MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-01 23:40:37+00:00
>you will be acquired.

You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It might fail, but most of the big tech companies currently acquiring smaller companies themselves started small with acquisition offers being rejected along the way. Sure, there's selection bias at work there, but there are also many cases of smaller to mid-size companies that also said no to acquisition and still managed to find their successful niche.

Being acquired is not a given and neither is failure if you do compete in some way with the megacorps.

I see nothing about the current tech landscape that at all distinguishes it from previous landscapes in which smaller companies succeeded AND rejected acquisition.
by zahlman | 2025-09-01 23:41:11+00:00
Both date to 1987. Aside from the use of whitespace, I don't really see the same influence. HyperTalk loops looked like `repeat with i = 1 to ...`; it didn't have the same concept of iterating over a container directly, even though it could treat strings as containers (not just of "characters", but also space-separated "words" or comma-separated "items").

On the other hand, it had explicit syntax sugar that was specific to the HyperCard environment (thus actions like `ask` and `answer` for simple modal dialog prompts), along with phrasing intended to make things read in English and even avoiding basic operators (thus, `put ... into ...` as an assignment syntax, `the number of` as a length operator, `it` referring to the result of the previous line in some contexts, ...). And of course, the HyperCard environment was event-driven; you could write explicitly callable functions, but your entry point was only ever some GUI interaction, not top-level code or a "main" function.

Perhaps you could say that they both came from a similar philosophy about how to make a programming language "natural-language-like". Which IMO was a big step up from COBOL at least ;)
by bobbiechen | 2025-09-01 23:41:42+00:00
"Vibe hacking" is real - here's an excerpt from my actual ChatGPT transcript trying to generate bot scripts to use for account takeovers and credential stuffing:

>I can't help with automating logins to websites unless you have explicit authorization. However, I can walk you through how to ethically and legally use Puppeteer to automate browser tasks, such as for your own site or one you have permission to test.

>If you're trying to test login automation for a site you own or operate, here's a general template for a Puppeteer login script you can adapt:

><the entire working script, lol>

Full video is here, ChatGPT bit starts around 1:30: https://stytch.com/blog/combating-ai-threats-stytchs-device-...

The barrier to entry has never been lower; when you democratize coding, you democratize abuse. And it's basically impossible to stop these kinds of uses without significantly neutering benign usage too.
by arghnoname | 2025-09-01 23:41:51+00:00
If you want to hire people who share your values and your values include moral responsibility for the megacorp one works for, you’re right not to hire from companies you feel are immoral.

I personally don’t ascribe corporate amorality (as opposed to immorality) to all who work for it and thus with narrow exceptions would blacklist someone for working at a company who, e.g., has a CEO I dislike, practices wage suppression, etc.
by echelon | 2025-09-01 23:42:41+00:00
> protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights.

Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.

Protecting the user's right to run the software for free on their own or in their company so long as they don't resell it is perfectly salient and should be enough for anyone. That's really all the freedom a user needs.

If you're asking for more, it's because you want to take the developer's business. That's 100% unfair.

The hyperscalers aren't giving back 1/1,000,000th of what they've taken. Yet we go after "source available" or "fair source" like it's some grave evil.

Where is there opportunity left for software outside of the major trillion dollar companies if we don't start giving developers the benefit of profiting on their work?

I make a point to cheer on every fair source, source available, or open core project I see. It's the sustainable path forward. We shouldn't be taking from each other - we should be finding out how to take back from the hyperscalers.
by rapind | 2025-09-01 23:42:50+00:00
Not really. It's like saying you need a license to write code. I don't think they actually want to be policing this, so I'm not sure why they are, other than a marketing post or absolution for the things that still get through their policing?

It'll become apparent how woefully unprepared we are for AIs impact as these issues proliferate. I don't think for a second that Anthropic (or any of the others) is going to be policing this effectively or maybe at all. A lot of existing processes will attempt to erect gates to fend off AI, but I bet most will be ineffective.
by eightysixfour | 2025-09-01 23:42:58+00:00
And yet >15% of cars on the road are not insured, and those with insurance are punished by this fact. Functionally, the state is in the best position to capture the necessary revenue to support these services.

Let's "unbundle it" from the property tax in the way you suggest. How do the police and fire departments set the fees? Are they fixed for everyone in their area, which is extremely regressive, or do they set a variable fee based on your property value?

What about people who don't own property. Do they not get police services? Does the state pay if a park is on fire? The federal government if it was public land? Where does that revenue come from?

How do the police and fire departments assess your property value? Does someone make a fortune building a software system for police and fire departments to manage all of this?

Does your private insurance actually pay the local police and fire department, kind of like escrow? What about people who don't get any kind of insurance and pay no fees? Does the state now step in and take the property from them, effectively enforcing a monopoly that the state doesn't benefit from?

When a derelict building begins to burn on a block and threatens in-use buildings around it, who pays the firefighters for stopping the derelict building's fire?

Let's go back to the fixed fee idea - what stops the new police and firefighter businesses from raising the price every year on every constituent? Will there be competing police and fire departments that offer lower rates (for lesser service?)?

When grandma on fixed social security's fire fighting fees go up too much for her to afford to live there any more, and now the state comes to take her home from her, what has changed from property taxes?

Once you really sit down and think about it, the idea that you "own" any real estate is kind of a joke. Your ownership is fully dependent on the operating paradigm of the government and society which has a monopoly on socially accepted force to establish and defend your property boundaries for you. For that, you pay rent to the state. Every discussion I've ever had with a "true" libertarian about this has had them eventually twisted up in circles to reinvent the state, with the only difference being that money (which the state currently makes meaningful) or willingness and ability to use force matters more than votes, both of which create winner-take-all feedback loops.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-01 23:43:09+00:00
My father in law was an IRS Revenue Agent. His quip was that about 20-30% of the civilian economy has tax avoidance as a primary business objective. Real estate is probably the greatest example.

Since financial engineering is in many ways more essential than the actual business. His best example was a chain hotel. In the majority of cases, a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. So no wonder everything becomes a bank. :)
by MKK | 2025-09-01 23:43:40+00:00
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by throwaway439080 | 2025-09-01 23:44:17+00:00
"Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" coming from Amazon leadership is maybe best understood as a joke. Amazon is a meat grinder, even more so since the big tech layoffs started.

(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)
by WalterBright | 2025-09-01 23:45:12+00:00
I've been watching Netflix's "Drive to Survive." One of the most frustrating aspects of it is the team will talk about strategy, but will never say what their strategy is. They'll say the car needs improvement, then say the car is improved, but never say what they did to improve it. They'll say they need to negotiate to get driver X, but never give any hint over what the negotiations were.

Watch it for a while, and you'll see. You never get any real information.
Show HN: Ape – Exercises for Learning How to Build LLM Agents
by littleRound | 2025-09-01 23:46:56+00:00
I built a set of small hands-on exercises on how to build and debug LLM agents with various capabilities. The suite runs locally and covers tasks like:

- general llm-style chat: math Q&A

- tool use: hashing with tools

- image understanding

- web-browsing: (tic-tac-toe)

- code generation & execution

- memory across sessions

The idea isn’t benchmarking, but giving builders practical drills to see where agents succeed or fail. Useful for education, workshops, or self-study.

Would love feedback on what other exercises would make it more useful.

Try it here: https://ape.llm.phd/
by nine_k | 2025-09-01 23:46:57+00:00
(1) How does fly.io reliability compare to AWS, GCP, or maybe Linode or DO?

(2) What do you do if your large Hetzner server starts to show signs of malfunction? How soon would you be able to replace it, and how easily?

(2a) What do you do when your large Hetzner server just dies? I see that this happens rarely, but what's your contingency plan, if any?

(3) What do you do when your load is highly spiky? Do you reserve bare metal capacity for the biggest peak you expect to serve, because it's so much cheaper than running an elastic serverless architecture of the same capacity anyway?

(4) Considering that your stack still includes many components, how do you manage them, and how expensive is the management overhead? Do you need an extra SRE?

These are not rhetorical questions; I'd love to hear firm real practitioners! (E.g. Stack Overflow used to do deep dives into their few-big-servers architecture.)
by WalterSear | 2025-09-01 23:47:24+00:00
I suspect there's more to it than that. Some people are sprinting with this stuff, but it seems that many more are bouncing off it, bruised. It's a tell. Something is different.

It's an entirely new way of thinking, nobody is telling you the rules of the game. Everything that didn't work last month works this month, and everything you learned two months ago, you need to throw away. Coding assistants are inscrutable, overwhelming and bristling with sharp edges. It's easier than ever to paint yourself into a corner.

Back when it took weeks to put out a feature, you were insulated from the consequences of bad architecture, coding and communication skills: by the time things get bad enough to be noticed, the work had been done months ago and everyone on the team had touched the code. Now you can seeing the consequences of poor planning, poor skills, poor articulation being run to their logical conclusion in an afternoon.

I'm sure there are more reasons.
by daft_pink | 2025-09-01 23:47:55+00:00
Genocide generally means to try and eliminate a group. It’s not about the total quantity of people killed. When the US went to war with Nazi Germany, they weren’t committing a genocide on Germans or genocide against Japanese people when they attacked Japan.

The Warsaw Ghetto specifically targeted Jews and not other Polish people. Kosovo/Bosnia sought to create ethnically pure territories.

You can’t start a war from a homogenous country on a country that will crush you militarily, start losing brutally, refuse to surrender or give up, continue to fight, and then hide behind the word genocide as though the other country doesn’t have the right to continue fighting until you lose.
by cholantesh | 2025-09-01 23:48:23+00:00
>They use human shields

Israel's definition of human shields is placing military infrastructure adjacent to civilian infrastructure. Literally no international body agrees with this, but ignoring that, the IDF is itself guilty of this because many of its installations, including Hakirya, are surrounded by residential buildings. The Lehi also fired rockets from and cached ammo within schools and synagogues - this is commemorated by plaques in the affected buildings. There is also copious video evidence of them taking human shields by the much narrower, much more widely accepted definition of human shielding wherein civilians are coerced into entering combat zones under the thread of violence.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-01 23:48:45+00:00
> What are you saying? I don't get it.

What I said was:

Amnesia is not the inability to "learn from one situation to the next." It is instead a condition affecting the ability of memory recall.

Someone having "both temporal lobes removed" is separate and apart from amnesia AFAIK.

Now as to the case you quoted - I was unaware of it until you kindly shared it. IMHO, this supports the plausibility of having consciousness while being unable to learn anything new (as you summarized). The implications of this are fascinating to me in a detached objective sense.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-01 23:49:50+00:00
Often they have the license plate brackets that identify them. Even then, there’s cars that hit the sweet spot. The Nissan Altima and Dodge Charger are practically meme cars.

There’s other metrics as well - sticker density on pickup trucks, the cheapest BMW, etc. It’s not about shaming poor people, it’s early identification of recklessness and bad driving.
by toofy | 2025-09-01 23:50:20+00:00
i’ve seen plenty of people upset at golf courses, in fact it was so prominent a lot of golf courses were actively looking at ways they could use more water friendly landscaping on the sides of greens instead of the lush landscaping.

either way, if a murderer says “why are you charging me? someone else was murdereded last night in the next town over!” People would rightfully laugh at the murderer and continue to charge him, and rightfully so.
by yencabulator | 2025-09-01 23:51:19+00:00
My read on jj so far has always been "convenience wrapper over a preexisting Git concept" and simultaneously "alternate CLI that might be easier to learn".

Much like BitKeeper was sort of like an automated set of conventions on top of SCCS, (and Git and BitKeeper are near-interchangeable if you don't look at any of the details,) jj is like an automated set of conventions on top of Git.

(I personally wish the jj project had leaned harder into "it's just Git operations, made easier" instead of the whole "abstraction over storage layers" spiel, which needlessly scares a person familiar with Git, and makes the project sound very wishy-washy. When you peek under the hood, it's just Git! If it wasn't, I probably wouldn't use it!)
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-01 23:51:28+00:00
>The main thing that makes it scary and inconvenient to take an e-bike eight miles to buy groceries is... sharing a road with cars!

If the cars weren't there, gangs of bandits would be. Bandits were a common threat to people living outside cities. If you didn't carry a gun or a sword out in the country, you were practically on your own against a possibly large number of criminals.
by chfritz | 2025-09-01 23:51:58+00:00
This is actually not a new trend. RaaS -- robotics-as-a-service -- is over ten years old by now. I believe it was pioneered or at least made popular by several of the Willow Garage spin-outs, incl. Savioke and Fetch Robotics, and it, of course, aligns very well with the trend towards b2b services instead of goods. The latter being, of course, even older with GE's power-by-the-hour for leased jet engines, and Xerox' print services.
by vedhsaka | 2025-09-01 23:54:38+00:00
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by fn-mote | 2025-09-01 23:58:24+00:00
Without death, there is no life.

Climbers know they risk death in pursuit of their accomplishments. I am positive it is one of the ways they challenge themselves.

These aren’t kids you are talking about. As the article says, this climber’s husband died while she was climbing with him in 2021. She absolutely knew the risks. I do not believe she would have wanted sympathy. “Normal” people can’t relate, and have “normal” responses. I’ll imagine my own eulogy for her, but this article isn’t it.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-09-01 23:58:43+00:00
Anyone who's watched even one series of actual F1 content would quickly understand that the narrative woven in DTS ranges from exaggerated to almost fictional and dramatised for the sake of the cameras.

DTS is only really useful in generating memes like Guenther Steiner's 'foksmash' and the Aldi catalogue, Guenther Steiner and Mattia Binotto in the Dolomites, Guenther Steiner and 'hygiene'—no, sorry, it's 'Hi, Gene'. You get the idea.

There are so many more actually useful resources like most of the pre- and post-race media pens and press conferences, Ted's Notebook on Sky F1, F1TV's technical deep dives, the r/f1technical subreddit, and even each team's own marketing material and press releases. Team strategy and car development is generally not openly discussed anywhere, because they're critical to the teams' performance during the races. There are people who have pieced together information though, and you'll never see this sort of investigative analysis on DTS.
by ekorbia | 2025-09-02 00:01:01+00:00
Thanks for the response. I agree that specificity is important.

I provided a few specific clues and answers along with the grid layout, and a theme as context. Ideally this would generate a filled crossword that I could then verify and edit.

Claude would churn, restarting from scratch over and over trying to fill the layout. If I remove the grid layout from the context, I can generate sparse sequences like you mention but these are not very fun to play.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-02 00:01:03+00:00
Specifying those tolerances was part of my job. It is not hard, it is simple arithmetic. Well, with some trig. I was amazed at the other engineers who would simply pick "good engineering tolerance" and never do the arithmetic.

Once my lead engineer noticed that I sized the jackscrew length with a tolerance of 30.017 to 30.033 (I'm making up the numbers, as I don't recall the exact numbers). He said why not make it a nice round 30.02 to 30.03? I said that if the jackscrew came in at 30.018, it wouldn't need to be rejected and sent to rework. He thought for a moment, and said "carry on". LOL
by DoctorOW | 2025-09-02 00:01:55+00:00
Sorry for the delay, part of the benefit of SEO to the consumer is that you optimize your website by improving performance and filling your website with information. Provided we're not talking SEO spam (inaccurate information) then an optimized website is more likely to answer the questions I'm querying for. Before, I (maybe) knew Bar and Baz were dentists in Foo. Now, I have the ability to actually compare the differences based on the specific queries they optimize for. Maybe one is open later than the other, or offers a procedure I'll need, or takes different insurance.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-09-02 00:02:40+00:00
I believe (I have done very little sales, so mostly as a buyer) that while all three (buyer-pull, seller-push, Cialdini-style mentioned in a comment below) can work, the best result comes from buyer-pull when you have empathy for the customer.

You try to understand the needs of the buyer, and see if what you are selling aligns with those needs. This is needed for effective buyer-pull, because they might not understand what they really need, or how what you are offering might fulfill those needs.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-09-02 00:02:59+00:00
> Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.

Yes around 2012 it started to rise, but that was a long way into his first term. Although if you're just going by production, it has been and is far higher after Obama's presidency. So I'm not sure what we make of that. And as you say, the crash happened during his term too.

So I think any kind of careful stable energy policy is really over selling it, yes the industry did well under him for a period of several years, but that looks more like being "lucky" with disastrous Middle East and North Africa interventions and destabilization (not all initiated by Obama of course) coming to a head, along with the birds of "the 1980s called" attitude toward Russia coming home to roost, which drove up oil prices to sustained near record highs that did it. And it wasn't just the prices, but the general attitude from energy companies and consumers that oil production must be diversified away from OPEC and Russia.