MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajkjk | 2025-06-20 14:19:34+00:00
I see it as moral action with a skill issue, which is how I see a lot of bad things in the world. People are very good at missing the forest for the trees.

In their defense they do try to do the calculations: is a high-paying job okay on net if you give most of the money away? depends on the job; depends on if somebody else would have it if you didn't; etc. Not that there is a rigorous way to do them but it's very much a group that does try.
by narratives1 | 2025-06-20 14:19:34+00:00
This attitude is my problem with this day. If this is a day celebrating the nation and how we overcame the evil of slavery to create something better, emancipating millions of fellow Americans, I’m for it.

If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.

We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.
by legacynl | 2025-06-20 14:20:31+00:00
Although I totally get where you're coming from, and certainly agree that user-experience could improve by not setting unintuitive defaults like emacs or vi or whatever. But 'opinionated nerds' is a strawman. FOSS and Linux ecosystem isn't a big mass of like-minded people all deciding that user-experience isn't worth spending time on.

Let's not forget that computer science and programming initially has been a field for and by expert and academics. A lot of tools are written by experts, people that were used to writing and reading long documents with instructions, are intimately familiar with their systems, and often write similar software themselves too. Nowadays that have changed of course, but the field still has a lot of these experts.

And experts in any field often forget how it feels to not be an expert, and as such assume a lot of things to be obvious and often forget to mention or explain crucial things. But you can't expect every expert in some field to also be an expert in educational psychology, that is a whole field in itself. And even then, you might not have the creativity or writing prowess to write clear and intuitive documentation and pick variable and function names.

On top of that people are free to do what they want. That they work on this stuff publicly and make it available in itself is something worth of praise. They don't suddenly have the responsibility to make stuff easy to use for people who aren't at the same level like that.

A distribution like Ubuntu is in part basically a specific collection of all these free tools and software and presets. And maybe there doesn't exist a super user-friendly alternative for every one, and there is basically no incentive for people to spend free time making these.

Even if Ubuntu specifically states to be user-friendly (i don't know if they do), there are numerous valid reasons might exist for that. It could be that the rather spend their time refining and improving a often used part of the system. Or that they see the terminal in itself as an expert tool, and they rather have non-experts use the configuration that's available through the UI.

Although it's beside the point I think it's also important to realize that it's basically inevitable that there's going to be at least some difference between the quality of software that's free and open source, versus a company that has the ability to spend, and stands to profit from it. In my opinion the free part means infinite value and trumps any gap in quality or functionality.

Still agree that nano or something similar should be the default and vi or emacs should be an option.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-20 14:20:41+00:00
This is a funny point, but I think it is just kind of a joke for the most part. Ultimately the CEO’s job is to eat responsibility, the LLM can’t be given a golden parachute and pushed out the window when the company has a bad quarter, so it is functionally useless.

However, there’s probably a kernel of truth. I guess the org tree should grow like log(n_employees). If AI really makes the workers multiple times more effective, then the size of the company could shrink, resulting shorter trees. Maybe some layers could be replaced entirely by AI as well.

There is also maybe an opportunity for a radically different shape to solve the “LLM can’t bear responsibility” problem. Like a collection of guilds and independent contractors coordinated by a LLM. In that case the responsibility stays in the components.
by McScrooge | 2025-06-20 14:21:11+00:00
I think a major part of the frustration is more the _assumptions_ around the work complexity. Like decision-makers more easily make invalid assumptions regarding the complexity of the software portion. A good PM will listen to the SWEs when forming these assumptions and good SWEs must be able to communicate about them.

This could be bias talking, though. Is it common for sales or support teams to be given milestones that are off by 50%?
by mistrial9 | 2025-06-20 14:21:40+00:00
so I talked to some people at random on the street, because I was bothered by this exchange. There are a range of responses and I think that the responses are very telling. I wont do a detailed writeup here. This one is the one I want to hilite:

Two middle aged, very poor African-Americans walking down the street in daylight, the woman with a shopping cart and the man with clean but ordinary clothes. I say in a loud voice from many feet away "Is today a holiday of come kind?" The guy replies facing me "the Post Office is closed, I dont know" .. I said "something is on" .. "yeah" .. I get creative .. "but you have been to Texas right?" and he says in a stage whisper with his hand next to his mouth like he is shielding the statement "its Juneteenth" .. I said "nobody cares about that here, right?" He replies "its a DAY, just a day. that's all it is". This is consistent with what I was referring to.. this man did not want to talk about this, or say the name.

After congratulating myself silently because you know "someone was wrong on the Internet" .. I walked a a few blocks and I saw an upright, clean cut African-American man walking, dressed in a way that suggested he was a Church member or off-duty uniform services, also very middle-aged. This man had a clean white t-shirt with an elaborate, dare I say "European logo style" t-shirt that said Juneteenth in some formal typeset way. So I bother to write this long and too-personal reply because "someone on the Internet was wrong" ;-)
by helpfulContrib | 2025-06-20 14:21:44+00:00
> .. the most frustrating part about software engineers believing themselves to be the part of the business with the most complex, unknowable work. ..

>_Every_ function in a tech business has hidden complexity.

In my opinion, the conflict is in the distinction.

Stereotypes abound, but I have always found in this battle between worlds, there is a simple bridging maneuver: never work for someone, or accept management guidance, from someone who cannot also comfortably do your work. corollary: never manage someone unless you're prepared to do their job for them comfortably.

Yes, this is cold and hard, but so are those stereotypes, kids. There are Manager Engineers and there are Engineer Managers. But there's also just managers and engineers with both skills, simply focusing their work as needed for the specific project. The ultimately fun organization to work in is where different people have different roles in multiple projects, comfortably.

Key word. Getting this mix comfortable is the job of a good CEO, fwiw.

And guess what, it doesn't matter whether the salesperson can do any job but understand just how great this particular hierarchys' products are, and why the end result of this configuration is worth the spend.
by vel0city | 2025-06-20 14:21:45+00:00
> win10 also usually does not properly shuts down or goes to sleep

This varies a lot on hardware, drivers, and other configuration choices. I've had plenty of machines that went to sleep quickly on a lid close and would actually stay asleep. I've had a desktop which the default configuration for the network adapter would have it wake the machine any time it saw any traffic come across the interface.

My personal and work laptop, I can close the lid and know its asleep. I never get a hot bag with them. My Legion Go will almost certainly wake itself up if I put it to sleep and put it in its case. Almost certainly a hardware event causing it to wake.
by rdtsc | 2025-06-20 14:21:55+00:00
I can see that as long as 100% of the profit goes to the education or other social causes.

It's also telling how they advertise it: "you might have fun", "you'll get lucky", showing pictures of winners on TV and etc. They never following it up with a matching info about how people are fooling themselves and throwing their money away. Sometimes there is a blurb hidden in fine print "have problems gambling, call such and such a number" but that's always the fine print not the main message.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-20 14:25:49+00:00
The devil is in the details, something had to happen after 9/11, but the PATRIOT act and invading Iraq weren't it. Likewise, yes, we should have higher standards on immigration, but maybe letting Palantir run wild and not letting people who don't have social media into the country isn't the solution.

Way too much of our political debate is binary.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-20 14:26:00+00:00
I have 7 different 100% LLM written programs in use at my company daily, some going back to GPT-4 and some a recent as gemini 2.5.

Software engineers are so lost in the weeds of sprawling feature pack endless flexibility programs that they have completely lost sight of simple narrow scope programs. I can tell an LLM exactly how we need the program to work (forgoing endless settings and option menus) and tell it exactly what it needs to do (forgoing endless branching possibilities for every conceivable user workflow) and get a lean lightweight program that takes the user from A to B in 3k LOC.

Is the program something that could be sold? No. Would it work for other companies/users? Probably not. Does it replace a massive 1M+ LOC $20/mo software package for that user in our bespoke use case? Yes.
by sleepyguy | 2025-06-20 14:26:09+00:00
My elderly mother-in-law is slowly going blind. She relies on Meta glasses to read print on everything — from the back of a can to the mail. She also uses them to help locate items around the house, whether it’s something on the counter or in the living room.

I’ve tried the glasses myself, and I’m convinced that wearable eyewear like this will eventually replace the mobile phone. With ongoing advances in miniaturization, it’s only a matter of time before AR and AV are fully integrated into everyday wearables.
by nyrikki | 2025-06-20 14:26:33+00:00
Still not an open source specific example.

1) Due to the stability of the Linux kernel ABI, switching distros is far easier than between Interactive, SCO, SunOS, IIRC, Ultrix etc...

There have only really been two major bootloaders in x86 Linux, Lilo and Grub, and the disk partitioning was driven by DOS/Windows and is still simpler than the dozens of differences between the commercial UNIXs or even adding on ons like VXVM.

I have switched Linux distros at a data center level several times in my career due to various reasons and it has only ever been constrained by downtime budgets, and typically is faster and easier than a major window upgrade, even before modern tools existed.

Different groups are always going to make different decisions, and those decisions will change over time within even single groups.

Nvidia drivers are a complete mess, even without licence concerns.

IMHO, with modern tools, you should let the application drive distro choices if needed, reserving your preferred distro for more generic needs that don't suffer from app vendor coupling.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-20 14:26:51+00:00
The bottleneck, for the most part, is actually being able to test them. Even a translation by a skilled engineer is liable to have issues if they don't actually have the hardware to test things out. Linux's driver support is built out mainly by people doing that, either hobbyists scratching their own itch of hardware they own or manufacturers contributing drivers for their own hardware.

(It's also why regressions are pretty common: it's completely infeasible to test all of linux on each release, some people test some parts of it, but it's all very ad-hoc, very little is automated, and it's not at all unified)
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-06-20 14:27:03+00:00
> X11 never had a model to permit this for accessibility tooling while blocking it for other code. Wayland does, but suffers from the surrounding infrastructure not being well developed yet.

Does it? Because last I checked, Wayland did not, in fact, have the same features, and you don't get credit for "permitting" use of something that doesn't exist.

> When you read anything about Linux accessibility, ask yourself whether you're reading something written by either a user of the accessibility features, or a developer of them. If they're neither, ask yourself why they actually care and what they're doing to make the future better.

Okay: AFAIK, mjg59 is not a user of a11y features, and is not a developer of them (22 years ago yes, since then no). Ergo, by his own standards he isn't allowed to talk about this.
by ghaff | 2025-06-20 14:28:07+00:00
Except it's sort of a poor correlation. Without making a study of it the best US collegiate football programs at least tend to be large state universities--which, don't get me wrong, are often good schools if you want them to be for you--but tend not to be the schools that come up in discussions of large endowments and the like. Basketball is more of a mixed bag in that it can rely on one or two star players and hockey, as I wrote elsewhere, is very regional and relatively small schools in the North have very good teams from time to time.
by takinola | 2025-06-20 14:28:09+00:00
I’ve been closely involved with one of the largest shelter providers in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of years and I can say this is not true for the vast majority of people we serve. The primary causes of homelessness for those people are getting evicted because of a temporary financial crunch (health issue, lost a job, etc), domestic issues (leaving a domestic violence situation) or legal issues (refugees, etc). I had a similar belief (that substance and mental instability) prior to working with this organization because the visibly homeless people I saw seemed to fall into that category so I fell into this bias. However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.

It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas
by Raidion | 2025-06-20 14:28:20+00:00
I would also argue that software (and the people that write it) have a "correctness" bias that is not fully aligned with business goals.

Tech debt is real, but so is the downside of building a system that has constraints that do not actually align with the realities of the business: optimizing for too much scale, too much performance, or too much modularity. Those things are needed, but only sometimes. Walking that line well (which takes some luck!) is what separates good engineering leadership from great engineering leadership.
by ebiester | 2025-06-20 14:29:01+00:00
This is a rather human failing - complexity is fractal: you only notice it when you get close enough to it.

However, I disagree that engineers only have to deal with the complexity of the computer; instead, I argue they have to translate the messiness of the organization and of every customer of the program and make it coherent to an inflexible computer.

And every exception and case added is a permutation that echoes through the system. (And, quite often, outside the system due to shadow processes that people use unintended consequences of the system to encode.)

That said, it's why I have so many of my senior engineers start learning the terms of business so that they can deliver those messages without me. It's part of my toolkit I expect them to learn.
by _9y71 | 2025-06-20 14:30:29+00:00
This is why you don't let Claude handle versioning and the release process. From v0.1.0 to v1.0.0 to v2.0.0, and then suddenly 1.2.0? Semantic versioning isn't quantum mechanics. (Even then, I'll admit it's sometimes hard for me too to decide the right increment when tagging versions. :)
by legacynl | 2025-06-20 14:31:01+00:00
I'm pretty sure that a VM gets abstrations of the underlying hardware. And these abstractions are fully documented and as such the generic drivers bundled with any linux distro will work perfectly with it. Running on actual hardware requires hardware specific drivers. Generic drivers exist for many types of devices, but they might not be able to fully use the hardware (or at all), which can lead to some features/the os to not work out of the box on linux distros.

And I assume that he refers to that emacs is the default $EDITOR var on ubuntu? I don't know if that's true, but i think emacs is one of these editors which is seen as having very bad usability. I can't imagine that emacs is the default $EDITOR on a recent ubuntu version, but I agree with the sentiment that those kind of editors should never be the defualt.
by seydor | 2025-06-20 14:31:30+00:00
> In a statement, Perplexity said: "The BBC's claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly."

Unless perplexity has a way to indirectly pay writers the way google does, this is very rich

> four popular AI chatbots - including Perplexity AI - were inaccurately summarising news stories, including some BBC content.

One of the interesting things about the failures of LLMs is that news sources have become more concise and more authoritative. Even google fails to get facts right with its AI summaries, so one is compelled even more to go read the website instead. And I'm not sure if LLMs will ever be able to grasp true from lies.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-20 14:32:39+00:00
It needs to focus on that instead of appearances.

Why? Their stock value is all about appearances --- not substance.

Revenue has stalled, earnings and sales are down all over the world, Cybertruck is a dud, Robotaxi is a joke and their humanoid robots aren't being sold yet so they remain just a question mark.

Does any of this really matter to their stock price? Nope. P/E is still at 180 --- and most "analysts" still rate it a "buy".

For comparison, the typical P/E ratio for an auto manufacturer is around 10. For the most popular ride hailing company Uber, it's 15.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-06-20 14:33:00+00:00
Maybe because Israel is accused of committing blatant crimes against humanity at the moment, and you can't let that potential reality seep into the country. Or its just more anti-freedom (speech) moves by the current administration in an effort to control public perception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
by linkage | 2025-06-20 14:33:26+00:00
Oh look, it's another "I'm allergic to using the 'mute/unfollow' button" screed.

As with X or any other social media site, LinkedIn is what you make of it. You can either curate your feed to filter out noise or you can whine about the masses doing whatever it takes to find a better job while pretending that you're above self-promotion.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-06-20 14:33:39+00:00
> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.

While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.
by vidarh | 2025-06-20 14:33:40+00:00
You have assumed it is HN staff, without evidence. I've read what you've written.

You've then further demonstrated exactly why these threads gets flagged by being hostile and making unsubstantiated allegations.

If you care about this project, the best you could do is to stop pushing this.

I'm pretty much the perfect audience for this project, and at this point not just the project leader looks like a problem, but supporters of it like you as well.

If you're intent on pushing away potential supporters, this is the way to do it.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-20 14:33:59+00:00
Such standard interfaces are rarely the problem, though there is often a headache of dealing with the pile of 'quirky' hardware that just so happens to work well enough with exactly what windows happens to do. The pain point is all the things that aren't that. Nonstandard, niche hardware which maybe has a few thousand users, or big and complex interfaces like graphics cards which are basically whole OSs on their own.
by tim333 | 2025-06-20 14:34:09+00:00
A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k (https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no.

I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.
by slumberlust | 2025-06-20 14:34:15+00:00
I appreciate the external vantage point, and agree that life across the board is improving and it's tough to retain that perspective in the modern era. Equally as important is remembering that much of the progress we enjoy today was not free, but was fought and paid for in blood. It is also at risk of constant erosion and requires vigilance and consistency to push back on.
by jitl | 2025-06-20 14:34:32+00:00
On the other hand, running on real hardware is less important if none of your hardware is real!

98% of Linux I interact with is running virtualized: on my desktop/laptop systems it’s either Virtualbox full-screened so I can use Windows for drivers, or a headless VM managed by Docker.app on my Mac. All my employer’s production workloads are AWS virtual machines.

My only Linux bare metal hardware is a home server, which I’m planning to retire soon-ish, replaced by a VM on an ebay Mac mini to reduce power bill & fan noise.

If someone can make a Linux compatible kernel that’s more secure and just as performant, it’s much easier these days to imagine a large new user base adopting it despite a dearth of drivers.