MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ygjb | 2025-07-17 18:27:27+00:00
This is already a highly successful model in Canada. We have many, many Crown Corporations as well as arms length, publicly owned corporations. Several of these crown corps have become successful enough that they are sold off to become private sector businesses as well.

I think a good balance for public sector and publicly owned corporations would be to mandate that any publicly owned company is given oversight by a different level of government (for example, Federal crown corps/publicly owned corporations should have an oversight board appointed by the provincial governments, provincial crown corps should have oversight appointed by municipal governments or federal government, etc), and there should be regular reporting and quarterly statements similar to what we would expect of publicly traded companies, even if they don't have the same fiscal accountability requirements.
by lproven | 2025-07-17 18:27:28+00:00
[Original author of the linked article here]

> It'd be a huge undertaking to even get the code to build.

It possibly would. On the other hand, a very educational undertaking. I was a Psion owner and user from the 1980s until the 2000-noughties, and I have posted things in various places about the Symbian source code over the years. Often some ex-Psion or ex-Nokia people pop up and mention the build tools, not unlike the post you link to.

The knowledge is still out there. Updating it might be more instructive than building yet another Unix-like OS. There are so many of those on Github it's remarkable; here's a list:

https://github.com/jubalh/awesome-os

Some got a remarkably long way. A handful of examples I admired:

* Serenity — https://serenityos.org/ -- also C++

* AtheOS — https://atheos.metaproject.frl/

* Syllable — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop

* SkyOS — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS

* HelenOS (academic) — https://www.helenos.org/

I could go on. There are dozens. Many are to some extent Unix-like. Symbian was very different indeed, which is one of the things that makes it interesting and different.

> It had its own Perl-based build system, and I'm not sure that those SDKs are even available any longer.

Perl is, of course. It may initially be necessary to hand-roll it, but I feel that a modernised Symbian that could be built with GCC or LLVM, and had more standard string types, error handling, and so on, would be a very interesting and desirable thing, even if it was totally incompatible with all classic 20+ year old Symbian software. And frankly, even if the result was 10x bigger and less memory-efficient, it would still be tiny compared to Linux or any of the BSDs.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-07-17 18:27:38+00:00
> but it turns out power requirements vary depending on wavelength of light being generated.

[pedantic]

It's actually because of the different forward voltages of the blue LED vs red, not the overall power

[/pedantic]

Clearly, I knew what you were getting at, but I made that comment because it's useful to understand that LEDs are primarily current controlled devices, not voltage controlled. Had you driven both LEDs with e.g., a 10mA constant-current driver, they would both be solidly visible.

For a regular indicator LED, this isn't really an issue (other than a too-low voltage will cause the flickering you observed), but for high-power illumination LEDs, or especially laser diodes, current management can be the difference between reliable operation or letting the smoke get out.
by duxup | 2025-07-17 18:27:38+00:00
Reminds me of the Casey Anthony trial where evidence of the "smell of death" was allowed ... with really no science behind what that even means as far as the witnesses were concerned.

As for shaken baby syndrome it's one of those things where it's the accused vs science. How the accused can or even has the resources to refute it ... seems insurmountable.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-07-17 18:27:46+00:00
It seems like you are addressing a completely different point, and creating a false dichotomy.

It makes sense that people dont want to work with others that try to do as shitty of a job as possible without being fired, fucking over whomever and whatever happens to be collateral damage.

Being an obsessive company man is not the only alternative, and certainly not what they were suggesting. Im not sure why you thought it was being advocated for.
by joshstrange | 2025-07-17 18:27:59+00:00
> I think the funny part is that humans are not exempt from similar mistakes, but a human making those mistakes again and again would get fired. Meanwhile an agent that you accept to get only 98% of things right is meeting expectations.

My rule is that if you submit code/whatever and it has problems you are responsible for them no matter how you "wrote" it. Put another way "The LLM made a mistake" is not a valid excuse nor is "That's what the LLM spit out" a valid response to "why did you write this code this way?".

LLMs are tools, tools used by humans. The human kicking off an agent, or rather submitting the final work, is still on the hook for what they submit.
by lenkite | 2025-07-17 18:28:17+00:00
Compilers simply could not keep up - that was reality, not just marketing. Ideally, Intel should have coded the compilers too and removed the rough edges. But they were a bit too slow and AMD ate Itanium's target market.

You have to admit though that the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) model was quite innovative. The philosophy influenced the LLVM project and some of the principles are used in GPU's and AI accelerator chips, even if hardware-based dynamic scheduling won the game.
by jstummbillig | 2025-07-17 18:28:31+00:00
I think there is a lot of confusion on this topic. Humans as employees have the same basic problem: You have to train them, and at some point they quit, and then all that experience is gone. Only: The teaching takes much longer. The retention, relative to the time it takes to teach, is probably not great (admittedly I have not done the math).

A model forgets "quicker" (in human time), but can also be taught on the spot, simply by pushing necessary stuff into the ever increasing context (see claude code and multiple claude.md on how that works at any level). Experience gaining is simply not necessary, because it can infer on the spot, given you provide enough context.

In both cases having good information/context is key. But here the difference is of course, that an AI is engineered to be competent and helpful as a worker, and will be consistently great and willing to ingest all of that, and a human will be a human and bring their individual human stuff and will not be very keen to tell you about all of their insecurities.
by karaterobot | 2025-07-17 18:28:39+00:00
Search engines are getting squeezed out by AI for me.

Kagi's search results are less polluted by SEO trash than Google, but there's still a non-zero amount of it. When I try to answer a question using Kagi (or any search engine these days) I end up feeling frustrated: there's so much information, and none of it is useful.

On the other hand, ChatGPT filters all SEO spam out for me, and typically does a decent job of answering my questions. I can follow the references it provides in its answer to verify what it says, and also learn more from external websites. It's a better user experience, with a better success rate for me.

Looking at my Kagi usage stats, I guess I'm not actually using it less from month to month (which I would have guessed I was). But, subjectively it still feels like I'm depending on it less for finding information on the web. I've given up on it for a lot of use cases, or it's no longer my first choice. I think my main use case is bang operators at this point, and that's where the numbers come from.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 18:28:44+00:00
Yes, again, similar to how a Tobacco consumer would reject older styles of Cigarettes. They were objectively worse - less nicotine, less impact on the brain, slower burning, and uneven burning. I used to smoke, ask me how I know.

> conspiracy of consumer stupidity

You misunderstand. Consumers aren't stupid, they're human. Human are remarkably easy to exploit. Exploiting the human mind is orders of magnitude easier than exploiting a computer.

I mean, you put a shiny machine in front of a human and tell them there's little to no chance they'll win money and they'll destroy themselves in front of it. Drain their bank accounts, ruin their marriage. You don't even have to lie - you can tell them gambling is bad, you can tell them they won't win, but that doesn't actually affect the exploit. Monkey brain see bright light, dopamine hits.

It's really quiet simple, and you're a market-minded man so you should be able to deduce this: it's all about incentives. You can continue to believe that the devices best for advertisers also happen to be what consumers want most. I think it's painfully naive, almost child-like.

I mean, look at smart TVs. Why do we have those? Do consumers prefer them? Sure. Is it to everyone's benefit that consumers prefer it? Certainly. So then we must ask - how did consumers come to prefer them? Was it, maybe, forced? Were they, maybe, exploited?

Just consider this. If I want to enter the Tobacco market, anywhere in the world, should I enter with a nicotine-free cigarette, or even a low-nicotine cigarette? Would those be successful? No, I think, the company would sink remarkably fast. We'd have no sales, consumers wouldn't buy it.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-17 18:30:01+00:00
> And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.

I always interpreted those sort of stories as kind of… somebody doing something they consider at least a little duplicitous.

At the time though, there was the concept of a “family computer,” which isn’t really as much a thing anymore. Also it was assumed (whether or not it was true) that kids knew tech better than their parents, so there could at least be a kind of justification. “I’m modifying the shared resource that I know best in a slightly underhanded way so that my parents will use it better.” I dunno. I didn’t do that sort of thing but I was an annoyingly conscientious kid.

> You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.

Was 4K Netflix ever finally fixed on Linux? IIRC it was limited to lower resolutions for the longest time.
by wlesieutre | 2025-07-17 18:30:08+00:00
"Cohort study" is the broader term for this type of work. For heart disease, the Framingham Heart Study (in Framingham MA) is a foundational one in the US.

It's not really something you can go looking to volunteer for though, someone has to be putting together a cohort study (which is a big expensive long term project) on a group that you happen to be part of, and you can agree to participate in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Heart_Study
by Knork-and-Fife | 2025-07-17 18:30:12+00:00
I'm in a similar boat. I really (really!) wanted to love the jelly star (when I used it for almost a month), but on Verizon I didn't have an LTE signal most of the time in the Seattle area, including downtown, which I find unreasonable. Also the battery life was horrible, 20% per hour of active use and 4% per hour of standby.

Using the jelly star proved that using a small screen is not a problem for me and I would gladly pay money for an experience like that.

But it also proved that it is not an acceptable option in terms of quality. Hopefully the Jelly Max is better in these regards.

I think Jelly Max the ideal size for me too (jelly star was a little too small for doing driving navigation). I'll keep an ear out
by seanhunter | 2025-07-17 18:30:12+00:00
There is a material difference between all of those examples and Intuit though.

It is normal for governments to use incentives to drive their policy objectives. If they want to incentivize home ownership for example, the resulting increase in complexity of the tax code may be a reasonable trade off.

Intuit is just trying to get a government guarantee that their business model will continue to exist, without their being any positive public policy angle to compensate for the negative externality. In other countries free tax filing is the norm, because although they have the same types of incentives to promote policy objectives, the government has not allowed themselves to become captive to someone like Intuit.

For example, I have filled my taxes in myself (for free) in the UK for about 20 years now. It used to be a (simple) paper form. Then around 15 years or so ago it changed to be web or paper (your choice) and now they strongly incentivise web over paper. For the last 2 or 3 years all the important details of my income and pension are already filled out automatically from the record they get from my employer and I only need to fill in the capital gains and charitable giving parts of my return.
by esseph | 2025-07-17 18:30:22+00:00
"I don't see how this episode would do anything other than encourage fewer parents to try to teach their kids before they go off to school."

You're so far outside the typical audience for this show!

Think more along the lines of poverty with no parents at home, maybe they're both working, or maybe one is incarcerated!

This show sure wasn't put together for young kids of privilege and financial and community support and means - the exactly opposite.
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-07-17 18:30:29+00:00
The consequences are not at all proportional. Individuals get their lives ruined, some even driven to suicide. Often they're not even profiting, at least not directly.

Companies shield the executives and workers breaking the law (and profiting from it!) and barely get fined, if at all. Often they're just told to cease & desist.
by andrewaylett | 2025-07-17 18:31:02+00:00
There's a whole industry full of people who will charge you for them to do at least a smidge of vetting. And it's not entirely snake oil: finding and publishing vulnerabilities is good advertising.

I might find the likes of Snyk somewhat annoying when I'm required to have them audit projects at work (they aren't as good as Renovate or even Dependabot at raising version bumps, and most of the alerts are false positives for our environment) but I mostly appreciate that they exist.
by daniel-payne | 2025-07-17 18:31:04+00:00
Here i was trying to show the strengths of both, unfortunately Agentic AI is graph based and node-red is flow based. Apples and Oranges.

As a hack, I have got LangGraph working inside of a node-red flow. I will write it up as a medium article in the next few days, as it might be of help to others. It's very codey.

I think production engineers will have to master the Langchain ecosystem, when we creating mission critical AI based systems. I think node-red has good nodes in place to record decisions and data as part of an AI ethics program.

Flowise have a good set of nodes around langchain, but I bet it was a massive and expensive undertaking to build.

Also Dashboard 2 is something n8n is sorely missing and is needed to monotor live systems.
by acheong08 | 2025-07-17 18:31:18+00:00
> If iOS detects a severely degraded battery it will clock down the CPU slightly

I currently have this problem (iPhone 11). It's not slight at all. Keyboard inputs sometimes has up to a full 1000ms latency and that's with autocorrect, suggestions, and spellcheck turned off. Scrolling in most apps are jumpy rather than smooth. When this phone dies, I don't know what I'll get. Hopefully a good linux phone exists by then.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-17 18:31:28+00:00
Well, here we're discussing Yandex, there's no "may or may not" about that one: https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...

> To me that seems incredibly unfair to normal russian people

Life's not fair. Among the unfairness experienced by a median Russian citizen, a random American's disinterest in supporting Yandex is probably low on their list.

> In general, collective punishment is maybe not the way to improve the world I think. But targeted action or boycott.

Sure. And again, here we are discussing the targeted action of boycotting Yandex and other corporations that are economic arms of the Russian government.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-17 18:31:32+00:00
Actually, a further thought about my higher-wealth friends. About half of them got there by a good mix of ability and determination, but half of them just seemed to be in the right place at the right time (early engineers at Facebook, engineers at NVidia just as it exploded, etc).

The latter aspect could sway the decision either way: "time off" is almost never the right time and place, so reduces the chances you'll be in that group. But the fact that this group exists, and the randomness by which one can be included, may take the lustre off of being in the high-net-worth group to begin with, if you don't have strong intrinsic desires to have a ton more money than what you'd need to live reasonably comfortably.
by michaelmrose | 2025-07-17 18:31:34+00:00
There are in fact lots of tasks people complete immediately at 99.99% success rate at first iteration or 99.999% after self and peer checking work

Perhaps importantly checking is a continual process and errors are identified as they are made and corrected whilst in context instead of being identified later by someone completely devoid of any context a task humans are notably bad at.

Lastly it's important to note the difference between a overarching task containing many sub tasks and the sub tasks.

Something which fails at a sub task comprising 10 sub tasks 2% of the time per task has a miserable 18% failure rate at the overarching task. By 20 it's failed at 1 in 3 attempts worse a failing human knows they don't know the answer the failing AI produces not only wrong answers but convincing lies

Failure to distinguish between human failure and AI failure in nature or degree of errors is a failure of analysis.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-17 18:31:39+00:00
> how it normally takes him 4 to 8 hours to put together complicated, data-heavy reports. Now he fires off an agent request, goes to walk his dog, and comes back to a downloadable spreadsheet of dense data, which he pulls up and says "I think it got 98% of the information correct...

This is where the AI hype bites people.

A great use of AI in this situation would be to automate the collection and checking of data. Search all of the data sources and aggregate links to them in an easy place. Use AI to search the data sources again and compare against the spreadsheet, flagging any numbers that appear to disagree.

Yet the AI hype train takes this all the way to the extreme conclusion of having AI do all the work for them. The quip about 98% correct should be a red flag for anyone familiar with spreadsheets, because it’s rarely simple to identify which 2% is actually correct or incorrect without reviewing everything.

This same problem extends to code. People who use AI as a force multiplier to do the thing for them and review each step as they go, while also disengaging and working manually when it’s more appropriate have much better results. The people who YOLO it with prompting cycles until the code passes tests and then submit a PR are causing problems almost as fast as they’re developing new features in non-trivial codebases.
by reactordev | 2025-07-17 18:31:42+00:00
I can attest to this. 16 or so years ago I walked into one of their offices to talk Intel GPU’s and shaders with folks. They knew enough to build hardware but their software stack was 10% of what a GeForce 4 MX could do.

I didn’t end up taking the job.

I never really knew what happened to that division.
by pretzellogician | 2025-07-17 18:31:44+00:00
>So it's not correct to wave it all away and say that it's all random bacterial infections

That is not what I said (per my comment "Yes, sure, lifestyle has something to do with any or all of these.") But it seems likely we'll find that lifestyle and diet are not the only cause, maybe not even the primary one.

>>> When Fuster presented the project in 2010, he noted how difficult it is to diagnose cardiovascular problems early and how simple it is to prevent them, with measures such as exercising, following a healthy diet, and not smoking. The new study shows that blood levels of imidazole propionate are lower in people with diets rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, tea, and low-fat dairy products.

So... cardiovascular problems can be "prevented" with those simple measures? It seems likely there are some non-smoking marathoner vegans that have died of heart attacks. But maybe he was mis-translated.

>About half of ulcers are caused by NSAID overuse.

(From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8002800/: "NSAIDs are second to Helicobacter pylori infection in causing peptic ulceration in the upper GI tract.")

I didn't know that! Thank you, that is very interesting.
by iLemming | 2025-07-17 18:31:49+00:00
> that's hardly a reason for me to switch - I've already learned emacs.

Most people think of keyboard input as a linear, one-dimensional approach to text editing, that's what you're doing here. Vim-style navigation offers something fundamentally different - a spatial "language" that maps directly to how we conceptualize our workspace.

Consider window management in vanilla Emacs:

- C-x 2 splits horizontally (mnemonic: "two windows")

- C-x 3 splits vertically (less intuitive—why 3?)

- C-x 4 becomes a prefix for file operations in other windows

The logic breaks down quickly. There's no consistent mental model connecting these commands. C-x 4 abandons the splitting metaphor entirely, becoming a namespace for "other window" operations rather than a window count.

Doom Emacs's vim-inspired approach creates a coherent spatial language:

- SPC w s - split

- SPC w v - vertical split

- SPC w h/j/k/l - jump left/down/up/right

The hjkl directional keys mirror vim's movement commands, creating a consistent spatial metaphor. Your fingers learn to "think" in terms of physical direction rather than arbitrary key combinations.

This spatial approach transforms window management from memorizing disconnected shortcuts into developing spatial intuition. Instead of thinking "what was that split command again?", you think "I want to move right" and your fingers naturally press 'h'. The keybindings become an extension of spatial reasoning rather than abstract symbol manipulation.

This principle extends beyond window management - vim's entire philosophy treats text editing as navigation through dimensional space, making complex operations feel natural and memorable.

And like I said, this model can easily be extended beyond just the text editor - you can navigate things in your browser, terminal, etc. Why would I even try to learn and memorize new keyboard shortcuts e.g., every time I install a new music player? I can control volume with j/k and previous/next song with h/l in any music player.

> I do think it's a stretch to call it "immediately graspable"

But it is though. It is very simple grammar. Anyone who's not mentally deficient can understand and learn it quickly. Building the muscle memory takes time, yes, but the idea itself is absolutely graspable. I remember, I hated myself for about a week. After that, my keyboard life was never the same.