MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by naasking | 2025-10-21 17:49:23+00:00
400 columns all of which are nullable screams "dynamic field set" to me. Why have all of those as columns rather than something like:

table Entity_Fields (ParentEntityId : int not null, FieldId : int not null, IntValue : int, TextValue : varchar(MAX), DateValue : datetime, ...)

Or per the OP's suggestion, a table per field type:

table Entity_IntFields (ParentEntityId : int not null, FieldId : int not null, Value : int not null) table Entity_TextFields (ParentEntityId : int not null, FieldId : int not null, Value : varchar(MAX) not null) table Entity_DateFields (ParentEntityId : int not null, FieldId : int not null, Value : datetime not null)
by renewiltord | 2025-10-21 17:49:36+00:00
General advice on Hacker News, social media for YCombinator startup incubator is as following:

1. Start New Company

2. Hire first employee: security and compliance engineer

3. Finish security audit

4. Post security bounty program (10% of gross revenue for finding security@company.com email)

5. Use only real languages like C, but intrinsic are bad. If you want to use intrinsic, use x86_64 assembly language.

6. Any time anyone suggests hiring sales guy, hire another security engineer, increase security bounty 10%

7. Start on initial MVP. Pre-commit hook send every patch to security engineer. Once he has reviewed you may commit on used Thinkpad.

8. After twenty years of this, bootstrapped, you have Hello World triangle display on screen. Congratulations.

9. Publish 100 Year Support Program: anyone who buy Hello World program entitled to full discount within 100 year of purchase and given source code

10. ???

11. Profit

Very smart advice from entrepreneurs of Hacker News
by NickC25 | 2025-10-21 17:49:46+00:00
>Because he founded a company that turned into PayPal

No he didn't. He co-founded (with several other people) a company that merged with a company founded over a year before (that he had no involvement in) which eventually became PayPal. He didn't found jack shit on his own.

> single-handedly launched the Western EV revolution

Say what now? Are we talking about Tesla? You know Toyota had a working hybrid on the market in 2000, correct? The West was already well on its way to electric vehicles when Musk bought himself a board seat at Tesla.

>single-handedly secured American access to space.

Americans had not only already gone to space, but had landed on the moon over 2 years before Musk was born. Yes, you read that right - he was quite literally not even conceived when Americans had not only sent rockets into space, but literally went to and landed on a moon.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-21 17:49:50+00:00
Aren't most paper ballots processed by machine anyway? Every ballot I've ever cast has gone through something akin to a Scantron machine.

The cost of human labor to count all ballots by hand will be enormous. Probably worth it I suppose, but this really is something that should be primarily automated. But again, trust in software. Sigh, why can't we just have nice things?
by hinkley | 2025-10-21 17:50:12+00:00
Just last night YouTube suggested that YouTube clip of the woman whose lawyer in a restraining order/domestic violence case teleconference told the judge she was afraid her client’s husband was in the house with her and the judge made him take his computer outside where police were waiting to arrest him.

Personally I think the judge should have made the woman go outside first, but “inside a suspect’s house” is statistically more dangerous than a traffic stop, which is the second most dangerous place for a cop to be.

I was more thinking of soon-to-be political prisoners but there are a lot of situations that match what I said.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-21 17:50:35+00:00
Fractional reserve bankers? Altruistic? Hell no.

They are propping up the world economy though. They're not sitting on top of their cash reserves like dragons and their hoards. They are "efficiently allocating the capital" by lending at interest. That's the number one cause of inflation. They make it so there's so much money circulating it slowly becomes worthless.

Someone needs a $1,000 loan. Bank issues it against some collateral. They grab the cash and spend it. Whoever receives that money deposits it at the bank. They keep $100 and loan $900 back out. It eventually gets deposited again. A significant fraction is loaned out again! Then it gets deposited again!! Then $1,000 turns into $100,000 literally overnight! Not one cent of it real until the loans are paid back, until somebody actually goes and extracts value from this planet! Exponential growth in a linear planet, it's unsustainable.

The entire global economy is leveraged this way! It's not real until the loans are paid back! If people start defaulting on these loans, it's fucking over. People depend on those payments in order to pay back their own loans. Defaults generate more defaults which generate even more defaults, like a society level stack unwinding. Next thing you know the government is "injecting liquidity" into banks. If they don't bail out the banks everything come crashing down.

We live in the age of CBDCs, of programmable currency. We have governments speaking of negative interest rates and expiring money to drive consumption. People have to keep consuming, they have to keep spending money. The motor of capitalism must keep turning. Otherwise the loans go unpaid and everybody gets liquidated.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-21 17:50:37+00:00
Of course people vibe-code in public - I was clear that I wanted to see evidence of these amazing productivity improvements. If people are building something decent but it takes them 3 or 4 times as long as it would take me, I don't care. That's great for them but it's worthless to me because it's not evidence of a productivity increase.

> there are also products being made are actually versatile, complex, and completely vibe-coded.

Which ones? I'm looking for repositories that are at least partially video-documented to see the author's process in action.
by mariusor | 2025-10-21 17:50:47+00:00
Posting those links without any insight from your side is just quoting dogma and, to me, it shows that you haven't really spent any time to consider the arguments. In my opinion shows that you lack imagination.

Every problem Tom mentions can be worked on and overcome. Maybe not today, maybe not by the next big election, but we should still start now, rather than later. We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process, especially for the demographics that are currently not very involved, which are also the demographics that are more likely to adopt electronic methods of voting.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-21 17:50:47+00:00
> there’s a control system and you need to change it

Why does the control system have to live on someone else's server in "the cloud"?

There's no reason for smart home devices to require an internet connection to the producer's service. Companies could just as easily put compute on device, or sell some sort of "bridge" (aka a home server appliance) that runs the compute and the accessories connect to.

Fully offline, local network only.

Save the online stuff just for analytics or other value-add features, but core functionality shouldn't require a web service.

The only reason it's 100% internet connection required all the time is to sell subscriptions, aka consumer hostile behavior.
by dkersten | 2025-10-21 17:50:56+00:00
Focusing on the last two, which I called out specifically:

> Once a bug is fixed, it won’t come back again

Regressions are extremely common, which is why regression tests are so important. It is definitely not uncommon for bugs that were fixed once to come back again. This statement doesn't "mostly hold".

> If you give specifications beforehand, you can get software that meets those specifications

In theory, maybe, but in practice its messy. It depends on your acceptance testing. It depends on whether stakeholders change their mind during implementation (not uncommon). It depends on whether the specification was complete and nothing new is learned during development (almost never the case). Providing a specification in advance does not necessarily mean what you get out the other end meets that specification, unless its a relatively small, trivial, non-changing piece and the stakeholders have the discipline to not try change things part-way through. I mean, sure, it may be true that if you throw a spec over the wall, then you will get something thrown back that meets the spec, but the real world isn't so simple.
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-10-21 17:51:26+00:00
You lose convenience/functionality though. E.g. it’s convenient for me to turn on the aircon an hour before I get home in the summer.

Edit: I'm not talking on a day to day basis, but when I go on a trip. And I don't have a porch nor I like beer.

Amazing that some people downvote for stating the obvious, which is that you can lose some convenience. There's trade offs when you connect something to the Internet? That's also obvious.

When I get back home in the summer from a short trip away, with a toddler and a million bags it is definitely convenient for me to have a cool home and not a 40+ degrees celsius one.
by f_devd | 2025-10-21 17:51:36+00:00
I do not think this is the case, there has been some research into brainrot videos for children[0], and it doesn't seem to trend positively. I would argue anything 'constructed' enough will not classify as far on the brainrot spectrum.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/05/17/why-kids...
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-21 17:51:37+00:00
Yeh. I'm used to using old version of RHEL at work so I ended up learning how to deal with slow moving distros.

I use the OS as a base system and most of the stuff that needs to be newer versions can be done by installing the binary to to ~/bin as it is added to your path by ~/.profile if the directory exists on Debian.

Stuff like Discord, Slack, Kdenlive, OBS etc. I install using flatpak.

Other stuff. Go, Vim (I compile vim from source) and nvim can stuff can be compiled or dropped into /usr/local

That covers most stuff IME. However I appreciate this won't work for everyone.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-21 17:51:42+00:00
> Would founders and investors still develop in the USA if their upside were curtailed?

Yes. Unified consumer market. Incumbency. Deep and international access to risk capital.

China only has the first two. It's still got a thriving start-up ecosystem.

> Almost all of this value is simply equity in controlled companies. What is the mechanism here?

Selling equity. This is a theoretical question for e.g. a closely-held family business. It's not for a public or mature private company.

> the government seizes your company?

Guess who ushered in the administration that's embraced this option!
by bongodongobob | 2025-10-21 17:51:46+00:00
I ended up giving up. It's incredibly hard to keep it on track but also let the user be creative. At any time I could just say things like "I jump into the lake" or "I open the chest" even though neither one was mentioned, and it would happily continue on. I found myself pretty far down the generate a JSON scene full of JSON objects to interact with and quit - because at that point, you're just writing a game engine.
by n8cpdx | 2025-10-21 17:52:29+00:00
The US doesn’t have a national ID system, so your proposal doesn’t make sense. The closest thing is social security cards but those are not photo IDs.

A signed affidavit or local ID should be fine to establish identity. That can be done when signing up for mail in voting (although I personally prefer in person).

Voter fraud is extremely rare under the current system.
by px43 | 2025-10-21 17:52:33+00:00
This Apple only nonsense is driving me nuts.

I pay OpenAI $200 a month, and use Codex all the time, but just installed the crappy ChatGPT app for Android, and just use it from the mobile web browser, because it's over a month behind on super common features that launched on iPhone on day one.

Same thing with Sora 2 being Apple only. What craziness is that? Why are developers leaning so hard into supporting closed source ecosystems and leaving open source ecosystems behind?
by kazinator | 2025-10-21 17:52:36+00:00
It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ...

AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers.

It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-10-21 17:52:41+00:00
For this reason, I believe thar the current surge we see in AI use for people manipulation (art is also a form of manipulation, even if unintended) is much more important than their hyped usage as a technical information processors.

Brainrot created by LLMs is important to worry about, their design as "people pleasers".

Their anthropomorphization can be scary too, no doubt.
by fogzen | 2025-10-21 17:52:41+00:00
> What keeps us awake are the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be "productive".

I thought it was threat of being fired and left without means to pay for rent and food?

The ruling class will work you as much as possible – to the point of death – unless stopped via labor co-ordination, mass strikes, and force.

The 40-hour week w/ fair overtime, fair breaks, etc. could be enforced and expanded to include software engineering.
by alwa | 2025-10-21 17:52:58+00:00
Do all content-spam “journalists” use the same LLM prompt to dial up the faux drama?

> Picture this: You're tucked in, ready for a night of optimized REM cycles, when your app pings an error. No more tweaking the chill to a crisp 55°F or firing up the "cool mode" for those midnight hot flashes.

> The core temperature control? Utterly crippled without the cloud. Users reported the app freezing on loading screens, refusing to connect, and leaving them stranded in whatever thermal hell their last setting dictated.

Toothless rhetorical questions, false or confusing stakes, awkward attempts at flippant tone…

Why would they have set it to an hellacious temperature? Wtf mattress goes to 55 degrees? Why are these stakes existential? Sleep on the couch or the floor ffs…

> The hits kept coming. Smart sleep tracking? Dead in the water—no logging of phases, no biometric insights, just a void where your sleep score should be.

These stakes seem low. I guess it sells, but…

And then a roundup of internet comments like “unacceptable” with unfunny padding.

If this is what the future of “internet journalism” looks like, I’m optimistic that enough demand will remain for the real thing that they’ll find a way to fund some.
by daheza | 2025-10-21 17:54:21+00:00
This nails so much of my frustration with software development at the moment.

The requests to my team are:

build what product says

close out 90% of the defects you find by priority order

deliver in the priority of feature > security > accessibility

once delivered move on to something else we only have time to work for 3 months on an initiative before we move on

These requirements don't end up with a well working product. They end up with gaps in product, defects that are obvious, non-accessible site. Things take time to polish and be made right, but that's not what is requested. Wanting to iterate and measure isn't important because its not more features.
by jsheard | 2025-10-21 17:54:30+00:00
> yeah the custom GPT announcement was literally a carbon copy of steve jobs announcing the app store down to the mannerisms and tics.

And then they nabbed Jony Ive of all people for their hardware project, with Altman stating that Steve Jobs would be "damn proud" of what they're working on. It's about as subtle as a brick to the face.
by hollerith | 2025-10-21 17:54:35+00:00
Yes, there's a lot of internal division (including now a few assassinations) in the US right now, but in general the US is pretty stable. E.g., it was stable from 1975 to about 2015.

The English-speaking lands where the US is now have seen two internal conflicts that killed at least 1% or so of the population: the American revolution, which killed about 1% of the population of the American colonies (but significantly less of the combined entity of England plus its American colonies) and the US Civil War, which killed about 2.4%.

Historically, China has been significantly less stable than that. Here is a link to a summary: https://chat.deepseek.com/share/16duc6iflzhav114dx

Here are 3 excerpts from that summary:

>The Transition from Yuan to Ming Dynasty (Mid-14th Century) . . . This period was one of the most devastating in human history. Plague and widespread warfare ravaged China. The population is estimated to have fallen from around 120 million at the Yuan peak to about 60-65 million at the start of the Ming. The death toll was catastrophic, easily exceeding 1% by an order of magnitude.

>The Ming-Qing Transition (c. 1618-1683) . . . While debated, estimates suggest a population decline of 20-40 million from a late-Ming peak of around 160-200 million. This includes deaths from war, famine, and plague.

>The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). This is the deadliest civil war in human history. Most conservative estimates place the death toll at 20-30 million people, with some estimates going as high as 70-100 million when including famine and disease. With a total population of around 400-450 million at the time, this represents a death toll of at least 5-7% of the entire population.

Imagine if the primary mission of the US Army was to put down internal rebellions and that everyone involved admitted that this was the main mission. That was the situation in China from 1949 to about 10 years ago, when it becomes no longer possible to identify with confidence the primary mission because Beijing added a second important mission, namely to use its navy and islands in the South China Sea to protect the sea lanes by which China imports oil from the Persian Gulf and exports manufactured goods around the world.
by jerojero | 2025-10-21 17:54:42+00:00
Chile has a very good election system and there's basically no machine input in the process.

What's important is being able to segment the population in enough voting places so that each voting place is maneaganle just by a small number of people. The Chilean system is scalable because you can always just add more voting places as the population grows.

Usually these voting places are civic centres, stadiums, schools.

It's a good system and generally for a presidential election we get the results in about 4 hours after voting ends.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-21 17:55:20+00:00
There is a reality which exists. Words have meaning. Words are more or less true as the meaning they convey conforms more or less well to the reality that exists. So no, truth is not rooted in the arbitrary. Quite the opposite.

Or at least, words had meaning. As we become post-lexical, it becomes harder to tell how well any sequence of words corresponds to reality. This is post truth - not that there is no reality, but that we no longer can judge the truth content of a statement. And that's a huge problem, both for our own thought life, and for society.
by alganet | 2025-10-21 17:55:33+00:00
It's kind of a stretch.

To a more naive, metaphor-blind audience, your mention of Don't Look Up makes it look like the scientists are warning about an alien comet and I'm the one ignoring it.

I'm very familiar with apocalyptical narratives of all kinds, but what I'm approaching here is much different. I'm talking about the integrity of scientific endeavours. In particular, space exploration endeavours.
by dmurray | 2025-10-21 17:55:35+00:00
One of the weird things for computer people about the Irish voting system is that it's non-deterministic! You can count the same ballots in a different order and get a different result (because it depends which votes you choose as "surplus" to redistribute).

In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.
by gbxk | 2025-10-21 17:55:54+00:00
Actually you can! After you run "k7 install" you'll have a k3s cluster up and running, with Kata as a runtime class, and Firecracker specified in Kata config. So nothing prevents you from hitting the Kubernetes API! kubectl will work.

Note: I use k3s' internal kubectl and containerd, to avoid messing with your own if you have some already installed. That means you can run commands like "k3s kubectl ..."

And thank you for the compliments on the stack.
by greymalik | 2025-10-21 17:55:57+00:00
> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding.

To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments

That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.
by sothatsit | 2025-10-21 17:56:00+00:00
Speak for yourself. I want cheaper building costs so we can build more housing, cheaper and safer vehicles, higher quality food so we can all be healthier, better medical technology and medicines so we can solve more diseases, and new washing-machine-like technologies so I can spend more time with friends/family. That’s not to mention that greater leverage on my labour would give me even more flexibility to choose the work I want to do, and how much I want to work.

Bread is already so cheap as to not notice the price most of the time. But other goods and services are absolutely not that cheap. And there’s certainly higher quality that could be achieved, especially in areas like medicine. It is a lack of imagination to not see all the ways in which cheaper goods and services could improve our lives.
by myko | 2025-10-21 17:56:56+00:00
https://github.com/Chuntttttt/TapeDeck

There was a post recently where someone linked to: https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...

and I thought the project was amazing, but I didn't like how the IDs were managed in yml, so I built this to make it more dynamic. I plan to add support for other smart home automations with it as well as more streaming services.

One of the features I really like about it is it makes it easy to print and cut out stickers to slap on the NFC cards for playing media.

My toddler loves it so far and one of his friend's has asked me to make one for him as well
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-21 17:57:24+00:00
> needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet

Why the special treatment for nuclear? Do you really think redlining a dam or storm-levee system would be less damaging?

Also, turning off internet connections means less-capable remote shut shut-off. Less-responsive power plants. Fewer eyes on telemetry.

We should be mindful of what is and isn't connected to the internet, and how it's firewalled and--if necessary--air gapped. That doesn't mean sprinting straight for the end zone.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-21 17:57:26+00:00
Apple Homekit certification is a good, easy label to recommend. It requires offline/LAN-only basic operation.

One of the overlooked features of the Apple Home app is its ability to firewall your IoT devices. If you have a compatible router:

Home Settings → Wi-Fi Network & Routers → HomeKit Accessory Security

The options are:

Restrict to Home Automatic No Restriction

The Automatic setting only allows devices to talk to a manufacturer whitelist of connections for things like firmware updates. The other two options are self-evident.

I've found that "Restrict to Home" occasionally causes problems with older devices.