MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by churchill | 2025-09-06 07:05:54+00:00
I'll need a source for that claim since it sounds blatantly made up. Aggregate/gravel costs $10/t., So, to get enough money for a snack, an addict would need to do an ungodly amount of work, digging up large stretches of highway and breaking it up hundreds of meters, or even a few kilometers.

The cost-to-benefit ratio just breaks down. You spend more calories making just $10. That's why vandals go for catalytic converters, copper, and aluminum. These are expensive metals that have an attractive labor-to-payoff ratio. Gravel is abundant in the countryside and no matter how poor or addicted a person is, the labor-to-payoff ratio makes no sense.
by ownagefool | 2025-09-06 07:06:19+00:00
Forget docker for a second.

Suddenly you're in a team with 2-3 people and one of them likes to git push broken code and walk-off.

Okay, lets make this less about working with a jack-ass, same setup, but each 5 minutes of downtime cost you millions of dollars. One of your pushes work locally but don't work on the server.

The point of a more structed / complex CI/CD process is to eliminate failures. As the stakes become higher, and the stack becomes more complex, the need for the automation grows.

Docker is just a single part of that automation that makes other things / possible / lowers specific class of failures.
by csomar | 2025-09-06 07:06:35+00:00
Think about it this way: You have a middle-man between the producer (builder, ie: home builder) and buyer (ie: someone who wants to buy the house). Now this middle-man might be providing a "real service" (or not, ie: capture) and now he is replaced by AI or a combination of.

There is no real "loss" here. The transaction between the buyer and the seller still happens. The middle-man has to figure out a different way to earn a living by providing a different service that AI can't provide. There will always be a buyer and a seller if the product is something you want to buy.

Most of the economy is made up by middle-man trying to offer a "service" or capture value in-between. Getting rid of them is not going to "collapse" the economy. Some people will be displaced but I am not sure why the value producers or acquirers will really care.
by metalman | 2025-09-06 07:06:55+00:00
Age verification is only one, of a growing list of fuckeries that does/can not work, at scale, without huge unknown fundamental changes to societal norms and practices. Thinking through to the end games of implimenting any of these new types of oversight leads to grim scenarios and outcomes for indivuals. Governments beurocracies are panting in antisipation of new powers and the many ways to exploit the nessesary (now) new contracts to be issued to new companies that will be "needed" to perform these (new) tasks that are outside of the governments expertise. Not just tax, not just fuckery, but privitisation of taxation and fuckery in.a way that gives a private entity all kinds of rights, and burdens people with new responsibilties. This pattern of seperating rights and responsibilities is the hallmark of the whole public private partnerships that results from the weaponisation of "saftey" The other thing that is standard is to ensure that there are no performance targets or reviews ever allowed to be included in any of these "saftey" initiatives, along with a complete elimination of marking the baseline conditions, so that future reviews, are impossible. The other two parallel things happening are moves to refuse cash/debit payments and push services including government, totaly online, for which there can be no legaly implimentable end game, that does not include providing free internet, devices, and training(in home), with all of the updating and maintenance, as there is no end run around the things that are legaly public accessable in a democracy, like documents.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-06 07:08:28+00:00
At least HVAC systems have a mostly standard control system and thermostats are easy to swap out. If a thermostat goes out of support and looses functionality, you do not need to replace the entire HVAC system; only the relatively cheap thermostat.

I'm contrast, while it is often possible to replace an infotainment system, the replacement needs to have been designed for a fairly specific set of cars, and actually installing it requires paying a mechanic for most people.
by pendenthistory | 2025-09-06 07:09:45+00:00
Laws that the EU passed in order to fine big tech one could argue. Just saying, you think Trump (and later Vance) will stand idly by? EU is a shell of its former self economically, there's not much we can do besides cozying up to an actual dictatorship (China) who literally shot thousands of students, turned them into pulp using tanks and flushed them down the drain. I know we all hate Trump, but the US is the better ally here still.
by gitaarik | 2025-09-06 07:09:49+00:00
From what I quickly gather, these are the things Google did that are against the EU anti-trust rules:

- Companies advertising through Google were not allowed to collaborate with other advertising companies under Google's contract. - Google runs an ad exchange (AdX) where advertisers and advertising spaces can connect, and Google didn't share platform's data with other members, giving them an unfair market advantage. - They also manipulated the way deals were made on the platform to their advantage.

To me it sounds just wrong anyway that Google runs this platform where companies compete with each other but also Google itself, so they'll always have more control.

I think it's a good idea having these anti trust rules, because otherwise you'll eventually get a a gigantic monopoly economy, and I just think that's not a good idea.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-06 07:09:51+00:00
A Nest E thermostat and a video doorbell came with the house.

Already replaced the doorbell with a Eufy, but I'll ride the thermostat into the ground, which might be around 6 years at this rate.

Another hurdle is that the Nest thermostat is tied into the local electricity co-op's peak-time usage reduction rebate program. They currently only support by Google (Nest), ecobee, Amazon, and Honeywell.
by daitangio | 2025-09-06 07:09:57+00:00
I do not know: the lack of proper docker compose support it is a problem for me. About security: gVistor adoption failure in Google is a proof that containerization cannot be enforced easily and container will always be less secure than a VM.

If you want proper security go to firecracker [^1]. Podman is the "RedHat/IBM docker-way" but I see very little benefit overall; never less if it works for you great and go with it!

[^1]: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io
by exDM69 | 2025-09-06 07:10:24+00:00
Has anyone got suggestions for blur algorithms suitable for compute shaders? The usual Kawase blur (described in the article) uses bilinear sampling of textures.

You can, of course, implement the algorithm as is on a compute shader with texture sampling.

But I have a situation where the inputs and outputs should be in shared memory. I'm trying to avoid writing the results out to off-chip DRAM, which would be necessary to be able to use texture sampling.

I spent some time looking into a way of doing an efficient compute shader blur using warp/wave/subgroup intrinsics to downsample the image and then do some kind of gaussian-esque weighted average. The hard part here is that the Kawase blur samples the input at "odd" locations but warp intrinsics are limited to "even" locations if that makes sense.

I would appreciate if anyone knows any prior art in this department.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 07:10:37+00:00
I generally downvote jokes, even the clever ones, because I don't come here for that (reddit is generally more fun for that; even though many are low effort, there are many that are just so clever), and I'm mainly interested in thoughtful prose and discussion. (Which sometimes is hard to come by here, too, but jokes are obviously not it.)

Probably what's happened is you ended up with a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of downvotes. I would expect HN's software to downrank "controversial" posts, since those are likely to lead to flamewars. So even if you see +30 on your comment, the overall tallies might be something along the lines of +100 -70.
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-06 07:10:56+00:00
Shoplifting may be a more antisocial activity. But stealing charger cables for scrap metal is obviously not - you need tools to cut them, you need to carry a relatively heavy cable to a place that will take it, you need to strip the insulation off of it. This is a very deliberate, tedious operation - a type of work, that only makes sense if you are relatively desperate for money.
by chneu | 2025-09-06 07:10:56+00:00
the whole "there are easier ways to do things so i never develop a skillset" is a big problem nowadays, imo. There are always easier ways to do stuff but in the long run they aren't the better way to do something because you wind up learning a system instead of how to do something.

i'll use my roommate as an example. Dude uses a knife sharpener system but can't actually sharpen a knife with a stone. The second his system doesn't work he can't actually sharpen a knife. All he knows is how to use the system. I see this in a lot of people nowadays. They know how to follow some instructions but the connections to why are never made.

As a society our basic skillsets are extremely atrophied because capitalism has turned everything into a pay-to-save-time system, or something.
by didibus | 2025-09-06 07:13:48+00:00
> so the anti-vibe-coding people feel like they need to claim that development speed has no impact at all

Strange, I'd been more of the impression that this is an argument from pro vibe-coders. As more data comes in, the "productivity increases" of AI are not showing up as expected. So as people question, how come things are not getting done faster even though you say you are 10x faster at coding? The vibe-coders answer by saying that coding isn't the bottleneck, as opposed to capitulating and saying that maybe they're not that much faster at coding after-all.
by globular-toast | 2025-09-06 07:14:03+00:00
Your handwriting skills are due to lack of practice. You weren't born typing at 121wpm.

I prefer typing for anything longer than a few words. But I can't type a picture (despite things like Mermaid and PlantUML) being useful.

I make extensive use of paper (and whiteboards if I'm sharing) for making pictures, mostly graph-like things such as flow diagrams, sequences, ERD etc. I feel somewhat "disabled" if I'm forced to just screen technology to do it (although Excalidraw is pretty good).
by a2128 | 2025-09-06 07:15:21+00:00
What happens sometimes is they get trafficked outside of the country, then they start sending messages to the original owner trying to manipulate them in various ways to remove the activation lock. Including lying that it's necessary to wipe the sensitive photos off the phone, lying that they're poor and got scammed by a seller who sold them a stolen phone, and sometimes harassing the owner with really graphic texts cursing their family members or threatening their lives until the phone is unlocked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/iphone-theft-sto...

It's not like the users are really losing anything by wiping and removing activation lock, the phone is already stolen, so it often works
by WalterBright | 2025-09-06 07:16:42+00:00
Friedman has a different take on this from "Monetary History of the United States". There was a severe contraction in 1937-38. 1939 saw a huge influx of gold from foreign arms purchases, which finally took the country out of the Depression. See the chart on page 530. 1936 was a false dawn.

"It is a measure of the severity of the preceding contraction that, despite such sharp rises, money income was 17 per cent lower in 1937 than at the preceding peak eight years earlier and real income was only 3 per cent higher. Since population had grown nearly 6 per cent in the interim, per capita output was actually lower at the cyclical peak in 1937 than at the preceding cyclical peak. There are only two earlier examples in the recorded annual figures, 1895 and 1910, when per capita output was less than it was at the preceding cyclical peaks in 1892 and 1907, respectively. Furthermore, the contraction that followed the 1937 peak, though not especially long, was unusually deep and proceeded at an extremely rapid rate, the only occasion in our record when one deep depression followed immediately on the heels of another." pg 493
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-06 07:17:47+00:00
> According to the article, metal prices are now artificially high, so this sort of crime is more attractive.

Yep. Is partially why I don't live in Austin anymore, because the police there are actively underfunded, short by ~250, and the police left do have really don't care about reducing violent crime and DGAF about property crime.

> I’m worried about what happens if we don’t get another FDR (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series).

The opposite is a Trump and becoming more like Mexico or Brazil where corruption is endemic, the masses in favelas, the government DGAF about ordinary people because it's all about enriching the already rich, and the middle class live in fortresses and are constantly worried about going out in public to be robbed by roving gangs.
by mikemcquaid | 2025-09-06 07:17:55+00:00
As a Scottish former founder with a bunch of founder mates outside the US:

> Why does a company want to be a US company

A big part of this is “they want investment from US VCs which demand it”.

Stripe Atlas and co. have made it easier and more popular than ever to have a US entity and e.g. Scottish entity and hire your engineering staff in the latter.

Sounds like this may or may not be hit by this tax but it’d still be way cheaper to pay it given how much cheaper devs are over here.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-09-06 07:18:30+00:00
> a module system which is still better than Haskell

The module system though powerful is quite awkward and verbose. I personally prefer adhoc polymorphism (class/instance in Haskell, trait/implementation in Rust). That is really missed in OCaml and is likely to be missing for the next few years even though there have been (stalled) efforts like Modular implicits in the past.

Haskell and Scala seem to have many features lacking in OCaml. Some of those features are excessive I'll admit and OCaml can argue that it is more minimalistic (which is also useful).

Yes, effects are definitely a cutting edge feature in OCaml. But they are untyped which is a big limitation I would say.

TL;DR -- OCaml does many things well. It's a good language. My main point is that the language needs to speed up its pace of evolution. OCaml's lunch is being eaten up by lower level and performance oriented languages like Rust. At the higher level it is being squeezed by Lean, Haskell, Fstar etc.
by quitit | 2025-09-06 07:20:16+00:00
That’s why more rail needs to be built. I.e a robust network - I find I’m repeating myself.

Side lanes are also a feature of these networks, and exist not just to overtake freight or behind schedule trains, but also enable different levels of service, such as express trains versus “all stops” style services.

The optics of this thread are telling.
by LMYahooTFY | 2025-09-06 07:22:35+00:00
The law was not broken by "super rich people".

It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all and have managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws.

They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI.

This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.
by hdjrudni | 2025-09-06 07:23:02+00:00
> I bet Alex won't have a dropdown to switch to Claude Sonnet for very long.

> We plan to continue service for existing users, but will stop new downloads of the app on October 1st. As long as you have the app installed, our plan is to continue serving you. But there won’t be any new features released.

Sounds like there won't be an Alex at all after very long.
by didibus | 2025-09-06 07:23:54+00:00
> and they're allergic to automation, hiring higher quality engineers, and hiring more engineers to improve velocities

I think there's another issue, but it could relate to your first two statement here. Even to try ideas, to explore the space of solutions, you need to have ideas to try. When entering development, you need clarity on what you're trying. It's very hard to make decisions on even a single attempt. I see engineers working task the entire time simply not sure what really the task is about.

And in a way, the coding agents need even more clarity in what you ask of them to deliver good result.

So even inside of what we consider "development" or "coding", the bottleneck is often: "what am I supposed to do here?" and not so much "I don't know how to do this" or "I have so much to implement".

This is obvious as well, once you throw more engineers, and you can't break up the work, because you have no clue what so many people could even all do. Knowing what all the needed tasks even are is hard and a big bottleneck.
by contingencies | 2025-09-06 07:24:44+00:00
Technically both of these approaches are not as good as a wide brimmed hat in terms of face protection. However, for some sports it's superior (anything with wind or clearance issues). I'm on a Stetson at the moment after a US trip but usually go for whatever broad brim is available. Buying new ones gets old so going for a 'crushable' model is the go - I like the felt Stetsons. The other benefit from a broad brim is it functions as an auto-umbrella in light weather which is damn cool. Also, hat-on-face is similar to those plane-sleep-eyewear bands.
by stevage | 2025-09-06 07:25:38+00:00
Pretty amazing writeup.

I didn't really understand why every image is slowly moving around. It says:

> Above the box you have an Animate button, which will move the scene around to tease out problems of upcoming algorithms. Movement happens before our blur will be applied, akin to the player character moving.

I don't really understand the explanation - the movement just seemed a bit annoying.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-06 07:27:16+00:00
The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated.

May Day comes from the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and Labor Day was the petty rescheduling of it by another one of the worst POTUSes who obeyed the business lobby in advanced: Grover Cleveland.
by iainmerrick | 2025-09-06 07:27:40+00:00
Oh! I wasn’t trying to make a big point except that paying for software isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if you’re already invested in Macs you’re presumably OK with paying good money for good products.

Having used Docker Desktop on a Mac myself, it seems... fine? It does the job well enough, and it’s part of the development rather than production flow so it doesn’t need to be perfect, just unobtrusive.
by globular-toast | 2025-09-06 07:27:46+00:00
> No gasoline-powered car (outside of supercars, maybe? Never drove one of those) could match the feel of pressing the throttle on an electric.

Probably need to be careful with this because flooring it is addictive and you'll waste a lot of energy doing it.

For me the feeling of an electric car gave me a strange feeling. I just felt like I was in an electric wheelchair. It really hammered home the ridiculousness of able-bodied people travelling around town in these huge electric wheelchairs. I don't hold much hope for the future but I'd love to be able to live in a town without these things around.
by didibus | 2025-09-06 07:29:33+00:00
Can't agree more.

> If you give them a task and spell it out, they can knock out code for it at a really good pace and wow upper management.

This is so true. I sometimes spend entire days, weeks, all I do is provide those type of engineers the clarity to "unblock" them. Yet I always wonder, if I had just spent that time coding myself, I might have gotten more done.

But it's also this that I think bottlenecks development. The set of people who really know what needs to be done, at the level of detail that these developer will need to be told, or that coding agents will need to be told, is very small, and that's your bottleneck, you have like 1 or 2 devs on all project that knows what to do, and everyone else need a Standard Operating Procedure handed to them for every task. And now everyone is always just waiting on the same 2 devs to tell them what to do.
by 14 | 2025-09-06 07:30:02+00:00
When I try to explain to someone just how big and massive our universe is I usually fall back to the Voyager 1 satellite which was launched almost 50 years ago. I like to tell people that it is traveling at an amazing 17km per second! Even at such an amazing speed it has still only just traveled approx 1 light day. At such a speed it will travel about 1 light year every 18,000 years.

Then I like to say the nearest next start is roughly 4 light years away. So even at 17km per second, or about 10.5 miles per second, it will still take approx 72,000 years for it to reach the nearest star.

That star is 4 light years away and our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. The next galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away!!! So at the incredible speeds of one of our fastest man made objects it would take something like 45 billion years to just get to the next galaxy!

Seeing how the known universe is estimated at over 46 billion light years in size and looking back on the other numbers I wrote it quickly becomes apparent that to travel across the galaxies one would need to be able to reach unbelievably unimaginable speeds. Even the speed of light as you mention would not be even close to fast enough to get anywhere significant.

On a side tangent I was always a trekie back in the day. I know their warp drive was faster then light but now I almost want to go back and look at the math of how fast they must have been going to be going the distances they were going.
by bartvk | 2025-09-06 07:31:43+00:00
That's interesting, so fiction would be more realistic if they always have distances of hundreds of lightyears apart?

But that means that galaxy-scale structure actually does matter, right? A hundred thousand sun-like stars isn't all that much, I'm guessing only a small percentage-points of those would have a planet in the correct orbit for terraforming, and you'd need to go outside your proposed 1000 LY volume?
by godelski | 2025-09-06 07:32:15+00:00
You want me to show that it is trivially false that all Neural Networks are not Markov Chains? I mean we could point to a RNN which doesn't have the Markov Property. I mean another trivial case is when the rows do not sum to 1. I mean the internal states of neural networks are not required to be probability distributions. In fact, this isn't a requirement anywhere in a neural network. So whatever you want to call the transition matrix you're going to have issues.

Or the inverse of this? That all Markov Chains are Neural Networks? Sure. Well sure, here's my transition matrix [1].

I'm quite positive an LLM would be able to give you more examples.

> the output only depends on the current input so the Markov property is trivially/vacuously true.

It's pretty clear you did not get your PhD in ML.

> The reason for the uniform random number

I think you're misunderstanding. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. But I'm failing to understand why you're jumping to the CDF. I also don't understand why this answers my question since there are other ways to sample from a distribution knowing only its CDF and without using the uniform distribution. I mean you can always convert to the uniform distribution and there's lots of tricks to do that. Or I mean the distribution in that SO post is the Rayleigh Distribution so we don't even need to do that. My question was not about that uniform is clean, but that it is a requirement. But this just doesn't seem relevant at all.