MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chubot | 2025-07-30 15:08:02+00:00
I would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really "from first principles"?

I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after hiring some Google employees to build their custom data centers. This project started in 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project

https://github.com/opencomputeproject

Google definitely rebuilt the stack from first principles -- the data center was basically a huge embedded system, from power to racks to CPUs/memory/disk/network to kernel to user space to cluster software. (And no, they did not use Kubernetes.)

I have no idea how active the OpenCompute project is -- is Facebook still the main contributor, and are they still releasing their new rack designs?

And I also wonder how much Oxide has diverged from it? At least on the hardware side. On the software side, I guess the Illumos-derived parts and Rust parts are completely different.

Well, when they say they did their own:

- board designs - microcontroller OS - platform enablement software - host hypervisor - switch - integrated storage service - control plane

Then yeah it seems like maybe only board designs and the switch COULD have either come from or been influenced by OpenCompute, but maybe those didn't either. (I have no idea tbh)

Maybe they only got the mechanical and power stuff from OpenCompute? i.e. the parts that change more slowly
by echelon_musk | 2025-07-30 15:08:22+00:00
This continues to be relevant:

> “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

― Jiddu Krishnamurti
by filleokus | 2025-07-30 15:09:05+00:00
Many people with mosquito issues around here (Sweden) uses something like https://www.clasohlson.com/se/Mosquito-Magnet/p/31-7190 which burns propane to produce Co2 to lure in mosquitoes and then sucks them in with a fan towards a metal grid to zap them with electricity.

Non-poisonous and from what I've heard fairly effective. Not sure if these exists in the US?
by exasperaited | 2025-07-30 15:09:07+00:00
I too have neighbours who have no such concerns. One of them was within hours of me calling the RSPCA to protect their terrified, yapping lonely pup until another neighbour politely talked to them. [0]

Those people shouldn't have pets either.

It's a childish western obsession: grown people with lifestyle animals. It has only got worse as childish western people acquired puppies to process their pandemic loneliness that they left alone when their old lives returned, while serious (poor) people had to deliver them food.

[0] which in retrospect I wish I'd done, because it would have exposed rather earlier exactly why the small dog was being left on its own in a garden of a house where the family in question were not actually resident. The small dog was perhaps trying to communicate something that might have materially changed our behaviour.
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by mhova | 2025-07-30 15:09:34+00:00
I have a few friends who run small businesses and they were still calculating employee time cards by hand or with messy spreadsheets. I wanted to build a simple tool for them that was fast, private, and didn't require yet another subscription or account.

EZTimeCard.com is the result. It's a completely free time card calculator that runs entirely in the browser.

All data is saved to local storage, so you don't lose your entries when you close the tab.

It handles daily and weekly overtime calculations and time rounding (15-minute, nearest, etc.).

There's no backend and no server. Your data stays with you.

It's built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS.

I'm looking for feedback on its usability, features, and any bugs you might find. Does it solve the problem well? What's missing?

Thanks for checking it out.
by chasil | 2025-07-30 15:09:38+00:00
This bacterial strain was discovered in 1976, but has been in the environment for a long time. Resistance should have already emerged?

"As a toxic mechanism, cry proteins bind to specific receptors on the membranes of mid-gut (epithelial) cells of the targeted pests, resulting in their rupture. Other organisms (including humans, other animals and non-targeted insects) that lack the appropriate receptors in their gut cannot be affected by the cry protein, and therefore are not affected by Bt."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis

Edit: "Spores and crystalline insecticidal proteins produced by B. thuringiensis have been used to control insect pests since the 1920s and are often applied as liquid sprays and donut pellets."
by incomingpain | 2025-07-30 15:09:47+00:00
>How many of you have library cards?

No. 0 cards.

>Do you use your library?

Generally avoid; excluding their EV charging in their parking lot which i use often. I dont go inside when charging.

>Why or why not?

As a middle aged man, im not welcome there. Multiple times ive been treated like im going to kidnap a kid. 1 time they demanded I show them an ID card just for entering the library; police cant even demand an ID unless im arrested. I understand the importance of their training to prevent kidnapping but it spills onto innocents.

I have historically done IT work for many libraries in the area. At the time of being IDed that one time, I wasnt there in any professional manner, but I at that time had access to all their firewalls, including their FMC. I was pretty trusted...

I consider as well, I'm not a fan of the sexually explicit LGBT books that they proudly display. Any age kid could pick up those books and see genitalia. I am trans... but that is too far.

There's nothing that they ever do that's for me. I talked to them during a festival, they had a booth. I asked them for a chess club and they said no. This was peak covid chess popularity.

Literally going on their website now and looking. There's "volunteer tech tutor" but like im currently watching devstral code a netflow tool right now. Im guessing it's not for me.

There's a "practice your conversational english" but like that's my native language.

Then there's "canadian citizenship preparation" but im a citizen by birth.

Over a month from now is the monthly book club. Several months from now is 'basic sewing skills'

Just literally nothing for me to go to the library.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-30 15:09:49+00:00
I am not sure I fully agree with the characterization above (that asking about salary is a 'red flag' in our process), but if I had to try and steelman it: we prominently put

> Everyone at Oxide makes $207,264 USD, regardless of location. (Some sales positions have a lower base salary and contain a commission component.)

On our applications page (see it here: https://oxide.computer/careers/sw-control-plane)

It's also a pretty well known aspect of the company. Combine this with the fact that our hiring process is different, where interviews are the very last thing before possibly being hired, and someone who has missed this fact could come across as having not done some very basic research about the company that they're applying to.

To be clear, I still think calling it "a red flag" is a stretch. I fully agree with you in a general sense, for places that are willing to negotiate compensation in the first place, but we make it very clear up front that we do not.
by bpt3 | 2025-07-30 15:09:56+00:00
It's not that they're unable to; it's that the field attracts people who are financially motivated and other companies have compensation structures that reward personal performance.

Top salespeople generally won't work for a fixed salary because they want to make as much as they can, and the way they do that is by having as much of their compensation tied to personal performance as possible.

I personally think more engineers/developers should think the same way, but it's also much harder to directly tie job performance to compensation when contributing to a product.
by phrocker | 2025-07-30 15:09:58+00:00
A few years ago, I started on a project and recently open sourced / sanitized part of it. RDP and memory store is still being sanitized (removing names, etc).

I began using the project because I wanted to learn about AI but also have workers (which I now call agents) use rules to perform actions on my behalf and monitor what I'm doing.

In short, I did this as a learning exercise. I just open sourced it and haven't really passed it along to anyone but am posting here in case anyone wants a view into the history of what people have been doing in AI. I did this with a small group before MCP, before semantic kernel, etc.

I wanted a single plane of glass to access infra, and use agents to do things like automate tasks, etc.

Chose java because that is what the group knew best. I don't expect anyone to want to use it, but I love to tinker and it's something I've enjoyed working on since I don't normally do UI work.
by geysersam | 2025-07-30 15:10:00+00:00
What's untrue?

Most Asian and ME countries recognize Palestine, most European/Western countries don't: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of...

About Chinese weapons exports it seems we have different sources. From what I can tell Israels arms imports are dominated by US and Germany, with scattered contributions from other European countries.

Chinas arms imports to Israel are miniscule by comparison.

On the other hand I'm sure China provides a lot of components to Israels military industry, but that's a different question.
by techpineapple | 2025-07-30 15:10:03+00:00
Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor.

On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
by mlyle | 2025-07-30 15:10:24+00:00
I think we live in a better world when the primary motivator for how we spend half of most of our working day isn't doing what's necessary to get strips of paper for survival.

That is, the work itself should be interesting and fulfilling.

Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is demeaning for everyone and less effective.

Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is still important.
by izzydata | 2025-07-30 15:10:45+00:00
This seems to the case from what I've seen. The economy was doing great and federal interests rates were practically non-existant. It was the age of free money which big tech took advantage of to higher a lot of people and gave big salaries to keep the best of people. Perhaps just to prevent competition.

I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
by westurner | 2025-07-30 15:11:01+00:00
More specific feedback about the Cyber truck flop debacle:

The market didn't want a remotely controllable by stolen phone APC.

The sharp edges on the bed area are a likely source of injury.

The sharp edges disqualify the cybertruck for sale in at least the UK because there are specific regulations about how rounded the body of a vehicle needs to be to spare pedestrians.

The dependency upon the sole - the largest - steel stamping machine in Texas is self-saboteurial.

What did market testing indicate about the "cyber punk" ethos? Is that your average EV purchaser in the US or worldwide?
by bjoli | 2025-07-30 15:11:05+00:00
It would not be the first time palestinians have been called amalek. Considering other ministers hang out with people voicing those ideas, I am not sure it can be as easily dismissed. Ben Gvir had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his office who had those views.

There is about a month between the letter and the video clip being published, a little more from the speech. Someone even took the time to write a song.

Smotrich also invoked amalek, but he continued with "what Rafah needs is complete destruction". It is very clear what he meant.
by bArray | 2025-07-30 15:11:17+00:00
I tried the Lord of the Rings, where I foretold the future and decided to get drunk instead. I ordered Gandalf to find a new ring bearer which they did, and another hobbit went off on the adventure.

Did run into this interesting problem though:

> An error occurred while generating the story: Rate limit exceeded for shared resources. Please try again in 4 seconds, or provide your own API key in settings.. Please try again. If the problem persists, you may need to start a new game.
by rkozik1989 | 2025-07-30 15:11:49+00:00
>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort.

Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.

Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
by golem14 | 2025-07-30 15:11:58+00:00
Maybe the easiest way is explain it by volume of water coming at you. A 'normal' wave comes at you for maybe 2-5 seconds, then recedes. A tsunami wave might come at you for what, a few minutes? So moves more than 20x-50x the water than an equivalent 'normal' wave, which has no other way to go?
by cdaringe | 2025-07-30 15:12:18+00:00
Not very controversial, tbh. Your observation is essentially that there is momentum on a current platform, which yields availability, pricing, and general convenience benefit. It’s borderline indisputable!

The market is complex. Those who will buy will be those who find that the existing ying doesn’t snap perfectly into their own business’ yang. They’ll be at the margins first (the post references a lab for instance, not a booming tech company), then over time less so.
by diggan | 2025-07-30 15:12:41+00:00
I do know that (I myself also worked in sales for a short stint, unrelated to software though), what I don't understand how these magical "sales people" apparently can't work for a fixed salary when literally everyone else can. Apparently the rest of us can do high quality work without being paid for each feature/bug fixed, yet these individuals cannot?

> Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.

Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain) that wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we had minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary would be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.
by yreg | 2025-07-30 15:12:48+00:00
Philosophers of mind have always tried to describe the brain using contemporary technology analogies. It's only natural and nothing to frown at.

Descartes compared the human mind to waterworks and hydraulic machines, other authors used mechanical clocks, telegraph systems, digital computers, and (in the recent decades) neural networks.

In the end it's all computing and to a degree all of those models serve as good analogies to the wetware, one just needs to avoid drawing wild conclusions from it.

I'm sure there will be new analogies in the future as our tech progresses.

We don't literally train on today's prompts while we sleep, but there actually _are_ some _computing_ tasks going on in our brains at that time that seem to be important for the system.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-30 15:12:55+00:00
> That’s the only rational action when 80-90% of federal civil servants belong to one party.

That's an obvious result of the Republicans making an outright political point of being for a "small state". Like, why should anyone who is a Republican even apply for a job that their own party actively campaigns for to go away?

> That’s how we ended up with a federal government that got so extremely out of sync with public opinion on issues like immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...

Unfortunately paywalled so hard that archive(.)today can't index it. Anyway, just blaming a "Democrat-leaning federal civil service" is ignoring the elephant in the room: decades worth of anti-immigration propaganda being shilled by Fox "News" and other TV/radio stations, Murdoch's rags and, last but not least, Russian bot farms on social media.
by gishglish | 2025-07-30 15:13:12+00:00
> Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession. Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.

Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer.

All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
by pastage | 2025-07-30 15:14:11+00:00
I do not expect people who reiceve my money to be my servants. I pay for services and if they are bad I see to it that they become better, or just shut up. I am sure every weapons manufacturer should be counted as a public servant, but it really makes no sense because the work they do has not meaning for me.

Now if they try to assert power over me. That is a different. That is why you need to make lobbying laws more effective.
by mjr00 | 2025-07-30 15:14:35+00:00
From the main site it appears they've been working full-time since 2021, after graduating.

Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
by mystraline | 2025-07-30 15:14:55+00:00
The hypothetical situation you set up is interesting, in that past a base amount of money to survive and thrive, that you would choose the more intellectually stimulating position. And I do get that.

For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business.

And, enough money can buy independenance in that you can get this flexibility of doing as you choose.
by runjake | 2025-07-30 15:15:04+00:00
I don't know, but I don't want Apple exercising even more draconian control over what apps I have on my Apple devices.

If I want to use an app with a horrendous security track record, I should be able to. See also: the plethora of other popular apps with horrendous security track records.

So, be careful what you ask for.
by conjectures | 2025-07-30 15:15:10+00:00
> There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal

It's not an unusual way of thinking, but every time I see it, it seems bizarre to me. If the candidate was to propose any project once hired, I'm sure these folks would want them to think about costs and benefits.

This policy selects either for people unable to reflect on their life with the same wit they apply to work; or people who will front about their motivations. Both seem like poor outcomes.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-30 15:15:18+00:00
I guess it is like a step function, or at least a step function on one side and a really long decay on the other. Is a step function a wave? I’m not sure, my signal processing class was too early in the morning. Maybe it depends on who you ask, mathematicians vs engineers. I’ll go along with the ones that might make a taser or something.
by freedomben | 2025-07-30 15:15:28+00:00
This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two).

> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.

Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
by fwn | 2025-07-30 15:16:01+00:00
> CSAM scanning has been around for at least 15 years. All service providers are required to do it by law.

That is true for scanning in the cloud, but it's important not to conflate this with client-side scanning. The distinction between cloud and local processing is foundational. Collapsing that boundary would mark a serious shift in how surveillance infrastructure operates.

> Once they receive the files they review them and confirm that the files meet the standard for the database, document its entry, create a hash and add that to the database. After that the file is destroyed.

That is already a structural problem: If the original is destroyed, how can independent parties verify that database entries still correspond to the intended legal and ethical scope? This makes meaningful oversight functionally impossible.

Even if centralizing control in a state-funded NGO were considered acceptable (which is already questionable), locating that NGO in the US (subject to US law and politics!) is a serious issue. Why should, say, the local devices of German citizens be scanned against a hash list maintained under US jurisdiction?

> So it's possible to submit an image that is not what CSAM is intended for, but the chances of it even remotely getting into the database is next to nothing. To add to this service providers can be sued for submitting invalid files.

Procedural safeguards are good, but they don't solve the underlying problem: the entire system hinges on policy decisions that can change. A single legislative change is all it takes to expand the list’s scope. The current process may seem narrow today, but it offers no guarantees about tomorrow.

We’ve seen this pattern countless times: surveillance powers are introduced under the pretext of targeting only the most heinous crimes, but once established, they’re gradually repurposed for a wide range of far less serious offenses. It is the default playbook.