MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgfl | 2025-10-30 16:42:05+00:00
Southern Italy. We’ve had burglars once actually, but that’s about it. I’ve since then also lived in Switzerland and Sweden, which are obviously much safer. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see the point in worrying about this. I take my precautions like anyone else and that’s about it.

Anyhow, sorry to hear about your experience. That’s how statistics work I guess. For any particularly unlucky person there’s a correspondingly lucky person that averages them out.

Conning is definitely more of a thing, but I wouldn’t place it in the same league as pickpocketing of tourists. Which of course is a thing, I don’t want to deny it. Just that using it as a reason to avoid Europe is absolutely blowing it out of proportion.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-30 16:42:06+00:00
This is true, but a bit of a dodge. Solar is competing with gas, so when you have a land parcel and want to maximize the energy you get from it, you need lots of sunshine to beat out gas.

This also factors heavily into where we use energy vs. where we produce it, and the associated losses. You can slot a GW of gas generation into ~350 acres anywhere. Solar you need ~5,000 acres with lots of sun. Combine this with the fact that the land where energy is used (population centers) is the land that is most expensive, and the difference becomes substantial. This also doesn't factor in energy storage costs, which is also necessary to reach parity with gas.

Also, don't take this as me attacking solar, I am a huge proponent, but there is a reality check needed so people can understand why we aren't paving the earth with panels despite constant headlines of "Solar is the cheapest energy". It's the cheapest energy when in an ideal location, and overwhelming majority of people in the US don't live in an ideal location.

This however doesn't really apply to non-gridscale generation. People can (and should) put panels on their roofs and batteries in their basement.
by sebastiennight | 2025-10-30 16:42:06+00:00
As with many times when we use the word "should" (and you've used it a lot), the perspective you're sharing is deeply influenced by your own cultural background and might not apply to many people reading.

A few examples: school loans, considering a house purchase to be a sound investment, purchasing once-in-a-lifetime household items, saving for a wedding (from the age of 17!?) or marriage (not sure what you even mean by that if you don't mean the wedding itself?).
by mmooss | 2025-10-30 16:42:21+00:00
> The Mozilla/Mitchell Baker vibes are strong here.

> She's saying this stuff because of her social background, not technical reality.

> Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Pavel Durov crying

> Whittaker ... publishes heart emojis and expresses concern

The gamergate vibes are strong here.

> She's saying this stuff because of her social background, not technical reality.

Always look first in the mirror.
by enether | 2025-10-30 16:42:27+00:00
I also strongly believe it's not a headache.

Vendors frequently push that narrative so they can sell their own managed (or proprietary) solution on it. With a decent AI model (e.g ChatGPT Pro), it's easier than ever to figure out best practices and conventions.

That being said, my point is more about the organizational overhead. Deploying Kafka still means you need to learn how it works, why it's good, its configs, API, how to debug it, set up obesrvability, yada yada.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-30 16:42:44+00:00
> We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.

I don't believe this is true. I think the gendered difference in interest in the cluster of topics we label "STEM" is mostly biological and deeply-seated - one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).

I also don't think that boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls. I think that girls are explicitly encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in much greater numbers than boys - this is exactly a consequence of the above-noted social fact that "Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly". And as you say, this is because males are much more likely to be intrinsically interested in pursuing STEM education and careers, whereas females are more likely to require explicit societal encouragement to do so. I've read more than one account of a woman who had worked in some kind of software-related field admitting that she wasn't intrinsically excited about the work, but felt like she would be a bad feminist if she left a STEM track to do something more traditionally female-coded instead.
by kccqzy | 2025-10-30 16:43:58+00:00
I think there is something deeper here: people have become scared of the unknown, therefore we need to hide things for them. But people don't have to be scared. In fact even for people who are using Handbrake comfortably, a lot of things Handbrake presents in its UI are probably unknown to them and can safely be ignored. The screenshot in the article shows that Handbrake analyzed the source video and reported it as 30 FPS, SDR, 8-bit 4:2:0, 1-1-1. I think less than a tenth of a percent of Handbrake users understand all of that. 30 FPS is reasonably understandable but 4:2:0 requires the user to understand chroma subsampling, a considerably more niche topic. And I have no idea what 1-1-1 is and I simply ignore it. My point is, when faced with unknown information and controls, why do people feel scared in the first place? Why can't they simply ignore the unknown and make sense of what they can understand? Is it because they worry that the part of the software they don't understand will damage their computer or delete all their files? Is it just the lack of computer literacy?

I do not readily empathize with people who are scared of software, because my generation grows up tinkering with software. I'd like to understand why people would become scared of software in the first place.
by nasvay_factory | 2025-10-30 16:44:14+00:00
i remember the 1110 thing on a calc as well.

741 + 369 & 963 + 147 | 123 + 987 & 321 + 789 (left right | up down)

159 + 951 & 753 + 357 | 258 + 852 & 456 + 654 (diagonally | center lines)

the design of a keypad... it unintentionally contains these elegant mathematical relationships.

i call this phenomena: outcomes of human creations can be "funny and odd", and everybody understand that eventually there will be always something unpredictable.
by simiones | 2025-10-30 16:45:00+00:00
The LLM proper will never answer "yes" or "no". It will answer something like "Yes - 99.75%; No - 0.0007%; Blue - 0.0000007%; This - 0.000031%" etc , for all possible tokens. It is this complete response that is apparently unique.

With regular LLM interactions, the inference server then takes this output and actually picks one of these responses using the probabilities. Obviously, that is a lossy and non-injective process.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-30 16:45:06+00:00
I am not arguing for some alternate solution. But sim swap attacks are common and relatively easy to do [1].

> The scam begins with a fraudster gathering personal details about the victim .... the fraudster contacts the victim's mobile telephone provider. The fraudster uses social engineering techniques to convince the telephone company to port the victim's phone number to the fraudster's SIM. This is done, for example, by impersonating the victim using personal details to appear authentic and claiming that they have lost their phone.

SMS 2FA should simply not be used if one cares about security.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam
by ttamslam | 2025-10-30 16:45:28+00:00
Hey I'm Matt! Really excited to answer any questions.

To elaborate a little bit on the "canary" comment --

For a while at Airtable I was on the infra team that managed the deploy (basically click run and then sit and triage issues for a day), One of my first contributions on the team was adding a new canary analysis framework that made it easier to catch and rollback bugs automatically. Two things always bothered me about the standard canary release process:

1) It necessarily treats some users as lower value, and thus more acceptable to risk exposing bugs to (this makes sense for things like free-tier, etc. but the more you segment out, the less representative and thus less effective your canary is). When every customer interaction matters (as is the case for so many types of businesses) this approach is harder to justify

2) Low frequency / high impact bugs are really difficult to catch in canary analysis. While it’s easy to write metrics that catch glaring drops/spikes in metrics, more subtle high impact regressions are much harder and often require user reports (which we did not factor in as part of our canary). Example: how do you write a canary metric that auto rolls back when an enterprise account owner (small % of overall users) logs in and a broken modal prevents them from interacting with your website.

I view what we’re building at Propolis as an answer to both of these things. I envision a deploy process (very soon) that lets us roll out to simulated traffic and canary on THAT before you actually hit real users (and then do a traditional staged release, etc.)
by MisterTea | 2025-10-30 16:45:56+00:00
> The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications.

Its not hard if the client isn't monolithic. I use ircs/ircx on Plan 9 which is a two part client: server that maintains connection to a network and channels the user joins. The server buffers incoming messages to a flat text file while the client just attaches to these buffers. I have a CPU server running 24/7 at home so it runs the server half and I can run the client on as many terminals as I want. It might be too simple but that is what I prefer.
by fullStackOasis | 2025-10-30 16:46:12+00:00
Yes, you can still do that directly (I did that just the other day).

I can't entirely understand Google's announcement, but it almost sounded to me like they will forbid sideloading if you're not an "official" dev (gone through their hoops). I also saw something in their statement about wanting to support hobbyists. It sounded like an afterthought.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-30 16:46:15+00:00
Mine is called the Bible. Which is a greek word for "the books" but commonly understood to be "the holy scriptures'. I'm happy to include Quran and Book of Mormon and all gnostic gospels into this mix; it's not important for this discussion.

Pali canon are also a personal favourite. Tao te ching is similarly good.

I havent read the bhagavad gita or the upanishads, but I should do so.

The reality here is that there's a single uncaused God. Even the polytheistic Hindus believe there's only 1 uncaused God(Brahman). But this God is too complex for human understanding. The religions are all bad, very insufficient, explanations of the God with a cultural lens to help in that understanding.

Your importance of your operating manual is to get you to the point that you live at peace with your neighbours and even your enemies. Life is too short to have enemies. Which is then complex about how to avoid ending up with enemies because cultural differences can be the break. Which is the importance of multiple religions.
by seydor | 2025-10-30 16:46:19+00:00
Tangentially i can't help but notice a pattern. Generation1 says "build more homes", then they build them and convince Generation2 to invest despite ever climbing real estate prices. Then the internet happens and Generation2 says "build more companies". They build them , and proceed to convince Generation3 to invest in those companies despite ever climbing stock values. Seems like these trends run in cycles
by jcynix | 2025-10-30 16:46:27+00:00
Interesting idea. But the voting will fail for reasons already stated. And somehow your idea sounds like the "old" Google+ from before 2018(?).

Take a look at how Usenet worked (and still works, although stuttering) it had filters in its newsreaders to select postings by certain people or topics and it had killfiles to hide postings by certain people or for certain topics. Killfile entries where either permanent or time limited.

Your centralized site could easily evaluate your reader's killfiles to see what or whom users dislike (I.e. implicitely voting with their kill file)

Intro to various newsreaders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rn_(newsreader) https://www.nndev.org/ https://slrn.info/
by somenameforme | 2025-10-30 16:46:35+00:00
They didn't celebrate the means, they celebrated the result. The Gauls had brutally sacked Rome in 390BC, and then further humiliated them as they were paying a massive ransom to end the siege. This became a part of the Roman identity and led to an obsession with ending the Gallic threat. Centuries later, Caesar would unambiguously achieve exactly that. In modern times it's hard to understand this because what happened last year is already ancient news, but in ancient times it was not uncommon for feuds, even on just a family level, to last for centuries.

Post-industrialization (kind of assuming they'd have access to modern tech here), slavery makes very little sense - even completely ignoring the ethical issues. Pay a negligible hourly/monthly cost to hire a skilled worker that can be easily replaced or dismissed as desired, or pay a huge up-front cost to take on somebody who is probably low skill, may or may not work out, and then be 100% responsible for all of their needs and other costs going forward? They'd likely outlaw it just like every other country that's gone through industrialization has.

Similarly exposure (which began to be phased out and moving towards adoption once Christianity took hold in Rome) was once again largely a product of technology. Abortion was extremely dangerous in those times for the mother, and exposure was one way it was done relatively more safely. And children were often exposed because of various deformities or their sex which, again, can now be detected at a prenatal stage. Though the sex issue again gets back to a lack of technology. Son's worked and essentially were your pension, whereas daughters joined the house of whoever they married, to say nothing of dowry related issues.

Obviously we have to do a lot of speculation to imagine what a Roman Empire in modern times would look like, but I don't think many of the knee-jerk reactions to it are really justified.
by robin_reala | 2025-10-30 16:46:35+00:00
But … that’s not a solar tower. If I think of solar towers I’m typically imagining what Wikipedia calls a “solar power tower”[1] (lots of mirrors pointing at probably something with molten salt) or maybe a “solar updraft tower”[2] greenhouse with a tall ducted fan in the middle. This is solar panels on a gimbal? Which is cool and all, but not as cool as the first two.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
by Spivak | 2025-10-30 16:46:38+00:00
Right, it's a reimplementation, a really good one, but it doesn't change how Python packaging and dev environments work mechanically. The PEP that would have actually changed Python packaging to be more like NPM (https://peps.python.org/pep-0582/) was rejected.

> If you ignore the parts of the flow

I don't get this, pip has worked with pyproject.toml since its standardization https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/. You don't need any constellation of tools, the only pieces that aren't provided by upstream is the version manager and the virtualenv manager. The new packaging flow has also worked with the authoritative pypa tools since their standardization https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/

Again, uv is great, I just think people are giving this one tool too much credit for the standardization process (that uv is an implementation of) that actually addressed Python packaging issues. Like for example uv run, that's all https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/
by timenotwasted | 2025-10-30 16:46:49+00:00
This is very cool and I could see it being really useful especially for those giant PRs. I'd prefer it if instead of the slider I could just click the different heatmap colors and if they indicated what exactly they were for (label not threshold). I get the underlying premise but at a glance it's more to process unless I was to end up using this constantly.
by nycdatasci | 2025-10-30 16:46:53+00:00
"When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google"

I agree with many of your statements, but this one simply isn't true. They've really struggled to integrate AI into products in a useful way. Do you remember glue on pizza? Founding Fathers reimagined for DEI? The Brain/DeepMind merger was largely an acknowledgement of their many misses from a product perspective.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-30 16:47:09+00:00
Couldn't agree with this more. I'm even an advocate for simulating walled gardens with Free Software. Let people who need to feel swaddled in a product or a brand feel swaddled.

It also opens up opportunities for money-making, and employment in Free Software for people who do not program. The kind of hand-holding that some people prefer or need in UX is not easy to design, and the kind of marketing that leads people to the product is really the beginning of that process.

Nobody normal cares that it's a thin layer over the top of a bunch of copyleft that they wouldn't understand anyway (plenty of commercial software is a thin layer over permissively licensed stuff.) Most people I know barely know what files and directories are, and the idea of trying to learn fills them with an anxiety akin to math-phobia. Some (most?) people get a lot of anxiety about being called stupid, and they avoid the things that caused it to happen.

They do want privacy and the ownership of their own devices as much as everyone else however, they just don't know how much they're giving up when they do a particular software thing, or (like all of us) know that it is seriously difficult if not possible to avoid the danger.

Give people mock EULAs to click through, but they will enumerate the software's obligations to them, not their obligations to the software. Help them remain as ignorant as they want about how everything works, other than emphasizing the assurances that the GPL gives them.
by alias_neo | 2025-10-30 16:47:13+00:00
All good.

I think it's common everywhere to be honest.

Here in the UK there's never been financial literacy taught at a national scale that I'm aware, there certainly wasn't when I was in school, albeit that was some decades ago now, and from what I've seen of my nephews/nieces it still isn't.

My children are still too young to worry about the minutiae, but we're already trying to teach them about income/outgoings and saving even at their middle single-digit ages.

Investing is something I can't say I'm extremely comfortable with the details of even at my advanced age besides the simple things like "I have a pension" and "I have a LISA".

I definitely think there's room for some self-service tools to aid in teaching these things to our kids from an early age.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-10-30 16:47:42+00:00
Illnesses and accidents are exactly the things you need savings for, and aren't really relevant here because they don't prevent you from saving until and after they happen. The issue appears to be that 50% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and have no savings? I can't imagine how this could be anything other than them just spending money on shit they don't need.

And yes, I am assuming you live in a developed country. I have Ukranian citizenship and right now the Ukrainian government is abducting men who are over 24 years old and sends them to death. If you live in a country like that, true, you shouldn't worry about investing because you don't even have basic human rights.
by strictnein | 2025-10-30 16:48:08+00:00
I'm unsure where you thought we were talking about "proving" anything with these statements? Forming illogical counter-examples doesn't show that the original premise was false, just that one can form clearly wrong examples of this.

No one has ever lived 150 years. Therefore there is nothing that can be predictive of living 150 years. One is starting with something that is known to be incorrect and then working backwards to phrase it in a similar way.
by fweimer | 2025-10-30 16:48:09+00:00
Is this technology used in the Internet core?

Or for de-bundling access networks and Internet service? Where I live, access networks use shared media (broadcast cable or GPON), segregating customers through device and protocol obscurity (no tcpdump) and maybe encryption (but without tcpdump, it is hard to tell). There's not much room for defining anything in software there.

And in data centers, how far does multi-tenancy go in practice? Can tenants push their own P4 programs into hyperscaler infrastructure?
by simiones | 2025-10-30 16:48:22+00:00
The point I'm trying to make is this: the LLM output is a set of activations. Those are not "hidden" in any way: that is the plain result of running the LLM. Displaying the word "Blue" based on the LLM output is a separate step, one that the inference server performs, completely outside the scope of the LLM.

However, what's unclear to me from the paper is if it's enough to get these activations from the final output layer; or if you actually need some internal activations from a hidden layer deeper in the LLM, one that does require analyzing the internal state of the LLM.
by verdverm | 2025-10-30 16:48:32+00:00
1. Productivity (quantity) does not equal quality. How is productivity even measured? (the jury is still out on this one)

2. LLMs & Agents do not automatically create better software. They more often prefer to write from scratch rather than use the library sitting right next to the code they reimplement. While they are good at writing narrowly scoped tasks, they are not good at large perspective work. They also make lots of mistakes, just like us.

3. Why haven't we seen the things you expect? Because of (1) hype and, similar to stock market trades, people only share their wins and not their losses. (2) They are not as capable as the proffers would have you believe.
by binaryturtle | 2025-10-30 16:48:46+00:00
I bought V2 a while ago too when it was offered extra cheap. The problem it doesn't run on my rusty machine. I bought it to have it as reserve once I upgrade my machine someday (who knows if my V1 stuff still runs then?). I learned about this weird activation server stuff afterwards, so ultimately I had to ask for my money back. There was no way to "activate" the software and store the key/keyfile in a backup. In no way this is future proof in my view.

I want to use my software w/o depending on the availability of some random 3rd party server. I guess it just got worse with this new app here. I'm not enthusiastic about it at all. This has nothing to do with a price point at all (I was happy to pay for all my 3 V1 apps separately).
by JohnFen | 2025-10-30 16:48:55+00:00
> You already got the job if you are negotiating salary, they wont take it away.

Exactly this.

In all my decades in the industry, both during up cycles and down cycles, I've never had anyone respond to negotiation by saying "never mind, the deal is off". The worst case is that they'll say "our offer is not subject to negotiations, take it or leave it."