MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robertlagrant | 2025-08-13 16:46:30+00:00
> I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.

Just responding to this as it seems the simplest: a capital-intensive business is something that will need millions of dollars over many years before it turns the first inkling of a product. Excluding this incredibly important type of business, and only thinking about tiny businesses when you're thinking of the phrase "capital-intensive business" is the problem.
by mvieira38 | 2025-08-13 16:47:38+00:00
I think most of the social media power users don't connect with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer) and share the ones they like through snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends" or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was with Facebook groups and whatnot
by t-3 | 2025-08-13 16:47:38+00:00
At least with vtt and srt, the chunk of text displayed is explicitly associated with a chunk of time, so something like that really shouldn't be happening. Maybe there is some sort of subtitle-writing on the fly like what is sometimes done with transcoding video, but that would be really strange for a plaintext format that is so light compared to the video and audio coming with it.
by logicprog | 2025-08-13 16:47:49+00:00
I think the fundamental problem here is that there are two uses for the internet: as a source for on-demand information to learn a specific thing or solve a specific problem, and as a sort of proto-social network, to build human connections. For most people looking things up on the internet, the primary purpose is the former, whereas for most people posting things to the internet, the primary purpose is more the latter. With traditional search, there was an integration of the two desires because people who wanted information had to go directly to sources of information that were oriented towards human connection and then could be enramped onto the human connection part maybe. But it was also frustrating for that same reason, from the perspective of people that just wanted information — a lot of the time the information you were trying to gather was buried in stuff that focused too much on the personal, on the context and storytelling, when that wasn't wanted, or wasn't quite what you were looking for and so you had to read several sources and synthesize them together. The introduction of AI has sort of totally split those two worlds. Now people who just want straight to the point information targeted at specifically what they want will use an AI with web search or something enabled. Whereas people that want to make connections will use RSS, explore other pages on blogs, and us marginalia and wiby to find blogs in the first place. I'm not even really sure that this separation is necessarily ultimately a bad thing since one would hope that the long-term effect of it would be it to filter the users that show up on your blog down to those who are actually looking for precisely what you're looking for.
by xenodium | 2025-08-13 16:47:53+00:00
> I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching.

Hits home for me. I tried hard to free my blog (https://xenodium.com) of any of the yucky things I try avoid in the modern web (tracking, paywalls, ads, bloat, redundant js, etc). You can even read from lynx if that's your cup of tea.

ps. If you'd like a blog like mine, I also offer it as a service https://LMNO.lol (custom domains welcome).
by pyrale | 2025-08-13 16:48:15+00:00
I’m not sure that the issue is just a technical distinction between humans and bots.

Rather it’s about promoting a web serving human-human interactions, rather than one that exists only to be harvested, and where humans mostly speak to bots.

It is also about not wanting a future where the bot owners get extreme influence and power. Especially the ones with mid-century middle-europe political opinions.
by 93po | 2025-08-13 16:48:20+00:00
this is what we call a slippery slope fallacy

there is no evidence that there will be a hot war, that it will involve destroying satellites, or the process of destroying the satellite would result in space junk that didn't naturally deorbit within a few years

if we have a hot war with a country capable of launch rockets into space to destroy satellites, then we're super fucked anyway, because that's also a nuclear country. satellites would be the last of my concerns, i would be digging a bunker in my backyard
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-08-13 16:49:10+00:00
I find LLMs have no problem disagreeing with me on simple matters of fact, the sycophantic aspects become creepy in matters of taste - "are watercolors made from oil?" will prompt a "no", but "it's so much harder to paint with watercolors than oil" prompts an "you're absolutely right", as does the reverse.
by ggoo | 2025-08-13 16:49:12+00:00
Particle board:

- degrades faster, necessitating replacement

- makes the average quality of all wood furniture notably worse

- arguably made the cost of real wood furniture more expensive, since fewer people can make a living off it.

Not to say the tradeoffs are or are not worth it, but "80% of the real thing" does not exist in a vacuum, it kinda lowers the quality on the whole imo.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-08-13 16:49:25+00:00
There was a guy a long time ago, who did YT videos of the tech markets in Tokyo and it was really surprising some of the best places to get parts for smartphones or robots were completely non-descript buildings in the heart of the city. He specifically went to places that most people wouldn't know about unless you really had great local information.

If someone were to do what you're saying, it would be a huge win for people visiting and being able to find these places. I would love to see this.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-13 16:49:48+00:00
> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,

Why would we work down the prosperity chain?

There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.

Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-13 16:49:59+00:00
I think it's almost inevitable. The very nature of the bureaucratic procedures that grow up around these sorts of flag lists is that effort tends to accumulate at those points, right or wrong, and your being listed on them becomes almost self-reinforcing through bureaucratic inertia and over-caution, mixed with laziness about investigating if their own systems are wrong and repairing the problem.
by 420official | 2025-08-13 16:50:18+00:00
If all we did was supply arms to our allies who are under attack without making egregious profit off of it, then yeah I think folks would feel better about the MIC, but as you're well aware we are only granting small shipments of weapons along with big demands including currently asking Ukraine to give up it's land to russia. We also have a long history of giving weapons to sow chaos around the world leading directly to things like isis and others. Arguably worse than that, we're now using these military weapons to suppress liberty in American cities.
by bronlund | 2025-08-13 16:50:37+00:00
I too was part of the initial Kickstarter and I had both the first and the second version.

When FitBit bought Pebble in 2016, some may argue that this was a good thing, the development of the watch and the OS just stopped - it was dead. FitBit had no intention of keeping the Pebble and just wanted to implement the software into it's own ecosystem.

Google bought FitBit in 2019 and released the source code for PebbleOS this year - but that is kind of late now, isn't it?
by PhotonHunter | 2025-08-13 16:50:39+00:00
My daily is a W126 with the OM603. It's getting harder every day to find parts (when I need them, which is infrequent) but it's worth the hassle because like you say there is nothing modern that has the same combination of feel and ride quality. Or visibility! I can parallel park this car (long wheelbase too) in tiny spots easier than a modern compact because you can actually see.

I've got a W140 with the M120 and a W123 with the OM616 and a 4-speed too, and while they have their charms (especially the W123) nothing tops the W126. It truly was not just the finest production sedan Mercedes made, but ever made by anyone. (Other contenders being the W100, the W140, and the Lexus LS.)
by tracker1 | 2025-08-13 16:50:43+00:00
I think a lot of decisions that eventually lead to the Oracle buyout were all pretty bad and Oracle itself being where good ideas go to die. As bad as MS is at extracting value out of its windows users, Oracle seems to fleece it's enterprise customers far, far worse. I don't think I would ever choose Oracle or IBM for anything.

It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.

I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.
by sour-taste | 2025-08-13 16:50:46+00:00
I used to see the Rockabilly dancers all around Yayogi Park in Shibuya (1). These guys would hang out in the park on the weekend with pompadours and jean/leather jackets and do goofy dances. It was sick. Something about Japanese culture encourages dedication to your hobbies, and people get super involved in them.

1) https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/tokyo-rockabi...
by rhdunn | 2025-08-13 16:51:54+00:00
You can do something like this currently with schema.org metadata:

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "WebPage", "contentRating": "18+", "isFamilyFriendly": false, "audience": { "@type": "PeopleAudience", "suggestedMinAge": 18, "requiredMinAge": 18 }, }

- https://schema.org/WebPage

- https://schema.org/PeopleAudience

- https://schema.org/AdultOrientedEnumeration
by sjducb | 2025-08-13 16:52:01+00:00
This sounds like the No True Scotsman fallacy.

We know all true scotsmen are good upstanding citizens. If you find a Scotsman who is a criminal, then obviously he is not a true Scotsman.

If you find a rationalist who believes something mad then obviously he is not a true rationalist.

There are now so many logical fallacies that you can point to any argument and say it’s a logical fallacy.
by wild_egg | 2025-08-13 16:52:09+00:00
CL is strongly typed but not statically typed. The compiler generally doesn't complain ahead of time that your function is going to do math on a string because it was called incorrectly. Typically a runtime condition will be signalled when it hits that point and you can sort it out from there.

Coalton moves that to the compilation step so you get an error back the instant you send the form to the REPL.
by gtirloni | 2025-08-13 16:52:11+00:00
> illumos-closed package, containing binary blobs still necessary to build illumos-gate, was added

https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-n...

> There are a small handful of illumos components for which source code is not available. Over time, we have replaced most of the closed source components from the Sun era with new open source versions. This work is ongoing

https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close...

> From this, however, project founder Garrett D'Amore took the last drop of the gate and announced illumos in mid-2010.

https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/
by tmtvl | 2025-08-13 16:52:20+00:00
In CL you can't declare, for example, a proper-list-of type, which is to say a type which accepts a second type and represents a proper list containing only members of that second type.

(deftype Proper-List-Of (subtype) `(or Null (Cons ,subtype (Proper-List-Of ,subtype))))

Doesn't work (for example). There kind of are ways to work around it to some extent with satisfies and ad-hoc predicate generation, but Coalton is a true value add in that aspect.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-13 16:52:20+00:00
Personally I really enjoy Mastodon and Bluesky but I am very deliberate at avoiding negative people, I do not follow and often mute or block “diss abled” people who complain about everything or people who think I make their life awful because I am cisgender or who post 10 articles an hour about political outrage. The discover page on Bluesky is algorithmic and respects the “less like this” button and last time I looked has 75% less outrage than the following page. (A dislike button that works is a human right in social media!)

Once I get my database library reworked, a project I have in the queue is a classifier which filters out negative people so I can speed follow and not add a bunch of negativity to my feed, this way I get to enjoy real gems like

https://mas.to/@skeletor

Cross posting that would cure some of the ills of LinkedIn!
by esafak | 2025-08-13 16:52:23+00:00
Coining new categories gives startups the validation they need to justify their differentiation, which is how they get launched. If the company coins its own category, prospective buyers will never find the product in the first place since they will not have not heard of the category. So companies like Gartner are serving a valuable function in the startup economy. It's the formalization of what Karpathy did when he coined the term "vibe coding", christening a new category.
by hualapais | 2025-08-13 16:52:25+00:00
OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”.

Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.
by skyzouwdev | 2025-08-13 16:52:34+00:00
This is interesting — I’ve run into that exact pain point of spending more time on plumbing than building features.

Curious about the choice of C++ for the core runtime. Was the main driver raw performance, or more about portability and low overhead in production environments? In my case, I’ve mostly worked with Python pipelines and they tend to choke when you try to scale concurrency without overcomplicating the architecture.

The graph-based approach reminds me a bit of Unreal’s Blueprints, but for AI ops. If you can make it genuinely easy to plug in custom nodes without touching glue code, that could be a big productivity boost.
by k310 | 2025-08-13 16:52:46+00:00
> Zuckerberg at least partly justified when he called Facebook a tool for “extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.” In this newly passive, docile consumption model, content is fittingly delivered to users in a livestock-adjacent “feed” — an idea presaged by M.T. Anderson’s 2002 dystopian novel of the same name. Human agency and volition are becoming more and more difficult to locate, as people’s tastes and desires dissolve into the algorithm and its authoritarian prophecies.

My view is that big "social media" sites have turned to channels where you can only react, but are so overwhelmed by other participants, notably "influencers" that you feel powerless to contribute.

A site like HN allows real participation, if not the (bogus) illusion of connecting with the whole damn world, or sharing your facts and opinions like a celebrity.

It's more like a college discussion group. Less the coffee and cookies.
by neon_electro | 2025-08-13 16:53:03+00:00
I have used Incogni for a few years now, I was a little worried after the first year things wouldn't be worth the price, but I'm noticing that there are data brokers who will happily remove you but not put you on a block-list, meaning that they will happily ingest your information again if it comes to them, and another request from Incogni will be needed to remove it again.

I'm on the fence about whether that's real value delivered from Incogni, but I do think overall it's working to limit some of the spread of my data.
by lenkite | 2025-08-13 16:53:40+00:00
All the cognitive load you save is immediately burdened by scanning 60-100 CSS classes in a 200-300 line length HTML element. And this repeated over and over and over in a ginormous number of lines. Giving you a massive migraine.

Turns out HTML size also increase by 7-20x in tailwind CSS.

Tailwind CSS is "write-only" code. Maintaining a site developed by someone else who has gone full-blown worship of the Tailwind Dao is a nightmare.
by creshal | 2025-08-13 16:53:44+00:00
Certbot is a giant swiss army chainsaw that can do everything middlingly well, if you don't mind vibecoding your encryption intrastructure. But a clean solution it usually isn't.

(That said, I'm not too thrilled by this implementation. How are renewals and revocations handled, and how can the processes be debugged? I hope the docs get updated soon.)
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-13 16:54:05+00:00
> let's not forget that operating systems 20 years ago were more "highly interactive, component-based, state-driven, design-system-heavy applications" and still globally (across all applications at once) themeable. So it seems to me that the problem is that modern UI in fact has lost the concept of modular components. e.g. every time someone comes out with light/dark mode as a feature, I can't help but feel like it's an insider joke that's been running so long that the new kids think it's serious

?

It would be possible to have this, by building all apps on the web platform exclusively from native input elements.

For forms. With no fancy things like combo boxes or multi selects!

Window interface, menu bar: using native controls there is ofc a power that web apps don't have.

Regarding the rest, I think you are painting the past with rose-colored glasses.

Yes, UI kits for native applications are more powerful than the web platform in many regards.

But the Windows applications I remember often were a mix of native controls and custom (of course, unthemable) elements.

Many applications even went out of their way to avoid native controls. E.g. SAP, Winamp, and loads of other programs I don't remember now.

Reinventing UI controls is not exclusive to the web platform and "the new kids" have no OS UI framework to build on. They have the web platform.

I too remember the styling options in Windows pre Windows 7.

I loved to play with the ones in Win98.

Most of them would have unpredictable effects on most desktop applications, because of the unpredictable mix of native controls and custom GUI.

If you want to improve web apps, why not argue for better native HTML interactive elements? E.g. menu, multi-select, date-picker...

What I agree with is that handling zoom, font size, color schemes should never be eschewed or ignored.

Oddly enough, in my work history, the Venn diagram of the people who argued for "just make it look like the design, nobody zooms" and the people being smug at web UI was very large. Smug at CSS too, the next moment cheering for obscure and inaccessible, bug-ridden "CSS-only" solutions that the one person who can write CSS proposed as a joke, because a styled toggle switch "shouldn't require JS" (I somewhat agree with this, although the programming language is unimportant).

Rant over... nostalgia is a nice thing.

But web apps are not Windows applications or GTK applications or macOS applications, and these all habe never been as perfect as you make them out.

Sure, large, data-driven applications with good developers for native UI did many things better than many web applications do.

But that's not because web app programmers are too stupid to just do the same thing. That's a tired trope.

Sure, web development has a low barrier to entry. Ranting about it has an even lower one though.
by dathinab | 2025-08-13 16:54:07+00:00
> It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?

because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys

there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)

like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay

or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it

and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).

And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.

and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?

anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-13 16:54:15+00:00
>What happens when you go to bed regularly with unsolved problems?

You're "sleeping on it" that's what everyone does, or should do. totally fine thing to be doing.

Last night, i wasthinking about what i would be doing today with gpt-oss-20b now that it actually works with tools.

I'm finding aider is my front runner right now.

>Either you encounter a new problem regularly that you don't know how to solve by bedtime; or you have long standing unsolved problems?

I wish i had the Steve jobs video to link. You're dealing with prioritization. I think it was 80/20. You spend 80% of your time awake fixing problems that matter. You can only work on 20% of nonsense that doesnt matter. Most people in his experience are more so working 20% on what matters and 80% on nonsense.

If you're 'sleeping on it" night after night. You're likely not prioritizing fixing stuff; you're working on the wrong things.

>In my experience this is what causes burnout at the fundamental level.

I look at a random page for "causes of job burnout" and they are all the 20%.
by omoikane | 2025-08-13 16:54:36+00:00
A lot of people design and build their own custom pen plotters, with varying level of precision:

https://note.com/penplotter/n/n4fdf6959738a

The page is in Japanese, but you can get a feel of things through the embedded videos. One of them links to this instructables page in English:

https://www.instructables.com/Mini-Plotter-V2/