MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MarkSweep | 2025-09-09 00:21:13+00:00
Would you be so lucky if your legacy code was written in a well-known language. At a previous employer we had a big pile code in a “macro” language. It could interface with the main C++ code base. It was similar to assembly language in that it had no loops (just gotos) and register-like local variables (no custom names, just L0, L1, L2,…). The semantics were weird, something like unexpected pass-value-value versus pass-by-reference behavior when calling functions.

One customer required lengthy qualification processes when changing the software. But “configuration changes” had a lower bar and somehow these “macros” counted as config. So eventually all the interesting business logic and RPC processing end up in a giant macro file.
by Briannaj | 2025-09-09 00:22:16+00:00
This is literally only as fast as text to speech. the only difference is that you don't have to speak aloud. Which is cool. But for using a computer its still annoying and worse than a mouse because with a mouse you can click or drag and place in a second, in this format you have to think "move the box from point A to point B (with coordinates or a description) etc etc".

I think its cool, I've been brainstorming how a good MCI would work for a while and didn't think of this. I think its a great novel approach that will probably be expanded on soon.
by zabzonk | 2025-09-09 00:22:30+00:00
It's not just London. For example the small city I now live in (Lincoln) has very few, if any, roundabouts in the city itself - they are confined to the ring-road around the place, and roads in/out of it. Not true for all places, of course - for example Swindon is notorious for its "Magic Roundabout".
by leetharris | 2025-09-09 00:22:42+00:00
The whole EV market is growing and everyone is racing to buy one before incentives run out. The article is framed as a hit piece and even has political statements in it. But here is an exact quote from the article:

"Sales of new EVs jumped more than 24% month over month in July to 128,268, according to the Cox data, driven by the looming end of a $7,500 tax credit for EVs and attractive deals. Tesla saw sales rise 7% to 53,816, even as its market share fell."
by homoiconic | 2025-09-09 00:23:27+00:00
This reminded me of The Evolution of Useful Things [1] by Henry Petroski, which in one chapter explores the incremental development of the paper clip from its origin as a straight pin that pierced the set of papers.

An aspect of paper clip design that’s easy to overlook is that you also need to be able to manufacture them at scale, so the machinery to produce them also needs to evolve with the overall form of the product.

[1] https://ia600104.us.archive.org/11/items/pdfy--rXmwRDB5uzq5M...
by gcanyon | 2025-09-09 00:24:13+00:00
For those thinking about speed: an average human talks anywhere from 120-240 words per minute. An average human who touch types is probably 1/3 to 1/2 as fast as that, while an average human on a phone probably types 1/5 as fast as that.

But for me speed isn't even the issue. I can dictate to Siri at near-regular-speech speeds -- and then spend another 200% of the time that took to fix what it got wrong. I have reasonable diction and enunciation, and speech to text is just that bad while walking down the street. If this is as accurate as they're showing, it would be worth it just for the accuracy.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-09 00:25:16+00:00
The environmental parameters reminds me a little of the old space 4x, Stars!.

Cute game. I break it out a couple times a year. There's been some great seed shop books (Watts's Freeze Frame Revolution, KSR's Aurora, Noumenon, Children of Time), and this is pretty different but has the spirit.
by nabla9 | 2025-09-09 00:25:35+00:00
Less than 10% of Tesla's value is in existing business. Tesla's revenue hasn't grown in three years

1. Car company (true) 2. energy company (eh) 3. robotaxi (next year since 2018) 4. robots ...

Google, Amazon Robotics/Kiva, Hyundai/Boston Dynamics, even Nvidia are ahead of Tesla in AI+robotics.
by halyconWays | 2025-09-09 00:25:51+00:00
From your link, I wish they would answer this, and they've been asked numerous times, and to my knowledge have avoided the question (which is very concerning to me):

>This is excellent news! Will there also be official documentation on the backup format, potentially even official tooling like signalbackup-tools[0] to access/parse backups offline? I'm asking because, having used Signal/TextSecure for 10 years now, my backups are worth a lot to me (obviously) and there have been times when I would have liked to mine & process my backed-up data. (Extract media from conversations in an automated manner, build a more elaborate search, …)

I'm like that poster and backup all my chats obsessively, since way back in the day, and experienced a period with Signal where it was impossible for me to access my own data because of their position.
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-09 00:27:40+00:00
> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is.

The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!
by tzs | 2025-09-09 00:28:14+00:00
> he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.

I'm confused by this. Zuckerberg has persistently had image problems. Sometimes it has improved for a bit but saying it has been rehabilitated seems to be a major overstatement.

Cook, on the other hand, has generally always been positive with the public except for some skepticism early that he could succeed as successor to Jobs.
by tw04 | 2025-09-09 00:28:21+00:00
>I'd love to see OpenWRT take a (deserved) bite out of the "SMB firewall vendors" like Netgate or OPNsense. Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway

Why? You don't want competition in the space?

>Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway

Huh? The older edgerouters were based on vyatta. The newer ones on a custom linux distro, neither of which are OpenWRT. They hired the original author of pfsense to build them a firewall based on Debian from scratch when they realized vyatta wasn't going to meet their needs. The UDM kernel is very much not OpenWRT

https://github.com/fabianishere/udm-kernel

Being excited about OpenWRT is great but spreading bad information and for reasons I can't fathom hoping for the downfall of other players in the market, not so much.
by giulianob | 2025-09-09 00:28:22+00:00
I just started using OpenWrt on Incus via LXC and it works really well. The most difficult part was just learning the config file. It looks like upgrading OpenWrt (esp. on LXC) is the tricky part though so not looking forward to that. I considered moving it to a VM so upgrading it is easier but it runs so smooth on Incus.
by the_af | 2025-09-09 00:28:25+00:00
Yeah, and how does drive-by downvoting encourage intellectually stimulating discussion?

I think my opinion was fair and interesting, and also on-topic, since TFA goes into a discussion about how a repetitive, punishingly difficult game such as Silksong shouldn't be engaging but it is (for the author), to which I replied: games as hard and "feels like work" like Hollow Knight turn me off. Difficulty is definitely the problem.

My wording, "am I the only one [...]" invited discussion of the kind we are supposed to welcome here, is it not? And we welcome discussions of art which are inherently subjective.
by cataflam | 2025-09-09 00:28:28+00:00
I mostly agree and I do use one.

You only need read the whole thread however to see reasons why this would sometimes not be enough: sometimes the password manager does not auto-fill, so the user can think it's one of those cases, or they're on mobile and they don't have the extension there, or...

As a matter of fact, he does use one, that didn't save him, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45175125
by loughnane | 2025-09-09 00:29:37+00:00
I get that. I also read many old books. Usually I can get context out of the sentence itself, but i'll occasionally bust out my phone. I see why it's nice, I just don't see why it's a top-tier feature.

Each their own of course. I can imagine if I was looking up 2-10x as many words as I am now then the convenience would indeed be much more important.
by mandevil | 2025-09-09 00:29:56+00:00
"Tesla is on track toward a second year of sales decline." - from the article

Consecutive years of sales declines is a situation where it does not matter if the market is growing or shrinking, it's bad for a company. The only way to grow if absolute sales go down is to raise margins on each individual unit.

"But with weakening sales and a host of competitors, Tesla has had to cut prices in recent years, squeezing its margins and worrying investors."

Hmmmm, I guess maybe the author of the article understands this better than you think?
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-09 00:30:32+00:00
> How much power is saved by soldering the memory or CPU instead of using a socket? A negligible amount if any; the socket itself has no significant power draw.

This isn't quite true. When the whole chip is idling at 1-2W, 0.1W of socket power is 10%. Some of Apple's integration almost certainly save power (e.g. putting storage controllers for the SSD on the SOC, having tightly integrated display controllers, etc).
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-09 00:31:33+00:00
> The question is how to “get people to understand that art isn’t an asset class,” Schwartzmann added. “That’s not how you should be collecting,”

> Valentine said ... "Asking $20,000 for a work in an artist’s first show is unsustainable"

none of the separate participants in this article are willing to acknowledge that these are related problems.

there is no price discovery in the art world, and it was only just beginning to happen in the pandemic era flush with cash

when you question the price or try to find any rational trend, the gallery director gaslights you into the prior quote "you should just love the piece!" okay but why should I love it at this price "because it will be another price in the future!" but why will it be another price who sets that price "we the gallery do! it moves up over time!" how does that work "you should just love the piece!"
by rtpg | 2025-09-09 00:31:39+00:00
Was a bit surprised at this, but looking into the packages in a work project that require six, a _huge_ chunk of them are packages that are still explicitly supporting Python 2.7 still (usually stuff related to operations).

I believe if you pay money to certain repo maintainers like red hat you can still have a supported version of Python 2.7.
by mosura | 2025-09-09 00:32:23+00:00
This is really the art as speculation fad coming home to roost. The people actually interested in art as art are now on things like Instagram buying direct from the artists with very little gatekeeping either by art schools or galleries.

It would be tempting to see if there is a correlation in when the “legit” art world price going off a cliff and the NFT bubble, because that suckered in a lot of the idiot end of the speculator crowd.
by Rhubarrbb | 2025-09-09 00:32:26+00:00
I use immich every day and I'm a big fan of it, but the search feature is dismal and still falls short of any other major image hosting provider:

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/8377

The way that semantic search works, they don't cap a relevance score (since it's all relative), and they don't allow you to sort through some kind of time index either.
by alisonatwork | 2025-09-09 00:32:56+00:00
You're not thinking about it the right way.

Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc.

When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-09 00:33:07+00:00
The strange thing about it was that even if IBM wasn't that big in in valuation, it was huge in employment and just having a footprint over many different cities all over the country The world and places like Binghamton people still feel betrayed that IBM had this huge presence and they just up and left, often leaving a toxic waste site behind. From janitors to programmers and salespeople and forklift drivers I personally know 10+ people who worked for IBM in the triple cities.

NVIDIA? I don't know a soul.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-09 00:33:31+00:00
Various contexts influence whether or not an internet user will be resilient to censorship attempts. Users are more resilient to censorship if they are aware that information is being manipulated. This awareness of censorship leads to users finding ways to circumvent it. Awareness of censorship also allows users to factor this manipulation into their belief systems. Knowledge of censorship also offers some citizens incentive to try to discover information that is being concealed. In contrast, those that lack awareness of censorship cannot easily compensate for information manipulation.[77]
by omnicognate | 2025-09-09 00:34:06+00:00
We don't understand individual neurons either. There is no level on which we understand the brain in the way we very much do understand LLMs. And as much as people like to handwave about how mysterious the weights are we actually perfectly understand both how the weights arise and how they result in the model's outputs. As I mentioned in [1] what we can't do is "explain" individual behaviours with simple stories that omit unnecessary details, but that's just about desiring better (or more convenient/useful) explanations than the utterly complete one we already have.

As for most humans not being mathematicians, it's entirely irrelevant. I gave an example of something that so far LLMs have not shown an ability to do. It's chosen to be something that can be clearly pointed to and for which any change in the status quo should be obvious if/when it happens. Naturally I think that the mechanism humans use to do this is fundamental to other aspects of their behaviour. The fact that only a tiny subset of humans are able to apply it in this particular specialised way changes nothing. I have no idea what you mean by "goalpost-shifting" in this context.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-09 00:34:07+00:00
> If the market grows in size and you’re able to grow revenue and profit, reduced market share in and of itself doesn’t matter.

The Tesla story and its high valuation were based on the idea that Tesla had won the car market, others couldn’t catch up, and Tesla was going to be doing laps around the competition with all of their additional business lines that grew out of their class-leading EV business.

If their EV business is losing market share, that really is a problem for the narrative. They could be fine as an EV company, but they’ve sold themselves as something far more.

> Tesla's overall annual revenue has continued to grow from $11.75 billion in 2017

2017 was forever ago in technology and economic terms. The most important problem right now is that their revenue isn’t growing while everyone else is getting better at EVs.
by redwood | 2025-09-09 00:34:34+00:00
The vanity of owning rare things is all too much... NFTs are really the culmination of the phenomenon. I'm all for owning beautiful things and paying if it's something handmade. But once it becomes such an extreme out of wack status symbol kept alive by a global elite it's just feeding the monster. The worst is when it's an expensive status symbol and still mass produced I suppose
by hn_acc1 | 2025-09-09 00:34:47+00:00
So basically, the "ideal" state of a human is to be 100% active driving agents to vibe code whatever you need, based on every movement, every thought? Can our brains even handle having every thought being intentional and interpreted as such without collapsing (nervous breakdown)?

I guess I've always been more of a "work to live" type.
by stevage | 2025-09-09 00:34:49+00:00
My experience with taking notes in meetings is definitely that the brain is the bottleneck, not the fingers. There are times where I literally just type what the person is saying, dictation style (ie, recording a client's exact words, often helpful for reference, even later in the meeting). I can usually keep up. But if I'm trying to formulate original thoughts, or synthesise what I've heard, or find a way to summarise what they have been saying - that's where I fall behind, even though the total number of words I need to write is actually much smaller.

So this definitely wouldn't help me here. Realistically though, there ought to be better solutions like something that just listens to the meeting and automatically takes notes.
by everdrive | 2025-09-09 00:35:09+00:00
Thanks, this is a really useful reply. With regard to identifying privacy-focused users in your system, I'm sort of imagining the following scenario:

- user has a bunch of privacy mitigations and tweaks in their browser

- user logs into your commerce site, searches for stuff to buy

- commerce site knows who the user is since they're logged in, and per your comment can infer whether or not they're wealthy, have kids, etc. based on the user activity and whether or not the user is likely have an expensive screen & GPU, etc.

Does that sound right? That's really interesting, and something I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't really thought of. In other words, I've spent a lot of time worrying about cross-site tracking, and advertising domains, etc. However, if I'm purchasing from Amazon they know it's me since I'm just shipping to my own house. Even in a scenario where my browser is magically un-fingerprint-able, it's obviously me since I'm using my account and shipping to my house.

In other words, I may potentially have prevented a bunch of cross-site tracking and fingerprinting. Perhaps when I go to washingtonpost.com they don't know I'm the same person that Amazon knows about. (that might be a best case scenario) However, by virtue of the fact that my privacy config is operating all the time, Amazon has also learned something about me I didn't necessarily need to tell them -- ie, that I'm privacy-focused.

Do you think that's a fair assessment, or am I missing the point?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-09 00:35:20+00:00
Political issues aside, Tesla has a variety problem. If we converge the split between midrange and premium, their lineup consists of a midsize sedan, a midsize SUV, and a niche truck.

Early on this was in their favor, but with more automakers entering the fray with serious attempts to compete, they’re going to have to add at least a couple more models to reman competitive: something in the vein of a Chevy Bolt on one end and an SUV that’s the next step up in size from the Y/X on the other. A more conventional truck that more directly competes with the F-150 also couldn’t hurt.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-09 00:35:31+00:00
I hold KISS above most "Enterprise Patterns" with YAGNI as a close second. I think abstractions should be used to reduce complexity with code as opposed to making it harder to reason about. If a pattern increases complexity in understanding, then it should make sense in more cases than not.

I'm also a fan of feature-oriented project structures. I want the unit test file in or next to the code it's testing. For UI projects, similar with React it's about the component or feature not the type of thing. For APIs I will put request handlers with the feature along with models and other abstractions that go together based on what they fulfill, not the type of class they are.

I consider this practice more intuitively discoverable. You go into a directory for "Users" and you will see functionality related to users... this can be profile crud or the endpoint handlers. Security may or may not be a different feature depending on how you grow your app (Users, Roles, Permissions, etc). For that matter, I'd more often rather curate a single app that does what it needs vs. dozens of apps in a singular larger project. I've seen .Net web projects strewn across 60+ applications in two different solutions before. It took literally weeks to do what should take half a day at most.

All for one website/app to get published. WHY?!? I'm not opposed to smaller/micro services where they make sense either. But keep it all as simple as you possibly can. Try to make what you create/use/consume/produce as simple as you can too. Can you easily use/consume/interact with what you make from a system in $NewLanguage without too much headache? I don't like to have to rely on special libraries being available everywhere.
by _mu | 2025-09-09 00:36:17+00:00
> now you have to be careful how and when you use the term "refactor" because the people who ought to be supportive hear "wasting time".

Programmers had a hand in this, sadly: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/RefactoringMalapropism.html

Nowadays people throw the term "refactoring" around quite loosely, usually meaning "rewrite" when that was not at all the original meaning of the term!

A little bit like how "vibe coding" quickly went from one definition to another even though people should have known better.
by stevage | 2025-09-09 00:37:10+00:00
I must be such a rarity around here, but if I could improve a hundred things about my life, none of those would make the list. Well, possibly the third one - more convenient ways to text people.

I guess I also kind of enjoy the physical sensations of putting a key in a lock, opening the door etc. Definitely don't want a digital-only existence.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-09 00:37:55+00:00
This "bad behavior" could easily regress into encrypted files stored on CD-R discs and distributed via the postal service at any time. However, we will all suffer from an invasion of privacy due to constant, non-transparent online monitoring. The real criminals won't notice anything, and the rest of us will simply accept that we are being constantly watched by mega-corporations, the police, and the government.
by jltsiren | 2025-09-09 00:37:58+00:00
If you are a PhD student or a postdoc, you are probably working in a PI's lab and often funded from their grants. It's also common that nobody else at the university understands the project well enough to replace the PI as your supervisor. That creates incentives to avoid reporting abuse and to tolerate unhealthy levels of toxicity, as the likely alternatives are switching to a new lab (and delaying your career) or leaving the academia.