MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-17 20:15:29+00:00
> Citing an average number is misleading

Not when you are also citing the coefficient of variation it isn’t.

> since the chart of the value of a dollar during that time looks like a zig-zag with some massive swings in both directions.

Uh, exactly the claim made, “we have accepted higher inflation in order to achieve stable inflation that is predictable.” (emphasis added)

Characterizing this as a bad thing is, IMO, quite bonkers, but so is denying that it is exactly what has happened.
by compass_copium | 2025-10-17 20:15:38+00:00
Nonsense.

A QC operator may be able to carry out a test with as much accuracy (or perhaps better accuracy, with enough practice) than the PhD quality chemist who developed it. They could plausibly do so with a high school education and not be able to explain the test in any detail. They do not understand the test in the same way as the chemist.

If 'understand' is a meaningless term to someone who's spent 30 years in AI research, I understand why LLMs are being sold and hyped in the way they are.
by stego-tech | 2025-10-17 20:15:41+00:00
I generally find the aversion to documentation comes from one of three places:

* A belief that sufficient documentation means their job is at risk (which, to be fair, is 100% correct in this Capitalist hellscape - ask me how I know first-hand)

* It’s irrelevant since the code will change again in a short amount of time

* A fierce protection over one’s output, sometimes manifesting as a belief that nobody but you could ever understand what you created

Sure, sometimes there’s wholly incompetent developers who can’t even tell you their own dependencies, but I’d like to believe they’re still the exception rather than the rule. As for the value proposition, collaborators and cooperators understand the immense value of good, thorough documentation; those who don’t see the value, at least in my experience, are often adversarial instead of cooperative.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-10-17 20:15:41+00:00
From what I've heard, their servers are in the US, so UK residents are connecting to the US to access the site and not the other way around. 4chan sells memberships that allow users to bypass some of the rules. If they accept payment from UK banks (no idea if they do or not), then perhaps the UK can make a claim they're doing business in the UK.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 20:16:04+00:00
I don't want to sound mean, but c'mon, the reality is that if you haven't touched a line of code in months, you are/were not a programmer. I love Claude Code, it really has its moments. But even for the stuff it is exceptionally good at, I have to regularly fix mistakes it has made. And I only give it the fairly easy stuff I don't feel like doing myself.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-17 20:16:05+00:00
If a Nobel laureate says they have an interesting hypothesis that they’d like test and that idea isn’t obviously impossible, it’s probably best not to dismiss it as crank science.

Walter Alvarez is another Nobel laureate who proposed a theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Many people thought that was crank science.

And it’s important to note he had another out there idea that there were hidden chambers in the pyramids of Egypt. That one turned out to be wrong.

What distinguished his theories from crank science is that he was open to the idea that they were wrong and was interested in actually using the scientific method to investigate them.
by empiko | 2025-10-17 20:16:22+00:00
We should completely strip all this talk from AI as a field (and get rid of that name as well). It just causes endless confusion, especially for general audience. In the end, the whole shtick with LLMs is that we train matrices to predict next tokens. You can explain this entire concept without invoking AGI, Roko's basilisk, the nature of human consciousness, and all the other mumbo jumbo that tries so hard to make this field what it is not.
by mbgerring | 2025-10-17 20:17:10+00:00
This is another way of saying "EVs are getting cheaper," so it's hard to understand why this is framed negatively.

Moreover, EV batteries are recyclable. The main thing holding back lithium recycling has been the supply chain of used batteries, because the batteries are quite durable.

If the resale value of EVs is falling, that makes it easier to extract the batteries and use the raw material to build better batteries.
by mind-blight | 2025-10-17 20:18:10+00:00
Oh interesting - I haven't been on their starting page in years. I'm surprised getting started with vite isn't higher up. That takes 5 minutes and doesn't require a full framework.

That said, starting with react router or expo is probably the right call depending on the project needs. Routing is not something you want to do yourself, and react native is pretty unfriendly without expo
by AJRF | 2025-10-17 20:18:22+00:00
> If that's true, why do leadership, VCs, and eventually either the acquiring company or the public markets keep falling for it then?

If I had to guess, it would be because greed is a very powerful motivator.

> As the old adage goes: "Don't hate the player, hate the game?"

I know this advice is a realistic way of getting ahead in the world, but it's very disheartening and long term damaging. Like eating junk food every day of your life.
by dinkleberg | 2025-10-17 20:18:22+00:00
This is a very obvious statement, but good MCP servers can be really good, and bad MCP servers can actively make things significantly worse. The problem is that most MCP servers are in the latter category.

As is often the case, every product team is told that MCP is the hot new thing and they have to create an MCP server for their customers. And I've seen that customers do indeed ask for these things, because they all have initiatives to utilize more AI. The customers don't know what they want, just that it should be AI. The product teams know they need AI, but don't see any meaningful ways to bring it into the product. But then MCP falls on their laps as a quick way to say "we're an AI product" without actually having to become an AI product.
by felarof | 2025-10-17 20:18:26+00:00
Hmm I've tried. Google chrome doesn't allow starting `--remote-debugging-port` on main profiles. Logs below from my MacOS. not sure if it allows on other OSes.

``` [I] ~ /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --enable-logging=stderr --remote-debugging-port=9445 (base) [27920:145785320:1017/131556.797325:INFO:components/enterprise/browser/controller/chrome_browser_cloud_management_controller.cc:206] No machine level policy manager exists.

DevTools remote debugging requires a non-default data directory. Specify this using --user-data-dir. ```
by theothertimcook | 2025-10-17 20:18:43+00:00
I wish there was a way to buy windows 11 LTSC with a version of MSOffice stripped of copilot, OneDrive, and all the modern windows fluff.

It’s wild how unreliable and complex windows has become, how can it be that Dropbox from 10 years ago was better than MS baked in cloud “backup”.

On the other hand, even though SharePoint is hot garbage the browser based Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook are getting better all the time and increasingly can work from the browser so maybe it will be a non issue and Debian or something becomes and option.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-10-17 20:18:54+00:00
> If I'm tired of one thing related to AI/llm/chatbots it's the claims that it's not useful.

That is the best example of straw argument I've seen this year. I enjoy reading discussions on LLMs and have seen a huge number of arguments, some reasonable and some ridiculous, but one thing I haven't seen is someone claiming that LLMs are not useful. We can discuss usefulness for a particular purpose, or the level of its fitness for it, but not the fact that millions of people find LLMs useful enough to pay for them.
by chairmansteve | 2025-10-17 20:18:55+00:00
"Personally I think offshoring is a far worse problem for workers than H1-Bs".

Yes, it's complicated. Arguably, when foreigners buy American made software eg, Microsoft products, they are offshoring software development to America.

So... if you start limiting software "imports" aka offshoring, other countries will do the same. So Microsoft will sell a lot less.
by jjangkke | 2025-10-17 20:18:56+00:00
I disagree with labeling AI to be a cargo cult. Crypto fits the description but the definition of a cargo cult has to imply some sort of ultimate end in which its follower's expectations are drastically reduced.

What AI feels like is the early days of the internet. We've seen the dot com bubble but we ultimately live in the internet age. There is no doubt that post-AI bubble will be very much AI orientated.

This is very different from crypto which isn't by any measure a technological leap rather more than a crowd frenzy aimed at self-enrichment via ponzi mechanisms.
by gortok | 2025-10-17 20:18:59+00:00
Why has Tesla depreciated so much since 2023? Could any of the depreciation be due to the character that is Elon Musk and his antics?

As someone who bought a 2023 Model Y 7 seat Long Range, I can tell you my desire to sell the car was 100% because of the negative brand value caused by Musk.

I’m not able to sell it because I’m currently $17,000 underwater on it and can’t afford to dump it, but I would if I had $17,000 to lose. I have a friend who did just that.

I love my Tesla (for the most part, it has some basic annoyances that remind me that building and testing a car for California is not the same as building it for everywhere), but as someone who tracked the depreciation of my own Tesla, it started plummeting when Musk decided to buy Twitter and spend his time exonerating the alt-right, and culminated with his foray into public policy.
by plastic3169 | 2025-10-17 20:19:42+00:00
> ”Full self driving" is another example; your car won't be doing this, but companies will brag about limited roll-outs of niche cases in dry, flat, places that are easy to navigate.

Not expecting my car to be self-driving anytime soon, but I have understood there is actual working robotaxi service in San Francisco which is not easy or flat? I think we can’t keep saying self driving cars will never happen when this kind of thing already exists.
Show HN: ASCII Automata
by california-og | 2025-10-17 20:19:56+00:00
ASCII AUTOMATA is a tool to analyze the visual connectivity of characters in textmode fonts. It works by scoring edge connectivity of each piece and finding the best matching neighbour piece. Every time it places a piece, it "grows" towards the edges it touches by placing a matching piece. The red heatmap shows how frequently each character is used, useful for analyzing the fonts.

I initially made it as a tool for myself. When I design textmode art fonts it is sometimes difficult to figure out if a specific character would actually be useful for drawing or not. I wanted a tool which would show how useful and versatile some character is, and how well it connects to all other pieces.

But, as it turned out, this tool produces unexpectedly beautiful emergent patterns, so I made it into a proper little toy-tool for anyone to play around with.

Sidenote: it was also a good opportunity to test a new method for constructing a responsive semi-complex UI.

I made a web component which renders text as SVG paths using hershey vector fonts. The SVG fills the parent element, and applies stroke after the stretching happens: so strings "a" and "aaa" take the same amount of space, while remaining legible because the stroke is independent of the text's transformations. Thus, I never have problems with overflowing text in the UI!

The layout is made with a CSS grid. For example the sidebar is simply <div style="--cols:8;--rows:41;" class="sidebar grid"> and then each UI element gets a position and size <vec-text style="--x:1;--y:19;--w:2;--h:1;">Cell Width</vec-text> . As a result, the layout is easy to make, the sidebar itself can be any size or shape,all the UI elements stay exactly where I put them, and all text remains legible due to the stretchy, monolined vector font web component. It's great!

The WHOLE UI layout is just 120 lines of HTML, and 40 lines of CSS (for around 90 UI elements)!

(it did take a while to fiddle with the coordinate numbers, but I'm working on a wysiwyg tool to make that easier too...)

[crossposted this comment from mastodon: https://typo.social/@gdc/115405978249292146]
by necovek | 2025-10-17 20:20:10+00:00
If Ukraine did not retire their nuclear weapons... (Russia was surprisingly all too happy to oblige)

All I am saying is that I am not sure it's so simple: sure, if everyone had them, the risk that there is some lunatic crazy enough to actually put them to use rises; but it also potentially stops a bunch of wars, especially bigger countries going after smaller ones.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-17 20:20:14+00:00
Wherever I've worked where we do a daily standup in Slack I use the life hack of filling out the standup at the end of the day as opposed to the beginning of the day. Instead of being the last person to fill it out, I look like I am the first.

Often in the morning I can't remember exactly what I did the day before whereas at 4:20pm I do know and on a good day I am raring to go and know exactly what I want to do the next day. So if I write it all down I can look it up and know what I have to do to get started.

I checked the other day and found that a lot of other people on the team had switched to my schedule.
by dandersch | 2025-10-17 20:20:43+00:00
Bad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux port using their weird "game inside a shell script" approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than just using wine/proton on the Windows build.

[0] apparently using this https://icculus.org/mojosetup/
by tracker1 | 2025-10-17 20:21:12+00:00
She had a couple old card and casino games she bought in the later 90's... they installed in WINE without any real issues at all, total surprise to me, but they were likely just using simple GDI calls or whatever, prior to DirectX really taking over. I had also installed a handful of similar games via the distro repositories.

She mostly used her browser for email (Yahoo) and to order grocery delivery once a week. She emailed and shared pictures with extended family quite a bit.

Nothing really extreme at all, and not really a heavy gamer by any means. Just casual play. Oh, she liked a few of the columns/gems type games as well.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-17 20:21:14+00:00
> And again this presupposes that you can disable Secure Boot, boot a malicious OS from another drive, fool the user into entering their password, automatically reboot, enable Secure Boot, boot into the legit OS, then come back later and have the ability to boot the OS yourself and log in as the user (because again, you don't have the decryption key, you have the user's login credentials).

But that's the same thing that happens with full disk encryption. They come get physical access to the machine but don't have the decryption key yet so they compromise the unencrypted part of the machine which is what prompts you for it, have that capture the key when you enter it, and now they have the key when they come back to use it.

If anything allowing the short password is even worse, because if you leave your machine in suspend you expect it to prompt for your unlock password but not the full disk encryption key when you come back, so the latter would be suspicious but the former doesn't let them unlock the disk, and now you're using the short password for both.

> You are also presupposing what the TPM is bound to. I don't use Windows, but using systemd-cryptsetup I could configure a TPM to bind to the drives in the system; in this way, it will refuse to boot my legit OS while your malicious disk is installed (well, it will demand a recovery key). Again, setting off alarm bells, and if I discover the disk with my recorded credentials before you can physically access it, I can just destroy it.

Except that it doesn't need to be installed once you're at that point. By then it has already captured your credentials and stored them or sent them to the attacker over the network, so it can disable that device right before it goes to boot into the original operating system.

Also notice that the original premise was to make it easy for ordinary users and now the workaround is to install Linux and change a setting that will confuse people as soon as they leave their own USB stick plugged into their computer.
by auraham | 2025-10-17 20:22:46+00:00
Another advantage of using Elixir/Erlang/Phoenix is high availability. If one client/incomming requests is taking a lot of time to complete, other users are not affected. We can even inspect the system in real time via iex. Please search for "The soul of Elixir" in YouTube, Sasa Juric explains this. Highly recommended.
by harrall | 2025-10-17 20:22:58+00:00
A good newspaper to me is one that regularly does their due diligence (fact checking, possibly considering things from several angles, giving background information) and has a consistent but reasonable bias. NYT and The Economist are very good ones.

It’s extremely hard suggesting newspapers to an online audience. People don’t easily separate bias and accuracy — they think they are correlated.

Bias and accuracy are unrelated to each other.

If I suggest The Economist, people think I’m for liberalism (The Economist has a major liberalism slant), but really, they tend to make factual statements and then turn to liberalism as a solution, which a regular reader can be like “okay the facts and your background introduction to the topic are good. I don’t necessarily agree with your solution but I get your viewpoint.”

When people ask for suggestions, they often want a simple news source that is unbiased. And I have nothing to give them because I don’t read unbiased news sources.
by LgWoodenBadger | 2025-10-17 20:23:05+00:00
"Meanwhile, a 2020 ICE is pretty much the same as a 2025 ICE aside from the wear and tear."

One would think and hope so, however numerous ICE manufacturers, even long-term reliability experts like Honda, have been adopting "wet belt" timing belts.

These run submerged/immersed in engine oil, which tends to degrade the belt, often resulting in clogged oil pickups, galleys, etc.

Buyer beware, unfortunately.
by llm_nerd | 2025-10-17 20:23:12+00:00
>I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45577203

There are thousands and thousands of comments just like this on this site. I would dare say tens of thousands. They regularly appear in any AI-related discussion.

I've been involved in many threads on here where devs with Very Important Work announce that none of the AI tools are useful for them or for anyone with Real Problems, and at best they work for copy/paste junior devs who don't know what they're doing and are doing trivial work. This is right after they declare that anyone that isn't building a giant monolithic PHP app just like them are trend-chasers who are "cargo culting, like some tribe or something".

>I also think they're over-hyped and that the current frenzy will end badly (global economically speaking)

In a world where Tesla is a trillion dollar company based upon vapourware, and the president of largest economy (for now) is launching shitcoins and taking bribes through crypto, and every Western country saw a massive real-estate ramp up by unmetered mass migration, and Bitcoin is a $2T "currency" that has literally zero real world use beyond betting on itself, and sites like Polymarket exist for insiders to scam foolish rube outsiders out of their money, and... Dude, the AI bubble doesn't even remotely measure.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-17 20:23:28+00:00
> But you chose trailer park because the point was to pick a group of people that a bunch of other educated white collar people (I think the trailer park people would use the term "coastal elites" for this group, lol) like feeling better than, hence why the other groups wouldn't do.

I started calling it that when I lived in the trailer park.

> If you wanted to make if harmless

It's already harmless. The people who live in trailer parks don't need your protection, and acknowledging that most of them don't want to be there isn't hurting anyone at all.
by James_K | 2025-10-17 20:23:34+00:00
US businesses can get bent. Half my country is rotten and hollowed out, all the shops replaced by Amazon. Screw them. Uber wants to come over here and put our local cabbies out of work, then bring them all back on lower wages with higher fees. Screw off. Air B&B destroys affordable housing all across Europe and turns cities into tourist hell. Oracle comes over here and they're trying their damnedest to get their hands on our valuable NHS data. Facebook (now Meta) comes over here and shows horrific content to young children, wrecking the mental health of teens, especially young girls. Twitter (now X) wants to pollute my country's politics with American fascist nonsense while its owner promises to donate hundreds of millions to far right political parties across the content.

I don't want any of these “services” thank you very much. Inflict them on your own people, not us.

American technology companies operate by finding technological solutions to evading the law, then counting on being too big to fail once regulators catch up. These companies do not provide innovative products, they abuse monopoly power to dominate industries. The Chinese are smart enough to make their own versions of all this stuff so that they aren't under the US yoke and I want the same here (sans the dictatorship of course). I want to replace every horrid US machine with something FOSS or publicly owned, and every regulatory step towards that is a win in my book.

Maybe instead of turning your nose up at other countries that dare to regulate your tech overlords, you should try to get your politicians to do the same thing.
by bragr | 2025-10-17 20:23:44+00:00
>Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games

My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all get messy and weird fast.

Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home. Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life, inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to them instead of the step kids.
by eh_why_not | 2025-10-17 20:23:51+00:00
In a discussion of an article about encouraging fact-checking in writing, I wish you would have made your quotes informative by replacing "many wise people" with the actual names of who said them.

For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/502048-why-you-fool-it-s-th...

[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-17 20:24:46+00:00
> I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field

Well, this is almost certainly true in some very vague sense - I mean, it seems much more unlikely to meaningfully categorize it as a gravitational phenomenon, or a strong interaction phenomenon or a weak interaction phenomenon. Though it would be cool if somehow it turned out our minds had color charge.

Of course, this is only the same sense in which Linux and McDonalds and potatoes are also electromagnetic fields, or phenomena related to it.