MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tharkun__ | 2025-07-05 10:07:10+00:00
I don't think that's true. A lot of people are afraid to ask basic questions that everyone would think are important because they'd feel stupid asking them.

The thing is that in many a case those basic questions have not all actually been asked and answered because everyone involved thought the same: it's stupidly simple, I better not ask for fear of being marked dumb.

I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.

But then it often turns out that one of those stupid questions has not been answered sufficiently or people were thinking of completely different answers to the question. So it was a good thing that someone brought it up.

And if the question did already get taken into account and people did have the same answer(s) in mind then if a senior person asked, it will probably just be taken as "this guy knows his stuff and is just dotting Is and crossing Ts" VS a junior "asking dumb questions that everyone should know the answer to, duh!"
by Dr4kn | 2025-07-05 10:07:40+00:00
Spin down isn't as problematic today. It really depends on your setup and usage.

If the stuff you access often can be cashed to SSDs you rarely access it. Depending on your file system and operating system only drives that are in use can be spun up. If you have multiple drive arrays with media some of it won't be accessed as often.

In an enterprise setting it generally doesn't make sense. For a home environment disks you generally don't access the data that often. Automatic downloads and seeding change that.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-05 10:10:57+00:00
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?

Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.

The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
by rgblambda | 2025-07-05 10:11:01+00:00
The Stop Killing Games website's FAQ does specifically mention this scenario:

>For existing video games, it's possible that some being sold cannot have an "end of life" plan as they were created with necessary software that the publisher doesn't have permission to redistribute. Games like these would need to be either retired or grandfathered in before new law went into effect. For the European Citizens' Initiative in particular, even if passed, its effects would not be retroactive. So while it may not be possible to prevent some existing games from being destroyed, if the law were to change, future games could be designed with "end of life" plans and stop this trend.
by loherj | 2025-07-05 10:12:18+00:00
Yes and no.

Calling us a lab is not quite right, we are a consulting company.

But hacking is not just limited to in between placements, everybody has (at least) 2 days per month to do that, regardless of any work for customers.

Also, since AI is such a strategically important topic, we have a team that just works on AI stuff internally. That’s where R1T and R1T2 come from.
by helpfulContrib | 2025-07-05 10:13:54+00:00
Multi-tasking that didn't suck.

Same as we use it now, to be frank. Unix workstations as an interaction model have persisted so long because it works just great.

I was writing a lot of Unix software in that period - database apps, business logic, and so on. For me, using an MSDOS-based system was a compromise, which I enhanced by using Desqview to get multi-tasking - it allowed multiple MSDOS instances on a single machine, in which I ran terminal software, compilers (our apps were being ported to MSDOS...), and database admin tasks - just like today.

What we have today in the form of MacOS or Linux workstations is pretty much what we had back then, too. The power is inescapable.
by tetris11 | 2025-07-05 10:14:15+00:00
Same with ovens. Stopped heating? Check the heating coil either at the back, top, or bottom of the oven.

You won't even need to pull the oven out, chances are you can unscrew it right there from within.

£20 replacement coil for 10 minutes of work, or pay for a whole new oven?

(The retailer assured us over the phone that they could not repair it, but had great discounts on new ovens...)
by jech | 2025-07-05 10:14:30+00:00
There are a number of providers that offer such a service with the SIP protocol. The upside is that you're not tied to a single provider; the downside is that most providers only offer unencrypted calls (using RTP, not SRTP).

OVH, for example, offers unlimited calls to landlines in 40 countries for 1€ per month: <https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/phone/voip/>.

Now that Android no longer includes a built-in SIP client, you must use a third-party application. I've had success with Linphone (ignore their somewhat obnoxious on-boarding procedure), I've also tried Baresip, but I've had it hang on occasion. Both are in F-Droid.
by xeonmc | 2025-07-05 10:14:30+00:00
Also, software has two things going for older late-starters:

- The mental muscles involved in the act of making software tends to be those that mature the latest, around 25--30. It is also the case for comprehending the concepts, because in the end software is mostly about "human rules for doing things" rather than "how things are in Nature, deal with it however you can".

- The proportion of the total corpus of knowledge probably has the highest online-availability of any technical fields, rather than being completely locked-in to academic intitutions.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-05 10:14:48+00:00
Top engineers move to best pay location. For example best engineers in europe etc. move to US or get similarly high salaries in Europe. And having more high talent people in a location creates a different culture.

There is ofc some difference but if you are taking averages you will have much better engineers in a company based in nyc vs berlin.

I’m not an expert but this has been very apparent in places I worked, US based companies just had a better work setup and everything moved faster and with higher quality.

As an example, just saying an engineer is quarter the price in Turkey so you can just outsource there is very foolish. It just doesn’t work that way, maybe in wet dreams of CEOs only.

Similar thing with LLMs, some people are salivating over how they won’t need developers but it just isn’t that way yet.

Seeing how hungry businesses are for outsourcing and hiring remote, and seeing how it isn’t really working that way should be concrete proof for this.
by kevincox | 2025-07-05 10:14:56+00:00
I'm not saying that these companies aren't charging "fair" prices (whatever that means) but for many hardcore gamers their spending per hour is tiny compared to other forms of entertainment. They may buyba $100 game and play to for over 100 hours. Maybe add another $1/hour for the console. Compared to someone who frequents the cinema goes to the pub or does many other common hobbies and it can be hard to say that games are getting screwed.

Now it is hard to draw a straight comparison. Gamers may spend a lot more time playing so $/h isn't a perfect metric. And some will frequently buy new games or worse things like microtransactions which quickly skyrocket the cost. But overall it doesn't seem like the most expensive hobby, especially if you are trying to spend less.
by cb321 | 2025-07-05 10:15:00+00:00
Besides already agreeing to disagree on the Java slogan & syntax, I agree with all you say. Familiarity/being taught in schools is for sure a huge deal. { Not really "news" - Steve Jobs used to give high schools Apple IIs for the same reason. :-) } When even Scheme-inventing MIT moved to Python the writing was on the wall.

I've always been a little surprised Nim wasn't more popular with its Python like syntax, Lisp like meta-power, C-like speed and usually automatic memory management. Ah well.
by ciwolex | 2025-07-05 10:15:20+00:00
If you want to really learn it and master it, I'd advise you start with a project to build something you'd like. With that in mind, learn a programming language. JavaScript, CSS and HTML will be a good start for the frontend. You'll then need some backend skills. You could learn MySQL and JavaScript will also help you develop the back end. Along the way, you'll figure out a lot of the stuff yourself. Avoid using AI at all costs if you really want to learn. Once you've mastered the skill, AI will be a multiplier. Good luck
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-05 10:15:48+00:00
Perplexity is too bulky for queries Kagi can handle[0], and I don't want to waste o3 quota[1] on trivial lookups.

--

[0] - Though I admit that almost all my Kagi searches end in "?" to trigger AI answer, and in ~50% of the cases, I don't click on any result.

[1] - Which AFAIK still exists on Plus plan, though I haven't hit it ~two months.
by exe34 | 2025-07-05 10:16:09+00:00
> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.

This is the thing people should learn to accept - and take on the responsibility to refuse to engage with cultural performances that are artificially gatekept.

I did buy a number of films/series on Amazon, but the moment Jeff decides to pull the rug, I will absolutely pirate them without the slightest feeling of guilt. I don't play video games, so thankfully I'm not at the mercy of those particular sharks. But when it comes to buying ebooks on Amazon, I removed the DRM on every single one of them when I bought them. Since Amazon has moved to stop download via USB, I've simply stopped buying any drm-infested ebooks from them. I'll buy them off kobo or I'll simply not have them at all.

People need to vote with their wallet.
by camel-cdr | 2025-07-05 10:16:48+00:00
My personal gripe with Rust's std::simd in its current form is that it makes writing portable SIMD hard while making non-portable SIMD easy. [0]

> the implementation of sin4f and sin8f are line by line equal, with the exception of types. You can work around this with templates/generics

This is true, I think most SIMD algorithms can be written in such a vector length-agnostic way, however almost all code using std::simd specifies a specific lane count instead of using the native vector length. This is because the API favors the use of fixed-size types (e.g. f32x4), which are exclusively used in all documentation and example code.

If I search github for `f32x4 language:Rust` I get 6.4k results, with `"Simd<f32," language:Rust NOT "Simd<f32, 2" NOT "Simd<f32, 4" NOT "Simd<f32, 8"` I get 209.

I'm not even aware of a way to detect the native vector length using std::simd. You have to use the target-feature or multiversion crate, as shown as the last part of the rust-simd-book [1]. Well, kind of like that, because their suggestion using "suggested_vector_width", which doesn't exist. I could only find a suggested_simd_width.

Searching for "suggested_simd_width language:Rust", we are now down to 8 results, 3 of which are from the target-feature/multiversion crates.

---

What I'm trying to say is that, while being able to specify a fixed SIMD width can be useful, the encouraged default should be "give me a SIMD vector of the specified type corresponding to the SIMD register size". If your problem can only be solved with a specific vector length, great, then hard-code the lane count, but otherwise don't.

See [0] for more examples of this.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/portable-simd/issues/364#issuec...

[1] https://calebzulawski.github.io/rust-simd-book/4.2-native-ve...
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-05 10:16:51+00:00
> But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game.

What? You do have the right to set up a theater and watch Terminator in it. And you can even use the old DVD and an old DVD player to do it. There's no law against that.

There shouldn't be a law against letting you play a game on whatever hardware can play it, provided you have the physical game available to you
by kragen | 2025-07-05 10:17:16+00:00
The concern is that capitalism allocates resources to the production of socially valuable goods because corporations can raise money to buy the means of production of those goods before producing them by selling shares in their future profits to investors who are willing to accept some risk of bankruptcy in exchange for those future profits, which result from consumers' rational judgment that the goods are sufficiently valuable to them to be worth buying at a price higher than the cost of goods sold.

None of the links in this chain is perfect†, but one of the weaker ones is where investors are willing to accept risk. A guaranteed deflationary currency is a risk-free way to get a return on your investment, so companies have to offer a higher rate of return, narrowing the set of goods that can justify such investment.

But the same criticism can be leveled at Treasury bonds and (to many people's minds) real estate, so I'm skeptical of it, and anyway "risk-free" is not a good description of Bitcoin.

______

† Consumers knowingly buy socially harmful goods such as cigarettes, they unintentionally buy worthless goods because producers lie to them, investors are largely speculators driven by herd mentality rather than rational assessors of future returns, corporations cheat investors due to principal–agent problems, and externalized costs and benefits such as pollution aren't measured at all. Still, it's a damn sight better at organizing economic production than the Great Leap Forward, the Southern slave plantations, or the medieval guilds.
by Mawr | 2025-07-05 10:17:57+00:00
> It takes an absolute expert human to accurately judge distance between themselves and an object even 5 meters away.

Huh? The most basic skill of any driver is the ability to see if you're at a collision course with any other vehicle. I can accurately judge this at distances of at least 50 meters, and I'm likely vastly underestimating the distance. It is very apparent when this is the case. I can't tell if the distance between us is 45 vs 51 meters, but that is information with 0 relevance to anything.

> The result was that this beep would go off ... the humans in the car know it means a crash is imminent, but can't tell what's going on, where the crash is going to happen, then 2 seconds "nothing" happens, and then cars crash, usually 20-30 meters in front of the Tesla car. Usually the car then safely stops. Humans report that this is somewhere between creepy and a horror-like situation.

This is a non-issue and certainly not horror-like. All one's got to do is train themselves to slow down / brake when they hear the beep. And you're trying to paint this extremely useful safety feature as something bad?

> Worse yet is how humans respond to this. We all know this, but: how does a human react when they're in a queue and the person in front of them (or car in front of their car) stops ... and they cannot tell why it stops? We all know what follows is an immediate and very aggressive reaction.

What are you trying to say here? If the car in front of me brakes I brake too. I do not need to know the reason it braked, I simply brake too, because I have to. It works out fine every time because I have to drive in such a way to be able to stop in time in case the car in front of me applies 100% braking at any time. Basic driving.

Generally, what you're describing as predicting is more accurately called assuming. Assuming that things will go how one wants them to go. I call that sort of driving optimistic: optimistically assuming that the car in front of me will continue going forward and that there is nothing behind that huge truck that's blocking my view of the upcoming intersection, so I can freely gas it through.

That mindset is of course wrong; we must drive pessimistically, assuming that any car may apply max braking at any time and that if any part of our line of sight is obstructed, the worst case scenario is happening behind it - there is a high speed object coming towards us at a collision course that will reveal itself from behind the obstruction at the last second. Therefore, we must slow down when coming around a line of sight obstruction.
by pavlov | 2025-07-05 10:21:28+00:00
Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix.

Every Microsoft developer had a Xenix workstation for things like email, access to network disks, running a decent C compiler, and debugging.

DOS was practically a single-program environment with no memory protection and no networking. Unix offered much better productivity for software developers.

Engineering in general was a field that used Unix workstations heavily. Microsoft didn’t become competitive until Windows NT in 1993.
by Doxin | 2025-07-05 10:22:39+00:00
I work in tech full time. I mostly write python code. Python similar to D allows you to override ~all operators.

I have yet to run into an instance where someone has overridden operators to do something completely insane. Honestly the weirdest real use-case I've ran into is pathlib overriding division on path objects to instead mean concatenation. Which seems confusing until you realize it just means paths get written like `build_dir = root_dir / "build"` which is sensible enough.

Weirdest not-real use case is of course the famous goto-in-python module which overrides attribute access in combination with unhinged dark magic to implement goto.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-05 10:22:53+00:00
GCC was largely ignored until Sun became the first UNIX vendor to have different SKUs for developers and plain users, quickly followed by other vendors.

Only then folks started reaching out to GNU, as means to avoid paying for UNIX developer licenses from their respective vendors.

Sun even had multiple levels, one of the reasons Ada didn't took off, was that UNIX vendors like Sun had it as an additional SKU, the developer license would only get the classical UNIX stuff, alongside C and C++ compilers.
by kragen | 2025-07-05 10:23:29+00:00
The US currencies were either literal precious metals, or gold-backed and/or silver-backed, throughout the 19th century until the Great Depression, except for a couple of brief suspensions. Consequently the average rate of inflation was zero. That was the period that it went from a fractious group of rebel colonies to the center of world economic development. So, while I'm sympathetic to the idea that a fiat currency with a predictable inflation rate might stimulate the economy, I think you are making an unjustifiably strong case for it.
by smusamashah | 2025-07-05 10:23:49+00:00
I have lots of games on steam (epic and Gog) too. I fear death of these platforms or removal or games that I 'own' already. I only recently started buying games, even bought the games out of guilt that I previously played pirated.

I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-07-05 10:24:04+00:00
In the first paragraph I thought you were on to something. You don't like their terms, don't engage

But you're still engaging by pirating and going against their terms. Jeff spent a ton of money making the TV show. He chooses who gets to see it and in what way. I'm not going to shed a tear for Jeff, but I find this sort of weaksauce to then pirate it..

How about if the license is fine, but you don't like their price? Is it okay then too?
by solatic | 2025-07-05 10:24:39+00:00
Scalpers are only a retail-wide problem if (a) factories could produce more, but they calculated demand wrong, or (b) factories can't produce more, they calculated demand wrong, and under-priced MSRP relative to what the market is actually willing to pay, thus letting scalpers capture more of the profits.

Either way, scalping is not a problem that persists for multiple years unless it's intentional corporate strategy. Either factories ramp up production capacity to ensure there is enough supply for launch, or MSRP rises much faster than inflation. Getting demand planning wrong year after year after year smells like incompetence leaving money on the table.

The argument that scalping is better for NVDA is coming from the fact that consumer GPUs no longer make a meaningful difference to the bottom line. Factory capacity is better reserved for even more profitable data center GPUs. The consumer GPU market exists not to increase NVDA profits directly, but as a marketing / "halo" effect that promotes decision makers sticking with NVDA data center chips. That results in a completely different strategy where out-of-stock is a feature, not a bug, and where product reputation is more important than actual product performance, hence the coercion on review media.
by imiric | 2025-07-05 10:24:48+00:00
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?

Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.

All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.

Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
by NomDePlum | 2025-07-05 10:25:17+00:00
This is my experience too. We served fairly complex data requests, around 200,00 per day, for mobile and commercial users using ECS Fargate and Aurora Postgres as our main technologies and it coped fine.

Used Golang and optimised our queries and data structures and rarely needed more than 2 of whatever the smallest ECS Fargate task size is, but if we did it scaled in and out without any issues.

Realise that isn't at scale for some but it's probably a relatively common point for a lot of use cases.

We put some effort into maintenance, mostly ensuring we kept on an upgrade path but barely touched the infrastructure code other than that.

One thing we did do was limit the number of other AWS services we adopted and kept it fairly basic. Seen plenty of other teams go down the rabbit hole.