MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijit | 2025-08-23 10:06:49+00:00
Come on, let’s be real for a moment.

two things could be possibly true, people are sheep and people who interact with the platform can enjoy it so much that they become fans. This means that any person who actually enjoys using the technology is immediately dismissible because now they are fans. Right?

It’s so stupid because I’m a die hard linux user but I can definitely appreciate my Apple devices.

I’ve had this discussion so many times in real life, what is the value of a ThinkPad T-series over a ThinkPad E-series; or a HP Elitebook over an Ideabook? The specification looks the same, on paper. Why should I convince my employer to fork out an extra €500?

The truth is, the things that really matter to people don’t fit very well on a spec sheet. Build quality, palm rejection, colour accuracy, enjoyable sound, even the feel of the chassis. Apple seems to put a lot of care and attention into these things, so yes, they’ve optimised the operating system to be more pleasurable to use… and so it is, even in low memory conditions- they prioritise things the user might care about. (The currently active program, being responsive etc).

I’ll give another example, The Commodore64. It is so comically weak compared to even the micro processor inside my keyboard… so if compared to a full-blown desktop computer of the modern day (which is thousands of times more powerful still…) I should feel like the modern computer is better. Yet when I type on a Commodore 64 it is so immediate… there is no lag in typing, the words appear on the screen as quickly as they are pressed, it feels mechanical. It feels immediate. it feels direct.

Why? Clearly the Commodore 64 has much fewer resources, but it feels so much nicer to write text on a Commodore 64. Not because of the keyboard (I have a better one), not because of the processor (because it’s a weaker one). But because the latency of typing is so low that it is barely perceptible and that goes directly against the specification.

One cannot infer user experience from spec sheets.

And people interacting with the Apple ecosystem who become fans might have a point. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it.
by tbonnin | 2025-08-23 10:07:29+00:00
Some companies publish the IP ranges of their crawler (OpenAI [1], Mistral [2] for example) but many like Anthropic don’t. Not sure those lists can be fully trusted though. Perplexity, for instance, was caught using IPs outside of their declared list [3].

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

[2] https://docs.mistral.ai/robots/

[3] https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...
by mikodin | 2025-08-23 10:07:51+00:00
I don't think it needs to translate to "go on vacation". During my time being employed, this translated into getting up and stretching, taking a few minutes to look out the window, going for a short walk, taking an intentional breath, sitting and meditating for 15 minutes, actually eating lunch away from my computer, or not eating lunch and going for a quick run or doing yoga or going to the gym.

This can come forth in so many ways.

Moment by moment we can have an eye on our body and what it is asking for, I've found it to not only make me more productive, but also led to my baseline of stress to being way, way lower then everyone around me which is contagious in a positive way.
by sokoloff | 2025-08-23 10:08:18+00:00
In the mid-90s, I remember computers being expensive enough that the game company I worked at offered 0% interest, payroll deduction loans to help employees buy them. Submitting a spreadsheet of parts I intended to use got me the loan money and then payroll took it back around 1% per paycheck for almost two years.

That’s unthinkable to me now given how good and cheap they’ve become. I paid a little under $2K for a P5-90 based system (just over $4K in today’s money).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-23 10:09:08+00:00
> Release early, release often

I’m big on this.

I find it efficacious to have an integrated product going as soon as possible, even if it’s a field of stubs.

It’s my experience that I almost never know what the end product will look like, no matter how much upfront planning time I devote, so being able to test and iterate the whole system, as soon as possible, is pretty vital.

It’s also one reason that I like to use test harnesses a lot[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/
by yurishimo | 2025-08-23 10:10:05+00:00
So, exactly how it was when cellphones first became commonplace? I started high school in 2008 and had a flip phone at that time. Yea, literally everyone was texting behind their back, under a desk, or whatever but it was fine. If we got caught, the teacher picked it up and we could come pick it up at the end of the day.

I can imagine if the current “meta” is literally holding your phone in your hand for the entire school day that problems would indeed arise.

Personally, I think banning phones in the classroom similar to what I grew up with is the minimum. If students still have poor outcomes or are being bullied by other kids sneaking phones, then yea, collect them at the door or implement stricter punishment for students caught with a phone.
by defrost | 2025-08-23 10:10:12+00:00
He's descaling with his mouth shut. Not inhaling.

> Even worse, he's using old school stick welding.

Can you show an example of that? (You linked to him using a needle gun not a stick welder)

He's got top of the range spooled feed welders and does jobs at a scale that take hundreds of metres of feed .. these are not the jobs you spend all day swapping sticks for.

If you watched more of the channel you might pick up a lot of discussion about what is and isn't toxic, what are safe and unsafe practices.

The same job | video you linked, different time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZf-fTK7q7E&t=592s

That's gouging out metal wearing a closed system breather as that's actual toxic residue.

Welding a nut on to help separate the metal sleeve - not a stick welder: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=438

> All your video did was reinforce that, ...

It honestly seems as if you saw what you wanted to see without paying attention to detail about what was actually happening.
by metalman | 2025-08-23 10:10:17+00:00
the same will be said of all the bomb/survival shelters that are bieng built now, everywhere, and have already been built, everywhere, along with countless fortresses and industrial structures that have underground sections.....must be millions of square meters/yards of foor space pick a culture, or time period, or furniture type and there will be an underground structure to fit your style...
by Martin_Silenus | 2025-08-23 10:11:48+00:00
Sleep. Best side task for your brain.

How many times has this happened to me?

You struggle with a feature or a bug, you think about it, you weigh the pros and cons for hours... because you don't want to start something that will set you back. You're tired, but you don't want to go to sleep until you've at least made a decision for tomorrow.

Go to sleep. Now.

Then you wake up knowing immediately what to do. You hardly believe it, because it was so hard to find before you sleep. And you do it. And it works. And you know that sleep was the key.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-23 10:12:02+00:00
You're confounding hallucination in humans, which is a purely sensory experience, and hallucinations in LLMs, which seems to be used to describe every kind of mistake and deficiency in LLMs.

And even if we were to cure schizophrenia in humans, just what makes you think that it would apply to LLMs? Having an extremely weak conceptual model of the world and not being able to reason out of rather simple problems (like LLMs struggle with) isn't schizophrenia.

This oversimplified explanation which posits that neural networks are just like human brains has truly gone too far now.

> Mathematically speaking it's possible to know how far away an inferenced point is away from a cluster of real world data.

And mathematically speaking, how would you accomplish this? As you probably know LLMs don't operate on conceptual ideas, they operate on tokens. That's why LLMs tend to fail when asked to do things that aren't well represented in their training data, they don't have a working model of the world even if they can fake it to a certain degree.
by supermatt | 2025-08-23 10:13:56+00:00
I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make.

My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.

In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.
by dijit | 2025-08-23 10:14:10+00:00
Unfortunately, at the behest of Microsoft, manufacturers just came out with s2idle suspend and removed s3 suspend.

And it seems the only Microsoft has working support… so sleep issues continue to plague linux… again… after we just solved them.

It makes me so furious.

more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608991
Which Fork?
by naturalcomputer | 2025-08-23 10:15:25+00:00
The relationship between humans and computers is at a fork. With fork 1 we harness computers intentionally as tools, which we can all control and use to improve our prospects. With fork 2 our interactions with computers shape and unintentionally undermine how we see each other and ourselves. Excluding dubious predictions of an AI singularity; whose intentions, if any, will influence which fork we take ?
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-08-23 10:16:21+00:00
In case you're genuinely confused, the reason for Anubis and similar tools is that AI-training-data-scraping crawlers are assholes, and strangle the living shit out of any webserver they touch, like a cloud of starving locusts descending upon a wheat field.

i.e. it's DDoS protection.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-23 10:16:50+00:00
Because Rust's standard library doesn't provide memory mapping you will need to use platform specific APIs.

In Zig it's exactly the same except that they decided to provide the POSIX platform specific APIs, which if you're using a POSIX system is I guess useful and otherwise it's dead weight.

It's a choice. I don't think it's a good choice but it's a choice.
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-23 10:17:52+00:00
XULRunner (Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird, Miro, Joost, TomTom Home, etc) abused XML external entities in language specific DTDs for internationalization / localization.

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/intl/iuc15/paper/iu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner
by lordnacho | 2025-08-23 10:18:39+00:00
I hate to turn everything into a conversation about AI, but this essay maybe explains best what LLMs have done for me recently.

Particularly the first part. I want to add a new feature, but I want to keep things clean. It needs tests, CI, documentation.

It makes exploring new ideas a bit cumbersome, because code tends to create minor distractions that eat up time. You miss a semicolon, or you forget the order of the arguments to a function you just wrote, do you have to flip to another file. Or the test framework needs an update, but the update breaks something so you have to do some changes. It's not just the time either, it's the context switch from the big picture to the very small details, and then back again.

LLM lets me do "one whole step" at a time. Or that's the positive spin on it. Seen another way, I'm further out from the details, and in most things, you have to hit a bit of a wall to really learn it. For senior devs, I lean towards the first, you've already learned what you're going to learn from fixing imports, you are operating on a higher level.
by close04 | 2025-08-23 10:20:12+00:00
Probably the same way they’d view the young tech startup billionaire. They’d understand they’re just seeing snapshots of an industry they don’t fully know so they’d avoid generalizing to “all young tech workers are billionaires”.

Why you’d think you can characterize an entire industry based on a few snapshots is not clear to me.

A few more things I’d add to the health risks of welding: the inevitable toxic crap on the hands even just by taking off the protective equipment, or the occasionally extremely uncomfortable body posture that needs to be maintained for hours on end while welding. And there are more extreme welding environments that put almost any job on earth to shame, like hyperbaric welding.

Over years things add up. If office work is hard on the body for too much sitting which is natural and fine is smaller doses, imagine work where even the small exposures are terribly bad.

Source: only welded once in my life but worked for a company that did a lot of it, from the mountain top to the bottom of the sea. All the safety avoids acute issues but the chronic ones will build up.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-23 10:20:13+00:00
I'll give you even odds that the number is within 4 orders of magnitude of correct. That is to say, in the year of 2025, there are/were fewer than 100,000 18 year olds, resident in the state of California, who have at least one child, and who made over $100,000 that year. If you prove me wrong I'll happily concede the point.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-23 10:20:19+00:00
> Containers are not isolated Operating Systems: Docker containers share the host kernel. This is what makes them lightweight and great for single services. Whereas desktop environments expect system services like (systemd, logind, udev, DBus) and device access to be available. Containers don’t provide that by default.

I thought Docker images always run in a VM on non Linux systems, no? This guy is running Windows on host, right? Confusing
by atemerev | 2025-08-23 10:20:21+00:00
Well, this is exactly what I use AI for.

I start to experiment with coding agents to try some things to make me unstuck. These are cheap to try.

Then, the outcome is either "wow, this can actually work" or "but this is bullshit, and will never work, let me do it myself the right way!"

Win/win.
by huhkerrf | 2025-08-23 10:21:43+00:00
> parents have instead decided that the better thing to fight for is their children having cell phones so they can hear the child's last words when the school shooting happens.

What's a ridiculous appeal to emotion. Between 2020 and 2022 there were 131 school shooting deaths, including suicides. Let's put those all in 2022, and assume that there were actually 0 suicides.

That means you have a 0.0026% chance to be killed (at most) in a school shooting. This is too much, but this is not the reason to allow cell phones in schools. Come on.
by xfalcox | 2025-08-23 10:23:04+00:00
Depends on your needs. You surely don't want 32k long chunks for doing the standard RAG pipeline, that's for sure.

My use case is basically a recommendation engine, where retrieve a list of similar forum topics based on the current read one. As with dynamic user generated content, it can vary from 10 to 100k tokens. Ideally I would generate embeddings from an LLM generated summary, but that would increase inference costs considerably at the scale I'm applying it.

Having a larger possible context out of the box just made a simple swap of embeddeding models increase quality of recommendations greatly.
by huhkerrf | 2025-08-23 10:24:38+00:00
You're just making things up, just like those people perpetuating the litter box hoax.

> The only known official instance of cat litter being placed in school classrooms for potential use by students was in the late 2010s by the Jefferson County Public School District in Colorado, where the 1999 Columbine High School massacre took place. Some teachers were given "go buckets" that contained cat litter to be used as a toilet in an emergency lockdown situation, such as during a school shooting.

_Only known official instance_ and not for drills, but in case there was an emergency situation.
by reacweb | 2025-08-23 10:24:56+00:00
I have 1 "big" xsl file in a project I maintain. I have fixed an issue this year. I have tried to use chatgpt prompt. The scope was perfect: I had the buggy xsl, the buggy result, the expected result and a clear explanation. It generated syntactically correct code (almost) that did not work because chatgpt does not understand. This was not a complete loss: a good refresher of the syntax, but I had to do the thinking fully alone and found alone how to use "node-set".

My previous change in this file was in 2017 when I replaced xalan by the xslt processor built in java. I was very surprised I had to make the following changes:

-<xsl:if test="string(serverName)=$sName"> +<xsl:if test="string(serverName)=string($sName)"> -<xsl:for-each select="attributeList/attribute[self::attribute!='']"> +<xsl:for-each select="attributeList/attribute[text()!='']"> -<xsl:if test="preceding-sibling::Connection[featureType='Receptacle'][position() = 1]/@Name!=@Name or not(preceding-sibling::Connection[featureType='Receptacle'][position() = 1]/node()) "> +<xsl:if test="preceding-sibling::Connection[position() = 1]/@Name!=@Name or position()=1">

These incompatibility issues with something I considered to be standard greatly damaged my opinion on xslt.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-23 10:25:11+00:00
They had high expectations (I suspect many here, would consider them “extreme”), and demanded that we take a great deal of accountability and responsibility. Not really big on micromanaging, but we were expected to deliver, with no excuses for failure.

If I showed that I could deliver, they would basically give me a “blank check,” for support, but I was expected to take this high level of trust seriously, and not abuse it. They wouldn’t second-guess my decisions.

They would assume that I knew what I was doing; which could be pretty scary, but I was also expected to ask for help, if I found myself over my head. They might be grumpy, but they’d give me the help. I did risk having the responsibility yanked, though.

Copping to my mistakes was expected. I was also expected to do so, in spite of possible dire consequences. If they found out about it after the fact, or if I tried to cover it up, things would go badly.

Throwing co-workers or employees under the bus was very bad. It pretty much destroyed your rep. Weasels did not do well.

High expectations, high trust, big support, a ton of agency, and really high standards on deliverables and transparency.

From what I read here, a lot of folks would have difficulty in that environment. I liked it, but it could be stressful.
by chii | 2025-08-23 10:25:16+00:00
i also want believe the same, but i am increasingly disillusioned that there's a political process that is capable of reforming it - think about the fact that no one asked for these measures of censorship, but they keep creeping in, as though some vested interest has been pushing it through at every opportunity.

So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
by kristoff_it | 2025-08-23 10:26:10+00:00
> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.

Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it, and this kind of shaming says less about Zig than you'd think.

When I first joined the Zig project, Zig was still using the bootstrap compiler written in C++ that would not free memory (it took more than 4GB to compile the Zig compiler). Some people at the time were asking us to prioritize work on the package manager but Andrew rightfully wanted to prioritize rewriting the compiler instead. In hindsight this was the obviously right decision: a package manager implies that one can very easily add an order of magnitude more code to their project, stressing the performance of the compiler. If we had not prioritized core infrastructure over giving people what they wanted faster, today we would have people complaining that adding a single dependency to their project makes the build impossible to complete.

The Zig project has a huge scope and we are a small independent organization. This makes us extremely nimble and efficient, but it does mean that we need to do things in the order that makes the most sense for the project, not for what the public wants.

The fact that we develop in the open doesn't mean that the language is ready yet.

People that already have the required domain knowledge (and who have a tolerance for breaking changes) will have the opportunity to be early adopters if they wish to do so, others will have to wait for Zig to become more mature. And we do make this clear in releases and all forms of public communication.

We have gone a long way since the bootstrap compiler days, but we are still missing key infrastructure:

- we have a x86_64 custom backend but aarch64 is not complete yet - incremental compilation is showing that we can get instant rebuilds of large projects, but it has missing features and it doesn't work on all platforms yet - we need native fuzzing since AFL keeps regressing everytime a new version of LLVM comes out - for the longest time we haven't had a strong I/O story, now we're finally working on it

The time for paving the road for a new generation of programmers will come (it's in the ZSF mission statement btw), but first we need to finish the plumbing.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-23 10:26:11+00:00
They'd be better off installing a small data centre.

But yes - AGAs are ridiculous Veblen goods, literally coal-fired technology repurposed for modern fuels, with modern fuel costs.

They stopped making the always-on models in 2022. The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby. So Agas remain a status symbol for a decreasingly small segment of minor aristocrats who don't care about running costs. But the bulk of the market used to be the aspirational middle classes, and they've mostly moved on.

For smaller cooking jobs an air fryer cooks faster and better, and costs a tiny fraction to buy and run.
by ionlyusegoogle | 2025-08-23 10:26:14+00:00
I've recently been exploring Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index. Those are some heavy words, I know.

In short; It divides the world in a hexagon-grid using the Ubers H3.

I thought it would be fun, that this divided world, can be owned by someone. Yes, EACH hexagon. And there are billions... And I also want it to be FREE to play. This is how Hexaworld is brought to life.

About 20+ users signed up already which already give me a lot of feedback!

I'm having fun creating and adding a LOT of features, owning, selling, marketplace. But also some fun features like attacking someone else and try to conquer their land. You can defend yourself as well. Global Leaderboards.

Included a reward system that rewards users. When they find a famous landmark or hidden hexagon that I have manually added to the world map, they get free in-game credits.

As I said, Its free to play, you can "earn" in-game currency, by doing objectives and achievements. And to be completely fair upfront, you can also buy in-game currency for obvious reasons of course.

Like: "Monopoly VS Risk VS Age of Empires: But on a real world map."

It's mobile responsive (as in; mobile works best), and for android users; its a PWA so you can install it as an actual app! iPhone does not like PWA's I guess. Later on I will actually convert this to a "real" app.

Looking to find some honest feedback from you guys. And no, it is not crypto related, nor will it ever be.