MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by handsclean | 2025-10-24 02:08:33+00:00
No. Almost everybody hated it out of context, but in context many understood that one man was about to obtain unprecedented power over all three branches of government and use it to vindictively pursue personal vendettas. These people were correct, this then happened.

Personally, I’m reminded of how every dysfunctional country’s deposed regimes flee or are killed. We sheltered Americans find it easy to forget that peaceful transfer of power is an accomplishment of lawful society, and as rule of law weakens we have only more chaotic, ignominious, and probably eventually violent transitions to look forward to.

Reaction to the Biden pardon is a pretty huge thing to be completely unaware of. You should reevaluate whether you’re in a media bubble.
by jasomill | 2025-10-24 02:08:35+00:00
I tend to look at technology prices in terms of cost per unit time of useful life.

If Apple continues to supply updates for six-year-old phones, iPhone 17 prices range from $11/month (base model iPhone 17) to $28/month (iPhone 17 Pro Max w/2TB storage), meaning it's only about 20% more expensive to store data on a RAID 10 array of iPhone 17 Pro Maxes running current iOS versions than on standard-tier S3 (not a relevant comparison, obviously, but it amuses me).

So I don't know what's reasonable, but Apple's policies certainly appear to be.

I'm still salty that Apple no longer offer battery service on my OG Apple Watch, however, so reason has its limits.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-24 02:08:48+00:00
It was semi intentional. It wasn't as extreme but the Senate was still a compromise for smaller states to have leverage in government and get them to sign on.

Meanwhile, the house is about 10 times smaller than what the founders envisioned. Maybe that's overkill but we probably should at least expand the house quite a bit. And Probably expand the supreme court as well.
by diegof79 | 2025-10-24 02:09:23+00:00
Oh, the nostalgia! Looking at the project felt like taking a trip in a time machine: the blog on Blogspot, the release files on SourceForge, the use of Delphi, and the screenshots reminiscent of typical 2000s IDEs.

It is not a criticism. The challenging task of creating an IDE deserves a lot of respect. I’m just surprised by the tech choices.
by raydev | 2025-10-24 02:09:49+00:00
Can you be specific about your bad experiences with Apple hardware? I've gone through 5 MacBook Pros since 2008 and my only complaint was the old Intel models always got too hot. Nothing ever broke on them and I guess I kept them relatively clean?

I also have all of the adapters that came with the MBPs too, all perfectly functioning, the oldest still attached and powering my 2013 model with the dead battery (2008 model was sold, still working). The magsafe cable is pretty yellow now, and maybe a little wonky from the constant travelling, but no fraying/fire hazard yet.
by wagwang | 2025-10-24 02:10:40+00:00
That fine and all but current trends point to the ss drying up because of demographic decline so it seems like it was just a big ponzi at the end of the day with millennials and younger holding the bag. Also, if its true that the boomers have paid surplus into the fund that is meant to smooth out the payment curve, then why do they need my money.
by voidhorse | 2025-10-24 02:11:09+00:00
Anecdotally, the degree to which one does certain types of thinking can change over time, too.

Around 2020, I decided to try to learn as much as I could about "higher" mathematics in earnest, having basically no background in the subject. Five years later, I have finally read and suffered enough to be able to pick up texts in any of the abstract branches of mathematics and at least understand most of what's being shown/said at a basic level.

More fascinating to me, though, is that this shift in focus has lead to a definite shift in my thinking. My thinking used to be almost hyperlinguistic. Words were my medium of choice, and I had a strong stream of inner linguistic thought running through my head. Now, that inner voice is mostly quiet. I also find that I tend to think about certain situations in terms of abstract "relationship pictures" rather than a descriptive sentence.

I actually kind of miss the old linguistic tendencies I had at times. I'm hoping a shift back into literature helps reestablish some of that.

And yeah, as with all general proclamations that sound nice because they allow us to seemingly boil complexities down to a singular thing, the whole "wiring is thinking" idea isn't true. The truth in that statement is more akin to "human thought is often tool assisted"—and a manner of tools can aid in elaborating thought. Thought and action are not as severed as we tend to think.
by habinero | 2025-10-24 02:11:11+00:00
I don't need to feel "special". My concerns are around the people who (want to) believe their statistical models to be a lot more than they really are.

My current working theory is there's a decent fraction of humanity that has a broken theory of mind. They can't easily distinguish between "Claude told me how it got its answer" and "the statistical model made up some text that looks like reasons but have nothing to do with what the model does".
by chaostheory | 2025-10-24 02:12:25+00:00
People use LLMs as their therapist because they’re either unwilling to see or unable to afford a human one. Based on anecdotal Reddit comments, some people have even mentioned that an LLM was more “compassionate” than a human therapist.

Due to economics, being able to see a human therapist in person for more than 15 minutes at a time has now become a luxury.

Imo this is dangerous, given the memory features that both Claude and ChatGPT have. Of course, most medical data is already online but at least there are medical privacy laws for some countries.
by nedflanders2 | 2025-10-24 02:12:29+00:00
M&A is a growth lever for startups, especially in a competitive market. Stripe bought Paystack. Databricks acquired Tecton, Neon, BladeBridge, Tabular, Arcion, MosaicML. Wiz bought Dazz, Gem Security, and Raftt. ServiceNow acquired Moveworks. Snowflake purchased Crunchy Data. CoreWeave agreed to buy Weights & Biases. Ripple acquired GTreasury. AlphaSense purchased Tegus. etc. etc.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-24 02:13:17+00:00
>Why is the theory sound?

Because tyranny of the majority is still a thing. Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes. So the house is there as a large power and senate can check it.

Of course, in practice the house is way under represented so its almost like we have a senate and a mini-senate. That's where things fall apart.
by beeflet | 2025-10-24 02:13:36+00:00
I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?

Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-24 02:13:45+00:00
Layers do still make good meat birds, not sure why you're assuming they aren't. I'd usually use a layer for soup, but I wouldn't waste the meat if I had to take the bird for some reason.

Cornish cross birds are likely the "freakish mutant birds" you're talking about. People bred them to grow as fast as possible, seems wrong to call them freakish since we wanted them that way. Its around 8 weeks old when they can't walk, that's the point where they have to be processed.

I wouldn't recommend feeding chickens back to the flock. Chickens will eat other chickens, but you need to be really careful with regards to the cause of death. I recommend anyone raising chickens also raises hogs, if you do lose a bird the hogs will east it and there aren't many illnesses that can cross between those species.
by hollerith | 2025-10-24 02:13:45+00:00
When an animal is attacked, e.g., by a lion, it will sometimes completely freeze (which often causes the predator to lose interest). Many different species and families of animals do this, but according to Peter Levine writing a few decades ago, in no species except human is there any evidence that having undergone this freezing response has long-term consequences. There seems to be something about the human mind (or the human lifestyle in modern times) that makes the freezing response tend to have very persistent effects.

I would like to call this freezing response psychological trauma. I think many experts use the phrase that way. Certainly the OP is using the term this way. But if people are going to use "traumatic experience" to refer to any very aversive experience or any experience that makes the person very sad, like you just did, then that is kind of a drag because most very aversive experiences, e.g., death of one's child, do not cause the freezing response or do so only rarely. Must those of us who wish to discuss the human version of this freezing response come up with a different term?
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-24 02:13:49+00:00
You can't put a corporation in prison. But a person you can. This is one of the big problems. The people making the decisions at corporations are shielded from personal consequences by the corporation. A corporation can be shut down but it rarely happens.

Even when Boeing knowingly caused the deaths of hundreds (especially the second crash was entirely preventable if they would have been honest after the first one), all they got were some fines. Those just end up being charged back to their customers, a big one being the government who fined them in the first place.
by com2kid | 2025-10-24 02:13:50+00:00
The PC app ecosystem is a tiny fraction of the App Store's, outside of, notably, Steam's locked down closed ecosystem.

Having a single way to pay, subscribe, cancel, browse apps, beta test versions, and update apps, proved to be a huge game changer for making software accessible while also minting millionaires around the world in terms of small development teams.
by karmakaze | 2025-10-24 02:14:23+00:00
I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.
by bcrl | 2025-10-24 02:15:22+00:00
If you're bottlenecked on a 100 byte read, the app is probably doing something really stupid, like not using syscalls the way they're supposed to. Buffered I/O has existed from fairly early on in Unix history, and it exists because it is needed to deal with the mismatch between what stupid applications want to do versus the guarantees the kernel has to provide for file I/O.

The main benefit from the mmap approach is that the fast path then avoids all the code the kernel has to execute, the data structures the kernel has to touch, and everything needed to ensure the correctness of the system. In modern systems that means all kinds of synchronization and serialization of the CPU needed to deal with $randomCPUdataleakoftheweek (pipeline flushes ftw!).

However, real applications need to deal with correctness. For example, a real database is not just going to just do 100 byte reads of records. It's going to have to take measures (locks) to ensure the data isn't being written to by another thread.

Rarely is it just a sequential read of the next 100 bytes from a file.

I'm firmly in the camp that focusing on microbenchmarks like this is frequently a waste of time in the general case. You have to look at the application as a whole first. I've implemented optimizations that looked great in a microbenchmark, but showed absolutely no difference whatsoever at the application level.

Moreover, my main hatred for mmap() as a file I/O mechanism is that it moves the context switches when the data is not present in RAM from somewhere obvious (doing a read() or pread() system call) to somewhere implicit (reading 100 bytes from memory that happens to be mmap()ed and was passed as a pointer to a function written by some other poor unknowing programmer). Additionally, read ahead performance for mmap()s when bringing data into RAM is quite a bit slower than on read()s in large part because it means that the application is not providing a hint (the size argument to the read() syscall) to the kernel for how much data to bring in (and if everything is sequential as you claim, your code really should know that ahead of time).

So, sure, your 100 byte read in the ideal case when everything is cached is faster, but warming up the cache is now significantly slower. Is shifting costs that way always the right thing to do? Rarely in my experience.

And if you don't think about it (as there's no obvious pread() syscall anymore), those microseconds and sometimes milliseconds to fault in the page for that 100 byte read will hurt you. It impacts your main event loop, the size of your pool of processes / threads, etc. The programmer needs to think about these things, and the article mentioned none of this. This makes me think that the author is actually quite naive and merely proud in thinking that he discovered the magic Go Faster button without having been burned by the downsides that arise in the Real World from possible overuse of mmap().
by righthand | 2025-10-24 02:15:40+00:00
It does come at the cost of useable desktop space because if you don’t use a separate monitor with your portable device, you can’t see or use icons in the task bar.

And peoples suggestions is to install 3rd party software or just deal with it. It doesn’t help that fanatics feel the need to tell you which parts of the screen are and aren’t important real estate. Like fuck me and my opinions right?

“Well actually mathematically there’s more real estate in less convenient places so it’s fine.” Is so…depressing to watch people just give in to any little idea that comes out of this company’s PR department, like their logic is The Only truth.
by rmason | 2025-10-24 02:16:06+00:00
Actually baby carriages aren't that popular in America anymore. I remember growing up in the fifties and sixties you saw them everywhere. Nowadays kids are either strapped to an adult or a car seat.

USA's birth rate is 1.6 versus Poland's 1.1 when both need to be 2.1 to maintain the population. What I do not know is if the large number of Polish men who left the country for employment are somewhat affecting that number.
by Avi-D-coder | 2025-10-24 02:16:38+00:00
At some point self driving cars will need their own loser driving laws.

Perhaps allowing them to drive around school buses is not a good idea, although personally I have felt far safer biking or walking in front of a Waymo than a human. But rules few humans follow, like rolling stops, and allowing them to go 5 over seems like a no-brainer. We have a real opportunity here to br more sensible with road rules; let’s not mess it up by limiting robots to our human laws.
by krisoft | 2025-10-24 02:17:07+00:00
> You have to know what you're fixing first.

In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result.

Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.
by saurik | 2025-10-24 02:17:16+00:00
> When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating. At least it's past it's peak.

I feel like you might just be ignoring tons of acquisitions... back in 2004, Goole went on a spree and acquired a bunch of companies. I happen to know the founders of what later became Google Photos, but I think Google Maps was even more important... was it already past its peak?

Microsoft acquired Powerpoint in 1987. I don't think they peaked until long after that, but, hell: Microsoft acquired DOS in 1981, and there is no way in hell they had peaked before that point, lol.

I mean, you comment even talks about Siri... do you know that Apple bought that one in 2010? (They also bought the Shortcuts feature, acquiring a company called Workflow... which happens to be made by the same team as Sky ;P. But, I totally appreciate that 2017 might be considered after Apple "peaked", though I imagine most people would disagree, as Apple Silicon has been a massive market disruption... though, arguably, they bought PA Semi to pull off that project, lol.)

This is just how companies work.
by habinero | 2025-10-24 02:18:52+00:00
The power grid absolutely can fail catastrophically and is a lot more fragile than people think.

Texas nearly ran into this during their blackout a few years ago -- their grid got within a few minutes of complete failure that would have required a black start which IIRC has never been done.

Grady has a good explanation and the writeup is interesting reading too.

https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM?si=Lmg_9UoDjQszRnMw

https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w?si=-v6-Li7PhGHN64LB
by schveiguy | 2025-10-24 02:18:57+00:00
D has been fully unproprietary since 2017. https://forum.dlang.org/post/oc8acc$1ei9$1@digitalmars.com

But that's only the reference compiler, DMD. The other two compilers were fully open source (including gcc, which includes D) before that.

Fully disagree on your position that having all possibilities with one language is bad. When you have a nice language, it's nice to write with it for all things.
by coppsilgold | 2025-10-24 02:19:09+00:00
zram tends to change the calculus of how to setup the memory behavior of your kernel.

On a system with integrated graphics and 8 (16 logical) cores and 32 GB of system memory I achieve what appears to be optimal performance using:

zramen --algorithm zstd --size 200 --priority 100 --max-size 131072 make sysctl vm.swappiness=180 sysctl vm.page-cluster=0 sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=200 sysctl vm.dirty_background_ratio=1 sysctl vm.dirty_ratio=2 sysctl vm.watermark_boost_factor=0 sysctl vm.watermark_scale_factor=125 sysctl kernel.nmi_watchdog=0 sysctl vm.min_free_kbytes=150000 sysctl vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=1500 sysctl vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=1500

Compression factor tends to stay above 3.0. At very little cost I more than doubled my effective system memory. If an individual workload uses a significant fraction of system memory at once complications may arise.
by bern4444 | 2025-10-24 02:22:23+00:00
> For instance, Math.random and Date constructors are fixed in workflow runs, so you are safe to use them and the framework ensures that the values don't change across replays.

How do you create an environment where everything is deterministic? Do they invoke every supported non deterministic function when creating the environment and rewrite those functions to return the values from the environment's creation time? Is there something more complex happening?
by ndneighbor | 2025-10-24 02:22:52+00:00
I think this acquisition makes a lot of sense and it's good business. Finding good MacOS developers who know the system level APIs more so than the docs is a tough go. It would make a lot of sense that OpenAI would just go ahead and hire out this expertise as they try to get their Mac app and their iOS app to get closer and closer to the system.
by fullstackchris | 2025-10-24 02:23:03+00:00
Just shows you how absolutely little people know about the web ecosystem - most people heard something once or twice from someone else and just assume its true - to make matters worse, you have the typical HN "vanilla html and js only!!!" bandwagon which, if you try to use for any serious web application will only lead you down a path of much pain and suffering. I've commented many times in many other threads that I just don't get it; I probably never will.
by blaufast | 2025-10-24 02:23:08+00:00
I DIYd this with permits and interconnect in the SF Bay Area. I’ve had no power bill for years now, and I have two hot tubs.

Panels and enphase on Craigslist are so cheap you don’t have to worry about it. Max out what you’re allowed with your main electrical panel size and you’ll never regret it. Don’t even consider doing less than the maximum. You will never meet anybody who believes they added enough solar after a year of ownership
by fs_software | 2025-10-24 02:23:43+00:00
In my opinion, pair programming and system design discussions are important in the interview process. Those sessions enable hiring teams to assess how the candidate leverages AI tools to build features, debugs, and thinks about solving system-level problems.

However, I'm convinced the future of technical screening for software developers is to do so with code reviews rather than evaluating solely on code production.

The ability to review code is crucial in our industry. You'll be reviewing code often regardless of who (or what) generated it.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-10-24 02:23:54+00:00
The one thing that has worked for me multiple times is using a calorie counter like myfitnesspal integrated with something like Apple Health and/or Strava. If it’s easy to enter food into the calorie counter and the exercise apps just track movement without having to do much, the rest is just ignoring the hunger pangs that go away after a couple weeks. That’s the hard part of course. :)
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-24 02:23:57+00:00
> My conclusion is that populism comes about when the "elites" perform badly.

That's only half true, or maybe a quarter. Actually, populism comes about when the people (are led to) believe that the (patsy) "elites" perform badly.

Without that clarification, we would miss the most likely explanations for present day populism.

> Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order.

This is manifestly false today, the elites are now consolidating power for themselves, removing competitors left and right, mostly left because the right surrendered without a fight. In the end, they not only retain power but get more of it while acting materially worse.
by Marshferm | 2025-10-24 02:25:22+00:00
Wax fruit vs. creative design? We make neural-syntax animation pre-viz for a blockbuster series on streaming, and never have to touch slop. Hand drawn storyboards, Rhino, Maya and 3dMax, to blender to unreal and never veer automation. We can never let LLMs touch it because what we're making has never been done prior, the spaces are referential. And it never can reference space. What I've seen demo'd (and I've inspected closed models using our library of isovist level architech) is worthless compared to wetware.
by whitten | 2025-10-24 02:25:50+00:00
To quote from the page: id: flags type: u1

This seems to say flags is a sort of unsigned integer.

Is there a way to break the flags into big endiaN bits where the first two bits are either 01 or 10 but not 00 or 11 with 01 meaning DATA and 01 meaning POINTER with the next five bits as a counter of segments and the next bit is 1 if the default is BLACK and 1 if the default is WHITE ?