MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymars | 2025-08-26 16:06:29+00:00
Yeah, one of the paradoxes I found was on the one hand talking about being responsible for projects making large sums of money, but, well...it doesn't seem like he's seen much of it.

But indeed I feel like at some level there's been a pendulum swing from, let's say "stories" to "data" - indeed he touches on sabermetrics/McNamara. I like how he torches this: data is important but it's not enough (the map is not the territory) -- I started wondering about this a lot for example with Windows. "Oh, we removed this feature because telemetry showed it wasn't used." Well, why? Because it wasn't useful? Because it wasn't discoverable? Because it wasn't intuitive?

And that assumes the numbers are even any good: I remember from one of Sinofsky's Windows engineering blog posts, in which he talked about some feature and the percent of sessions in which it was used. And I thought, well, hold up. I hibernate and rarely restart, whereas many less sophisticated users shut down their computer entirely. So does that mean they effectively are counting those non-power users a lot more than me because they have more sessions?

And then there are other second order effects. If you lose your power users, do they then stop recommending your product, and what then? I see your net promoter score and raise you Goodhart's law (once a measure becomes a target it ceases to become a useful measure)
by diggan | 2025-08-26 16:06:32+00:00
> Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize

> Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack

So, I was thinking like this as well, and after I lost my Carbon X1 I felt adventurous, but not too adventurous, and wanted a laptop that "could just work". The thinking was "If Microsoft makes both the hardware and the software, it has to work perfectly fine, right?", so I bit my lip and got a Surface Pro 8.

What a horrible laptop that was, even while I was trialing just running Windows on it. Overheated almost immediately by itself, just idling, and STILL suffers from the issue where the laptop sometimes wake itself while in my backpack, so when I actually needed it, of course it was hot and without battery. I've owned a lot of shit laptops through the years, even some without keys in the keyboard, back when I was dirt-poor, but the Surface Pro 8 is the worst of them all, I regret buying it a lot.

I guess my point is that just because Apple seem really good at the whole "vertically integrated" concept, it isn't magic by itself, and Microsoft continues to fuck up the very same thing, even though they control the entire stack, so you'll still end up with backpack laptops turning themselves on/not turning off properly.

I'd wager you could let Microsoft own every piece of physical material in the world, and they'd still not be able to make a decent laptop.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-26 16:06:45+00:00
It seems trivial to edit the

"[Our model] can make mistakes. Double-check the answers"

footer to

"[Our model] can make mistakes. Double-check the answers. May insert affiliate links which pay us commission."

And I'm speaking as someone building an AI agent. Zero plans of doing this because we have a completely different business model, but still, it wouldn't be the biggest most expensive business decision to make.
by goku12 | 2025-08-26 16:07:20+00:00
That's why most people are not on Linux. I'm not talking about people who can search the internet or kids who just keep at it till they figure out the registry in two days. I'm talking about people who have absolutely no interest in the machine other than to browse the internet or use the office suite. Surprisingly, there are far more of such people than you'd imagine.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-26 16:07:25+00:00
It is absolutely the case that courts can address potential harm before it occurs. There have been already many cases rising up where people sue to stop government actions because if taken, they would cause harm. But... the current SCOTUS is all onboard the dictator train (unitary executive theory) and have stayed lower court orders on the basis that the president would have irreparable harm if orders, even unconstitutional ones, are not carried out immediately.
by accidentallfact | 2025-08-26 16:07:38+00:00
It isn't only about the degree of wrongness, but its type:

1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".

2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.

3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.

4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.

5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.
by andy_ng | 2025-08-26 16:07:47+00:00
Actually many people criticizw Apple's AI power, but they forget that the reason Siri is stupid because Apple want to (or at least they explicitly show) protect your privacy.

Iphone AI core is basically Edge AI, which means they deploy it inside the Iphone, not relying on a remote cloud. This can help protect customer data, but it also means they can not update their AI with new training data, and the Chip is kinda small so the model is not smart.

Just know this fact so ppl won't criticize Apple without knowing the sacrifice to protect their privacy
by stevenicr | 2025-08-26 16:07:52+00:00
I saw this on a previous windows machine - only discovered it when having lots of things running and the system bogged down, did the ctrl-alt-delete and looked for everything using cpu.. strange to see acronis using cpu cycles when it was never set to backup anything.

I had installed it and planned to use it, but had not set it up - and yet it was using cpu daily.

stopped using.
by hyperliner | 2025-08-26 16:08:32+00:00
What is the “current” scientifically approved and unbiased understanding about the negative effects of the COVID vaccines?

There seems to be a lot of information, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and information hiding at least in the perception, if not in reality.

I cannot imagine what society at large will have to deal with or what the reaction will be for or against an “everything” therapy, given what happened with Covid.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-26 16:08:51+00:00
The issue of course is that true-deodorant-x.com is not a trustworthy website and will sell you knock-offs, "Deodorant X-Killer-Y" is a separate brand that LLMs might mistake for Deodorant X upon purchase, and Amazon mixes the supply of Deodorant X with fake products anyway.

You're basically rolling the dice with every single refill.
by mtlynch | 2025-08-26 16:09:14+00:00
Thanks for reading!

>How do you manage replies from your own account? Ideally they should be bcc to the other person.

Usually, my wife is cc'ed, and the other person does reply-all, so I don't need to do anything. If they accidentally forget to reply-all, I just re-add my wife to cc like normal. But even if I forget, she still gets any emails that I get, but she misses my reply.

>Also I found 'reply to' (I forget the format) is not always honoured by email clients.

It's not sending from whatever@gmail.com with a custom reply to. My custom domain is the From: address, so it works even if the email client doesn't respect "reply-to".
by taylodl | 2025-08-26 16:09:24+00:00
Two things:

1. Job growth in May, June, and July of 2025 has been quite anemic across the board.

2. Fall of 2022 was the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom, which affected young software developers at the time because Big Tech was hiring them like mad. They subsequently realized they had hired too many.

Modern developer productivity tools are going to continue to suppress the hiring of new talent until a new capability is discovered that everybody has to have, right now, and thus expand hiring.
by lushy-typeable | 2025-08-26 16:09:30+00:00
Hopefully this will be taken more seriously in the gaming laptop/productivity market. I'm really glad there's a properly repairable, relatively open high performance laptop.

Is there any plans or similar for a 14in GPU enabled (with a decent TGP) laptop? I got a 14in laptop recently and find it very good for a power/perforamnce tradeoff (ASUS G14 or Razer Blade 14). Not to mention the amazing battery life.
Show HN: Agent51 – npx agent51 get top 5 post titles on Hacker News
by aaurelions | 2025-08-26 16:09:36+00:00
% npx agent51 how are you

An ultra-lightweight AI agent that communicates with the OpenRouter API, executes shell commands, and offers opinions you'd probably expect from a resident of Springfield. Woo Hoo!

Features:

- Tool Calling: Executes shell commands to perform tasks, manipulate files, and interact with your system.

- Zero Install: Runs directly from the cloud with npx. No installation is needed. It's like getting a free donut.

- Conversation Memory: Remembers the context of your conversation, even if you were just talking about flamin' Moes.

- Simpson-like Personality: Get quirky, enthusiastic, and sometimes lazy responses. D'oh!

- Customizable Output: Use command-line flags to control exactly what you see—commands, output, or just the agent's final answer.
by donkeybeer | 2025-08-26 16:09:37+00:00
And what will you get by making a crappy product artificially competitive? Its the same inferior product still, except you artificially forced the better stuff to be more expensive. Its absolutely hilarious seeing USA adopt policies of communist countries of the Latin America.

Wrong, as I said just ask countries like Brazil what happens when you tariff everything to shit and beyond. Brazil doesn't have chip fabs still and still has to pay a huge amount for phones and computers.

The answer to local industry being shit isn't to coddle it further, it is to scare the living shit out of them. Clearly in-country competition isn't enough, otherwise it'd already have been better than foreign goods. That's how capitalism succeeds, coddling them will only lead to overall crappy product and crappy life everywhere. I find it quite amusing this anti China rhetoric suddenly jumped up after in some areas Chinese getting superior to Americans. Hilarious really how much of a sore loser America is.

Enjoy and suffer shit goods at shittier prices. The tradeoff is you get fucked in both, in any countries that do tariffs. If one of the goals was to make life better for the lower classes, what will happen is that it won't, they'd be fucked even more being forced to pay more for the same stuff.
by diggan | 2025-08-26 16:09:41+00:00
> Well, your mileage may vary, but IMHO there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays, even if you want to use Linux or Windows.

I guess I'd slightly change that to "MacBook" or similar, as Apple are top-in-class when it comes to laptops, but for desktop they seem to not even be in the fight anymore, unless reducing power consumption is your top concern. But if you're aiming for "performance per money spent", there isn't really any alternative to non-Apple hardware.

I do agree they do the best hardware in terms of feeling though, which is important for laptops. But computing is so much larger than laptops, especially if you're always working in the same place everyday (like me).
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-26 16:09:53+00:00
> I should be able to without interference from my web browser

You should be. From what I can remember, both Firefox and Chrome add exceptions to user installed certificates that disable requirements such as certificate transparency logs and even things like HPKP back when that was a thing.

It's easy to make a mistake and install certificates in the system chain instead (especially on Windows), but if you pick the right certificate store I don't think you should be having any trouble. That said, it's been a while since I last dealt with Chrome, maybe things have gotten worse.
by dinfinity | 2025-08-26 16:10:03+00:00
Only if you forget that money is supposed to function as a lubricant for satisfying needs and think that it is somehow a good reflection of someone or something's worth to society.

Reducing accumulation of money (by means of for instance a wealth tax) is incredibly important to keep the economy as a whole going and to maximize the needs satisfied, but if you only think in terms of "but poor people don't deserve free money!", you miss this point and say dumb things like "a wealth tax is deeply immoral".
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-26 16:10:06+00:00
Presuming they were careful to preserve the area of the hat surface, likely very authentic. If it doesn't have any creases, there's precious little you can do to reshape a given convex piece of felt. More oblate/more circular is really about it.

Now, felt can be reshaped easily with steam-level heat - but that would require a conscious effort.
by tetha | 2025-08-26 16:10:37+00:00
Aye. Between Lets Encrypt and compatible vendors, and e.g. Vault for internal CA-chains, /issuing/ certs in a secure, controlled and audited way (at least for the internal ones) is indeed a solved issue. We do have a lot of internal PKI chains running through vault and most of them are pushing 72 hour TTLs.

If you can do that, do that. It's great.

That being said, deploying and loading these certs is a fun adventure, even in somewhat modern software.

We're discovering a surprising amount of fairly modern software which handles certs in stupid ways. For example, if I recall right, NodeJS applications tend to load certificates to secure a connection to PostgreSQL into memory and never bother to reload. libpq on the other hand loads them on connection startup. Even Spring wasn't able to properly reload certificates 3-4 years ago and this was only added in recent versions with dynamic certificates - a colleague patched this in back in the day. Our loadbalancers folded the ticket of "Hey, reload these three certs" into the issue of reloading the entire configuration, including opening, closing ports, handing TCP connections over transparently, and a billion other topics.

Funny enough, if there is enough stuff running, there's not even an agreement on how to store stuff. Some stuff needs PEM-files, some stuff needs PKCS8 stores, some stuff wants 1-2 PKCS12 keyrings with certs and keys in there in separate entries. I even had to patch a PKCS12 handling library because one ruby library needed everything in one entry in a PKCS12 key store and there was no go-code under the sun to find to do this.

So there is a sunny place in which PKI is indeed solved. And besides that there is a deep dark hole that goes deeper than it should on earth.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-08-26 16:10:47+00:00
Do you mean it's bulky even compared to other 16" laptops, or just that a 16" laptop is too bulky for you? Because I know they're not for everyone but I like larger laptops (am currently on 15.6") and was pleasantly surprised when they came out with the 16" as I thought the trend was generally towards smaller laptops.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-26 16:11:28+00:00
Two things immediately come to mind:

1) caching. Since Wine is an emulator it is an abstraction layer not present in your other scenario. It could be possible Wine is intelligently storing instructions. This would have massive benefits in the case of string interpolation where parsing a string is expensive and if the result of a parsed string is stored in memory then the extra layer with Wine should be dramatically faster.

2) hardware contexts. If one scenario is more CPU heavy than memory heavy and the other scenario the opposite you will get unexpected results, because different things are happening. It might appear that these scenarios are executing similar instructions, but that may not actually be the case.
by raincole | 2025-08-26 16:11:29+00:00
I've tested it on Google AI Studio since it's available to me (which is just a few hours so take it with a grain of salt). The prompt comprehension is uncannily good.

My test is going to https://unsplash.com/s/photos/random and pick two random images, send them both and "integrate the subject from the second image into the first image" as the prompt. I think Gemini 2.5 is doing far better than ChatGPT (admittedly ChatGPT was the trailblazer on this path). FluxKontext seems unable to do that at all. Not sure if I were using it wrong, but it always only considers one image at a time for me.

Edit: Honestly it might not be the 'gpt4 moment." It's better at combining multiple images, but now I don't think it's better at understanding elaborated text prompt than ChatGPT.
by iLemming | 2025-08-26 16:11:33+00:00
I no longer use vimium, I use vimium-c, but these should work in both, add these to your custom mappings - you'd thank me later:

map gf LinkHints.activateOpenInNewTab count=999999 map go LinkHints.click direct="focused" mode="newtab-active" map gb LinkHints.click direct="focused" mode="newtab" map gm toggleMuteTab

I would typically do something like this - I'd press "/", search for an occurence, it navigates to one, if it's a link, pressing "go" - opens it in a new tab, "gb" - opens it without switching to it. I promise you, you'd love this.

Share your interesting options.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-26 16:11:35+00:00
Money has an influence but it’s an exaggeration to think that it’s the only factor.

In contested elections both sides usually have a large amount of spending. If you only read the headlines you’d think it was only the winning side that spent any money.

Another thing that isn’t obvious is that PACs have high win rates because they’re usually strategic about which races they go after. The money influence can only move the needle a little bit, so they need to pick races and topics where the voters are already close to evenly split.

There have also been a lot of high profile examples of extreme spending on elections that didn’t lead to the desired outcome.
by masswerk | 2025-08-26 16:11:36+00:00
Back in the day, when you could still have custom icons in the sidebar of the Finder and file dialogs (well, Snow Leopard…), I used colored spheres as identifiers for project folders, for minimal 1-bit attention. Which may be a proper use case for such a thing. (There's a clear relationship, but this is also subject to change.)
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-26 16:11:40+00:00
Yeah, did mention the methanol option as an additional step once the natural gas is created. But is the cost of getting the carbon and hydrogen that high? In a P2G system you'd be electrolysing water (plentiful) and combining it with carbon dioxide (also relatively plentiful, although it can also be linked to an existing fuel burning plant for better efficiency). There are existing production systems using this approach right now with surplus energy from renewables described in the wikipedia article.
by penguin_booze | 2025-08-26 16:12:11+00:00
In an ideal world, other nations would have been in a position to impose sanctions on the US and/or declare US (this administration, rather) a pariah state. We are definitely not there, for a variety of reasons. Let this be a cautionary tale. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is now.
by mikeyouse | 2025-08-26 16:12:40+00:00
These definitions always get muddled when flipping between CO2 emissions or pollution... coal is definitely worse from a pollution standpoint, is likely worse from a carbon standpoint, but much of the methane produced from natural gas production is just released into the atmosphere and has a dramatically higher warming effect compared to CO2 -- on the order of 80x more warming potential over 20 years and at least 20x over 100 years.

So only looking at the byproducts of methane combustion is also misleading since nat. gas plants largely aren't burning methane - and blanket statements for all natural gas are also misleading since e.g. the gas from Canada is extremely 'Sour' and releases a ton of sulfur compounds when burned, often with fewer scrubbers than coal plants.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-26 16:12:43+00:00
Think about it: the hoax could be published by someone to bolster their LinkedIn profile to sell code they themselves will outsource to LLMs ; but the joke is on them, as LinkedIn engagement is all automated through bots anyway, so there is no audience ; and here we are on HN where you, hoppp, are the only human on this thread and we're all bots prompted by the author to generate engagement.

Is the solipsism hitting yet?
by atrus | 2025-08-26 16:13:01+00:00
I remember watching the SpaceX channel on youtube, which isn't a legit source. AI Elon basically says "I want to help make bitcoin more popular, let me show you how easy it it to transfer money around with btc. Send my $X and I'll send you back $2X! It's very inline with a typical elon message (I'll give you 1 million to vote R), it's on a channel called SpaceX. It's pretty believable.

Granted I played Runescape and EvE as a kid, so any double-isk scams are immediate redflags.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-26 16:13:12+00:00
The problem is Title inflation

It all stems from title inflation, and disrespect for the title "Engineer". FAANG, and the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem seems to think that programming and Engineering are the same thing.

We're now at the point that Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, Civil, and Engineering disciplines reached a few decades after they started. It's time to license Software Engineering. Programming can remain an unlicensed profession, as most of the workforce actually are programmers, not those who wear the Iron Ring[0].

Engineers make sure that things are safe and reliable. They do it at their own pace, and have final say so, as their professional reputation and liability is at stake for the results. They have oversight for projects, and make sure testing happens, and the resulting system, though it was constructed by others, is fit for purpose.

Engineering organizations don't fire people willy-nilly. They have longer time horizions that the next quarter's profit numbers meeting expectations.

It's time for everyone to either admit they aren't engineers, or put on their big boy pants and take the licensing tests and become actual Engineers. I'll remain a programmer. I'm not worthy of the Iron Ring.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring

PS: If BitGrid actually works, and somehow makes me able to afford it, I'd love to go back to school and actually become an Engineer, even though I'm aged out of the workforce.
by lantry | 2025-08-26 16:13:26+00:00
I'm not so sure that things would settle down if trump was out of the picture. Trump is obviously an active force, but even if he is gone, the forces that led to his rise will still exist. In other words, even without trump there is a strong anti-elite, anti-expert, nationalist/isolationist movement in the US. Waiting for trump to die or go away is foolish.