MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gerdesj | 2025-09-07 21:10:41+00:00
Great choice mate.

I really must get around to looking into opnsense again. I look after 50 odd pfSense boxes (about half on Netgate gear) across the UK but I am a believer in choice and I remember when opensense sort of split from pfSense. Its great to see the project thriving.

When you deploy a well respected alternative to your ISP provided equipment and get it to work, you generally get it right. They (pfSense, opnsense, openwrt and all the rest) will not do an insecure config out of the box. You do have to try quite hard to get it wrong!

Adguard, pfBlocker, pi-hole and co. all largely do a similar job and that is keeping your devices away from the seamier parts of the internet and the seamier sides of the internet away from your network. They are not perfect but are really good at it.

Think steel bound three inch thick front door, with really good hinges and a lock that would give a professional a hard time, rather than PVC or wooden panel with a mortice lock. Do keep an eye on the windows though ... 8)

Keep it and everything else reasonably up to date and you are probably golden.
by atoav | 2025-09-07 21:11:01+00:00
The thing about age verification ia that it is at its core identity verification. You need to make sure the person on the other side of the screen is indeed who they are.

This means it isn't enough to verify the age of an account once. If all you need are verified accounts you just created a black market for verfied accounts.

That means you need to verify the identity of the actual person sitting in front of the screen with regularity. And that is problematic in various ways.
by BirAdam | 2025-09-07 21:11:26+00:00
This presumes quite a bit. As it stands, AGI has not been achieved, and this article is claiming that, by 2028, 90% of all knowledge-worker jobs will be done by an AI system.

Even were that to happen, it is unlikely that a UBI would be put in place, or if it were, that it would be successful. An Ouroboros of taxing owners to pay the public who buy from the owners wouldn't be successful. The reality is that were all workers to be replaced by AI, the economy would collapse. Then, the owners of the systems would be forced to liquidate their assets, the prices on GPUs would crater, and the AI means of production would be redistributed among the hands of the public. Then, small models would be driving productivity in the new wave of startups following the crash. This pattern could repeat many times.
by instig007 | 2025-09-07 21:11:30+00:00
> What you have written is not a serious proposal in terms of a working way to extend Protocol Buffers to allow repeated oneofs.

I didn't intend to propose a solution for protobuf specifically, I explained why the author of the subject article had a point in calling the authors of protobuf amateurs, given the existing spec, that led to specific implementations of the parsers, and the respective downsides.

> But in the real world (yes I'm going to keep saying that, since you don't seem very familiar with it)

I'll have to repeat that "real-world vs the rest of you" talking point is the specific attitude of (ex-)google folks that make them look amateur or, at least, ignorant.

> This isn't as pretty as people might like but it works just fine in practice and we move on to more important things.

That doesn't explain why you didn't implement it differtently, you just stated that you did. So, why didn't you implement it differently, if you admit that a few lines above with: "Yes, I know that. With a clean slate, we can do anything."
by OtomotO | 2025-09-07 21:12:12+00:00
I mostly see two extreme positions:

Either AI is a total fraud, completely useless (at least for programming), or it's deus ex machina.

But reality has more than one bit to answer questions like "Is AI a hype?"

Despite only recently becoming a father and feeling like I am in my prime, I've seen many hypes.

And IT is an eternal cycle of hypes. Every few years a new holy cow is sent through the village to bring salvation to all of us and rid us of every problem (un)imaginable.

To give a few examples:

Client-Server SPAs Industry 4.0 Machine Learning Agile Blockchain Cloud Managed Languages

To me LLMs are nice, though no revelation.

I can use them fine to generate JS or Python code, because apparently the training sets were big enough, and they help me by writing boilerplate code I was gonna write anyway.

When I try them to help me write Rust or Zig, they fall extremely short though.

LLMs are extremely overhyped. They made a few people very rich by promising too much.

They are not AI by any means but marketing.

But they are a tool. And as such they should be treated. Use them when appropriate, but don't hail them...
by ElevenLathe | 2025-09-07 21:12:17+00:00
If you use software (i.e. an LLM or spiritual successor) to produce a "clone" of another piece of software, is that not a pretty cut and dry case of it being a derivative work? No creativity was exercised by human beings in that scenario, so it would seem to be akin to something like converting a photo between image formats.

People get around this via "clean room" reverse engineering where one engineer tears down the thing to be cloned and writes a detailed spec, and then a different engineer (who has never seen the internals of the thing in question, and so isn't "tainted" by that knowledge) implements it from that spec. You could do this with AI, but then all that spec writing/reading is done by a machine too, so you haven't really bought yourself anything legally.

To be clear, I'm not a lawyer. I'm just musing aloud.
by TuringNYC | 2025-09-07 21:12:18+00:00
This is very refreshing. I've lost a lot of hope in the past year.

I purchased a domain with Google Cloud a year ago for a business domain. There is no way to manage it. I get emails from SquareSpace noting they manage the domain. However, logging into SquareSpace they show no owned domains. Google Cloud says to go to SquareSpace. SquareSpace's AgentBot chats quickly give up and re-direct me to their FAQ, even after going thru a long process of uploading drivers licenses etc. The FAQ suggests I should contact the AgentBot. Meanwhile, the domain is up for rewnewal in 3months, so the problem has lasted for 9months no w/o resolution. Some online docs say Google Cloud domains got purchased by SquareSpace, others say only Google Domains got purchased by SquareSpace.

Meanwhile, not a single person responds. You cannot reach a human. You cannot contest it. I totally see the risk of going with Google for any other enterprise products.
by adrianmonk | 2025-09-07 21:12:33+00:00
I attribute some of it to the Great Depression. My grandparents grew up during it, and it had an effect on them. They never wanted to get rid of anything because what if times got really hard again? You might be so poor that you couldn't reacquire what you got rid of.

They lived a comfortable middle class life, and that fear never materialized. But they were still prepared in case it did. And they passed that kind of thinking on to the next generation.
by rolph | 2025-09-07 21:12:40+00:00
depending on institution, if you feel you can stand equal with faculty, you may apply to challenge for credits, and a full ride for uncanny ability [independent accomplishment]

get a syllibus for degree courses, and get the c.v. of faculty, as well as theses of grad student t.a. corpus. know these things inside and out, as well as recent extensions of these theses, and when you can stand up to an examination board to make successful defense vs challange, you may be ready.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-09-07 21:12:53+00:00
The price is a little steep and I wonder how well a watch with its smaller antenna will work in difficult terrain. My InReach Mini often doesn’t connect in narrow canyons and I assume the smaller watch will be even worse. An emergency device that doesn’t work in an emergency is pretty useless. That’s why the iPhone satellite messaging doesn’t work for me either. In my backcountry tests it was a crapshoot whether it worked or didn’t.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-07 21:13:24+00:00
The difference with the .com era is that a website is and was immediately useful when it came out. Yes there was too much speculative investment, but the inherent merits of the technology were plainly obvious.

This is not the case with AI. It is not even clear if these tools are useful. This really is much more an “Emperor has no clothes” situation, which is why this bubble is perhaps more dangerous.
by psadri | 2025-09-07 21:13:32+00:00
I do miss the earlier "heavy" models that had encyclopedic knowledge vs the new "lighter" models that rely on web search. Relying on web search surfaces a shallow layer of knowledge (thanks to SEO and all the other challenges of ranking web results) vs having ingested / memorized basically the entirety of human written knowledge beyond what's typically reachable within the first 10 results of a web search (eg: digitized offline libraries).
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2025-09-07 21:13:53+00:00
They are still a target for theft

https://www.economist.com/interactive/britain/2025/08/17/the...

> More recently London has become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to turn up in China.

> Globalisation created the supply chain that allows each iPhone—assembled from nearly 3,000 components—to reach the hands of a consumer. The same forces inverted see that phone yanked out of it, re-exported and broken apart again.
by adastra22 | 2025-09-07 21:14:15+00:00
In rust you would add a NEW trait, which is brought in scope by those who need it. Or add a new method to an existing trait, with a default implementation.

The problem you describe makes no sense. It sounds like, for example, wanting to add a new variant to an enum while also not wanting to modify match statements which now fail exhaustive testing. That’s a direct contradiction.

The only sensible charitable interpretation I can come up with is that you want to add new methods to a type without having to update any existing type definitions. This is what traits do.
by yencabulator | 2025-09-07 21:14:17+00:00
It's kinda weird since the payload seems to be (repeat:u8 + rgb565:u16)*, so always multiples of three bytes, not two.

Given how this is sort of software is usually written, my guess would be they originally didn't have the RLE encoding and were just sending (rgb565:u16)*. That'd explain it.
by zdw | 2025-09-07 21:14:47+00:00
A lot of "new" products in the "bargain" category can have remanufactured parts, even without telling the end users.

For example, in this DankPods video he pulls apart two cube speakers, and while they look mostly the same on the outside, one has a Nokia-sized lithium battery that is directly soldered to, and the other has a swollen pouch pack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfnabYBtJ2I&t=325s

Unfortunately end users can't tell whether they got a "race to the bottom" item, so as much as I'd like cheap repairs, it seems like those also come with a huge amount of buyer beware that they may not know about.
by rleigh | 2025-09-07 21:16:19+00:00
Recently it's got really bad though. The taskbar is badly broken.

* If you use auto-hide, it won't show when some applications are open. Edge in particular is bad.

* Some applications simply don't show on the taskbar at all. Teams is one. It's in the alt-tab list.

* Sometimes it stops working entirely.

The testing and QA of this stuff appears to be largely absent.
by whimsicalism | 2025-09-07 21:16:42+00:00
> Here’s the problem for consumers: To meet data center demand, utilities are building new power plants and power lines that are needed only because of data center growth. If state regulators allow utilities to follow the standard approach of splitting the costs of new infrastructure among all consumers, the public will end up paying to supply data centers with all that power.

I don’t agree with the premise of this article. Of course they will “include these costs” for all ratepayers because the alternative would be Meta (or whoever) just buys all the electricity (or at least a much greater share). Of course ratepayers share in the cost of building new infra because the equilibrium price of electricity has gone up.
by Aloha | 2025-09-07 21:16:45+00:00
WW1 in a way was special, because you had modern weaponry with 19th century medicine (and arguably 19th century tactics - meaning an army that wasn't mechanized).

The fact that the war was effectively stalemate for 2ish years also contributed to both the medical issues involved and the psychological impact of combat too.

They did have fairly strong and comprehensive landline field phone networks, wireless wasn't really needed.
by imiric | 2025-09-07 21:17:03+00:00
... And end up with elements that have dozens of classes until you need to parse CSS in your head in order to figure out what the element is supposed to look like. This methodology completely misses the point of using classes to begin with.

Good class and ID names should be semantic, just like the markup. Don't describe what the CSS does; describe what the element is.

Not only that, but it introduces useless abstractions that could've been avoided by just writing CSS directly. How is `.content-center` better than `align-content: center`?

Tailwind and its ilk are one of the worst trends to have ever happened in web development. It's making people forget how to use CSS, while being useless in the process. I truly don't understand it. And, yes, I've worked on projects that used it extensively. It's awful.
by gerdesj | 2025-09-07 21:17:39+00:00
It's a silly old meme from the days before Mr Dawkins invented the word meme.

We were sadly not past expressions like that in say the 70s or 80s but by the 90s, that phrase was definitely considered ironic (in the modern sense). Back then irony was merely one metallic mouth feel, along with steely, coppery and brassic.
by mindslight | 2025-09-07 21:17:58+00:00
It feels like you're just skipping the core of my points and repeating the justification that has allowed the situation to get this bad. The fake prices and 50-100% discounts are indeed symptoms of a pathological behavior that indicates it's not about true good-faith "discounts".

One straightforward healthcare reform that could be done tomorrow would be to mandate that providers must charge the same price no matter who is paying, rather than the current behavior of operating pricing cartels in league with the insurance companies. This would work even if the government kept giving itself a pass by excepting Medicare.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-07 21:18:16+00:00
> The problem is how to statically ensure that you don’t run into the case of a missing implementation

Static (compile-time) guarantees are only applicable to languages with static binding rules, in which case there is no problem - the compiler will just report "cannot resolve overloaded function" or something similar.

This is of course one of the downsides to languages with dynamic types and dynamic binding ... that many errors can only be detected at runtime.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-07 21:18:27+00:00
> I hope at some point AI will replace most diagnostics and doctors that are not up to date.

That's a valid hope, but not a very realistic one just yet. The error rates are just too high. Medicine is messy and complex. Yes, doctors get it wrong every now and then. But AI gets it wrong far more frequently, still. It can be used as a tool in the arsenal of the medical professional, but we are very far away from self-service diagnosis for complex stuff.

> I also hope it will completely kill US pharmacy conglomerate.

That is mostly based on molecules and patents, not so much on diagnostics, that's a different group of companies.

> AI was trained on public domain knowledge. All things we get from it should be free and available everywhere.

Not necessarily, but for the cases where it is I agree that the models should be free and open.

> I can only hope.

Yes. I've seen some very noble efforts strand on lack of capital and every time that happens I realize that not everything is as simple as I would like it to be. I've just financed a - small - factory for something that I consider both useful and urgent, but my means are limited and it was clear that I had no profit motive (which actually means my money went a lot further than if I had had a profit motive).

Once you get into medical education or diagnostics the amounts usually run into the millions if you want to really move the needle. No single individual is going to put that out there on their own dime unless they were very wealthy to begin with. I've invested in a couple of companies like that. They all failed, predictably, because raising follow on investments for such stuff is very hard, even if you can get it to work in principle.

The best example of stuff like that that did work is how the artificial pancreas movement is pushed forward hard by people hacking sensors and insulin pumps. They have forced industry to wake up and smell the coffee: if they weren't going to be the ones to offer it then someone else inevitably would. Even so it is a hard problem to solve properly. But it is getting there:

https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/wearenotwaiting-the-p...
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-07 21:19:54+00:00
To be fair, a book is fundamentally a wear item. I remember learning how my university library had its own incinerator. After a certain point it makes no sense to have 30 copies of an outdated textbook taking up space in the racks. Same goes for beatup old fiction and what have you. One might think a little urban school or branch library might want some but they too deal with realities of shelf space constraints and would probably prefer that their patrons had materials more current or in better shape.

That being said, I’m sure these companies did not exclusively buy books at the end of their life.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-07 21:20:02+00:00
Idea: workshops for teachers that teach them some kind of Socratic method that stimulates kids to support what they got from G with their own thinking, however basic and simple it may be.

Formulating the state of your current knowledge graph, that was just amplified by ChatGPT's research might be a way to offset the loss of XP ... XP that comes with grinding at whatever level kids currently find themselves ...
by sixtyj | 2025-09-07 21:20:05+00:00
Imagine hardware industries :) Agriculture, forestry, carpenters… AI is toothless and maybe it is or will be used as aid.

Everybody wants AI, it is similar to ebook readers will displace books, websites will displace other marketing channels, PDAs will displace desktop computers, and tablets will displace PDAs etc…

AI fever it is and we should take some drugs to cool down :)
by storafrid | 2025-09-07 21:20:42+00:00
Think half an abstraction layer higher. You're on the right track with multiple PHP virtual runtimes on a single VM - that could conceptually be viewed as a sort of precursor to function runtimes.

The serverless function has higher-order features included as part of the package: you get an automatic runtime (just as with PHP but in this case it can be golang or dotnet), the function gets a unique endpoint URL, it can be triggered by events in other cloud services, you get execution logging (and basic alerting), multiple functions can be chained together (either with events or as a state machine), the function's compute can be automatically scaled up depending on the traffic, etc.

Think of it as: What do I have to do, in order to scale up the conpute of this URL? For hardware it's a call to DELL to order parts, for VMs or containers it's a matter of scaling up that runtime, or adding more instances - neither of those processes are simple to automate. One key characteristic of the function is that it will scale horizontally basically however much you want (not fully true, aws has a limit of 1500 instances/second iirc, but that's pretty massive), and it will do it automatically and without the request sources ever noticing.

Functions are also dirt cheap for low/burst traffic, and deployment is almost as easy as in the PHP FTP example. Personally I also think they are easier to test than traditional apps, due to their stateless nature and limited logical size (one endpoint). The main downsides are cost for sustained load, and latency for cold starts.

With that said, they are not "endgame". Just a tool - a great one for the right job.
by ath3nd | 2025-09-07 21:20:50+00:00
> uncritically quoted over and over assures me that the anti-AI fervor is at least as big of a bubble as the AI bubble itself.

Counterpoint: the AI fanboys and AI companies, with all their insane funding couldn't come up with a better study and bigger sample size, because LLMs simply don't help experienced developers.

What follows is that the billion dollar companies just couldn't create a better study, either because they tried and didn't like the productivity numbers not being in their favor (very likely), or because they are that sloppy and vibey that they don't know how to make a proper study (I wouldn't be surprised, see ChatGPT's latest features: "study mode" which had a blog post! and you know that the level is not very high).

Again, until there is a better study, the consensus is LLMs are 19% productivity drain for experienced developers, and if they help certain developers, then most likely those developers are not experienced.

How's that for an interpretation?
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-07 21:22:00+00:00
$1200 is stupid expensive, my Fenix 6 Pro was half that. The F6P was worth every one of those 60,000 pennies, which is coincidentally approximately how many hours I've worn it since purchasing it in 2018.

I always leave my phone at home for running, biking, hiking, kayaking, etc: not being tethered is part of the appeal.

The subscriptions for this new one or for InReach are infuriating, and they even recently made it worse because you can no longer effectively deactivate it. I only do 3 or 4 real backcountry expeditions in a year, I don't need this activated for 12 months.

I used to carry an InReach until the MBAs decided I was cheating them out of surplus cash that they could demand. Now I have an ACR PLB1 instead, no subscription but it can still call in the cavalry if I break my ankle twenty miles from civilization.

I would buy this if (honestly, when) the price drops by half, or better yet the Enduro version with a MIP screen. Some rich sucker will probably want to trade theirs in when the $3000 Fenix 9 Supreme comes out....
by existencebox | 2025-09-07 21:22:26+00:00
I respectfully think you overestimate the impact this will have.

Like with the H1-B cap discussions there were murmurs about some time back (Not actually reducing the cap, but instead priority-weighting it by salary instead of difficulty to fill the position, something that'd actually _hurt_ US workers in the positions they can actually compete and be paid well for) this change feels a lot more like a performative money grab than something that will actually change the economics.

Indian headcount is not 25% cheaper for the roles I've seen it used for. It is integer-N cheaper, where N can sometimes be >3-5. Additionally, there simply is not the functional, social, or business infrastructure to spin up a new 10k person business center overnight in the US, meaning that for many use cases even if individual labor is findable, it's not realistic in the same respect.

If anything my fear (and what I've observed thus far) is that businesses will see overseas staffing as critical enough that the cuts will come out of the highest cost center: US employment.