MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-09-16 17:13:44+00:00
Back when Microsoft released Windows 98, they completely revamped the Explorer UI (made it shittier imho), among other things making folders open with a single click instead of the previous double click. This, their marketing department said, was to make your local computer look and behave more like the Web, and thus be more familiar. The theme of Windows 98 was an OS built for the Web, with smooth integration between local and Web resources.

I was like NO!!! YOU DO NOT WANT THIS!!! The difference between your local computer and the Web is like the difference between your house and St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans during Carnival parade season. My wife may feel "at home" in both, but she stands a good chance of being pickpocketed in one environment; the other, much less so.

I'm with you. We should emphasize a bright-line distinction between interaction with machines and interaction with people. "My Computer" in Windows 9x is okay to me, especially in light of the above; you WANT people to recognize the difference between "my computer" and "someone else's computer". But messages like "Please wait while we set things up" in recent Windows piss me off. What is this "we" shit, kemosabe? Who are you and what are you doing messing around in my computer?
by rglynn | 2025-09-16 17:14:15+00:00
Interesting. Do you really think that?

My initial assumption would be that there are a lot, likely a majority, of parents who have had next to no advice on how to raise kids. Furthermore, I would posit that many of them were not raised in particularly nurturing circumstances themselves.

As such, I would expect that the advice ChatGPT gives (i.e. an average from parenting advice blogs and forums), would on average result in better parenting.

That's obviously not to say that ChatGPT gives great advice, but that the bar is very low already.
by atourgates | 2025-09-16 17:14:52+00:00
I was joking about the billion dollar idea.

My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.

Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.

But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.

I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.

One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-16 17:15:24+00:00
I spent a couple years apprenticing in Texas data centers (electrician)...

>99.99% of the time [we were] just standing around not doing anything

So much time I voluntarily spent sorting parts / carts, in preparation for the few hours each week we were actually needed — most just dove into their phones, idly — and even I wouldn't have considered myself in that over-productive squareroot. Everything was dual-feed power, so most of the year was spent unrushed.

But those few times of year where managed-risk pushed its limits... were certainly all hands on deck experiences.
by lukev | 2025-09-16 17:16:01+00:00
More new programs should be written in Java/on the JVM.

Most of the reasons Java dropped out of popularity no longer apply, and at this point it is an incredibly stable and mature ecosystem.

I can come back to a Clojure program I wrote ten years ago and it runs great, meanwhile a TypeScript program I write 6 months ago requires a bunch of updating and cleanup.
by saratogacx | 2025-09-16 17:16:12+00:00
It was a time when federated and unified views were considered the optimal user experience and there were many flavors of the concept at the time (msft had search providers that would let you service any kind of result in windows or sharepoint search). However, 'brand awareness' started to take over. Nobody wanted to be just a provide to an obviously google-ish experience because it makes them easier to replace.

Like with messaging apps, everything fractioned to fall to a zero sum game of exclusive 'experiences'.
by anonym29 | 2025-09-16 17:16:41+00:00
Mandatory phone number registration does not and never has prevented fraud.

Plenty of free VOIP services exist, including SMS reception.

Even when the free service providers are manually blocklisted, one-time validations can be defeated with private numbers on real networks / providers for under a dollar per validation, and repeated ongoing validations can be performed with rented private numbers on real networks / providers for under ten dollars per month.

The rent-an-SMS services that enable this are accessible through a web interface that allows connections from tor, vpns, etc - there is no guarantee that the telecom provider's location records of the IMEI tied to that phone number is anywhere close to the end user's real geographic location, so this isn't even helpful for law enforcement purposes where they can subpoena telecom provider records.

This "phone number required" practice exists for one primary reason: for businesses to track non-fraudulent users, data mine their non-fraudulent users, and monetize the correlated personal information of non-fraudulent users without true informed consent (almost nobody reads ToS's, but many would object to these invasive practices if given a dialogue box that let them accept or decline the privacy infringements but still allowed the user to use the business' service either way).

Sometimes, they are also used for a secondary reason: to allow the business to cheap out on developer costs by cutting corners on proper, secure MFA validation. No need to implement modern, secure passkeys or RFC-compliant TOTP MFA, FIDO2, U2F when you can just put your users in harm's way by pretending that SMS is a secure channel, rather than easily compromised by even common criminals with SS7 attacks, which are not relegated to nation-state actors like they once were.
by kibwen | 2025-09-16 17:17:10+00:00
> Go modules go even further and add automatic checksum verification per default

Cargo lockfiles contain checksums and Cargo has used these for automatic verification since time immemorial, well before Go implemented their current packaging system. In addition, Go doesn't enforce the use of go.sum files, it's just an optional recommendation: https://go.dev/wiki/Modules#should-i-commit-my-gosum-file-as... I'm not aware of any mechanism which would place Go's packaging system at the forefront of mitigation implementations as suggested here.
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-16 17:17:23+00:00
I pretty much only ever use 'you' when I need to explain something to the person behind the keyboard. Most of the time though I just don't use any pronouns and let the subject be implied.

I do use 'I' when the message is from me, the developer, and not the program as a separate entity.

Though sometimes I do find it cute for the program to refer to itself in the first person. Not often though
by toast0 | 2025-09-16 17:17:40+00:00
Setting child lock on doors is an intentional decision, once, and then it stays that way until another intentional decision to unset it. If you purchase a car and the child lock was set, you might not notice it was set.

Depending on the configuration of the car, if you end up in the back seat with the door closed and the child lock is set on all rear doors, it can be pretty difficult to get out.
by supermatt | 2025-09-16 17:17:44+00:00
I thought i would give this AI assisted coding another go, so have subscribed to ChatGPT to try out this new codex, but it just seems soooooo slooooow.

I just don't see how this can be considered productive - I am waiting 20 minutes staring at it "thinking" while it does trivial tasks on a virtually bare repo. I guess for async agents its not such a big deal if they are slow as molasses, as you can run dozens of them, but you need a structured codebase for that - and i am already hours in and haven't even gotten a skeleton.

I have read through all the docs, watched the video. It would be so much quicker just to write this code myself. What am I doing wrong? Is it just super slow because they are over capacity or is this just the current state of the art?
by sarchertech | 2025-09-16 17:17:45+00:00
Well if you’d googled it you’d have seen it was true.

From pg in 2008.

>I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
by LiquidPolymer | 2025-09-16 17:17:58+00:00
I have the "Apollo Remastered" book and it is gorgeous. I'm going to buy this one too. Obviously they went back to the original film from the missions and did a full scan. NASA almost never gives access to the original film and instead we have been seeing duplicate transparencies which involves a loss of detail and dynamic range. They were good enough back then. But these first generation scans cannot be matched for detail and color.
by machiaweliczny | 2025-09-16 17:17:59+00:00
No React won and I choose it in 2015 because FB used it for their own app while Angular was by google but never really used by their top engineers so it was crappy. I think they still use Clojure compiler to this day. FB had correct incentives to keep it stable and good. Now that Vercel overtook I am more sceptical of incentive alignment
by marci | 2025-09-16 17:18:03+00:00
It all depends on the scale you use. At the individual, sure. But it's like cars. They keep getting more effecient, yet total energy consumption keeps increasing.

The further we can go, the further we will go.

The more CPU power we get, the more JS heavy websites get.

The more images we can generate, the more we will generate.

The more we can do, the more we do, whether we should or not.
by Symbiote | 2025-09-16 17:18:20+00:00
I was in a car accident age 12. Both doors on the driver's side were blocked by another vehicle, which was on fire, so my dad had to climb awkwardly through the passenger side.

My door in the back was blocked, but my brother wasn't able to open his, as it was damaged. I had to kick it while pulling the handle.

Good luck doing that in a Tesla.
by clusterhacks | 2025-09-16 17:18:22+00:00
I think it is just poorly worded. From another point in the paper:

"Our analysis draws on a new dataset that combines LinkedIn resume and job-posting data from Revelio Labs. The dataset covers nearly 285,000 U.S. firms, more than 150 million employment spells from roughly 62 million unique workers between 2015 and 2025, and over 245 million job postings."

I guess we can read that as saying the authors identified 62 million workers who held 150 million positions over the 2015-2025 time window.

I'm still deeply skeptical about the underlying data. The 62 million represents a huge percentage of employed people in the U.S. in any of the years 2015-2025. This source shows 148 million/yr to 164 million/yr employed over that timeframe:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the-united-states/

On the other hand, I also saw estimates saying LinkedIn has approximately 30% of the U.S. workforce with a profile on the platform. Which is wild to me.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-16 17:18:50+00:00
CA desperately needs to get rid of the overwhelming liberal majority ruling party that from local to statewide politics has been experiment after experiment after experiment of virtue signalling bullshit. The state definitely needs balance to make it so that the new laws or changes have at least a voice in opposition.

It's ridiculous. Thankfully at the state level Newsome has been able to stop a lot of the bullshit - mostly because his son was a HUGE CK fan and his politics have been changing because of that.

I don't actually want a conservative majority - I just want balance and force lawmakers to have opposition so only the good things get through.
by uncircle | 2025-09-16 17:18:53+00:00
My blue collar job will soon be carpentry and fixing up a cheap house. That way I can stop paying exorbitant amounts for rent slavery, and I don’t have to burn out 40 hours a week in tech to make rent.

It’s not gonna be fun for my joints, but breaking my back on my own house will probably the most useful skill I will learn in my life than clicking my life away sat at a keyboard. After two decades, doing hard work that’s hidden behind a screen, and the only impact is a virtual number incremented once a month, I wish to do something — anything — that leaves a mark on the physical world.
by sgt | 2025-09-16 17:19:46+00:00
If you're into LLM's you need to consider using Apple Silicon so you can continue developing on your own machine with MLX. MLX isn't just a replacemnet for CUDA, no way - it's made for the Apple arch. The new M5 chip will likely have serious ANE and ability to use the unified memory. Then we're talking powerhouse. Current Mac Studios are already more cost effective than say RTX 6000.
by theamk | 2025-09-16 17:19:50+00:00
Talk to hardware directly

Most "from scratch" would be some sort of microcontroller - write directly to hardware, program registers directly. It's the best feeling when you know every single instructions on the CPU is under your control, there is no 20 million lines of kernel code that do something.

But the MCU needs special hardware (MCU itself, display, programmer) so it is not a good starting project. This brings us to good old MS-DOS. Sure, you need to call BIOS to set up graphics (mode 13h, "320x200x256 colors" is the best for beginners), but after that, you are talking directly to hardware.
by ck2 | 2025-09-16 17:20:02+00:00
it's nice to see so many people running marathons now

y'all better safety-qualify at least -6 minutes tho, -7 if you can

YEAR FIELD SIZE CUT-OFF NOT ACCEPTED 2024 30,000 5:29 11,039 2025 30,000 6:51 12,324
by zahlman | 2025-09-16 17:20:14+00:00
BTW we don't have @-pings here; I found this reviewing my own comment history. Also, it appears that your comments are being automatically filtered. I don't see especially good reasons for this (although it's clear you've made a throwaway for this specific topic and you're getting a lot of downvotes); consider emailing hn@ycombinator.com about it.
by com2kid | 2025-09-16 17:20:17+00:00
Microsoft considers documentation status and long term support status to be the same thing. If the behavior of a function / API is not going to remain stable, it isn't documented. If they don't want to pay maintenance/support costs for an API (more rigorous testing, sample code, etc) the API won't be documented.

Historically Microsoft had a 100% back compat guarantee for APIs, so the second an API was documented its external interface was frozen in stone forever. There are still APIs around to this day that have misspelled struct fields because someone made a typo 30+ years ago.

If an API isn't documented it is "use at your own risk", although if enough large software starts depending on it, the API may have to be frozen anyway (or compatibility shims put into place) to avoid breaking popular software programs.
Show HN: LLM Memory Notes – semantic memory layer for AI agents (MCP)
by josef_chmel | 2025-09-16 17:20:20+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been building LLM Memory Notes (LLMMN), a hosted semantic memory layer that gives AI agents persistent, searchable memory via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). You can create “Memories” (containers) and save “Notes” (entries) that are indexed using AI embeddings; agents can then search by meaning (e.g., searching “database error” will find relevant notes about “PostgreSQL timeout” or “MySQL connection failed”) . To get started, sign up on llm‑memory.com, create a Memory in the web UI, and obtain your API token . Add the server to your .mcp.json and use your MCP client’s ReadMcpResourceTool and AddNoteTool to query or add notes ; the docs have a full Quick Start guide . LLMMN is a hosted service (not open source), currently in a public beta with free early access; final pricing is still being determined . We’d love feedback from anyone building agent tooling or experimenting with persistent context layers!
by mindcrime | 2025-09-16 17:20:35+00:00
FWIW, if you have an SDR that doesn't work with the frequency you want to work with, you may be able to use an up-converter or down-converter in front of the SDR to shift the frequency enough to work. There are ones like the Ham It Up[1], etc. that may be appropriate depending on the circumstances. Or you could possibly build your own.

[1]: https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-addons/ham-it-up.html
by nine_k | 2025-09-16 17:20:53+00:00
If you are talking to a remote entity not controlled by you, you should assume that your communication is somehow accessible to whoever has internal access that other entity. That as well may be not the entity's legitimate owners, but law-breakers or law enforcement. So, no, not private by default, but only by goodwill and coincidence.

There's a reason why e.g. banks want to have all critical systems on premises, under their physical control.
by ElijahLynn | 2025-09-16 17:22:19+00:00
from what I heard, the intention is to make it much more affordable than it is now. I don't remember the source right now but I did think it was a blog post or something like that.

I think if it's affordable then people will easily take that. instead of drinking and driving at night or other unsafe activities. if it's affordable then people can just take a waymo home and then back again to get their car when it's safe again.
by spindump8930 | 2025-09-16 17:22:24+00:00
Fairly certain that AI (meaning an expensive llm type model) isn't needed to detect spam a large amount of the time. Classical classification methods could work while also being more privacy friendly (e.g. running on device).

> According to AT&T, a big difference with its product is that it is built into the network itself.

This doesn't seem like an asset...
by dismalaf | 2025-09-16 17:22:27+00:00
So the answer is no. You probably saved up enough for said cheap house and future living expenses from your tech job.

Right now, in Canada, the average rent is like 70% of the average income. If you enter the workforce today, in a myriad of professions, it's looking like there is zero chance of ever owning a home if you're not at least 2 standard deviations above average.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-16 17:23:34+00:00
It’s an NEC violation (and also incredibly reckless) to connect electrical equipment that has not been tested by a NTRL. [0]

No inspector will sign off on a non-listed piece of electrical equipment, especially for a homeowner.

I repeat, do not connect electrical equipment to your home’s electrical distribution network unless it is tested by one of the labs listed in the link below, especially if it is hardwired.

[0] https://www.osha.gov/nationally-recognized-testing-laborator...
by DennisP | 2025-09-16 17:23:48+00:00
Maybe you're the person to answer this question then.

How can I find the price of battery storage, per kWh delivered to the customer, assuming a pure wind/solar/battery grid?

I can easily find the price per kWh of battery capacity but that's not the same thing. I'm looking for the effective levelized cost of electricity, over the lifetime of the battery, so I can compare against generation sources.
by MBCook | 2025-09-16 17:24:26+00:00
For us 8 to 17 was tough due to a lot of things you weren’t supposed to be using going away (sun packages). But TONS of libraries did it anyway. And the move from javax to jakarta for a lot of things in there was also tough.

If you could get through that, you’re golden. From what I’ve seen going to 21 or 25 look easy. They’re just adding features, the big upheavals of doing the long needed cleanup are over.

I expect keeping up to date to be far easier from now on.
by presbyterian | 2025-09-16 17:24:35+00:00
> It's probably better to wait a year or two before critiquing Liquid Glass.

Releasing a broken operating system with "it'll be better in a year or two" simply doesn't work for me. If things haven't improved by the time Sequoia is EOL (which they very well me, I'm about 50/50 on it right now), I'm just going to move to Linux.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-16 17:26:09+00:00
> Is one NPM package the equivalent of one object file?

No. The closest thing to a package (on almost every language) is an entire library.

> Can NPM packages call internal functions for their dependencies instead of relying so heavily on bringing in so many external ones?

Yes, they can. They just don't do it.

> Doesn't bringing in so many dependencies lead to a lot of dead code and much larger codebases then necessary?

There aren't many unecessary dependencies, because the number of direct dependencies on each package is reasonable (on the order of 10). And you don't get a lot of unecessary code because the point of tiny libraries is to only import what you need.

Dead code is not the problem, instead the JS mentality evolved that way to minimize dead code. The problem is that dead code is actually not that much of an issue, but dependency management is.
by spindump8930 | 2025-09-16 17:26:26+00:00
For many of us a better Turing test is contextual to a topic we CARE about. Lots of LLMs sound better than a randomly sampled human on a topic I don't know too much about (e.g. opinions on new movies). They're decent on engineering topics I only vaguely know about, but still below the bar (though getting better!) on topics I really care about.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-16 17:26:32+00:00
I like perplexity's deep research model which is based on deepseek i think. i use that for most kind of writing, discussion, research, etc. where I need some kind of feedback. Claude seems to go crazy sometimes when you ask it to do the same task. Whereas for coding, Claude Code is obviously better than everything else under the sun.
by xenadu02 | 2025-09-16 17:26:50+00:00
It is worth reading the history of the proposal. The final form is superior to the others so someone was doing a lot of editing!

Take the final and second form where the use of multiple letters was eliminated, instead using "v" to indicate bits of the encoded character.

I also chuckle at the initial implementation's note about the desire to delete support for 4/5/6 byte versions. Someone was still laboring under the UCS/UTF-16 delusion that 16-bits was sufficient.
by paxys | 2025-09-16 17:27:09+00:00
> The more Apple talks and moves like other big tech companies [...]

My brother Apple is a $3.5 trillion dollar company, and has been in this league for multiple decades now. I don't know why so many communities of people online have convinced themselves to buy into them like they are a scrappy group of hackers/tinkerers fighting "the man" or even some religious movement.

Apple's target audience is rich people buying the latest iPhones and Macs every year.
by mynameisvlad | 2025-09-16 17:27:34+00:00
On their roadmap (it's in the linked blog post https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/09/15/autoModelSele...):

> Let users on a free plan take advantage of the latest models through auto

It also describes how the auto selector works in more detail:

> When using auto model selection, VS Code uses a variable model multiplier based on the automatically selected model. If you are a paid user, auto applies a 10% request discount. For example, if auto selects Sonnet 4, it will be counted as 0.9x of a premium request; if auto selects GPT-5-mini, this counts as 0x because the model is included for paid users. You can see which model and model multiplier are used by hovering over the chat response.