MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Levitz | 2025-09-05 15:25:22+00:00
I'm really at a loss on how to make this any more clear.

You are looking at a case of a person LITERALLY admitting they are using it for propaganda and your reaction is "I'm sure it's actually not, it's actually neutral and it's just that it differs from your view". I'm sorry but I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.
by condenser | 2025-09-05 15:25:29+00:00
I'm interested in using podman for my homeserver because of the deamonless and rootlessnes nature, but I haven't found a convenient replacement for docker compose.

On my dev machine I do `docker compose up -d --build` in the directory of the Dockerfile, and it builds, uploads, and restarts the service on the server. In the podman world you're supposed to use Quadlets, which can be rsynced to the server, but I haven't found something simple for the build-step that doesn't involve an external registry or manually transferring the image.

What's the end-to-end solution for this?
by globnomulous | 2025-09-05 15:26:13+00:00
Correction:

> It has no connection whatsoever to 'data' in our sense.

This is wrong. There is an etymological connection, which means that 'data' in our sense is derived from the sense 'that which is given.' My point, badly stated, was that the word in this sense is no longer Latin. It doesn't translate directly back into Latin. You'd need to use a different work in order to capture the sense that the word takes in English.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-05 15:26:18+00:00
Isn't that similar to "what would Jaws be like as a movie is the shark worked"? It's not always a good thing. Spielberg has said he believes he would have made a worse movie and included more of the shark if it wasn't so finicky. Similar to today's bloat software that doesn't do any kind of refactoring because storage/memory is cheap. If there was that much storage, they would have figured out how to do unnecessary things that were not mission critical.

Sometimes, strict limitations are not a bad thing. It can be a weed out course level of filtering (since classes just started up again)
by kuschku | 2025-09-05 15:26:19+00:00
> This sounds like a contrarian troll question.

See the sibling comment regarding my motivations for this question

> It's one of the reasons so many of us are obsessed with tools.

That's answering another question I never really understood.

So you choose tools based on the vibe they give you, because you want to get into a certain mood to do certain things?
by cortesoft | 2025-09-05 15:26:25+00:00
Whether that is the most ‘fair’ method or not, a pay per play model wouldn’t be the best for either listeners, artists, or streaming company.

There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.

No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.

The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.

In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.
by vips7L | 2025-09-05 15:26:28+00:00
They also failed because Java never made them easy to work with. If you faced a checked error that you couldn't handle it is impractical to uncheck them. You have to write a shit ton of boilerplate.

A a; try { a = someThrowingFn(); } catch (AException ex) { throw new RuntimeException(ex); }

It sucks. In Swift this is simply: val a = try! someThrowingFn(); Kotlin is moving towards having both unchecked exceptions (panics) and errors as values. I think its absolutely the correct decision. They're also including an easy way to panic when you can't handle an error: val a = someThrowingFn()!!;

The other thing that I think made checked exceptions worse in the beginning was the lack of pattern matching and sealing with exceptions. Being able to exhaust all the different types of a particular error is really important if you want to properly respond. If you had a meaningless top level exception like IOException you couldn't effectively determine what actually happened and everyone just defaulted to unchecking it. Nowadays it's a little better if you seal your exception hierarchy:

sealed abstract class SomeException extends Exception permits A, B { final class B extends SomeException {} final class C extends SomeException {} } try { someThrowingFn(); } catch (SomeException ex) { switch (ex) { case A a -> iCanHandleA(a); case B b -> throw new IllegalStateException(b); // can't handle this one } }

Hopefully that becomes even better with the exceptions in switch [1] proposal:

switch (someThrowingFn()) { case throws A a -> .. case throws B b -> .. }

The real big issue like you said is that they're not completely in the type system. Especially when it comes to lambdas; you need to invent a Result<T, E> type every time you want to work with lambdas. Obviously all of these things are solvable with library code, try! is easily some static panic function; it sure would be nice to not have to write them. Overall I'm hopeful that with the overall programming community moving back towards checked errors that the OpenJdk team will invest in making checked exceptions better, but only time will tell.

[0] github.com/Kotlin/KEEP/blob/main/proposals/KEEP-0441-rich-errors-motivation.md [1] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8323658
by dcre | 2025-09-05 15:26:37+00:00
"Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion."

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract...

Great stuff!
by bee_rider | 2025-09-05 15:26:47+00:00
I think it less like: governments see social media sites as damaging, so they ban them.

It is more like: a lot of people see social media sites as damaging, so they don’t particularly care when their governments ban them for whatever arbitrary reasons the governments come up with.

So, I’d expect the more that social media sites come back online to reflect their responsiveness to dealing with government demands, not the damaging-ness.
by ardit33 | 2025-09-05 15:27:02+00:00
lol.... development speed and quality are both the bottleneck my dude. But if you have enough speed, you can fix quality issues as you are able to test and fix things faster.

You have even CEO of car companies that get fired because they mess this up. Or even the Sonos company lost a lot of value, and got their CEO fired because they messed up and can't fix it in time.

Speed is not everything. Developing the right features (what users want) and Quality are the most important things, but development speed allows you to test features and fix things fast and course correct.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-05 15:27:26+00:00
Neither the fed or congress can do any quick fix for housing prices (and the fed can't really do anything).

There are only two ways (yes, it's a real life binary system) to lower housing prices.

1.) Build more housing

2.) Make an area less desirable to live in.

That's it. There is nothing else besides those two.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-09-05 15:27:29+00:00
I think we should we put this title-based distinction to rest.

Whether you call yourself an engineer, developer, programmer, or even a coder is mostly a localized thing, not an evaluation of expertise.

We're confusing everyone when we pretend a title reflects how good we are at the craft, especially titles we already use to refer to ourselves without judgement. At least use script kiddie or something.
by ai-christianson | 2025-09-05 15:27:35+00:00
Yeah we spawned an agent, his name is Jeremy, that runs 24/7 and coordinates work within the team. He reaches out to individuals on the team (via email) and we interact with him, things like:

- "Hey Jeremy, I completed <X>, what should I look at next?" - "Jeremy, who's currently working on <Y>"

He's backed by db so it ends up being way more powerful than something like trello or Jira.

This is one of our agents we use internally to dogfood our product (gobii dot ai). We spun up the agent, told it that its job was helping coordinate and prioritize work within the team, and authorized it to contact the relevant team members. Now we all just email to/from the agent (would love Discord or Slack, but we don't have that quite yet.)
by Aurornis | 2025-09-05 15:27:36+00:00
> An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licensing perspective.

Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.

Every new software license requires legal to review it.

These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)

Then they start investigating how often people use software packages and realize most people aren't actually using most software they have seats for. This happens because when software feels 'free' people request it for one-time use for a thing or to try it out and then forget about it, so you have low utilization across the board.

So they start making it harder to add new software. They start auditing usage. They may want reports on why software is still needed and who uses it.

It all adds up. I understand you don't think it should be this way, but it is at big companies. You're right that that the $24/user per month isn't much, but it's one of dozens of fees that get added, multiplied by every employee in the company, and now they need someone to maintain licenses, get them reviewed, interact with the rep every year, do the negotiation battles, and so on. It adds up fast.
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2025-09-05 15:28:32+00:00
I asked Google Gemini for book sources, got this: "The Vetinari Clock originates from Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of books, specifically appearing in the waiting room of Lord Vetinari, a recurring character. It is first described in Feet of Clay and also features in Going Postal, where its purpose is to psychologically unsettle visitors by ticking irregularly while still maintaining accurate time"
by rsyring | 2025-09-05 15:28:45+00:00
Additionally, there aren't even any trusted repos out there building/publishing a .deb for it. The ones that I could find when I searched last were all outdated or indicated they were not going to keep moving forward.

I could get over this. But, IMO, it lends itself to asking the "why" question. Why wouldn't Podman make installing it easier? And the only thing that makes sense to me is that RedHat doesn't want their dev effort supporting their competitor's products.

That's a perfectly reasonable stance, they owe me nothing. But, it does make me feel that anything not in the RH ecosystem is going to be treated as a second-class citizen. That concerns me more than having to build my own debs.
by anakin87 | 2025-09-05 15:28:50+00:00
LLMs improve when they can practice and reason in interactive environments.

Recent work (DeepSeek-R1, GRPO) shows RL can teach models to prefer better outputs by giving rewards.

But most RL environments for LLMs are fragmented or closed. That makes it hard for the community to experiment or reproduce results.

Environments Hub is a new open platform by Prime Intellect where anyone can share RL environments for training or evaluating LLMs. Think of them as software packages: data, harness and scoring rules.

Agents today incorporate models and tools (from APIs to a terminal), so environments need to capture that complexity.

I wrote a hands-on walkthrough covering:

- RL + LLM basics - Navigating the Environments Hub - Evaluating models and agents - GRPO-style training of a tiny model on an alphabetical sort task

If you want to experiment with RL for LLMs or just see how open environments can accelerate learning, this walkthrough is a practical starting point.
by ux266478 | 2025-09-05 15:29:44+00:00
I don't think Haskell is a good language to model our idea of error handling off of. It's one of many bugbears I have with that language, that it uses the Maybe monad as an error type. It technically works, but doesn't provide a meaningful distinction between "This function might not return anything, and this is defined behavior" and "This function has a singularity". MonadError exists, but I can't think of anywhere it shows up without digging deep into dragon caves of the compiler. Everything a normal user is going to touch will deal exclusively in Maybes.

I'm not a fan of Rust as a language for many reasons, but I will give it credit for making proper usage of the Result monad. They could have abused Option the same way Haskell abuses Maybe, but they didn't.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-09-05 15:29:45+00:00
I mean the funny thing is that I've never driven or wanted a car with more than a 10-gallon tank, so my "ICE" (it's a Prius, so it actually does better than a full ICE car would) range is already <400 miles. Having to stop at a "gas station" for 30 minutes instead of 10 minutes every 4-6 hours really doesn't seem like that big of an ordeal, especially since I'm probably going to be stopping for meal breaks on that interval anyway. And if you just need a top-off to make the last 100 miles rather than a full charge, you can probably do it in 10-15 minutes anyway, right?
by cyphar | 2025-09-05 15:29:53+00:00
Maybe I'm the outlier here, but I think intentionally torrenting millions of books and taking great pains to try to avoid linking the activity to your company is far beyond something as "trivial" as ignoring robots.txt. This is like wringing your hands over whether a serial killer also jaywalked on their way to the crimescene.

(In theory the former is supposed to be a capital-C criminal offence -- felony copyright infringement.)
by rpdillon | 2025-09-05 15:30:06+00:00
Nope! I just think the business model is rotten. I worked at Amazon MP3 back in the day, mostly because I adored the concept of people paying to download DRM-free files. Same reason I use GOG for my games: I have a lot of money waiting for people that want to sell me files that I have control over.

But the industry moved another direction, and they want ultimate control over everything: not just the songs themselves, but the clients to play them and everything in between. And the tragedy is they screw the artists just as much as customers. Copyright has been captured by the middlemen at the expense of the artists and audiences: that's the real reason people have no respect for the industry, and why copyright is so reviled.
by jfengel | 2025-09-05 15:30:32+00:00
"...boosted expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in September to stimulate the economy"

The new unemployment rate is 4.3% That's above the Fed's 4% target for full employment, but not all that high above it.

By contrast, inflation is about 3% -- a full percentage point above the target of 2%, and 50% higher.

Lowering target rates is supposed to lower unemployment and raise inflation. Once you hit full employment, additional money for wages increases money supply without increasing product supply.

The Fed, of course, has more precise models than I've just described. But these numbers suggest to me that the Fed should leave rates as they are; they aren't any kind of emergency or pending emergency. The market is at or near record highs; it doesn't need its bubble expanded.

I know the the Fed is under political pressure because politicians like soaring stock markets. And the pressure is now verging on threats. But it still seems unlikely that the Fed will cave quite so soon when the numbers say to do just the opposite.
by troyvit | 2025-09-05 15:30:37+00:00
This is my biggest problem too, and it's not just my problem but Podman's problem. Lack of name recognition is big for sure compared to Docker, but to me this version mismatch problem is higher on the list and more sure to keep Podman niche. Distros like Ubuntu always ship with older versions of software, it's sadly up to the maintainer to release newer versions, and Podman just doesn't seem interested in doing that. I don't know if it was their goal but it got me to use some RedHat derivative on my home server just to get a later version.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-05 15:31:05+00:00
You're right that it's no different than other software, but when you reach the point where the average employee has 20-30 different licenses for all the different things they might use, managing it all becomes a job for multiple people.

Costs and management grow in an O(n*m) manner where n is employees and m is numbers of licenses per employee. It seems like nothing when you're small and people only need a couple licenses, but a few years in the aggregate bills are eye-popping and you realize the majority of people don't use most of the licenses they've requested (it really happens).

Contrast this with what it takes for an engineer to use a common, free tool: They can just use it. No approval process. No extra management steps for anyone. Nothing to argue that you need to use it every year at license audit time. Just run with it.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 15:31:15+00:00
To play devil's advocate, the suckiest part about stack scanning is that it's a linked list walk. It's not a linear scan. So it's all pointer chasing. And it's very likely to find previously unmarked pointers, which involves CAS and other work.

(It would be a linear scan if I was just conservatively scanning, but then I'd have other problems.)

This is one of the most counterintuitive parts of GC perf! You'd think that the stack scan had to be a bottleneck, and it might even be one in some corner cases. But it's just not the longest pole in the tent most of the time, because you're so unlikely to actually have a 1MB stack, and programs that do have a 1MB stack tend to also have ginormous heaps (like many gigabytes), which then means that even if the stack scan is a problem it's not the problem.
by ivape | 2025-09-05 15:31:30+00:00
There’s probably more to say about general didactic discourse. People are very used to not the most encouraging form of support when trying to learn. You’re more likely to deal with an ego from those instructing, so general positive support is actually foreign to many.

Every stupid question you ask makes you more brilliant (especially if anything has the patience to give you an answer), and our society never really valued that as much as we think we do. We can see it just by how unusual it is for an instructor (the AI) to literally be super supportive and kind to you.
by Johnny555 | 2025-09-05 15:31:53+00:00
You didn't include the price of the one you found on Amazon, if it's this one, it's $69.97, the same price as the one sold by Raspberry:

https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-200MB-Compatible-SU01KG...

I'd buy the one from Raspberry just because I know they've tested it and it works well. (plus I prefer to not buy from Amazon, but that's just my personal preference)
by nine_zeros | 2025-09-05 15:32:11+00:00
> Older voters are more likely to have voted for Trump, but also young men.

Ah, but boomers are not just old voters. Boomers are also owners and sponsors of faux news that has brainwashed the young men into thinking that maga cares about them - only to get their votes and then revert to serving the billionaire overlords.

The generational issue here is that the old people are actively brainwashing and sabotaging the youth - even outside voting.
Can we be done with sites that ask for signups on arrival?
by mring33621 | 2025-09-05 15:32:19+00:00
Hi, online vendor!

I actually might be interested in your product, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give me a minute to read a couple pages of your site before you bug me!

Immediate signup asks and intrusive, time-pressure offers are a huge turn-off.

Please stop doing that.

Thank you!
by whstl | 2025-09-05 15:32:52+00:00
I saw two projects in a row in a German Fintech (the one that has AI in its name that forbids usage of AI) go exactly the same way.

Two/three months to code everything ("It's maximum priority!"), about four to QA, and then about a year to deploy to individual country services by ops team.

During test and deploy phases, the developers were just twiddling thumbs because ops refused to allow them access and product refused to take in new projects due to possibility of developers having to go back to code.

It took the CEO to intervene and investigate the issues, and the CTO's college best friend that was running DevOps was demoted.
by michaelmrose | 2025-09-05 15:33:00+00:00
Many jobs even most jobs don't work you at or near the short term max capacity you can achieve because it isn't sustainable, lacks redundancy or because the nature of work flow and peer expectation creates a degree of slack.

Condensing the workforce as you describe risks destroying redundancy and sustainability.

It may work in tests with high performers over short dutations but may fall under over longer terms, with average performers, or with even a small amount of atrition.

Having cog number 37 pick up the slack for 39 doesn't work with no excess capacity.
by staplers | 2025-09-05 15:33:03+00:00
Sure, I get your point. I don't really consider stablecoins or even most cryptocurrencies true crypto due to human control (which invalidates the value of crypto).

I've watched for over a decade how this forum utterly decimates any actual discussion of crypto (bitcoin) due to willful ignorance or blind naivety. So excuse my excitement when I get a chance to actually discuss its merits or disadvantages.

In this sense, I will agree that stablecoins are just a technological way of obscuring certain mechanisms in how fiat currency is distributed and is basically a derivative instrument that exists outside established regulatory framework (similar to how uber/airbnb operated for a decade until the govt caught up)
by mindslight | 2025-09-05 15:33:08+00:00
Ron Vara's book actually outlines a whole bizarro universe where devaluing USD constitutes a strength, from some idea that the best way to compete with China is by putting ourselves where China was 30 years ago. So yes, an outright goal of theirs is to weaken USD. I have no idea if they earnestly believe this nonsense, or if they are just getting paid by our adversaries to sell it to the public.
by ciconia | 2025-09-05 15:33:10+00:00
The article sort of glosses over this, but to me the real question is delivering value over the long run. This takes patience and tenacity not just from developers but also from management. Making a product that lasts and that evolves and that delivers for your clients is definitely a lot more challenging (and finally rewarding) than vibe-coding an MVP in a couple of weeks. I have the impression that in that regard AI coding tools are quite inadequate and don't really deliver the value they purport to.
by h3lp | 2025-09-05 15:33:34+00:00
It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurship, but the politics make it virtually impossible to switch to because consumption tax is regressive, and it is a huge change. The tariffs debate and the general political atmosphere created a misdirection: voila, we have both income and consumption tax! The next development will be the politicians discovering to their horror the high levels of taxation, and abolishing the income tax. Brilliant!