MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seabrookmx | 2025-09-24 19:04:26+00:00
> The joysticks are connected to a pilot hydraulic circuit, which proportionally moves the cylinders in the main hydraulic circuit which ultimately moves the excavator joints

I've actually spent a decent amount of time running an excavator, as my Dad owns a construction / road building company. It was a great summer job!

An important note about the pilot hydraulics is that they _provide feedback to the operator_. I would encourage any system that moves these controls on behalf of a remote human operator or AI to add strain gauges or some other way to measure this force feedback so that this data isn't lost.

The handful of "drive by wire" pieces of equipment that my Dad or other skilled operators in my family have ran were universally panned, because the operators are isolated from this feedback and have a harder time telling when the machine is struggling or when their inputs are not sufficiently smooth. In the automotive world, skilled drivers have similar complaints about fully electronic steering or braking systems, as opposed to traditional vacuum or hydraulic boosting approaches where your foot still has a direct hydraulic connection to the brake pads.
by seec | 2025-09-24 19:05:05+00:00
I don't understand why you went with a single licence valid for all platforms. Clearly each client is a different product on each platform, even if it might have the same core functionality.

I don't know what the original price was and I understand why he is mad, but that was a poor business decision. If you overpromise that's kind of on you, plenty of companies have been burned by such behavior.
by vegadw | 2025-09-24 19:05:21+00:00
- making music, making musical tools (soldering together pedals, making VCV rack modules etc.

- Longboarding

- Gaming (Minecraft, MiniGolf Games, and RoR2, mostly - all socially)

- Writing, mostly for my website ( opguides.info ) but the ocassional fiction story too

- Fursuitting and attending furry events

- Projects? Just like, generally making things. I'm always happiest when I have a few things in the works. It's usually one-off. Like, recently I did acrylic pour art. I'll probably never do it again, but it was fun.
by jmyeet | 2025-09-24 19:05:27+00:00
> Lolwut?

This is why I used this example because you've just demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In late feudalism, serfs would sell the food they grew to pay their fedual landlord, an early from of taxation.

> Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people.

Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.

Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating a new food desert.

As for locally grown food being expensive, that's not really true once you look at the bigger picture. We've seen this pattern play out in every country the IMF and Wolrd Bank have gotten involved in. The IMF/WB place conditions such that local farmers can no longer produce crops to feed their populations. Those they have to buy from the West. Instead, farmers have to grow export crops to earn foreign currency to service debt.

In the short term this lowers food prices but forces all the farmers off their land. They then have to move to cities to seek work and/or become a drain on the state.

Inevitably, with and without manipulation, the local currency collapses and locals can no longer afford that foreign food. It's entirely predatory. A system was destroyed for foreign bankers. This is almost exactly what happened in Haiti and Somalia, to name just two examples.

Now if the community owned that supermarket, this predation just wouldn't happen. In other words, it's the worker's relationship to the means of production.

[1]: https://www.worldhunger.org/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxp...
by kiitos | 2025-09-24 19:05:33+00:00
I am not really sure what you're talking about

RPC is "remote procedure call", emphasis on "remote", meaning you always necessarily gonna be serializing/deserializing the information over some kind of wire, between discrete/different nodes, with discrete/distinct address spaces

a client request by definition can't include anything that can't be serialized, serialization is the ground truth requirement for any kind of RPC...

a server doesn't provide "an object" in response to a query, it provides "a response payload", which is at most a snapshot of some state it had at the time of the request, it's not as if there is any expectation that this serialized state is gonna be consistent between nodes
by internet_points | 2025-09-24 19:05:37+00:00
but now it's on HN and people are discussing this idea that's been thrown out and some people agree and some don't and some bring up how it's similar to Bertrand de Jouvenal and others start thinking of de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam (I'm sure you could draw a connection to James C. Scott too) and before you know it you've got the beginnings of a bibliography right here in these threads
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-24 19:05:38+00:00
Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not).

I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize.

More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-24 19:05:39+00:00
I think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because:

1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.

2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.

3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
by mhashemi | 2025-09-24 19:05:39+00:00
Yep, from a founder's perspective PH is mostly an SEO thing. I'm not sure if it's the _best_ SEO thing, but I guess that's part of being a first-time founder!

Re: feeling too frugal, my friends came up with a name for it, "poor man brain" lol. I talk a little about it here: https://sedimental.org/announcing_finfam.html
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-24 19:05:52+00:00
You also have a "vote" as a consumer. The market could be much more responsive than a "democratic" system.

For instance, say you think pesticides are a bad thing. You can get 49% of the population to vote to the ban them and what do you accomplish? Nothing

No wonder people look at politics with despair.

If you can get 5% of the population to eat organic food on the other hand, you've reduced pesticide use by 5%. You create trade associations, the idea of organic food spreads more widely and maybe someday you get enough support that you can change the law.

That's hope.
by vrmiguel | 2025-09-24 19:06:03+00:00
Not sure I get your point. One can definitely "get good" at problem solving. Isn't that the whole purpose of Leetcode and whatnot?

I struggled with Rust at first but now it feels quite natural, and is the language I use at work and for my open-source work.

I was not "mentally deficient" when I struggled with Rust (at least that I know of :v), while you could say I had a skill issue with the language
by BizarroLand | 2025-09-24 19:06:38+00:00
I mean, his words are the words of a white supremacist. His ideals are the ideals of a white supremacist.

Just because he isn't calling for war, murder, famine, pestilence, plague, death, and the fourth Reich all to fall on people of other colors does not mean that he isn't a white supremacist.

Like I said. It's easy to overlook. No one should long for a "pure" society.

There are no pure humans on this planet outside of a select group of african people who never interbred with neanderthal or denisovians, and as the last bastion of "pure" humans they seem fairly well content to not enforce their superiority on other people.

https://www.universityherald.com/articles/70130/20170321/har...

So, let's all just be mutts and get along. Love who you love. Live where you want to live.

And let other people do whatever the hell they want to do as long as it does not hurt anyone.
by procaryote | 2025-09-24 19:06:45+00:00
I have a vague memory of using dead code removing javascript toolchains pretty long ago, like the closure compiler

I'm not sure the dependency tree madness actually translates to smaller code in the end either, given the bloat in the average web app... but to be fair it would be perfectly plausible that javascript developers opted for micro-libraries motivated by performance, even if it wasn't the effect of that decision.
by fgfarben | 2025-09-24 19:07:22+00:00
My pet idea is that Western societies should prescribe antibiotics at random to a different tiny fraction of the elderly population each month / year.

People who suffer from unexplained / untreatable diseases like arthritis or MS might get some relief, while there would be an added pressure on the pharma industry to innovate in antibiotic development by accelerating the loss of existing antibiotic efficacy through the evolution of resistance.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-24 19:07:30+00:00
You don't cancel them when there isn't any show on that you're watching, and then resubscribe?

Like I feel like it's pretty common to be either a Netflix or Disney/Hulu household all the time, and then just subscribe to one other in any given month depending on what show you're mainly watching.

Like now that Slow Horses is back, it's time to wait a couple weeks and then switch to Apple TV for a month to catch the 6 episodes.
by enslavedrobot | 2025-09-24 19:07:40+00:00
I'm very happy with the performance. I use FSD everyday. It is very very good. I only intervene when I want to. In my last generation hardware, that runs on a 144 TOPS computer, it will very occasionally (twice in the last 4 months) do something like start moving a few seconds before a red light turns green. These critical interventions happened all the time a couple of years ago, but since the introduction of V12 software have been all but eliminated.

FSD is literally improving exponentially, looking at it in Europe (where it is blocked by regulators with economic incentives to delay Tesla's progress) is like looking at a fully fueled rocket ship at ignition and complaining that it is not moving.

Go take a ride in a new Model Y with hardware 4 and V13 software in North America and you'll realize how the EU regulators are screwing over European customers.
by handoflixue | 2025-09-24 19:08:24+00:00
I feel like "just issue a ban" trivializes the complexity of this: banning one account does basically nothing, and they can just create a new account. Multiple people often have the same name, so you can't just ban everyone with that name. It's trivial to take new pictures, etc..

That leaves, what, asking a private company to do facial recognition scans on all new users? Requiring them to present official government ID ala the recent EU laws?
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-24 19:09:53+00:00
checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space, and on days where we have all hands or some other reason to have everyone in the office people can sit on the floor or in the lobby. The other tried to bring our remote team back to the office for in-person collaboration only to realize that I'm fully remote as per my hiring agreement and the rest of the team is split across Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas and one of our contractors is secretly working from his family's horse farm in Jalisco. So we all had to dress nice, commute and pay to park in order to sit on teams calls in an empty office rather than sitting on teams calls at home in comfort for free. We eventually figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a $12/person/day revenue stream. The trust is broken because someone looked at the trust and said "I'm gonna break that to see if there's money inside."
by techblueberry | 2025-09-24 19:09:54+00:00
“ Nvidia was up about 4.5% on the announcement. This project alone is a full year’s worth of Nvidia chips, which should further put to bed any question of Nvidia running out of Western customers for its chips, as discussed later in the post.”

Wait NVIDIA is paying its customers to buy more chips and I’m supposed to not be concerned they’re running out of customers?

This thinking seems to be a direct descendent of SBF’s thought process. Is there such a thing as being too smart? It seems amazing to watch people make a decision a like 80 IQ person knows is stupid but a 140 IQ person thinks is smart, and bet on the 80 IQ person.
by esafak | 2025-09-24 19:10:08+00:00
I assume Netflix does not merely use the PPP but also considers the demand curve for its own product. That curve won't translate to different products and locales, so I would not base business decisions on this. For example, in a particular region there may be many substitutes to Netflix, causing pressure on its demand, but not in whatever sector your product is in. And vice versa. In case it needed saying.

Fun little project.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-09-24 19:10:18+00:00
On the other hand those same corporations can generate, file, and litigate more patents than just a dude could ever hope to.

It's 2007. Just-a-dude has a great idea, he notices customers to his website often buy just one item, so he'll let them do that with one simple click. What's this, he's just received a cease and desist? Sorry bro, Amazon patented that 10 years ago.
by godelski | 2025-09-24 19:10:21+00:00
I mean these numbers are just made up anyways, so why are engineers concerned with them? The idea of engineers needing to justify monetary value is just... ill conceived. They should be concerned with engineering problems. Let the engineering manager worry about the imaginary money numbers.

> User retention is a thing.

Problem is no one needs to care about the product's quality if the product has the market cornered... Even less of a concern if the users don't know how to pick good products from bad products. Tech illiteracy directly leads to Lemon Markets
by CharlesW | 2025-09-24 19:11:03+00:00
Googling around a bit, Sublime Text doesn't seem to be particularly good at this: https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/unable-to-open-a-large-text-...

In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."
by computerex | 2025-09-24 19:11:12+00:00
I don't know. Foundation models are very good, and you can get a surprising amount of mileage from them by using them with low level interfaces. But personally I think companies building development tools of the future will use LLMs to build systems with increasing capabilities. I think a lot of engineering challenges remain in scaling LLM's to take over day to day in programming, and the current tools are scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine LLMs with traditional systems engineering.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-24 19:11:31+00:00
Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10 months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.
by NoLinkToMe | 2025-09-24 19:11:53+00:00
I don't follow the point. Suppose we live in a perfect world where exactly similar alternative flights are always available the moment yours gets cancelled. You still have to pay for it. And you do that by using the refund money.

Cancelling a flight without refunding it, just means profiting at the expense of the customer.

Businesses are able to insure their limited cost of cancellations, and price their tickets to absord these insurance costs (which are ultimately born by the ticket-payer).

Deregulating this point just puts all the risk and burden with millions of individual customers, some of whom cannot easily carry the cost of unexpected events, and aren't professional parties that can and routinely do enter into properly-negotiated insurance products to mitigate their risk.

> 've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)

My understanding is that refunds eligibility starts at a >3 hour change, meaning an alternative timetable of 2 hours doesn't trigger an automatic refund right now. Further, even in the case of a significant change (>3h), the refund isn't automatic, it is only paid once the customer refuses an alternative booking or compensation. For international flights it's even 6 hours instead of 3.

> Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.

I do agree on this point, context really matters. And I think in theory it makes sense to offer price-differentation based on the context. i.e. if I am slow-travelling for 4 months, I'd be happy taking a 10% cheaper ticket (no-insurance), and have no recourse if there is an 8 hour delay.

Whereas earlier this month when travelling overseas for a wedding the day prior, I'd have paid a 10% extra fee to insure my travel time, to ensure I have recourse to travel with a limited (<2h) delay no matter what or be significantly compensated.

But that's still all theory, at some point differentiation on everything leads to complex and difficult decision making for customers. Fun in a Sim computer game, not so fun when booking a flight is a 20-step process with 200 pages of T&C that I have to assess against my personal situation.
by ReptileMan | 2025-09-24 19:12:01+00:00
Tinder responsibility ends with their app, unless they have claimed that they somehow vet the people for safety. Or they provide chaperone service.

Putting yourself in a vulnerable position with a person you only have met online without someone trustworthy vouching for them is inherently unwise. Meeting trough friends/collogues has a bit more safety guardrails.
by lamontcg | 2025-09-24 19:12:10+00:00
> My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations [...]

The large organization are turning to rent seeking, which adversely affects the liberty of the average individual.

Claiming that it has "slightly empowered the individual" is a reflection of where you are in the current social structure. If you've fallen below the line, then you're certainly not empowered at all, and more like you're enslaved. And that line keeps on going up.

The corrosiveness of increasing housing costs and health care costs are examples of this. The fact that individual transportation is both necessary and is likely to turn into a subscription-model is likely to be another example.

Regulatory capture is also a part of this. Large organizations enjoy the complexity of government regulations (while at the same time screaming about it) because they have the resources to navigate it, and they enjoy near monopolies which allow them to pass the costs down to their customers. And we've entirely forgotten how to break up monopolies, like we did with AT&T.

Also, most organizations these days exist to capture profits for the people who lead them. And this can even be seen in left-leaning political organizations that are more concerned with fund-raising than solving the problems that they're supposedly addressing (the DNC being the most massive example of this).

All of this corrodes individual liberties of the average person. It just may not have caught up with you yet, or you may have lucked into the resources to avoid it.

This is why I'm a left-libertarian anti-capitalist. The problem that we have today is too much power in the hands of large organizations (the fact that organizations are led by individuals, however, is not a logical contradiction -- the problem to solve here isn't a simple rule to limit the ability of individuals to work together, but an optimization problem to increase or maximize individual liberty, which necessarily results in a push-pull tradeoff at the interaction between individuals and groups that they might participate in). All large organized groups (Religion, Government, Corporations, Unions) needs to be restrained in their ability to exploit individuals. What we have now is that Unions have been destroyed and Government and Religion largely do the bidding of Corporations and their billionaire owners.

(Billionaires being individuals is also not a logical contradiction -- they have so many resources they may as well just be massive organizations -- employing hundreds of people and owning all kinds of property)
by kergonath | 2025-09-24 19:13:12+00:00
> If I weren't a computer nerd I probably wouldn't feel this way, but on Linux I feel more empowered

There are also more footguns and rabbit holes. Overall, I am about as happy with Linux than with macOS (I use both daily), but I would not say that one is really more empowering than the other.

I like tinkering with KDE but it’s full of inconsistencies and instability in a way than even the worst Finder I’ve used was not (e.g. the whole desktop freezing when adding a widget to the desktop with a brand new install). Never mind the Russian roulette that is updating nVidia’s drivers.

On the other hand on macOS it’s easier to get to things that are actually productive.
by JamesSwift | 2025-09-24 19:13:12+00:00
> Who didn't love [...]

:raises hand:

Granted, I didnt grow up a baseball fan and am only now getting into through my kids being in baseball, but coming from less "traditional" sports like basketball I really dont care for the whole spectacle side of baseball. Even in little league you get way more arguing with umpires from coaches and parents alike and its all so juvenile.