MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-06 12:01:37+00:00
For the sake of mind melding I'll give it one more shot, but don't mind if we just don't connect on this issue at this time.

OP says stopping Amazon purchases have near zero effect, but might make you feel better, you said you don't do it for feelings but instead to avoid hypocrisy. My 1st comment was directed ONLY at the hypocrisy statement.

Hypocrisy is not a quantifiable thing, and is actually ONLY about how two decisions are interpreted. What is hypocrisy to one person is not to another. So it's subjective. Yet your subjective analysis of your own actions takes precedent, justifying your decision to avoid Amazon. Fine. The term I use for "subjective analysis that forms a most-likely-post-hoc justification for an action" is feeling. It feels right to do it is all we can really say about that. This is important and good and unassailable. It's morals and character. Good stuff definitely but not quantifiable.

As for the rest of the stuff about voting. Taking one dollar from Amazon is quantifiable, but we don't know how many dollars are required to make them change. It comes down to how the board or CEO or analysis or market feels about Amazons p/e or profit. So, not helpful. Will cutting another 100$ out of Amazons profits bring us closer to a change? What will that change look like? How much more do we have to cut to create a change? Are there better or worse changes if we cut more now vs more later vs quickly vs gradually? Etc etc.

Unlike voting which has a very precise decision point and an exact measure of progress towards that decision point for each vote cast. Perfectly quantifiable.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-06 12:01:59+00:00
> LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output.

If you run an open source model from the same seed on the same hardware they are completely deterministic. It will spit out the same answer every time. So it’s not an issue with the technology and there’s nothing stopping you from writing repeatable prompts and promoting techniques.
by whoisyc | 2025-07-06 12:02:14+00:00
We are not past peak PC gaming. What we might see soon is the end of big budget AAA game production. It’s not even that AAA games are bad, it’s just they require such a ridiculous amount of production value that they have to be blockbuster after blockbuster to not fail, and when they do fail, they don’t just wipe out the lifetime saving of one guy who quit his job to make an indie game, they wipe out thousands of jobs and entire studios and franchises.

My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.
by manter | 2025-07-06 12:02:27+00:00
I've wanted to play around with Cloudflare's Durable Objects more seriously for a while, so this was mostly an excuse to do that. I'll be writing a post about my experience at some point. (Short version - really powerful tech, missing any kind of ops tooling)

Ordah is a dumb side project, but it scratches an itch for me - I had a list of ~100 domain names/product names to choose from for _another_ side project and was going a bit nuts.

... I might have a problem with procrastination.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-06 12:02:42+00:00
I don't think it's a macOS ripoff, they would've also ripped off more of the dock if that was the goal. For instance, you would've been able to do things like "pin the task bar to the side".

I think they wanted the start menu to be front and center. And honestly, that just sounds like a good idea, because it is where you go to do stuff that's not on your desktop already. But clicking a button in the bottom left and having the menu open in the middle would look weird, so centering the icons would make sense.

I think there are better ways to do it and I'm sure they've been tried, but they would probably confuse existing Windows users even more.
by everdrive | 2025-07-06 12:02:53+00:00
You can actually put a backup camera in the rearview mirror. Back before rollover protection cars had quite amazing visibility. Best vehicle visibility I've had in the past 5 years was actually a 1997 F-150. You'd think it's a big truck, but you could more or less see all around you, and it didn't have that crazy high front hood either.
by 0xTJ | 2025-07-06 12:03:30+00:00
Not only is what you're saying about being past peak PC gaming factually wrong, but I can't imagine agreeing with your opinion.

How is the real money in social media? Those platforms that make money almost exclusively by making the user experience worse (in particular shoving ads and promoted content down your throat, and harvesting your personal data). In contrast, selling games actively makes money by giving people what they want.
by metalman | 2025-07-06 12:03:56+00:00
I think that by "secondary reflection" you are perhaps refering to a direct single reflection, rather than a double bank? But in any case it is very very unlikely that there will anything availible outside of a high caliber optics lab that can reflect cohearant laser beams in such a way as to retain a dangerous power level. The 40 watt laser is needed in order to provide a kill shot in in a small target in millisecond pulse, that only has to penetrate a fraction of a millimeter, and would be unlikely to penetrate a full cm into a human eye and do permanent damage even with a direct hit, not that anyone is going to advocate for useing lasers for eye surgery....oh wait
by zbentley | 2025-07-06 12:04:03+00:00
I recommend being very honest with yourself here, whether or not you want to share it in a reply.

Is the low chance of bad consequences the only factor keeping you from talking to strangers? There’s a low chance of bad consequences when you cross a busy street, too.

Is fear of rejection by an individual or group a factor, too? There’s a much higher chance of that happening, but it’s far from life ruining.

Are you worried that you have social behaviors that make it more likely you are considered creepy in social interactions? If so, are there ways you can reduce those behaviors?

Are there other areas where acute awareness of severe potential negative consequences makes you avoid activities that lots of other people in your cohort might enjoy?

Source: it me. If you’re in a similar situation, know that it can get a lot better. Just takes time and work, like everything.
by haebom | 2025-07-06 12:04:19+00:00
This article was written because I suddenly remembered a story I wrote in 2018 to someone working in Singapore. As I also mentioned in the writing, it has a strong conspiratorial nature. However, I personally have such doubts. Currency should fundamentally be exchangeable, but currently Tether and Circle exchange these for dollars and purchase relatively safe short-term government bonds from the US or China, making this arrangement seem natural. However, if they were to face a situation like a bank run or become unable to pay out $1, I think the analogy of a “water faucet” wouldn’t necessarily be incorrect.
by cwillu | 2025-07-06 12:04:28+00:00
There's been more or less no progress on the alignment problem; we don't consistently manage it for corporations, we certainly don't manage it for LLMs, and the prevailing wisdom an elaboration on the theme “why would an AGI do something dumb like that lol?”

I expect people in nations that are modernized, but with significant sovereign wealth funds and well-developed social programs will survive the longest, but I expect being economically choked out is inevitable even with a very slow (decades to centuries) take-off.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-06 12:05:00+00:00
> But things aren't always equal, and if the first submission was from a user who submits a lot and gets many big front page hits, we don't feel the need to just hand them more karma and will happily give the points to a less karma-rich user who submitted it later, especially if theirs is already on the front page.

I know dang has said that generated comments and bots are against HN guidelines previously, but should I read what you're not saying between the lines, and should I interpret it as consistent with HN policy to use scripts or bots to post to HN? Because that seems to be happening in this case, and keeps coming up, because it keeps happening. After a certain point, inaction is a choice and a policy by proxy.

inb4 someone asks what it is and what it is that is happening; if you don't already know, ask somebody else, and if you're not a mod on HN, I'll likely consider your response a concern troll if it isn't on topic for this thread or attempts to derail it, which I fully expect to happen, but I am constantly willing to be surprised, and often am on this site.

As the previous construction was rather strained, I'll say it plainly:

Is it okay, as in, consistent with and affirming the HN guidelines, to use scripts/bots to post to HN, or not? My reading tells me no.
by Flundstrom2 | 2025-07-06 12:05:07+00:00
Kind of reminds me of the self-driving cars of the early 80`s. Yes, it worked! I a van, crammed with racks and racks of then-state-of-the-art electronics. But, as someone back then mentioned; While the car crawls at 30 km/h on an empty road with clear painted lines, it was more like driving 70 km/h with closed eyes for 5 seconds, before opening them briefly and then closing them again.

The I would say, we're doing the same now, with loads of electronics, even more power consumption and hallucinating models. Working, but don't bet your life on it.
by olelele | 2025-07-06 12:05:09+00:00
From what I can recall there has been similar things happening in Germany where police informers used the money gotten from informing on their (extreme right-wing) group to finance the group agenda. This is far from new. Secret services should be abolished in the name of democracy.

There was also the cases where at least one British undercover police officer infiltrated environmental organisations, and in the process fathered children under their assumed identity.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-07-06 12:05:16+00:00
I've recently started using Claude Code, and also expected to not like it (based on using Claude Web to generate some code). I have 17 years of experience.

But it's actually been fantastic. It's challenging in a new way: splitting things down into small enough descriptions that the LLM don't go down a rabbit hole it can't get out of. While also giving high-level guidance to plan for the whole project.

I like UI design, but implementing it is tedious and slow. With Claude I can get a dashboard page done in less than 1 min, from a spec, that I can iterate on. Instead I can focus on the parts I care about, like backend. I need to nudge it to always care about security and storage concerns. I've seen O(n²) loops where O(n) would be sufficient. It keeps making enough mistakes that I'm not exactly out of a job.

The best way to use Claude Code is to write those descriptions and use examples of what you want the output to look like, so take it in small steps and do manual corrections.

However, you need to have seen some good code before using it to make something good. It's just a tool, like compilers and IDEs. I'm pretty happy I don't have to input programs using eight data switches and a latch switch on an Altair 80. And I'm now pretty happy I don't have to care so much about internal API boundaries, because doing a refactoring is one sentence away.

However, I do keep running out of quota after 2-2.5h out of 5h. If I had a company sponsoring this, it would be a no-brainer to use it more.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-06 12:05:37+00:00
> Yes, last time I read about a fire in that tunnel I believe it was the brakes. I don’t know how.

Friction brakes convert momentum into heat. If you ride the brakes going down a mountain you generate more heat than the brakes can dissipate into the air and the brake temperature keeps going up until they're hot enough to start a fire.
by milkshakes | 2025-07-06 12:06:17+00:00
> The issue is that you have to put in more effort to solve a problem using AI, than to just solve it yourself

conceding that this may be the case, there are entire categories of problems that i am now able to approach that i have felt discouraged from in the past. even if the code is wrong (which, for the most part, it isn't), there is a value for me to have a team of over-eager puppies fearlessly leading me into the most uninviting problems, and somehow the mess they may or may not create makes solving the problem more accessible to me. even if i have to clean up almost every aspect of their work (i usually don't), the "get your feet wet" part is often the hardest part for me, even with a design and some prototyping. i don't have this problem at work really, but for personal projects it's been much more fun to work with the robots than always bouncing around my own head.
by ChrisNorstrom | 2025-07-06 12:06:48+00:00
Pessimistic Me:

Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to.

Optimistic Me:

I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck.

So I guess Valve's a hardware company too now.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-06 12:07:17+00:00
I know doctors, you are 1 patient away from accidentally killing someone; then your insurance goes up and you have a death on your hands.

You're meeting sick contagious people all the time, and you get sick all the time. Just like daycare workers.

Canada has a ton of immigration, so you're 1 patient from getting TB or some other exotic airborne disease.

Ive known many lawyers. Ive considered it. Not too late, could combine it, be a lawyer for hackers and other IT.
by drpixie | 2025-07-06 12:07:32+00:00
1. Don't take it personally. They don't know or care who you are.

2. Some kind of rate limiter is becoming essential for servers. Scanning/probing is worse than rude but there's plenty of obnoxious out there.

Fail2ban can easily be configured to handle simple login or vulnerability scans.

If there's not something similar for web servers, it wouldn't be hard to write one. Anyone know of fail2ban or rate-limiters for webservers?
by jbreckmckye | 2025-07-06 12:07:33+00:00
It really depends whether VALVe remains the Benevolent Dictatorship of GabeN or sells out, goes public or something.

In the latter case, what happens is the Extraction Vultures roll in, pitch some flashy slides about innovation and then progressively ruin PC gaming.

That can't be allowed to happen, so therefore, VALVe can't be allowed to monopolise this market.
by notahacker | 2025-07-06 12:07:43+00:00
There's also the simple fact that in a regular electoral system there is a mechanism for figuring out whether you're voting for the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow, called previous track record of that individual or the faction they're affiliated with. And the Lion, Robot or Scarecrow or at least their party usually intend on getting reelected, so whilst they always overpromise, they have some incentive to deliver something the electorate wants.

The solution to "candidates don't always deliver what the electorate wanted them to deliver and the electorate doesn't always hold them accountable" isn't "let's put people who never promised anything in the first place and aren't accountable for anything in charge, and somehow assume that they're going to be more benign"
by clvx | 2025-07-06 12:07:54+00:00
They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine. The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer.

Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
by BobMontgomeryJr | 2025-07-06 12:08:26+00:00
Your "shared language of touch screen interactions" is and will forever be unrealized as endless 'innovations' 'novelties' of creative developers and companies remain unfettered by any requirements for compliance voluntart or otherwise to UI 'standards'. Software developers are focused on myriad depths and constraints of toolkits and frameworks languages and libraries to get network, cloud, and actual functionality right, and immersed in those worlds, burden users with their own vast congitive prejudice that their application is the only one in the world, figuring 'users' have unlimited time to decipher undocumented UIs effectively gamified and unique across hundreds of spplications by not only gestures but by required and precise cadences to correctly effect those gestures, cadences which are overloaded and confounded by network and device delays and zero haptic or audio or visual feedback on what may have been 'commanded' or what is yet to be acomplished and displayed onscreen.
by tralarpa | 2025-07-06 12:08:57+00:00
> ...of course?

No, it isn't. That sounds strange, right? But here is an explanation what eternauta3k probably meant: In modern physics, there is a kind of consensus that asking “why” has often been inappropriate or even misleading and should be therefore left to philosophers. The real questions are: Does our current model describe all observations? If not, can we find a model that does? And, even better, can that new model make predictions that we can verify?
by cs702 | 2025-07-06 12:09:12+00:00
Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on:

"I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice.

I don’t want AI books on Amazon—but I don’t get a choice."
by haebom | 2025-07-06 12:09:44+00:00
What I’m genuinely curious about is the recent trend of numerous countries announcing plans to create their own stablecoins. From news reports alone, I’ve seen China, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, among others, pursuing this path. If each country develops its own stablecoin, what would be the practical significance? I understand that dissatisfaction with the existing SWIFT system is driving this rush—everyone wants their own alternative. However, this raises a fundamental question: what will ultimately serve as the global standard? The current trajectory suggests we’re heading toward a fragmented landscape where multiple sovereign digital currencies compete for dominance. While each nation naturally aspires to establish their currency as the international standard, this creates an inherent contradiction. Without coordination or convergence toward a unified system, we risk replacing one centralized system (SWIFT) with multiple competing systems, potentially creating more complexity rather than the streamlined efficiency these initiatives presumably seek to achieve. The real question becomes: will market forces, political influence, or technological superiority determine which digital currency ecosystem prevails, or will we end up with a permanently fractured global payment infrastructure?
by pama | 2025-07-06 12:09:58+00:00
I use a personally-adjusted variant of M-x shell for most of my last 20 years of Emacs use (after trying various hacks including things mentioned in this article). I end up having about 20–100 named shell buffers on each machine, different projects, logs, etc, and I keep all histories of each shell in separate history files. It helps that the buffers are practically infinte size and I can use standard Emacs editing for anything, plus comint, which is a great simple interface to shells. I have some tools to split the Emacs frame into multiple pieces and reorganize them quickly so I can see any number of my open shells, limited only by the monitor size. I dont understand how people live without such shell management solutions; I’ve seen expert tmux users struggle with keeping track of all shells, whereas Emacs has tons of tools to work on buffers that directly work: starting from simple ibuffer, bookmarks, previews, to multi-occur (which can specialize to shells or subsets of them), to whatever you wish to do with buffers really.

btop/htop/nvtop or other curses-heavy tools have specialized solutions (open vterm or eat and run it), but all the composing unix tools run in M-x shell.
by spangry | 2025-07-06 12:11:17+00:00
Won’t the reserve currency simply switch to being “backed” by some other fundamental productive input? And by switch I mean the world’s most militarily powerful country will ensure that countries producing this fundamental input denominate their exports of it in their currency, if they don’t want to risk being “liberated”.

Personally, my money is on semi-conductors. It’s currently sitting at #4 in total international trade value, behind automobiles (which are increasingly reliant on semi-conductor inputs), refined oil, and crude oil.

Certainly casts a new light on contention over Taiwan.
by YmiYugy | 2025-07-06 12:11:18+00:00
Yes, but it's running on pretty powerful hardware. Try this with 1 vCPU, 512MB RAM and a website, that makes a lot of requests for a single page visit. Until recently I used to maintain some legacy B2B software, where each customer got their own container with very strict resource limits. A single page visit could cause 20-50 requests. Removing CGI was a significant performance win, even with a single user loading just one page.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-06 12:12:12+00:00
The first rule of cool is don't care about cool. The second (for experts) is that you can care if you don't show it. The third is that you can read research about cool and yet not care (God level cool)

That said, I think coolness research can help uncool people fight uncool shit like this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478115
by iwassayinbourns | 2025-07-06 12:12:13+00:00
Pentester/bug bounty hunter here. I appreciate that this is frustrating for the owner to experience, but this reads like normal internet noise to me, or at worst someone fired up burp suite and hit go on a website. Many, many commercial tools run these sorts of attacks en masse by default, some SaaS companies even do it as a product. The entire internet is being scanned constantly and many of those scanners have automated collections of attacks run against websites when discovered. I’m not say it’s right, but it is the reality we live in. I wouldn’t be taking it personally.
by hermitcrab | 2025-07-06 12:12:46+00:00
At one point I was fixated on conversion rates, cost per click, pricing tiers etc for my small software business. Then I realized I'm doing ok, and I don't have to squeeze every last penny out of it. Now I choose what to do based at least as much on how interesting it will be for me, as how much money I think it might earn. It has been quite liberating.