MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alixanderwang | 2025-08-16 12:55:02+00:00
> I’m often alone on this. Engineers look at complex systems with many interesting parts and think “wow, a lot of system design is happening here!” In fact, a complex system usually reflects an absence of good design.

For any job-hunters, it's important you forget this during interviews.

In the past I've made the mistake of trying to convey this in system design interviews.

Some hypothetical startup app

> Interviewer: "Well what about backpressure?"

>"That's not really worth considering for this amount of QPS"

> Interviewer: "Why wouldn't you use a queue here instead of a cron job?"

> "I don't think it's necessary for what this app is, but here's the tradeoffs."

> Interviewer: "How would you choose between sql and nosql db?"

> "Doesn't matter much. Whatever the team has most expertise in"

These are not the answers they're looking for. You want to fill the whiteboard with boxes and arrows until it looks like you've got Kubernetes managing your Kubernetes.
by immibis | 2025-08-16 12:55:52+00:00
Dissenters nonetheless get treated by the same system that treats trolls and haters, by the people they're dissenting from. If there's a system that site moderators can use to globally block trolls and haters, they also use it to block their dissenters. Every time. If there's a system where you can stop me replying to you, it'll get used by people selling snake oil to block people from replying saying "hey this is actually snake oil". Every time.
by sitkack | 2025-08-16 12:55:56+00:00
They don't talk about pollution, some pollution will drop off while coagulating microplastics can be much higher. The whole ocean is basically a fractionating column. Of course they are going to want to dump the salt in the bottom to complete the mass transfer loop of the upwelling water. This is going to mess up the whole thing.

Humans should be operating in closed water systems. We would have to do that anywhere else we go, we should be turning Earth into well run spaceship.
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-08-16 12:56:14+00:00
I use KDE every day. It's totally fair if people notice that stuff; I have many friends who do, but not everyone does (like me). I care more about functionality. In which case KDE is just about fine.

I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?
by rkomorn | 2025-08-16 12:57:04+00:00
Edit: I just realized I was totally thinking about this in the desktop/laptop context and not at all that of TFA.

I feel like you should love something like https://projectbluefin.io/ then?

I tried it a few months ago. It had some rough edges that made me move away (to Debian and then most recently NixOS), but I might swing back the way of Bluefin at some point.
by the-anarchist | 2025-08-16 12:57:20+00:00
For 2025 they have received...

> - 2025: $30,665.41

Which translates to roughly $2,500 per month.

> We are currently spending $53.53/month on our services.

... and now they ask for ...

> we need $5,800/month in recurring donations to fund full-time Accrescent development

Sorry, but this doesn't make much sense considering the overall development of the app store.

I've been keeping an eye on it for some time now and for the past two years or so it didn't really change much. They catalog consists of 32 apps, out of which 3 are icons, 2 are the same app in different versions, 2 are one app and one companion app for it, and most of the rest are odd picks considering the far more popular alternatives on other app stores.

The app store itself has remained stagnant for a long time, without introducing any new features (screenshots of the apps? App descriptions? Ratings? Comments? Version history? Nothing). As a matter of fact, if you look at the releases changelogs, you will see that development is at its bare minimum: https://github.com/accrescent/accrescent/releases

I'm sorry to be negative here, but this OSS project does not appear to be the developer's main focus and this blog post makes it sound even more like an easy cash-grab. After reading through the post I am in fact more willing to drop the app altogether, rather than to donate for them to reach their goal of over $5k a month.

There are OSS projects where plenty more people are putting in significantly more work and that do not even come close to $5k per month in donations. This seems vastly out of touch.
by Fabricio20 | 2025-08-16 12:57:26+00:00
I will be honest since im with parent here, it took me literally 15m to figure everything out when I reinstalled this week. I just do all the nos on oob, once I get to desktop I uninstall OneDrive (via control panel, etc..), go to settings, activate windows -> disable stuff that I dont want -> customize start menu to my liking (settings button near power button, left-aligned, etc..) -> open start menu and right click uninstall all the apps (whatsapp, netflix, outlook, etc..) -> then go to explorer and change the defaults to my preferences and lastly open gpedit and disable all the AI and cloud search stuff under administrative templates (they are all there and have clean descriptions!!).
by elros | 2025-08-16 12:57:59+00:00
> I’ve made my decisions, leave me alone!

Perhaps you and GP aren't really the target market for their products. Part of why, after many years of Slackware and Arch Linux on desktops I assembled myself, compiling kernel modules, etc etc, I decided to pay Apple for the past decade is exactly because I don't want to make these decisions.

Frankly I pay Apple for the following things, in order or descending importance to me:

1) Decisions / sensible defaults / ecosystem / walled garden;

2) MagSafe cable so I don't trip on cords and/or damage my machines;

3) The subjective feeling that their corporate interests are more aligned with mine than other players in the market, viz. privacy etc.;

4) Pixel density;

5) Well-built aluminum bodies;

6) Large trackpads;

To be fair, I'm not saying the prompting for things I don't want (e.g. I don't consume any media services or exercise stuff) isn't annoying, but it seems to only happen once I switch devices every few years. It's been useful for me to discover services I wouldn't know about otherwise, which I now am a customer of, such as iCloud.
by mastry | 2025-08-16 12:58:18+00:00
Here are some. I’m not saying these are all completely useless, but all of them should have taken a back seat to sum types.

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...
by aembleton | 2025-08-16 12:58:58+00:00
Plenty of wooden toothbrushes already available. All use plastic bristles though: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=wooden+toothbrush

Here you can buy toothbrushes with horse hair bristles and silk dental floss in a glass jar: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gaia-Guy-Eco-Friendly-Biodegradable...
by gtsnexp | 2025-08-16 12:58:58+00:00
Not full-time. I mostly switched around school, weekends, and library trips. I hadn’t really stopped to ask what I “got” from it until your question—so thanks for this! At the time it wasn’t about extracting any value; it was the adventure of exploration and the hope of recovering something “lost.” I didn’t find anything hidden. In hindsight, the real payoff was realizing there isn’t a secret doctrine behind it all: what we call “occult philosophy” looks like early natural philosophy—people trying to model nature with the tools and knowledge they had. Same impulse as good science today, just different instruments and corpus.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-16 12:59:02+00:00
Not the parent, but last year I moved on to Win11 on a new laptop.

It took... about a week at worst, I think.

Just run the bundled distribution to look how it goes, note the things you need to throw out, do a clean install (see my other comment in this thread), apply the tweaks.

The longest one was to disable the effing F23 (aka Copilot) key, PowerToys weren't helping so I used the trusted SharpKeys, which I already use for 10+ years to remap idiotic PrtSc to ContextMenu on ThinkPads.

Sure, I'm not your average computer illiterate Joe, but if we are talking about a comparison with a typical *nix distribution... like in a sibling comment there is "Not everyone knows how to do that" about tweaking, but the same applies to *nix too.
by jackdecker | 2025-08-16 12:59:46+00:00
I was thinking the same thing - Went back and re-read it though, and I think it’s more that the author wrote a first draft and then had AI to help spice some stuff up. He either:

1. Used AI to help and doesn’t care if it sounds a little AI generated / actually likes it 2. Didn’t use AI but reads enough AI slop that his writing style is directly influenced by it (scary) 3. Used AI but doesn’t use AI enough to immediately recognize when language sounds like it was generated by ChatGPT and didn’t bother correcting (this is my guess)

There’s a few times I got tripped up because it went from pretty human writing to “holy shit shit that’s ChatGPT I’m going to stop reading,” yet the author would save it with human writing right after.

This is kind of a ramble, but it actually was one of those pieces of writing that I felt was genuine and improved by some of the ChatGPT language rather than just clickbait garbage - I could tell the author was just trying to make it worthwhile and interesting to read, and I honestly really enjoyed it.
by hereme888 | 2025-08-16 12:59:56+00:00
The other day my Windows locked behind an advertisement for Microsoft's backup services, trying to trick me into surrendering all my private data to their servers.

They even added a typical dark pattern that on clicking "No" another "But... We recommend it, are you sure?" appeared.

What a disgrace to push such an ad on people's computers. This abusive behavior is their company culture.
by jmpman | 2025-08-16 13:00:32+00:00
I already have the option to pay for more HP on my Tesla model 3. Yes it’s not a subscription, but the capability already exists. It’s a software unlock. I’d prefer if I had the option to pay my the month. My wife already thinks the Model 3 accelerates too fast, but I’d want to try it for a month. No way is she going to support $2k, but she won’t notice $100 for a month.
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-16 13:00:38+00:00
>But that's obviously not true, unless you're implying that any system that reproduces human behavior is necessarily conscious.

That could certainly be the case yes. You don't understand consciousness nor how the brain works. You don't understand how LLMs predict a certain text, so what's the point in asserting otherwise ?

>Yes, but your bird analogy fails to capture the logical fallacy that mine is highlighting. Plane wing design was an iterative process optimized for what best achieves lift, thus, a plane and a bird share similarities in wing shape in order to fly, however planes didn't develop feathers because a plane is not an animal and was simply optimized for lift without needing all the other biological and homeostatic functions that feathers facilitate. LLM inference is a process, not an entity, LLMs have no bodies nor any temporal identity, the concept of consciousness is totally meaningless and out of place in such a system.

It's not a fallacy because no-one is saying LLMs are humans. He/She is saying that we give machines the goal of predicting human text. For any half decent accuracy, modelling human behaviour is a necessity. God knows what else.

>LLMs have no bodies nor any temporal identity

I wouldn't be so sure about the latter but So what ? You can feel tired even after a full sleep, feel hungry soon after a large meal or feel a great deal of pain even when there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. And you know what ? Even the reverse happens - No pain when things are wrong with your body, wide awake even when you need sleep badly, full when you badly need to eat.

Consciousness without a body or hunger in a machine that does not need to eat is very possible. You just need to replicate enough of the sort of internal mechanisms that cause such feelings.

Go to the API and select GPT-5 with medium thinking. Now ask it to do any random 15 digit multiplication you can think of. Now watch it get it right.

Do you people not seriously understand what it is that LLMs do ? What the training process incentivizes ?

GPT-5 thinking figured out the algorithm for multiplication just so it could predict that kind of text right. Don't you understand the significance of that ?

These models try to figure out and replicate the internal processes that produce the text they are tasked with predicting.

Do you have any idea what that might mean when 'that kind of text' is all the things humans have written ?
by midnitewarrior | 2025-08-16 13:00:50+00:00
This has nothing to do with the user, read the post and pay attention to the wording.

The significance here is that this isn't being done for the benefit of the user, this is about model welfare. Anthropic is acknowledging the possibility of suffering, and harm that continuing that conversation could have on the model, as if it were potentially self-care and capable of feelings.

The fact that the LLMs are able to acknowledge stress under certain topics and has the agency that, if given a choice, they would prefer to reduce the stress by ending the conversation. The model has a preference and acts upon it.

Anthropic is acknowledging the idea that they might create something that is self-aware, and that it's suffering can be real, and we may not recognize the point that the model has achieved this, so it's building in the safeguards now so any future emergent self-aware LLM needn't suffer.
by vintermann | 2025-08-16 13:01:08+00:00
That feature was a "you're kidding!" moment for me when I first played that game. Ok, the first person graphics weren't exactly Doom, but that they were there at all was crazy. First person shooters were a pretty new genre when the game came out! They even were "better" than Doom in some ways, with many monsters having ridiculous graphics filters.
by ccppurcell | 2025-08-16 13:01:10+00:00
My partner uses Windows and I occasionally provide my amateurish tech support. One thing not mentioned in this article is the right click situation. I can't really describe what's wrong because I've not used Windows regularly in ten years. All I know is it is very confusing and basic tasks are hidden behind an extra click. I'm sure this is another mcrib situation but I wanted to mention it. There's probably a way to change it. But there are so many things like this and they usually come up when I'm trying to solve some other problem and don't have time to get distracted finding the setting. Is it so hard to make basic functionality the default and let users add on some of these features if they want to.
by csr86 | 2025-08-16 13:01:16+00:00
For me best would be "right room(and tool) for the right job". If I want to program alone, I focus a lot better at home. Running "social_program.exe" in the background in my brain eats a lot of focus in office. Just being aware that there are others nearby is enough.

However, sometimes I need to talk, design or pair-program. For that I enjoy the office.
by EdwardCoffin | 2025-08-16 13:01:28+00:00
It's unmentioned in the article, but Trevor Blackwell's PhD thesis, Applications of Randomness in System Performance Measurement [1] was advocating this in 1998:

This thesis presents and analyzes a simple principle for building systems: that there should be a random component in all arbitrary decisions. If no randomness is used, system performance can vary widely and unpredictably due to small changes in the system workload or configuration. This makes measurements hard to reproduce and less meaningful as predictors of performance that could be expected in similar situations.

[1] https://tlb.org/docs/thesis.pdf
by metaltyphoon | 2025-08-16 13:01:49+00:00
Anyone that started computing using DOS is very aware of terminals.

> I find it uncommon to see anyone who chooses to use a terminal regularly using the MacOS default terminal

If you are going to say that about windows the same could be said about macOS. In fact, I only know of one mac user within my circle that has used the non default terminal.

Anecdotally, at day job, every terminal I see on windows is riced out. The Windows terminal app video from MS probably helped with that lol.
by Jach | 2025-08-16 13:02:12+00:00
I'm not sure if the misunderstanding is on my end or yours, but I don't see how you get "I won't use them" from my comment mentioning I have over 130 games on GOG alone. I just added 3 more. I've even played some because sometimes they give away a game I don't already have and wanted to play! But it's not a sustainable practice, it's not particularly healthy for the ecosystem, that's a problem. (Amazon's free Prime Gaming giveaways give the games on a mix of GOG, Amazon directly, Epic, or Legacy Games. I have no idea how much revenue GOG gets from the deal but I'd bet it's > $0 and it would probably hurt to suddenly go away.)

Valve doesn't feel the need to shovel free games at me to get me to use their services, they're right not to do so because their services are still the best and I'm not begrudgingly using them but happily using them. And again, especially for Linux, where they've given a great deal back to making it a viable gaming platform. For launchers, I use Lutris and Heroic to manage my non-Steam games from Epic, GOG, Amazon directly, Humble Bundle, and Itch.io. I tend to configure these to use the GE fork of proton, again something that wouldn't be where it is without Valve.
by andai | 2025-08-16 13:02:35+00:00
Reposting the article so I can read it in a normal font:

Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer.

Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood, and even the most prominent experts in the field failed miserably again and again to modulate the expectations (with incredible errors on both sides: of reducing or magnifying what was near to come), it is hard to tell what will come next. But even before the Transformer architecture, we were seeing incredible progress for many years, and so far there is no clear sign that the future will not hold more. After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures.

However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful and independent of humans, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones. Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots. Their pattern matching wants that previous technologies booms created more business opportunities, so investors are polarized to think the same will happen with AI. But this is not the only possible outcome.

We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence: either AI will be eventually a commodity, or the governments would do something, in such an odd economic setup (a setup where a single industry completely dominates all the others).

The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that, so far, and even if the economic forecasts are cloudy, wars are destabilizing the world, the AI timings are hard to guess, regardless of all that stocks continue to go up. But stocks are insignificant in the vast perspective of human history, and even systems that lasted a lot more than our current institutions eventually were eradicated by fundamental changes in the society and in the human knowledge. AI could be such a change.
by the8472 | 2025-08-16 13:02:55+00:00
> In a way it's not a fair comparison,

Indeed. And the comparison is unnecessarily unfair.

You're comparing the dynamic range of a single exposure on a camera vs. the adaptive dynamic range in multiple environments for human eyes. Cameras do have comparable features: adjustable exposure times and apertures. Additionally cameras can also sense IR, which might be useful for driving in the dark.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-16 13:04:43+00:00
Also you can do maintenance/repairs yourself for the cost of parts, self-insure, and, obviously, clean it yourself. For EVs and hybrids, you can provide the fuel yourself (solar). The manufacturer intentionally making things like repairs difficult would be the only reason you "need" to pay for regular services, though that also doesn't really fit into a subscription model either since it's going to depend on how much you've driven.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-08-16 13:04:43+00:00
> so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up

Even without any of the reasons you mentioned I shouldn’t have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, the flight attendant should.

I’d pay 50% more for any flight where it’s the flight attendant’s job to make people and their kids shut the hell up.

Wouldn’t you?
by al_borland | 2025-08-16 13:05:01+00:00
It doesn’t even take a $500/year credit card. That’s what I’m saying. That sets a higher bar. A couple going on 1 trip isn’t going to get an expensive credit card to get into lounge one time. People also need to qualify for that card, which is another hurdle.

I have a card that’s only $50/year that gets me into some lounges (last I looked I think some of that access is going away). And even less than that are the ones where you can just pay your way in one-time, no membership of any kind needed.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-16 13:05:04+00:00
You make a great point - I am still a Mac user because their ecosystem is thoughtful and cohesive and their computers have lasted forever.

I guess I just wish they weren’t so… pushy. As a consumer, I get nudged by all kinds of companies every day, so I get a little… overstimulated (?) by it all, and sometimes just want to use it the way that I want to use the device.

I’m also the guy that has turned off notifications for almost every phone app, because it feels invasive of my brain space… I want to decide when I will use an app and when I won’t.
by mastry | 2025-08-16 13:05:05+00:00
Yes, very clunky. One of the big issues with this approach is that switch expressions still require a default branch because there’s no way in C# to express a completely closed set. This makes future changes to the set (sum type) hazardous.

They continue to fiddle with design approaches to solve this. See https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2025...
by yoz-y | 2025-08-16 13:05:36+00:00
That said, the complaint is coming back. Namely because most new movies use an incredible amount of CGI and due to the time constraints the quality suffers.

As such, CGI is once again becoming a negative label.

I don’t know if there is an AI equivalent of this. Maybe the fact that as models seem to move away from a big generalist model at launch, towards a multitude of smaller expert models (but retaining the branding, aka GPT-4), the quality goes down.