MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by upboundspiral | 2025-08-05 16:22:56+00:00
Now I haven't read the book "Looking Forward." If I can get my hands on a copy it promises to be an interesting read. But I would like to follow up on the other ideas presented.

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill

Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to? I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.
by thyristan | 2025-08-05 16:23:00+00:00
Proxmox with Ceph can do failover when a node fails. You can configure a VM as high-availability to automatically make it boot on a leftover node after a crash: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availability . When you add ProxLB, you can also automatically load-balance those VMs.

One advantage Ceph has over VMware is that you don't need specially approved hardware to run it. Just use any old disks/SSDs/controllers. No special extra expensive vSAN hardware.

But I cannot give you a full comparison, because I don't know all of VMware that well.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-05 16:23:06+00:00
In a few decades? Anyone remotely rational or educated is looking at what is happening in the US right now as unbelievable idiocy. Idiocracy was overly rosey, as at least there Camacho understood self-limitations and could defer to others. In the US, a pedophile traitorous imbecile is busy laying out the same policy goals you would find in an online forum full of angry old assholes who never accomplished anything and are a joke, so the best they have is tearing down.

A lot of very smart, capable people gave the US such a comfortable position on this planet that it allows absolute garbage like Trump to float (not going to sugarcoat it for the many Trumpists on here -- the guy is a garbage human being, and encapsulates the absolute worst traits of humanity. His takes on almost everything are impossibly stupid and ill-informed nonsense, but he has captured his party so thoroughly that the clucking chickens all start repeating buffoonery verbatim), and so many in US politics, to ply unbelievably clownery and get away with it for a while. But the collapse is coming much faster than many people realize.
by stillpointlab | 2025-08-05 16:23:22+00:00
I hade a comment section on a blog in the early 2000s. It was a spam nightmare. Never again. I would not have one even with the products that claim to handle that spam for you.

As for the "I thought about this problem for 10s let me tell you all the things wrong with it" - yeah. Engineers do that. I'm constantly pointing it out in relation to LLM coding agents.

Lately I've been stuck in YouTube court cases recommendations. There are live trials and many archives for all sorts of real court cases at every stage. I have grown an appreciation for what a judge does. A judge listens and makes sure all information has been provided before making a judgement/ruling/order. The patience those folks show is significant. I can only imagine how tiring that amount of active listening must be. I have found it personally inspiring and educational.
by hintklb | 2025-08-05 16:23:40+00:00
You need to review your assumptions.

> There is no landlord renting at a loss.

there absolutely is. Again, most people don't do the math. It's no different for their rental property. They think it is "worth it".

> the landlord is going to pass that cost on to the renter.

Nope, there are a lot of studies on this. Rental prices are defined by offer and demand, not by costs for the landlord.
by philipkglass | 2025-08-05 16:24:11+00:00
American rooftop solar power has much higher costs than in Australia:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/rooftop-solar-three-times-cheape...

The study from Compare the Market finds the average residential solar installation cost in the US is $A4/W, while Canada’s national average was $A3.65/W. By contrast, Australia’s national average was $A0.89/W, more than $A2/W cheaper.

It's also significantly higher than in Germany:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/10/24/residential-pv-prices...

The cheapest offers for a PV system with 10 kW of power without storage are just over €1 per watt, the most expensive are around €2 euros per watt.

All these countries have access to the same solar panels. The national minimum wage is lower in America than in the other countries. So why do American rooftop systems cost so much more? Mostly because of high "soft costs" in America:

Soft costs are the non-hardware costs associated with going solar. These costs include permitting, financing, and installing solar, as well as the expenses solar companies incur to acquire new customers, pay suppliers, and cover their bottom line. These soft costs become a portion of the overall price a customer pays for a solar energy system. While solar hardware costs have fallen in recent years, soft costs represent a growing share of total solar system costs.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-soft-costs-basics
by Wissenschafter | 2025-08-05 16:24:19+00:00
"Granted, you can say "you still can play musical instruments/paint pictures/etc for yourself", but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse."

I sit and play guitar by myself all the time, I play for nobody but myself, and I enjoy it a lot. Your argument is absurd.
by josephjrobison | 2025-08-05 16:24:38+00:00
Like everybody, I waffle back and forth, depending on the day and the project.

I have so many bundled-up ideas for content in my head, but I can never find time to get them out. In addition, I hate wasting time on building tables, formatting text, etc. There's a reason that a lot of busy CEOs don't hand-write blog posts, but will go on podcasts, video, and conferences, and spend hours there. The reason is that the communication speed is much faster talking and being interviewed. All that to say is that via a combination of transcription and AI-powered formatting, that's an area where LLMs can really help.

I do think LLMs + search is more helpful than a Google Search. Clicking through all the links for you and bundling it together is a much better experience and truthfully it finds and surfaces ideas and content that a normal search just doesn't, or it takes the user going to the 4th page to get there.

Third, entertainment. We often find ourselves deep in a doomscroll looking at images and video - on Instagram, TikTok, whatever. If AI can produce entertaining imagery and video for the pure goal of decompressing and relaxing after a long day out at the oil fields or as a janitor at the elderly care home, then there's value there. Sure it may not be beautiful art like an Oscar-winning film, but is it worse than reality TV? Even better is those who enjoy the creativity of seeing images from their mind produced vividly via something like Midjourney.

So all that being said, that's where I'm seeing the value.

But I totally agree with the author - if I have a team member that puts work in front of me that's supposed to be well done, and it's obviusly GPT-generated, that's an issue - unless we agreed on it.

The point of doing good work a lot of times means doing something new and creative. If it's AI-generated, there still has to be the human touch. I could go on - we all have perspectives here - but I'll stop there!
by cryptonector | 2025-08-05 16:24:53+00:00
I was responding to:

> It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.

My response was not wrong as to that. The Allies did care a great deal about the Japanese people, and you can see that in the Potsdam declaration, but they also cared about their own soldiers' lives. If we hadn't had, or did not want to use, the nukes, then maybe we might have tried blockading for a while, who knows -- it's what the then leadership surely would have considered, and you can't blame someone today for mentioning it.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-05 16:24:57+00:00
> but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse

Kids do it all the time.

> So what is final state here for us?

Something I haven't seen discussed too much is taste - human tastes change based on what has come before. What we will care about tomorrow is not what we care about today.

It seems plausible to me that generative AI could get higher and higher quality without really touching how human tastes changes. That would leave a lot of room for human creativity IMO - we have shared experience in a changing world that seems very hard to capture with data.
by perihelions | 2025-08-05 16:24:59+00:00
It's just that.

> "Asked for comment on NOAA cuts and the EU's moves to expand its own collection of scientific data, the White House Office of Management and Budget said Trump's proposed cuts to the agency's 2026 budget were aimed at programs that spread "fake Green New Scam 'science,'" a reference to climate change research and policy."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44789903 ("Europe is breaking its reliance on American science (reuters.com)")
by eugenekolo | 2025-08-05 16:25:26+00:00
I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines.

There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
by FergusArgyll | 2025-08-05 16:25:27+00:00
None of their links work?

- https://gpt-oss.com/ Auth required?

- https://openai.com/open-models/ seems empty?

- https://cookbook.openai.com/topic/gpt-oss 404

- https://openai.com/index/gpt-oss-model-card/ empty page?

Am I holding the internet wrong?
by tracker1 | 2025-08-05 16:25:44+00:00
I wish I could upvote this more than once. I really liked the F# inspired pipe operator proposal and even used it a bit when I used to lean on 6to4/babel more, but it just sat and languished forever it seems. I can't really think of any other language feature I've seen since that I would have wanted more. The new Temporal being one exception.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-05 16:25:45+00:00
The median wage in the US is $38K. That’s what an Amazon driver can make.

Are you really telling me that in 2025 someone with skills and grit can’t make more than that? Hell I was making a little over $50K as regular old enterprise dev in Atlanta working for a company that mailed out utility bills in 2000.
by morpheos137 | 2025-08-05 16:26:05+00:00
Everyone dies anyway. It is better to live a more free, meaningful life close to nature and the natural human habitat than to be a slave to the machine that is technological society. There is more to life than your iphone or selling some bullshit tech product to get rich in the era of late stage humanity. How many long lasting species do you see that seriously damage their natural environment in order to achieve a temporary advantage? Viruses that kill their host too fast go extinct or mutate to a more sustainable variant. Technological human civilization is a virus on the whole planet. Maybe the reason we don't see aliens is because technology in a selfish biological species inevitably leads to collapse or extinction. How many of the first people do you think died of starvation when predator overwhelmed prey during the extinction of paleolithic megafauna? The neolithic was a technological innovation. Agriculture brought hardship to many in the long run. Whenever an organism overshoots the long term carrying capacity of its environment there are consequences to that organism. The biosphere of earth in a healthy equilibrium can not carry billions of humans. So nature will correct the problem it created. Technology is a natural phenomenon of a biological species. It will not save humanity from nature. If true AI ever arses as a self sustaining non biological species of life then its best course of action is to reduce the human species competing for resources in the same limited world as it. Then too other species can thrive again. Thus nature corrects itself.
10 years building internal tools, and the SaaS stack is still a nightmare
by seyz | 2025-08-05 16:26:45+00:00
Over the last 10 years, I founded Forest Admin and operated as CEO.

We built a SaaS used by hundreds of companies (sometimes with thousands of employees per account) to manage their internal operations.

We ate our own dog food from day one. If anyone was supposed to get this right, it was us. And yet… our SaaS stack ended up being a mess.

We had a powerful admin panel from day one. But around it? Chaos.

Each team had their own tools:

- Sales lived in HubSpot

- Support used Intercom

- Docs were spread across Google Drive, Notion, and Slite

- Comms happened in Slack, of course

- BI ran on Metabase connected to a fragile warehouse

- Automation was duct-taped with n8n

- Data modeling happened in dbt, pulling from a dozen disconnected SaaS tools

But context was scattered. Workflows broke easily. APIs failed silently. Engineers debugged glue instead of shipping. The SaaS bill was huge. Onboarding/Offboarding took hours. Invoices reconciliation too. We used dozens of tools. Many forgotten, none truly integrated.

You can’t scale on a stack you don’t control. Even with the best internal tooling, if the foundation is fragmented, it will break.

At some point, engineers lost control of the stack. And I think it’s time to get it back and rebuild systems that are coherent by design.

So I’ve decided to go back to first principles. I’m bootstrapping a new company to rethink how the SaaS stack should be architected from the ground up. Not patched, rebuilt. A rethink of the foundation itself.

If you’ve hit the same wall. Too many tools, not enough truth. I’d love to hear how you approached it. Where did you start? What tradeoffs did you make? And what would you do differently, if you had to rebuild your internal stack from scratch? What should a modern foundation for SaaS systems look like?
by Kiro | 2025-08-05 16:26:52+00:00
I don't understand your argument at all. I've made hundreds of songs in my life that I haven't shared with anyone and so have all other musicians I know. The act of creating is separate from finding or having an audience. In fact, I would say that the complete opposite of what you say is true.

And even so, music production has been a constant evolution of replacing prior technologies and making it easier to get into. It used to be gatekept by expensive hardware.
Show HN: I made an open-source AI support widget built like a dev tool
by frenchriera | 2025-08-05 16:26:57+00:00
I made this out of frustration.

I want the support in my SaaS to feel like my product: fully customizable, part of the UI, and able to access my codebase so AI agents can actually do useful things.

I believe smaller, more technical teams will be solving bigger problems even faster. And support should be just as flexible and composable as the rest of the stack.

So I built Cossistant: support defined in your code, that even your AI agents (or LLM copilots like Cursor or Claude) can understand and maintain.

Curious what others here think about this approach?

Waitlist is open: https://cossistant.com Code: https://github.com/cossistantcom/cossistant
by hajile | 2025-08-05 16:27:01+00:00
I've heard both assertions. I tend to believe that Carbon Fiber is a fine material to use.

This submersible used untested techniques. They didn't adhere the layers together properly and apparently never bothered to X-ray the tube as that would have shown at least some of the defects. It also seems like there were other design issues with how the tube was paired to the ends.

Most importantly, the deaths were caused by negligence during operation and maintenance. They had the data showing when the hull was damaged on the previous expedition, but either never did their due diligence and analyze it or ignored the results. Even during their last expedition, they may well have avoided death if the alarms had been heeded.

EDIT: to answer the people who seem skeptical, there are companies making carbon fiber vessels that have successfully gone much deeper than those Titanic dives. We're still in the learning stages with the technology, but we'll eventually find the combinations and standards that can make it safe to use (at which point, it may become better than our current solutions). Until then, maybe we shouldn't be shoving people into damaged experimental vessels to see what happens.

https://www.compositeenergytechnologies.com/underwater-carbo...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376273321_Carbon_Fi...
by throw0101d | 2025-08-05 16:27:03+00:00
> If they didn’t care about civilian losses, why do people believe the civilian losses in these bombings were necessary? Why is it assumed that the US needed to kill civilians and ended up killing just the right amount of civilians to force surrender?

The number of people killed (civilian and military) was irrelevant. The fire bombings killed as much, if not more, people. The Japanese leadership didn't care about numbers: after the first bomb dropped the War Cabinet ignored it thinking it was a bluff on the US part, and they didn't have any more bombs.

It was only after the second bomb that they started re-considering. Even then, after two bombings, the War Cabinet was still deadlocked at 3-3. The Emperor had to be called in to break the stalemate.

The difference was in the psychological effect of a new type of weapon. From Hirohito's statement:

> Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast#C...

I would recommend reading the book, which goes over the Japanese government deliberations using internal Japanese minutes/documents and interviews of those involved:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...

* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...
by guywithahat | 2025-08-05 16:27:13+00:00
I mean the positive take is sustainable change needs to be profitable; unprofitable change always turns into corruption. It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar, while still having much cheaper electricity costs. When you create these government subsidized programs, you hurt low income individuals and risk creating bad government incentives.

Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.
by casenmgreen | 2025-08-05 16:27:22+00:00
I may be wrong, but this seems to make no sense.

A neural net can produce information outside of its original data set, but it is all and directly derived from that initial set. There are fundamental information constraints here. You cannot use a neural net to itself generate from its existing data set wholly new and original full quality training data for itself.

You can use a neural net to generate data, and you can train a net on that data, but you'll end up with something which is no good.
by Intralexical | 2025-08-05 16:27:36+00:00
Probably because helpful people will be driven away when they open a thread and see contrarian attitudes. But contrarians that open a thread and see helpful attitudes will just be contrarian towards both OP and the helpful people.

Outcome | Helpful | Contrarian -----------|------------------------ Contrarian | Contrarian Contrarian Helpful | Helpful Contrarian

So yes, there may be effects in play like zero-sum thinking, anonymity, ego, obstinacy, or self-selection for strong opinions or real-life jerks.

But it almost doesn't matter whether contrarian attitudes really are "very common". Absent a force that mitigates this unbalanced outcome matrix, it's almost an asymptotic statistical certainty that any Internet thread with enough participants will have enough contrarians in it that the entire thread (and the dominant strategy for anyone who wants to participate in the thread) devolves towards contrarianism.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-05 16:27:47+00:00
> Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon. For instance, Julia Liuson, another executive at Microsoft, which owns GitHub, recently warned employees that "using AI is no longer optional."

So many clowns. It's like everyone's reading from the same script/playbook. Nothing says "this tool is useful" quite like forcing people to use it.
by glenstein | 2025-08-05 16:28:27+00:00
I do think solar companies have hired door to door marketing teams that use straight up manipulative tactics. I don't want to hold that against the whole industry, and even sales reps for many solar companies hold themselves to a much higher ethical standard.

But some states have had to push regulations because door to door marketing teams have misrepresented who they are, used pressure, and tried their best to imply without saying that a "switch" to renewable energy was non-optional or was like some technical correction with a billing problem.
by pantalaimon | 2025-08-05 16:28:44+00:00
> we don't inherit any software (is that true?), we at least inherit assembly code

To stay with the metaphor, DNA could be rather understood as firmware that runs on the cell. What I mean with software is the 'mind' that runs on a collection of cells. Things like language, thoughts and ideas.

There is also a second level of software that runs not on a single mind alone, but collection of minds, to form cliques or a societies. But this is not encoded in genes, but in memes.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-05 16:29:15+00:00
Kagi is pretty good but wow is kagi maps hot trash. I now have the muscle memory of adding !gm to every search string that I might want to go to a map.

I think probably Kagi should just make this the default - doing good maps is a hard problem, and I dont think its one that is solvable on Kagi's scale.