MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gerdesj | 2025-05-01 21:58:33+00:00
Norks has at least two meanings in en_GB. North Koreans and (generally) female breasts. The first has a pretty obvious derivation and the second is anyone's guess.

Surely no-one would conflate norks with norks. Please, no riffing on the sheer size of the Dear Leader's ... errm ... norks.

Now, how about "nack", "nark", "nick", "nock", "neck", "nerk" and "nuck"? I know they are all valid en_GB words, except nuck but I'll bet it is in use somewhere. Slap a k on the front for more fulsome larkery.

Hopefully that has cleared that up.

(edit: add some more n..k words and a note about a leading k)
by gotimo | 2025-05-01 21:58:53+00:00
...Apple makes revenue on the devices? On any monthly subscriptions you take with them? On the developers paying for licenses?

And let's not act as if people would use iOS if they couldn't have their apps. It is so much of a net gain to Apple to allow people to develop their apps there's a good chance it's indirectly profitable without any direct revenue from IAP's.
by noone_youknow | 2025-05-01 21:59:07+00:00
Another great article! I always enjoy reading these.

That additional type ‘a’ register, supporting copying directly from the type ‘b’, is intriguing. I can well imagine the article to be correct that it’s a place to stash ESP during interrupt stack setup, specifically if there’s a privilege transition since I would think it’d be easier from an implementation point of view to “simply” copy ESP to that special register, load the new ESP from the TSS, and then stack that special register after stacking SS using the usual stacking logic.

Though of course that then raises the question of how SS itself is handled, since something similar would be needed there I think.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-01 21:59:15+00:00
> It doesn’t mention for example, that those scientists who immediately changed their views concurrently received millions of dollars in new grants

Would you have preferred that they have their grant applications cancelled after having published a paper?

Let's dig in a little bit to the weasel words here.

========

> Fauci "prompted" authors of the influential Proximal Origin paper

Here's the source email that mentions this nefarious "prompting":

> There has been a lot of speculation, fear mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space and we thought that bringing some clarity to this discussion might be of interest to Nature [sic]. Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus.

What a smoking gun! Err... I guess not...

=====

> worked with NIH leadership to “put down” the lab-leak hypothesis

This refers to Francis Collins asking Fauci whether there was more that could kill momentum behind the competing theory. It's important to note this momentum was driven primarily by media attention and not growing scientific consensus or any new scientific evidence.

That is entirely consistent with someone who does not want what they see as an incorrect explanation to become the public's consensus view (especially when concerned about the possible ramifications of that consensus forming without sufficient evidence).

This happened after Fauci had "prompted [a team] to work through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus."

Fauci's response: "I would not do anything about this right now."

====

Again: No one prevented any scientist from publishing their competing theories. They may have had a hard time getting taken seriously, they may have not been accepted to Nature, they may have been called a quack: but that is often what it means to go up against the consensus view.

That is not censorship. That is the imperfect system of science as it always works in every domain.
by echelon | 2025-05-01 21:59:20+00:00
This keeps happening:

1. People put a lot of work into building databases. The license choice is OSS / FOSS.

2. Some people in the community (original authors, community leads) make a company around the database and continue developing it for years on end. They sometimes raise venture capital to expand the business.

3. Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily millions in revenue. Original creator / company doesn't get anything, and the hyperscaler isn't obliged to pay.

4. The company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee.

5. Amazon / Google / Microsoft fork the database. The community revolts. Sometimes the people revolting are employees of the hyperscalers, other times these are just FOSS fans that hate "source available" licenses or relicensing.

6. Database company is forced to walk back the changes. Still no revenue.

---

The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.

Basically your license needs one of a few things if you want to prevent Amazon from walking off with your money:

- A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright.

- A MAU / ARR clause such that hyperscalers are in the blast radius. Note that this also hits your customers.
by whazor | 2025-05-01 21:59:49+00:00
I have personally followed the same strategy, but at the expense of my ‘career development’. Trying to perform well or getting a promotion can be a lot of unproductive effort.

I think the only downside of 100% uniformity is that you don’t hire and train junior engineers, which should also be like a duty. While you could pay juniors the exact same salary, this might give that person a lot of stress (“ concerned that they aren’t doing enough“). One solution could be to offer traineeships, where the you offer actual coaching for a fixed duration. While clear goals like: finishing first small task, first doc, led first initiative. Then automatically completing after one or two years.
by parrit | 2025-05-01 21:59:51+00:00
That's the point. "$175k is good enough for me" doesn't mean much, especially as they also have a large stake in the company (not an assumption) as well as possibly other advantages (or not, they dont divulge).

Don't get me wrong. Rethinking comp is great and they are paying well. But you can't make the argument that X is enough for founders (plus let's forget equity!!) and so X is generous for everyone.
by bloomca | 2025-05-01 21:59:57+00:00
It's possible, but you need to be very social. Basically you do group activities every few weeks, some people are friends but live further so you meet them rarely, and some friends either need to live very close to you or share some activities (kids clubs, maybe some fitness activity, maybe work, etc).

My sister has 10+ friends she actively maintains. I have 2 :)
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-01 22:00:05+00:00
"They also let you get quite close to them… less than a foot away in some cases."

That happened to me some years ago in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, two remarkable pictures particularly come to mind Vermeer's The Milkmaid and a Rembrandt self portrait.

The Milkmaid is comparatively small painting (~18×16" according to Wiki) and I was not only able to view it up incredibly close and in detail but also it was a quiet time for visitors and I had the painting all to myself. I stared at it for minutes in a strange state of amazement brought on by not only how wonderful this Vermeer masterpiece was and that I was looking at it for real and it wasn't a dream but also that I could get so close and do so for so long given the work is worth many, many millions, it's effectively priceless. My experience was even more remarkable given that I was visiting the museum just after Rembrandt's The Night Watch had been repaired, restored and put back on display after a maniac had slashed it with a knife.

The other painting was a Rembrandt self portrait, it was in an alcove all on its own. Again, I had this truly remarkable painting all to myself to view close up. It was an incredible experience, with Rembrandt's eyes staring directly at me it felt as if he was talking to me. It shocked me that a painting that is over 350 years old and painted by someone many generations removed from today could generate such a large emotional response in me.

I consider that particular visit to the Rijksmuseum (I've been there a number of times) as one of the most memorable experiences of my life and I consider it a great privilege that the museum provided me the opportunity to see these remarkable works up close and in depth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)
by latexr | 2025-05-01 22:00:19+00:00
Your comment appears to assume, wrongly, that saying zero is the same as rejecting, rebuking, denying, and/or misunderstanding the technology. It’s not. The world isn’t black and white and coding isn’t just about money or having a job, people do have other values.

Furthermore, there is a sleuth of interesting coding problems outside of boilerplate that LLMs embarrassingly continue to suck at. Programming isn’t all JavaScript and Python libraries (not throwing any shade on those languages, it’s merely an example).
by cyanydeez | 2025-05-01 22:00:21+00:00
The only trade deficits that matter are ones that create security dependency. Biden recognized that at the tail end of COVID and that's why they onshored chip manufacturing because so much modern tech needs chips.

In world wars, America never wanted to stop being militarily capable so they spend almost a trillion ensuring there's no deficits of the ability to wage war.

No one in government prior to trump was operating under the idea that all deficits are ok. Strategic deficits are bad. Now all deficits are bad, which is not the case, at all.

America would not suffer any reasonable damage having a coffee bean deficit. Or a tea deficit. Or beer deficit.

The terms of the current regimes debate is simply trying to use the word tariff in place of national sales tax and corrupting it as a Nazi isolationism tool.
by alganet | 2025-05-01 22:00:24+00:00
Are we doing "who's the most oppressive?".

These kinds of arguments always end up in some sort of historic "who is the baddest baddie".

Thanks Russia and USA. It's all about you two. All roads lead to the cold war.

Current wars and small state sovereignty? How hilarious. Just mere fading pages in the big book to serve as examples of oppression.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-05-01 22:00:29+00:00
BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, Yevgeny Prigozhin... it is a pretty long list. Even your boy heavily implies what he is okay doing with his own rhetoric, to say nothing for what his proxies (like Lavrov and Dugin) say.

I imagine you see cruise missiles hitting childrens hospitals and say, "false flag". I hope you're a paid propagandist and not an honest believer that Russia is somehow right here.
by carstenhag | 2025-05-01 22:00:36+00:00
I understand that currently (and maybe because you are "only" 75 employees) it feels fair for everyone, or people are even feeling bad about it. Also it sets the bar high when hiring someone, I get that.

But what if in a year or two a person is not so great anymore? Just by my own past work experience at 2-3 companies, there were always some colleagues that were definitely not good at their job (and this was pretty much common knowledge, multiple people had the same opinion). Maybe they were good at the beginning, or not even then. I would have felt it to be super unfair for them to get the same money, or the same salary bump as me.
by joeismailyan | 2025-05-01 22:00:37+00:00
Depends on the task. I use AI for planning/figuring out how to implement stuff. Probably 80% is with AI to bounce ideas off and figure things out.

Writing the code, probably 30% is with AI. Our product requires a lot of context for AI to get stuff right so it's challenging to get it to write good, working code. If it's a small thing that doesn't require a lot of context then I use AI.

I use various tools for this, let me know your needs and I can provide recommendations.
by davb | 2025-05-01 22:01:46+00:00
Related, I found that even after designating an application (iTerm2) as a "Developer Tool" in System Settings -> Privacy & Security, there were circumstances where notarisation checks were still carried out. Particularly, launching tmux then detaching and reattaching would cause the processes to no longer be exempt. This applies to any executable (+x), including shell scripts. I put together a test script that proves it at https://gist.github.com/davebarkerxyz/4111276ae1fb4a7566b271... (the second run is much quicker than the first one after a tmux reattach, but within applications marked as Developer Tools the times should be nearly identical).

Fortunately as of Sequoia (15.4.1), I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue.
by commandlinefan | 2025-05-01 22:01:49+00:00
What Apple offers that nobody else seems to is _consumer-friendly_ high-end hardware. I've been given company-issued Dell laptops (for example) that zipped along beautifully, even with Windows installed. When I asked the IT department where they bought them so I could buy one myself, they weren't even sure where they came from. I'm sure they cost the same as a high-end macbook (and performed comparably) but apparently you have to be a multinational conglomerate in order to procure one.
by sgarland | 2025-05-01 22:03:12+00:00
Didn’t have to, prod benchmarked it for us, twice.

If you’re curious, the EBS disks Aurora uses for temporary storage, when faced with a QD of approximately 240, can manage approximately 5000 IOPS. This was an r6i.32xlarge.

My hypothesis is currently that the massive context switching the CPU had to do to handle the interrupts slowed down its acceptance of new connections / processing other queries enough such that everything piled up. I’ve no idea what kind of core pinning / isolation AWS does under the hood, but CPU utilization from disk I/O alone, according to Enhanced Monitoring, was about 20%.
by sparky_z | 2025-05-01 22:03:24+00:00
I'd rather not put even more of the economy under even stricter control of the federal government just now, with so much chaos afoot. Giving state governments even less room to maneuver to weather whatever comes next doesn't seem wise to me. Especially when (as you seem to implicitly agree?) there's not much of a current problem that needs solving, but you just feel like we should anyway because why not?
by blibble | 2025-05-01 22:03:28+00:00
the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers

which is sort of funny because the term "Open Source" was itself coined to make it possible for people to seek funding to build companies based on the (crazy?) idea of producing software, then giving away its source code

20 years later, the structure of the industry has now changed, and now "Open Source" exists to feed Amazon, Microsoft and Google

if it's not possible to alter the definition to include licenses that include terms that allow sustainable value creation for businesses other than the hyperscalers, then the term is no longer fit for purpose, and we need a new one

"Fair Software"?
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-01 22:03:41+00:00
I recently started doing a 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, where you look around you and name 5 things you can see, touch and name 4 things you can touch, name 3 things you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste.

I was surprised how different it felt to consciously see and touch things. It's not like I'm walking around my house with my eyes closed normally, but most of the time things aren't really registering. Stopping to intentionally focus for a second on an actual object or a sound I'm currently hearing seems to sort of wake me up, bring me out of a trance a little. Not as well as digging in the garden, but not bad for a few seconds in the middle of the work day.
by hmottestad | 2025-05-01 22:03:56+00:00
Dunno about Redis, but for Elastic I still feel sorry for them being thrown around like a rag doll by Amazon. On principal I will not use the Amazon fork, because I don’t want to support a company that would prefer to fork a project rather than fork over some cash. Amazon is more than willing to sell you their Elasticsearch fork at a loss as long as they can eventually recoup the losses when Elastic inevitably dies. At which point they will naturally abandon the open sources side of their fork and continue development in private, at a much slower rate, while doubling the price of the AWS service. At which point you’ll have no choice but the pay up, cause there aren’t any competitors left.
by Agingcoder | 2025-05-01 22:04:31+00:00
Well, if you’ve built a career on something, you will usually actively resist anything that threatens to destroy it.

In other words, what is progress for the field might not be progress for you !

This reminds me of Thomas Kuhn’s excellent book ´the structure of scientific revolutions’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
by benjiro | 2025-05-01 22:04:42+00:00
Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no.

And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.
by hirvi74 | 2025-05-01 22:05:02+00:00
The one issue I have never been able to overcome is that the medications are completely ineffective unless they induce hyperfocus. Now, it doesn't take me a lot to get into this state. I could easily enter such a state prior to medication, though I often needed (and still need) some kind of fuel -- intense desire or passion, impending deadline, etc..
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-01 22:05:35+00:00
> Prefer to pay no taxes but having to build your own roads? Good luck with that.

I never implied preferring not to pay taxes. Marginal land value and consumption tax rates would set incentivizes properly.

Earned income tax is the rich and the old and their younger beneficiaries benefiting (rent seeking) off of others’ labor.
by znpy | 2025-05-01 22:05:52+00:00
The post is a bit misleading as the agpl is a licensing option but not the license.

It’s a good trade-off though. Grafana does the same and they’re doing just fine.

I hope redis gets to live a long life now that’s more open than ever (essentially it’s free software now) :)

After the redis troubles I hope more people start to realise that the GPL license is the way really, and that other licenses (like the BSD that Redis used to use) are really just too risky.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-01 22:06:39+00:00
It’s not about programs being multithreaded. It’s about computers running multiple programs at once on different threads and they all perform well.

One can write software that uses the CPU cache in non-dumb ways no matter how many threads your program has. You can craft your structs so that they take less space in RAM, meaning you can fit more in cache at once. You can have structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs if that helps your application. Few people think of things like this today, they just go for the most naive implementation possible so that the branch predictor can’t work well and everything needs to be fetched from RAM every time instead of building things so that the branch predictor and the cache are helping you instead of impeding you. People just do the bare minimum so that the PM says the card is complete and they never think of it again. It’s depressing.

The tools to write fast software are at our fingertips, already installed on our computers. And I have had zero success in getting people to believe that they should develop with performance in mind.
by echelon | 2025-05-01 22:06:44+00:00
> "Fair Software"?

That's the term most frequently used! I've seen a number of different efforts start to coalesce around this.

https://fair.io/

This was also a really nice license:

https://defold.com/license/

We need licenses like these to combat Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. "Open Source" is their grift now.
by larusso | 2025-05-01 22:07:22+00:00
Yeah reminds me about the weird way Apple provides multi language support for iMessage announcements over AirPods. I’m from Germany and my phone is set to English because of job related reasons. I message a lot of people in English and the family and friends in German. Siri used to be set to German and in the past was either not cape-able to read English messages or butchered the message. Sometimes it simply says it can’t read it. For a year or so some messages will be read by a computer voice similar to DECtalk. I have no clue when the system decides to use it because it happens randomly. Now I switched Siri to English for Apple Intelligence and it got a bit better. But it’s still strange though.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-01 22:07:25+00:00
This is also why DOGE has accomplished absolutely nothing when it comes to government efficiency. Despite lobotomizing key US strengths in research, health, food safety, etc, federal spending is up YoY.

Healthcare expenses are eating the federal budget alive, and the religious belief that collective bargaining with the health care industry is pure marxism (despite every other developed nation doing it with good results). Rather than dealing with that head on, the approach will be to simply strip millions of health care.
by donmcronald | 2025-05-01 22:07:29+00:00
> Now if LLMs can use specific remote MCP which is another SaaS for your LLM, the remote MCP powered service can charge a subscription to do wonderful things and voila!

I've always worked under the assumption the best employees make themselves replaceable via well defined processes and high quality documentation. I have such a hard time understanding why there's so much willingness to integrate irreplaceable SaaS solutions into business processes.

I haven't used AI a ton, but everything I've done has focused on owning my own context, config, etc.. How much are people going to be willing to pay if someone else owns 10+ years of their AI context?

Am I crazy or is owning the context massively valuable?
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-01 22:07:35+00:00
Interesting that there are 25 comments here and none mentioning narcissism.

Our modern world was already in an epidemic of narcissism before social media and since then things have only accelerated. Like the author, I have also noticed that it is somewhat more common with men talking to women and I wonder why.

I see a number of people here saying that they are non-askers or that being a non-asker is a good thing and I think many of them aren't quite understanding the author's definition of non-asker. To me, if we have a conversation and I ask you two things and the conversation devolves into a random subject, that is totally fine. On the other hand, if I'm having a conversation and it's a "questions" conversation - getting to know you, catching up about our kids, discussing our startups etc - and you don't ask a single question then that is very weird. Picture this: we're both parents, my Timmy and your Jones were friends before we moved away. For an hour I've asked questions and heard all about your Jones but you didn't ask a thing about my Timmy. Or: we're students working on our internships, catching up, I've asked all about your internship and how it's going and you just don't care about mine. Or: we're strangers flirting in a bar and I've asked all about you but you haven't asked a thing about me. In all those circumstances I am going to get the (almost always correct!) feeling that you don't care about me. If we're just talking about sports, or politics, or hiking or whatever then there is no need to ask personal questions, but if it's a context where the whole point is personal questions, and a question is reasonably expected, then it's pretty weird if it never comes.