MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wavemode | 2025-09-08 18:42:49+00:00
I mean, it's not an uncommon job. Hasn't everyone hung out with a "government official" at some point? Even the people who work the counter at the DMV are government officials, technically. (And are perfectly capable of engaging in corruption, if there is insufficient oversight.)

It doesn't sound like the parent commenter was having lunch with the president. Just some random bureaucrats overseeing a construction project.
by capitainenemo | 2025-09-08 18:42:54+00:00
Possible I suppose. You can restrict firefox memory usage in the config. Perhaps their dynamic allocation was getting confused by what was available on the 64 bit machine? Still. Why would any 32 bit app even try to allocate more than it actually could handle. I dunno. I'm still inclined to think missing libs (or out of date libs) - but hard to say without a bit more detail on the crash. Did anything show up in .xsession-errors / stderr ? Were you able to launch it in a clean profile? Were the crashes visible in about:crashes for the profile when launched in 64 bit? I suppose it doesn't matter too much at this point...
by toast0 | 2025-09-08 18:43:17+00:00
General IQ tests probably aren't legal in the US; Griggs v Duke Power Co [1] says (more or less) that employment tests have to be job related if the results of the test have disparate impact on protected classes of people.

It's hard to argue that a general IQ test is job related, but they're likely to have a disparate impact on protected classes of people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
by Gormo | 2025-09-08 18:43:18+00:00
OTOH, I can't imagine not using an RSS reader. I'm sitting here with Liferea on my desktop connected to my TT-RSS server, which I use to manage pretty much everything I subscribe to: blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, webcomics, subreddits, and several aggregators including HN. Having to access all of those separately via their own websites sounds like a nightmare.
by zokier | 2025-09-08 18:44:00+00:00
I love OpenWrt.

But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.
by ben_w | 2025-09-08 18:44:24+00:00
A lot of Star Trek writing wildly errs with computers. And other things, but also computers.

Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).

Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)

Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
by pohuing | 2025-09-08 18:44:25+00:00
There's a bunch of annoyances in teams. The text editor is awful if you try to paste/send code for one. The screen sharing is shit by default and only lets one person share at a time for no good reason. It's fairly slow. And it doesn't have a global fucking hot key for push to talk/muting. Despite being integrated with the damn task bar(which is broken if you're on hold in one call and active in another, then it's too stupid to figure out that the mute button is intended to mute my active call, not the one that's on hold...). Also the teams feature gets out of your way, which is an issue if you're trying to use it like you would channels in discord or slack. Would be nice to at least have a notification pip there.
by whartung | 2025-09-08 18:44:38+00:00
What "everyone"?

They don't have to agree on anything.

The poster child for this is Smalltalk. An untraditional environment despite being around 60 years. The source code is stored locally in an internal file tied directly to the runtime image. You can export/import code through "traditional" avenues, but not just anything, it needs to be structured source code. You can't readily move raw text in and out.

Despite this impedance mismatch with "the rest of the world", ST folks have been developing code and collaborating for decades. They even manage to get things accomplished.

Also, consider many of the modern logging platforms that are logging to databases rather than just raw files. While some grouse about that, others manage to make do. Letting the structured log managers handle the lower level details and provide a better UX.

The game is to make sure that your UX for your system is capable of the task, not worrying about interoperating with everyone else.
by asdff | 2025-09-08 18:44:51+00:00
Lurking forums and irc is probably a terrible way to train a hacker than a dedicated program that introduces you to the tools you'd be using on the job right away. Even today people don't even like hiring self taught engineers anymore like 20 years ago, when there are many more people today who have gone through legitimate education programs.

The one hacker I met in my life went to West Point and had no experience they didn't gain from being placed in their program after graduating with decent test scores.
by pseudosavant | 2025-09-08 18:45:18+00:00
Between the microcontrollers, Zero models, the Pi 4, and the Pi 5, they have quite a full-range from very inexpensive and low power to moderate price/performance SBCs.

One of the bigger problems with Pi 5, is that many of the classic Pi use cases don't benefit from more CPU than the Pi 4 had. PCIe is nice, but you might as well go CM5 if you want something like that. The 16GB model would be more interesting if it had the GPU/bandwidth to do AI/tokens at a decent rate, but it doesn't.

I still think using any other brand of SBC is an exercise in futility though. Raspberry Pi products have the community, support, ecosystem behind them that no other SBC can match.
by andrepd | 2025-09-08 18:45:24+00:00
Explicitly, from TFA:

> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.
by rapht | 2025-09-08 18:45:25+00:00
Sorry if that sounds offensive, but you are being a bit shortsighted here. The theory just says that shareholder value serves both as a guide to what a business should do, and as a measure of how good it has done, because that measure encompasses all others. Which is debatable but far from stupid: do you really think Apple would have sold so many i* had they been ugly? Do you really think that angry people demanding taxes, regulations, etc don't affect how businesses decide to actually go and maximize shareholder value? The actual real absent in Friedman's reasoning is "eventually": externalities always come to haunt the shareholder value, the question is when do they become tangible enough that this aligns with society's perception of those externalities.
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-08 18:45:29+00:00
If the most negative place on the internet you regularly are exposed to is HN, you have some excellent memetic hygiene, congratulations.

I try to only use the parts of the internet that enrich me but the dopamine from places like Reddit, Bluesky, youtube (for hours) etc is pretty tough loop to break. It's obvious these places are not particularly helpful to me in the way I use them, but I find my fingers typing the URL without thinking and once you hit that first link it's so easy to just fall into it for way longer than you should.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-09-08 18:45:51+00:00
I'm a staunch defender of OpenWRT. Having used just about every "router distro" folks care to name (remember SmoothWall?) for the last 20~ years, OpenWRT is built like a tank and just keeps trundling along

I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going. 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

Something I'm excited to try myself in future is running "OpenWISP" [1] to manage a small fleet (three) OpenWRT devices in parallel for a deployment in a shared workshop. This seems to also be something that OpenWRT could be better at integrating, but it's nice to see "a vendor" tackling it

[1] https://openwisp.org/
by adastra22 | 2025-09-08 18:46:07+00:00
I have unfortunately lost signal history on various devices. Most recently I lost my iOS history when I restored from a backup without following the right procedure to keep Signal history. I have the full history on my desktop macOS signal though.

Can I use this to restore my macOS signal backup to my iOS phone, so I once again have access to all my old messages on the phone?
by allemagne | 2025-09-08 18:46:18+00:00
I read through this book relatively recently and agree with the praise here for the core idea that legacy code is code that is untested. The first few chapters are full of pretty sharp insights that you will nod along to if you've spent a decent amount of time in any large codebase.

However, most of the content in the last half of the book consists of naming and describing what seemed like obvious strategies for refactoring and rewriting code. I would squint at the introduction to a new term, try to parse its definition, look at the code example, and when it clicked I would think "well that just seems like what you would naturally choose to do in that situation, no?" Then the rest of the chapter describing this pattern became redundant.

It didn't occur to me that trying to put the terms themselves to memory would be particularly useful, and so it became a slog to get through all of the content that I'm not sure was worth it. Curious if that was the experience of anyone else.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-08 18:46:33+00:00
> Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."

Even if... one would think that a capitalist economy would do great with more and capable workers. One would think that more stuff would get done. Right?

I think there is a good chance that it will, in fact, shift millions towards unemployment. I am pro technology, yet technology in the hands of profit seekers will only be used to seek profits.

It happened during the agricultural revolution and during the industrial revolution. Millions of people were made unemployed by more efficient technology. Millions had to flee the country sides to then be thrown out of factories a few decades later, leading to slums and mass poverty. So many that the government had to enact more and more welfare programs like public schools, and food programs.

Capitalism is the only economic system that cannot handle more workers. For-profit production is not compatible with mass employment.

Almost like capitalism shoots itself in the foot and then forgets about it.
by aavshr | 2025-09-08 18:46:33+00:00
Please make yourself aware of all the facts before posting ignorant comments like this. Children died, shot while protesting against blatant corruption and lack of accountability that's going on for decades. The social media ban was just the final straw.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/8/six-killed-in-nepal-...
by leptons | 2025-09-08 18:46:43+00:00
When I write a sentence, I do it with intent, with specific purpose in mind. When an "AI" does it, it's predicting the next word that might satisfy the input requirement. It doesn't care if the sentence it writes makes any sense, is factual, etc, so long as it is human readable and follows gramatic rules. It does not do this with any specific intent, which is why you get slop and just plain wrong output a fair amount of time. Just because it produces something that sounds correct sometimes does not mean it's doing any thinking at all. Yes, humans do actually think before they speak, LLMs do not, cannot, and will not because that is not what they are designed to do.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-08 18:46:47+00:00
Does anyone actually care at all about frequencies? I care if my task finishes quickly. If it can finish quickly at a low frequency, fine. If the clock runs fast but the task doesn't, how is that a benefit?

My understanding is that both Intel and AMD are pushing high clocks not because it's what consumers want, but because it's the only lever they have to pull to get more gains. If this year's CPU is 2% faster than your current CPU, why would you buy it? So after they have their design they cover the rest of the target performance gain by cranking the clock, and that's how you get 200 W desktop CPUs.

>the commitment to higher memory bandwidth via on package memory; being able to count on higher bandwidth means you can expect to have more operations that are waiting on execution rather than waiting on memory, so wider execution has more benefits.

I believe you could make a PC (compatible) with unified memory and a 256-bit memory bus, but then you'd have to make the whole thing. Soldered motherboard, CPU/GPU, and RAM. I think at the time the M1 came out there weren't any companies making hardware like that. Maybe now that x86 handhelds are starting to come out, we may see laptops like that.
by loudmax | 2025-09-08 18:46:54+00:00
An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.

China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.

Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.

Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
by isolli | 2025-09-08 18:46:58+00:00
That's how my children's iPads are too. Permanent downtime, with a few always allowed apps, and the rest on demand. And indeed, the most frustrating part is when my daughter needs to do some research for school. I'd have to allow each and every website she visits, so I temporarily un-downtime her phone instead...

Edited to add: for some reason, time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click). That's why I had to opt for permanent downtime.
by andrepd | 2025-09-08 18:47:20+00:00
From tfa:

> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.
by ajmurmann | 2025-09-08 18:47:44+00:00
I'd be worried about any internet-connected IOT device in my home. It the very least it can snoop on traffic. The Nest in particular could a) use it's motion detector to report if you are home b) harass you through temperature changes (and maybe even gaslight you by not showing them) c) maybe overload something (itself?) and cause fire?

That's just what I can come up with sitting here and having no in-depth knowledge. I am sure actual security experts could come up with more scenarios.
by coldtea | 2025-09-08 18:47:45+00:00
>Let's say you corrupted one bit in a blender asset 200 revisions ago and it was unnoticeable and still upgraded through five blender upgrades, but now on the sixth upgrade it fails with a corruption error and doesn't upgrade.

And let's say you have archived copies of it with checksums like I suggested, going back to all revisions ago.

What's the issue again now, that ECC would have solved? Not to mention that ECC wouldn't help at all with corruption at the disk level anyway.
by paulddraper | 2025-09-08 18:47:46+00:00
> So, what else is wrong with javascript dev where something as simple as coloring console text has 32 releases and 58 github contributors?

I see a new CLI graphics library on HN every other week.

https://github.com/fatih/color (Go) has 23 releases and 39 contributors.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor (Rust) has 173 contributors.
by crowcroft | 2025-09-08 18:47:48+00:00
A serious company would not consider this research. Zero evidence of anything is presented. No one in the organisation or advisory board have any expertise in building modern LLMs, and most are self-fashioned AI Execs that moved into the space all of about 2 years ago...

https://sovereign-au.ai/preserving-australias-digital-voice-...
by SubiculumCode | 2025-09-08 18:47:48+00:00
Ah... I was here wondering why browsers don't just run sites in a built-in virtual containers..allowing the same reports of the same hardware for everyone. especially for WebGL and canvas fingerprinting.

I suppose someone might say it is about performance of going through a virtual layer? I understandit might break specialized 3D web-apps...but for common web-browsing? idk. Do people regularly use web-based app that need direct access to a GPU to be fast and functional? But surely, an exceptions list could work.

I am sure I am missing something, but what?
by zargon | 2025-09-08 18:47:49+00:00
We will buy 4 cards if they are 48 GB or more. At a measly 16 GB, we’re just going to stick with 3090s, P40s, MI50s, etc.

> 3x VRAM speed and 3x compute

LLM scaling doesn’t work this way. If you have 4 cards, you may get 2x performance increase if you use vLLM. But you’ll also need enough VRAM to run FP8. 3 cards would only run at 1x performance.
by wtallis | 2025-09-08 18:47:56+00:00
The CPU in such switches is far too slow to do any data plane operations, so performance is entirely due to the hardware switching. Replacing Ubiquiti's OS with OpenWRT just gets you a different management interface for configuring the hardware features that actually handle traffic. (Unless for some reason you desperately want to have a VPN endpoint that would be limited to a few Mb/s at best.)
by non_aligned | 2025-09-08 18:48:36+00:00
The limit of a process at infinity is not necessarily subject to the same constraints as the outcome you're seeing after a finite number of steps. The assumption you're making here is intuitive, but it bites students in the butt every now and then.

Most simply, after "infinitely many" steps, the "arbitrarily close" in your mental model becomes "infinitely close", and in real numbers, "infinitely close" is the same as "equal to", because you don't have infinitesimals.

It's the same reason why we can construct irrational or transcendental numbers as a limit of an infinite series of rational numbers.
by hagbard_c | 2025-09-08 18:48:37+00:00
I switched from Nextcloud Photos to Nextcloud Memories to Immich. I submitted a patch [1] to Immich to make it possible to directly login via (Nextcloud) OIDC which, in combination with the Nextcloud 'External Sites' app makes it possible to integrate Immich directly into Nextcloud. I do not automatically add all photo and video material synced to Nextcloud into Immich yet, relying on a set of scripts I've been using for years to maintain all our media in a single repository. It should be possible to either use Nextcloud to sync media which is then shown in Immich through its 'External Libraries' feature (this is how I use it) as well as to use Immich to sync media and access it that way. No matter how it is used Immich can be integrated to be as easily accessible as any 'native' Nextcloud app. Performance is far better than Nextcloud Memories, this was my main reason for moving away from the latter. The search and facial recognition features in Immich do not require a server with GPU access, performance is fine on my by now rather aged DL380 G7.

[1] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18763/commits/fe7a...
by trod1234 | 2025-09-08 18:48:58+00:00
Capitalism requires a free market with price discovery.

Its ironic that they promote the titled narrative when we have neither a free market, nor effective price discovery (due to dark pools and other actors). The lack of those things in fact point to the dominant economic model being closer to Socialism than Capitalism.

I never understood how people can think that the answer to the failures of socialism is more socialism.
by sigotirandolas | 2025-09-08 18:49:02+00:00
Not the parent, but the default `npm install` / `yarn install` builds will ignore the lock file unless everything can be satisfied, if you want the lock file to be respected you must use `npm ci` / `yarn install --frozen-lockfile`.

In my experience, it's common for CI pipelines to be misconfigured in this way, and for Node developers to misunderstand what the lock file is for.
by kayson | 2025-09-08 18:49:04+00:00
There are a lot of GitHub issues about this (mine being similar to the last one)

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10135

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/13098

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11263

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/14293
by DDerTyp | 2025-09-08 18:49:05+00:00
You’re right and the excerpt you quoted was poorly worded and confusing. A lockfile is designed to do exactly what you said.

The package.json locked the file to ^1.3.2. If a newer version exists online that still satisfies the range in package.json (like 1.3.3 for ^1.3.2), npm install will often fetch that newer version and update your package-lock.json file automatically.

That’s how I understand it / that’s my current knowledge. Maybe there is someone here who can confirm/deny that. That would be great!
by doubled112 | 2025-09-08 18:49:20+00:00
Try it and come back to let us know. The modern web is incredibly heavy. Videos everywhere, tons of JavaScript, etc.

My wife had an HP Stream thing with an Intel N3060 CPU and 4GB of RAM. I warned her but it was cheap enough it almost got the job done.

Gmail's web interface would take almost a minute to load. It uses about 500MB of RAM by itself running Chrome.

Does browsing the web include checking your email? Not if you need web mail, apparently.

Check out the memory usage for yourself one of these days on the things you use daily. Could you still do them?