MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michaelt | 2025-08-11 20:31:40+00:00
A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping of broadcast media by the powerful.

This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.

And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies and trickery.

Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.

This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.

You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-11 20:31:59+00:00
> In my experience it's a dumpster fire of consumerism and influencerism, and has just as much fake news as western media

I was frankly going off the kids of business contacts I’ve met. But I’m realising they’re all wealthy—the kids of America’s rich are able to make eye contact, too, because their screen time is tightly regulated.
by burnte | 2025-08-11 20:32:10+00:00
> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.

As an extrovert the chances I'll use an AI agent in the next year is zero. Not even a billion to one but a straight zero. I understand very well how AI works, and as such I have absolutely no trust in it for anything that isn't easy/simple/solved, which means I have virtually no use for generative AI. Search, reference, data transformation, sure. Coding? Not without verification or being able to understand the code.

I can't even trust Google Maps to give me a reliable route anymore, why would I actually believe some AI model can code? AI tools are helpers, not workers.
by rustystump | 2025-08-11 20:32:36+00:00
Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.

I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.

The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
by wvenable | 2025-08-11 20:32:56+00:00
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed.

Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.

I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
by rschristian | 2025-08-11 20:33:08+00:00
Ha, was wondering why I started getting a few more stars all of a sudden.

For extra context: I created the tool ~9 months prior to the meltdown as one could vaguely mention an individual trolling over NPM deps and absolutely everyone in the ecosystem with a bit of experience would know who was being referred to, aka, "You Know Who". And, if you dared mention him by name, he'd eventually show up reciting his download counts in endless "appeal to authority"-style arguments, trying to brow-beat people into accepting that he knows more or whatever, ergo, "He Who Must Not Be Named" (at least, if you didn't want him being annoying in your mentions).

There's a number of "-phobia" apps in the ecosystem and given the negative impact he has on dependency trees, it felt fitting to offer a similar, somewhat satirical, app to detect how much of your dependency tree he controlled.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-11 20:33:29+00:00
It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.

My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).
by ben_w | 2025-08-11 20:33:29+00:00
> Curious how "Homeland Security" and "State Security" are equivalent names.

Yes, but the unfortunate thing with names is that people get to pick them to sound however they want.

This is why the official name of the Berlin Wall translates as "anti-fascist protection barrier", along with all the examples that probably inspired 1984 (written in 48, so before the wall).
by kachapopopow | 2025-08-11 20:33:41+00:00
I just vim ~/.todo.txt or more recently, just having claude code act as a middle man for it asking to generate what (should) be done then asking it what I need to do to finish x, has mcp integration to my IDE's so it can see what I am doing update the todo automatically, basically, a real life assistant which I now see why nearly every CEO has one.
by catigula | 2025-08-11 20:33:48+00:00
The null hypothesis is that Apple chips aren't better. You simply assumed they were into evidence. It's up to you to provide the figures that they are.

Of course, they really aren't, which is pretty obvious. It doesn't make sense that Apple would randomly invent some categorically new CPU technology when they don't even own an instruction set or foundry and that they would simply be concocting some vendor lock-in supply chain scheme.
by foobarian | 2025-08-11 20:33:49+00:00
Went up and down Washington as a group of 20 somethings. Boy were we suffering on the way down. At one point below the treeline as we are crawling down, these two guys catch up to us; they looked like they were in their 60s. Grey hair, thin as twigs. They whooshed past us literally hopping rock-to-rock. That one little moment had a lifelong impact on me ever after as I though how nice it would be to be able to do the same at that kind of age.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-11 20:34:06+00:00
Not only ssh, it has a pluggable connection scheme to include a wide range of "how do I talk to the system," which includes AWS Session Manager, docker, kubectl, and a bunch of network appliance protocols

But I also recognize that I'm not the target audience for a GUI management app so I don't mean to pile on the "you're holding it wrong" but I do mean to draw attention to any robust solution not getting stuck in a local minima or else the user will need a separate app for each mental model of what managing "a Linux" means
by yupyupyups | 2025-08-11 20:34:19+00:00
>parents

You do understand that there are creeps out there grooming children, right? Parents definitely do need to have oversight over their own kids.

Children should absolutely not have privacy on the internet.

The ID requirement is terrible, but saying that children need privacy to explore their sexuality on the internet is very problematic.

If this is the position the UK government holds then that brings into question their desire to protect children online in the first place.
by bitbasher | 2025-08-11 20:34:21+00:00
GitHub has been a growing disappointment for quite a while.

1. GitHub itself isn't opensource despite being the opensource forge.

2. Microsoft (of all companies) acquired it.

3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.

4. GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).

5. GitHub striking down repositories and user accounts (the Russian developer, yt-dlp, etc).

6. LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.

7. GitHub forcing AI agents in pull requests and in various pages on GitHub.

8. GitHub's CEO resigning and now in more of Microsoft's AI control.

I left back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. I wondered if it was a mistake for me to leave, but.. I haven't regretted it yet.
by nativeit | 2025-08-11 20:35:00+00:00
I’m not sure it was so much folks “not seeing it coming” with ChatGPT, only that anyone with anything beyond surface-level understanding of ML workloads and data science wouldn’t have thought to attempt to package such an immense, expensive, and potentially powerful product as a “chat bot”, and certainly nobody would have thought it would be a good idea to then heavily market it as some sci-fi notion of “artificial intelligence”, and proceed to gaslight the entire planet with what it might eventually be capable of. Only because, with the exception of Sam Altman, such a person would have been laughed out of a career. The only real surprise with LLMs seems to be that unscrupulous people have managed to raise so much goddamn money lying about its potential, that it’s got a real chance of crashing the global economy once everyone realizes it’s never actually gonna replace any meaningful jobs.
by ankit219 | 2025-08-11 20:35:24+00:00
No justification for a $100k number. For $100k a year or about $8k a month, you will end up using 1B tokens a month (that too a generous blended $8 per million input/output tokens including caching while the number is lower than that). Per person.

I think there is a case Claude did not reduce their pricing given that they have the best coding models out there. There recent fundraise had them disclose their Gross margins at 60% (and -30% with usage via bedrock etc). This way they can offer 2.5x more tokens at the same price than the vibe code companies and yet break even. The market movement where the assumption did not work out was about how we still only have claude which made vibe coding work and is the most tasteful when it comes to what users want. There are probably models better at thinking and logic, especially o3, but this signals the staying power of claude - having a lock in, it's popularity, and challenges the more fundamental assumption about language models being commodities.

(Speculating) Many companies woudl want to move away from claude but cant because users love the models.
by grim_io | 2025-08-11 20:35:40+00:00
The iPhone opened up a whole new world of opportunities which were very clear from the start.

No one, except Steve Ballmer, would describe it as a potential fad or question how good it can actually get before Apple goes bankrupt from all the investment into this new tech.

I like this new stuff we get now, but the iPhone felt like a clear win with no downsides of a potential societal collapse.
by MikeTheGreat | 2025-08-11 20:36:58+00:00
Personally I'd separate this out into two cases:

1 - Actively dislike the family

Sure, skip the funeral. If you & the family didn't get along in life there's no reason to put yourself through something you don't want to go to.

2 - Anything else

I'd go as a show of support for the family because the family was important to my friend. "It's what my friend would want" is the guiding principle here.

That said - I'm writing this as someone who was very uncomfortable going to funerals and now, years later, I regret choosing to stay home rather than go.

Your mileage may vary, as they say.
by m463 | 2025-08-11 20:37:09+00:00
I suspect there might be on-board antennas in addition to offboard antennas.

I had a device with wifi, and I figured I could disable the wifi by just disconnecting the antenna.

Nope.

Then I connected the antenna to a dummy load

Nope.

there are onboard antennas that take over and continue to work.

I suspect the same thing for cellular (though I have no actual data about the system in question)
by coderintherye | 2025-08-11 20:37:21+00:00
>Anyone reading War and Peace will need at the very least a list of characters

Indeed, I almost gave up on it for that reason. Great story but does the character really need 6+ different ways to refer to them. "Too Like the Lightning" and its sequels are also great but Ada Palmer suffers from same of the same desires to refer to characters in far too many different ways to keep up with. That said, I also scored poorly on the face blindness test so maybe it's a cognitive inability keep up with too many names on my part.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-08-11 20:37:22+00:00
This would be amazing if obsidian mobile did not take 10 seconds to start or even recover from being in the background and lose scroll position every time. For the desktop I would be absolutely happy with all todos in a simple markdown file. There can also be any number of UIs on top of markdown that people use over the years and grow out of but as long as the base system is markdown files you get the best of both worlds. I would never consider using an app for notes or todos that does not persist like that and no: ability export is not the same as native persistence in a human readable format. (Discovered the heard way multiple times when apps advertising with export failed or just lied.)
by immibis | 2025-08-11 20:37:28+00:00
Brandolini's Law is relevant. If we havs to carefully point-by-point critique every point our opponent makes, while they get to use ChatGPT to write nonsense at fifty times human reading speed, we lose.

To work around this, when a bullshit-producing organization is cited, it's proper to ask for an alternative citation from an organization that produces mostly non-bullshit. If it truly isn't bullshit content, there should be many, so cite one.

It's just spam filtering. I don't reply to "forward this to ten people you know or suffer eternal damnation" but my ignorance doesn't mean they're right. If you put important content in an email starting with "Dear Sir or Madam, I have a business proposal, I am a Nigerian prince" that's on you and the fact that I ignore your email doesn't mean I agree with whatever you wrote in the email.
by nis0s | 2025-08-11 20:37:39+00:00
I am not sure how much of this is said in jest or whatever, but I seriously want humans to spread out from Earth.

The human mind is unique in what it is capable of given all other known incidence of intelligent life, and this phenomenon deserves something just as cosmically grand as its state of cosmic improbability.

To start, since we don’t have good life support systems yet or a good understanding of how to mitigate the adverse effects of being out in space for prolonged periods of time, maybe we need more remote sensing and communication programs.

Remote control of automated building systems would be ideal so that you don’t need to transport life support systems, but maybe just their materials before a human ever steps out onto a planet.

Besides that, reusable nuclear launch vehicles would make interstellar travel and transport more energy efficient. To add to that, since chances of event failure are never zero for nuclear reactors, it would make sense to create methodologies which speed up removal of radiation and ionizing materials from the environment.

Ideally, water is transported from a non-Earth planet which has ice, and we can geo-engineer Earth-like conditions for planetary water recycling.

But maybe our current physiology can only survive best on Earth, so venturing to other planets would be for non-residential purposes, like having data centers and crypto-miners on other planets.

Honestly, a lot of the work for being in space needs to be done at home first. So maybe, the next frontier is not space (yet) but somewhere like Antarctica where a lot of this can be tested before being put to use.
by skeaker | 2025-08-11 20:37:42+00:00
> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?

This isn't so much up to feeling as it is up to interpretation of the law. If there isn't a good way for Wikipedia to hide parts of itself and the law requires that it does, then it is effectively banned by the letter of the law.

The question of it continuing to operate exists because it is an obvious good to society that the law is yet to act on shutting down themselves. Right now it continues to exist in the UK despite being illegal due to the good will (or incompetence if you're not feeling generous) of the UK government.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-11 20:38:45+00:00
I disagree fundamentally with the modern division of labor. I’ve been around long enough to understand that it doesn’t actually have to work like this.

I don’t think you can be an expert in generic “Product” just like I don’t think you can be a generic management expert.

And I don’t think you can decide what to build or how it should work from a user perspective without taking into account how it’s built. In many ways I think how it’s built tends to inform what it should do more than the other way around.

However, Product alone is never the cause of bad software in my experience. It’s always product plus an engineer who refuses to push back on the initial proposal.

In most cases when product and design comes to you with a feature, and all the solutions you can come up are going to add tech debt or take forever, you should step back and talk to Product about the problem they are actually trying to solve.

If you go back to product with “I can build this very similar feature that will get you 90% of the way there, but will take 1/2 as long and not create maintenance problems down the line”, they will almost always be happy with that.

The real problems are caused when an engineer says immediately “yep I can build that in 2 weeks” and starts trying to force their solution through by telling everyone that product insisted on this specific feature in this specific timeline that unfortunately can only be done in the way they’ve designed. And then they tell product that they have a solution but are being blocked.

I’ve seen this pattern over and over.
by mcbobgorge | 2025-08-11 20:40:30+00:00
I grew up in New Hampshire and the White Mountains are such a good playground for stuff like this. Big network of trails, all kinds of terrain. Four very different seasons, lots of weather.

Basically anything you want to find in mountains, you can find in the Whites. Ice climbing, mountaineering, multi-pitch trad climbing, bushwhacking, easy trails, empty trails, whatever. I was very lucky to be able to hike there.
by sandworm101 | 2025-08-11 20:40:52+00:00
It isnt a trend. This is marketing. Thirty years ago, the a380 was pitched as having room for luxury too. The new plane is always going to have more legroom, wider aisles and better air conditioning than anything before. But it never happens. The pitch to actual operators is the square-feet of floorspace and how many seats can be crammed into that space at given price points. Just like concord, this thing only makes sense with quazi-economy seating. Do not expect to nap on a nice lie-flat seat.
by zahlman | 2025-08-11 20:41:34+00:00
Title edited for length and clarity from the original: N.S. bans hiking and use of vehicles in woods as dry conditions raise wildfire fears

For context, the government of Canada provides https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map to track wildfires. At time of submission, Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.
by p1necone | 2025-08-11 20:41:54+00:00
> Even among tech people, they have good will

Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.

As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.

Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
by jayd16 | 2025-08-11 20:42:12+00:00
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.

Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.

The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?

I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
by fuzztester | 2025-08-11 20:42:25+00:00
From:

https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...

>GitHub has operated as a separate company ever since Microsoft acquired it.

Yeah, right.

And Santa Claus exists, Virginia.

Oxymoron of the decade ...

https://www.google.com/search?q=oxymoron+meaning
by yuntian | 2025-08-11 20:42:29+00:00
We just released 4.8 million real user–ChatGPT conversations collected from our public chatbot.

- Covers a wide range of topics and languages, all from actual users in the wild.

- Includes 122K conversations from reasoning models (o1-preview and o1-mini) which are long, often involving complex problem solving, and very costly to collect.

- 2.5M conversations from GPT-4o.

Links:

- Non-toxic version: https://hf.co/datasets/allenai/WildChat-4.8M

- Full version (gated): https://hf.co/datasets/allenai/WildChat-4.8M-Full

- Exploration tool: https://wildvisualizer.com
by pier25 | 2025-08-11 20:43:09+00:00
I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.

MAUI is a mess.

Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.

C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.

Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).

They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?

And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
by matt-p | 2025-08-11 20:43:53+00:00
I do, of course. It's just worth considering that not every parent is how you or I might like or imagine them to be.

For some children their parents finding out they're gay would cause a great deal of real world physical or phycological harm. It's a really tricky thing to navigate, but aside from saying 'no children should be allowed access to the internet unsupervised' it gets really difficult.