MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j-krieger | 2025-10-08 08:35:15+00:00
> Yet we don't have too many runaway billionaires that are more powerful than governments, and we are still ALL a bit better off because of that. It's boring, but it works.

A literal millionare is chancellor.

> reedom for us is free healthcare,

Last I looked I paid 10k a year for government mandated healthcare. Where can I apply for the free one?
by stubish | 2025-10-08 08:36:35+00:00
I know the reactor will explode in seconds causing a chain reaction that will echo back in time erasing the entire universe from existence, but I just have to stop for a minute or three to express my feelings and deliver a monologue about my motivations and info dump this hastily assembled backstory in case I need to nobly sacrifice myself for the greater good, while you just look on gormlessly nodding as the body count climbs. Everything might be turned up to 11, but the eye rollingly forced emotional bullshit managed to overshadow it all. I would have preferred the Seasame Street script writers to have written it.
by piva00 | 2025-10-08 08:36:53+00:00
I was looking into a self-contained NAS to keep my local archive of almost 20 years of photos, Synology was always the most recommended solution but this policy was definitely the reason I did not purchase one.

Unfortunately for Synology I will wait to see if it's a policy they stick to or if they might change it again in the future, I have all my backups synchronised to off-site storage (Backblaze and Glacier), so the local NAS was just a nice to have convenience instead of shuffling through different local disks...
by tempestn | 2025-10-08 08:37:04+00:00
A company could decide to never pay a dividend, yes. But that doesn't mean the stock is worthless; you need to take the thought process further. Who ultimately controls a company? The shareholders. So, imagine a scenario where a company is profitable and seemingly valuable, but for some reason the share price is not increasing, so the shareholders are not seeing their wealth increase. In that scenario they would probably either pay a dividend or, more likely, take advantage of the profitability and low stock price to buy back stock, driving up its value.

Either way, the owners of a successful company are going to want to profit from it, which will make the shares valuable. Of course, investors know this, and so the share price tends to track current value of expected future earnings even without the company taking direct action to distribute profits.
by jchw | 2025-10-08 08:38:22+00:00
I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.)

If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to ship this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as Network Attached Storage, after all.)
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-10-08 08:38:29+00:00
I take issue with your last sentence;

> gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowledge, on demand, which you can then apply to your work.

Gives you access to the power to access and {mis}understand the {most repaeted over the last 1-10 years} engineering {errors, myths, misunderstandings, design flaws}, on demand, which you then can apply to your work {to further bias the dataset for future models to perpetuate the slop}.

Do NOT trust AI agents. Check their work at every level, find any source they claim to use, and check its sources to ensure that itself isn't AI too. They lie beyond their datasets, and their datasets are lying more for every minute that pass.
by tecleandor | 2025-10-08 08:38:42+00:00
So, finally, they're upgrading PHP from a version that was EOLed 3 years ago. Although they're leaving versions for example, 8.1) that are going to EOL in two months.

Similarly with Node.js, they've removed versions EOLed years ago, but they haven't talked about removing newer versions that were also EOLed months ago...

Not to talk about their kernel versions.

> Node.js v14, Node.js v16, PHP7.3, PHP7.4, and PHP8.0 are no longer supported. > To ensure compatibility, the following packages will be automatically updated or will require a manual update to a compatible version: > Active Backup for Business 3.1.0, Active Backup for Google Workspace 2.2.6, Active Backup for Microsoft 365 2.6.1, Advanced Media Extensions, Antivirus by McAfee, Antivirus Essential, Cloud Sync, Container Manager, Download Station, File Station, Hyper Backup, Hyper Backup Vault, Log Center, Media Server, Note Station, PACS, Presto File Server, Snapshot Replication, Storage Analyzer, Surveillance Station 9.2.0 or below, Synology Chat Server, Synology Drive, Synology Mail Server, Synology MailPlus Server, Synology Photos, Universal Search, and Web Station.

Edit: OMG, they're fixing CVEs from 2020. The "we use older versions but we backport every security fix" is obviously getting out of hand for them.
by DanielleMolloy | 2025-10-08 08:38:43+00:00
I went into a biosciences/AI PhD with CS/AI background because I wanted to dedicate a few years of my work life to science. So did quite a few other CS / AI grads around me and supervised by me. Few expected to bother with the academic career track and ridiculous conditions afterwards, they all expected to go straight into stable industry or gov AI jobs afterwards.
by simianwords | 2025-10-08 08:38:46+00:00
> Weird how Sonnet 3.7 cost the same (when released) as Sonnet 4.5

Then I think we agree that while the cost remained the same, the performance dramatically increased.

FWIW Sonnet 3.7 costs 2.5x as much as GPT-5 while also being slightly worse.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-08 08:40:20+00:00
This sounds like an absolute nightmare. Technology disconnected us over decades, then gave us "solutions" to stay in touch 24/7, people are lonelier than ever but we keep pushing for more of this shit. You can already call and video call your family, basically for free, what does VR bring to the table ?

"Hey John, grandpa will expire soon can you quickly jump in your headset and upload yourself to his VR cabin in the wood, the one we rent from MetaSpital for $99 a day, to take a selfie with him before he dies alone in a cold hospital room"
by crimsoneer | 2025-10-08 08:40:33+00:00
Are people not vibe coding lots of tiny things? I certainly am.

Last weekend I had a free hour and built two things while sat in a cafe:

- https://yourpolice.events, that creates a nice automated ICS feed for upcoming events from your local policing team.

- https://github.com/AndreasThinks/obsidian-timed-posts, an Obsidian plugin for "timed posts" (finish it in X minutes or it auto-deletes itself)
by sally_glance | 2025-10-08 08:40:51+00:00
Well said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ...

Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.
by soganess | 2025-10-08 08:40:57+00:00
I'm sorry, that is not fair to ChatGPT.

I use Copilot every day (it is the only assistant that does not need Google Play Services), and it is a complete buffoon in voice. Like, actually painful to use.

I know it is supposed based on the 4o family, but it must be based on 4o-mini or something. Plus, its context window for voice is goldfish bad, on the order of low minutes (~2). And worse, you cannot write a system-level prompt for it. I am shocked at the 1.81%; I would have expected it to be much lower.

ChatGPT is better on every front. It passes the “if you tweak it, you can mostly get it to do what you want” test. Copilot, not so much.
by danwills | 2025-10-08 08:41:05+00:00
I want to know more about an intuitive take on how the Zeta function does what it does! I know it must relate somehow to finding (or perhaps excluding) all the composite numbers but I'd really love to get more of a feeling about what each 'octave' of the function is adding-in. Seems like it must be something that 'flattens' the composites but increases sharply (in the infinite sum) at each prime.. but it's still a mystery to me how one could intuitively realise or discover that it's this specific function!? How did he do it?!
by SilverSlash | 2025-10-08 08:41:23+00:00
Is this different from ChatGPT agent mode that I can use from the web app? I found that extremely useful for my task which required running some python and javascript code with open source libraries to generate an animated video effect.

I greatly appreciated ChatGPT writing the code and then running it on OpenAI's VMs instead of me pasting that code on my machine.

I wish Google released something like that in AI Studio.
by liampulles | 2025-10-08 08:41:48+00:00
I would really like to hear from people who have have hacked together their own code generation tools for production projects, including taking an existing tool and extending it for purpose.

Did it work well? Any lessons that others should know of?

I've built dev tooling for local deployment management and release automation and those have worked well, but the code generation piece is something I'm curious about.
by skissane | 2025-10-08 08:42:17+00:00
A Linux Docker image, probably doesn’t have any USB devices exposed to it-well, it depends on exactly how you run it, but e.g. if you use Docker Desktop for Mac, its embedded Linux VM doesn’t have any USB passthrough support. This is the kind of thing where a physical Linux host (laptop/desktop/NUC/RPi/etc) is much more straightforward than running Linux in a VM (or as a K8S pod in a datacenter somewhere)
by modo_mario | 2025-10-08 08:42:45+00:00
Why are you so adamant that they must be suckers? Don't these kind of purchases happen all the time? Let's say you want at least ....10 years of fat profit worth for you to sell your business. Could be more since it's sustainable, has high margins, etc but let's pick the round number. Big company comes along and offers you 11 years of profit worth of money. You sell. They know it's going to take a bit longer for the purchase to pay for itself but they also want to transform the business a bit to funnel in developers to popularize their main products and take wind out of the sails of competitors which they project will bring in the equivalent of at least 3 years of your business's profit over time along with some other stuff....so they're happy to overpay for your business since it'll probably cover the lil bit of extra risk

In that case everyone's a winner...except maybe us as customers.
by lukebrandon | 2025-10-08 08:43:22+00:00
Hey Community!

This week on The React Native Rewind: Live Activities finally land in JavaScript, NativeWind 5.0 tries to make Tailwind feel at home in React Native, and Nitro Fetch fetches… fast. Also, apparently nobody’s building for Android anymore, but we’re not bitter.

If you’re enjoying the Rewind, your feedback and shares keep it alive
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-08 08:43:23+00:00
There is some sense in it and I’m surprised by all the naysayers here.

For starters, Quest is by far the biggest selling VR/XR headset. So he is already seeing some success here.

And as we’ve seen before, Facebook isn’t going to dominate forever. It makes complete sense throwing large sums of money at future technology while you still have large sums of money to burn.

Chasing new technology when you’re already behind and your revenue is decline is a guaranteed way to fail.

Moonshots like this you waste a tonne of money when that money is comparatively cheap anyway. Plus it keeps people talking about your business, which is never a bad thing.
by Galanwe | 2025-10-08 08:43:42+00:00
> The vast dollar value of the market is about sharing risk and providing liquidity.

This, very well summarized.

I would nuance (but not disagree with) your comments on pension funds though. The thing is PF do not invest themselves, they usually are, or delegate to, funds of funds, which in turn decide on allocation based on the desired risk profile. It could very well happen that the total allocation is the sum of a multitude of individually short term investments, as long as these are diversified enough. I would concede that in practice that is not really feasible though.

These risks profiles are numerous, diverse, and ultimately idiosyncratic. People often forget or don't know about all these risk constraints, because they work in a fund that is bound to a specific risk mandate.

For instance, depending on how your investment vehicule is structured (the regulatory enveloppe through which you sell your fund, which ultimately determines to who you can sell, how you can advertise, how profits are taxed, etc), you can have liquidity constraints (e.g. clients should be able to redempt daily, weekly, ...) risk parity constraints (e.g. per asset class vol budgets, to be respected daily, weekly, etc), exposure budgets (e.g. country, sector, beta, ...), counterparty risk (e.g. minimum number of managers to allocate to, or clearing houses, or custodians), idiosyncratic risks (e.g. an insurance company will need to be neutral against natural disasters, healthcare exposure, etc), ESG, etc
by vladms | 2025-10-08 08:43:44+00:00
Economics works on larger scale than region or sector. I am sure that people that were copying books in the medieval ages would not have invested in the printing press, but someone else did and it was still good for society even if not for that specific group.

Society works by balancing the interests of various groups, and there will be people with different opinions than yours, including some you don't like.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-08 08:43:45+00:00
> Many German political parties have extremist elements in them.

No, they don't. Extreme in this context is defined as anti-democratic, those who want to dismantle the system at its foundation and destroy democracy, usually while removing certain groups. That's not something other parties aim for. Sure, they want to change the system, but only to improve the democratic.

> but not okay calling out the far left

There are not many real far left parties in Germany, and usually they are very small, irrelevant and called far left. Most of them are also not against democracy, they are fine with the general system, but argue about details or the economic system. The biggest far left party is "Die Linke", and they are radical left, not extreme left. Maybe they do have some extreme voices, but they are irrelevant.
by bananapub | 2025-10-08 08:44:16+00:00
> What about the accessibility of software development? Its completely vanishing for people that can not afford to pay for these agents.

what do you actually mean by this? it's clearly untrue - anyone get get a laptop and install linux on it and start bashing out code today, just as they could last week and last year and thirty years ago.

do you mean that you think at some point in the future tooling for humans to write code won't exist? or that employers won't hire human programmers? or that your pride is hurt? or you want your hobby to also be a well-paid job? or something else?
by cess11 | 2025-10-08 08:44:17+00:00
They want you to come to a store, where they can exert immediate influence over you. In some sense it's a cult, more specifically a political cult, and they want you to spend as much time as possible in their environment. They are your family, it's where you go to eat, have someone else take care of your kid, relax and so on.

Ingvar Kamprad was a lifelong fascist, which heavily influences IKEA. Loyalty over competence, futurism over tradition, things like that.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-08 08:44:32+00:00
The technology obviously has merrits. When the bubble pops LLMs won't go away, just like the dotcom crash didn't spell the end of the internet.

The issue isn't that there aren't good business models or value creation, it's that anything related to AI currently has valuations that are unsustainably high given the current limits of the technology. That leads to economic activity that just couldn't exist without those valuations. And once the hype cools down the valuations will go closer to reality, leaving a lot of companies unviable, and many more will have to severely cut back spending to remain viable.

Or maybe the entire AI market pulls a Tesla and just stays at valuations that aren't justified by normal market fundamentals. Or maybe the technology adapts fast enough to keep up with the hype and can actually deliver on everything that's promised. This doesn't have to come down, it's just very likely that it will.
by kimixa | 2025-10-08 08:44:47+00:00
"successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.

And it feels like for most of these companies it's a whack-a-mole of cycling from which happened to burn you last rather than any actually being fundamentally "better". Pretty every alternative mentioned in this thread have released some real bad products.
by andybak | 2025-10-08 08:45:00+00:00
It's just another way to record a time and place. No more different to a video than a video is to a photo. Just slightly more fidelity.

It's a good thing. It's a nice thing. Chill.

I get that there's reasons to be angry at big tech but this isn't one of them. Accurate and easy 3d scanning, high fidelity rendering and a way to view in 6dof stereoscopic is just a great use case entirely separate from the machinations of our evil overlords.
by account42 | 2025-10-08 08:45:24+00:00
This will only result in others reproducing more to replace those who are predispositioned to think like you.

Also, have fun not having anyone to take care about you when you grow old. And your retirement won't be worth shit either without a new generation to keep the economy going.

Yeah no thanks, fuck your anti-natalism. You might as well remove your own ecological footprint if you would deny your children's their existence for that reason.
by yason | 2025-10-08 08:45:43+00:00
Online control is like a squatter waiting for years in the bushes on your yard and it only takes one time that you forget to lock your door and he sneaks in and claims he lives in your home, and uses all possible legal loopholes to prevent any imminent relocation.

A pedigree of chatcontrols has already been turned down several times in the past but there's nothing stopping it from being raised from the dead a couple of years later over and over until it finally passes. And then it's very much impossible to unpass.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-08 08:45:52+00:00
It just goes to show how little information there really is about what will happen here. Literally no one knows. It's uncharted territory, but it's filled with map-sellers.

Another good example is railways in the US. That was an huge, huge boom, around a fifth of GDP. No one knew what the railway-based economy of the 1900s would look like but it was surely going to be spectacular. All that money! The speed! The cargo! All those people! Railways absolutely were a commerce multiplier, and made stacks of revenue very quickly and got investment from around the world to build build build. But, eventually, the (over)building was done, there were bankruptcies and consolidations and it ultimately did not become the dominant industry. And yet, it's still a big industry that enables a lot of other economic activity. Trains are still expensive to operate, but moving goods is pretty cheap. Obviously there's a natural physical monopoly at play there that AI doesn't have so again, who knows.

Which leads to another thought the AI investors, both commercial and national, maybe should eventually have: is there an automobile or airliner to their railway?
by rhdunn | 2025-10-08 08:46:50+00:00
The issue is around maintenance/development burden. For example, when manifest V2 was dropped in favour of manifest V3 it is possible for a downstream project (Edge, etc.) to maintain V2 support. However, that gets harder the further along the projects go and the code diverges; that may mean keeping more code around (if interfaces or utility classes are changed/removed), or rewriting the support if the logic changes (such as the network stack).

It's like projects trying to keep Firefox XUL alive, or GTK+ 2 or 3.

The project has now moved from just updating the external dependency to working on that and possibly actively fighting against the tide. That is a lot harder and requires more work each time you update the dependency.

So in effect you have vendor lock-in. And if the vendor controls or affects downstream products like plugin developers (targeting manifest V3) or application developers (targeting GTK+ 3 or 4) then its even harder to maintain support for the other functionality.
by pierre_vannier | 2025-10-08 08:47:51+00:00
Simon,

I want to reach out since I want to express my disappointment regarding this thing you write here:

"I propose we call this vibe engineering, with my tongue only partially in my cheek."

Back in march 2025, you and I had a brief convo on X about this very term that came to my mind "Vibe Engineering":

https://x.com/pierre_vannier/status/1904933441042317821

I also mentioned it in our podcast in April 2025: https://x.com/Flint_company/status/1909946181897044195

Yesterday, I pinged you on X about this "term's paternity" in your thread without any response: https://x.com/pierre_vannier/status/1975579806495293910

You and I met in AI Engineer in SF last June and we discussed for 1 hour (not about this specifically but about AI and all).

At the very least, it could be cool to mention it in your post or newsletter since, I do think this little convo on X + our talk in SF might have just planted the seed in your head for this "invention" of yours...

I don't want to stay in history books but I think it's cool to also credit people when you iterate on their idea instead of just make the thing entirely "yours"...

Best Pierre
by cranium | 2025-10-08 08:48:43+00:00
I find coding agents to be a powerful throttle on the speed dimension in exchange of quality in the general sense. With tests to ensure correctness is not compromised (not a silver bullet), linter and pre-commit for code style, the byproduct of AI code is utter verbosity. Pleads to be concise don't work – no more than the "Don't be wrong/hallucinate". In that regard, I like Blaise Pascal quote "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."
by Zanfa | 2025-10-08 08:48:50+00:00
Even from the POV of micro-frameworks, the JS ecosystem sucks. There's just so many competing half-baked libraries doing the same thing slightly differently and incompatible ways.

Compare this to the Ruby ecosystem, where every framework (including Rails) uses Rack, which means that all the frameworks compose together, if that's how you'd like to modularize your monolith. Or the other ecosystem known for its preference for libraries over frameworks, Go, where everything is standardized around http.Handler, so whatever you pick is basically guaranteed to compose.

And it's not just the lack of good overall frameworks, it's the general lack of good defaults for libraries in Node-land. Among the most popular ORMs/query builders over the years there are some surprising omissions, with Knex not supporting connection pinning or Prism not doing database joins by default for a long time.