MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-06 16:41:00+00:00
I hate the term “poaching”. Labor is transactional like everything else in capitalist society. It’s a trade for money for labor and they are trading theirs to the highest bidder.

If you want to know why they aren’t acquiring the company - blame the government making it harder for large companies to acquire other companies. But the government can’t stop these same companies from just hiring the people. They didn’t want the probably money losing product and history shows most acquisitions result in shutting down the product anyway
by sircastor | 2025-07-06 16:41:24+00:00
> I have found that there are people who just want to watch the world burn. There are many reasons, but, at its most basic, hurt people hurt people.

I'm not sure that it's even malicious. I think many hackers look at a website or a service as a game to play. They aren't thinking so far as the person that this action affects, just as far as "I wonder if I could get all the data off that site?" or something similar. And on top of that, some view the rate-limiting as a challenge.

I think it's the same thing that drives the excessive snark or cruelty in comments. They don't think of the person on the other end as a person, they think of them as an endpoint.
by regnull | 2025-07-06 16:41:41+00:00
I notice an interesting phenomenon here and elsewhere. There is this complaint where everyone agrees that the current state of affairs sucks. There are some (perhaps limited, but still) ways to improve it, and yet, they don’t get much traction. My very brief research produced this list of cars with limited touch screens:

Toyota 4Runner, Toyota Tacoma, Jeep Wrangler, Nissan Frontier, Ford Maverick, Ford Bronco, Jeep Gladiator, Mazda MX-5 Miata

I wonder what kind of cars do you guys drive.

Stranger still, if someone comes up with an idea of how to improve that thing that sucks, frequently the reaction is very negative. Sadly, the whole thing more and more gets into “old man yelling at the cloud” territory.
by crote | 2025-07-06 16:43:26+00:00
> the freight train network in the US is a lot better than that of Europe and Asia

That depends a lot on how you look at it. The US got screwed by geography and doesn't have a lot of inland waterways. This means that rail freight is the only viable option for a lot of bulk cargo. The US is sending an awful lot of coal and grain via train, but in Europe most of that is done by river and canal.

The US also has a rather poor record quality-wise. Electrified rail basically doesn't exist, precision-scheduled railroading has made delivery times a joke, the infrastructure is crumbling, and freight trains are utterly incapable of playing nice with passenger rail. Heck, they are literally running trains which are too large to fit on the railways! It has been optimized for dirt-cheap bulk transport and as a result it isn't really capable of doing anything else.

The fact that US railways have such high tonne-miles, despite the state of the railways, says more about the complete lack of competition than it says about the railways.
by yndoendo | 2025-07-06 16:44:59+00:00
Nikola Tesla fits this all to well. He was a genius in an very narrow subject and rejected the ideas of his peers in his field. He didn't believe electricity was made of subatomic electrons and it all came from an either. He was even trying to use the Earth as a wireless energy transmitter when it is a grounding source.

Too many people believe that a person really good in context A will be good in context B to Z. Or the Shaolin Monk Fallacy, just because you can do push ups with two fingers and swing a staff does not mean you are instantly good with a pool cue or tennis racket.
by ciconia | 2025-07-06 16:45:01+00:00
"Any sufficiently advanced AI technology is indistinguishable from bullshit."

- me, a few years ago.

I find the whole situation with regard to AI utterly ridiculous and boring. While those algos might have some interesting applications, they're not as earth-shattering as we are made to believe, and their utility is, to me at least, questionable.
by oblio | 2025-07-06 16:45:22+00:00
Guess what, all those places can just use Python 3.12 for as long as it's maintained and if they REALLY can't update, they can:

a) make the system air gapped

b) pay a Python consulting company to back port security fixes

c) hire a Python core dev to do the system, directly

OOOOR, they can just update to Python 3.13 and migrate to the equivalent Python package that's not part of the core. For sure they already use other Python packages already.

We're making a mountain out of a molehill, also on behalf of places that have plenty of money to spend if push comes to shove.
by snoman | 2025-07-06 16:46:19+00:00
This is difficult to express because I too have enjoyed using an LLM lately and have felt a productivity increase, but I think there is a false sense of security being expressed in your writing and it underlies one of the primary risks I see with LLMs for programming.

With minor exceptions, moving from one language to another isn’t a matter of simple syntax, trivia, or swapping standard libraries. Certainly, expert beginners do espouse that all the time, but languages often have fundamental concepts that they’re built that and need to be understood in order to be effective with them. For example: have you ever seen a team move from Java to Scala, js to Java, or C# to Python - all of which I’ve seen - where the developers didn’t try to understand language they were moving to? Non-fail, they tried to force the concepts that were important to their prior language, onto the new one, to abysmal results.

If you’re writing trivial scripts, or one-off utils, it probably doesn’t build up enough to matter, and feels great, but you don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what to look for. Offloading the understanding of the concepts that are important for a language to an LLM is a recipe for a bad time.
by toast0 | 2025-07-06 16:46:38+00:00
Cargo shipping is a mix of all modes. Rail has a lot of good things going for it, but capacity is limited, routes are limited, speeds are limited, and trains are fairly inflexible.

Trucks can be used for a lot more things. They might not be ideal for long distance routes, but they're often used for them. Dock to dock time is often going to be far less with long haul trucking than truck to local train depot, rail to remote train depot, truck to remote dock.

It's also much harder to build rail capacity than road capacity; certainly that'a a function of our government, but someone with one container to move has to work within the environment.

Trucking also feels like it has more agency. If your truck fails, you can send another to pick up the load; if your train fails, you're at the mercy of the railroad. If there's disruptive weather in the path, a truck can drive around it; almost always a train will have to stay on its route, and may need to stop for the weather to clear. If the shipment needs to be recalled, the truck can turn around; you might be able to get your load off the train, but maybe not?
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-06 16:46:45+00:00
I pay for a subscription to a local news blog (because our local newspaper no longer covers local news). I would not pay for the same content delivered by AI. Does the blogger use AI to write his stories? I trust him when he says he does not but I guess I have no way to know for sure.

I will pay people for the value they create. I won't pay for AI content, or AI integrations. They are not interesting or valuable to me.
by skotobaza | 2025-07-06 16:47:17+00:00
I don't think there is much trouble in re-releasing and remastering games, since the company does not forfeit its IP and it doesn't give anyone else the right to publish the same game. Plus no one suggests that the company should instantly release the server binaries or source code upon game's release. Only when they themselves stop profiting from it.

For instance, with WoW, you currently have unofficial servers, but it doesn't stop Activision Blizzard from making huge money from WoW, both from new addons and classic ones.
by theturtle32 | 2025-07-06 16:47:32+00:00
Yes! This is how things should be. And additionally, I want to see all the keyboard shortcuts visible on the menu items they activate. And every tool tip that pops up when you hover over a button should also show whatever keyboard shortcut activates that function. It's the best way for novice users to notice and the keyboard shortcuts for the things they care about without having to go elsewhere to look them up.
by crackrook | 2025-07-06 16:47:44+00:00
I have a few reasons I might more willingly accept the legality of alcohol, I believe they're also the reasons prohibition didn't work:

1. Alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, to get a significant portion of society to stop using it would be like trying to get people to stop eating bread or to stop having sex. It would be expensive and unproductive to enforce.

2. Alcohol is easy, though more dangerous, to make. To prohibit it would be to turn people towards more-dangerous moonshine.

3. Relatively speaking, alcohol's health effects aren't that bad; it's poison, but it's only very mild poison. Overindulging on alcohol once mostly leads to a hangover, it's difficult to drink enough alcohol to kill yourself and it starts to get unpleasant before you reach that point. The real dangers of alcohol seem to come with chronic use.

4. Alcohol is not extremely addictive. It seems most people can somewhat regularly partake without becoming alcoholics. In my understanding most addictive drugs won't get you hooked the very first time you try them, but trying them a few times is usually all it takes. Anecdotally, having used both, sometimes in excess, I find it much easier to resist a drink than nicotine.

If you pair these with the other harms and expenses of general drug prohibition (organized crime, disproportionate criminalization of minorities, etc) it becomes very hard to justify the prohibition of alcohol, in my mind.

Some of those things apply to tobacco too but to a lesser degree, so the case for illegalizing it might have some legs, although I suspect it's not worth it either. I might argue that burning tobacco products, specifically, should be illegalized due to the fact that there are several known, practical, and less destructive nicotine delivery methods. Lozenges, patches, and vapes work, and so far seem to be much less catastrophic for one's health. It's not clear to me that you'd get murderous tobacco cartels who lace their product with fentanyl.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-06 16:47:50+00:00
Even in the early 2000s CGI was really old tech. People were moving to more modern systems that solved the problems with CGI. What's funny is, modern systems actually have exactly the same problems as some of those newer solutions, yet they're just ignored/accepted now?

In the mid-2000s I worked on a very-large-scale website using Apache2 w/mod_perl. Our high-traffic peaks were something like 25k RPS (for dynamic content; total RPS was >250k). Even at that time it was a bit old hat, but the design scaled very well. You'd have a fleet of mod_perl servers that would handle dynamic content requests, and a fleet of Apache2 servers that served static content and reverse-proxied back to the mod_perl fleet for dynamic requests. In front of the static servers were load balancers. They'd all keep connection pools open and the load balancers avoided the "maximum connection limit" of typical TCP/IP software, so there was no real connection limit, it was just network, memory, and cpu limits.

The big benefit of Apache2 w/mod_perl or mod_php was that you combined the pluggability and features of a scalable and feature-filled web server with the resident memory and cache of an interpreter that didn't need to keep exiting and starting. Yes you had to do more work to integrate with it, but you have to do that today with any framework.

The big downside was bugs. If you had a bug, you might have to debug both Apache and your application at the same time. There was not as much memory to be had, so memory leaks were a MUCH bigger problem than they are today. We worked around it with stupid fixes like stopping interpreters after taking 1000 requests or something. The high-level programmers (Perl, PHP) didn't really know C or systems programming so they didn't really know how to debug Apache or the larger OS problems, which it turns out has not changed in 20 years...

FastCGI and later systems had the benefit that you could run the same architecture without being tied to a webserver and dealing with its bugs on top of your own. But it also had the downside of (in some cases) not multiplexing connections, and you didn't get tight integration with the web server so that made some things more difficult.

Ultimately every backend web technology is just a rehashing of CGI, in a format incompatible with everything else. There were technical reasons why things like FastCGI, WSGI, etc exist, but today they are unnecessary now that we have HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. If you can multiplex HTTP connections and serve HTTP responses, you don't need anything else. I really hope future devs will stop reinventing the wheel and go back to actual standards that work outside your own single application/language/framework.
by cb321 | 2025-07-06 16:48:04+00:00
Well, I spent a little more time on it, and for that one Perl version (on one cpu, i7-6700k, one OS - Linux 6.15, with one compiler gcc-15) I got a 1.5x slowdown of perl startup from 2008 to 2025. Not great!

zsh# rei=(chrt 99 taskset -c 2-3 env -i HOME=$HOME PATH=/bin) zsh# tim=(-k2 -o14 -n14 -m14) # Set 1 zsh# $rei tim $tim './perl-5.8.9</n' 'perl-5.42.0</n' 218.5 +- 1.9 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead 626 +- 14 μs ./perl-5.8.9</n 953.5 +- 8.6 μs perl-5.42.0</n # Set 2 zsh# $rei tim $tim './perl-5.8.9</n' 'perl-5.42.0</n' 247 +- 15 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead 633 +- 26 μs ./perl-5.8.9</n 989 +- 25 μs perl-5.42.0</n # Consistency check - well within 2 sigma for both zsh# a (989 +- 25)-(953.5 +- 8.6) 36 +- 26 zsh# a (626 +- 14)-(633 +- 26) -7 +- 30 # Final report; weighted means to maximize precision zsh# a mean(989 +- 25,953.5 +- 8.6)/mean(626 +- 14,633 +- 26) 1.525 +- 0.033

EDIT: Oh, yeah, and /n -> /dev/null is a symlink I always use.
by alok-g | 2025-07-06 16:48:58+00:00
WinSplit Revolution. It's a minimalistic but powerful Window manager for Windows. Some forks exist but all seem stalled. https://github.com/dozius/winsplit-revolution There are many alternatives, but none as good. WinSplit used to work fine until a few years back.

Microsoft Money. I moved to GNUCash, but still miss Money.

Winamp, as another comment here noted, cannot be considered outdated. I have tried many alternatives but find none to be as good. Sonique was a good alternative which stalled a long time back. Thankfully Winamp still works.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-07-06 16:49:07+00:00
This is super cool!

From the article:

Each LLM call incurs latency, cost, and token overhead. More subtly, it compounds context: every step includes not only the original query, but intermediate outputs and scratchpad logic from earlier prompts. This creates a growing burden on both inference and model performance.

I was working with agents over a year ago before the common workflows had really been set in stone. At that time we were heavily doctoring the context to give a very streamlined representation of what had occurred during a given run to the LLM. Is this not standard practice?
by wwarner | 2025-07-06 16:49:55+00:00
As a longtime emacs user, this perfectly summarizes what is most awful about it! It makes me cringe when people wag their fingers to correct the "misperception" that emacs is merely a great text editor and IDE, but rather a programmable elisp application platform. In reality, vanilla emacs with only a little bit of configuration (and as with any other editor, substantially more tinkering with installation and configuration of supporting binaries), provides a really great programming environment for almost any type of application.
by chongli | 2025-07-06 16:49:59+00:00
I see this a lot with math concepts as they begin to get more abstract: strange visualizations to try to build intuition. I think this is ultimately a dead-end approach which misleads rather than enlightens.

To me, the proper way of continuing to develop intuition is to abandon visualization entirely and start thinking about the math in a linguistic mode. Thus, continuous functions (perhaps on the closed interval [0,1] for example) are vectors precisely because this space of functions meet the criteria for a vector space:

* (+) vector addition where adding two continuous functions on a domain yields another continuous function on that domain

* (.) scalar multiplication where multiplying a continuous function by a real number yields another continuous function with the same domain

* (0) the existence of the zero vector which is simply the function that maps its entire domain of [0,1] to 0 (and we can easily verify that this function is continuous)

We can further verify the other properties of this vector space which are:

* associativity of vector addition

* commutativity of vector addition

* identity element for vector addition (just the zero vector)

* additive inverse elements (just multiply f by -1 to get -f)

* compatibility of scalar multiplication with field multiplication (i.e a(bf) = (ab)f, where a and b are real numbers and f is a function)

* identity element for scalar multiplication (just the number 1)

* distributivity of scalar multiplication over vector addition (so a(f + g) = af + ag)

* distributivity of scalar multiplication over scalar addition (so (a + b)f = af + bf)

So in other words, instead of trying to visualize an infinite-dimensional space, we’re just doing high school algebra with which we should already be familiar. We’re just manipulating symbols on paper and seeing how far the rules take us. This approach can take us much further when we continue on to the ideas of normed vector spaces (abstracting the idea of length), sequences of vectors (a sequence of functions), and Banach spaces (giving us convergence and the existence of limits of sequences of functions).
by skydhash | 2025-07-06 16:52:11+00:00
Emac's primitive are much more involved for sure. But the focus on having a simple and common representation for input and output instead of the separation between prompt and output has make it a lot easier to write involved tooling. Instead of a TUI application which breaks the unix philosophy or a script for a single workflow, you have both. The closest I think is now Vim+tmux, but it's now as easy to modify on the fly.
by ben_w | 2025-07-06 16:52:46+00:00
I generally hear everyone insisting that they themselves are "hiring the most competent regardless of X", it's just that pro-DEI assumes the baseline rate of competence is all groups are about the same really and anti-DEI assumes that rich == competent and oh look at the distribution of money in ${insert country here because it's not actually limited to America where it's white men with most of the money}.
by charcircuit | 2025-07-06 16:53:11+00:00
Games already handled this today on Steam, Apple Store, Play Store, etc by taking down the store page preventing new copies from being sold. Users can still redownload it. That's how things work today, and is how they would still work if SKG gets what they want. This isn't a new problem and is already the industry standard for how expiring IP works for the digital distribution for games.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-06 16:53:30+00:00
Yet some parts of math are 'preferred' over others, in that most 'serious' mathematicians would rather read 100 pages about functional analysis than 100 pages of meandering definitions from some rando trying to solve the Collatz conjecture.

Some people would like to have a filter for what to spend their time on, better than "your elders before you have deemed these ideas deeply important". One such filter is "Can these ideas tell us nontrivial things about other areas of math?" That is, "Do they have applications?"

Short of the strawman of immediate economic value, I don't think it's wrong to view a subject with light skepticism if it seemingly ventures off into its own ivory tower without relating back to anything else. A few well-designed examples can defuse this skepticism.
by allenu | 2025-07-06 16:53:58+00:00
Yeah, I think you're right. I didn't phrase it quite right.

Arbitrarily scrolling in mid-conversation is rude, but somebody picking up their phone to look something up or read a text message now happens without a big fuss, whereas before, I think people were more likely to apologize for the action. It's acceptable to just pick up your phone now to look up something or check your messages during a conversation in a lull.

On the other hand, I see couples seated together in restaurants just scrolling their phones privately at the same table, so generally it seems like it's more "okay" to disengage to your technology.
by mock-possum | 2025-07-06 16:54:55+00:00
> Not only did the photographers capture a significant number of red sprites, the Himalayan storm also featured even rarer TLEs called jets and ghosts. The team found 16 secondary jets, powerful columns of often blue or purple light darting upwards into the sky, and at least four ghosts, green hazy glows that can sometimes hover above red sprites.

Oddly we will just have to take the author’s word for it, because no photographs depicting those rarer TLEs appear in this article.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-07-06 16:55:20+00:00
>They're not thinking about grammatical rules, in fact many people that learn many languages almost never learn grammar very well at all, what they learn is how to ask for a bathroom, where an address is, what's such and such called, or how do you say..., or how are you today?, how much is this?, that is okay, and various responses, ect., things that allow them to do things with people who speak different languages.

Learning phrases is not learning a language. Again, you're doing nothing to explain the very real phenomenon of individual differences in second language acquisition.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-07-06 16:56:27+00:00
I am not that interested in motives, since they are rarely truly knowable.

I prefer to judge my political opponents by what they actually do, and by that metric, it is self-evident from both their public and private speech, and from the legislation that they seek to (and sometimes do) pass, that Republicans would like to destroy (or at least massively downsize) redistributive programs that provide assistance to the poor.

Now, as to why they might want to do this, I remain mute and disinterested, since in 61 years of life, I've never heard any explanation that doesn't deconstruct under cross-examination.
by lanstin | 2025-07-06 16:56:31+00:00
Because hundreds of years after multiple things have proven that systems with free and open flow of information, skills, and techniques beats any system where information is walled off, capitalism (or corporatism really) still insists, all too often, on favoring feudal style top down methods of control instead of bottom up “empower the teams and facilitate the flow of information”; they don’t merely suppress the flow of information they actively ignore information; and they prefer people idle rather than work on non-approved priorities.

Many people use capitalism to mean the system of multinational corps and their secretive, hierarchical, and morally offensive ways, rather than anything to do with free market economics (which are predicated on the free flow of information in the market).