MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deanCommie | 2025-05-19 20:03:08+00:00
You will never convince Europeans of this. They simply seem to be unable to grasp that (1) cultural norms about introversion/extroversion and friendliness are not universal, and so the default baseline IS more outgoing, social, friendly, and extraverted in North America, and (2) because of the other differences in service industry culture [not necessarily themselves all positives but nevertheless relevant], the service industry in America optimizes for extraverted and friendly people.

So yeah, when the super friendly waitress comes over and asks the table "how is your day going", they're not forcing a smile for a tip. It helps, but they're most likely naturally outgoing and friendly and genuinely curious.

When you grow up with this environment, moving to Europe is adaptable (have done so), but whenever you go back home it is a breath of fresh air.
by meta_ai_x | 2025-05-19 20:03:08+00:00
Windows has many useful software that is not available on Linux.

So, for me Windows + WSL is more productive than just using Linux. The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows). No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky. Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrator which is simply not available on Linux
by zipy124 | 2025-05-19 20:03:12+00:00
Corporation tax is much lower and easier to dodge than income tax. Corporation taxes were only 11% of UK government income compared to 28% for personal income tax, 18% for national insurance and 17% for VAT (sales tax). If a company did develop AGI, it would sell services in the Uk and pay licenses to the technology in a subsidiary in a low-tax durisdiction like we have with ireland for the past couple of decades.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-19 20:03:13+00:00
Not all distros that exist in the current year are "modern". Mint for example, still ships with X11 and old forks of Gnome. Lots of people are running Arch with weird components that don't work well for whatever reason. And so on...

Modern means systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Gnome, an up to date kernel, etc... So the current Ubuntu and Fedora releases.

I've had 100% working laptops for 15 years now. Because I always run the newest Ubuntu.
by toast0 | 2025-05-19 20:03:15+00:00
It's not my idea of a good time, but Windows pioneered some stuff that's really handy for servers.

Receive side scaling[1] is super handy at high volume, and it came from Windows. And Windows has better apis for it than I saw in FreeBSD or Linux when I needed it (I didn't look too closely at Linux though, so maybe it was there).

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...
by DamnInteresting | 2025-05-19 20:03:23+00:00
I have some married friends who worked at Disneyland for years, and they have stories about wealthy park visitors and the escorted, line-skipping, side-loaded experience they have at each attraction. They are often shuttled around through dedicated parts of the underground tunnel system, and enter rides through alternate entrances, often experiencing the attractions entirely out of view of the gross public.
by rplnt | 2025-05-19 20:03:34+00:00
There's an explanation somewhere as to why. It has to do with "not breaking" stuff relying on it. So I guess it only answers "why we won't fix it".

Anyway, I don't think this is enough. Or I guess it only works to stop the trigger during install? I have the NO_AUTO_UPDATE set up, and recently needed to update (or upgrade? who knows) a single package and it somehow ended up with Homebrew working for over two hours. I saw it installing python at least two times.
by wwweston | 2025-05-19 20:04:06+00:00
because the fundamental ethos of homebrew and a lot of “modern” tools is to prioritize the conservation of attention. Aka “don’t make me think“ which, ironically, appears to often be adopted, not only on behalf of users, but at a meta level, so things which might well deserve prompts are simply pre-configured.

some charity is due here, because this is the culture, and also because for any software tool of sufficient complexity, there is always more to think about than attention to give. But the culture could use more improvement and reflection here.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-19 20:04:26+00:00
I had a conversation about 15 years ago where he told me about a book he was reading about the risk of anti-intellectualism in the US. I laughed it off. I think about this at least once a week now.

What we've seen over the last 10 years in tech and politics is the rise of people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and they wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.

I've had so many conversations with crypto bros about how crypto doesn't really solve anything and NFTs are BS and DeFi is pushed by people who have no idea of why finance is the way it is or they're simply trying yet another rug pull. This is a fundamentally anti-intellectual position.

What we've seen since January 20 is the absolute dumbest, most ignorant sycophants destroy things they simply don't understand and don't want to understand. Destroy USAID (as one example)? Foreign aid is a tool of US soft power, a key part of US foreign policy. That's not money for nothing. We're buying influence. Don't even get me started on tariffs. Again, it's fundamentally anti-intellectual.

Part of me is glad to see how many people are waking up to the myth of meritocracy.

By taking punitive yet performative action against the ICC for hurting Israel's feelings by saying true things does nothing but weaken US tech influence over Europe. it tells Europe that the US cannot be relied upon and an alternative needs to be found.

Fun fact: the US has passed a law colloquially known as the Hage Invasion Act [1]. This not authorizes but requires the US to invade the Hague if the ICC ever detains and prosecutes any US service member or official or those of any ally.

By itself it doesn't really matter but it's death by a thousand paper cuts and there are a thousand other small things that are pushing Europe to distance itself from the US.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
by bawolff | 2025-05-19 20:04:32+00:00
While i strongly disagree with the usa's sanctions on the ICC, i'm very surprised that the ICC has to rely on american cloud providers.

It seems like a court, especially one dealing with international crimes where international esponage seems quite likely, should have in-house tech. It seems like being fully independent would be really important. Sort of in the same way i would expect e.g. the eu gov not to be dependent on a foreign cloud provider either (have no idea if they are or not)
by neom | 2025-05-19 20:04:47+00:00
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it.

A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole..."

Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter X

Capitalists only truly respond to: compounding.
by throw0101b | 2025-05-19 20:05:04+00:00
> It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.

> It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.

> It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.

> It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.

> For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.

* A.R. Moxon, https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267
by jimt1234 | 2025-05-19 20:05:44+00:00
Back in the 90s, I worked on a "side project" that screen-scraped the daily Dilbert strip and added it to an internal "employee portal" website. A lot of people liked it, including all the pointy-haired middle managers. However, after about a week, I was told to remove it immediately, not because of the legal/ethical issues around screen-scraping (stealing) the strip, but rather because this particular day's strip was about Dilbert's company laying off a bunch of employees so the company's executives had more money to buy vacation homes (or something like that), and, by coincidence, our company announced a massive layoff on that exact same day. The timing was totally coincidental, but perfect. Executives were furious; my boss told me he got yelled at by our VP. I loved it.
by Ameo | 2025-05-19 20:06:48+00:00
Sounds similar to my own experiences trying to debug GH actions locally.

I've tried twice now to get it working, pulling down many GBs of images and installing stuff and then getting stuck in some obscure configuration or environment issue. I was even running Linux locally which I figured would be the happiest path.

I'm not eager to try again, and unless there's a CI that's very slow or GH actions that need to be updated often for some reason, I feel like it's better to just brute-force it - waiting for CI to run remotely.
by ramoz | 2025-05-19 20:07:03+00:00
"Lock i-"

At this point Claude Code is a software differentiator in the agent coding space.

I am building things related to AI code assistants - we were hacking ways to integrate Claude Code - it was the first thing we wanted to build around.

It's too early to care about lock in.

Need the best, will only build around the best.
by NickC25 | 2025-05-19 20:07:07+00:00
Had Donald Trump liquidated his real estate holdings upon receiving them from his father, and invested them into the S&P500 exclusively, his net worth IIRC would be approximately in the range of ~$30-40 Billion.

Instead, he's bankrupted 3 casinos, and declared bankruptcy 6 times.

Why do people think he's some sort of business genius?
by ty6853 | 2025-05-19 20:07:14+00:00
At the time of creating the condo the 0.1 acres would be substantial cheaper. If I have thousands or millions of acres to choose from and I can pick whatever 0.1 acres I want my demand for housing is 0.1 acres and the supply is still all the available land. Pushed to the mathematical limit the housing value of the land approaches zero for the land you buy for your hong kong condo, since demand is now near zero and supply far outstrips it. That is, the cost of the 0.1 acres to the developer is about the same as all the worthless for housing land surrounding it.

Since a large portion housing is currently locked up in 30 year mortgages in a once in a lifetime COVID era near 0% loan that people will not give up for less than a king's ransom, we should be especially sensitive of price of land for new construction, and that will continue to be a dominant factor in rental costs and home prices.
by mjr00 | 2025-05-19 20:07:21+00:00
From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# and PowerShell which limits its usefulness at MS.
by davrosthedalek | 2025-05-19 20:07:24+00:00
On Windows, I don't have to pick my hardware accordingly.

I have to onboard a lot of students to work on our research. The software is all linux (of course), and mostly distribution-agnostic. Can't be too old, that's it.

If a student comes with a random laptop, I install WSL on it, mostly ubuntu. apt install <curated list of packets>. Done. Linux laptops are OK too, I think, but so far only had one student with that. Mac OS used to be easy, but gets harder with every release, and every new OS version breaks something (mainly, CERN root) and people have to wait until it's fixed.
by a2128 | 2025-05-19 20:07:25+00:00
File Explorer is better on Windows? How? I tried Windows 11 for the first time a month ago and it takes several seconds for file explorer to open, it's asynchronously loading like 3 different UI frameworks as random elements pop in with no consistency, there's two different rightclick menus because they couldn't figure out how to make the new one have all the functionality of the old one so they decided to just keep the old one behind "Show More Options", and it's constantly pushing OneDrive in your face. I'm offended that this is what they thought is good enough to ship to a billion users.
by DannyBee | 2025-05-19 20:07:59+00:00
I honestly don't get what HN, or even some commenters, thinks should happen here in the real world.

I understand in the pretend world they want to be able to do $x without ever worrying about being beholden to any other countries laws or politics or whatever else.

They want this for lots of values of $x, and often have fun asserting it will soon be possible.

In the real world however, this has never been possible, since the dawn of recorded history, for lots and lots and lots of values of $x.

Pretty much any time $x becomes valuable or interesting enough, it becomes impossible to have this happen in all and usually most cases.

It often doesn't matter how simple a thing $x is - sailing a ship for example, or buying produce, it usually only matters how valuable or interesting it was.

As long as enough countries exist, and they have laws that have extra-territorial effect, the likelihood this problem will be really solved trends towards zero.

What exactly does someone expect to happen here when it's just people and companies trying to follow the laws they think they are required to follow.

This is actually what should happen, and is happening

The usual response is then that some country or group of countries need to build some untouchable-by-other-countries infrastructure and that will solve having to deal with others politics. This seems to me naive at best. The only cases this will work is for things that can be 100% contained and controlled within a given country/group. That is roughly impossible for most interesting things.

For example - it makes no sense to have a economic-block-specific email provider to work around sanctions, because whoever wanted to sanction them will just ban transiting email to them, and then transiting packets, and then equipment, and then chips to make equipment, and then machines to make chips to make equipment, and then wafers used to make chips, and then raw resources used to make wafers, and then equipment to mine raw resources, and then ....

Let's assume you don't care about this group, but they are still powerful. Great - they'll do this not just directly, but indirectly, by forcing others who do have to care to do the same to you.

Now, it would be different if you are building this thing as a political move or strategy, rather than expecting it to solve your problem directly. But otherwise, it is remarkably rare to be able to work around the politics with technology, and if you do, you won't be able to for very long.

It's much more useful to focus on dealing with the politics, if you want to change it.

Wasting lots of time and energy and money trying to avoid politics seems like a bad plan
by mholt | 2025-05-19 20:08:32+00:00
[]byte is a buffer. (io.)Reader is any type that can read bytes, like as part of a stream. There are `bytes.Reader` and `bufio.Reader` and `strings.Reader`, and many others, depending on what you're reading. These three types allow you to read []byte, any buffered input, and string, respectively, as streams.

Streaming is more efficient for large pieces of data (files, etc; whatever you have), but the buffer is usually easier to work with and grants more flexibility.
by KZerda | 2025-05-19 20:08:38+00:00
I used Linux as my daily driver for years, before finally switching back to Windows, and then to the Mac. I got tired of things like wine breaking on apps, I got tired of the half-assed replacements for software available on Windows, like GIMP compared to Photoshop. I got tired of the ugly desktop that inevitably occurs once you start needing to mix QT and GTK based apps. Linux is not a panacea.
by mhnuam | 2025-05-19 20:08:51+00:00
We have been trying to investigate this SSD/HDD lifecycle carbon footprint tradeoff over the past months, albeit limited to a case study of KV-stores so far. The work is getting published at CCGrid2025 which is currently taking place, so the paper should soon be available.

> However if you are just looking for space and the performance isn't an issue then the HDD will be the less CO2e emitting solution for now

Yes, that is what our results showed and this is the "easy" conclusion: if a HDD can handle the load, then it should be used as it will have both lower operational emissions as well as lower embodied emissions. Where it gets more complicated is when you have a load that you could handle with a single SSD but where a few HDD would be needed in parallel to achieve the same performance. In that case, one of the big factors (besides device lifetime and embodied carbon estimates) is the carbon intensity of your operational electricity: if the electricity footprint is low, you can afford the lower operational efficiency of your HDD setup, since the increased energy consumption is less impactful. The reason this is relevant is because this

> This i think will change however as more of the grid uses renewable energy

does not apply equally to all parts of the lifecycle. Hardware manufacturing is expected to decarbonize much slower than the operational part. See also https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604930.3605717 (very insightful article in general).
by ashishb | 2025-05-19 20:09:06+00:00
Imagine you are reading files which can be of varying size (KB to GB). A byte array will do a contiguous allocation of the file size.

A Reader can be much more thoughtful. And I say "can be" because someone can make Reader as inefficient as a byte array.

Or they can read in chunks.

For example, if you are trying you read exif data or reading up to first N bytes, Reader is a superior approach.
by yubblegum | 2025-05-19 20:10:14+00:00
So this little game actually amplifies the distinction between "game theory" and (let's call it) 'relationship theory'. In the former you rely on strategy. In the latter, you rely on established trust.

You run the game once and at the end you are given 'character' headsup on the participants. Next time around playing the same game, you know who is who.

p.s. In effect the distinction can be generalized as 'depth of priors' for the 'bayesian game'.
by masklinn | 2025-05-19 20:10:20+00:00
byte[] is a bytes buffer, a sequence of bytes. io.Reader is an abstraction around a read stream. You can adapt a byte[] to a Reader by wrapping it in a bytes.Reader, that way if a function needs a reader and you have bytes, you can give them your bytes.

The problem TFA has, is that bytes.Reader implies a copy: it's going to read data into a second internal slice. So when all their library needs is the bytes, they could use the bytes themselves, and avoid a potentially expensive copy.

Obviously you could just have a second entry point which takes straight byte[] instead of a reader, but in this case they're trying to conform to the standard library's image module[1] which does not expose a bytes interface and conditionally adds further indirection layers.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/image
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-19 20:10:48+00:00
> I have 45 years experience in programming, I use debuggers all the time, I know all sorts of langages including assembly langage, I know how all this works at the lowest level.

Sorry but my suspension of disbelief got shattered here. 45 years of experience and you couldn't figure out that something trying to install to your terminal is probably malware because the guy sounded polite? My goodness.
by throw123xz | 2025-05-19 20:10:53+00:00
The founder is very hands on and in the context of the recent "issues" xAI experienced, which happens to match some of the founder's political views, any discussion about xAI has to touch on Musk.

You having issues with any criticism of Musk is a bit weird though. I'm not going to say that the moderators should be better, but it's also disappointing to see some users always jumping in to defend Musk when his companies, products and actions (via DOGE, for example) are criticized.
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-19 20:10:58+00:00
On kind of a tangent I think it would be interesting to train a model on a certain time frame, or non-web content. Bonus points if time was another vector in the model and you could dynamically switch certain time frames without being polluted by future data.

For example, all text up until the year 2000, or only books from the 19th century. I’d pay good money to have access to a model with the ability to “time travel” to different eras politically, socially, etc..
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-19 20:11:16+00:00
Absolutely. This is part of the reason I refuse to go back to JavaScript work, because JavaScript developers don't live in that world.

Everybody claims to want software that achieves better performance and better durability. Even in JavaScript land people claim to want better performance and better durability. Yet, when it comes down to taking ownership or actually doing the work there is no greater evil, so there is a lot of lip service and whining there.

As an experiment just mention replacing some dependencies at work in JavaScript land with some code you have written and see what happens. There aren't salaries large enough to go back to that.