MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greycol | 2025-10-21 22:20:59+00:00
I mean not to defend the telemetry philosphy (my smart home setup is local only with a couple of tell-tale heart exceptions[1]) but I'd expect that any cheap sensor net where your trying to infer data from indirect sensors would be grabbing as much data as possible especially if it didn't have strong local processing.

But yeah don't buy products that don't work local only, if they require online the temptation will be to great at some point to abuse that requirement.

[1] They're slowly driving me insane and I'll destroy them for the peace of mind at some point if an update doesn't brick them first.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-21 22:21:07+00:00
Babble intended to pitch the brainwashsble the inception that AI is indistinguishable from the economy and therefore a replacement for it, an idea that suits OpenAI's reckless business tactics by making it sound like AI overriding the actual economy is both inevitable and a forgone conclusion.

The cautious will consider that the current commonly repeated observations about en14n of the internet as an output of the dotcom bubble will continue, and might follow Moore's law: Thanks to AI en14n will double every 18 months and swell out into the economy at large as it explodes. (Tron Ares will be regarded as weirdly prescient like the movie Her.) Ofc a select cult of privileged carnival barkers will become rich beyond reckoning with the societal spotlights tracking their every move, while the commonwealth will continue to fracture into ruin.

All signs point to the collective mind going insane as it is overwhelmed by a map that's more detailed than the territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars
by josephkready | 2025-10-21 22:21:13+00:00
The "no account, just pay-per-use" model for a Redis caching service is a genuinely brilliant friction-killer. Seriously, setting up an isolated in-memory store for a quick side project or a temporary developer workflow can be such a tedious process of account creation, provisioning, and subscription management.

Big kudos to the team for focusing on developer experience and simplifying a core infrastructure component.
by iamjs | 2025-10-21 22:21:51+00:00
> Bridging the Gap: Why Not Just Docker Compose?

The draw of a docker-compose-like interface for deployment is so alluring that I have spent the last year or so working on a tool called Defang that takes a compose file and deploys it to the cloud. We don't support Hetzner (yet), but we do support AWS, GCP, and DO. We provision networking, IAM, compute, database, secrets, etc in your cloud account, so you maintain full control, but you also get the ergonomics of compose.

If you are on a PaaS and you want to reduce cost without losing ergonomics and scalability, it might be interesting.
by ricksunny | 2025-10-21 22:22:36+00:00
(for posterity: my use of quotemarks left something to be desired here - the quote 'that does..codebook' is Mr. Wong's quote, not my own. I got an uncharacteristically large number of upvotes from the comment above. I suspect had less to do with HNers' appreciation of library science, and more to their expressing appreciation of one's display of their professional bonafides, which I regret, in this case, are not my own to profess.) Although I wonder if HN's commenting system removed any addititional quotemarks I may have placed at the time.
by tcmart14 | 2025-10-21 22:22:38+00:00
I do agree with this. If we are returning to the moon just to say we did, as a space lover, I do have an issue with this and can't really get on board. I am hoping we have some other larger goal in mind, like maybe are back to the idea of a permanent moon base and a potential jump off point for other projects or we have a list of long term moon experiments to do. But yea, it just isn't exciting if we are going there to take a couple pictures and just to rub it in the face of China or India or some other nation. We've already done that.
by ggm | 2025-10-21 22:22:57+00:00
It will sell for a lot more than it's competition. It won't have a significant upside apart from being a shorter supply chain, and it will have a french metric tonne of non-US components and dependencies, without a great deal of hurt.

None of this means he shouldn't do it. To the contrary. It's necessary, and it should probably be funded.

If I had to rank concerns, outsourcing smart device management to Asia in the power and utility sector at large would be my #1 and #2 would be the lack of an independent supply chain for portable devices, because they go everywhere
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-21 22:22:58+00:00
Yeahna, thats just memory exhaustion.

Swap helps you use ram more efficiently, as you put the hot stuff in swap and let the rest fester on disk.

Sure if you overwhelm it, then you're gonna have a bad day, but thats the same without swap.

Seriously, swap is good, don't believe the noise.
by eightys3v3n | 2025-10-21 22:23:01+00:00
I'm not sure I follow. Every knot is defined as if you close the ends it cannot be unravelled without cutting the ends again. So the trifoil knot is included in this... but so is almost if not every other knot aren't they? Do we have "knots" that aren't mathematical? I feel like if you tie any "knot" then fix the ends together most or all of them would not be possible to untangle.
by shoo | 2025-10-21 22:23:05+00:00
I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1]

> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
by int_19h | 2025-10-21 22:23:19+00:00
I specifically stated that the domain here is "the area over which Rome was the hegemon". Which is less than the whole world, obviously (but also more than Europe; North Africa, for example). We're talking about the rest of the world today because USA is truly a global hegemon, though.

And I don't know how you define "fall", but the standards of living and things like technological knowledge, culture etc basically cratered for several centuries; it sure does sound like a fall to me. "Failed state" is a modern term that doesn't quite have a direct analogy, but even so what was going on in most Roman provinces (and ultimately even Rome itself) could be reasonably described as such - stable governance would also take centuries to reassert itself.
by mamcx | 2025-10-21 22:23:46+00:00
You can decompose in 2 problems, because well is better, but is in fact one. Can be argued that is only this single problem:

How, in ACID way, store data that will be efficiently look it up later by a unknown number of clients and unknown access patterns, concurrently, without blocking all the participants, in a fast way?

And then add SQL (ouch!)
by codyb | 2025-10-21 22:23:52+00:00
It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.

Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-10-21 22:23:57+00:00
It really depends upon how much data you have. If its enough to just dump then go crazy. If it isn't its a bit more trouble.

Regardless, you're going to have a much easier time developing your app if your datastore access latency is submillisecond rather than tens of milliseconds.

So that extra trouble might be worth it...
by gchamonlive | 2025-10-21 22:23:57+00:00
For me the problem is managing the transition minimizing unnecessary suffering.

The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.

The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.

This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.
by ewoodrich | 2025-10-21 22:24:22+00:00
Lately the Claude-ism that drives me even more insane is "Perfect!".

Particularly when it's in response to pointing out a big screw up that needs correcting and CC utterly unfazed just merrily continues on like I praised it.

"You have fundamentally misunderstood the problems with the layout, before attempting another fix, think deeply and re-read the example text in the PLAN.md line by line and compare with each line in the generated output to identify the out of order items in the list."

"Perfect!...."
by Bender | 2025-10-21 22:24:38+00:00
Just me personally, I would only go as far as to mention in a local community forum there is a farmers market on {n} dates. I would expect people to want to visually inspect the produce at least the people I know in this neighborhood. Some people go to farmers market to socialize. For people that don't care to inspect the produce they just put in an order with the local grocery store to have food delivered.
by kjs3 | 2025-10-21 22:25:05+00:00
It sorta did as Ada, tho Ada is a much bigger language than M2 (or Pascal)[1]. There was at least one Ada-83 compiler for DOS (Janus), but it was a tight fit and a miserable experience. To me, the missed opportunity was Modula-3; much of what was nifty about Ada (and other things) in a smaller package.

[1] People often forget how compact a language Pascal (and somewhat M2) is. It comfortable self-hosts on 8-bit machines with a few dozen K (not M) of memory. It does an OK job even on the 6502 (admittedly, p-code). There was even a cross compiler for the 8051.
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-21 22:25:07+00:00
Check out Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail

>Each chapter of the book covers one or more of the six main protagonists—Lededje Y'breq, a chattel slave; Joiler Veppers, an industrialist and playboy; Gyorni Vatueil, a soldier; Prin and Chay, Pavulean academics; and Yime Nsokyi, a Quietus agent. Some of the plot occurs in simulated environments. As the book begins, a war game—the "War in Heaven"—has been running for several decades. The outcome of the simulated war will determine whether societies are allowed to run artificial Hells, virtual afterlives in which the mind-states of the dead are tortured. The Culture, fiercely anti-Hell, has opted to stay out of the war while accepting the outcome as binding.
by esafak | 2025-10-21 22:25:23+00:00
I have similar concerns, like how to reconcile authz with search. Search wants to be its own thing, and so does authz. Pray tell how I'm supposed to get a paginated list of authorized results? You have to filter or have the search service call the authz service. Life is easier when the main database can handle everything.

We should develop and translate this extension to other databases.
by Spivak | 2025-10-21 22:25:52+00:00
I can assure you I am as white as they come, my family being a mix of Quebecois and Irish I'm "wears sunscreen in the winter" pale.

I'm at a loss for why you would assume something about my racial background from my view that voting should be made easy and convenient in a democracy. I'll go even further, in addition to being able to vote digitally you should automatically be registered to vote when you establish residency, voting should be compulsory*, and it should be a national holiday. But outside the bigger picture I selfishly want this because I don't want to bother driving to my polling place when I could voted in less time than it took to type this reply.

* I wouldn't have any punishment for not voting, that would be a huge mess. But I would have it on the books in the hopes that people would follow it simply because it's the law.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-10-21 22:26:01+00:00
There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers, assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and reheating for us, better and faster than we on average do.

The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...
by aeternum | 2025-10-21 22:26:14+00:00
Rational/risky experiments are illegal currently.

For example take the famous mask debate. It could easily be solved by having volunteers willing to stand in a room with people with covid at various distance, each using randomized masks/no mask. There would be plenty of volunteers for such a study but there's no way it would be approved.

The FDA doesn't count lives lost due to inaction and slow approval of new drugs and treatments. As Munger always said "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." By any rational calculus, that one Thalidomide win by the FDA has caused incalculable death, pain and suffering by pushing out the timeline on not only recently discovered cures but all those built on top.

Imagine for example the number of lives saved if GLP-1 was purchasable over the counter in the 1990s when it was first discovered.
by casey2 | 2025-10-21 22:26:25+00:00
Programmer isn't a real thing, all these classes of people are made up. The biggesdt difference between an iPad Toddler and Dijkstra is that the toddler is much more efficient at programming.

Sure you can discover things that aren't intuitively obvious and these things may be useful, but that's more scientist than anything to do with programming. programming + science = computer science programming + engineering = software engineering programming + iPad = interactive computing programming + AI = vibe coding Don't equate programming with software engineering when they are clearly two distinct things. This article would more accurately be called the software engineers' identity crisis. Maybe some hobby engineers (programming + craft) might also be feeling this depending on how many external tools they already rely on. What's really shocking is how many software engineers claim to put in Herculean effort in their code, but ship it on top (or adjacent if you have an API) of "platforms" that could scarcely be less predictable. These platforms have to work very hard to build trust, but it's all meaningless cause users are locked in anyway. When user abuse is rampant people are going to look for deus ex machina and some slimy guy will be there to sell it to them.
by taeric | 2025-10-21 22:26:33+00:00
I'm very curious what the method they used to attribute this to the advice? I ask as I swear I saw something around that timeline talking about "trans fats" and how they were a possible culprit in a ton of nutrition related woes. Notably, in 2015 was when it was removed from the "safe" list and it was on the way out during this time.

It sucks, as I can't find whatever paper I thought I read that implicated trans fats in allergies. Searching "trans fats allergies" shows several. I'm assuming it was one of the main results.

So my question is largely, why would it be more likely that the advice is why allergies reduced? Seems if there was evidence that trans fats were leading to increased allergies, that removing them would be by far the bigger driver?
by bloppe | 2025-10-21 22:26:39+00:00
Ya, there's not much you can do when leadership is so terrible. If this kind of workflow is genuinely blessed by management, I would just start using Claude for code reviews too. Then when things break and people want to point fingers at the code reviewer, I'd direct them to Claude. If it's good enough to write code without scrutiny, it's good enough to review code without scrutiny.
by tom_ | 2025-10-21 22:26:43+00:00
My thoughts too. I've never had any real problems running it on Windows myself, but it doesn't feel like Mac users are any worse off.

I've been using Mac Emacs since about 2010, so perhaps I dodged some of the worst stuff, and it's always felt - for good or for ill - very much the same as using it on Windows or Linux/X-Windows, both of which I've been using since 2005 or so.

I've always used the standard GNU version rather than any specific Mac port. Over the years I'll have done some mix of downloading prebuilt binaries, building it from source, or getting the MacPorts version.

Perhaps I have missed out on some Fancy Extra Mac Stuff, the sort of thing that would come as standard with any project that took the platform seriously, but it's never really felt like a problem. And indeed, I figure if I'm happy enough with it running on X-Windows and on Windows, why wouldn't I be just as happy with exactly the same thing on macOS too? A consistent (or near enough) cross-platform experience is part of why I use Emacs anyway.
by decimalenough | 2025-10-21 22:26:47+00:00
> Sportsbook hold has doubled from 6% when parlays were just introduced to over 12% today.

> Options were 26% of Robinhood’s revenue in 2024 with an implied gross margin of over 90%.

Wow. For comparison, slot machine RTP (payout ratio) usually hovers around 91-93%, meaning a "hold" of 7-9%.
by Panzer04 | 2025-10-21 22:27:06+00:00
Money locked up in companies is managed at the leisure of its management, regardless of how good that might be for anyone else (ie. the shareholding owners). Money sitting there doing nothing is a poor use of it, so most companies are encouraged to run with only enough working capital to keep operations going.

It sounds weird, but this is better for shareholders and the economy (and companies can raise capital as needed down the line) than having all companies hold 3x the cash on the balance sheet.

The argument would be different for a foundation by wikipedia, albeit you still have problems between what the wikipedia management might want (high wages, little accountability) and everyone else.
by paganel | 2025-10-21 22:27:07+00:00
> 1. We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting.

The Portuguese used to have the best sea-worthy ships throughout the 1400s. They were soon followed by the Spanish. It didn't matter, because by the 1600s the Dutch, and then the English, had transformed the world's big seas and oceans into their playground.

In other words, if you don't use it you lose it, and right now the Americans need to "use" it, they need to show that they're still capable of getting to the Moon and beyond.
by gcatellani2k | 2025-10-21 22:27:08+00:00
How could it ruin somebodys sleep, when they could just simply pull the plug? And in case of the preheated matress just lay it outside or put some ice on it. Seems like constructed problems to me.

And: whoever buys products that can only be run when it connects to a foreign server is an idiot. There should be laws preventing cloud-only physical products, as this causes unnecessary waste as soon as the companies stop offering the service (for whatever reason). They should at least habe to offer containerized versions of the backend service that can be run locally.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-21 22:27:19+00:00
The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point there.

The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. Other humans then come along, with similar intent, and verify it. Studies in the past have shown Wikipedia's accuracy rate is roughly on par with traditional encyclopedias, and more importantly sources are clearly documented. Making validation and further research fairly easy. And if something isn't sourced I know immediately it's more suspect.

LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". They just slap words down based on statistics. It is admittedly very impressive how good they are at doing that, but they don't produce truth in any meaningful way, it more a by product. On top of that all its sources get smashed together, making it much more difficult to verify the validity of any given claim. It's also unpredictable, so the exact same prompt could produce truth one time, and a hallucination another (a situation I have run into when it comes to engineering tasks). And worst of all. Not only will an LLM be wrong, but it will be confidently and persuasively wrong.
by hu3 | 2025-10-21 22:27:36+00:00
Yep, he just wants to become too big to fail at this point.

I view OpenAI like a pyramid scheme: taking in increasing amounts of money to pursuit ever growing promisses that can be dangled like a carrot to the next investor.

If you owe investors $100 million, that's your problem. If you owe investors $100 billion, that's their problem.
by underlipton | 2025-10-21 22:28:01+00:00
Space and the moon were so important that we famously put black female mathematicians on the job in the waning years of Jim Crow. The current admin is dismantling not just so-called DEI, but decades of civil rights protections that ultimately allowed things like SGI's 3D rendering pipeline to exist. This is just one of the myriad ways that America is not in any way serious about a task as monumental as reaching Mars with actual, human astronauts. It would require an intense and extreme dedication to facing factual reality, which we do not seem currently capable of. Rockets do not run on truthiness, they explode on it.
by gchamonlive | 2025-10-21 22:28:04+00:00
> SSDs make swap almost invisible

It doesn't. SSDs came a long way but so did memory dies and buses, and with that the way programs work also changed as more and more they are able to fit their stacks and heaps on memory more often than not.

I have had a problem with shellcheck that for some reason eats up all my ram when I open I believe .zshrc and trust me, it's not invisible. The system crawls to a halt.
by carabiner | 2025-10-21 22:28:52+00:00
> The guesthouse where Mr. Mangione stayed is a small building converted from the village’s post office into a bare-bones lodge with four rooms. When Mr. Mangione booked online, there was only a room with a bunk bed left, known as the Hunter room, which overlooks cedar-capped mountains and a roaring river, said Juntaro Mihara, the inn’s owner. He spent six days at the guesthouse.

> Unlike other guests, Mr. Mihara said, Mr. Mangione left his room completely spotless and took out his own trash.

> “If asked who would be the most impressive and tidiest guest ever in my business record, I’ll answer it’s him,” Mr. Mihara said.