MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keyringlight | 2025-08-16 14:28:48+00:00
The way I see it related to this are the questions who was/is paying MS for windows or who are their customers (at various points in time). At the time counterfeiting was meant to be the main concern, someone was paying for it and the money didn't flow through to MS. Between the cost of windows being hidden away for someone buying a OEM machine or wrapped up in a contract for businesses there probably wasn't many that deliberately chose or were aware of that particular software component in what they were buying. The rise of mobiles and ad networks meant no one thought about paying for the OS software, consumers would never pay for firmware on any other electronics and that assumption followed on so the costs were absorbed by whoever designed the platform, manufacturer or carrier. It pays to be the middleman though, through various app stores.

There's also the move from making an application for an OS (for many GUI tools mostly explored what they need to provide, are 'done' and stable by now) towards clients for an online service, cross platform frameworks or websites where you could argue the browser is the OS shell. I'd guess if there's any strategic failing for MS with windows, it's that they haven't given developers much reason to make apps _for windows_ with things that can't be done elsewhere, even for gaming the constraint is loosening, and a lot of that is driven by AMD/nvidia/intel or following what is getting made for consoles.
by jackcosgrove | 2025-08-16 14:29:02+00:00
The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
by vidarh | 2025-08-16 14:29:53+00:00
That's interesting, because after ElevenLabs launched their music generation I decided I really quite want to spent some time to have it generate background tracks for me to have on while working.

I don't know the name of any of the artists whose music I listened to over the last week because it does not matter to me. What mattered was that it was unobtrusive and fit my general mood. So I have a handful of starting points that I stream music "similar to". I never care about looking up the tracks, or albums, or artists.

I'm sure lots of people think like you, but I also think you underestimate how many contexts there are where people just don't care.
by zahlman | 2025-08-16 14:30:21+00:00
> I don't want to go into the details, but I regularly experience UX problems in Ubuntu. Even things like reading/writing a USB port requires sudo, or editing system config files, which is wild to me. And adding a trailing newline to the config file in question will prevent your GUI from booting. Adding an item to the PATH is a combo of unintuitive, or filled with incorrect instructions (Including Go's home page CAO yesterday...).

None of this sounds like anything I've experienced, or heard described, in 3 years of using the Ubuntu-derived Mint.

> Or, software I write can't be launched without using having the user go to the CLI, or creating a GUI-specific config file and placing it in a certain location.

How exactly are you distributing it? If the problem is e.g. that your users download an AppImage and it isn't executable, they can most likely change the permissions from the GUI. I don't know what you mean about GUI-specific config files. I had thought that https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/la... was pretty widely recognized.

Distros don't generally have "app stores" but rather package repositories, modulo branding. Publishing there isn't about making your launcher work; it's about letting the system handle dependencies and letting the distro maintainers patch (and build trust in) your code.
by maxbond | 2025-08-16 14:30:57+00:00
It's unlikely the boolean will result in better utilization, the savings will probably be consumed by padding. Most people don't know how to use structure packing to create a row which is actually smaller after it's been padded (though it's not very hard, anyone could learn). Columns are generally ordered by which features were shipped first and not by alignment (as is necessary to minimize padding).

I do try my best to pack my columns, but it's a fragile and likely premature optimization. Better to opt for something defensive at a cost of like, 7 bytes per row (in Postgres).
by conscion | 2025-08-16 14:31:11+00:00
I don't think they're confused, I think they're approaching it as general AI research due to the uncertainty of how the models might improve in the future.

They even call this out a couple times during the intro:

> This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare

> We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future
by dpkirchner | 2025-08-16 14:32:07+00:00
I share your concern and I'd add one more:

The motivation behind wanting to be 10% stronger will (probably not) go away after starting a creatine regime. So where do you go from there? Testosterone? Steroids? I can't speak for anyone else but when I work out I am usually trying to meet or beat my last session (despite the march of death) so I think I'm at risk of going too far with supplementation.
by technofiend | 2025-08-16 14:33:22+00:00
The last thing I did yesterday before leaving for the day was make my employee open a change record for the weekend. Why? Because between in-person and virtual interruptions I literally could not get my work done. Tomorrow, I'll make my employer pay CBRE hundreds of dollars for off-hour cooling so I can sit (hopefully) undisturbed and finish.

Nobody is winning in this scenario; I'm losing weekend time to play catch-up, my employer is spending money on AC that could have been saved if people took "no meeting Fridays" seriously, and "no meetings" needs to include teams, symphony, slack, whatever. Like having an office would be grand, but having solid time to concentrate and work is the real issue.
by evanelias | 2025-08-16 14:33:23+00:00
> Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised)

This simply isn't true, unless you're considering any minor refinement to a human-created design to be "often done with AI".

It certainly sounds like you're implying AI is often the initial designer or primary design tool, which is completely incorrect for major publishers and record labels, as well as many smaller independent ones.
by troupo | 2025-08-16 14:33:32+00:00
> keybindings that are app specific and that are _not_ exposed in the keyboard configuration menu

Isn't it the same issue across all operating systems then?

> You really assumed I haven't searched - and figured out - how to change keyboard shortcuts?

You wouldn't believe how many times I've ran into people who said something and it turns out they didn't do something that would fix their issues :)
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-08-16 14:33:36+00:00
I was thinking 30 years ago. The response to 9/11 definitely made the flying experience worse in the US. Plus of course the gradual shrinking of seat space.

Happily my last few flights I have used points to upgrade to sit in the front of the plane, which alleviates the space problem, but just having to spend more time hanging around in the airport because of added security is hard for me to deal with.
by StevenWaterman | 2025-08-16 14:33:47+00:00
Essentially the idea is that there is an "optimal" amount of alertness (inverted U curve). People with ADHD start below the optimal point, and stimulants move them up towards the optimal point. People without ADHD are typically closer to the optimal point, and stimulants move them past it.

Someone with ADHD taking a large dose will therefore feel the same as someone without ADHD taking a small(er) dose.

Methylphenidate improves sleep in people with ADHD: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2276739/

> Compared to [non-adhd] controls untreated [adhd] patients showed increased nocturnal activity, reduced sleep efficiency, more nocturnal awakenings and reduced percentage of REM sleep. Treatment [of those with adhd] with methylphenidate resulted in increased sleep efficiency as well as a subjective feeling of improved restorative value of sleep.

I can't find a corresponding paper studying the effect of stimulants on sleep in healthy adults. I would assume it hasn't been studied because it's common knowledge and it's not worth the risk of making healthy people take stimulants. I also don't think that's the part you were disputing.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-08-16 14:33:55+00:00
What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here?

Like on its face, looking around the world, this sentiment feels absurd right now. We are moving mountains to build this stuff up. AI is not the lowly underdog here, it is immediately the top of the food chain.

If things are not moving fast enough for you, that feels more like personal contradiction you are working through here. Like it almost sounds like you want this to be the 90s again and be a Cypherpunk advocating for cause, but you look around and actually you're already the suits, the feds; you're on top, and the virtuous fight for freedom was null and void from the start. So all you can do is force yourself into feeling like a victim always already. September was too short!
by teeray | 2025-08-16 14:34:12+00:00
I think locality is the difference. Electricians and Plumbers are needed basically everywhere. Conversely, there’s not much of a local market for bespoke software development in random towns in the US. While, yes, there are various contractors with statewide coverage, Joe-with-a-pickup-truck who treats the neighbors right in town still wins out many times.
by essnine | 2025-08-16 14:34:25+00:00
I see more people starting businesses because they now have less risk, more people not changing jobs just to get a pay hike. The sort of financial aid UBI would bring might even make people more productive on the whole, since people who are earning have spare income for quality of life, and people with financial risk are able to work without being worried half the day about paying rent and bills.

It's a bit of a dunk on people who see their position as employer/supervisor as a source of power because they can impose financial risk as punishment on people, which happens more often than any of us care to think, but isn't that a win? Or are we conceding that modern society is driven more by stick than carrot and we want it that way?
by manithree | 2025-08-16 14:34:28+00:00
Anybody find a license for their online catalogue? Searching for license found one "resultaten" that was a link that 404's, and no hits for "licentie."

Along those lines, though, this: https://www.veradekok.nl/en/2015/08/introducing-the-dememori...

will let you download full page images. and I think this: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/issues/209

Should work, also. I don't know Dutch law, but I would think books this old would have to be public domain.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-16 14:34:32+00:00
I'm not a huge fan of KDE, but I prefer it strongly over Gnome. Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better.

> they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.

What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
by noosphr | 2025-08-16 14:34:34+00:00
People are going to be surprised when the cheap humanoid robots out of China get paired with transformer models for planning and control.

I got a bit caught with my pants down between GPT2, which was so hyped, and GPT3.5 which was also hyped but the delta between reality and Sam's bullshit was much smaller. I've been keeping my eye out on both the hardware and software and we're in the pre-gpt2 days for robotics right now. There's a lot of cute little results that need a few million dollars to get put together.

The next 5 years will make the effect of transformers on office work since 2022 seem like a slight breeze compared to a tornado.
by zellyn | 2025-08-16 14:34:46+00:00
I recently had an interview like this. Felt like half the answers I gave were of the form, “You can do scaling/sharding/partitioning thing X here, but once again, for an internal app I’d try really hard to avoid doing any of that”. If you’re interviewing with capable, experienced developers, they’ll appreciate that answer (at least, I got the offer on this one!)
by thefaux | 2025-08-16 14:34:53+00:00
The wonder of Bach goes much deeper than just the aesthetic qualities of his music. His genius almost forces one to reckon with his historical context and wonder, how did he do it? Why did he do it? What made it all possible? Then there is the incredible influence that he had. It is easy to forget that music theory as we know it today was not formalized in his day. The computer programs that simulate the kind of music he made are based on that theory that he understood intuitively and wove into his music and was later revealed through diligent study. Everyone who studies Bach learns something profound and can feel both a kinship for his humanity and also an alienation from his seemingly impossible genius. He is one of the most mysterious figures in human history and one could easily spend their entire life primarily studying just his music (and that of his descendants). From that perspective, computer generated music in his style is just a leaf on the tree, but Bach himself is the seed.

> These people haven't suffered from the fact that mass production of media is cheap, they've benefited from it.

Maybe? This really depends on your value system. Every moment that you are focused on how you look on camera and trying to optimize an extractive algorithm is a moment you aren't focused on creating the best music that you can in that moment. If the goal is maximizing profit to ensure survival, perhaps they are thriving. Put another way, if these people were free to create music in any context, would they choose content creation on social media? I know I wouldn't, but I also am sympathetic to the economic imperatives.
by dgb23 | 2025-08-16 14:35:02+00:00
Switzerland and Germany have very good systems for apprenticeships.

However, one of the challenges is to find them as you said. Apprentices typically start at a young age (16) and you have wildly different levels of maturity there. Another issue is that many jobs aren’t attractive to locals (anymore), and immigrants fight the uphill battle of having to learn the language, culture etc.
by sho_hn | 2025-08-16 14:35:25+00:00
Honestly, I'm surprised you get told off a lot. My own subjective experience is the polar opposite :-)

As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy.

I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except.

Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-16 14:35:33+00:00
Where the pump is located is indeed not critical, it's where the filter is located that is critical.

The filter cannot be on the surface. If we didn't have it at the bottom we would not be able to have flow on the high-pressure side of the pipe that is not through the membrane.

This flow is why this thing has an advantage, and it's because of this flow that the saltwater on the high-pressure side is not much saltier than seawater.
by tomasGiden | 2025-08-16 14:35:52+00:00
How about in-app purchases and subscriptions? The code is already there. Is it abusive?

Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?

No, I see it as the opposite. I see it as Volkswagen simplifying production by limiting variability and giving you the option to get a less capable product at at a cheaper price.

A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores. Does it matter? Now they can still buy a computer. Is that a bad thing?
by Timwi | 2025-08-16 14:35:53+00:00
Aw man, no mention of Funciton :) [0]

I believe I understand where the designer is coming from. Traditional languages use a 1D syntax to express a structure that is really not 1D (the parse tree). However, I don't think it's really 2D either. If you think about how an interpreter would have to proceed to execute Recto code, it would still parse it into an internal representation and then execute that, and this internal representation no longer uses the 2D layout of the code.

I'm not implying that it's a bad idea or anything. To the contrary, I think Recto is a cool idea. I'm just skeptical that simply making a language syntax two-dimensional automatically makes it easier to understand, code in, collaborate in, or implement a parser/interpreter/compiler for.

[0] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Funciton
by the_af | 2025-08-16 14:35:58+00:00
You have it backwards. It's a relative minority that recognizes it as a legitimate concept. It's just that this minority lobbied for the laws.

(As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests. See the current LLM craze, and also... did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this? Put that in your pipe and smoke it).

(Or also: many AAA game developers played pirated games in their youth. It was part of their formative years. )

Most people don't believe in the concept. You don't either, regardless of your protests here: you admitted you pirate everything. If you believed this was deeply immortal and harmful you wouldn't.

Your actions speak louder than your words.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-08-16 14:36:01+00:00
In most countries I know of (almost all of western EU), for electrical vehicles, you have to register the real maximum power output by the engine. If a software update allows you to increase that over the registered power, then you are in violation of motor vehicle codes and would need to a) pay a fine b) then update the registration, which is usually a $$$ process.

If, like TFA, they register the power output as larger than the actual one in order to give room to these "unlocks", then you basically have a vehicle which can do less than what its registration says, which people tend to notice and riot about (you pay more taxes and insurance).

In which country does the tax rate depend still only on volume?
by corimaith | 2025-08-16 14:36:09+00:00
>That's always been the deal.

This is a bit of popular myth on sites like this but isn't supported by economists, historians or people in finance. The total volume of oil trade is small fraction of total global trade or capital flows.

Like I said, the USD is the reserve partly because it's beneficial to these surplus economies to have somebody else holding the bags, but also because there aren't viable alternatives because anybody else who can do it dosen't want to. And given there are 180^180 possible exchanges, a reserve currency will exist for practical reasons.

>I don't actually think there's any law of nature that reserve currency status == de-industrialization.

A currency that assumes reserve currency status will strengthen due to increased demand, thus making their exports more expensive and thus uncompetitive on the international stage. Which is incompatible with the export-driven strategies of the EU, China or Japan, all the main contenders for alternative reserve currencies. If you look at the behaviour of their central banks, when they receive capital inflows, they in turn buy assets elsewhere to offset the appreciation to maintain the value of their currency. But the Fed cannot and dosen't do that.
by Swizec | 2025-08-16 14:36:15+00:00
> These are not the answers they're looking for.

These ARE the answers we are looking for. As the system design interview (I’ve done hundreds) I want you to start with these answers then we can layer on complexity if you’ve solved the problem and there’s time left to go into navel gazing mode.

Seeing the panic slowly build in mid-level engineers’ eyes as it dawns on them that not every problem can be solved by caching is pretty fun too. “Ok cool you’ve cached it there, now how do you fill the cache without running into the same performance issue?”
by lovich | 2025-08-16 14:36:34+00:00
Every software job I’ve had for over a decade has had at least one employee on the team working in a different office or from home. Frequently different time zones. This was already a reality and as the other guy in the thread said, we’ve already seen maximal outsourcing.

>So what if the guy works night and sleep days

is what you said in another comment and it has a lot to do with working with others to the point where I see remote jobs specify what time zones you can live in so that you have overlap with the rest of the team. Everyone whose worked with coworkers on a completely different shift than you knows how often simple tasks turn into 3 days events simply from the cycle of

Send request -> clarifying question is sent back -> send clarification taking an entire 24 hours for each step to resolve
by miragecraft | 2025-08-16 14:37:09+00:00
I disagree that you shouldn’t use document.write for <script> and <style> tags, as it’s the only way to force dynamically inserted script to run in a parser-blocking manner during parsing, and to prevent flash of unstyled content (FOUC) for dynamically inserted styles.

Yes it’s slower, but does it matter for your specific use case? Async scripts are harder to reason about, esp if you have nested templates. FOUC is also a much bigger and more noticeable problem than the tiny delay to parse the CSS snippets.

Forcing scripts to be parser-blocking is also needed if you want to nest document.write, to ensure it is writing to the correct location in the document.

I created an HTML includes library that utilizes document.write extensively: https://miragecraft.com/projects/x-include
by nkrisc | 2025-08-16 14:37:19+00:00
“Toothpaste” is the commonly accepted English word (in most English dialects, as far as I’m aware) for that paste which we use to clean our teeth with a brush. So I expect we’ll call it “toothpaste” regardless of the exact chemical composition.

If keratin is the active ingredient, I would suspect the exact source doesn’t really matter.
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-16 14:37:19+00:00
no matter what you ask AI to do, it’s going to give you an “average“ answer. Even if you tell it to use a very distinct specific voice and write in a very specific tone, it’s going to give you the “average“ specific voice and tone you’ve asked for. AI is the antithesis of creativity and originality. This gives me hope.