkedIn. Either there is mass Psychosis going or a lot of people are philosophical zombies.
by stevetron | 2025-04-24 16:07:46+00:00
In the US, the way milk is sold, is that larger amounts cost less. In other words, the 1/2-gallon container, buy two of those, and it costs significantly more than a single 1-gallon container. It gets even worse for quarts. But I seldom buy in the 1-gallon container as it will generally spoil before I've used it all, so there isn't any savings there for me.
by _mlbt | 2025-04-24 16:08:21+00:00
Other than politics why would you believe any other scenario to be more likely than the lab leak hypothesis at this point? It’s far too much of a coincidence that patient zero was in such close proximity to the WIV that studies and researches viruses exactly like COVID-19. The actions of the CCP and those aligned with their interests just further cements the likelihood of this hypothesis.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-24 16:08:50+00:00
> and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years

It didn't, though. Like, as the site you linked says, you're talking about a shift of on the order of 5%, and it's largely a reversal of a slightly smaller shift in the other direction 4 years ago. That's pretty much noise, and you wouldn't expect it to make a substantial difference on this site.
by josefritzishere | 2025-04-24 16:09:08+00:00
In America, if something makes money our government will do backflips trying to engineer it into legality. The same companies that profit by these means donate to policy-making lobbies, PACs, and directly to politicians, legally, despite the obvious conflict of interest. There is also almost no barrier between being a lobbyist and government employment. In most arenas it presents as corruption and profiteering. But in our failures on gun control and policing... the consequences are fatal. (spelling)
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-24 16:09:12+00:00
20% of farmers are big enough to skip the wholesalers and sell internationally. The other 80% sell to local wholesalers to sell internationally. And even though most wheat et al is consumed in the US, a significant amount is exported. A small drop in demand can have a massive impact on price.

"100 supply, 101 demand: price goes up. 100 supply, 99 demand: price goes down."
by xmprt | 2025-04-24 16:09:41+00:00
> You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric

I think this isn't true. The same way suburbia spread out from cities, I think walkability can spread outwards too in baby steps.

For example, SF is relatively walkable/has public transit. The next step would be slowly removing parking minimums and making the areas surrounding SF more walkable. And then over time as people in those surrounding areas start using their cars less (not getting rid of them but at least trying to do short journeys on foot/bike/transit).

Over time that spreads outwards because half the community served by an area no longer needs a car for their daily travel and the envelope of walkability spreads further.