MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mpyne | 2025-10-25 03:58:39+00:00
> My take is that 70/80's built programs from a set of blueprints of what was required. Where each programmer had a set of requirements, knew what were required, when it is needed to be completed by and the tools available to enable the next level in development.

The thing is, you couldn't start dev until you had those blueprints. So that's a lot of time at the start of the project where development had to sit idle even if you had a good idea of what the architecture would at least be.

> If someone lagged behind then the project halted until but the end result was solidity and a completed application. At least during that time other programmers could improve their work and document.

No, you didn't get this. Apps that completed had bugs then too, whether in design, specification or implementation. It's why the waterfall paper basically said you'd have to built it twice either way, so you should try to accelerate building it the first time so you'd know what you messed up when you built it the second time.

Or as Mel Brooks, who wrote the Mythical Man-Month would say, "Build one to throw away; you will, anyhow."

Nor could programmers productively spend downtime simply document things, the documentation was supposed to have already been written by the time they were writing out punch cards. The "programming" had already been done, in principle, what remained was transcribing the processes and algorithms into COBOL or FORTRAN.

Startups are perfectly free to adopt the methods of the 70s if they wish, but they will be outcompeted and ground into dust in the process. Likewise, there is more to agile than Scrum (which is what you're describing with sprints), and it seems weird to describe the dread you'd get of blocking your team if it takes a week to do your part but act is if a week slip on the critical path in a waterfall effort is no big deal.

I mean, you're actually right that many (not all) waterfall-based teams treat it like it's no big deal, but that's the reason that waterfall projects were often disastrously over-time and over-budget. "We've already slipped 3 weeks to the right, what's another day?". Well, those add up... at least with agile you can more easily change the scope to fit the calendar, or adapt to changing market pressures, or more rapidly integrate learnings from user research.
by mikewarot | 2025-10-25 03:59:13+00:00
I've been using it for a while. The string handling is magic compared to that of C/C++ with pointers and nulls and the constant need to allocate and free memory to get things done.

The only downside is the documentation. Listing the parameters of a function and not explaining the purpose of the function, or what those parameters actually mean, is not proper documentation.

Borland set a fairly high bar with the Turbo Pascal 3 manual.
by kstenerud | 2025-10-25 03:59:26+00:00
I had a Huawei Magicbook for years that finally died last year. It was as close to Apple quality as I'd ever seen in hardware (except for the damn touchpad again - although the Huawei one was head and shoulders above any other non-Apple one).

For hardware quality, Huawei is solidly in second place, with the rest trailing pretty far behind.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-10-25 04:03:11+00:00
I recently got into self-hosting Seafile and successfully set it up on my dedicated server. Had to think backup and security strategies quite a bit and ultimately I set up a bulletproof backup mechanism. Tested it pretty rigorously.

Seafile took me by surprise in terms of how quick it was at picking up new files and changes - syncing works incredibly well too. I moved all my files from my Google Drive into my Seafile instance and I'm now using it on all my devices as my main cloud storage solution.
by tavavex | 2025-10-25 04:06:06+00:00
Honestly, I didn't even think of BSD. I actually don't know anyone who uses it on a personal level, I assumed it was more of an OS that you had to use for your job. But I guess, given how niche it is for individual use, you'd be right. But to be pedantic, if you took something really obscure (like hobbyist OSes that have little practical use), you'd probably get to a 100% "hacker" user base.
by rekabis | 2025-10-25 04:06:59+00:00
> let the intelligent few rule

The flagnark??

The intelligent few? When becoming fantastically wealthy is almost 100% down to luck, doesn’t he really mean the lucky few?

Because I’m seeing some pretty stupid and moronic people there at the top. People who have let greed dominate them, people who have become drunk with power, people who have lost all semblance of empathy.

The people at the top aren’t any more smarter or better than the rest of us. They were just luckier.
by godelski | 2025-10-25 04:07:03+00:00
> It won't generate the word eggs even though eggs probably comes after lay frequently

Even a simple N-gram model won't predict "eggs". You're misunderstanding by oversimplifying.

Next token prediction is still context based. It does not depend on only the previous token, but on the previous (N-1) tokens. You have "cat" so you should get words like "down" instead of "eggs" with even a 3-gram (trigram) model.
by DavidPeiffer | 2025-10-25 04:08:17+00:00
It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.

For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.

In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.

I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.
by lazyasciiart | 2025-10-25 04:08:23+00:00
That’s not what he said. He wants to get rid of kids being tracked into gifted kindergartens because a) it’s ludicrous and b) testing four year olds is just a roundabout way of finding the kids with parents who got them a tutor for kindergarten entrance exams, and the replacement metric of getting pre-k teachers to pick them is not much different. He argues that kids don’t need to be shuffled off to special schools until more like 8 years old, when the 2nd grade testing happens.

He also obviously doesn’t believe it’s wrong to adjust learning to capacity. He just has the less popular view that this can be done without tagging kids at four years old and changing their lives. (He probably also understands that there’s plenty a brilliant math kid who belongs in a standard English class, or even in remedial classes to deal with a concurrent learning disability).
by markasoftware | 2025-10-25 04:09:13+00:00
I have a friend who did similar tunneling a while ago. It also works on cruise ships.

He discovered that on some airlines (I think American?), they use an advanced fortinet firewall that doesn't just look at the SNI -- it also checks that the certificate presented by the server has the correct hostname and is issued by a legit certificate authority.

My friend got around that restriction by making the tunnel give the aa.com SNI, and then forward a real server hello and certificate from aa.com (in fact I think he forwards the entire TLS 1.2 handshake to/from aa.com). But then as soon as the protocol typically would turn into encrypted application data, he ignores whatever he sent in the handshake and just uses it as an encrypted tunnel.

(The modern solution is just to use TLS 1.3, which encrypts the server certificate and hence prevents the firewall from inspecting the cert, reducing the problem back to just spoofing the SNI).
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-25 04:10:12+00:00
In short, you manage people. You tell others what to do and you think about what to do.

It's technical management. You create impact off the work of others. You tell 10x people to do 10x work and you get 10x the credit when management only is like 1x of talent and effort.

I met a principle engineer who didn't know what a database transaction was and it still fits every description on this site. We shouldn't call these people engineers anymore. They are managers that don't need to do 1 on 1s.
by roshin | 2025-10-25 04:10:31+00:00
I know this probably goes against hn ethos, but one of my most important features is the search. I store TB of data and it could be hard to find a picture. I want the cloud software to analyze the image so that I can search "2 people on Nothing street" and find it.

so far google is amazing at search. hopefully others will be better, but it's really hard to evaluate cloud software based on that
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-10-25 04:15:10+00:00
This. The quotes I got for a single 2 ton heat pump with a oil backup ranged from $15K to $45K.

It's insane and really made me look into the DIY installs. Even if I broke 2 of those it would still be cheaper than one professional one.

Solar install is another scam. All those companies want to steer you into a PPA rather than let you buy panels.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-25 04:15:15+00:00
I worked for a company that was all hateoas. In the formal sense, explicitly structured around the concept, not the sense that html has both data and actions via links, it worked, it was a real product, but it was slow and terrible to develop and debug.

The front end ui was entirely driven, ui and functionality exposed by the data/action payload.

I'm still not sure if it's because of the implementation or because there is something fundemental.

I came away from that thinking that the db structure, the dag and data flow is what's really important for thinking about any problem space and any ui considerations should be not first class.

But I'm not a theorist, I just found a specific real, real formal working implementation in prod to be not great, it's a little hard even now to understand why.

Maybe it just works for purely text interfaces, adding any design or dynamic interaction causes issues.

I think maybe it's that the data itself should be first class, that well typed data should exist and a system that allows any ui and behavior to be attached to that data is more important than an api saying what explicit mutations are allowed.

If I was to explore this, I think folder and files, spreadsheet, dbs, data structures, those are the real things and the tools we use to mutate them are second order and should be treated as such. Any action that can be done on data should be defined elsewhere and not treated as being the same importance, but idk, that's just me thinking outloud.
by SpicyUme | 2025-10-25 04:15:22+00:00
When I had mine I got the form with warnings about side effects. When I saw the allergic reaction I was a bit concerned, I asked the tech and was told it wasn't a big deal. Since I was in the basement I didn't have service and I decided to trust them given the large number of my friends who've had MRIs. It was fine, but it seemed like a major thing to toss in the patients lap right before they get strapped down in a tube.
by tb_technical | 2025-10-25 04:15:43+00:00
You really have to ask the question "does all industrial production aid itself to war?" when making this determination.

Additionally, most people don't consider the Mexico factor. Presently some of the most talented machinists in the world live in Mexico manufacturing parts for American automotive (and other industries).

But, really, this comparison can only be proven in conflict - something both the USA and the CCP want to desperately avoid right now due to his economically coupled they are.

Just in time logistics has been a disaster for the American war machine.
by b0rbb | 2025-10-25 04:17:42+00:00
This makes me wonder if Carmack's feelings on NeXTSTEP had anything to do with the decision to release the first publicly available release of Quake 3 on OS X only at first.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd... .

At the time, I remember the ATI Rage128 chipset being the big deal and reason for why Q3's beta came out first on Mac... but gosh now I wonder if it was the feelings for NeXTSTEP.
by llbbdd | 2025-10-25 04:18:07+00:00
What is the subtle distinction? I'm "many" and it's not clear at all here. If we had some massive physics breakthrough, the LLM needs to be tought about it, but so do people. Teaching people about it would involve producing a host of documents in some format but that's also true of teaching people. Training and learning here seem to be opposite ends of the same verb no matter the medium, but I'm open to being enlightened.
by neltnerb | 2025-10-25 04:19:24+00:00
I've got to throw out an obvious explanation.

A third of the country rents. Renters pay the utility bills. Landlords pay for appliance upgrades.

Why would the landlord put any effort into upgrading appliances when the cost of not upgrading them is borne by the renters?

I've never rented at a place where they didn't want to fix broken equipment with the cheapest possible replacement. And no renter would ever consider purchasing a major appliance like this since they'll end up priced out before they recover the cost in utility bills.

They're a nice technology, but our incentives are all wrong for a lot of housing stock.
by zenoprax | 2025-10-25 04:22:26+00:00
Elegant and correct. It seems so obvious to me that if someone wanted a ChatGPT answer they would have sought it out for themselves and yet... it's happened to me more than a few times. I think some people think they are being clever and resourceful (or 'efficient') but it just dilutes their own authority on that which they were asked to opine.
by transcriptase | 2025-10-25 04:22:59+00:00
> People are told that the authorities have it all under control and the experts can be trusted. Then they discover that the experts are human, fallible, and sometimes incompetent or corrupt.

Try

People are told that the authorities have it all under control and the experts can be trusted. Then they discover that the authorities and experts, in the name of “the greater good”, actively suppressed debate, knowingly mis-represented uncertainties, pretended reports of serious adverse reactions to vaccination were not only impossible but simply fear-mongering from the uneducated, and then pressured social-media platforms to take down factual information when it threatened the official narrative.

This without even touching on the fact that the WHO, who has one damned job, refused to even declare a pandemic and spoke against any travel restrictions or public health measures outside their lazy guidance until the virus was confirmed to be spreading out of control in nearly every nation on earth.
by pols45 | 2025-10-25 04:23:47+00:00
Depending on the time horizon the predictions change. So we get layers - what is going to happen in the next hour/tomorrow/next year/next 10 years/next 100 etc (and layers of compression of which language is just one) and that naturally produces contradictions which creates bounds on "intelligence".

It really is a stupid system. No one rational wants to hear that, just like no one religious wants to hear contradictions in their stories, or no one who plays chess wants to hear its a stupid game. The only thing that can be said about the chimp intelligence is it has developed a hatred of contradictions/unpredictability and lack of control unseen in trees, frogs, ants and microbes.

Stories becomes central to survive such underlying machinery. Part of the story we tell is no no we don't all have to be Kant or Einstein because we just absorb what they uncovered. So apparently the group or social structures matters. Which is another layer of pure hallucination. All social structures if they increase the prediction horizon also generate/expose themselves to more prediction errors and contradictions not less.

So again Coherence at group level is produced through story - religion will save us, the law will save us, trump will save, the jedi will save us, AI will save us etc. We then build walls and armies to protect ourselves from each others stories. Microbes don't do this. They do the opposite and have produced the krebs cycle, photosynthesis, crispr etc. No intelligence. No organization.

Our intelligence are just bubbling cauldrons at the individual and social level through which info passes and mutates. Info that survives is info that can survive that machinery. And as info explodes the coherence stabilization process is over run. Stories have to be written faster than stories can be written.

So Donald Trump is president. A product of "intelligence" and social "intelligence". Meanwhile more microbes exist than stars in the universe. No Trump or ICE or Church or data center is required to keep them alive.

If we are going to tell a story about Intelligence look to Pixar or WWE. Don't ask anyone in MIT what they think about it.
by Wistar | 2025-10-25 04:24:36+00:00
I am reminded of the story of the American who stole rare feathers from a British museum.

The Smithsonian wrote up the story: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-feather-...

After the magazine article was published, NPR’s “This American Life” ran a piece about the feather heist: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/654/the-feather-heist
by eredengrin | 2025-10-25 04:26:59+00:00
> sudo worked for decades perfectly well

Yes, if you ignore all the bugs resulting from features that almost nobody uses.

> along with the rest of the systemd abominations

Not too interested in engaging systemd debates. I have enjoyed using systems with and without systemd, and while I understand the arguments against feature creep, I think you'd be throwing the banana out with the peel to overlook the idea behind run0.

For such a security sensitive piece of software like sudo, reducing complexity is one of the best ways to prevent logic bugs (which, as you mentioned in the sibling, is what the above bug was). If run0 can remove a bunch of unused features that are increasing complexity without any benefit, that's a win to me. Or if you don't like systemd, doas on OpenBSD is probably right up your alley with a similar(ish) philosophy.

For anyone who wants to read more about Lennart's reasoning behind run0: https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/112353324518585654
by Retric | 2025-10-25 04:30:22+00:00
> been updated dozens of times

18 times. 27 total amendments with 1-10 all passing on December 15, 1791.

> a few decades ago

There hasn’t been a meaningful change in over 54 years.

> The constitution is indeed one law, not several different laws

Those recent amendments are a minimum different laws. If you want to call it one law then there’s either 2 federal laws in the US. One needs to be ratified by the states and the others don’t.
by TheGoddessInari | 2025-10-25 04:30:57+00:00
I've seen this on occasion before, but the offering seems vague and confusing to me.

But asking to see if clarification is available:

* No API access at all. Is that correct?

* Usage limits aren't at all clearly defined, but their presence is suggested. Message per day/month, tokens per whatever limits? * Content policy restrictions? They mention major models/providers. * An actual list of models available? GPT, etc, are cool if that's all you need, but what about major/popular open source models? * Encrypted/protected user content is mentioned, but do you allow verification by users that this is the case for compliance reasons? (This makes me think of providers that let you verify the nature of the secure computation yourself.)

This looks neat in theory, but there's nothing that goes into the exact technical nature of the offering. You may consider these suggestions for what might assist discerning technical users to have enough information about the service vs competitors that disclose all relevant information about the service up-front.
by jimt1234 | 2025-10-25 04:32:28+00:00
For years, I've taken the position that intelligence is best expressed as creativity - that is, the ability to come up with something that isn't predictable based on current data. Today's "artificial intelligence" analyzes words (tokens) based on an input (prompt) to come up with an output. It's predictable. It's fast. But, imho, it lacks creativity, and therefore lacks intelligence.

One example of this I often ponder is the boxing style of Muhammad Ali, specifically punching while moving backwards. Before Ali, no one punched while moving away from their opponent. All boxing data said this was a weak position, time for defense, not for punching (offense). Ali flipped it. He used to do miles of roadwork, throwing punches while running backwards to train himself on this style. People thought he was crazy, but it worked, and, imho, it was extremely creative (in the context of boxing), and therefore intelligent.

Did data exist that could've been analyzed (by an AI system) to come up with this boxing style? Perhaps. Kung Fu fighting styles have long known about using your opponents momentum against them. However, I think that data (Kung Fu fighting styles) would've been diluted and ignored in face of the mountains of traditional boxing style data, that all said not to punch while moving backwards.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-25 04:33:09+00:00
This analogy is fundamentally flawed, both literally and metaphorically:

A surgeon isn’t a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at.

First, the literal.

Surgeons are managers of the operations they perform and heavily rely on the surgical team with which they work. If the author had any clue about surgeries, they would understand that the most important person in a major surgery is the anaesthesiologist, not the surgeon(s).

Second, the metaphorical.

The author goes to great lengths to identify "grunt work" as being "not the most intellectually fulfilling or creative part of the work." What they do not do is understand that there is no such thing as "grunt work" if, for any definition of work, it is valued without judgement.

But if a person identifies with being "the surgeon", with everyone else being "a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin", then the post makes sense from an egocentric perspective.
by xethos | 2025-10-25 04:33:42+00:00
Even if you're a social media company, where network effect is everything and getting into everyone's pocket matters, you can still go iOS first. Snap ran with that strategy at first, and it hardly killed the company.

Notably, that's a situation that actually matters for cross-compatibility. There's no web client for SnapChat. Hertz & Costco could point Android users to the web with few repurcussions, IMO
by jofla_net | 2025-10-25 04:34:27+00:00
Its most simply summed up as what I call the tradesman's protection racket.

On one side of the coin you have any moron, calling himself a repair man which can and does end in disastrous jobs which can be unsafe. This though has much lower pricing.

The flip side is, basically a protection racket where suppliers only sell to you if you have a 'loicense' and the hurdles required to become said VIP are so high, giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people. Prices then skyrocket.

I wish I could live in a world somewhere in the middle, but as I've seen both ends of the spectrum, they both suck for different reasons.