MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fgonzag | 2025-10-08 19:07:06+00:00
Hot swap drives are necessary on data centers where you don't want to have to pull the whole server and open the top cover just to replace a disk.

But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're going to resync the array anyways.

I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and reliable storage in a very small footprint.
by asdff | 2025-10-08 19:07:20+00:00
Results are certainly thinner than in years past when you could seemingly inspect the entire crawled corpus. You can search for a pretty broad topic and hit the wall pretty fast today. I think they are limiting the depth of queries these days probably owing to search volume and the size of cache they can sustain what with current webdev standards. It was a different story when websites were a few kb to mb 20 years ago even though storage is "cheaper" today.
by pixelready | 2025-10-08 19:07:28+00:00
I think Hashimoto has the right idea with Ghostty. If you have the financial / time freedom (and the spousal support) to tinker with a passion project, that seems like a great way to spend your time and skills without commercial pressures contributing to burnout.

I always like Neal Stephenson’s approach with his Sci-Fi novels too. Most of them have a central conceit based around a topic he wanted to learn more about (linguistics, nanotech, cryptography, etc…), so in essence writing the novel was just an excuse to obsess about that topic for a while.
by cwyers | 2025-10-08 19:08:07+00:00
The opening of the article is laying out the case that the laws are good -- they make the market legible to participants. As he says:

``` To navigate all of these technical minefields, you need the help of a third party. In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems.

To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise, in which all affected parties submit evidence about what the best rule should be and then get a chance to read what everyone else wrote and rebut their claims. Sometimes, there are in-person hearings, or successive rounds of comment and counter-comment, but that’s the basic shape of things.

Once all the evidence is in, the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based. This whole system is backstopped by courts, which can order the process to begin anew if the new rule isn’t supported by the evidence created while the regulator was developing the record.

This kind of adversarial process—something between a court case and scientific peer review—has a good track record of producing high-quality regulations. You can thank a process like this for the fact that you weren’t killed today by critters in your tap water or a high-voltage shock from one of your home’s electrical outlets. ```

And this is central to Doctorow's point, right? The narrow question of the legality of Uber's current service offerings is actually pretty well litigated, and if Uber was as flagrantly illegal as he claims, "we're an app" wouldn't have kept them in business. Doctorow argues that this is happening through regulatory capture -- the case isn't primarily that Uber is violating the currently existing set of laws, regulations, court precedents, etc. It's that Uber is violating what the regulations _would be_ in a world where they had less market power with which to influence regulations.

And so it's not enough to argue about how the apps get around _current_ laws. By Doctorow's own arguments, we're debating the merits of a counterfactual set of different regulations that we would have if you changed current conditions. And at that point, it is absolutely fair game to ask if this counterfactual set of different regulations is actually better for market participants.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-10-08 19:08:09+00:00
There are plenty of NAS boxes out there with better specs, lower power consumption, faster networking, and half the price.

Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.

In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.

Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).

And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.

If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).

Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.

The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.
by ramesh31 | 2025-10-08 19:08:29+00:00
>Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more funding and easier journal publishing, which gets them more exposure, so they end up with their labs and get their name on a lot of papers.

There's a ton of this among all historical figures in general. Any great person you can name throughout history, almost without exception, were born to wealthy connected families that set them on their course. There are certainly exceptions of self made people here and there, and they do tend to be much more interesting. But just about anyone you can easily name in the history math/science/philosophy were rich kids who were afforded the time and resources to develop themselves.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-08 19:08:37+00:00
I worked at a small startup-ish company like this: No bug tracking, no source control, no dedicated build machines (builds were published off of a random engineer's laptop, based on whatever code he had on it currently), no tests, no documentation. None of these were seen as important by the CEO (he was not a software guy). He just wanted engineers cramming features all day. When you started talking to him about development process, toolchains, infrastructure, best practices, his eyes would glaze over and ask how this helps him deal with his 5 screaming customers right now.

The CEO definitely felt he needed to be involved with these practices, to forbid them.
by dooglius | 2025-10-08 19:08:59+00:00
If one wants to start talking cosmology, it's unlikely to the case that arbitrarily long-lived computers are possible, I don't think any of the theories in [0] are conducive to either an infinite-time or infinite-memory computer, so the strict mathematical definition for Big-O doesn't hold up. IMO it's better to use Big-O as an effective theory for predicting runtime on human-scale computers than take the mathematical formalism too literally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe?...
by godelski | 2025-10-08 19:09:03+00:00
> Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.

The "move fast and break things" strategy is a fantastic strategy when you are approaching a problem and trying to figure it out. But if you don't go back and clean things up when you do then you're left with a lot of junk and dead weight. A lot of technical debt builds up this way. It's slow and no singular instance is to blame. Just like how you don't get fat by eating a single cookie. Hell, you don't get fat by eating an entire fucking cake in one sitting. You get fat by doing so repeatedly and by not doing things to mitigate that buildup.

You can't run fast when you're fat. And you don't get fat overnight. It is slow. Maybe you gain a pound a week and lose a second on your mile time every day. You likely won't notice such effects. But by getting fat you have to work so much harder to move fast.

This is true for weight, software, countries, and all sorts of things. Professional athletes spend far more time on maintenance and implementing good habits to ensure nothing slows them down. But often we look at those things as if they provide no progress. Maybe they don't move us literally forward, but they are definitely key to doing so. Let's not make this mistake
by JoshTriplett | 2025-10-08 19:09:21+00:00
Depending on the level of security you need, there are any number of steps people could take or the industry as a whole could take:

- Don't allow remotely installing things on a device, only doing so with physical presence on the device.

- Have "binary transparency" mechanisms to make sure that you're seeing the same binary everyone else is, and you're not getting served a special backdoored version nobody else sees. (This doesn't prevent global backdoors, of course, but those are more likely to get caught.)

- Relatedly, have multiple independent app stores in different jurisdictions, and make sure they are serving identical binaries. That ensures no one jurisdiction can surreptitiously demand and enforce a backdoor.

- Have signatures from the original app author that can be verified, and ensure that intermediaries (e.g. "app stores") can add signatures but can't add anything to the package that's not covered by the original signature. That reduces the number of parties you have to trust.

- In an ideal world, only install Open Source software that's reviewed and subject to multiple independent reproducible builds.
by jonahbenton | 2025-10-08 19:10:24+00:00
Discourse quality is 99.9999% a trust/safety/moderation policy and tooling outcome. Content can be problematic on any of dozens of dimensions (tone/energy/relevance down to actual criminal consequences) at any size. Whether conversations retain signal and communities develop and grow trust entirely depends on what decisions moderation does or does not make.

Did shorter content chunks simplify the moderation problem, in the context of an org that wanted to build communities? Absolutely. Does Twitter post Elon have completely (completely) different goals and values? Of course, yes, opposite end of the spectrum. What relative percentage of resources does Elon twitter devote to moderation? Maybe 1%. So is it obvious that conversations are going to be completely different and lower "quality"? Yes, yes it is. That is a goal.
by tamimio | 2025-10-08 19:10:44+00:00
The rule of thumb is if you can use Linux and you don't have a very weird niche application that only runs on Windows, then you should migrate to Linux. There are plenty of good entry-level distributions and all sorts of applications too. Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files, so be proactive. I think even macOS is better than Windows in the current day, and you don't need a fortune too. The other day I found a mid-2012 MacBook Pro for $15 at the thrift store, installed 16GiB RAM and an SSD that I both had around, and installed the latest Sequoia with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and voila, works just like new!
by throwaway173738 | 2025-10-08 19:10:44+00:00
That’s different. He’s not saying to totally isolate the child, but that the child is born to modern humans without any language or culture or knowledge but who live in a wilderness. So not a place of deprivation but a place of danger and exploration. I would argue that kids are wired to explore, and that the parents would do their best to protect the child. It’s kind of a useless thought experiment because our lineages stretch back unbroken to the beginning of life, and that includes culture and transmitted knowledge.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-08 19:11:06+00:00
"Actually the quoted 'sudden correction' is not referring specifically to AI, but the market in general"

As I read that quote it states that valuations "particularly" for AI companies "appear stretched"

This suggests the "correction" will apply to those valuations in particular

The report later refers specifically to these so-called "technology" companies

"5: Equity market valuations had increased since Q2, to near all-time highs, partly driven by strong Q2 earnings of US _technology firms_. The price appreciation of the largest _technology firms_ this year had increased the concentration within US equity indices to record levels. The market share of the top 5 members of the S&P 500, at close to 30%, was higher than at any point in the past 50 years."

"6: Equity valuations appeared stretched, particularly in backward-looking metrics in the US. For example, the earnings yield implied by the Cyclically-Adjusted Price-to-Earnings (CAPE) ratio was close to the lowest level in 25 years - comparable to the peak of the dot com bubble. ... Some _technology companies_ were trading at valuation ratios which implied high future earnings growth, and concentrations within US equity indices meant that any _AI-led_ price adjustment would have a high level of pass-through into the returns for investors exposed to the aggregate index."

Given their "stretched" valuations according to this report, any "sudden correction" would apply to these so-called "technology" companies

Aside from the instances where the report refers to overvalued "tecchnology" companies particularly, the parent comment is correct that the report does not refer to "AI" specifically

Thus, ...
by baobun | 2025-10-08 19:11:10+00:00
One anecdote. I was worried about a recent friend of mine (non-technical solo traveler) becoming besties with ChatGPT and overly trusting and depending on it for basically everything.

Last time we met they had cancelled their subscription and cut down on the daily chats because they started feeling drained by the constant calls for engagement and follow-up questions, together with "she lost EQ after an update".
by toyg | 2025-10-08 19:11:11+00:00
The minefield is just the reality of the Italian business landscape. In a country dominated by small companies run by families and friends, this sort of thing happens every other day.

In that particular story, if true, I bet the writer is a relative of someone in the branch of police dedicated to tax checks (the much-feared Guardia di Finanza, who effectively wields power of life and death over most small businesses).
by landl0rd | 2025-10-08 19:12:01+00:00
Actually most people agree that legality and morality are overlapping but separate categories. There are legal and immoral things as well as illegal but moral ones. I have no problem with someone breaking a law I see as immoral if the act itself is morally positive or neutral. It is a matter of benefit versus odds of being caught.

For example, do you think it is immoral for marijuana people to consume their drug of choice? It remains federally illegal.
by gosub100 | 2025-10-08 19:12:17+00:00
SMR drives aren't defective though. They have a capacity and they are capable of storing at that capacity. They just can't keep up with the throughout requirements of a nas. And remember the WD SMR scandal was because they weren't being forthcoming about that limitation. I fully support Synology's move to lock it drives. I think it's the tech crowd that got it wrong... mostly. Synology should have sweetened the deal and along with the lock-in, offered cheaper prices with proof of purchase of the Disk Station.
by lordnacho | 2025-10-08 19:12:26+00:00
When I optimize stuff, I just think of the SIMD instructions as a long sandwich toaster. You can have a normal toaster that makes one sandwich, or you can have a 4x toaster that makes 4 sandwiches as once. If you have a bunch of sandwiches to make, obviously you want to align your work so that you can do 4 at a time.

If you want to make 4 at a time though, you have to keep the thing fed. You need your ingredients in the cache, or you are just going to waste time finding them.
by salleisha | 2025-10-08 19:13:41+00:00
Most people talk about AI in the context of flashy features — code generation, image tools, marketing copy. But the real impact might be happening in the background.

We’ve been building TaxHero AI, where we use n8n + OpenAI to automate things like bookkeeping, categorization, and tax deadline tracking for early-stage startups.

It’s not glamorous — but the leverage is insane. AI doesn’t replace founders; it replaces the 80% of admin tasks that drag them down.

What I’m noticing: the boring stuff (compliance, ops, accounting) is finally becoming programmable.

Would love to hear what other founders or engineers are seeing in their own stacks. Is AI quietly taking over your “least exciting but most painful” work too?
by tredre3 | 2025-10-08 19:13:45+00:00
> Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point.

But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for fun?

The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough performing ARM MCU!
by asdff | 2025-10-08 19:13:49+00:00
There is something deeply sinister about seeing a defense contractor building in and around DC. Very nondescript 80s-90s dark plexiglass office box with a parking lot. Only with metal fencing, coated in cameras, anti ram bollards, and an armed guard at the gate, plus no doubt other security measures we can't see. The most secretive cutting edge science on death and killing being performed in the most otherwise happy go lucky seeming 90s model suburbia where there seemingly aren't any poor people around at all. Something deeply dystopian about this model utopia optimized for an ever present and unstoppable war machine.
by specproc | 2025-10-08 19:14:03+00:00
> So, am I able to run Office 365 on it?

> Yes. :)

I mean, great. I've never actually tried since going all in on Linux. Figured I'd just abandon the Windows world. This would be useful though.

Does anyone here actually do this, with Winboat or any other tool? Every time I've tried it's been too flaky to be worthwhile, but it's been a good few years.

I'd chuffing love to have Affinity back.
by sixhobbits | 2025-10-08 19:14:05+00:00
It's kinda hard to write an example or template for a communication pattern that seems really personal and genuine. OP is describing a pattern and is explicit that it's both a) a good thing to do on an emotional and ethical level and b) that the industry is small and it's good to not burn bridges.

I think it's clear from context that you can make the actual message a lot more personal based on your relationship with that person, but it seems harsh to say 'this looks like an HR template' when the post is kinda explicitly trying to make a general point.
by kanjun | 2025-10-08 19:14:06+00:00
I resonate on the exhaustion — actually, the context switching fatigue is why we built Sculptor for ourselves (https://imbue.com/sculptor). We usually see devs running 4-6 agents in parallel today using Sculptor today. Personally I think much of the fatigue comes from: 1) friction in spawning agents 2) friction in reviewing agent changes 3) context management annoyance when e.g. you start debugging part of the agent's work but then have to reload context to continue the original task

It's still super early, but we've felt a lot less fatigued using Sculptor so far. To make it easier to spawn agents without worrying, we run agents in containers so they can run in YOLO mode and don't interfere with each other. To make it easy to review changes, we made "Pairing Mode", lets you instantly sync any agent's work from the container into your local IDE to test it, then switch to another.

For context management, we just shipped the ability to fork agents form any point in the convo history, so you can reuse an agent that you loaded with high-quality context and fork off to debug an agent's changes or try all options it presented. It also lets you keep a few explorations going and check in when you have time.

Anyway, sorry, shilling the product a bit much but I just wanted to say that we've seen people successfully use more than 2 agents without feeling exhausted!
by everyone | 2025-10-08 19:14:23+00:00
Ive been on DOS and Windows since the 80's... Recently I was mainly using Windows 10 LTSC, but now I'm finally transitioning to Linux Mint as my daily driver.. It's just so *good* .. The functionality, ease of use, and "just works" aspects of it are better than any other OS imo. It shows what can happen when a small team works with the goal of just making the OS good and giving it as much functionality as possible vs when a giant corp works on it with all sorts of random goals and agendas.

I am a game dev and avid gamer, so that was the only thing keeping me on Windows, but with stuff like Wine, Bottles, Proton, Lutris, + stuff like this coming out that reason is fading away.
by worik | 2025-10-08 19:15:03+00:00
> Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files

I really hope this is correct. If there were any justice in the world....

But, oh my aching head, the IT industry seems to be fill of people barely holding on, hoping and preying nobody calls their bluff.

To these people, who hold a death grip on middle management, "nobody gets fired for buying microsoft" is a real thing

Quality be dammed, job security rules the roost
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-10-08 19:15:45+00:00
Ok, let's imagine that I agree with what you just said...

Given your stated premise of the major media landscape being manipulative right-wing grooming stations hiding behind veneers of centrism and the unimaginable power that carries with it, what do you think can legitimately counter the state of things you described other than an empire-shifting media effort that would take financial investments on the scale of an entire small nation state?

If they're uninformed, how much can you actually inform them against the background? If they're uncaring, still, after everything, how can you make them care? If they're undecided, still, after everything, how will you get them to decide?