MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrArthegor | 2025-06-07 19:22:46+00:00
Yes I know, but maybe my initial message wasn’t clear enough.

But for me the fact Linux is just the kernel doesn’t make the previous criticisms invalid. The first concerning the development of the different components in sort of echo chamber where no one seem to communicate with each other is directly taken from the Linux Kernel philosophy, the maintainer have expressed in multiple time they don’t care what happen outside of the kernel, in contrast with FreeBSD developers for example

The second point is more towards distribution I admit
by JCattheATM | 2025-06-07 19:23:51+00:00
> Well, we can't refuse a system or a technology on the basis of "depends".

Of course we can, based exactly on the dependencies. If someone has an atrocious representation, we don't need to trust the system, if they don't then it becomes more reasonable to do so.

> Your physical safety when traveling anywhere by any means depends on many factors. You still leave the house, don't you?

Not all risks are equal.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-06-07 19:24:25+00:00
The idea of porn as an outlet valve just sounds to me like the self-medication hypothesis for alcoholism. I have no doubt there's people who watch lots of porn and believe that it's helping them with some problem or another, but I'm more skeptical that it actually is helping and a lot more skeptical that it's so helpful as to make up for the negative consequences.
by jodrellblank | 2025-06-07 19:24:55+00:00
This is one of my pet dislikes; so after 1950, a time when a computer that could win at tic-tac-toe was ‘AI’, nobody is ever allowed to talk about AI again without that whinge being posted? Because AI was solved then so shut up?

The author of that whinge thinks that what we all wanted from Artificial Intelligence all along was a HAAR cascade or a chess min-maxer, that was the dream all along? The author thinks that talking intelligence any more is what, “unfair” now? What are they even whining about?

Because the computers of yesteryear were slow enough that winning a simple board game was their limit, you can’t talk about what’s next!

And thats to put aside the face recognition that Google put out which classified dark skinned humans as gorillas, not because it was making a value judgement about race but because it has no understanding of the picture or the text label. Or the product recommendation engines which recommend another hundred refrigerators after you just bought one, and the engineers on the internet who defend that by saying it genuinely is the most effective advert to show, and calling those systems “intelligent” just because they are new. Putting a radar on a car lets it follow the car in front at a distance because there is a computer to connect the radar, engine, and brakes and not because the car has gained an understanding of what distance and crashing are.
by gdubs | 2025-06-07 19:25:20+00:00
Adding a bit more context: The World Wide Web arguably exists because of HyperCard. The idea that information can be hyperlinked together.

Atkinson was a brilliant engineer. As critical to the launch of A Macintosh as anyone — efficient rendering of regions, overlapping windows, etc.

And last but not least, Mac Paint. Every computer painting program in existence owes Atkinson a nod.
by healsdata | 2025-06-07 19:26:03+00:00
I read it as the author being passive aggressive -- they're implying the problem is parents who, instead of learning how to manage what their children can do with electronic devices, just want the government to make bad things illegal.

But, you know, we've never been able to agree as a people on what "bad things" are. So it should be, as you said, for each parent to engage in setting boundaries and being responsible.
by whateveracct | 2025-06-07 19:26:54+00:00
Yes I am dismissing. People don't have a right to not be dismissed if I judge them poorly. People are allowed to have bad professional opinions of others.

And I am dismissing the types you describe specifically. I dismiss them (privately amongst the likeminded) at work all the time too. I just put them on a list in my head when they start spouting these sorts of bad values.
by hungryhobbit | 2025-06-07 19:27:02+00:00
Developers don't convince anyone of anything! They just build stuff according to standards (which are inevitably set not by standards orgs, but by the most popular browsers), and then they expect all browsers to follow those standards and "just work".

When a browser like Safari fails to adhere to those standards, sites will break ... but you can't expect developers (of most sites; I'm not talking about the top 100 or anything) to test in every possible browser ... and then change their code to accommodate them. Certainly not in ones with single-digit percentages of market share, that require their own OS to test (like Safari).
by derefr | 2025-06-07 19:27:22+00:00
I think this approach made a lot of sense in the 2000s and 2010s, when consumer electronics with internet access were expensive things well out of reach of a child unless given to them by a parent.

But we're in an era now where cell phones and tablets — especially used + low-spec ones — are something that even a young child can acquire en masse: from their friends at school, or from any mall kiosk or convenience store with their allowance, etc.

You can put all the parental controls you like on the nice phone you buy your child — but how do you put parental controls on the four other phones you have no idea they own?

(Before you say "search their room" — they could leave them in their desk at school, charging them with a battery bank they charged at home or got a friend to charge for them; and then use them with free public wi-fi rather than locked-down school wi-fi. This doesn't require any particular cleverness; it's the path of least resistance!)

If you ask me "well, what do we do, then?"... I have no idea, honestly.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 19:27:35+00:00
Just to be clear, "special group" here means "any small business that wants to do any R&D of any kind", right? Because software was not a special group before, all R&D was opt-in for this kind of accounting.

Now, after this change, software is a special group singled out, a deviation in the tax code specially carved out for us to make our field specifically the exceptional one with no wiggle room. No other type of development is named in Section 174 to explicitly require companies to amortize.

So who is that subsidizing now?
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-07 19:27:38+00:00
> instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people

Eh?!

This makes no sense. Is it something like "smartphones bring addiction", i.e. the inability to deal with a tool normally as duly, because some people were left immature, is taken as an excuse to fall into bad logic?

If everyday people faint in front of begonias, it's not the begonia. Treat the roots.
by Retric | 2025-06-07 19:28:10+00:00
> You keep saying this across this thread, and keep ignoring that Section 174 has now redefined "profitable" for tax purposes to include companies who:

Because generating an asset IE software isn’t a pure loss that’s why you’re doing it in the first place. Companies with a cash flow problem are different than companies which an actual loss.

> i.e., a startup that earns $1mil and spent $8mil in software dev expenses is only able to deduct 10% * 8mil = $800k of expenses, which means that as far as the government is concerned they made a profit of $200k and owe taxes on that on top of their already-net-loss of $7mil.

That assumes 100% of expenses are software development related. But the numbers are imaginary so using your example taxes are 21% of 200k, so 7 million in losses = 7.042 million in losses. A 1/2 of 1% increase, the sky is fucking falling.

Further a competent account would likely want you to carry the majority of those expenses to the future. Given the option many companies voluntarily did so because it made financial sense. You can only carry 80% of losses forward a likely future issue, but these expenses don’t fall under that category.
by philsnow | 2025-06-07 19:28:44+00:00
The purpose of the append-only feature of borgbackup is to prevent an attacker from being able to overwrite your existing backups if they compromise the device being backed up.

Are you talking about using ZFS snapshots on the remote backup target? Trying to solve the same problem with local snapshots wouldn't work because the attack presumes that the device that's sending the backups is compromised.
by duxup | 2025-06-07 19:28:54+00:00
As a user I find the pattern of "oh noes Apple" and "How to fix Apple" and such stores as weirdly disconnected from my experience.

I don't much care that they lost a lawsuit, vision pro looked like a neat experiment but it didn't bother me that it didn't do well, and the AI stuff I lived without before and can continue to do so.

Not that those don't matter, but the media snowball of articles, I'm not sure how much it reflects consumer sentiment.
by chriswarbo | 2025-06-07 19:29:05+00:00
Hmm, not sure I agree. Most of those arguments get populated by taking the fixed-point, along with any given overlays; so it's easy to swap-out a library everywhere, just by sticking in an overlay. The exceptions mostly seem to be things that just don't work with the chosen version of some dependency; and even that's quite rare (e.g. it's common for Nixpkgs maintainers to patch a package in order to make the chosen dependency work; though that can causes other problems!)
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-07 19:29:07+00:00
> I'm failing to see your point

That's weird because I'm pretty sure that my point is explicitly spelled out. But just in case, here it is again:

If your trust is based in municipal numbers or statements, you should be aware that municipal numbers and statements are not trustworthy because there's a lot of widespread decaying infrastructure (and coverup!) between where they test, what they make public, and where your water comes out of your faucet.

And if your trust is based on "Rah, rah, America!", you should know that 15% (!!) of water systems serving over 10k people have PFAS levels measured above what the EPA says is safe. (And if you don't think that 15% is a lot, holy smokes, that's nuts.)

So if you aren't testing your tap constantly then you have no idea what your water is like, no matter what the city says their water is like.

And if you are testing your taps constantly, it's less hassle and gives a better result to just filter your water instead.

The author says "I don't filter because I constantly test my taps and they're good each time." That's not the same at all as saying that filtering isn't a generally good idea, especially for anyone who isn't constantly testing their taps. The author ALSO says "a fuckton of you have more PFAS in your water than the EPA says is safe, just not me, lol". The author also chooses to ignore that their good water today may become bad tomorrow.
by tptacek | 2025-06-07 19:30:55+00:00
I'm sure there is when you're just getting your sea legs in some environment, but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote. Rote code is both depleting and mutagenic --- if you're fluent and also interested in programming, you'll start convincing yourself to do stupid stuff to make the code less rote ("DRY it up", "make a DSL", &c) that makes your code less readable and maintainable. It's a trap I fall into constantly.
by rayiner | 2025-06-07 19:31:01+00:00
Just because people don’t have a grand unifying theory tying their preferences together doesn’t mean their preferences are motivated by “mere blind anger.” Trying to fit your preferences into some internally consistent framework is a high-IQ fixation.

That’s especially true because society is hard to analyze. For example, I think it will be bad for society to encourage greater race and ethnic consciousness in a diverse society. I can point to all the sectarian conflict that exists in countries around the world as an example of what I seek to avoid, but that’s hardly definitive. Is the upshot that we have to proceed with a vast social experiment, because we can’t provide a closed form analysis of the proposal a priori?
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-06-07 19:31:15+00:00
Yea the proxying/observability is without question the simplest part of this whole problem space. Once you get into the weeds of automating all the eval and prompt optimizing, you realize how irrelevant wireshark actually is in the feedback loop.

But I also like you landed on mitmproxy as well, after starting with tcpdump/wireshark. I recently started building a tiny streaming textual gradient based optimizer (similar to what adalflow is doing) by parsing the mitmproxy outputs in realtime. Having a turnkey solution for this sort of thing will definitely be valuable at least in the near to mid term.
by ajb | 2025-06-07 19:31:17+00:00
Ideally a backup system should be implementable in such a way that no credential on the machines being backed up, enable the deletion or modification of existing backups. That's so that if your machines are hacked a) the backups can't be deleted or encrypted in a ransom attack and b) If you can figure out when the first compromise occurred, you know that before that date the backup data is not compromised.

I guess some people might have been relying on this feature of borgbackup to implement that requirement
by debeast | 2025-06-07 19:31:39+00:00
About a month ago I was tired of losing my ChatGPT prompts.

I’d write a good prompt, use it once, and then spend forever trying to find it again. Notion, docs, screenshots, chat history — total mess.

So I built a simple tool for myself to save, search and reuse prompts. I called it EchoStash.

I shared it once on Reddit, and since then over 100 people started using it. I’ve been building it live based on their feedback.

Added so far:

+ official prompt libraries (like Anthropic's, OpenAI, Cursor etc.)

+ starter playbooks for people who don’t know where to start with prompts

+ better onboarding and UI

+ and working now on a community prompt library

If you want to try it: https://www.echostash.app
by roarcher | 2025-06-07 19:32:04+00:00
As a veteran I haven't heard of that particular one, but I've heard of disability ratings given out for trivial enough things that I think it's plausible. I knew of one guy who got it for PTSD after being stationed in Okinawa doing an office job for 4 years. And I know another who has a rating for migraines, which he freely admits to not having and lying to the VA about.

I never applied for disability of any kind, but it would seem that the VA examiners question nothing and hand out ratings like candy. According to the migraine guy, it's one of those situations where they have to find things to spend their budget on or they lose it next year. I'm of the opinion that if they can afford to spend their budget supporting freeloaders and liars then perhaps it would be better used by some other office, but I digress.
by jodrellblank | 2025-06-07 19:33:14+00:00
And my point is: so what? [edit: missed a bit; it's not 'moving the goalposts' because those things were never the goal of Artificial Intelligence!].

A hundred years ago tap water was a luxury. Fifty years ago drinkable tap water was a luxury. Do we constantly have to keep hearing that we can’t call anything today a “luxury” because in the past “luxury” was achieved already?
by paxys | 2025-06-07 19:33:51+00:00
The ROI calculation is way too short sighted to be meaningful. To start you are already paying college tuition, and the expectation is to get an education that will help you pay off the loans (and then some). Going a few hundred deeper in the hole every month to have a roof over your head (you know, the most basic requirment for humans after water and food) is a no brainer and will massively increase your education ROI. A couple months of "homeless man" cosplay is probably fun and games but start to face the heat, cold, humidity, animals, police, theft, physical danger and more and those As aren't going to remain As for long.
by manquer | 2025-06-07 19:35:46+00:00
I find it quaint and amusing people expect politicians to live privately same as their public personas.

As long as they votes consistently with their stated public beliefs (icky or flawed as they are ) on which they got elected does it matter they are very different private person ?

I would go so far as to say, them being different publicly than in private is a qualification for the job, if they cannot dissociate their personal beliefs from the will of their electorate then they shouldn’t do the job .

Don’t we all have one work persona and another home one ? Being a congressman should be no different.

On the other hand, the ones who sell on a public persona to get votes and switch their voting pattern after election to a different belief system is far more of hypocrite (Sinema or fetterman?)
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-07 19:36:01+00:00
> outlet valve

It is very rational: some need the experiences to meet the natural instances, and virtual ones suffice.

> self-medication hypothesis for alcoholism

Do not even joke: alcoholism is (*) an addiction (*) to an intoxicant...

> watch lots

That's you assuming things.

> helping them with some problem or another

Still you with your constructs: maybe they just enjoy it like other pleasant experiences.

> negative consequences

That confirms "it's you": which "negative consequences"? We do not see any necessary damaging impact.
by zahlman | 2025-06-07 19:36:13+00:00
Mr. Atkinson's passing was sad enough without thinking about this.

(More seriously: I can still recall using ResEdit to hack a custom FONT resource into a HyperCard stack, then using string manipulation in a text field to create tiled graphics. This performed much better than button icons or any other approach I could find. And then it stopped working in System 7.)
by homebrewer | 2025-06-07 19:36:40+00:00
For anyone looking to migrate off borg because of this, append-only is available in restic, but only with the rest-server backend:

https://github.com/restic/restic

https://github.com/restic/rest-server

which has to be started with --append-only. I use this systemd unit:

[Unit] After=network-online.target [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target [Service] ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/rest-server --path /mnt/backups --append-only --private-repos WorkingDirectory=/mnt/backups User=restic Restart=on-failure ProtectSystem=strict ReadWritePaths=/mnt/backups

I also use nginx with HTTPS + HTTP authentication in front of it, with a separate username/password combination for each server. This makes rest-server completely inaccessible to the rest of the internet and you don't have to trust it to be properly protected against being hammered by malicious traffic.

Been using this for about five years, it saved my bacon a few times, no problems so far.
by derefr | 2025-06-07 19:36:51+00:00
I somewhat agree with your point, but I'd quibble with the analogy, and its implication about the usefulness/importance of fences.

I'd argue that the Internet is less like water, and more like a freeway. (It is the "information super-highway", after all!)

We do put (quite tall) fences up between freeways and residential areas (or between freeways and areas with wildlife!), and for good reason: unlike deep water (that both humans and animals have a vague instinct is an "unknown quantity" best to be approached cautiously), a freeway can, at a non-rush-hour time, look like a perfectly safe and quiet and predictable place — a place just like the calm, safe meadow or bike path or residential lane beside it — until, midway through crossing one, a truck sudenly whizzes over the horizon going 120mph and smashes right into you before the driver has time to react.

And that's the Internet: a seemingly safe, predictable place — with unexpected trucks whizzing through it, ready to smack into you.
by the_af | 2025-06-07 19:37:20+00:00
Why wouldn't I heap blame on Musk (as well as on Trump, mind you)? The guy's deranged and repulsive.

I don't think your objections are fair. Let's go over them:

The average Trump voter doesn't know much about Epstein, and certainly doesn't believe Trump was involved in anything with that scandal. Any evidence that may turn up would be considered "fake news" to them. Whatever you may think of Trump voters, and whatever things they really are to blame for, knowingly voting for someone they believe to be a pedophile isn't one of their sins.

Musk just implied Trump is a pedophile (or is suppressing certain documents because of his links to a pedophile). Musk also claims without him Trump wouldn't have been elected. These are Musk's claims, so he has thrown away any possible defenses of "but I didn't know/believe this" and "but I'm irrelevant in the grand scheme of things".

You also claim Musk could defend himself with "but I didn't know at the time". This is very, very weak. When exactly do you suppose he learned this? In the few days that have elapsed since this very public falling out, maybe even a few days before? Oh, please. You know you don't believe this, these two were heaping praise on each other and calling themselves friends for most of their collaboration since Trump's second term, and only now Musk found out about Epstein? What, an aide rushed this info to him just in time for their current breakup? Absurd.

Any way you slice it, Musk had this accusation up his sleeve the whole time, he just chose to deploy it now.

So again I must ask, what does this say -- in his fans' eyes -- about Musk as a person?

PS: You seem to believe I'm somehow defending Trump here. If that's your worry, let me be clear that I think Trump is a disgrace. I don't know whether he's a pedophile though, unlike Musk I don't claim to have seen any secret documents. To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if both Trump and Musk are pedophiles, these aren't exactly examples of decent human beings.

PPS: it has also just occurred to me you could be wondering why I'm focusing on the outrageous things Musk has said, but not on the contradictory, absurd or just plain dumb things Trump is saying about Musk? Well, because Trump has an expiration date. I suppose he can do lots of immediate damage to Musk, but he must do so now. Musk, as the world's richest person, has a much longer shelf life and more time to do damage to the US and the rest of the world, and bizarrely, has a large cult following. So I wonder what his followers think.
by jajko | 2025-06-07 19:37:24+00:00
LBGTQ+ in highly oppressed environment (ie in some countries they execute gays in 2025). Even if not, some folks have quirks they would be ashamed of if it went public, ostracized, lose jobs, in some cases divorces etc.

Is it really that hard to imagine? US alone made (for us Europeans a bit weird but we don't mind at the end) very popular categories of porn like "banging stepsister/brother/mother/father", I am pretty sure those folks wouldn't like that history revealed to their close ones.

And TBH, I simply don't want to know other folk's preference even if its a very mundane one. Don't need to add that 'feature' to the mental model of them I have in my mind, what I have is already too much sometimes.