MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ultrarunner | 2025-09-23 23:42:37+00:00
At some level these platforms are the public square and facilitate public discussion. In fact, Google has explicitly deprioritized public forum sites (e.g. PHPbb) in preference to forums like YouTube. Surely there is a difference between declining to host and distribute adult material and enforcing a preferred viewpoint on a current topic.

Sure, Google doesn't need to host anything they don't want to; make it all Nazi apologia if they thing it serves their shareholders. But doing so and silencing all other viewpoints in that particular medium is surely not a net benefit for society, independent of how it affects Google.
by maroon_unperson | 2025-09-23 23:42:53+00:00
Dang is a great moderator, but I think it's a reach to say hackers don't find this interesting, it's not getting upvotes from nowhere.

Hackers have a natural curiosity for the world, and that includes politics too.

From phrack and cult of the dead cow, to chaos computer club and even pg's own writings, none can be described as completely a-political.

The ability for an increasingly authoritarian leader to wave a hand and ban a mostly exaggerated threat is exactly the type of dystopia hackers have been writing about for years. I may not see it that way but surely that is interesting and worth discussing!

The flagging and flame war suppression mechanisms do us a disservice by silencing these topics and relegating them to an unseen graveyard.
by breadwinner | 2025-09-23 23:43:22+00:00
It is social media that is the root problem.

On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
by orlp | 2025-09-23 23:43:30+00:00
Aarch64 does indeed have a proper atomic max, but even on x86-64 you can get a wait-free atomic max as long as you only need to support integers up to 64. In that case you can simply do a `lock or` with 1 << i as your maximum. You can even support larger sizes by using multiple registers, e.g. four 64-bit registers for a u8 maximum.

In most cases it's even better to just store a maximum per thread separately and loop over all threads once to compute the current maximum if you really need it.
by jjk166 | 2025-09-23 23:44:12+00:00
Well work on making those resources available instead of, again, informing CSAM creators how to better hide their activities. I fail to see how repeatedly removing CSAM from a single IP address is more of a boon to CSAM distributors than playing whackamole with multiple IP addresses. Wasting law enforcement resources on other things while CSAM producers are free to operate is a separate, and in my opinion much more pressing issue.
by unpopularopp | 2025-09-23 23:44:23+00:00
I'm probably the extreme minority on HN (0.00001%) but I pretty much never used any CLI applications. Just never really needed them. But recently at work (we use Macs) I had some tasks which need the Terminal.app so I kinda tried to dig in and learn some stuff but whenever I feel I already know something (more or less) there is always some new stuff entering the picture next day. Shell, console, terminal... now a terminal _emulator_ :insert exploding galaxy brain meme:
by nocoiner | 2025-09-23 23:44:46+00:00
Here are his recommendations.

> First, eliminate forward-looking earnings guidance. This practice forces companies to make public commitments about future performance, creating enormous pressure to meet those predictions regardless of changing circumstances.

Honest question - are companies forced to make forward looking projections? I would have assumed the whole reason they have a legal safe harbor for making forward looking statements that turn out to be wrong is because companies WANT to be able to make these projections as an IR exercise, but maybe I’m wrong.

> Second, create accounting treatments that allow companies to separate long-term innovation investments from operational expenses, giving investors clearer visibility into both current performance and future potential.

I am fairly sure that every accounting rule that exists is because someone has abused the numbers, but OK, let’s give companies more freedom. What could go wrong. (And wasn’t capitalizing opex basically what brought down WorldCom?)

> Third, develop new metrics and incentives that reward patient capital deployment and long-term value creation, not just quarterly financial performance.

Ah yes, innovative metrics like McDonnell-Douglas’s “return on net assets.” Last I heard, they had taken over their biggest competitor. Mission accomplished!

Wasn’t this the guy who wrote some ridiculous piece about how HP buying Palm was a terrific idea but it all fell apart because he was out of the office or something?
by rlpb | 2025-09-23 23:45:09+00:00
A million people adding 12MB each would be 12TB in increased storage sales. Is that really significant in increased profit if you set it off against the cost of providing the storage, the computational cost of generating 12TB of images, plus the salaries of the developers to write and then maintain this feature?

I think it's more likely that they're doing it because they think it makes their product better, increasing sales that way instead.
by latent22 | 2025-09-23 23:45:24+00:00
Hey alex-moon one feature you had issues was that HTMX does not process server generated shadow DOM content because it uses the standard old DOM parser. Next point release should have https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/pull/3185 merged hopefully which will allow the use of Document.parseHTMLUnsafe() which is the modern browser replacement that does support this use case but it might go behind a new config flag.
by binary132 | 2025-09-23 23:45:29+00:00
Just waiting on llama.cpp support :)

I usually use GPT-oss-120B with CPU MoE offloading. It writes at about 10tps, which is useful enough for the limited things I use it for. But I’m curious how Q3 Next will work (or whether I’ll be able to offload and run it with GPU acceleration at all.)

(4090)
by dang | 2025-09-23 23:45:43+00:00
Can you please stop posting like this? You've done it repeatedly, it's against the site guidelines, and it's destructive of the curious conversation we're trying for here.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note these ones:

"Please don't fulminate."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot in other threads as well. We ban such accounts, so if you'd please fix this, we'd appreciate it.
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-23 23:46:16+00:00
Sure, but I'm not remotely blaming Biden[1]. A lot of tech companies took this on themselves, seeing themselves as arbiters of speech for a better world. Some admin (Trump admin) people might have given them suggestions, but they didn't have to do the strong-arm stuff, and the results weren't remotely helpful.

We already had a pretty strong undercurrent of contrarianism regarding public health already -- it's absolutely endemic on here, for instance, and was long before COVID -- but it mainstreamed it. Before COVID I had a neighbour that would always tell me hushed tones that he knows what's really going on because he's been learning about it on YouTube, etc. It was sad, but he was incredibly rare. Now that's like every other dude.

And over 80% of the US public got the vaccine! If we were to do COVID again, I doubt you'd hit even 40% in the US now. The problem is dramatically worse.

[1] That infamous Zuck interview with Rogan, where Zuck licked Trump's anus to ingratiate himself with the new admin, was amazing in that he kept blaming Biden for things Meta did long before Biden's admin took office or even took shape. Things he did at the urging of the Trump admin pt 1. I still marvel that he could be so astonishingly deceptive and people don't spit in his lying face for it.
by godelski | 2025-09-23 23:46:45+00:00
I recently migrated from vim to neovim and you can just migrate everything. I forgot where I found this but put this in ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

" Load vim configs

set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after let &packpath = &runtimepath source ~/.vimrc

Then in my zshrc (well... I organize differently) I have the function

function _exists() { command -v "$1" &> /dev/null } alias_vim() { if (_exists nvim) then alias vi='nvim' alias vim='nvim' elif (_exists vim) then alias vi='vim' fi }
Ask HN: How Do You Learn to Love Your Job?
by EmilienCosson | 2025-09-23 23:46:46+00:00
We often hear the advice “choose a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” But in reality, many of us don’t always have the luxury of picking the perfect career. Sometimes we end up in roles out of necessity, circumstance, or because it was simply the available path.

My question is: are there ways to learn to love (or at least enjoy) the work you already do?

I’m curious about practical strategies. For example:

- How do you find meaning in tasks that don’t feel inspiring?

- Can reframing, curiosity, or focusing on small wins actually shift your mindset?

- Have you personally managed to go from “this is just a job” to “I actually enjoy this”? If so, what helped?

I’d love to hear from people who managed to cultivate genuine interest, passion, or at least peace with their current profession.
by leakycap | 2025-09-23 23:46:50+00:00
A car dealership hired me to help them change systems. Their 20+ year existing vendor suggested screenshots when asked how they could access/export their data.

Anyway, we Did better than Printshots but only had that option because the data was all on-premise.

If export options even exist from cloud providers, the incredibly slow speed and poor reliability of download/restores doesn't help.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-23 23:47:53+00:00
IMO, the issue is that "Scientific computing" covers several disparate use cases.

When you care about the math, Mathematica. It's a replacement for several pages of hand-written math, or a chalkboard.

When you care about the result, MatLab. It's a replacement for your calculator, and maybe Excel.

When you care about the resulting software? Python/Julia/Fortran.
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-23 23:48:04+00:00
Surprised the article didn't mention the most fitting sense in which life is computation, which is at the biosphere level. Life can be characterized as a (recursive) search function executing continuously over billions of years. It seeks out new environments, reacts to changes in the environment at all scales between molecules and mountains. Life is a vast, distributed visitor pattern whose payload is itself.
by mulmen | 2025-09-23 23:48:08+00:00
Yes that’s how free markets work. Your idea has to be free to die in obscurity.

Compelled speech is not free speech. You have no right to an audience. The existence of a wide distribution platform does not grant you a right to it.

These arguments fall completely flat because it’s always about the right to distribute misinformation. It’s never about posting porn or war crimes or spam. That kind of curation isn’t contentious.

Google didn’t suddenly see the light and become free speech absolutists. They caved to political pressure and are selectively allowing the preferred misinformation of the current administration.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-09-23 23:48:12+00:00
They start with minority groups and most people don't think it will affect them. Until one day, one of their associates are taken away.

Then they are faced with the cognitive dissonance that either:

1. the authorities are good and correct

2. or the authorities have been evil and horribly wrong the whole time with your support which makes you complicit.

And no one wants to think of themselves as being complicit in evil. So mental effort is expended to convince themselves it must be 1.

Most people have heard of this quote: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

But I prefer it stated this way:

"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept"
by Scoundreller | 2025-09-23 23:48:59+00:00
> 100,000 SIM cards housed in “SIM servers

> all being within 35 miles of midtown Manhattan

Firstly, these are in fixtures that hold 4 or 8x as many SIMs as radios, so they can’t all be online at the same time.

How many SIMs are active ~35 miles of Manhattan?

Crashing the cell network is fear mongering.

Here’s what I think they’re mostly used for: gray market VOIP termination. Get an unlimited plan and charge US call termination at 0.5 cents/minute. There are 44000 minutes in a month so your potential gross revenue is $220. Sure you can’t run it 24/7, but plans are a lot cheaper.

Then get darker:

As youre doing that, charge for premium SMS reception, ie: validating new Uber or Gmail or whatever accounts as the numbers are “fresh”. Then after that, probably SMS spam.

That’s all low bitrate and easy on the towers until you get creative with data. Big companies have no choice but to be more lenient on mobile traffic because it’s all CG-NAT’d. You can’t do IP bans unless you want to block entire providers and block legit users.
by Bender | 2025-09-23 23:49:28+00:00
In my career the only time certifications came up was for a B2B relationship where the customer wanted {n} people to be certified in AIX or HP-UX. There was also a B2B customer that wanted {n} people to have RHCE's for Redhat because they were using it for Oracle and the DBA's had to be trained on Oracle. But that's it really. I have never seen anyone in leadership care about it at any company I interviewed at for the purposes of hiring.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-23 23:49:43+00:00
>Any computer program (without network stuff or inputs for a time (assume your computer has a true RNG module)) you could run is a Markov process. Just say that your state space is the space of possible ways the memory of the computer can be.

No. The entire computer is a Markov process in that situation. An individual process may still remember its past states and therefore not be Markovian. See the example I gave about allowing or blocking transactions.
by catlover76 | 2025-09-23 23:49:58+00:00
Your point has some merit, but overall the Israeli government's policy for the past several decades has been to kill and imprison large numbers of them; violently displace them from the West Bank with increasing speed; refer to them as "vermin"; starve the population deliberately; shoot at children; and more!

It seems pretty fair to say that Israel--including, to be clear, a large chunk of its population--wants to annihilate them, but is trying to do it slowly enough so that it can maintain some plausible deniability. The only concrete indication to the contrary is the plan to send the population of Gaza to the Sudan or wherever.
by leakycap | 2025-09-23 23:50:24+00:00
Incredible! For only $1,999.95 I can get a DVD version of the repair manual for my 1990s VW Cabrio

https://books4cars.com/bookLandingPages/96_VA35.php

~~~

That said, I tried every esoteric car I've owned and it had a shop manual even for things that only sold 3,000 in the US per year. So a great resource if you're lucky enough not to own a 90s Cabriolet.
by ironman1478 | 2025-09-23 23:50:35+00:00
In the article it mentions that Google felt pressured by the government to take the content down. Implying that they wouldn't have if it wasn't for the government. I wasn't accusing Google of anything, but rather the government.

Maybe it's not banning, but it doesn't feel right? Google shouldn't have been forced to do that and really what should've happened is that the people that spread genuine harmful disinformation, like injecting bleach, the ivermectin stuff or the anti-vax stuff, should've faced legal punishment.
by someNameIG | 2025-09-23 23:50:46+00:00
It's more that people in general* connect to personal stories far more than impersonal factual data. It's easy to connect to seeing people say they had adverse reactions to a vaccine than statistical data showing it's safer to get vaccinated than not. It's also easier to believe conspiracies, its easier to think bad things happen due to the intent of bad people, than the world being a complex hard to understand place with no intent behind things happening.

These are just things that some of the population will be more attracted to, I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, lockdowns, or mandates. At most the blame can be at institutions for lacking in their ability to do effective scientific communication.

*And this skews more to less educated and intelligent.
by typeofhuman | 2025-09-23 23:50:52+00:00
Not OP, but we did learn the US federal government was instructing social media sites like Twitter to remove content it found displeasing. This is known as jawboning and is against the law.

SCOTUS. Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, holds that governments cannot coerce private entities into censoring speech they disfavor, even if they do not issue direct legal orders.

This was a publicly announced motivation for Elon Musk buying Twitter. Because of which we know the extent of this illegal behavior.

Mark Zuckerberg has also publicly stated Meta was asked to remove content by the US government.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-23 23:51:48+00:00
> The minimum house temperature your home should be kept at to avoid damp, mould and condensation is 18°C, according to health and energy experts.

That article and the supposed experts are idiotic. Condensation is a function of relative temperatures and humidities. If your house is warmer than outdoors, then you're not going to get condensation from outdoor air.
by kbenson | 2025-09-23 23:52:21+00:00
Which is mostly irrelevant because I have a few rack units of free space, with free power and bandwidth I can use if I want, but I haven't bothered because I don't have a need worth shelling out the money for a modern platform to put in it.

I'm well aware of the costs of power and the lgostics of colocation, this is purely about how I'm more willing to spend $100-$200 for a toy than I am $1000-$2000.
by n4bz0r | 2025-09-23 23:53:08+00:00
This can't be right. How are they still afloat?

Actually, that's the question (or rather the feeling) I had even before seeing these numbers. Just by reading the docs and looking at everything they built (and how they built it) made me wonder if they spend more than they make. That's a really funny feeling I never had before. Like, surely economies can't be that forgiving when it comes to polishing things. Is that what's happening to the company? Mere overspending?
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-23 23:53:12+00:00
This is the kind of evolved computer science that was going on when I was a teenager. Have an upvote eig!

My addition: it's funny for how much speculation we get in the, "hard cognitive science" (RIP) that in lieu of the big insights we get from Godel, Turing, Russell that many/most undergraduates and even post-graduates still haven't internalized Wittgenstein's work especially the Tractatus. I feel like it gets us to, "the questions you're asking about how life works and the questions about what is at the core of logic and mathematics (language) are definitely related but not in any of the fundamental ways you hope they are..."

For the uninitiated-- try reading the thing in one sitting. It takes about an hour:

https://wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Tractatus_Logico...
by sterlind | 2025-09-23 23:53:24+00:00
am I understanding correctly that Chat Control will use AI to scan the text of every private message, and automatically report suspected "grooming attempts" to police? how the hell do they think that will work? does the AI know that the message recipient is a minor? that the message sender is an adult? that "want to meet up tonight?" is sent by a pedophile to a stranger's kid for an illicit rendezvous, and not by a dad to his son to work on a science fair project?

this is just bananas crazy. so many lives will be ruined by false positives. the chilling effect will be like an Arctic snowstorm. and any actual groomers will find ways to disable it.
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-23 23:53:38+00:00
> No you don't? Why not tell your grandma about PowerPC and Motorola 68000 Macs too while you're giving her pointless information about CPUs Apple used in the past.

Yes, I do, when Apple advertises new features in macOS and for whatever reason, they just don't work on their Macs. Why? Because some of their machines are Intel-based and Apple chose not to implement certain features they expect on their Intel hardware.

Similarly, I have to do the same for software. While fat binaries are common, sometimes they end up with ARM binaries that just won't work. Similarly, the ability to run their iOS apps doesn't exist on Intel Macs and they don't know why.

> I... can't even imagine what scenario you could possibly be running into any of this so I don't know how to argue against it.

My family member spent thousands of dollars on software licenses for their business. For years, they could use that software on their Macs, until they couldn't. I'm talking about things like Office and tax software.

Similarly, try using an old macOS version that older Macs get stuck on. You eventually cannot even get a working safe browser anywhere, because the APIs Firefox and Chrome depend on change between macOS versions due to API churn, eventually deprecating old macOS versions altogether when it comes to new releases. Eventually, the entire Mac app ecosystem does this and the only solution is to either upgrade your macOS version through hacks or buy a new Mac with an updated macOS version and then experience that again in a few years.

Then there are driver issues. I have family members that have perfectly good music production hardware that drivers no longer work for. For some of it, it looks like 3rd party companies developed paid drivers for new macOS versions. Same thing with touch screens, had to go down the paid driver route for those, too. That's just not a problem on Linux.

> You describe using a Mac like the black and white "before" footage from an infomercial showing that previously the only way to cut a tomato is smushing it with the side of a dull knife

I mean, that's one way to interpret being honest about my experience as tech support for my family's Macs and other computers over the years. The Intel -> Arm transition + Apple's propensity for API and OS churn affects their users who aren't buying new hardware every time a new version comes out.

> If a Mac is too difficult for someone, Linux is not the solution.

I'd stand by the statement that if a Chromebook would suit a user's needs, so would Linux. Both require a curated experience and there should be no expectation of users setting it up themselves. You can make computers running Linux into solid email/Facebook/Zoom/office/web/etc machines a la ChromeOS, and in my experience, that keeps people happy.

Obviously, Linux is not a universal solution, Macs or other software/hardware might be the right solution. I wouldn't subject musicians in my family to Linux, but it has kept my older family members online and safe.