MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Traster | 2025-09-23 14:39:04+00:00
I don't like this line of reasoning because it's largely just crystalizing a loss. We have this in the UK - houses of multiple occupancy. It's a great idea where you take a home that in the 1980s would house a family and split it into 5 flats where each person can rent 10-20 square metres each. I would much rather someone did something to address the fact that the average family in the UK can afford roughly 1/5th the amount of housing they could in the 1980s. And of course, because of this arbitrage now a family that wants to live in that home is competing with the rental income of 5+ tenants in a HMO.

Surely, the correct solution is just to put in some simple rules to bring the cost of housing down. For example: planning restrictions are suspended until the average family home hits 3x average family income. Rather than just packing us like sardines into ever more expensive houses.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-23 14:39:31+00:00
I think everyone in this thread should read https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...

Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-09-23 14:39:31+00:00
It shouldn’t just happen when nations align with our president’s philosophy, but we should do more of this. I suppose the difficulty is in doing this in a sustainable way. I don’t want Argentina to collapse if we pull back our support. I imagine failed states around the world might have turned out much better with a little support from the US, even the socialist ones.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-23 14:39:35+00:00
By the way, if you want a quick overview of this kind of equipment if you've never seen it before, here's (randomly picked by Bing Shopping) China Skyline's marketing blurb for a similar 64-port SMS gateway:

* https://chinaskyline.net/sk-gsm-voip-gateway/esim-64-ports-s...
by tialaramex | 2025-09-23 14:39:43+00:00
> Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker

I like the fact that "fighting the borrow checker" is an idea from the period when the borrowck only understood purely lexical lifetimes. So you have to fight to explain why the thing you wrote, which is obviously correct, is in fact correct.

That's already ancient history by the time I learned Rust in 2021. But, this idea that Rust will mean "fighting the borrow checker" took off anyway even though the actual thing it's about was solved.

Now for many people it really is a significant adjustment to learn Rust if your background is exclusively say, Python, or C, or Javascript. For me it came very naturally and most people will not have that experience. But even if you're a C programmer who has never had most of this [gestures expansively] before you likely are not often "fighting the borrow checker". That diagnostic saying you can't make a pointer via a spurious mutable reference? Not the borrow checker. The warning about failing to use the result of a function? Not the borrow checker.

Now, "In Rust I had to read all the diagnostics to make my software compile" does sound less heroic than "battling with the borrow checker" but if that's really the situation maybe we need to come up with a braver way to express this.
by asib | 2025-09-23 14:39:45+00:00
> down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video

To be fair, this is apparently table stakes for being a YouTuber at the moment. Maybe not hundreds but definitely several. Veritasium did a video [0] about how he has to do this to maintain enough viewership to keep YouTubing viable as a full-time job.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
by uselesswords | 2025-09-23 14:39:45+00:00
Yea but he’s not exactly going around randomly punching people in the face is he? Lot of moral grandstanding in this thread.

He’s a human being and he’s not perfect but some of these comments calling him a psychopath or sycophant are going way too far. My psychoanalysis of everyone psychoanalyzing Mr Beast would be to turn the screen off and get some fresh air
by sheepybloke | 2025-09-23 14:39:51+00:00
> Switch to someone who won't? And who would that be?

The issue is that it's not as simple as just "switching" and giving another company your money. How would you migrate your 5-10 years of Confluence pages and Jira tickets if you wanted to switch from Atlassian? You're going to put all of your members through the hassle of switching a booking service/payment process? You know you're being screwed, but the cost to switch is often more than the increased cost. The modern economy is balancing cost increases to your customers with the cost to switch to a competitor.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-09-23 14:39:54+00:00
For configuration I dislike the XML object model KDL is built around. It needlessly complicates things to have two different incompatible ways (properties and children) of nesting configuration keys under an element.

Pkl seems syntactically beautiful and powerful, but having types and functions and loops makes it a lot more complicated than the dead-simple JSON data model that YAML is based on.
Show HN: Kekkai – a simple, fast file integrity monitoring tool in Go
by catatsuy | 2025-09-23 14:39:59+00:00
I built a tool called *Kekkai* for file integrity monitoring in production environments. It records file hashes during deployment and later verifies them to detect unauthorized modifications (e.g. from OS command injection or tampering).

Why it matters:

* Many web apps (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.) on AWS EC2 need a lightweight way to confirm their code hasn’t been changed. * Traditional approaches that rely on metadata often create false positives. * Kekkai checks only file content, so it reliably detects real changes. * I’ve deployed it to an EC2 PHP application in production, and it’s working smoothly so far.

Key points:

* *Content-only hashing* (ignores timestamps/metadata) * *Symlink protection* (detects swaps/changes) * *Secure S3 storage* (deploy servers write-only, app servers read-only) * *Single Go binary* with minimal dependencies

Would love feedback from others running apps on EC2 or managing file integrity in production.
by falcor84 | 2025-09-23 14:40:14+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if Yudkowsky would agree that the initial creation of "Information Technology" was an almost direct stepping stone (in evolutionary terms) on the path to AI, which in turn (he argues and I agree) will lead us towards superintelligence. I suppose that Kurzweil might take this even further, arguing that the path was set as soon as an early hominin picked up a stick and intentionally drew an arrow towards berry bushes in the ground.
by bluGill | 2025-09-23 14:40:28+00:00
Most homeless have "mental issues". On a good day they will try, but they have bad days often enough. Sometimes mental issues are caused by 'hard drug' use, but there are plenty of other causes. Society has not found a good answer to these people (many of the things tried have been worse than living on the streets - despite a few freezing to death)

Some of the homeless could live in a roommate situation. Others are "so far gone" that no reasonable person would want to live with them, and they would destroy a room if allowed in one without supervision.

Homelessness is a hard problem. Anyone claiming they have a solution is wrong. However that doesn't mean we shouldn't try - just because you can't solve the problem doesn't mean you can't make things better for a subset.
by cyberclimb | 2025-09-23 14:40:35+00:00
In the Netherlands from what I've seen (at least around Amsterdam) it's almost always forbidden for houses to be rented out to a group of flatmates (e.g. students), some people go so far as to fake relationships to imply they're a couple instead.

I'm not sure if this an actual law but housing listings often imply its forbidden in the neighborhood, they're looking for couples and families with kids.
by vikramkr | 2025-09-23 14:40:44+00:00
And what about the predictions of energy use that did pan out, like air conditioning and stuff? Also in 1999 how many personal computer companies were restarting nuclear power plants to fuel their projected energy consumption? Feels like a weird argument to make when the investments into AI I fra are literally measured in gigawatts. Feels like a weird argument in general - ai consuming lots of energy isn't some weird degrowth conspiracy theory
by duxup | 2025-09-23 14:40:51+00:00
Trump hangers on have these creepy sycophantic habits like this one.

Honestly it seems like such a weak play by these department heads and appointees where you have every other hanger on having to praise Trump constantly, like they don't know if they're in his favor any moment and have to try to keep it that way.

I was watching a few press conferences and some of his appointees default action when they get a question they don't like is to just jarringly start praising Trump... like they're terrified to even acknowledge mildly difficult questions.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-23 14:41:04+00:00
There are very obvious, important differences between the options they had available. Both in terms of general user expectations for end of life apps, as well as concrete promises made to their customers to make a sale.

Do you apply the same sort of lazy false equivalence to all moral and ethical questions? People will always complain, therefore you can do anything!

I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates, but I don't have any patience when they take active steps to renege on their promises by adding ads or taking features away - that's just fraud.
by HexDecOctBin | 2025-09-23 14:41:33+00:00
Y2K errors in old COBOL code kick-started Indian IT sector, which then lead to immense economic progress and mass scale reduction in poverty. I hope LLMs pepper every thing they touch with many such errors, so that nations of Africa and poorer parts of Latin America (that can't do cheap manufacturing due to a lack of infrastructure and capital) can also begin their upwards economic journey by providing services to fix these mistakes.

In order to help reduce global poverty (much of which was caused by colonialism), it is the moral and ethical duty of the Global North to adopt LLMs on a mass scale and use them in every field imaginable, and then give jobs to the global poor to fix the resulting mess.

I am only 10% joking.
by mothballed | 2025-09-23 14:42:18+00:00
If it's illegal you're in a situation where the landlord likes money and the tenants like not being homeless. In a house where 4th amendment rights are strongest.

In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter, and in most jurisdictions the complaints are public record far enough ahead of time anyone with the slightest bit of foresight would get ahead of it.

In my county sometimes I monitor the local complaints, mostly initially when I was looking at properties because I did not want to live next to a neighbor who likes to be a busybody to the code enforcement. There are a number of properties that just lock their gates whenever a code complaints happen or tell code inspection to kick rocks, by the time they come back with a warrant the situation is faked well enough they can't do anything.
by wildzzz | 2025-09-23 14:42:42+00:00
Here's my guess how this has and will play out:

1. Sim box operators were running multiple locations for sending spam texts, cheap VoIP for scams, and potentially other phone-related crimes. 2. Operators were associated with other criminal gangs. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly. Someone may have been running a drug side-business from a location. 3. Someone uses this sim box operation to send threatening scam messages that happen to reach these government officials. For whatever reason, they take it seriously. 4. Now that the feds and NYPD have raided this sim box operation, they have to justify why they were doing this. It's probably not directly illegal to run a sim box farm so they are going to play up the threat a bit to get more coverage of the investigation.

I can assure you, a lot more dangerous criminal activity happened within a 35 mile radius of the UN than some zombie cell phones sending scam texts. While I applaud anyone shutting down scams, the window dressing is embarrassing. Someone has watched too much Blacklist or any of those fantastical police procedurals.
by ZJChen | 2025-09-23 14:42:50+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I’m Zhijie Chen, founder of Verdent and formerly Head of Algorithms at TikTok. Verdent is built for larger, production-grade tasks: it plans before coding, runs agents in parallel, tests results, and explains diffs. Our north star is a full Plan Code Verify loop, and we are building toward that. Curious what kinds of tasks you would actually trust an AI to handle end to end.
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-23 14:43:01+00:00
> or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room

Based on personal experiences I would say that it's only individual leases that are illegal. I lived in an SRO back in college without even realizing it was an SRO, rooms were rented out individually and everyone had a separate lease.

The more common version of this is to just do it privately with your friends or other people that you meet. If that's illegal then that will be news to me and like half my friends that currently live with roommates. Doing it privately raises a number of issues around housing discrimination. A landlord cannot stop you from renting a unit/room but there's nothing stopping a roommate from refusing to sign with you if they don't like some characteristic about you, granted in reality you probably wouldn't want to have that person as a roommate anyways.

Granted there might have been laws in place where I used to rent that capped the number of un-related folks living together but in my experience the landlord never brought it up, likely cause they knew enforcement would just never happen.
by naasking | 2025-09-23 14:43:44+00:00
> Until now, it was a code smell if you need those often. There are exceptions to that, but those are a small minority.

Documentation for a system, particularly a rationale, is never a code smell.

> There are ton of Apache projects whose documentation is rather a burden than helpful. They are long and absolutely useless.

LLM prompts are short and to the point by comparison, that's part of my point.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-23 14:43:57+00:00
> Yea but he’s not exactly going around randomly punching people in the face is he?

I mean, not directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrBeast

"In September 2024, Donaldson was one of the subjects of a class action lawsuit that alleged widespread mistreatment, sexual harassment, and unpaid expenses and wages on his ongoing reality television series."
by ajross | 2025-09-23 14:44:34+00:00
Exactly. And the whole point of a cellular network architecture is that it's resistant to DoS attacks (what the rubes call "unexpectedly heavy usage"). Sure, you can take a cell out with a hundred fake phones, and all the users in that cell will hop to the next one. Or at worst walk a block over to find another. The attack doesn't scale, at all.

And even if you wanted to deploy custom hardware to do it, it would be far easier to just use a high power jammer on the band anyway than mucking around with all those SIMs.

These are for making actual use of the telecom facilities at scale, with the anonymity you get from burner SIMs. It's fraud, not terrorism.
by jmarchello | 2025-09-23 14:44:36+00:00
Fair point. I don't disagree. I personally just like to stay as close to default GNU/Linux tooling as is practical. It's a matter of personal taste.

For me, this makes it so my expectations and muscle memory transfer cleanly between my workstation and other servers, devices, etc. I find the default tools are much more powerful than is often understood, and you can replicate most third party functionality fairly easily. That's not always the case mind you, and I happily use those tools.
by lbhdc | 2025-09-23 14:44:38+00:00
This is a problem I have heard over and over across different publishers.

Global news seems to be oversaturated. There are dozens of outlets repackaging snippets from reuters and elsewhere into articles. They come out around the same time, hit more or less the same beats, and for the reader are essentially fungible with other articles on the topic.

Before AI overviews they would use SEO to game their way into traffic. That allowed everyone to publish the same content with lots of friction and the biggest brands would still do well. It seems AI overviews has shown these companies users "revealed preference", and it isn't for their high friction websites.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-23 14:45:05+00:00
> capitalist society uses the fear of homelessness to force people onto the work treadmill

If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Do you think animals spend most of their time looking for food because they're also operating under the capitalist system?
by pfdietz | 2025-09-23 14:45:16+00:00
Here is the quote (from the 3rd ed., page 41):

"In general, the least effective methodology of all is random-input testing—the process of testing a program by selecting, at random, some subset of all possible input values. In terms of the likelihood of detecting the most errors, a randomly selected collection of test cases has little chance of being an optimal, or even close to optimal, subset. Therefore, in this chapter, we want to develop a set of thought processes that enable you to select test data more intelligently."

You can immediately see the problem here. It's optimizing for number of tests run, not for the overall cost of creating and running the tests. It's an attitude suited to when running a program was an expensive thing using precious resources. It was very wrong in 2012 when this edition came out and even more wrong today.
by palata | 2025-09-23 14:45:18+00:00
> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet

I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy.

It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot more of it, and therefore we use more electricity.

It's called the rebound effect.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-23 14:45:34+00:00
There are many communes you can join, especially on the west coast, and it is usually free to join and free to live there. However you definitely need to work all day (doing mostly manual labor) at those too.

I am not aware of any viable life option that doesn't involve the need to work a lot. Besides being born into a trust fund or being content with homelessness.
by amluto | 2025-09-23 14:45:43+00:00
I give OrangePi a lot of points for putting an M.2 slot on the bottom of the PCB. Not only does Raspberry Pi charge extra for their M.2 board, it sits in an obnoxious location above the board where it interferes with many other things one might want to put on top, e.g. any sort of passive cooling.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-23 14:46:19+00:00
Yeah this whole blog is sus. Author claims to have been around for 17 years, doesn't have a single project of note and makes naive claims. Github history has thousands of commits per year every single day to private repos, yet very little public code or record to offer credibility. Not clear where they work or what they work on. Makes inflammatory claims about hot-topic languages. Throws up ads on the blog. Personally posts blog to HN on a relatively new account, rather than it organically finding its way here. Sorry I'm not buying it.

He seems to know what he's doing, from the author's Twitter:

Post something slightly mentioning rust in r/cpp, Rust evangelists show up, post something slightly mentioning rust in r/zig, Rust evangelists show up. How is this not a cult?
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-23 14:46:34+00:00
But AI training has been behaving like Bitcoin mining, which constantly increases the difficulty. AI companies so far have been having to release costlier and costlier models to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t want the final iteration to be a Dyson sphere around the sun or the black hole at the center of our galaxy so Gemini 10,000 Pro can tell us “Let there be light.” Or maybe we do, I don’t know.
by boburumurzokov | 2025-09-23 14:46:40+00:00
I have been using GitHub Copilot and other VS Code agent extensions like Cline. Common gaps across these vendors I identified: Planning rarely includes clear acceptance checks, edge-case lists, or traceability from plan items to commits/tests.

I think Verdent provides good planning, where prompts can be structured and I can review, accept, or adjust this plan before any code changes are made.

The only thing I do not like about Verdent does not offer a free plan. It's worth it as a paid tool but it would be great to have free credits to get started. For example, you can use the Cline or Copilot free version or you can bring your own model.
by randycupertino | 2025-09-23 14:46:41+00:00
I think some of the perceived "rudeness" is just misinterpreted gen z social anxiety. Shout out to the "gen z stare" this is the best video I've seen with examples: https://www.tiktok.com/@dantejamees/video/752596765491436263...

Not necessarily rudeness, moreso unwillingness to do fake-cheerfulness over the top "customer is always right" obsequiousness.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-23 14:46:45+00:00
I think in MrBeast's case it goes beyond just overexposure to seeming like a sketchy guy because of how hard he tries to project the image of being a good person while simultaneously flaunting his wealth.

It's very reminiscent of many crypto-scammers, who flaunted their wealth and talked about wanting to help others become wealthy too, only to eventually rug pull.
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-23 14:47:33+00:00
In the 1970s, it was usual for working class newlyweds would have to live with their parents until they were able to find housing. That's why second-rate comedians of the time like Les Dawson had so many mother-in-law jokes: there was an awful lot of resentment between young men and their mothers-in-law to exploit. There's nothing new about multiple families crowding into houses designed for just one family in this country - that's why there are so many pubs.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
by tormeh | 2025-09-23 14:47:35+00:00
Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners. Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war. Perhaps because rents are downstream of values, and so it's politically easier for owners to make the correct choices to advance their agenda than it is for renters, which have an extra logical leap required of them.
by bilekas | 2025-09-23 14:47:36+00:00
I know for my own side businesses with some friends we have moved over completely to EU from email to server co-location. We have stopped entirely with any regions outside the EU entirely.

This limits us in some areas but we do actually need to be very careful with the data we temporarily manage and there doesn't see any security in the US or even the UK for that matter.

In our case it's not our only source of income so we can afford to be picky, it's less of a moral stand and more of a risk aversion one.