MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 20:24:01+00:00
>Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then

Sure, and it was wrong because it turns out the conductor does get rewarded. Given train strikes that had to be denied as recently as a few years ago, it's clear that's an essential role 150 years later.

With how they want to frame AI as replacing labor, who's being rewarded long term for its thinking? Who's really being serviced?
by Theodores | 2025-10-05 20:25:20+00:00
I was smirking at this until I remembered that I have just one USB stick as my 'backup'. And that was made a long time ago.

Recently I have been thinking about whether we actually need governments, nation states and all of the hubris that goes with it such as new media. Technically this means 'anarchism' with everyone running riot and chaos. But, that is just a big fear, however, the more I think through the 'no government' idea, the less ludicrous it sounds. Much can be devolved to local government, and so much else isn't really needed.

South Korea's government have kind-of deleted themselves and my suspicion is that, although a bad day for some, life will go on and everything will be just fine. In time some might even be relieved that they don't have this vast data store any more. Regardless, it is an interesting story regarding my thoughts regarding the benefits of no government.
by kashunstva | 2025-10-05 20:25:21+00:00
> I can see it being a good thing if done carefully.

My experience with raising three kids is there’s a limit to the amount of messaging that gets through with any fidelity. So, the only financial teaching I did with them, was the stocks, bonds, diversification, risk and prudence schtick. I could see the attempted teachable lesson about gambling losses going sideways and crowding-out the rest.
by toomim | 2025-10-05 20:25:30+00:00
You're making a debunked claim that takes his statement out of context to make it sound like the opposite of what he actually said.

https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966474125616013664

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-dMa3rIcjY

https://youtu.be/1pteZE5FpNc?si=UG2jJZovGldIJKJ0&t=1559

This has the effect of whipping up political anger and violence against people based on false pretenses. You are an embodiment of the problem.
by IgorPartola | 2025-10-05 20:25:34+00:00
IPv6 is in most ways simpler than IPv4. There are a couple of gotchas but honestly all you really need to do to see this look at the IPv4 and IPv6 packet header structures to see that they difference is minimal and IPv6 has less room for complexity. You lose NAT (it is possible but nobody really does it), your TTL is now just a hop count, the netmasks are more or less like the old IPv4 class networks instead of the classless setup we use today. Each network gets a minimum of /64 (that is 4 billion squared addresses), and you actually have proper and functional link local networking.

But yes it uses colons instead of dots. Sorry about that.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 20:25:45+00:00
I agree that this is very important. The flip side of that you will also have entrenched lazies who refuse to keep up with new knowledge, get comfy in their chair, plus grow a big ego etc. It's a tradeoff.

You have to give breathing room for creativity to unfold, but the breathing room can also be taken advantage of.

Also, it used to be more accepted to play elite inside baseball, hiring based on prestige, gut feel and recommendation. Today it's not too different in reality, but today we expect more egalitarianism and objectivity, and do literature metrics become emphasized. And therefore those must be chased.

Similar to test prep grind more broadly. More egalitarianism and accountability lead to tougher competition but more justice but less breathing room and more grind and less time for creative freedom.
by bluescrn | 2025-10-05 20:26:00+00:00
Has it, or has the Internet just made problems much more visible?

Now, whenever there's conflict, disaster, or crime, there's a smartphone camera pointing at it within seconds.

Are we facing a rapid rise in extreme weather events? or in violent crime? In both cases, we're certainly seeing far more footage of them in recent years - but that doesn't necessarily say anything about overall trends.
by pico303 | 2025-10-05 20:26:12+00:00
What a lame excuse. “The G-Drive’s structure did not allow for backups” is a blatant lie. It’s code for, “I don’t value other employees’ time and efforts enough to figure out a reliable backup system; I have better things to do.”

Whoever made this excuse should be demoted to a journeyman ops engineer. Firing would be too good for them.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-10-05 20:26:25+00:00
So OUTSOURCE it. There are probably a thousand very talented writers that would collaborate on writing the books, coming up with plot, tracking canon, and GRR can just cruise in and edit/supervise.

Hell, you can probably train an AI to check the canon.

If he just likes being famous and making money, do that. He'll be more famous and more rich, and the people get books to read.

It's going to happen when he dies, so if he wants some say in what happens, he should do it now. Otherwise it will get Disney Star Wars'd.

And you know what? GoT will NEVER be remade the way it is. I guess he doesn't have any children, so he doesn't care.
by grafmax | 2025-10-05 20:26:52+00:00
You’re misunderstanding me. My point is if we were to have sincere solidarity with Chinese people against the international ruling class we would look at our domestic members of that class first. That is simply the practical approach to the problem.

The function of the administration’s demonization of China (it’s Sinophobia) is to 1) distract us from what our rulers have been doing to us domestically and 2) to inspire support for poorly thought out belligerence (war being a core tenet of our foreign policy).
by scotty79 | 2025-10-05 20:26:57+00:00
It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.

This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.
by Buttons840 | 2025-10-05 20:27:54+00:00
On a related tangent:

Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months".

I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-month before I left. When I announced my departure they tried to get me to stay.
Ask HN: Startup Governance Woes
by throwawayfoundz | 2025-10-05 20:28:04+00:00
I'm a co-founder who was removed from the board of a startup I helped build. Still a major shareholder. Recently discovered the CEO and other executives started a new company in the exact same space as ours.

Found evidence they used our company's funds to pay for the new venture's marketing. When I formally requested documents about this, they first claimed nothing existed. After I showed proof of the spending, they created backdated board resolutions claiming it was all a "mistake” absolving them of any wrongdoings and approving that their new venture can be pursued separately.

The new venture is actively competing for the same customers we serve. The CEO and our lead investor are running it while still controlling our company.

For those who've dealt with founder conflicts: is pursuing legal action worth it, or does it just destroy value for everyone? The company is post-revenue with actual customers, so there's something real at stake.

I’ve already spoke with a lawyer and understand all the options available to me as a shareholder from a legal standpoint and it’s all relatively straightforward albeit expensive.

What would you do?
Ask HN: TT-RSS Forks?
by 4oo4 | 2025-10-05 20:28:19+00:00
With the demise of TT-RSS, I've heard a few people mention that they use forks of it. If you use one, can you tell more about it? I'm guessing that there will be new forks that happen from the current TT-RSS (since a lot of the forks in use sound older) but I'm just curious what's out there now.
by hyperhello | 2025-10-05 20:30:02+00:00
Not a bad idea, but the dock has gone to pot too. For example I just dragged an alias of a folder there and it doesn't even understand I wanted the folder.

Everything seems to be at the point where you want to invite the developer over, get him drunk, and make him swear at his own product until he agrees the experience is not great. Of course there is no "the developer" anymore.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 20:30:54+00:00
Lol that's like saying you can make a career out of your love of playing and releasing music. Sure, get to the end of the line. Or playing games and streaming it. Yes, a few make money that way. But theres a vast vast oversupply of people who would want to do that. You have to be very good, work hard, and be very lucky in addition.
by IgorPartola | 2025-10-05 20:30:58+00:00
If this isn’t your job to build networks or networked services then this comment isn’t aimed at you. If that is your job then you are neglecting a part of your job.

This is like an electrician saying it isn’t my job to install ground circuits because appliances shouldn’t get ground faults. Or a consumer saying it isn’t my job to install ground circuits because I am not an electrician.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-05 20:31:46+00:00
Yeah but it's not like everyone could back then either. My mom had a masters degree but couldn't read a map to save her life. On the other hand, I never "learned", it was just obvious. I could rotate in my brain without trying.

I think we're nowhere close to WALL-E, nor are we headed in that direction. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important.
by tsoukase | 2025-10-05 20:33:04+00:00
Because of the interplay between dozens of unknown regulating genes that effect in an obscure way the final decision to trigger the cell mitosis (division). Even if we ever uncover the whole cascade mechanism, how can we stop this monstrous process in everyone of the billion cells that are able to divide? We still have no idea of any drug, viral vector or DNA fragment that can intervene tissue wide.
by moribunda | 2025-10-05 20:33:35+00:00
I second this suggestion. This might sound obvious but during my therapy my psychologist asked me to do this, but in a non-personal/non-threatening way for the relation. Just by telling them that I'm working through my issues and I'd like to get an honest (best would be written/no-interaction type) feedback - what makes them uncomfortable etc. This helped me a lot - to see how different the transmission was on the receiving end from my intentions.
by doesnt_know | 2025-10-05 20:33:51+00:00
> If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination.

I've had a lot of success in asking "are you asking me to do this or telling me", when I've been tasked with something I think is extremely dumb.

If the response is "I'm asking", then I will usually respond with some variation of "can you assign it to someone else, or better yet, throw the task in the garbage".

If the response is "I'm telling you", then I'll go on a spiel about how I think it's incredibly stupid and the people involved in this decision are bad at their jobs, then get on and do it.

But if you're reading this, there is a good chance you are American, so take this advice with a massive grain of salt as I'm not. The culture here in NZ sounds extremely different to almost everything I've read on this forum.
by zh3 | 2025-10-05 20:34:01+00:00
Fairly obviously a 1Gbps network is not going to compete with 5Gbps SATA or 20Gbps NVME. Having said that, for real performance we load stuff over the network into local RAM and then generally run from that (faster than all other options). On the internal network the server also has a large RAM disk shared over NFS/SMB, and the performance PC's have plenty of RAM - so really it's a tradeoff, and the optimum is going to depend on how the system is used.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-05 20:36:40+00:00
> It definitely did -- they weren't in color though.

They were invisible. In HyperCard you could make any region of the screen clickable, and run a script when it was clicked. Not unlike the image maps that websites used to use. You would normally include something visual in the clickable region, but you didn't have to.

I believe the mouse cursor would change if you put it inside a clickable region.
by ben1040 | 2025-10-05 20:36:56+00:00
I have a UniFi doorbell that I chose because it's self hosted and the video stays in my home. It also easily lets you get an RTSP stream of the camera feed.

Earlier this spring we put a bird feeder outside the front door and it dawned on me I could be piping the doorbell cam into BirdNET to classify the bird calls. With an RTSP stream there's no need to mount a microphone anywhere, that comes for free from the doorbell.

My wife is the bird person in the house more so than I am, but it was still really fun to set up and watch the identifications come across.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 20:37:20+00:00
I guess I should have used "frequently" and "usually" when describing that I constantly run into problems relating to API's that cause mini-rabbit holes.

The thing is these API's are probably just as massive as old school OS cosebases, so I'm always tripping into new landmines. I can be doing high level gameplay stuff one week. Then the next week I need to figure out how authoring assets works, and then the next week I'm performing physics queries to manage character state. All in the same API that must span 10s of millions of lines of code at this point.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-05 20:38:00+00:00
> The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information

They were still right though: it's absolutely clear without an ounce of doubt that whatever you put on an US cloud is being accessible by the US government, who can also decide to sanction you and deprive you from your ability to access the data yourself.

Not having backups is entirely retarded, but also completely orthogonal.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-05 20:38:21+00:00
The actual skill is having knowledge and knowing when to not trust the AI, because it is hallucinating or bullshitting you. Having worked on enough projects to have a good idea about how things should be structured and what is extensible and what not. What is maintainable and what not. The list goes on and on. A junior rarely has these skills and especially not, when they rely on AI to figure things out.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 20:40:03+00:00
>. For everything that becomes easier, new harder skills become more important.

I'll ask point blank, then: what new "hard skills" are becoming more important in the short and mid terms that you see on the horizon? My biggest fears are that the technocrats very much want to raise a generation of "sheep" dependent on them to think. They don't need thinkers, only consumers.
by em-bee | 2025-10-05 20:40:40+00:00
of course. my point is that we don't know if it will be enough. and i am not saying linux is a risky bet, because there are no safer bets to make. (other than gabe taking his earnings and keeping them for himself)

if microsoft shuts out Steam, then valve will lose more than 90% of its current revenue. despite the insurance policy that just might kill the company outright.

and, the more revenue valve gets from linux, the more of a threat it becomes to microsoft, which makes microsoft trying to shut out Steam even more likely.

our only hope is that regulators prevent microsoft from even trying...
by Paracompact | 2025-10-05 20:41:30+00:00
> Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?

I promise I don't have an axe to grind in this discussion (I'm a math PhD by training but have every sort of artistic interest including a lifelong desire to become a writer), but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard. But honestly, I would like to see this opinion dispelled.

It is not the argument of the mathematician that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is important just because their colleagues have agreed it is. Rather, it is because, if you actually talked to a mathematician about it, you would be taken on an ever-ascending journey of definitions, statements, and proofs, each one staking new ground in ways that (unless you are a true prodigy) you would never have arrived at but can objectively verify to be correct.

I could compare this to my average experience attempting to approach a darling in the humanities such as Derrida's concept of différance. Here I find myself reading explanations that seem to recursively invoke other neologisms and French puns, gesturing at instabilities and absences, but never, and I mean never, arriving at something I can verify, or hold to be a truly novel thought or insight into a well-defined problem. The argument seems to be "this is important because Derrida said it is, and because a cascade of subsequent scholars have built careers interpreting what he meant." If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
by doesnt_know | 2025-10-05 20:41:54+00:00
I personally don't think ultimatums are a tool that you should ever employ in an employment situation outside of collective action.

You can just leave off the ultimatum and attempt to improve your situation by communicating it in a way that is directly actionable (I'd like to work on X instead of Y, can you arrange that?). You'll have your own internal deadlines of course, but you shouldn't communicate them.
by Roscius | 2025-10-05 20:42:14+00:00
I entirely agree - I have a 30 year career in STEM and am now a senior software architect at a $5b company. I also read, write and speak classical Latin at an advanced (almost fluent) level.

My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.

I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is theirs...
by xmprt | 2025-10-05 20:42:54+00:00
The US has some broken incentives where if a small company fails then it hurts the shareholders but if a large company fails, it's "too big to fail" and ends up getting bailed out by the government. That's why it's worrying how Tesla is growing unsustainably. If the risk pays off then shareholders reap the benefits but if it crashes and burns then everyone takes a hit.
by jncfhnb | 2025-10-05 20:42:56+00:00
I don’t really agree about the premise here. We want people to surpass some basic level of competency in literacy and numeracy skills. The bars which people fall below here are not impressive. Are forced courses a good means to achieve that? In my opinion, no, these forced courses are functionally useless.

You can’t teach things students don’t care to learn.
by Buttons840 | 2025-10-05 20:43:03+00:00
By the time a company is that dysfunctional, why bother? Just do the minimum to get paid.

I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions.

By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such a company? I'll just do the minimum.
by milch | 2025-10-05 20:43:44+00:00
Personally I think they are useful, but in a much narrow way than they are often sold as. For things I'm very familiar with, they seem to reduce my productivity by a good chunk. For things I don't want to do like writing some kinds of tests it's probably about the same, but then I don't have to do it, which is a win. For things I'm not very familiar with it probably is at least 2x faster to do with LLM, but that tends to diminish quickly. For example, I recently vibe coded a website using NextJS without knowing almost anything about it. Incredibly fast to get started by applying my existing knowledge of other systems/concepts and using the LLM to extend it to a new space. A week or so of full time work on it later I'm at the point where I know I can get most things done faster by hand, with the occasional LLM detour for things I haven't touched before
by sandreas | 2025-10-05 20:44:08+00:00
Interesting idea... thanks for sharing.

I have two setups.

1.) A mirror with an attached Tasmota Power Plug that I can turn on and off via curl to spin up an USB-Backup-HD:

curl "$TASMOTA_HOST/cm?cmnd=POWER+ON" # preparation and pool imports # ... # clone the active pool onto usb pool zfs send --raw -RI "$BACKUP_FROM_SNAPSHOT" "$BACKUP_UNTIL_SNAPSHOT" | pv | zfs recv -Fdu "$DST_POOL"

2.) A backup server that pulls backup to ensure ransomware has no chance via zsync (https://gitlab.bashclub.org/bashclub/zsync/)

To prevent partial data loss I use zfs-auto-snapshot, zrepl or sanoid, which I configure to snapshot every 15 minutes and keep daily, weekly, montly and yearly snapshots as long as possible.

To clean up my space when having too many snapshots, I wrote my own zfs-tool (https://github.com/sandreas/zfs-tool), where you can do something like this:

zfs-tool list-snapshots --contains='rpool/home@' --required-space=20G --keep-time="30d"
by whizzter | 2025-10-05 20:45:15+00:00
Any interpreter could theoretically do those "marking" things, also JIT's do far more than just "bytecompile" hot loops, _all_ cooperative modern GC's are enabled by JIT semantics for things like read and/or write barriers (this helps a GC keep track of objects that keep getting "touched" whilst the GC can work in parallel).

Outside of the mentioned, things like detecting finegrained lifetimes is very very hard and the mentioned escape analysis is an optimization that needs to be capped to avoid the halting problem. (1)

A fairly deep covererage of GC behaviours can found in Bacon's "Unified Theory of Garbage Collection" where the author theoretically connect previous works on tracing collectors and reference-counting systems and show that the optimized variations often existing in a design-space between them. (2)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

2: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-g...
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 20:45:18+00:00
It was a fundamental confusion of cause and effect. People noted that the college educated earned more, so assumed that expanding college will confer that same status to all that obtain that pledge. But it inflated its value. Similarly if you squeeze everyone through high school and look the other way even if they don't match the criteria, you just inflate the value of the high school diploma instead of giving the previous high school graduate prestige to everyone. Then the same happened with undergrad. More students, less requirements and then surprise that you don't get an automatic college wage premium for having studied English literature or psychology or communication at some low tier college.