MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Earw0rm | 2025-07-20 10:16:54+00:00
Memory loss and survivor bias.

There was mountains of tacky, throwaway crap produced in the 80s. Guess what, we've thrown it all away. Quality lasts.

And don't even get me started on the food. A lot of tin cans. Desserts that you reconstituted from powder in a packet. The list goes on.
by sgt101 | 2025-07-20 10:17:24+00:00
I bought some wrangler jeans, because I remembered that I had a pair years ago that fit me better than levis, the levis were quite expensive and the wranglers cheap.

They were ok for the first wear - but not great to be honest.

Then I washed them and they were unwearable.

Didn't do anything fancy, just a cool wash, dried them on the line.

They turned to cardboard.
by ath3nd | 2025-07-20 10:18:01+00:00
Have you considered that it's not that we are spending money on cheap stuff, it's that even expensive stuff is built to not last with the incentive you come back for more? You do realize there are whole R&D departments working on planned obsolescence.

- Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

- Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements: https://www.euroconsumers.org/microsoft-security-windows-10-... If an OS's new version is supposedly...faster and better written, why does it require newer hardware?

- Apple's right to repair fight: https://sustainablebrands.com/read/apple-support-right-to-re... and then, when they saw they can't support this position anymore, suddenly becoming a champion of sustainability

- Apple's refusal to change their idiotic charging cables to a standard one, so they can sell you crap that works on no other device. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66778528

I know Apple are mentioned a lot here, but they are a perfect example of what happens when nobody calls out a monopoly on their shady practices.

> but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.

Ah yes blame it on the consumer, who dares to live longer.

> Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.

I don't get the logic here. If I knew I would live to 100, would it not make sense to buy stuff that serves me well over the long run (i.e more expensive)?
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-20 10:18:24+00:00
I'm incredibly skeptical of any non-invasive BCIs. EEG was around forever, and has completely failed to become useful as an interface system.

Neuralink N1 is a fully invasive BCI, with over 1000 recording channels that go down to neuron level. In practice, that's barely enough to provide a useful, reliable control interface. It's still SOTA - anything else that exists is straight up worse.

The pathway to better BCIs seems to be in more invasive interfaces with greater channel counts - not the other way around.
by haunter | 2025-07-20 10:18:28+00:00
>clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash

Or maybe just don't buy cheap thrash?

I bought some T-shirts while in Covid from a sports brand and 5 years later they are still as if they were new :shrug:

Of course price =/= quality, but when almost everyone is ordering their new clothes from Shein then what do you really expect?
by pfdietz | 2025-07-20 10:18:44+00:00
The most important datum is that Boeing refused to build an SST without large government subsidy. This was evidence they decided there wasn't much of a market. And this decision was taken before the 1973 mideast war that kicked off the oil embargo and energy crisis.

Today, we see similar evidence in that Boom is being forced to develop their own engine because none of the actual engine makers want to make an engine suitable for a SST. I believe there is considerable skepticism that Boom will be able to do this, btw.

It should be noted that even subsonic airliners have gotten a bit slower over time. Fuel economy > travel time for them to some extent, even being subsonic.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-20 10:18:47+00:00
This is not intended to be an insult of any sort, but I am pretty sure the use of LLM to write this was not so moderate, but I have nothing against it, you have a working project. I have done the same with projects similar to this.

I use lazygit (also written in Go) and magit a lot, they are quite nice. For GUI, I use Git Cola.

I wish the demo GIF was something more complex, perhaps adding & removing a particular chunk and committing it or something like that.
by orwin | 2025-07-20 10:19:08+00:00
It forces you to separate your user data from the billing data, and that's just good practice too.

Keep your billing information immutable, and separate it from user logs. Honestly following GDPR make your code better.

At least when it passed, it pushed us to rework our DB architecture, which was heavily needed. After that i left and got hired to implement a global RBAC in a big company (took almost two years, but it was a solo project), and once again GDPR rules made the architecture decisions a breeze, because the constraint it brings pushes for good architecture (and it make it easy to sell it to the managers to be honest).

Maybe in countries where KYC and tax laws are different than in europe it might be different, but for european devs who cared about good design, GDPR was a good thing (i have a friend who worked for a French Defense company at the time, he told us that multiple teams including his spent 6 month or more refactoring old code and fixing years old issues)
by binwiederhier | 2025-07-20 10:20:13+00:00
This strongly depends on your environment and on your RTO/RPO.

Sure, there are environments that have automatically deployed, largely stateless servers. Why back them up if you can recreate them in an hour or two ;-)

Even then, though, if we're talking about important production systems with an RTO of only a few minutes, then having a BCDR solution with instant virtualization is worth your weight in gold. I may be biased though, given that I professionally write BCDR software, hehe.

However, many environments are not like that: There are lots of stateful servers out there with bespoke configurations, lots of "the customer needed this to be that way and it doesn't fit our automation". Having all servers backed up the same way gives you peace of mind if you manage servers for a living. Being able to just spin up a virtual machine of a server and run things from a backup while you restore or repair the original system is truly magical.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-20 10:20:40+00:00
AI writing will be impossible to distinguish from human writing in a year or two. The weird crappy way it writes now will be adversarially driven out of it in the next LLM releases, and probably gone in one or two more.

No more lists of 3 things, no more emdash, no more vacant live laugh love level vapid niceties.
by hansmayer | 2025-07-20 10:21:04+00:00
Yes, the first time ever you have an interaction with them did indeed look magical and had something to it, wondering if these machines are passing the Turing test already. Alas, fast forward a few years, and many thousands of LoC generated by paid for 'latest and ever improving models', I was never more certain that the tools are unfortunately just statistical machines and the tail end of the 20+ years of machine learning, that is, learning how to guess outputs based on inputs. Yes you can quickly generate a scaffolding for an app. You can even do more than that, if you are very particular with your prompts. It can even sort-of stand in for the search engines we knew from before 2020s (unfortunately a sub-par replacement imho). But the key thing most of us complain about is that the returns are disproportionately small compared to the huge investments that have been made so far and even more that we have commitments for. More than 200B USD invested so far at least, for an industry generating < 15B revenue in 2024, how is that sound reasoning? How is that revolutionary? Hundreds of billions more promised, for what? So that lazy recruiters can generate job descriptions easier? Imagine the societal change we could have effected if that sort of money was invested in real problems. Hell, I'd propose even Mars colonisation would have been a more noble target then sinking in a trillion dollars over the next years into what? I would respect the VCs and GenAI crowd more if they realised that there may be some potential in the software-development field and focused effort just on that, as specialised field, as this is where we notably have some gains, notably also with a lot of crap to fix along the way. Instead they chose to push it as some kind of a B2C utility that everyone should use, probably aware of high disproportion between the investment and the return. They are desperate for the average Joe to learn to ask Gemini "oh no i spilled some sugar into my bowl, what should i do" - an actual commercial that was aired on TV. There is no cynicism, just evaluating the products realistically and seeing them what they are. The engineers were always the first to promote an innovative product - why are most of us not doing it now? Think about it.
by rnikander | 2025-07-20 10:22:16+00:00
Interesting. My projects would benefit from those more convenient clones into closure captures. The other point where Rc is uglier than, say, Swift, is the explicit `.borrow()` and `.borrow_mut()` everywhere. I wonder if that could also be made more convenient/high-level without sacrificing the control over high performance (like C++) that got me to use Rust in the first place.
by markovs_gun | 2025-07-20 10:22:22+00:00
Idk. I feel like at some point we have to blame society as a whole for things or things will never get changed. Social change in the past has been hard fought to get public perception to change. When my grandparents were kids, for example, black people were not allowed to use the same facilities as white people and a majority of people supported this. Sure powerful interests in the media promoted this view, but ultimately the majority was wrong and had to change.
by ndr_ | 2025-07-20 10:22:57+00:00
A confabulated arc to my current employer during a ChatGPT session led me to discover that ChatGPT Team injects four fields — full name, email, user name, and organization — into the prompt it sends to LLM. This happens even when the “Memory” feature and all personalization settings are disabled. The free tier doesn’t do this.

Can anyone on ChatGPT Enterprise or other LLM chat systems (Claude.ai, Google AI, etc.) reproduce this? Thoughts on practical privacy or compliance implications?
by vntok | 2025-07-20 10:23:32+00:00
> Production systems need 99.9%+ reliability

This is not remotely true. Think of any business process around your company. 99.9% availability would mean only 1min26 per day allowed for instability/errors/downtime. Surely your human collaborators aren't hitting this SLA. A single coffee break immediately breaks this (per collaborator!).

Business Process Automation via AI doesn't need to be perfect. It simply needs to be sufficiently better than the status quo to pay for itself.
by SllX | 2025-07-20 10:23:36+00:00
We haven't had a derailment here since 2009 where a train left the track by about a foot or so. It could happen, but in the course of normal business operations, evacuations are not a regular event here pulling operators out of their cabins. More likely is a door breaks (or rather someone breaks a door) and they have to seal it manually to keep the train moving, but I only see that happen on the older >20 years old stock and pretty much never on the newer stock.
by rollcat | 2025-07-20 10:23:47+00:00
> The actual core of OTP was the supervisor tree but that's too complicated so Golang is basically just more concise Java.

Which is ironic, maybe kinda funny. The first "larger" project I've tackled in Go was a chat server. I wanted a simple supervisor for each connected client; in case a goroutine encountered a recoverable error but needed to be restarted. I don't have any practical experience with OTP, but I've always been a big fan of daemontools/runit/etc: just let it crash, restart, and recover.

So in Go, you can't (easily) obtain a handle to a goroutine. The authors' entire argument seemed to be that this would allow developers to implement "bad" patterns, like thread-local storage. You can of course still come up with some wrapper code, like this:

type Service struct { err <-chan error run func(*Service) } s := &Service{err: make(chan error)} realRun := func() error { ... } s.run = func(s *Service) { s.err <- realRun() } go s.run(s) err := <-s.err

But what you really wanted was something like:

run := func() error { ... } g := go run() err := <-g

Now of course you still want some wrapper code to maintain client/connection state, etc. But if you wanted a "real" supervisor tree, you'd have to do this dance for every sub-goroutine you'd like to spawn. You'll soon end up with func(*Service, any) and throw away static typing along the way. Generics wouldn't be introduced until 18 releases after, and I don't think they would help all that much.

Correct me if I'm missing anything obvious.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-07-20 10:25:22+00:00
Human multi-step workflows tend to have checkpoints where the work is validated before proceeding further, as humans generally aren't 99%+ accurate either.

I'd imagine future agents will include training to design these checks into any output, validating against the checks before proceeding further. They may even include some minor risk assessment beforehand, such as "this aspect is crucial and needs to be 99% correct before proceeding further".
by qwery | 2025-07-20 10:25:29+00:00
Planned obsolescence is very much an actively employed, functional, business strategy.

I think you're only considering one aspect of planned obsolescence -- where the product is designed to have a short lifetime. I don't know why you would believe that that isn't part of "business as usual", but there's more than one way to make a product obsolete. The typical case is when a company releases yearly model refreshes for a product with an operational life far in excess of 12 months. This stategy is most common in markets with a monopoly or oligopoly, in saturated product segments.

Have you ever heard the phrase "last year's model"?
Show HN: Emporium – An Open Source Shopify Alternative for Creators
by dominus_silens | 2025-07-20 10:25:36+00:00
Hi HN

I've been building *Emporium*, a fully open source and self-hostable eCommerce platform designed for creators, artists, therapists, solopreneurs, and independent sellers who want to run their own store — *without monthly fees or vendor lock-in*.

---

### Tech stack (briefly):

- *Frontend*: React + TailwindCSS + Zod + ShadCN UI - *Backend*: FastAPI + PostgreSQL + Pydantic models - *Form engine*: JSON-driven admin forms auto-synced with backend models - *AI integration*: Optional local assistant via ShellGPT + Ollama - *Deployment*: Docker with `sacred-run-all.sh` (1-line bootstrap)

---

### Why Emporium?

I built this because most eCommerce platforms are: - Expensive (SaaS monthly plans) - Closed-source or bloated - Not made for small, mission-driven creators

*Emporium* is: - Light, fast, and modular - Based on simple JSON configs for UI/admin - Easy to host locally or on your own VPS - Designed for clarity and customizability

---

### Links

*GitHub Repo* → [https://github.com/DOMINUS-SILENS/COMMERCIUM](https://github.com/DOMINUS-SILENS/COMMERCIUM)

---

This is still a work in progress — I'd love feedback from the community.

Try it out, clone it, fork it, break it. Ideas and contributions welcome! Let me know if you'd like to help build plugins, payment modules, or local-first features.

𓂀 Built with open source spirit and sacred commerce in mind.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-07-20 10:25:46+00:00
That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.

If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
by latexr | 2025-07-20 10:25:55+00:00
> Yet here we are. Rather than exploring this fantastic new tool, so many here are obsessed with pointing out flaws and shortcomings.

Now think about any technology you disapprove of, and imagine that defence: “We have just invented bombs and killer drones, yet rather than exploring these fantastic new tools, so many here are obsessed with pointing out flaws and shortcomings.”

> I get the angst of a world facing dramatic change.

Respectfully, I think you’re being too reductive. There are legitimate arguments and worries being exposed, it is not people being frightened simpletons afraid of change.

> I don't get the denial and deliberate ignorance flaunted as somehow deep insight.

Some of that always happens. But if that and fear of change are how you see the main tenets of the argument, I ask you to look at them more attentively and try to understand what you’re missing.
by j-bos | 2025-07-20 10:26:00+00:00
Sometimes I'll read comment online that does the equivalent of breaking my "willing suspension of diabelief" by sounding just like a standard gpt reply. I even slipped up and commented as much, which is not in itself an interesting comment , just because it was so jarring to read. But idk what it is about reading something lexically equivalent to injection molded plaatic that feels so annoying, plastic is great! But maybe it's similar to the feeling of buying an upcharged "branded" Alibaba product on Amazon. I can't trust the reseller on the basis of their effort because I don't know them and it's just as likely they put 0 effort into quality control (thoughtful selection, validation).

But in the end, like the article implies, any comment could be "manufactured."
by nephalegm | 2025-07-20 10:27:23+00:00
Reading through the article it’s explained in the recovery process. He reads the intent log entries and the completion entries and only applies them if they both exist.

So there is no guarantee that operations are committed by virtue of not being acknowledged to the application (asynchronous) the recovery replay will be consistent.

I could see it would be problematic for any data where the order of operations is important, but that’s the trade off for performance. This does seem to be an improvement to ensure asynchronous IO will always result in a consistent recovery.
by binwiederhier | 2025-07-20 10:27:36+00:00
Databases these days are pretty resilient to restoring from crash consistent backups like that, so yes, you'll likely be fine. It's a good enough approach for many cases. But you can't be sure that it really recovers.

However, ZFS snapshots alone are not a good enough backup if you don't off-site them somewhere else. A server/backplane/storage controller could die or corrupt your entire zpool, or the place could burn down. Lots of ways to fail. You gotta at least zfs send the snapshots somewhere.
by torlok | 2025-07-20 10:28:35+00:00
The rental experience has everything to do with payment. With a credit card, a person has to prove they shouldn't have been charged by a corporation, and without, the corporation has to prove a person should be charged. That's a massive difference. It blows my mind how people think putting down a credit card is normal. You're basically giving somebody access to your money to be used at their leasure.
by bornfreddy | 2025-07-20 10:28:40+00:00
> ...that the great promise of capitalism — if you work, you can have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation — is no longer being fulfilled;...

That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life will be good enough.
by buran77 | 2025-07-20 10:29:10+00:00
> Many products are hard to compare due to the enormous price difference

Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times".

My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+ years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary - for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.
by MrGilbert | 2025-07-20 10:29:35+00:00
Same. We had that phase were every manufacturer build their own tiny OS around 2007/2008. I had an LG KS360 and a Sony W200i. The LG would crash regularly. The W200i would work fine, but of course had all the proprietary Sony connectors. The W350i on the other hand was a catastrophic phone, that I had replaced twice, as evident in my Amazon account.
by tootyskooty | 2025-07-20 10:29:39+00:00
One underdiscussed advantage is that an LLM makes knowledge language agnostic.

While less obvious to people that primarily consume en.wiki (as most things are well covered in English), for many other languages even well-understood concepts often have poor pages. But even the English wiki has large gaps that are otherwise covered in other languages (people and places, mostly).

LLMs get you the union of all of this, in turn viewable through arbitrary language "lenses".
by hansmayer | 2025-07-20 10:30:05+00:00
Or something called "Airplane", imagine being able to visit the remotest part of the Earth within 24h, it would have blown the socks off of our ancestors, wouldn't it? Also fairly remarkable compared to "I found the problem! I need to connect to the database before querying it...", "You're absolutely right, I forgot strings cannot be compared to numbers" etc
by brap | 2025-07-20 10:30:14+00:00
I don’t know which models you guys are working with, but all of the SOTA ones I’ve tried in different configurations ended up producing mostly garbage.

I find myself having to spend more time guiding the model in the right direction and fixing its mistakes than I would’ve spent building it all myself.

Every time I read one of these stories I feel like maybe you guys have models from 2035, because the ones we have today seem to be useless outside of creating greenfield, simple React apps that just sort of work.

One thing I’ll say is that it’s been a real time saver for debugging. For coding, a huge waste of time. Even for tasks that are menial, repetitive, require no thinking etc. I find that it’s mostly crap.
by ath3nd | 2025-07-20 10:30:15+00:00
> On one side you have companies that are working hard 24/7 to have more money at any cost. On the other side you have average Joe who can barely work, have time for family and have time for relaxing.

You are taking that as a natural state of things, a law that can't be broken, while this is just the end effect of living under capitalism. It's not set in stone and can be changed. We just need to change the incentives:

> It is only natural that companies are pushing more and more as time goes on. And there is no reason it should stop other than companies messing it up?

Jail time for executives, breaking down monopolies, and enforcing of antitrust laws come to mind as an effective way that's worked in the past. Also unionizing and strikes for the workers for fair pay. State intervention and re-nationalization of companies that misbehave, especially water, utilities, transport and agriculture. Also progressive wealth tax up to 70%-99%, so there is less incentives to be greedy (if you think that's too much...well, that already happened in 50's USA).