MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elil17 | 2025-10-15 17:29:52+00:00
> The announcement follows the release of an external report by UK-based consultants Alma Economics, which found that the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy.

I feel like this is not a good rate of return. For example, in the USA, 1 dollar spent on SNAP generates 1.52 dollars of economic benefit: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...
by drweevil | 2025-10-15 17:30:00+00:00
"Peace Prize Winner Has Supported Trump’s Military Actions in the Caribbean" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/world/americas/maria-cori...)

From the article:

>should Mr. Maduro fall, her movement was prepared to take territorial and administrative control of Venezuela...

>She has also touted an economic plan to American and other investors...

This is what "pro-democracy" really means. She is calling for military intervention against her own country, with an implied promise to give "investors" access to Venezuela's natural resources. In most places this would be called treason.

Also, NYT: "Venezuela’s autocratic leader...". Let me know when you call Mr. Trump "America's autocratic leader" and we'll be good.

and, NYT: "the Carter Center [...] found that count to be accurate." No. It said the count could not be independently verified, which is not the same thing.

None of this is the stuff of a Peace Prize.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-15 17:30:16+00:00
> This implies

What I said was that it worked out a lot better for Jobs than it did Xerox, not that they didn't get anything. It certainly didn't work out how they'd hoped. And that hasn't gone unnoticed by would-be funders of future Xerox PARCs.

> Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.

I dunno, to me it feels like the people who are good at doing and investing in basic research are not the same kind of people who are good at building and investing in applications. Yes you can present a counterfactual where if only Xerox had Jobs' vision and execution everything could have been different... but chalking it up to just "they could have done it better and been successful" misses the fact that they were doing the best they could with the smartest people they could find, and still couldn't capitalize.
by watermelon0 | 2025-10-15 17:30:41+00:00
Launching unsigned apps is a problem, especially if an app bundle contains multiple binaries, since by default you need to approve exception for each of them separately.

I know that it's possible to script that since Homebrew handles it automatically, but if you just want to use a specific app outside of Homebrew, experience is definitely worse than on Linux/Windows.
by olooney | 2025-10-15 17:30:43+00:00
I think this is interesting and partially true: humans are scary. But it's important to remember the opposite is true as well: humans are the most cooperative species out there by a wide margin.

Eusocial insects and pack animals are in a distant 2nd and 3rd place: they generally don't cooperate much past their immediate kin group. Only humans create vast networks of trade and information sharing. Only humans establish establish complex systems to pool risk, or undertake public works for the common good.

In fact, a big part of the reason we are so scary is that ability to coordinate action. Ask any mammoth. Ask the independent city states conquered by Alexander the Great. Ask Napoleon as he faced the coalition force at Waterloo.

We are victims of our own success: the problems of the modern world are those of coordination mechanisms so effective and powerful that they become very attractive targets for bad actors and so are under siege, at constant risk of being captured and subverted. In a word, the problem of robust governance.

Despite the challenges, it is a solvable problem: every day, through due diligence, attestations, contract law, earnest money, and other such mechanisms people who do not trust each other in the least and have every incentive to screw over the other party are able to successfully negotiate win-win deals for life altering sums of money, whether that's buying a house or selling a business. Every century sees humans design larger, more effective, more robust mechanisms of cooperation.

It's slow: it's like debugging when someone is red teaming you, trying to find every weak point to exploit. But the long term trend is the emergence of increasingly robust systems. And it suggests a strategy for AI and AGI: find a way to cooperate with it. Take everything we've learned about coordinating with other people and apply the same techniques. That's what humans are good at.

This, I think, is a more useful framing than thinking of humans as "scary."
by crazygringo | 2025-10-15 17:31:23+00:00
I mean, every laptop needs a charger.

If you sell your old laptop when you buy a new one, you generally sell it with old charger. And different Apple laptops take chargers of different maximum watts (they're compatible but not optimal), so they're not all the same anyways.

There's a reason they generally make sense to bundle. Especially with laptop chargers, which provide a whole lot more power than some random little USB-C charger you might have. Sometimes letting the free market decide actually gives customers what they want and find most useful.
by masklinn | 2025-10-15 17:31:50+00:00
M series chips are ridiculously massive, as Apple apparently does not want to transition to chiplets, so they can’t easily compose CPU. Thus refining the process and improving yields on the smaller parts probably makes sense.

As an other example the current ultra part is the M3, and it was released early 2025, after even the M4 Pro/Max, and a good 18 months after the M3 was unveiled. We might not see an M4 Ultra until 2027.
by recursive | 2025-10-15 17:31:52+00:00
I believe it was an episode of the podcast "Shift Key". Season 2, episode 5 is called "A Beginner's Guide to the Interconnection Queue". The hosts talk to some industry people who present the case. They say that there practical reasons why the interconnection queue is slowing down renewable generation deployment significantly.

I don't know if this podcast presents a balanced view, but it sounds convincing to me.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-15 17:31:58+00:00
engineers are rewarded way more in equity than salespeople

The only time I have seen this is with startups --- where they are cash strapped so engineers building the new product are given *equity* instead of wages.

Equity can be created simply by issuing stock --- which for a startup with negative cash flow is basically worthless at the time.

This is highly risky for the employee. If the product/company is wildly successful, early employees can get rich. But most startups fail --- so more often, they're left with nothing to show for their work.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-10-15 17:32:10+00:00
Some pharma companies in the EU come up sometimes with good ideas (famously BioNTech), but it's the US and its money, building on that or just simply coming on top in most cases and ripping off the benefits. But let's not forget, that like for BMW or Bosch or others, the EU pharma companies that are somewhat competitive with the US companies are companies which exist for decades ...
by leakycap | 2025-10-15 17:32:51+00:00
Apple knows their sales numbers, so I imagine is that they know the base model will sell the most quantity. Having it out now means more sales at the highest MSRP before talk of the next model release.

Buyers who walk into an Apple store for a base MacBook Pro will wait if they hear a new model is coming out. So if you have a buyer basing purchases on the generation number, it makes sense to launch that model as soon as possible.

Pro/Max buyers generally are checking into specs and getting what they need. Hence the M2 Ultra still being for sale, for some niches that have specific requirements.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-15 17:33:00+00:00
You are confusing the rating of the solar panel with the amount of power it actually produces. Solar has a capacity factor of .1. So if you are doing a hours of daylight x rating of the panel calculation, you are over by 5x. If you are doing a hours of the day x rating of the panel, you are over by 10x. Basically you are confusing capacity vs utilization.

Or to provide simpler proof, if your calculations were correct, utilities would be falling over themselves to build solar. They aren't and will resist doing so. There are good (correct) engineering reasons for that, not political ones.

PS We use a faction of the farmland we did in 1900 to feed 2x the number of people. Fertilizer and biotech improved the amount of food produced per unit of land back in the 70s by an incredible amount. And without either lots of new nuclear or fossil fuels we can't continue to do that. This is why we don't decide these things with votes but instead employ engineers.
by WalterBright | 2025-10-15 17:33:07+00:00
> the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.

Perot failed at buying his way into the Presidency. So did Bloomberg. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost the election. Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and lost the election. The idea that rich people thoroughly control the government doesn't add up. (Though people definitely get rich by getting into power. The Clintons entered the White House as paupers and emerged around $100m.)
by monkmartinez | 2025-10-15 17:33:25+00:00
My parents use their iPad(s) for 100% of their compute needs. At 70+ years old, they will tell you those needs are minimal.

If you use one program at a time, do not need an actual file system, have no need to install software from a variety of places (Github, Vendor sites, etc), have no problem installing multiple "apps" that only work behind paywalls or not at all and you don't care about replacing a functional device whenever Apple obsoletes it... iOS is the best thing since sliced bread.

If you need anything outside of iOS's limited list of abilities, its a trash operating system that has crippled amazing hardware.
by busymichael | 2025-10-15 17:33:28+00:00
My experience share only supporting the latest OS:

I have launched apps focused on a new feature in the latest OS and regretted it. The # of people who have the latest OS is much smaller than the full install base for much longer than I thought. As a result, my marketing conversion was unnaturally low - people who liked the app idea but couldn't install because they had the wrong OS. This causes two problems: potential users I activated but couldn't convert and this signal gets internalized by the App Store, pushing down future impressions.

Now I always have a fallback implementation of the feature so I can target the prior OS. Both Mac and iOS.
by pmezard | 2025-10-15 17:34:47+00:00
> What evidence do you have they are not all bad? I can't think of too many major high level EU leaders that people would consider to be a net positive.

A net positive compared to what? To have nobody at the head of the state and have anarchy? Or compared to the next one who wants the job?

Let's be concrete. I live in France, which currently is not going to give anyone lessons about governance. Current president is Macron. Is he evil bad, super corrupt? I do not think so. He is a bad mix of arrogance, naivety and brilliance in some domains. In the end, his run will end with average results as best, but not for lack of trying. It does not make him evil bad.

Previous one, Hollande was nice guy out of his league. Mediocre at best. But not evil or corrupt.

Previous one, Sarkozy, was brilliant and corrupt. He is going to jail next month. Still nowhere as bad as Orban on the civil rights front.

Regardless, all of them are better than having Le Pen (far right) as president. Who is already known to be corrupt populist and a Russian puppet.

I am afraid this is another of these "perfect is the enemy of the good" conversation.

Same with Van der Leyen. Fair enough she may have taken money from Pfizer and whatnot. But you are comparing that to someone who literally suggests violent action against people of his own country. I am sorry but things are not white and black.

I find it funny that most people on HN despise politicians but on the other hand are very happy to keep their cosy job for ad-tech/vc-fueled/well-paid companies instead of doing their part.

Try running for mayor of a small/medium city and see how well you respond for corruption after a few years of constant harassment.
by the8472 | 2025-10-15 17:35:36+00:00
So, what if I told you that some humans have been vat-grown without brains and had a silicon brain emulator inserted into their skulls. Are they p-zombies? Would you demand x-rays before talking to anyone? What would you use then to determine consciousness?

Relying on these status quo proxy-measures (looks human :: 99.9% likely to have a human brain :: has my kind of intelligence) is what gets people fooled even by basic AI (without G) fake scams.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-15 17:35:39+00:00
Even if we accept that premise, it still doesn't follow that PARC-like research centers are the only or best way to achieve that outcome. PARC's remit was to invent the office of the future, not to do the typical R&D thing which would be to make incremental improvements on their current products. Laser printers are exactly an incremental improvement on their current products.

So what you're saying here is that the best thing to come out of PARC for Xerox was an incremental improvement to their existing product line that could have been proposed by a typical R&D team.

Again, not a great selling point for the ROI of PARC from Xerox's perspective.
by everforward | 2025-10-15 17:35:52+00:00
Sure, but in practically every other non-essential situation (i.e. food, medicine, housing) that gap would be considered supply in excess of demand and allowed to work itself out.

This feels like it violates the social contract where we all produce things other people want/need, and in return we get the things we want/need. It feels wrong that artists get a special carveout there, where they get to produce things other people don't want (at a livable price) and everyone else is forced to create the things they want/need anyways.

This would be different to me if it were a full post-scarcity thing that everyone gets because the prior contract is based on a scarcity that doesn't exist anymore. This feels wrong because it both acknowledges that scarcity still exists, while taking money from the people producing those scarce goods to fund creating goods that are overabundant to a degree where the creators are destitute.

If we were collectively creating so many car tires that they were being sold below marginal cost, the solution would be to make fewer tires and have the workers go make something else. It reads wrong to me that for art the solution is just to levy taxes and continue making more than the market can bear.
by vid | 2025-10-15 17:35:55+00:00
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think emulating a physical screen in a virtual field of view is the wrong way to do this. Why introduce off-axis viewing and all the other unnecessary weirdnesses? What if the entire field of view were the screen, with head and eye movement as navigation? I guess make the windows transparent so it's less disorienting, and it would at least initially be overwhelming, but past that it could be quite transformative.
Critique this 8–9-module course for experienced devs moving to contracting
by koehn | 2025-10-15 17:36:13+00:00
I’ve been a software consultant for ~30 years. I’m shaping a course for experienced engineers (US SWE/DevOps/SRE, ~5–15 yrs) who want to move into contracting using an agency-first workflow: you qualify/price/deliver; agencies bring openings and handle MSAs/SOWs. Expected time: 2–4 hrs/week.

I’d love a sanity check from people who contract or place engineers: what’s missing, out of order, or unrealistic?

What students should build • A realistic target rate (with clear rate math) • A recruiter-ready profile and 10–15-minute qualification script • A simple “operate-like-a-business” setup (LLC/banking/insurance) • A pipeline plan that typically leads to interviews in ~6–12 weeks • Tactics to avoid scope/rate mismatches and keep agencies happy

Draft syllabus (9 modules)

Module 1: Introduction — What’s This All About? (Why you should/shouldn't go independent) Module 2: How Contracting Through an Agency Works Module 3: Finding Work & Working with Agencies Module 4: Setting Up Your Business & Life Infrastructure Module 5: Landing an Engagement Module 6: At the Engagement Module 7: Paperwork & Legal Basics Module 8: Building a Reputation & Staying Marketable Module 9: Long-Term Strategy

The course is designed to help people who want to go into the agency model get past the fear of the unknown (this was my biggest blocker for me before I went independent). By giving detailed instructions in a step-by-step structure, it helps engineers reap the benefits of contracting: higher pay, better hours, and a better lifestyle than working as an employee.

Specific questions • Which topics deserve more/less time? • Better ways to model rate, bench, and markup? • What do you look for in Right-to-Represent and MSA/SOW alignment? • Any “gotchas” you’d teach before the first engagement?

I’m not selling anything here—just looking for blunt feedback from other people who’ve done this.
by marssaxman | 2025-10-15 17:36:27+00:00
When I looked for a new job several months ago, the majority of positions I saw were remote. There may be fewer than before, but the share still seems to be quite large. I do live in a tech hub, so there were good local options, but I ended up with a remote job anyway - they happened to have the most interesting work to offer.

I have moved long distances for work before, and in principle wouldn't mind doing so again, if I thought it would be an enjoyable place to live (you could not pay me enough to move to the suburbs!), but this time around I was not willing to consider it because of the disruption it would create for my family. Once the kiddo graduates, it'll be a different story.
by cudgy | 2025-10-15 17:36:55+00:00
We are far from UBI though. It will take major league arm-twisting to get the government to take care of citizens like that. The oligarchs want it all, and it’ll take some serious work to overcome their resistance to increasing their taxes for UBI.

Also, AI may be more capable by the time we even get there if we ever do and AI may be a better entrepreneur than a human. Once that happens, look for the cost of AI to go sky high and access to it highly restricted and only available to the elite.
by greg5green | 2025-10-15 17:37:08+00:00
>The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet).

Is that good? Their cellular modems have been terrible. I'll reserve judgement until trying one out.

>The M1 itself is so powerful

I think this is a bit of a fallacy. Apple Silicon is great for the power consumption to power ratio, but something like a Ryzen 9 7945HX can do 3x more work than an M1 Max. And a non-laptop chip, like an Intel Core Ultra 7 265k can do 3.5x.
by jasonjayr | 2025-10-15 17:37:25+00:00
> TACAMO (take charge and move out) is the back up communications system to the US nuclear submarine fleet in case an attack on land based transmitters disables them. A rotating fleet of Navy E6 jets equipped with 200 KW transmitters and two 2½-mile-long trailing wire antennas (TWA) at 35,000 ft altitude to provide 24/7 coverage. Short pings are transmitted every few seconds.

Regarding "longer antenna" for submarines... -- I recently learned about this signal from https://www.sigidwiki.com/ -- which has been helpful to ID all the fun stuff you can see with RTLSDR
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-10-15 17:37:40+00:00
Yes clearly it’s different definition

Organization means everyone is in the same singular organizational identity - eusocially

The closest formal group seems to be the European Union - but that’s still infinitely far away from what’s needed to survive

Humans either figure out how to form a biological superorganism or go extinct to non-human intelligence

This isn’t happening tomorrow, but on century time scales, it’s obviously the only likely trajectory
by quotemstr | 2025-10-15 17:37:51+00:00
Worse, conservatism in a GC further implies it can't be a moving GC, which means you can't compact, use bump pointer allocation, and so on. It keeps you permanently behind the frontier.

I remain bitterly disappointed that so much of the industry is so ignorant of the advances of the past 20 years. It's like it's 1950 and people are still debating whether their cloth and wood airplanes should be biplanes or triplanes.
by daxfohl | 2025-10-15 17:38:18+00:00
I don't think "serverless is bad" is necessarily the full lesson here. The bigger lesson is when a service has dependencies, moving that service closer to the client (without also moving those dependencies) will counterintuitively make the e2e experience slower, not faster.

Prefer building physically near your dependencies. If that's not fast enough, then you have to figure out how to move or sync all your dependencies closer to the client, which except in very simple cases, is almost always a huge can of worms.
by adornKey | 2025-10-15 17:38:27+00:00
I don't think there's much secret evil out there. I've taken a look at some people that were officially in power for something - they were nice handsome people - sometimes a bit stupid. I think the biggest problem is stupidity. Stupid people in power will do powerful stupid things - while they think that they're doing something great. The more intelligent ones can change their minds quickly if you feed them with good arguments - but that's not easy, because they often live in a bubble and are out of reach.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-15 17:38:45+00:00
Is it reasonable to wonder if they set up this attack to target OP specifically, the whole thing was customized for OP? Rather than a broad phishing of lots of developers or what have you.

Although now that makes me wonder -- can you have AI set up an entire fake universe of phishing (create the linked in profiles, etc) customized specifically for a given target.... en masse for many given targets. If not yet, very soon. Exciting.
by aeldidi | 2025-10-15 17:38:55+00:00
I think the "local maximum" we've gotten stuck at for application hosting is having a docker container as the canonical environment/deliverable, and injecting secrets when needed. That makes it easy to run and test locally, but still provides most of the benefits I think (infrastructure-as-code setups, reproducibility, etc). Serverless goes a little too far for most applications (in my opinion), but I have to admit some apps work really well under that model. There's a nearly endless number of simple/trivial utilities which wouldn't really gain anything from having their own infrastructure and would work just fine in a shared or on-demand hosting environment, and a massively scaled stateless service would thrive under a serverless environment much more than it would on a traditional server.

That's not to say that I think serverless is somehow only for simple or trivial use cases though, only that there's an impedance mismatch between the "classic web app" model, and what these platforms provide.