MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-06-24 15:48:58+00:00
> What’s a single reason to keep 32 bit packages?

They don't take up much space and mostly just require compile time.

That'd be the main reason to keep them around.

As far as the drag on linux, AFAIK there's really no drag caused by having 32bit binaries floating around. There's more drag in supporting really old architectures like the Pentium 2.
by tristor | 2025-06-24 15:49:15+00:00
> shitposted from my 8yo phone while driving my $500 car through traffic on bald tires

I mostly agree with you, but some of those "needless" expenditures have negative externalities when avoided. Whether that's processed foods causing heart disease and diabetes that strain public health resources, or your bald tires greatly increasing the likelihood of an automobile accident that could kill you or someone else. Your response takes an opposite extreme that none of this matters, when in fact much of it matters, but it's not like treating it like it matters makes you a better person. We need to eliminate moral value judgements from the equation, while still being reasonable.
by luxepthn | 2025-06-24 15:49:17+00:00
Land rights conversion. I believe if 2/3 of homeowners (living in a low-density area) agree to a proposed readjustment, then the rights of the land belonging to all homeowners are thusly converted. Oddly makes sense as the end-product, in turn, allows for greater density whilst retaining much of the aesthetic of said-land.
by hilbert42 | 2025-06-24 15:49:58+00:00
I should have been more specific but I thought it obvious. I was referring to China nowadays, specifically the time since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms which he instigated shorthly thereafter.

I suggest you read this link about Chinese leaders/leadership, especially the section headed Change from Charismatic Revolutionaries to Technocrats especially paragraph/bullet points four and five:

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat8/4sub1/item2247.html
by rybosome | 2025-06-24 15:50:07+00:00
This is quite an impressive list, and many of the things ranking low in difficulty for the author would have been quite high for me. It's definitely inspiring, makes me want to dust off a toy of my own.

That said, I feel the conclusion on learning with LLMs deserves some more nuance. It really depends on how you use them.

This is a terrible prompt for learning:

> Implement this solution for me

This is an AMAZING prompt for learning:

> Please give me an overview of ELF. Focus on the highest level abstractions, more of the 'why' than the 'how'

Certainly one can argue that it takes something away, in that you did not have to conduct the research yourself whenever a question occurred. However, if you are engaging in honest intellectual work (i.e. really thinking), then having a Socratic teacher always ready to discuss your questions is a profound accelerant to the learning process.
by thomascountz | 2025-06-24 15:50:19+00:00
You can have debts totally only up to a certain percentage of your income. Banks require that you produce a monthly budget demonstrating that you have a certain amount left per month after all expenses and debts are paid. You have to be able to prove this by giving them access to your tax and financial records. Most rates for things like homes and cars are consistent from bank to bank across the country.
by dredmorbius | 2025-06-24 15:50:42+00:00
Can the conclusion of ‘no risk’ be supported by ‘no data’? One of the common pitfalls in critical thinking is to neglect the logic that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The ‘having plastic particles in your body is safe’ conclusion conjures up a classic error known as the ‘appeal to ignorance’ fallacy Locke (1690), which is, ‘there is no evidence against x. Therefore x is true.’ This type of statement has no place in rational thinking. Note that to propagate claims of this type is to unduly shift the burden of proof onto those seeking conclusive evidence.

...

The European Environment Agency’s two Late Lessons from Early Warnings reports (European Environment Agency, 2013, European Environment Agency, 1896-2000) highlighted the danger. The reports analyze the impact of past inaction (or action) on environmental damage caused by, for example, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and public health issues generated by exposure to asbestos or diethylstilbestrol (DES). Each case is deconstructed to identify patterns leading to delays in appropriate decision making. The insights led to recommendations regarding how to respond to new warnings with the precautionary principle, i.e. to act to reduce potential harm as the preliminary signs of harm are still arising. It is interesting to note that the EEA had difficulty in identifying any cases of overregulation of a pollutant that had turned out to be benign when all the science was in. Most early warnings turn out to be legitimate. The costs of inaction are often drastically underestimated (European Environment Agency, 2013).

"Where is the evidence that human exposure to microplastics is safe?", HA Leslie, MH Depledge, Environ Int. 2020 Jun 26;142:105807.

<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7319653/>

We are aware of harms from materials leaching from plastics, as well as direct harms from PFAS (<https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea...>) and BPA (<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25813067/>), to name only two of the myriad compounds and constituents of plastics.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
by danielbln | 2025-06-24 15:51:33+00:00
I have more joy than ever working on toy software while using LLMs. My joy comes from building things, thinking architecture, components, creative solutions that create something new and exciting. Hand-setting lines of code is NOT what brings me joy personally, it's a means to an end. Dancing with agentic LLMs is so much fun to me. I can however understand that if the code part is what brings you joy, then we're probably not moving in a direction that pleases you. For those of us who like to build, first and foremost, it's heaven.
by leet_thow | 2025-06-24 15:51:38+00:00
Check out Melbay's catalog of books: https://www.melbay.com/Products/CategoryCenter/F36/Guitar%20...

A lot of the books come with digital downloads of PDFs of the sheet music / tabs along with the author performing the pieces on MP3s.

Get set up with a footstool, and position yourself in front of a computer screen with the PDFs open to practice.
by Neywiny | 2025-06-24 15:52:05+00:00
Looks like it switches different ranges. ST makes something similar that has similar dynamic range without switching. They use analog circuitry (op amps and junk) to compensate for the resistor drop, so the path is uninterrupted. I've had systems where the auto-ranging on a bench meter is enough to cause it to reset. I can't find a schematic for the PPKII (haven't looked too hard though) but if it's actually switching the supply, that can cause issues to devices downstream. Especially if that switching causes a voltage drop change.
by roughly | 2025-06-24 15:52:05+00:00
One of the best things that I’ve done for myself, career-wise, came during a 6-month sabbatical between jobs. I had a bunch of projects that I wanted to do, but I kept finding myself stymied by scope creep - when you don’t have any constraints, it’s hard to decide how big a project should be, and the projects would grow to these massive unfinishable beasts.

I decided to constrain myself to one week per project - whatever I could get done in a week was what I’d do for this project. The experience of going from zero to something useable in either a new language or a new framework or a new field in a week was enormously confidence-building - learning that I was actually pretty good at this whole programming thing and breaking through a bunch of walls I’d run into previously in my professional career gave me an incredible amount of trust in myself to be able to take on new challenges that really helped me when I was looking for a new job. At the same time, it reminded me what I loved about programming - in a week, I was able to build something that solved a problem I had or that someone I knew had, and I got to do so in a creative and intellectually challenging fashion.

If ever you find yourself in a position to take a couple months off between jobs, skip the leetcoding or whatever else and just build some toy projects - you’ll be amazed how much you already know.
by ayushrodrigues | 2025-06-24 15:52:05+00:00
Hey! Yes it will, as long as you can process the payment with Stripe, you can use us. I know Stripe has discounts for non-profits.

However, Autumn is really only useful when combined with our permissions / entitlement management. So if your donors get access to certain things once they donate, then it would make sense to use us!
by 0x500x79 | 2025-06-24 15:52:08+00:00
I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed.

MCP allows you to bring tools to agents you don't control. It's awesome, but it isn't the right match for every problem. If you believe the hype of X/LinkedIn you would think that MCP everywhere is going to be the solution.

Bringing tools to your local Claude client is awesome, but there are still challenges with MCP that need to be solved and like all technology, it isn't applicable universally.

Not to mention it's a recipe for burning tokens!
by blackbear_ | 2025-06-24 15:52:40+00:00
While the theoretical bottleneck is there, it is far less restrictive than what you are describing, because the number of almost orthogonal vectors grows exponentially with ambient dimensionality. And orthogonality is what matters to differentiate between different vectors: since any distribution can be expressed as a mixture of Gaussians, the number of separate concepts that you can encode with such a mixture also grows exponentially
by 9rx | 2025-06-24 15:52:45+00:00
> I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history

Maybe the data is wrong? I took out a few loans over the years with strange comments from the lenders like "You don't have much credit history", but since it didn't impact anything I didn't think much of it. Somewhere down the line a lender was like "I don't think this is you". Turns out that it wasn't.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-24 15:52:51+00:00
Agreed but I think it’s better to use streams and deliver messages reliably and in order today, despite the extra effort.

For instance, TLS is stateful. If you want to deliver unannounced (stateless) datagrams to a server, you’d technically be able to use the servers pubkey but you’d have to sacrifice forward secrecy. Making business logic with dropped packets and OOO delivery is also very difficult depending on domain.

Personally I would like to see faster bootstrap and especially resumes of streams to eliminate handshake cost. For instance:

- resume with last shared secret for 0rtt handshake (I believe Quic supports this)

- allow the dialer to queue/send data before ack (this is an API-breaking change on sockets, but worthwhile imo - it makes socket FSM on app layer easier to use because it never needs to be nil
by bee_rider | 2025-06-24 15:54:04+00:00
I think the line is still a bit fuzzy in the case of a small single-proprietor (at least as far as I know, maybe he hired some more folks, I haven’t been keeping track) company like SourceHut. I mean, it is a company that has become well known around here because the owner made a lot of practical, nuts-and-bolts decisions aligned to his ideology (like the decision to price things from the start to make a reasonable little profit, an explicit rejection of the hypergrowth ideology).

> Practical reasons can generalise to everyone but not ideological reason. I wouldn’t move to Saudi for example because I’m not a Muslim. But if I were to understand that he moved due to practical reasons that matter for his core business then that is generalisable.

I think I sort of disagree that practical reasons are universally generalizable in a way that ideological reasons aren’t.

Practical reasons are generalizable in some cases, but your ability to learn practical lessons from somebody else will depend on how your situations are practically similar.

Ideological reasons are also generalizable in some sense—I mean, lots of people have similar ideological beliefs. And SourceHut was founded on ideological principles that are not universally held, but which are widespread enough for folks here to at least be curious about them here.
by strictnein | 2025-06-24 15:54:33+00:00
> If you don't want to make yourself clear, that's fine. If you want to be petty, that's fine as well.

I literally just repeated to you what you said to me. But, yeah, I'm the petty one.

> Sorry you struggled to not understand your own concept that you put forward that because a lawyer isn't required

What? Why are you misinterpreting everything I wrote?

> we shouldn't hold lawyers up to the standard of a lawyer anyway? That's facially silly.

Where in the world did I say this?
by matheusd | 2025-06-24 15:54:40+00:00
You're right to doubt it!

And indeed, accounting for externalities (unmeasured or unmeasurable) is a tough economic proposition. If it weren't hard to account for every single variable, creating a planned economy would be easier (ish).

FWIW, there's a whole sub-field just dedicated to determining the value of life for various purposes (a starting link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). You may disagree with any specific assessment, but then you have to argue how that value should be calculated differently.
by jmcqk6 | 2025-06-24 15:55:48+00:00
It's useful to remember this when tempted to make arguments that assume there is a Right Way to do things. We are exploring a massive possibility space where components interact in non-linear ways. There isn't a right way, there is no golden path. The reality of our society is an integration of each individual experience. We build theories as abstractions of that integration in order to manage and engage with that massive complexity. It can be useful, as long as we remember that they are abstractions. When we forget that our abstractions are only abstractions, we tend to cause additional problems on top of that which we were already trying to engage.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-24 15:55:55+00:00
I disagree with your statement simply because I myself started my tech career in the midst of the Cloud First hype cycle, and even then principles around data management and limiting access (eg. via RBAC) was already well understood.

Maybe a significant portion of the HN base simply never worked with companies that either sold to or were a part of regulated industries, but I do not buy that.

Furthermore, all of the design patterns I am describing can and have be implemented within cloud environments as well.
by freejazz | 2025-06-24 15:56:02+00:00
> How so? The comment I was responding to made no such distinction

Should I mention that water is wet every time I mention water? The executive is the executive, the judicial is the judicial. It's inherent in the discussion and pretending otherwise only for the benefit of furthering obtuse points that go nowhere serves the benefit of no one. So you either didn't know, and do now, or you're just cratering the discussion.
by aisenik | 2025-06-24 15:56:40+00:00
I abhor destruction and it is troubling that we have ideologues in power who subscribe to the most odious philosophies mankind has created.

Your reticence and observations are astute.

For context, I was raised in a mormon home and have spent most of my life as a scientifically-minded atheist, which makes my recent connection with well-documented spiritual qualia remarkable to me.
by grep_name | 2025-06-24 15:56:54+00:00
Interesting. I've been using the pie theme fish for years, and have various problems with it, but have not found something in OMF which is better for me. I also don't like the OMF dependency in my configs.

Maybe it's finally time for me to sit down and write my own shell prompt once and for all. I wonder if I can make it context-aware of fish's editing vs normal mode when vi mode is enabled
by jona777than | 2025-06-24 15:57:21+00:00
I recently wrote my own invoicing application. I got wrapped up in the joy of adding the features I wanted. Many of these features come at a premium monthly fee for a big named product.

I needed to get an invoice out in a timely fashion. As much as I wanted to use my app, I found certain kinks I needed to work out (with styling, adding addresses, etc.) -- This was where I realized what you have articulated.

At some point, it becomes better to prioritize the "fun" in working on my bike, and the "usefulness" of the daily driver bike.

In doing so, perhaps the fun/usefulness of each converges over time.
by chiffre01 | 2025-06-24 15:57:41+00:00
"despite no(?) evidence of harm" If you look up most of the chemicals on the list, all of them have suspected health impacts and the most have been confirmed to be harmful in some degree or another.

For example: DEHP - Endocrine disruption, disruptor of thyroid function, Ingestion of 0.01% caused damage to the blood-testis barrier... etc

source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis(2-ethylhexyl)_phthalate
by ravenstine | 2025-06-24 15:58:47+00:00
One thing I've learned about building toy software projects or even just small personal software (stuff that's actually useful) is to avoid implementing flexible configuration engines. I used to fall into this trap where I thought I should make my software to be configuration-centric so that it would be usable for others in case I decided to make my code FOSS. The problem with that is making a configuration engine is a lot less efficient than just writing the code to do the damn thing. I've almost never shared any code outside of small libraries that were very low in complexity, and I wasted a lot of time writing code for other hypothetical people when I should have just been writing it for myself.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-24 15:58:51+00:00
Oops oops )':

MPK emitted a not-so-subtle, semi snob culture, for sure. I guess it got worse[?.]

As in most organizations, the genuine cool people and the genuine coolness of the culture gradually evaporates is replaced with an uncool simulacra.

Microkitchen selection and quality went down a lot, and I hear it's not great these days.

Opines for the sea of VMware Palo Alto micro/kitchen snack shelves c. 2011.

PS PSA: Anyone interviewing on-site somewhere for partial WfH or complete RTO, evaluating their snacks should be high on the list because it sends signals like they're cheap/adequate, considerate/not, and boring/awesome. Not exactly a "brown M&Ms" signal, but close.
by dsign | 2025-06-24 15:59:33+00:00
Can't speak for every country, but in Sweden for example tax data to a certain level of detail (income by labor, income by capital) is publicly available for each citizen. Same for debts. And debts that go to the collection authority, which has a very dark name (kronofogden), are very public and somewhat worse than having to wear a scarlet letter. So credit institutes have enough of an idea of your finances to decide your rate.
by nradov | 2025-06-24 15:59:47+00:00
And how do lenders assess previous defaults when underwriting new loans?

From what I've seen, most developed countries actually do have the equivalent of the US credit reporting agencies. It's just that the functionality goes by different names and is distributed across several different types of entities rather than being centralized in three credit reporting agencies (plus Fair Isaac Corporation / FICO which is a vendor to all of them).

For better or worse, it's not really possible to have a modern economy with high growth rates unless lenders have a reasonably reliable way of quantifying borrower propensity to pay. Debt to income ratio is a piece of that, but some people are just deadbeats.
by slt2021 | 2025-06-24 15:59:55+00:00
just FYI, USA has no problem with a country spreading fundamentalists, for example Saudi Arabia spreads Wahhabism, Syrian's various conflicting islamic fundamentalist groups were backed, some by CIA, some by Pentagon. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were a USA ally and fundamentalist who fought against Soviets.

the issue is that Iran is not under the USA/Israel's control, that's it. Fundamentalism, religion is only a convenient pretext that is used to spread islamophobia and unjust hatred towards Iranians.

if you actually read Ayatollah Khomenei's twitter, it mostly anti-imperialist, anti-zionism, and strive to be independent. There is no fundamentalism in Iran's ideology
by _verandaguy | 2025-06-24 15:59:57+00:00
Code signing doesn't stop redistribution of unmodified copies of software, and it allows for cryptographic attestation of its origin (when used properly). If you modify the software, you'll have to re-sign it and make sure your code's consumers trust that signature's chain of trust.

DRM prevents you from redistributing original media (with varying degrees of effectiveness) and doesn't do much for cryptographic attestation (nominally).

These are two very different systems for different purposes.
by thomascountz | 2025-06-24 16:00:38+00:00
Banks are required to prove their loans are affordable. They can only lend someone an amount that they can prove the borrower can afford.

In my experience, rates are not low in the U.S. They are high because high risk loans are able to be granted.

The availability of debt for things like housing and cars is very complicated, but high taxes, a high degree of education, livable minimum wages, and realistic employee rights helps increase stability and decrease risk. I don't say it to be flippant. It is more complex than even I understand. It's only to say that, given that these systems are designed artificial systems, there are multiple implementations that work under various constraints and incentives.
by dredmorbius | 2025-06-24 16:01:05+00:00
I love Wilhoit's original, and want to note that he's been active lately on HN as well (<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FrankWilhoit>).

His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>

Or some guy named Matthew, somewhat earlier:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

<https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm>
by hilbert42 | 2025-06-24 16:01:21+00:00
As I replied to boringg, I should have been more specific. I was referring to China nowadays—since Mao's death and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.

See section Change from Charismatic Revolutionaries to Technocrats especially bullet points four and five in this link on Chinese leadership: https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat8/4sub1/item2247.html.
by HK-NC | 2025-06-24 16:01:37+00:00
I have onoy seen Das Boot once, it was the full version at midnight in a quiet neighbourhood, all lights off in the house, surround sound setup in the room (never met anyone with this since) it was terrifying and the hours somehow flew by despite being on the edge of my seat and alert for much of it. Definitely recommend seeing the movie in this context if anyone is lucky enough to get the chance.
by declan_roberts | 2025-06-24 16:01:45+00:00
This is one thing I don't get about the LLM people. For most of us who are professionals, writing software is not very hard, and it is in fact fun!

I don't need to let a computer write my software. I already know how, and I enjoy it. I need the computer to do the hard part (gathering requirements, speaking with stakeholders, etc).

Software is a joy.