MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nebula8804 | 2025-09-25 21:29:01+00:00
Musk and Gates have very different philosophies.

Gates seems more calm and collected having gone through the trauma of almost losing his empire.

Musk is a loose cannon having never suffered the consequences of his actions (ie. early Gates and Jobs) and so he sometimes gets things right but will eventually crash and burn having not had the fortune of failing and maturing early on in his career(he is now past the midpoint of his career with not enough buffer to recover).

They are both dangerous in their own ways.
by lovich | 2025-09-25 21:29:04+00:00
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.

Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.

The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
by sadiq | 2025-09-25 21:29:59+00:00
It might work. TESSERA's embeddings are at a 10 metre resolution, so it might depend on the size of the features you are looking for. If those features have distinct changes in colour or texture over time or they scatter radar in different ways compared with their surroundings then you should be able to discriminate them.

The easiest way to test is to try out the interactive notebook and drop some labels in known areas.
by m_fayer | 2025-09-25 21:30:30+00:00
It seems like the programming world is increasingly dividing into “LLMs for coding are at best marginally useful and produce huge tech debt” vs “LLMs are a game changing productivity boost”.

I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations.

But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves.

I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break).

But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-25 21:30:34+00:00
Because it's closed source so you have no idea of what is happening. You can then scan for other things, such as "hate speech", or "tax evasion" and then the slope becomes more slippery than a lube party on a vinyl sheet, and Kim Jong Un awaits you at the Ski Bar at the bottom.

Those passive surveillance systems have a chilling effect on democracy, just like mandatory ID on social media, and provide politicians a lever so convenient that you know that it will be used, especially in the EU.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-25 21:30:46+00:00
Windows convention for access keys (as opposed to keyboard shortcuts). E.g. you can choose &File > &Open by pressing Alt-F then O (as an alternative to Ctrl-O), with the requisite keys underlined when you press Alt; you can choose the dialog option labelled &Abort by pressing Alt-A, with the requisite key always underlined in the traditional Win32 toolkit. (By convention, OK and Cancel don’t get access keys, as you can always use Enter and Escape respectively instead.) Not every menu item gets a shortcut, but in a competently designed Windows UI every one gets an accelerator.

(This idea is nice but not without its problems. For those of us who regularly use more than one keyboard layout or even system locale, it doesn’t work all that well.)
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-25 21:31:00+00:00
The writing was on the wall once Linux was a thing. I did alot of solution design in that period. The only times there were good business cases in my world for not-x86 were scenarios where DBAs and some vertical software required Sun, and occasionally AIX or HPUX for license optimization or some weird mainframe finance scheme.

The cost structure was just bonkers. I replaced a big file server environment that was like $2M of Sun gear with like $600k of HP Proliant.
by robomc | 2025-09-25 21:31:20+00:00
I found out recently that I've been paying for Prime Video since 2020. I think I did legitimately sign up for it. That's not my complaint.

But it's fairly scummy how it doesn't seem to send you any email, the payments have a very vague generic coding like "AMZ2318971239", and the actual subscription management is super buried. I only noticed it, after years of using Amazon a fair bit, when I went deep into my account panes looking for something else.
by Lammy | 2025-09-25 21:31:22+00:00
This is notable because XYplorer is famous for being a modern 2020s application whose 32-bit version is still written in Visual Basic 6: https://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=VB6

And because it rules and I'm a happy paid lifetime license owner <3

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623387

Specifically w/r/t twinBASIC 64-bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42637089

Forum thread regarding 64-bit betas to release (very impressive to go from first beta to 28-dot-0 in two and a half months!) https://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?t=28739
by SequoiaHope | 2025-09-25 21:32:01+00:00
I often speak to people who say that no one would innovate without government-secured monopoly on information, and this is clearly false as open source works without this monopoly. As such it seems to me that people who make that claim don’t understand how innovation works.

Often I say that if we phased out patents and other IP restrictions, then investments would not stop but they would change from less frequent large investments to more frequent small investments. As long as designs can stay secret until release, there will always be first mover advantage and brand recognition. But you might get smaller investments to build out manufacturing for the next year, rather than bigger longer term investments. The flip side is that stagnant innovators who got lucky once will be subsumed by more agile competitors who can better deliver those innovations to market.

Thus investment and innovation wouldn’t stop - markets still ensure certain advantages for innovators - but the nature of investment and innovation wouldn’t shift towards more incremental moves and more diverse actors. A major upside to this is that those best suited to scale an existing nascent technology would be free to compete at doing so.

It should be noted that even die hard capitalists are against IP restrictions [1] as they are a massive government investment in the market. So proponents of IP restrictions must reconcile their arguments in favor of this government intervention with their potential interest in free markets.

[1] https://youtu.be/GZgLJkj6m0A
by hashim | 2025-09-25 21:32:41+00:00
So the problem is that you don't believe Palestinians are on their "own turf", because Israel "legally" won it from the villagers there in 1948 after having the British install them to it. Got it. Once again, the Palestinian homeland is exactly where the kibbutz (which is a military camp and outpost) was, mere miles from Gaza, and all of the people involved were actively standing members of the IDF (i.e. the occupying army akin to the Americans in Vietnam). You keep calling it a terrorist attack while appearing completely clueless that it's a largely meaningless political term. We considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist while he was locked up for 30 years, and for the UK at least he was only removed from that list in 2013.
by zahlman | 2025-09-25 21:32:51+00:00
I remember a claim that someone was trying to use an ML model to detect COVID by analyzing the sound of the patient coughing.

I couldn't for the life of me understand how this was supposed to work. If the coughing of COVID patients (as opposed to patients with other respiratory illnesses) actually sounds meaningfully different in a statistically meaningful way (and why did they suppose that it would? Phlegm is phlegm, surely), surely a human listener would have been able to figure it out easily.
by op00to | 2025-09-25 21:32:54+00:00
> makes you more independent from big tech

Citation requested. Big tech considers your IP address dishonorable, and blackholes your emails. How independent are you now when you can't email any providers that use blacklists?

> contributes to reducing the power of big tech

Again, citation requested. Big tech will just blackhole your emails and you'll only find out when your users complain.
by rjh29 | 2025-09-25 21:33:33+00:00
Revisionism? I was around then and I implemented plenty of sites in IE. It always had bugs that other browsers did not (and there were more than two engines back then). Maddening lack of support of features that other browsers had implemented, often requiring crazy workarounds. Transparent PNGs didn't even work! Not to mention all the proprietary crap like ActiveX.
by benatkin | 2025-09-25 21:33:36+00:00
You have the same lack of network support with cgroups containers if you configure them properly. It isn't as if it's connected and filtered out, but as though it's disconnected. You can have it configured in such a way that it has network support but that it's filtered out with iptables, but that does seem more dangerous, though in practice that isn't where the escapes are coming from. A network namespace can be left empty, without network interfaces, and a process made to use the empty namespace. That way there isn't any traffic flowing from an interface to be checked against iptables rules.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-25 21:33:49+00:00
> Refusing to distinguish between random Palestinians and Hamas members is literally the entire problem

Well, it is difficult to distinguish between the two when you’re hunting down terrorists who hide among civilians. But also, let’s not forget - the civilian population of Gaza VOTED for Hamas. In polls they still show support for Hamas even after October 7. There are videos of those civilians cheering in the streets while the naked bodies of raped / murdered women were paraded down the street by Hamas terrorists. I don’t think you can pretend “random Palestinians” are entirely innocent either.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-09-25 21:35:00+00:00
Apple has to take some of the blame from this, MacOS without Electron apps is a much less useful proposition. If they knew they were going to change this API in this release it would have made sense to reach out and offer a public way to Electron.

End of the day the needs of users running Electron apps outweighs whatever opinions the internal Apple team has about their APIs
by op00to | 2025-09-25 21:35:02+00:00
I was part of a team ran EMail services for a ~15,000 person campus of a ~80,000 person university in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a full-time job for a team of people to keep things running, up to date, control spam, etc. It was a minefield 25 years ago! Literal years before GMail was a thing.
by dcre | 2025-09-25 21:35:39+00:00
"We’ve also removed the duplicative meta-spaces (People, Favourites). Filters are the new foundation — more flexible, more future-proof, and built for growth."

As a heavy Element user for work, I have long hated this in Element X iOS and now I have the pleasure of hating it in Element web. Everyone at my job is mad about the remove of these "duplicative" metaspaces. Here's a GitHub issue about it: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/30849

I am a UI dev and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after using Element for nearly 5 years, it really does feel like the user experience only gets worse over time. It is really sort of amazing.
by jfengel | 2025-09-25 21:36:28+00:00
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.

Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).

Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
by XorNot | 2025-09-25 21:36:37+00:00
Most people love generic platitudes with no details though.

So when you say they "want smaller government" it's that they are literally agreeing with that statement verbatim rather then any plausible version of what that could be (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").

See Brexit for another national scale example of this: had anyone been forced to vote for a specific policy, it wouldn't have happened.
by aabajian | 2025-09-25 21:36:43+00:00
I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over.

Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes.

Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no.

Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say you have an AI that reads images primarily and writes pristine reports. The bottleneck will still be the time it takes for the radiologist to look at the images and validate the automated report. Today, radiologist read very quickly, with a private practice rads averaging maybe 60-100 studies per day (XRs, ultrasounds, MRIs, CTs, nuclear medicine studies, mammograms, etc). This is near the limit of what a human being can reasonably do. Yes, there will be slight gains at not having to dictate anything, but still having to validate everything takes nearly as much time.

Now, I'm sure there's a cavalier radiologist out htere who would just click "sign, sign, sign..." but you know there's a malpractice attorney just waiting for that lawsuit.
by keeda | 2025-09-25 21:36:58+00:00
> The problem is, there are very few if any other studies.

Not at all, the METR study just got a ton of attention. There are tons out there at much larger scales, almost all of them showing significant productivity boosts for various measures of "productivity".

If you stick to the standard of "Randomly controlled trials on real-world tasks" here are a few:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566 (4867 developers across 3 large companies including Microsoft, measuring closed PRs)

https://www.bis.org/publ/work1208.pdf (1219 programmers at a Chinese BigTech, measuring LoC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbDDYKRFjhk (from Stanford, not an RCT, but the largest scale with actual commits from 100K developers across 600+ companies, and tries to account for reworking AI output. Same guys behind the "ghost engineers" story.)

If you look beyond real-world tasks and consider things like standardized tasks, there are a few more:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11121676 (96 Google engineers, but same "enterprise grade" task rather than different tasks.)

https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/dfab4e9... (25 professional developers across 7 tasks at a Finnish technology consultancy.)

They all find productivity boosts in the 15 - 30% range -- with a ton of nuance, of course. If you look beyond these at things like open source commits, code reviews, developer surveys etc. you'll find even more evidence of positive impacts from AI.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-25 21:37:03+00:00
Nah, HP made bank on their superdome computers even though they had very few clients. People paid through the nose for those. I worked on IA-64 stuff in 2011, long after I thought it was dead :D.

The real thing that killed the division is Oracle announcing that they would no longer support IA-64. It just so happened that like 90% of the clients using Itanium were using it for oracle DBs.

But by that point HP was already trying to get people to transition to more traditional x86 servers that they were selling.
by keybored | 2025-09-25 21:37:06+00:00
> IMO there's no point having a clean history of commits within a PR. With rare exceptions, if you have a PR with a clean history of commits and each commit compiles and passes the tests... they should be separate PRs! If it isn't clean then it should be squashed.

A perfect illustration of a backwards mindset. If this made sense then the standard or least common denominator PR tool would work better with many small PRs, which here also means they must be able to depend on each other. (separate PRs!!!) So is it?

> Also I really really wish GitHub had proper support for stacked PRs.

No. It doesn’t even support it.

So how does this make sense? This culture of people wanting “one PR” for each change, and then standard PR tool that everyone knows of doesn’t even support it? What’s the allegiance even to, here? Phabricator or whatever the “stacked” tools are?

It’s impressive that Git forge culture has managed to obfuscate the actual units of change so much that heavyweight PRs have become the obvious—they should be separate PRs!—unit of change... when they don’t even support one-change-then-another-one.
by runako | 2025-09-25 21:37:29+00:00
> you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare

This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits. (Although it would help offset costs to have a lower-risk pool of insureds come into the program, in addition to the other societal benefits.)

> earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest

Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.

> imputed rent on the $400,000 house

They live in the house, which lowers their monthly expenses to a level where they can pay them using Social Security and the interest from their savings.

Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years. And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-25 21:37:43+00:00
> Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing.

Then why don't we use the non-hypothetical numbers? More than 10% of retirees are millionaires and the $1000+ in payments is actually $2000+ on average and even more for the people who made enough money to be millionaires.
Show HN: Jamfound – Democratizing Music Collaboration Through Voting
by Fra_MadChem | 2025-09-25 21:38:59+00:00
As a musician, I was frustrated by online collaboration tools that either had no curation (everything gets mixed together) or were too restrictive (only the creator decides).

So I built Jamfound: a democratic music collaboration platform where the community decides what sounds good.

Here's how it works: 1. Someone uploads a base track (max 30 seconds, WAV) 2. Musicians contribute stems (bass, drums, vocals, etc.) 3. The community votes on their favorite contributions 4. The winning stems are automatically mixed into the final track

It's like a musical version of Reddit's upvoting system, but for audio.

Built with Flask + React, supports high-quality WAV files, includes BPM detection and automatic mixing.

Try it: https://jamfound.com Code: https://github.com/Jamfound/Jamfound

The voting system prevents the chaos of endless revisions while keeping the collaborative spirit alive.
by browningstreet | 2025-09-25 21:39:49+00:00
I get it -- I go through the same calculus every year. I also have the associated credit card, and.. well.. it all ends up paying for itself in the end.

I'll move to a secondary tier Amazon market where boring retail isn't quite as compromised as the bay area and the equation will probably change for me, but I'm also likely to end up in a rural mountain area and it might be a lifeline for me.

I haven't had issues with Alibaba stuff, and there have been just enough instances where Amazon delivered where local or alts couldn't. Like the light bulbs in my bathroom.. Ace Hardware doesn't stock my item, I couldn't order them elsewhere, but Amazon connected me to a vendor who fulfilled in about 2 weeks. And yes, I went without light in my bathroom for 2 weeks and was looking the whole time.
by JambalayaJimbo | 2025-09-25 21:39:51+00:00
Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? It's the cognitive load that I find difficult to believe about these numbers, not the

At one point I was also working crazy hours at a fast food shop. But that was only possible because I could "zone out" and just pour the customer's coffee and make sandwiches. Writing code for that long would have been impossible.
by bogdan-foo | 2025-09-25 21:40:27+00:00
"Whenever it looked like the networking issue was happening, a script automatically tore down the machine and spun up a new one with a new IP. If this really wasn’t just a me problem I’d be curious to hear what everyone else near the top of the leaderboard was doing to circumvent this."

I remembered that I have a free VPN subscription and put it to good use. When requests started to fail, a script changed my IP to another random country.

As for the solution, I used an approach similar to primal-dual optimization + some manual tweaks that made sure it capitalized when the random gods provided. To make sure I'm close to the optimal, I saved the streams and run an offline solver.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-25 21:40:34+00:00
You're right - such association with colour is not limited to Americans. I almost forgot being told about the slaves in the Gaza strip.

It turns out that Gazans call black-skinned Gazans "slaves". I've met black-skinned Bedouins but not black-skinned Gazans, and I don't know if the black-skinned Gazans are also Bedouins. I actually didn't know the word for slave in Arabic, but it was similar enough to the word in Hebrew that I was able to figure it out. I'd later have it confirmed. Not only do they called the black-skinned Gazans "slaves", they treat them as such as well. No lack of colour-motivated racism in the Gaza strip. Yes, I speak with Gazans in Arabic, and before October 7th I'd have conversations with them face to face.

As for Israeli racism - I think that we're the only country in the world who went out to help dark-skinned people immigrate en masse. Israel has a large Ethiopean community. I've had Ethiopean commanders in the army, and I work with quite a few Ethiopeans. I don't feel that they treat me in any unusual way, nor do I treat them in any unusual way.
by Nvorzula | 2025-09-25 21:41:03+00:00
I'll throw in my own niche usecase for thermoelectric - deep sky imaging.

I do astrophotography as a hobby (taking pictures of galaxies/nebulae/etc). This involves doing long, multi-minute, exposures repeatedly all night long. The heat generated from such long exposures produces what are called "hot pixels" - noise generated by heat disrupting the electronics.

To combat this, dedicated deep sky imaging cameras run a thermoelectric cooler to bring the sensor to sub-zero temperatures. These sensors tend to be about 23.5×15.7mm in size.

Niche, sure. But I saw an opportunity to bring up an aspect of my own life where I sincerely do not think even the smallest compressors would be practical. Plus, the lack of moving parts in thermoelectric is very attractive.