MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-07-31 17:36:42+00:00
I've worked with Cassandra for ten years, you don't think I understand consistency and availability tradeoffs?

Are you acting like FDB has magically solved the CAP theorem? They've beaten mathematics?

If you want to talk about low-value comments, yours is up there. Mine was a basic question about how FDB streams large distributed datasets in a partition.

Do you have any insights, or are you just an asshole?
by spencerflem | 2025-07-31 17:36:45+00:00
Anti vax is nutty, anti nuclear makes some sense if the goal is worldwide disarmament. I agree AI is an incredible boon for surveillance and censorship but I’m highly skeptical that it will solve climate change and currently seems to be making it worse by measurably increasing power usage. XAI is using diesel for theirs and the air quality in town is measurably worse now.

I’m with you that cruelty and domination is winning right now, and that a sizable fraction of people are fundamentally evil and an even more sizable fraction basically don’t care. I still eat meat and acknowledge that it’s immoral to do so.

Just think that whatever happens after climate catastrophe / the water wars will likely be worse but it feels natural that it will at least be a different type of worse. I don’t see the global internet as being extremely relevant then.

Idk, as an individual there’s nothing much I can do and arguing here won’t help anything so I guess agree to disagree.
by breadwinner | 2025-07-31 17:36:54+00:00
Just a few months ago Musk filed a lawsuit in August accusing OpenAI of offering "lavish compensation" to "starve competitors." [1] That's when OpenAI was paying employees 100s of thousands. Now Meta is paying 100s of MILLIONS. Where is Elon Musk now and why is he quiet about this?

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/xai-openai-salary-workers-pa...
by thebruce87m | 2025-07-31 17:37:06+00:00
If only the system would cope with power outages I would agree. My viewports refuse to reconnect to the cameras and need multiple forgets/adoptions to come back to life. The (wired) cameras themselves take hours before they show up again, except for the (WiFi) doorbell. During this period I can see the all online via the managed ubiquiti switches.
by j45 | 2025-07-31 17:37:14+00:00
This reminds me of the types of applications that are installed on the Ubquiti Dream Machine Pro.

Ubiquiti has a pretty smooth setup that works well together, the recent years of reliability issues, updates, and data security issues however has been enough to stop buying Ubiquiti and protect it with other gear such as NetGate firewalls.

The Dream Machine Pro had lost some critical advanced configurability from the ui and command line compared to it's predecessor, leaving a lot of users in no man's land. Some of it has been resolved from what I can tell. I own one and had to supplement it with another device in front of it temporarily. Once things are in production, we usually don't look for reasons to touch it.

If your internet is 1 gig or less, I'll still vouch for the trusty littel EdgeRouter X, there's a great guide on setting up a nice little home network on it to learn which direction your next steps will be like.

Hopefully this proves itself in a year and it's an easy decision.
by alexpotato | 2025-07-31 17:37:18+00:00
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.

I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling.

Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!
by cess11 | 2025-07-31 17:37:41+00:00
Nothing in the israeli conduct is "bog standard". The drop in longevity in the Gaza strip in 2024 outpaces the Rwandan genocide by a large margin.

Israel is a colonial enterprise, sustained by colonial practices and ruled largely through the displacement of indigenous populations by settlers.

The current crisis in Palestine is hugely damaging to the international judicial order and moves the limits of possible conduct in armed conflict, in Ukraine as well as in Sudan and elsewhere. Many states have shown themselves to be sorely lacking in legitimacy over the last couple of years and will likely suffer quite a bit of unrest for this and related reasons.

I live in such a state, that has also recently come under continous US military presence. This makes this issue important to me.
by tetha | 2025-07-31 17:37:44+00:00
This is something I've started to notice as I've talked with artists on tour.

Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.

Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.

And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.

If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
by agentultra | 2025-07-31 17:37:56+00:00
People should unpack what a software developer does before jumping in.

Do you enjoy reading tables of letters and numbers from some dusty ISO standard in order to displays strings to a user who literally doesn't care and will never look at it? Under time pressure? With threats of getting replaced every few years by the new technology that will replace you?

Enjoy getting paged at 9pm in the middle of your kids' school play to put out the massive... oh the login to the intranet portal that only the one sales guy uses... not a fire.

Do you want to sweat bullets solving algorithms puzzles on a whiteboard in front of a bored reviewer... algorithms and data structures you will never use and will get chastised for writing on the job?

Enjoy letting others take credit for your work and ingenuity (yay team!) then taking the blame when you don't meet their impossible deadlines that they made up (how could you)?

Like getting angry emails from corporate shills that use code you write in your free time to release a new version with their requested features yesterday or else!?

Want to be able to remember op-codes from the data sheet of some processor nobody even uses anymore instead of your mothers' birthday?

Sure the money is good but they don't tell you that you're going to get hemorrhoids, astigmatism, carpal tunnel, a bad back, type-2 diabetes and a life long partnership with a therapist.

... and yet I still can't stop programming.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-31 17:38:09+00:00
Devstral was trained specifically to follow the "agentic" or "tool use" pattern.

Where it does each step. Read the files, then edit in text editor get it right, then write to the file.

Codestral is pre "agentic" the here's the code you copy and paste it.

Devstral > codestral.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-31 17:38:11+00:00
> No one can argue that you’re stealing a product that’s not being distributed, the law specifically says you need to put in a reasonable amount of effort to commercialize something to claim it damages you for someone to steal it

The law literally does not say that, either for things that are literally subject to be stolen, or, more to the point here, for copyright protection where “steal” is merely a very loose metaphorical term sometimes used to refer to infringement.
by jchw | 2025-07-31 17:38:19+00:00
Never even once thought that running a coffee shop would be fun, but then that example kind of made it seem interesting. I mean, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't actually want to do it, but also it does seem interesting to just sit there and explore different coffee beans and mess with the parameters and see what happens. There is an unloved page in my Obsidian notes somewhere where I have a table of grind size vs amount of water where I attempted to figure out the best trade-off for my drip coffee maker. (I have honestly been too lazy to actually do coffee at home for a little while now, but for a while I got sucked in.)

That said, unfortunately as much as it is depressing, the thing that I go Mr. Beast levels of obsession with is definitely software. I almost wish it could be drawing or something else that is a little more interesting, because while it is a great career that I probably would've been screwed without, it does feel pretty thankless at the end of the day. I don't think people who make software are really that valued by anyone but their own. You rarely hear people rave about software when it merely just works, even though sometimes it really is doing crazy things to make that happen. The ultimate end goal for software is to make it look and feel effortless, and if you truly win, the reward is that people will think it actually is.

That's also why I'm both terrified and excited by the prospect of machines writing competent code. I am not sure I will find the jobs left for me as interesting as actually writing the code itself. But also, if I really could have an army of even junior engineers running locally on a GPU cluster, the possibilities that would unlock feel pretty extensive. I'll just have to figure out how many GPUs I can afford while I'm waiting in the unemployment line. (Or that future may never actually come, if we're really hitting as hard of a wall as it looks like, but I'm not a believer in the meat brain being some sacred piece of matter whose functions can't possibly be replicated by logic gates. So I think it's probably a matter of time, it's just that maybe we're not actually sure how many, in part because people treat it as such an inevitability that they look at you funny if you suggest it might not be tomorrow.)
by darkmighty | 2025-07-31 17:38:24+00:00
On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.

Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.

From wiki:

> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"

Campaign donations, per this website:

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.

Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.

It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
by danudey | 2025-07-31 17:38:32+00:00
> I haven't tried any meds for the ADHD, I'd have to talk to doctors about that. I'm on the fence on the whole idea. I've made it this far without them.

One of the nice things about medication for ADHD, and I've mentioned this to a few people who are new to having (or supporting people who have) ADHD, is that the medication is very straightforward and you get roughly instant feedback.

That is to say that, if you compare to something like SSRIs for treating depression, you get a medication and a dose picked out, you start on the medication, you get awful side effects for weeks, and then maybe after a few weeks you start to see some benefits. Then again, maybe you don't, so you spend a few weeks tapering off so that you can try some other medicine, etc and see if that has any benefit.

With ADHD medicines just being (mostly) short-acting stimulants, in a lot of cases people can get a prescription, take one dose, and find out within an hour or two if it's making a difference. There can definitely be side effects and getting the right medication and dosage can be a lot of work, but being able to take a medication at 8 AM and be feeling the effects before noon is amazing - and having them wear off by the evening is also amazing. You don't have to struggle with juggling your brain chemistry for weeks just to see if anything happens, and you don't have to spend weeks undoing that to be clear of it; you can start and stop in a day.

> For the ASD there are no meds, as far as I understand.

Well, because ASD isn't a disease or a condition, it's a difference in how (and how much) you perceive the world.

> I probably need to force myself to go out into the world more. The pandemic really gave me an excuse to be alone all the time and 5 years later I haven't really stopped. I feel like it's making it worse, because I'm more out of practice of how to be around people.

This is true for me as well, to some extent, but I've also gotten to the point where I don't really care that much about masking or fitting in any more than necessary. I'm open about being neurodivergent, I'm not afraid to discuss it, and thankfully I'm in an industry where a lot of people are the same way - diagnosed or not - and at least kind of get it to some degree. Still important to not just be "outright weird" as some autistic people can be, so I'm not going to start telling our lead marketing strategist about the human leather and organ trading outpost I set up in Rimworld, but being open about it has made it a lot more relaxing to be around other people.

Maybe part of that is getting rid of the "what if they think I'm weird?" worry after realizing that eventually they're going to think I'm weird regardless and I just have to be sure to come across as "harmless weird" and not come across as "stranger danger weird".
by cap_andrea | 2025-07-31 17:39:57+00:00
Love this! Finally someone breaking open the MCP ecosystem for real dev use. mcp-use looks like the right balance between power and simplicity. The agent abstraction + tool discovery is super smart.

Also, hacking an IKEA curtain with MCP is an all-time flex.

Curious if you’re planning to build infra on top or keep it strictly dev tools?
by antonvs | 2025-07-31 17:39:58+00:00
Any corporate behavior that doesn’t lead fairly directly to increased share price, profit, revenues, or market share would qualify.

But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.
by Fischgericht | 2025-07-31 17:40:19+00:00
At least I have to order the devkits from China, can't get them from the US.

As you know, in practical terms china/taiwan/hongkong don't make a difference anymore when it comes to customs and shipping times.

But I understand and value that you understand the business, and we are looking at it from a different angle and potentially from inside/outside a bubble.

I understand your point that markets will adapt looking at it on a large scale. But the question is HOW the market is adapting. In the US far too many people are assuming that the world will bend for Trumpamerica.

In reality the world is at least in my industry is doing free-trade agreements in record time now. And the people in China I work with are not even thinking about the US market anymore at all. The future markets are elsewhere on this planet. What they care about is that the EU won't buck to Trump and also implement any kind of trade barriers against China just to please Trump.

And again: You are talking about bulk distribution. I am talking about small businesses, R&D, rapid prototyping, time to market. Days count. Every day I wait for a prototype I have developers sitting here doing nothing. You can not "shift" that problem. There is only one region where you are able to get not just SOME of the electronic parts you need, but ALL of them.

And that very clearly is not the USA.
by rayiner | 2025-07-31 17:40:25+00:00
> decades worth of anti-immigration propaganda being shilled by Fox "News"

Quite the opposite. It takes massive amounts of propaganda to make americans as tolerant of immigration as they are. Most people in the world value their culture, and don’t like foreigners coming into their country in large numbers and changing their societies.

If my home country experienced the kind of immigration the U.S. has seen, where immigrants and their children are so numerous that they’re routinely swinging elections, there would be a civil war.
by sysmax | 2025-07-31 17:40:30+00:00
Most of the AI hiccups come from the sequential nature of generating responses. It gets to a spot where adhering to code structure means token X, and fulfilling some common sense requirement means token Y, so it picks X and the rest of the reply is screwed.

You can get way better results with incremental refinement. Refine brief prompt into detailed description. Refine description into requirements. Refine requirements into specific steps. Refine steps into modified code.

I am currently experimenting with several GUI options for this workflow. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to try it out.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-31 17:40:31+00:00
> The drop in longevity in the Gaza strip in 2024 outpaces the Rwandan genocide by a large margin

Now do Ethiopia, Sudan and Myanmar. (Fact is we generally can’t calculate these statistics in most war zones.)

> Israel is a colonial enterprise, sustained by colonial practices and ruled largely through the displacement of indigenous populations by settlers

This is a popular refrain in American political science circles, agreed. It needs to be stated as such because there really isn’t great evidence for it, it’s just a convenient because it’s available to be applied.

You don’t need settler colonialism for barbarism, war crimes or even genocide. You do need it to oversimplify this conflict.
by klibertp | 2025-07-31 17:40:48+00:00
> I'm not really sure what the appeal of Elixir as a language is actually supposed to be

Easy:

- rebinding - higher-level OTP abstractions - AST macros - nicer, more readable syntax - (optionally) cleaner stdlib

(Assuming you're not trolling: you chose to focus on features that can only be judged subjectively, and therefore can only be discussed as preferences. It's ok to have them, but actively displaying them is a bit pointless. Objectively measurable features of both languages put them very close together, with both having slight advantages over the other in different areas, on average making them almost equivalent. Especially compared to anything non-BEAM.)
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-31 17:41:24+00:00
To anyone working in these types of applications, are embeddings still worth it compared to agentic search for text? If I have a directory of text files, for example, is it better to save all of their embeddings in a VDB and use that, or are LLMs now good enough that I can just let them use ripgrep or something to search for themselves?
by accrual | 2025-07-31 17:41:34+00:00
This is cool but man, it feels like we're pushing more and more complexity into the browser to build webpages that work like desktop apps.

Just reading "Chrome Speculation Rules API" makes my skin crawl a bit. We already have speculative CPU instructions, now we need to speculate which pages to preload in order to help mitigate the performance issues of loading megabytes of app in the browser?

I understand the benefits and maybe this is just me yelling at clouds, but it feels crazy coming from what the web used to be.
by Troryetem | 2025-07-31 17:41:55+00:00
I've found this extremely tedious, for three reasons:

(1) So many words to say "the devil is in the details".

(2) There are jobs that are not detail-oriented. Yes, there are some nuances to them, but they are not detail-oriented. Some people are irritated to death by having to fuck around with details, yet they excel at other jobs. There's nothing "nuts" about either group of people

(3) "Unpacking", as in, dumping all the details of a job on someone up-front, is silly. It's OK to have a plan, but it's unrealistic to expect to know everything in advance. "One step a day", "Rome wasn't built in a day". Uninformed choices and risk-taking are inevitable.

> When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.

Strongly disagree. It's because financial pressure and time pressure do not let them experiment and test themselves at various studies and jobs. "Unpacking-as-you-go" should be the standard. Instead, we force people to commit to something particular when they're in high-school, and changing course later is prohibitively costly. Whenever someone pulls that off, it always counts as an exception, a big feat to write news articles about.
by supportengineer | 2025-07-31 17:42:03+00:00
I want the same thing I've always wanted. To be a software engineer in the 1990's.

I want to come to work and see pyramids of Jolt Cola on the desks.

And for lunch, we'll go out as a team in our Honda Civics to get some $3 Chinese food.

In the lobby, we'll have back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal stacked up on the side tables.

We'll merge our code by copying it onto floppies and handing it to that one dude.

At some point we might setup a machine with a modem so you could dial in, telnet to a machine and check your email with pine.

When you leave work at 5:30pm, you're done for the day.
by toast0 | 2025-07-31 17:42:27+00:00
I've never been convinced by an explanation of how QUIC applies for flows in the data center.

Ossification doesn't apply (or it shouldn't, IMHO, the point of Open Source software is that you can change it to fit your needs... if you don't like what upstream is doing, you should be running a local fork that does what you want... yeah, it's nicer if it's upstreamed, but try running a local fork of Windows or MacOS); you can make congestion control work for you when you control both sides; enterprise switches and routers aren't messing with tcp flows. If you're pushing enough traffic that this is an issue, the cost of QUIC seems way too high to justify, even if it helps with some issues.
by danudey | 2025-07-31 17:42:49+00:00
It would be great if you spent any time at all educating yourself about the science and actual experiences behind it, rather than spouting off about what you assume to be true based off of nothing.

Your willful ignorance of objective fact does nothing to improve the discussion, and just shows you as being unwilling to engage intellectually.

Put aside your preconceived notions and do some actual research and you might learn some really interesting things.