MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-05 23:31:41+00:00
But this problem isn't going to be solved by every app making its own sync system. Even if there is a magic library you can adopt that does pretty good, then everyone having their own completely independent hosting solution and sync schedule.

If files are insufficient, what data-structure would make modular sync possible for multiple applications in an OS?

And I’m not suggesting one doesn’t exist, I’m challenging to present a comprehensive solution, that probably involved operating systems.

> I want my wife and I to be able to make separate edits on our phones when we're in a dead zone.

Files do this.
by foxglacier | 2025-07-05 23:32:03+00:00
The last century was so exciting and filled with wonder of technology and the future. Unfortunately, popular feelings are somehow much more negative now, even though we've still got mind-boggling technology being developed like AI, self driving cars, cheaper access to space, autonomous drones, and even finally flying cars are being attempted in a new and more hopeful way than before. I blame climate change for a culture of negativity.
by conorbergin | 2025-07-05 23:34:27+00:00
Interesting that you talk about using shape optimization leading to more manufactureable results than a continuum approach. What sort of manufacturing do you envision, welded tube frames, cast parts? The weird organic results you get from the free form simulations are often pretty easy to 3d print with something like SLS, as long as they don't have voids and thin features. The constraints on other manufacturing methods are a lot more complex.
by wrs | 2025-07-05 23:34:32+00:00
I’m not comparing anything blindly; that is in fact the exact opposite of my advice. Nor am I saying all big hypes are equivalent, just that there’s always a big hype about something, and you need a strategy to stay levelheaded about them despite the irrational polarized yelling you hear.

I use LLMs every day in my work (both to help write code and as a component of the thing I’m coding). They’re pretty cool. But as an engineer you need to make decisions based on what they actually do, in your empirical observation, not what people tell you they will do, eventually, in their fantasies. Speculating about that is just noise. The engineer’s job is to find the signal.

In my observation, I can trust an LLM to write code way more than last year, but I still have to keep it on a very short leash. Will it be better next year? I don’t know. Nobody does.
by jrflowers | 2025-07-05 23:35:24+00:00
> What did they do to the USSR?

The answer to that is kind of, globally, the thing that defined the second half of the 20th century. Like I can’t think of a subject that has been covered in more detail than “what the US did to the USSR”. There are roughly infinity books about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
by FreakLegion | 2025-07-05 23:35:41+00:00
There's no legal 'creative stuff with options' to get around the five-year holding requirement. QSBS can be rolled over into other QSBS without restarting the clock, or you can agree to delay the actual sale (including payment) until you've met the holding requirement. At the end of the day, though, you have to hold the stock for five years, and any early payment you take (e.g. for writing options) is taxed normally.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-05 23:37:13+00:00
I haven't lost data on btrfs but I have broken half the partitions I made with it. The comparison doesn't feel baseless to me.

> 0.001% the real world testing

Statistics can be quite powerful. If you have a million installs, and your billion-install competitor has 100 problems per million installs, you can make some pretty strong statements about how you rate against that competitor. Just for easy example numbers.
by lightbulbish | 2025-07-05 23:38:23+00:00
I never suggested they were unambiguously bad, I meant to propose that it is a valid concern to talk about.

In addition, with your argument, should you not legalize all drugs in the quest for maximising profits to a select few shareholders?

AFAIK, the workings of addiction is not fully known, I.e. it’s not only those with dopaminergetic dispositions that get ”caught”. Upbringing, socioeconomic factors and mental health are also variables. Reducing it down to genes I fear is reductionist.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-05 23:38:47+00:00
People buy fuses from Amazon for the cars/motorcycles not understanding it can kill them. They are actually evil at this point for doing nothing about any of these ongoing issues. They can't be unaware if us rando consumers are aware (or if they are doing recalls for fake products).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU
by WD-42 | 2025-07-05 23:39:18+00:00
Check out Aardvark (renamed to reflection) it's a collaborative note-taking app from the GNOME folks. I think the idea isn't to completely remove cloud infrastructure, but to at least make it optional and/or provide alternatives. For example, this note app works via P2P. blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2025/06/30/aardvark-summer-2025-update/
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-05 23:40:33+00:00
> "out-of-context" literally means that the reason isn't in its context. Even if it can make the leap that the number should be zero if it's a bank holiday, how would an LLM know that yesterday was a one-off bank holiday?

Depends. Was it a one-off holiday announced at 11th our or something? Then it obviously won't know. You'd need extra setup to enable it to realize that, such as e.g. first feeding an LLM the context of your task and a digest of news stories spanning a week, asking it to find if there's anything potentially relevant, and then appending that output to the LLM calls doing the work. It's not something you'd do by default in general case, but that's only because tokens cost money and context space is scarce.

Is it a regular bank holiday? Then all it would need is today's date in the context, which is often just appended somewhere between system and user prompts, along with e.g. user location data.

I see that by "out-of-context reasons" you meant the first case; I read it as a second. In the second case, the "out-of-context" bit could be the fact that a bank holiday could alter the entry for that day; if that rule is important or plausible enough but not given explicitly in the prompt, the model will learn it during training, and will likely connect the dots. This is what I meant as the "defining aspect of LLMs as general-purpose AI tools".

The flip side is, when it connects the dots when it shouldn't, we say it's hallucinating.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-07-05 23:41:02+00:00
You can literally stub out exactly the structure you want, describe exactly the algorithms you want, the coding style you want, etc, and get exactly what you asked for with modern frontier models like o3/gemini/claude4 (at least for well represented languages/libraries/algorithms). The fact that you haven't observed this is an indicator of the shallowness of your experience.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-05 23:41:30+00:00
> But what ensures zraid block coverage on more than one spindle? This probably is safe for a large enough set of drives, but what is the threshold?

Surely they'll use a similar allocation strategy to what ZFS currently uses to allocate disk sectors. And of course if you mix a 4TB and a 8TB drive in a AnyRaid-Mirror configuration, you can only ever have 4TB redundant, so like current ZFS I assume you'll see 4TB. But if you then add a 12TB drive later, you can get 12TB mirrored.

> Is it going to be accepted upstream?

Good question. The S3 storage backend was initially said to be upstreamed, but ended up staying private to maintain a competitive edge.

Haven't checked out HexOS before, but given they're partnering with TrueNAS[1] and hiring Klara, Inc for development, one can certainly hope so.

[1]: https://www.truenas.com/blog/powered-by-truenas-hexos/
by TZubiri | 2025-07-05 23:41:56+00:00
I get what you mean, but the term source code is starting to get ambiguous, my argument is that the prompt is the source code, the python code I call the target code or generated code.

The generated code is stored on as a release artifact though, you can find it on the release tab on github. It's just not part of the repo, as it's not strictly source code under the Stallman definition, which has technical and legal implications.
by tomhow | 2025-07-05 23:42:00+00:00
My speculation is based on well-established heuristics like Hanlon’s Razor and the presumption that people act in line with their incentives.

From the earliest time I became involved with YC (nearly 17 years ago) it was drummed into us that you don’t mess around with IP, because it kills funding rounds, acquisitions and commercial deals, and harms one’s reputation and stirs up unwelcome attention just like this.

I’ve been subjected to suspected theft of my IP by a client and I can absolutely empathize with the feeling of outrage from people who’ve been subjected to this; it was one of the very worst things I’ve experienced in my career.

But there are well-established conventions for how to deal with it, which begins with a demand to stop doing it and not do it again (“cease and desist”).

Of course this company should stop and not do it again and it’s completely reasonable for them to be held to account on that.

But if HN commenters are demanding someone else be honest and honorable, they need to be willing to hold themselves to the same standard, and it’s a basic societal norm that we allow legal processes to progress and not take matters into their own hands with personal vilification/mockery or exaggerated/unfounded allegations.
by splice-cad | 2025-07-05 23:43:04+00:00
Continuing to make some additions and changes to ease use and improve the appearance of the harness design:

[1] Added many standard DSub, M8/M12, and USB connector outlines/pin arrangements to aid in the creation of connectors not currently in the library

[2] In concert with the addition of more connector outlines, added a Magic Button on the Connector and Cable Creator pages that pulls all fields for an entered MPN from Digikey or Mouser. Now, you can just enter your part number (like CDM806-04A-MP-F011-67 for this CUI connector, https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/same-sky-formerly...) and the fields will populate automatically. If a standard outline is recognized, you have the option to load the outline and pin arrangement too. For cables, this will pull the core count and other cable properties.

[3] The Harness Builder now features a grid and snap-to functionality to align items. You can also share a link (ie, https://splice-cad.com/#/shared/lgcy2htze9zlqs4igdgycfncy98f...) to a harness design that a collaborator can view or clone/edit).
by prairieroadent | 2025-07-05 23:43:34+00:00
my intuition on all this, and what both you seem to be getting at is that is wildly difficult to understand the problems of others at least to the degree that you understand your own problems, which even then understanding one's own problems is hard... which leads to the perspective of focusing on what they understand (their own problems), and then as a side-effect of addressing their own problem helping others by documenting their problem and attempted solutions... documenting and broadcasting adds a little bit of overhead but it seems like an environmentally-friendly approach to participating in society in a healthy way
by HexDecOctBin | 2025-07-05 23:43:38+00:00
I just tried asking ChatGPT on how to "force PhotoSync to not upload images to a B2 bucket that are already uploaded previously", and all it could do is hallucinate options that don't exist and webpages that are irrelevant. This is with the latest model and all the reasoning and researching applied, and across multiple messages in multiple chats. So no, hallucination is still a huge problem.
by Sinthrill | 2025-07-05 23:43:40+00:00
Customers want a solution, but without actual proof of customers willing to pay or do anything about it, how can you truly know? Because of companies awkward financing, the situation is very similar to:

- Assuming tractors don't exist - "Would people go through the effort to ship a tractor to their farm, learn how to use it, and either pay you to repair it or figure it out themselves ..while also paying you per field plowed."

Like, it seems like an obvious 'yes' but this is obviously my framing, not theirs, and maybe I am completely off base and what I am offering to them is truly a truck with a plow and not a tractor that they think will constantly get stuck in the mud.
by kmoser | 2025-07-05 23:43:51+00:00
I would argue that even if other people have designed an entire system and "all" that is left to do is to write the code, things can go very wrong if the coder isn't good at designing their code well (e.g. to be efficient, robust, etc.). It's "design" all the way down; there is no imaginary line where design stops and coding starts.
by gerdesj | 2025-07-05 23:45:07+00:00
... invent is the word you seem to have missed out. Hallucinations present rather than hide.

A person will misspell a word or put in some sort of rubbish. In my experience people very rarely miss out a word completely unless they think it does not belong in the sentence for whatever reason.

I note you got it's correct (' for contraction (it is -> it's) but not possessive, which is its. Normally, possession is indicated with 's)

You also smashed it with a suitable choice of capital letters and finished with an exclamatory flourish!

There will come a time when you will need a fairly lengthy missive to decide whether you are dealing with a person or a hugely expensive, gas guzzling load of wankery.

Today is not that time.
by TZubiri | 2025-07-05 23:45:42+00:00
Have you read the README?

You write as if I were a vibecoder, I'm not.

"There is no code, nothing useful to me,"

There is code. It's in the release tab as a build artifact, not in the diffable repo as source code.

You are expecting this to be a free tool, and to fulfil a thousand hurdles to fit

"what the fuck can I do with that repository? There is no code, nothing useful to me, no automated way to build the application, and the source code can change every time you generate it which means no specifications, no tests, no way to improve this application, and no way to create regression tests. If I ever saw that thing at work, it would go to the trash can."

I think you may be approaching it as a gratis tool that you can build consume and use, and that it should be useful to you and easy to build and fulfill 100 hurdles to reach the quality level of other OS tools like Linux, Git or whatever. This is not it, think of it more like an article with code. It's designed to be read, which I think you didn't do, the semantics of github made you expect a free useful thing.
by pavement_sort | 2025-07-05 23:45:45+00:00
>It implies a defensive structure. I.e the advantage I get out of low status.

OP is using the term moat in the standard way, actually. Something you have to cross to get to the reward (skill at a particular thing), that most people won't pay the cost for (being temporarily bad at something and low status). It stops most people from even trying to compete.

Quote from the article:

"It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be)."
by gruez | 2025-07-05 23:45:52+00:00
Objective or not, he raises some good points, namely that the book's author isn't very objective herself, by engaging in cherrypicking of the worst companies to make her point. Sure, some editorial discretion might be justified when choosing examples for a book, but this style of argumentation is as rigorous as arguing that vaccines are bad by bringing up all the worst cases of side effects.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-07-05 23:48:24+00:00
I fear it's too late for this. For any category of item, pretty much all the stuff you buy from Amazon or elsewhere online generally comes from the same few factories in China. Any other potential suppliers probably went out of business years ago, are too expensive, or are too small or local to work with.

You could open a brick and mortar store tomorrow but you'd be selling the exact same products that come from the same factories as Amazon.
by jmogly | 2025-07-05 23:48:42+00:00
Once, when I was fresh out of college, I worked at a mortgage company, a really rotten place. All day I looked at loans, applied some rules, issued a thumbs up or thumbs down. Some couple in Honululu Hawaii with x income trying to get an n amount mortgage. Denied. Approve. Denied … all day every day, people reduced to just a set of facts, and I, a faceless “underwriter” in some far off corner of the country have final say over whether or not they get the house they want, that they might dream of. It’s dehumanizing.

Before I jumped to tech, I took one more shot at credit underwriting, and interviewed at a company in New York City that did something called “factoring”. On paper, it seemed like an ethical, maybe even highly beneficial application of finance. You buy a company’s invoices so they get money today instead of 30-90 days from now. Decent enough, this is probably useful I thought. I go to the company’s office in New York, in financial district for the interview. Goes fine, I ask what kind of customers they have, what interest they charge and it quickly becomes apparent that this company is basically a roundabout-welldressed shylock.

I guess the interview went well enough and it’s a smallish company so the CEO wants to personally vet potential new hires, I meet him in his office. An ex wallstreet banker that started his own company, imagine al Pacino from that movie where he plays the devil. It was a really odd conversation, and it was obvious to both of us that we didn’t see eye to eye. The one thing I remember saying, and the context begets me, I said “we really do build our own personal hell in this world don’t we?” And I remember it being kind of a Freudian slip of a realization, as I sat across from this man who was obviously quite proud of his own self-built cage. He just looked at me funny and asked what the hell I meant by that, and I couldn’t really articulate it, however they still they gave me a job offer (it was terrible, I didn’t take it, the interviewer was practically abusive towards me on the phone for not graciously accepting it or even negotiating).

I just think to myself, these people in their endless drive for personal material wealth, their complete inability to grasp the value of anything worldly and good, how did they stray so far from the path? Who/what led them away and blinded them from seeing natural goodness?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-05 23:48:52+00:00
You know, I recently saw someone speculating that China would be ready for war in 2027 (as is their stated goal), but that they would go after Siberia rather than Taiwan. Taiwan is very risky (have to cross the strait, and who knows what the US will do?), but Siberia is more straightforward.

Well, if China is in fact thinking that, then China would love to keep the war in Ukraine going, because it weakens Russia.
by kmoser | 2025-07-05 23:50:19+00:00
I'm sorry it didn't work out for you. Sometimes it's luck of the draw. It also depends a lot on which industry you're in (finance, gaming, etc.). As an extreme example, if you're any good at COBOL, you can probably get a job working on legacy systems regardless of your age. Gaming, probably not so much.

You may have more success getting smaller freelance jobs at first and building a reputation as a can-do developer, which might be easier to parlay into a full time job. But at the end of the day, connections are sometimes the most important factor, so I would encourage anyone in your shoes to work on not just their technical chops but also their people-meeting skills.
by ginko | 2025-07-05 23:50:27+00:00
A computer operator is someone who maintains the operation of a computer system and schedules programs submitted by users.

It’s mostly a dead profession that has been automated by operating systems.

Honestly neither programmer or user have negative connotations to me. They both imply an active role when interacting with the computer. The term I _really_ hate that’s getting way too commonly thrown around lately is consumer.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-07-05 23:50:33+00:00
"Trust about whether or not another company will maintain confidentiality" still sounds like a business problem to me (or at least one valid way of perceiving the problem)

And the biggest advantage I see of this perspective over the "technical problem" perspective is that assigning responsibility completely covers the problem space, while "hope that some clever math formula can magic the problem away" does not.
by majormajor | 2025-07-05 23:50:39+00:00
Project Hail Mary is light reading sci-fi. Which is fine, I enjoyed it, but if you are looking for something meatier, covering broader themes and character development, here's some other recent stuff (there's a lot of old stuff covered already in other comments):

Stories of Your Life and Others; Exhalation (Ted Chiang) - both are short story collections vs novels, though

Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)

Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer) and sequels (wordy, philosophical, interesting future society)

Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin) - more near-future and grounded

Void Star (Zachary Mason)
by tombert | 2025-07-05 23:51:34+00:00
It's actually impressive that Trump managed to appoint the absolute worst possible person to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I know nothing about biology, I know that I know nothing, so if someone decided for whatever reason to appoint me to the position it would be fairly harmless because I would defer extremely heavily to people who actually know about this stuff.

If he had appointed someone with proper medical or biological training, that would be fine because they actually know about stuff and can make informed decisions.

RFK Jr. is the absolute worst person because he thinks he knows a lot about biology, but he actually knows nothing, and is largely informed by a lot of conspiratorial nonsense, meaning he has the potential to cause a lot of irreparable to the US healthcare system. He's not going to defer to actual expertise, he's going to defer to idiotic blog posts filled with anecdotes about how a friend of a friend of theirs got a vaccine and it was bad.

I cannot imagine that this attempt at chicken eugenics will work as intended. I suspect that if this were a good idea, it would have been tried already.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-05 23:53:18+00:00
> Forcing it into the kernel to save users who are clearly not in any shape or form competent enough to partake in your experiment is definitely not part of the job.

That code needs to be there for non-experimental users later on.

The reason to push it in quickly is so it can get tested and iterated on. Saving a handful of experimental users is not the main benefit.
by int_19h | 2025-07-05 23:53:22+00:00
> Proprietary frameworks like CUDA and others are going to fall at some point, is just a matter of time.

CUDA outlived several attempts to offer an open alternative by now, starting with OpenCL.

It's really ironic for a hardware company that its moat, such as it is, is largely about software. And it's not even that software around CUDA is that great. But for some reason AMD is seemingly incapable of hitting even that low bar, even though they had literally decades to catch up.

Intel, on the other hand, is seriously lagging behind on the hardware end.