MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lr0 | 2025-07-18 21:37:24+00:00
I remember when I was using Arch around 5 years ago and I was looking for the Brave browser package, when I found it could be only be installed through the AUR, for some reason I had the assumption that since it's hosted on Arch's official servers it must be properly reviewed even if it was built by the community (like how Chrome web extensions are, for example). And I installed so many AUR packages for things that I used to manually install or find a workaround to install their .deb file on my Arch (using dpkg[0] for example). Then, I was in IRC and I found two fellows talking about "trusting" the AUR, and you can imagine the rest. I started an AUR-detox.

Before moving totally from Arch I kept some AUR packages that I could not let go of, but on the condition of checking their scripts thoroughly and making sure to check them even more thoroughly with each update, and only updating them when it's really necessary. I'm not sure if other Linux package repositories (like Nix) have these supply-chain-attack possibilities or if they employ a better review mechanism, but I really hope if Arch maintainers can find a solution to make the AUR safer, at least more than how it currently sounds.

[0]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dpkg
by Fogest | 2025-07-18 21:37:26+00:00
The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem.

I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.
by ajross | 2025-07-18 21:38:06+00:00
> All the pitfalls of concurrency are there [in async APIs]

This is one of those "in practice, theory and practice are different" situations.

There is nothing in the async world that looks like a parallel race condition. Code runs to completion until it deterministically yields, 100% of the time, even if the location of those yields may be difficult to puzzle out.

And so anyone who's ever had to debug and reason about a parallel race condition is basically laughing at that statement. It's just not the same.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-18 21:39:30+00:00
I'm afraid that this might sound flippant, but the answer to your question comes through another question - why were early 19th century industrialists obsessed with replacing textile workers? Replacing workers with machines is not a new phenomenon and we have gone through countless waves of social upheaval as a result of it. The debate we're currently having about AI has been rehearsed many, many times and there are few truly novel points being made.

If you want to understand our current moment, I would urge you to study that history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots
by ytpete | 2025-07-18 21:40:03+00:00
Right — and I'd conjecture until LLMs get close to the accuracy of an entry-level employee, they may not have enough economic value to be viable beyond the hype/novelty phase. Why? Because companies already chose a "minimum quality to be valuable" bar when they set the bar for their most junior entry level. They could get lower-quality work for cheaper by just carving out an even lower-bar hiring tier. If they haven't, maybe it's because work below that quality level is just not a net-positive contribution at all.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-18 21:40:15+00:00
See https://www.pa.gov/governor/newsroom/press-releases/governor...

BTW, in the interest of helping the author be a cause and not an effect, note that the visibility of zyz domains are suppressed:

https://www.spotvirtual.com/blog/the-perils-of-an-xyz-domain

For instance these are blocked at my workplace because they are associated with email phishing.
by dismalaf | 2025-07-18 21:40:17+00:00
Everyone needs to stop competing with Office and just build a better office.

The truth is, no one needs to be compatible these days. Everyone is either:

- using the same software company-wide, whether it's LO, Google Docs or MS Office

- exporting to PDF when sharing docs with someone outside the organization

The real thing that LO is missing is server side hosting and easy syncing... Until they get that, it's just going to be something used by individuals and small orgs.

I still remember, at my university we had LO installed on lab computers, MS Office was a "requirement" for students to purchase, but most profs simply insisted we simply hand in assignments as Google Docs links because there was incompatibilities between .doc, .docx, the formats made by LO, etc... Google Docs were the only ones that could be shared and be 100% identical on every computer with the link.

If LO had a web hosted solution and provided easy to install server code for organizations, they'd dominate. But they don't...
by jdiff | 2025-07-18 21:40:20+00:00
Could you explain more what's wrong with the STM32 family as a target? The Playdate's got a complete implementation and an STM32 heart. And other members of the family have seen other non-system-specific implementations, although neither is complete. I'm not deeply familiar with the family, so insight is welcomed, but I don't immediately see why they'd be unsuitable.

And while they're far more numerous, ultimately I think they're less likely to be used for personal computing. Sifting through the ruins, if you can find any functioning personal computer, you can get started immediately. Even if you don't have a compiler, you certainly have a web browser and write permissions. All you need to bring is the emulator spec.

That's an easier bar to clear than harvesting chips, a set of other working parts, gathering documentation for each, ensuring you have tooling and likely libraries for each, and most critically: enough existing, functioning tech to program it all. But if you already have that, you already have everything you need to compute without bootstrapping a new device. Not to say it wouldn't be worth the effort, but it's not an easier or alternative path to personal computing, just a path to share or persist it.
by 9x39 | 2025-07-18 21:40:49+00:00
>That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.

It doesn't have to follow directly; the problem is often indirect. H1Bs are much better behaved for employers because they are nearly powerless to say no, and can be slow-walked for raises, promotions and squeezed for high hours worked to reduce effective wages. There's also cultural migration issues - India is 70%+ of the H1B program. Does India have a monopoloy on top global talent, or is it just a process vulnerable to political capture and top execs' whims?

Talent exists everywhere, but when one country absolutely dominates a process, it suggests the process has been captured.

>Big tech is not the one abusing this program.

Did they promise that in a press release or something? Compared to Microsoft, TCS and Infosys are bottom tier tech, but the H1B program in general is sketchy based on the accusations the biggest players have had over the last decade.
by intended | 2025-07-18 21:41:18+00:00
I’m rejecting the assertion that the data covers a physics model - which would be invariant across nations.

I’m positing that the models encode cultural decision making norms- and using global south regions to highlight examples of cases that are commonplace but challenge the feasibility of full autonomous driving.

Imagine an auto rickshaw with full self driving.

If in your imagination, you can see a level 5 auto, jousting for position in Mumbai traffic - then you have an image which works.

It’s also well beyond what people expect fully autonomous driving entails.

At that point you are encoding cultural norms and expectations around rule/law enforcement.
by haunter | 2025-07-18 21:41:32+00:00
You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.

I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.

In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)

I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.

Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250

Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).

And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.

Few days later bought my first gaming PC.

Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
by LexiMax | 2025-07-18 21:41:33+00:00
> The real question is: Why didn't past presidents utilize that power that they clearly had?

The two parties have different platforms and have material differences in the way they govern, but the oligarchs that fund both sides of the aisle ultimately want the same thing - more money and power at the expense of the working class. Both sides are not the same, but both sides _are_ complicit.

That said, you'll notice that a lot of the whataboutism in this comments section tries to equivocate the policy of the two sides. It obviously false, but it's purposeful in that it's trying to bait responses that correct the record of the Democrats. A response that instead advocates for specific policy is much more productive and derails the attempt at making the conversation about red vs blue.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-18 21:41:40+00:00
If this is correct then the lgpl would be ideal?

Also, it depends how much value-add they see their modifications having. For small tweaks and bug fixes they'll contribute it. If they invest a lot of money into something, they'll be loath to hand that value over to their competitors. There is some tipping point where the competitive value (or more realistically the jealous urge not to share) of their efforts exceeds the utility of easy tracking with upstream changes.
by lucbocahut | 2025-07-18 21:43:30+00:00
The main argument builds on the assumption that the economy is a zero sum game when it clearly is not. Just because we invest these ressources in AI does not mean we could mobilize the same capital for other pursuits.

Precisely AI is being built out today because the value returned is expected to be massive. I would argue this value will be far bigger than railroads ever could be.

Overspending will happen, for sure, in certain geographies or for specialty hardware, maybe even capacity will outpace demand for a while, but I don’t think the author makes a good case that we are there yet.
by ndiddy | 2025-07-18 21:44:12+00:00
According to the oral history of Tom Rolander (VP of engineering at DRI, he was in the famous IBM meeting), IBM wanted to call CP/M-86 "PC-DOS" and pay a one-time licensing fee, but DRI said they had to keep it as CP/M-86 and pay a per-device royalty. About a month after the meeting, Rolander heard through the grapevine that IBM had licensed QDOS instead of CP/M-86 for their operating system. Kildall informed IBM that he was already aware of QDOS and was preparing a lawsuit against SCP because he believed it to be an illegal CP/M clone. To defuse the situation, IBM promised that they wouldn't bundle an OS with the PC, would offer PC-DOS, CP/M-86, and UCSD P-System alongside the PC, and would pay the royalties up front for some large number of copies of CP/M-86. The condition was that DRI wouldn't sue IBM or Microsoft over the similarities between QDOS and CP/M. When the PC was released, Kildall and Rolander discovered they had been double crossed:

> So we got the notice about the rolling out and all the rest of that, and so as Gary and I were want to do, we flew up to San Jose and took a cab over to the IBM store, and we came in the store, and sure enough there was the IBM PC sitting there, and here were the three boxes of the operating system. And we looked at this and the IBM PC-DOS was priced at $40, and then over here was CP/M and it was priced at I’m pretty sure it was $260. It was more than $200 above PC-DOS, and I don’t even remember what the UCSD P-System was. But we looked at that and I’ve never had my face slapped in my life, but I know what it would feel like to have my face slapped. It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone.

Here's a link to the full oral history if you're interested: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
by oytis | 2025-07-18 21:44:26+00:00
The general view in my bubble was that blue collar jobs are seen as dumb, physically demanding and dangerous, so we kind of replacing them for their own good, so that they can do something intellectual (aka learn coding). Whereas intellectual labour is kind of what humans exist for, so making intellectual work redundant is truly the end of the world.

Maybe it's my post-communist background though and not relevant for the rest of the world
by jsnell | 2025-07-18 21:44:39+00:00
For a first approximation, yes? Their earnings have been growing steadily for years ($4-5B growth in each of the last 8 quarters), with no seasonal effects.

Q1*4 is highly likely to be a better estimate of their eventual 2025 calendar revenue than their current trailing 12 months revenue would be. Probably still a bit conservative, but easier to justify than projecting that growth continues at exactly the same pace.
by didibus | 2025-07-18 21:45:00+00:00
I think asynchronous as meaning out-of-sync, implies that there needs to be synchronicity between the two tasks.

In that case, asynchronous just means the state that two or more tasks that should be synchronized in some capacity for the whole behavior to be as desired, is not properly in-sync, it's out-of-sync.

Then I feel there can be many cause of asynchronous behavior, you can be out-of-sync due to concurent execution or due to parallel execution, or due to buggy synchronization, etc.

And because of that, I consider asynchronous programming as the mechanisms that one can leverage to synchronize asynchronous behavior.

But I guess you could also think of asynchronous as doesn't need to be synchronized.

Also haven't read the article yet lol
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-18 21:45:08+00:00
> I just wish we forced every new data center to be built with renewables or something.

Already the case in Europe. And in the US, most of the biggest player are doing this: Google, Microsoft, Meta, AWS. By now those 4 are the largest buyers of renewable purchase agreement in the entire world. MS alone invested something like 20B in renewable purchase.

But the issue is that installation of renewable in the US is not bottlenecked by lack of demand, it's bottlenecked by permitting, zoning issue etc. The queue for power deployment right now is something like 100GW (i.e. how much production is paid to be built, but not yet built), that is around 10% of the current total US power capacity. So it's not really clear to me if buying more renewables helps making it's deployment faster through economies of scale, or if the purchase order is just sitting in a queue for years and years.

One notable exception is xAI/Grok, who has one of the biggest cluster, is powering it 100% with gas and afaik did not offset it by buying the equivalent in renewable. Having built the cluster in a what was a washing machine factory that does not have adequate power supply or cooling tech, they have been rolling in 35 mobile gas turbines (large trailer trucks that you connect to gas pipes) and 50+ refrigeration trucks. IMHO, it should be illegal to build such an energy consuming system with such a poor efficiency, but well.
by ziml77 | 2025-07-18 21:45:15+00:00
I've seen claims of decent speed improvements when using CachyOS, though I can't say I've ever hunted down solid confirmation. I'm a bit wary of the project because I would have to put a lot of trust in them since they're rebuilding everything themselves and could easily introduce malware somewhere in there. (But I've been scared of distros before only to have it pointed out to me that some very well respected people are involved, so I could be worrying for nothing here too)
by esseph | 2025-07-18 21:46:25+00:00
I'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam app, it seems fine between the two.

Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?

I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky.

Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.
by Ethee | 2025-07-18 21:46:34+00:00
I have a friend who works writing COBOL for a US state government, I sent him this post and this was his response:

I work in COBOL for government systems.

We upgraded our old mainframes to IBM Z16's, and we just got some new ones in recently for our backup server.

Part of the job is taking whatever they decide in legislation and translating that into code that processes whatever they decided to make law, from fees, suspensions, special legislation for certain areas, etc.

Our programming environment primarily uses TSO/ISPF and changeman for version control. We have access to IBM's IDz (previously RDz) as an IDE for development, and I would personally prefer to use that but haven't been able to get it installed on my work computer due to licensing issues. Part of security protocol is that we cannot use anything open-source, so VSCode with Zowe is, unfortunately, out of the picture.

We maintain a lot of old programs and modules, but we are also actively developing new programs as we expand our IT department - and yes, that is new COBOL programs. We have a Linux side as well which mainly deals with the web-side, but they still interact with the mainframe to call on modules - but all they are really doing is sending data to CICS to get data back. They do not know anything about the COBOL itself or how to program in it.
by oytis | 2025-07-18 21:46:53+00:00
Nobody wants to be unemployed, but people generally love the idea of getting what they want without having to interact with not to say pay to other people.

Like you have a brilliant idea, but unfortunately don't have any hard skills. Now you don't have to pay enormous sums of money to geeks and have to suffer them to make it come true. Truly a dream!
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-07-18 21:47:37+00:00
You're looking at dots on a graph when you should be looking at lines and curves (and slopes of curves). The author makes this argument:

* Movement of capital from other fields to "AI". * Duration of asset value (eg, AI in months/years vs railroad in decades/centuries). * "Without AI datacenter investment, Q1 GDP contraction could have been closer to –2.1%".
by smeej | 2025-07-18 21:48:31+00:00
I think you're missing the point that most of the things that make this hard for people are also what makes it hard enough for them to read that they won't do it well, even for things like emails.

Reading is a skill, and it's not the same as being (technically) literate. For someone who's a competent reader, there's nothing at all more intimidating about being asked to read a page from a book (you can choose the book, but a page from a book is not a "wall of text," and the book's publication also implies at least some pre-screening for accessibility) than being asked to have an impromptu conversation about where to find the potatoes, and whether you know any tasty recipes for them.

Most people don't read well. They read well enough to understand street signs before they pass them, or to get through an article intentionally written to a 6th grade level. But anything where the details are important? Or that requires explanation? They either cannot do it, or find it so difficult that they won't.
by rscho | 2025-07-18 21:49:15+00:00
Ideally, you'd want a test (or two sequential ones) that's both very sensitive (rule candidates in) and specific (rule healthy peeps out). But that's only the first step, because there's no point knowing you're sick (from the populational and economic pov) if you can't do something useful about it. So you also have to include downstream tests and treatments in your assessment and all this suddenly becomes a very intricate probability network needing lots of data and thinking before decisions are made. And then, there's politics...
by rpdillon | 2025-07-18 21:49:26+00:00
This is exactly it. I was talking to my wife about this this morning. She's a sociologist researcher, and a lot of people that work in her organization are responsible for reading through interviews and doing something called coding, where you look for particular themes and then tag them with a particular name associated with that theme. And this is something that people spend a lot of hours on, along with interview transcription, also done by hand.

And I was explaining that I work in tech, so I live in the future to some degree, but that ultimately, even with HIPAA and other regulations, there's too much of a gain here for it not to be deployed eventually, And those people in their time are going to be used differently when that happens. I was speculating that it could be used for interviews as well, but I think I'm less confident there.
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-07-18 21:50:27+00:00
> "... builds on the assumption that the economy is a zero sum game when it clearly is not"

Be cautious making assessments as to compounding effects; while it remains the critical attribute, the compounding nature of a system is not always obvious. For example, the author is correct that financing for AI CapEx is starving other fields of investment at least in the short term.
by chowells | 2025-07-18 21:52:25+00:00
Addition vs multiplication is a bad and useless thing to talk about. It's a waste of time. It's much more useful to talk about what number you get at the end. You might get that number from adding once, or twice, or even more times, but that final number is the actual thing you need to understand and "addition vs multiplication" just gives absolutely no information or insights whatsoever.

They're just different names for different things. Not caring that they're different things makes communication difficult. Why do that to people you intend to communicate with?
by schimmy_changa | 2025-07-18 21:53:30+00:00
In addition, the massive investment may be overbuilt, but then likely will end up being useful long-term. This is just as the initial buildout of the internet to power pets.com was a bust at the time, but then led to Amazon, YouTube, Zoom, etc and in fact led to us being able to weather Covid better than you'd have expected.

The modern internet came from folks getting connected over-exuberantly based on near-term returns (with a lot of investors losing their shirts) but then humans figured out what the actual best use of the technology.

Highly recommend this book for more, Carlota Perez is very insightful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...