MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by int_19h | 2025-10-07 09:46:04+00:00
Well, we get those two letters "for free" anyway, and the phonemes are distinct in modern English, so let's use them!

"ð" also has the nice property of being sufficiently similar in looks to "d" that someone reading it and not familiar with the letter might pronounce it as "d" and thereby make a decent approximation. Unfortunately that's not the case with "þ" though. If we ignored the historical letters and instead just picked something reasonably sensible, I'd probably go with "đ" and "ŧ" for this reason.
by jesus_666 | 2025-10-07 09:46:46+00:00
It's an implementation of an old recommendation to never have more than 80 characters per line, ostensibly to limit horizontal eye movement but mostly stemming from legacy 80-character terminals and punch cards.

The value of that recommendation is rather dubious considering today's high-resolution displays that allow for smaller font sizes. 80 readable characters at 768p are not the same as 80 readable characters at 4K.
by piva00 | 2025-10-07 09:48:07+00:00
I have a few acquaintances who grew in consulting to become partners who have never, ever, ever worked in the field they consult for. They've only done consulting, only looked through the lenses they were required to for the job they were asked to do with no real experience in the industry.

The only person I know who ended up at a high-ish position at McKinsey with proper industry experience had as their only job being the founder of a company they worked quite hard for 15 years to build, and sold it. Still, it's someone who only had a narrow experience in their industry which is now advising companies in very unrelated fields.
by dugmartin | 2025-10-07 09:49:14+00:00
The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.

Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
by roenxi | 2025-10-07 09:49:59+00:00
Oh sorry, if I'd registered the change of name I probably wouldn't have commented. But since I'm here anyway...

It is the internet, some number of people are always going to misunderstand any comment. If you don't get it then that is ultimately an exercise for you, the reader and if you have clarifying questions I'm generally happy to have a go an answering them. I write a lot of comments, I do my best to be clear, my best is not a standard of perfection.

But ol' mate is telling me what my opinion is, based on a ridiculous reading that isn't what I wrote, isn't something I ever believed and persisted in it after I'd drawn his attention to all those facts. At that point, it is more his problem than mine even if the comment is badly written. When someone says "my opinion is not X", they have never said "my opinion is X", never said anything that logically implies "my opinion is X" and it happens that believing in X is ridiculous, nobody has any business telling them that they seem to believe X. They probably do not believe X.

1 comment, sure fair enough happens to everyone. But at some point it's just being obtuse. If we're talking about real-world facts sure I get things wrong but at some point my opinion on my opinion is authoritative. I do not believe poor people are poor because they're irrational. If anyone is going to start insisting that I do they're running the risk of getting some progressively nasty language thrown at them, I do not intend to sit here quietly and be smeared by this chap.

> You can disbelieve my honest report that you are not explaining your position well

You seem to doing a decent job of it, you're doing a lot better than keiferski with just 1 attempt and no questions. I think he just did badly at reading comprehension on this one.
by otikik | 2025-10-07 09:50:05+00:00
It's not only "giving advice". "Consulting" includes a range of things, down to implementing software.

The customers are big companies with huge budgets, and a lot of red tape. The guarantees they want the most are legal. If things don't go well in a project, or if a project isn't implemented on time, they want to have someone to sue. Someone that will not simply go bankrupt and disappear. "Quality" is almost a nice to have, compared to the legal guarantees.

Enter the Consultancy companies. They have a huge amount of workers, a lot of them fresh out of university. The quality of the work they produce might not be great, but when problems arise, they can always throw more people at the problem (or to make them work longer unpaid hours). They are sometimes called "meatfarms", because of this. They will not go bankrupt easily.

The way these companies develop software is by third parties, often overseas, sometimes, frequently via several intermediate companies, each one adding their cut.

I must stress out that it work. Boring, soul-crushing at times. But it is not easy. Just dealing with the red tape is a job on itself. The kind of contract that needed to be written before a medium-sized project has to be very detailed. It details things like what will happen when the project derails, what will be the penalty and who will pay what. It's a small book.

Source: I was one of those "fresh out of college" people when I joined Accenture. I once was asked to estimate how much would it cost to change one (static) website's scrollbar color from default to yellow. The quote for that change alone, perhaps 10 LOC change implemented by someone in India, was 3000 euros. This was around 2010. I was glad when they offered me a severance package.
by survirtual | 2025-10-07 09:50:28+00:00
Michelangelo had apprentices and assistants, many of which did a significant portion of the work. You could model him as the executive artist, directing the vision. Is this so different from prompting? Whose name is attached to all those works?

I will say Michelangelo was particularly controlling and distrusting of assistants, and uniquely did more work than other master artists of the time, but the point remains. The vision has always been the value.
by belahon | 2025-10-07 09:51:18+00:00
> 1: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance (this article has a lot of examples from DHH's blog)

Basically just a blog post from some guy aghast that DHH has different political opinions to him. I'm politically on the left too but I can't imagine getting so incensed about someone else having right-leaning views.

Do these people never leave the house to meet anyone outside their echo chamber? The mind boggles.
by 3abiton | 2025-10-07 09:51:26+00:00
The argunent is that it forced people to break their habit. Which is always the main hurdle for adoption. There is nothing innovative about Linux 2025 compared to 2024 or 2023, Windows just got worse. I say this as a 12+ years linux user. The biggest shift for the normies was Proton, and we got steam to thank for that. But Linux is more secure, reliable and hard tested as ever.
by surgical_fire | 2025-10-07 09:51:26+00:00
Both can be true, depending on a few factors.

My first attempt at Linux was installing Mandrake sometime circa 2002. I was only a kid that liked computers back then, not really an advanced user. I could not make the mouse work, and gave up. Probably for a more advanced user that was not an issue, and Linux was better already.

Many years later, around 2015, I had the option to work from a Linux environment at my workplace, and went for it. Ubuntu this time around, during Windows 7 days. Many consider Windows 7 to be peak Windows, and I found Ubuntu to be much, much better. At least for regular use and Dev work. The only thing that kept me from using it on my own PC was that running my game library was not possible back then. I did keep it on dual boot for a few years though.

What allowed me to move for good was Proton. In some ways, that is the point where I can say, without any caveats or asterisks, that Linux is definitely better.
by vintermann | 2025-10-07 09:51:46+00:00
Leaders are usually insecure. They need validation. Management consultants give it, for money. In theory, they can take the blame if things go very wrong. But in practice, management consultants tell you to do what everyone else does, and that means both leaders and consultants are saved by the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect.

But there's more to it than that. Your investors don't trust you if you're not the sort to trust Deloitte. (Your investors probably also invest in Deloitte, by the way.)
by iamacyborg | 2025-10-07 09:52:22+00:00
> I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior.

Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
by lxgr | 2025-10-07 09:52:23+00:00
Tailscale is great, but by itself is the wrong tool for the task of routing traffic over some host only for a single browser tab (but to all destinations for that browser tab), as it seems to be "all or nothing" when it comes to using a remote exit node.

It's probably possible to set up a local SOCKS proxy that knows to use some Tailscale non-exit-node for egress, and to manually allow that traffic within Tailscale and on the remote node, but not out of the box as far as I can tell.

Installing a SOCKS proxy on the remote node, reachable only over Tailscale, would be an alternative, but that doesn't work on an Apple TV.
by __atx__ | 2025-10-07 09:52:57+00:00
Curiously, a local supplier [1] has been offering raw uranium glass rods for the last few years. There are even artists making new pieces from it [2].

[1] https://www.glass-laser.cz/URANOVE-SKLO-c38_111_2.htm?page=2 [2] https://www.pacinekglass.com/produkt/breeze-uran
by steven_okrstool | 2025-10-07 09:53:05+00:00
Too many startups struggle with distribution and we end up building products no one knows exist.

Having worked in SEO and marketing for 12+ years, I knew I had to build and distribute at the same time. So, I started with SEO and content.

Within 9 months, I've gone from zero visibility to ranking #1 in Google for all software category keywords.

I now get 4,000 visitors per month, 10 sign ups per day and paying customers. It's only the 7th October and it's already my best month ever.

There's dozens of SEO tactics I used but here's what I believe has had the most impact.

1. Listicles

I have several top 10 lists on my website. I actually tested different platforms, used real screenshots and update them frequently.

Don't worry about cannibalization. One article ranks #1 on Google and another one ranks #1 on Bing. Both drive qualified traffic.

2. Guest posts

Find tech-related/ B2B / SaaS websites and pitch them content. Make sure there's context. For ex. one of my posts is on a Woocommerce site, so my article is how OKRs can help grow your ecommerce store.

I've published 30+ guest posts this year. 90% are branded backlinks. And some, have no link at all. Pure brand play.

3. Existing listicles

If you search for "Best X", there are dozens of articles already ranking in Google. Reach out to them and ask to be featured. Some will ignore you, some will ask you to pay, but eventually - some will say yes. I've ended up on 10+ existing sites.

When you add all this together, it means that when you search "Best OKR software" my website is featured in approx. 20% of the top 50 results. A great way to establish credibility.

4. Original research

I launched the Startup OKR report in June and it got picked up by some big media outlets. Sure, it takes time to create, but I'm still distributing the research today. I try to link to the research 2-3 times in either my own content or in guest articles.

I use a variation of the anchor "According to research by OKRs Tool". This is the strongest way to build authority.

5. Keep content fresh

I've published 100+ articles on my own website this year and I make sure it always stays fresh - and never more than 6 months old. Each month, I updated content that is close to being more 6 months+ and rewrite the intro and include 1-2 internal links to new content.
by antonyh | 2025-10-07 09:53:29+00:00
You hit a chord here with me, I've moved away from WP to Hugo & Eleventy. For interactive features like comments, the search/sort/filter of databases is a strong draw though, and I'm already wanting to add search to Hugo. There's compromises in every approach, but SQL brings a lot to the table that flat files just can't do without a fair wedge of effort... or is there a tool/library that could index thousands of markdown files plus their comments in json/yaml/md format? Statically rendering the comments would give get me 80% of the way there, without free text search. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the tools available, blinded by my past experience and knowledge with older architectures.

I still wouldn't put them into Git along with the rest of the site, that's a definitely no-no. A separate Git? Also no for me. Filesystem does seem viable on reflection, and I feel inspired to explore this now.
by vasvir | 2025-10-07 09:53:57+00:00
Thanks that's an interesting trick.

This is beautified if somebody wants to see how it is done.

function() { var myBody = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]; var myBodyWidth = myBody.style.width; if (!myBodyWidth || myBodyWidth === 'auto' || myBodyWidth === 'inherit') { myBody.style.width = '1200px'; myBody.style.marginLeft = 'auto'; myBody.style.marginRight = 'auto'; myBody.style.position = 'relative'; myBody.style.cssFloat = 'none'; } else { myBody.style.width = 'auto'; myBody.style.position = 'static'; } }
by hxii | 2025-10-07 09:54:14+00:00
While my D2D is MacOS and Windows 10, I’m not a newcomer to Linux and I WISH I could just move myself and my wife to Linux instead of waiting until W10 kicks the bucket.

But until the experience and process are seamless (or at least much more simplified), I honestly cannot see people “just switching”.

I had to jump through SO MANY hoops to stop my case fans from automatically spinning at 100% and getting CoolerControl to work (see it87 and Gigabyte), and it’s still happening, that it’s not even remotely amusing anymore.
by abxyz | 2025-10-07 09:54:25+00:00
The trope you’ll often hear in circles like ours is that big 4 consultants exist to provide cover for unpopular decisions. That’s sometimes true. However…

Big corporations and governments aren’t startups in which everyone is encouraged to do as they please in service of the mission. Corporations and governments hire people for very specific roles with very specific responsibilities. Stepping outside of your responsibilities is discouraged. Employees inside big organizations have to think, “how fucked am I if I make this decision and it goes wrong?”. A startup can write off big losses without a second thought, a big corporate or government has to investigate.

If you need to make a big decision, you don’t let an intern take a shot at it, even if they are convinced they have the perfect idea, because if it goes wrong, it’s on your head — which idiot let an intern fuck it up?

You bring in consultants who are (ostensibly) experts so that your responsibility ends at having done the right thing and if anything goes wrong, it’s not on your head.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-07 09:54:49+00:00
This. They're shouting at the sky from whatever squirrels are running around their brains without understanding anything about real CPUs. It's somewhere between a shitpost and AI slop. They offered no better alternative except to bitch about how "imperfect" things are that work. I'd like to see their FOSHW RTL design, test bench, and formal verification for a green field multicore, pipelined, superscalar, SIMD RISC design competitive to RISC-V RV64GC or Arm 64.
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-07 09:55:32+00:00
When I put my computer to sleep and then wake it up, sometimes there's no video output until I switch to a different terminal and then back to GUI. How on Earth is a non-IT person supposed to figure this out.

Also, my parents bring home documents from work, and they often get documents from different institutions, which means they already hit edge cases of compatibility issues between different office suites, and telling them "this one sometimes reads docx correctly" is hard sell.
by delaminator | 2025-10-07 09:56:12+00:00
Even claude Code does it.

Be typing a prompt and get 1) Do Action 2) Always Do Action 3) Don't Do Action

But if, like me, one looks at the keyboard while typing, you might not notice and be typing away and it has stolen your focus. Worse it used to default to 1) when you pressed enter and so you might have agreed to anything.

DO NOT STEAL FOCUS.
by piva00 | 2025-10-07 09:56:57+00:00
That would be, in my opinion, an orthogonal issue, and not clear from your "and eat you anyway" remark.

The only good thing coming out of both Trump's terms is the diminishing influence of the US, I can see your point on how US money could influence politics here but at the same time it's also now much harder for that influence to take hold properly. US influence was much stronger back in the late 90s, early 00s, it's been waning since 9/11, and kinda reaching a tipping point with Trump.

The next financial implosion, which is inevitable in the boom-bust cycles, can likely cement this diminished influence, the US won't have that much extra money sloshing around to fuck with other countries, they are losing long-time allies which propped them up to recover from the 2008 mess they created. It'll probably be the best time to decouple away from the US, including their financial influence in our politics.
by fragmede | 2025-10-07 09:57:35+00:00
it's a trope at this point.

I'm the CEO and I don't really like it when the annoying guy down the hall tells me what to do, so I'm gonna spend $50,000 and have a team come in and interview everybody and then they'll tell me the same thing the annoying guy said, for years, but because they're outside consultants, I'll listen to them when they say it.
by jack_riminton | 2025-10-07 09:57:48+00:00
As someone who did an MBA and was groomed to be a Consultant and then repented (now a software engineer) you have to understand that the customer of a consultancy project is an exec.

1. The exec has been charged with exploring a new product space, a potential M&A deal, more vertical integration etc etc

2. The exec needs a gauge on the "size of the prize", is this thing worth doing? roughly how will it be done? how long etc.

3. The exec probably already has a rough idea or gut feeling about one such option

4. The consultants produce something that usually supports the gut feeling, other times it will suggest alternatives and provide some facts and figures to support
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-10-07 09:58:37+00:00
Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...

Here's the Handelsregisterauszug for Proton, which shows ownership: https://www.zefix.admin.ch/en/search/entity/list/firm/118926...

Proton's peering relationships: https://bgp.tools/as/62371#asinfo

I'm not sure what exactly you're looking for.
by tnolet | 2025-10-07 09:59:39+00:00
Why do you have an accountant? Or a lawyer? It's the same thing. Corporations don't have all skills in house for a ton of things.

I was an IT consultant. A big energy company wanted to go to the AWS cloud. Their folks were too busy and had no experience. We (my consultancy company) already had the knowledge.

Consultants don't only give advice. In many cases, they also do the work. But advice is also a "product". If your in-house team does not have the knowledge or time, you hire a consultancy firm.
by sigwinch | 2025-10-07 10:00:03+00:00
These are good examples.

1. Since tax prep is siloed away from development, you don’t know what you don’t know about your company’s tax and regulatory posture. You as a product owner don’t know how it compares with the industry. You don’t know the space of ways it can change.

2. But then, when they find that your development floor looks like everyone else, it’s less than profound. This analysis is most valuable to the outliers; maybe a company that’s merged and bought smaller ones and as a result needs to be told that they’re out of shape.
by _trigrou_ | 2025-10-07 10:02:12+00:00
This piece perfectly captures why I built and still enjoy using my personal proof of concept a custom solution designed just for me. It’s essentially a self-generated newspaper, curated from RSS feeds and read on my e-ink tablet for a peaceful experience.

If you’re curious about how it works, I’ve detailed the entire process here: https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds
by UpsideDownRide | 2025-10-07 10:02:29+00:00
Indeed. I always dabbled with Linux here and there. W11 was the final straw for me as well. I feel like LLMs help a ton too, not only do they make initial troubleshooting much easier, they also are pretty great at generating simple scripts that enhance the system.

I'm so happy to have made the swap, using my system is now much more enjoyable and if I don't like some aspect of it I can change it up with MUCH less effort than in Windows.

Also I'm positively surprised how good gaming on Linux is now. It was always a big blocker to full commitment to Linux.
by ale42 | 2025-10-07 10:02:51+00:00
Too specific to gaming, and AFAIK NVIDIA-specific. Plus, RDP disconnects the physical console, so the screen stays off and keyboard/mouse can't interfere. There is some software like NX that can blank the screen (actually, make it black or show some silly gradient animation) and inhibit the keyboard/mouse, but the screen stays on; and it's not even by default. Does anybody here know an open-source business-grade remote desktop software for Linux? I'd be really interested to deploy it.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-10-07 10:03:27+00:00
How does this work in two-party consent states. IANAL but as I understand it, you need to permission to record someone in California.

As an aside, I don't consider myself a particularly paranoid person (relative to the median HN commenter, I'm probably still in the 95th percentile of paranoid-ness in the general population), but I couldn't imagine ever wearing a device that records my entire life and uploads it to Meta of all companies....
by blacklion | 2025-10-07 10:03:42+00:00
But you have one copy of the key stream. It is not safe. You need at least two places to store at least two copies of the key stream. You cannot store it in non-friendly cloud (and this thread started from backing up government sensitive data into cloud owned by other country, possibly adversary one.

If you have two physically separate places which you could trust key stream, you could use them to backup non-encrypted (or "traditionally" encrypted) data itself, without any OTP.
by wltr | 2025-10-07 10:04:33+00:00
As a relatively long-time desktop Linux user, now I approach all hardware makers as ‘oh, loser I’d never buy from’ including NVidia (which support is better on Linux, last time I’ve heard of them). I understand that’s a bit of a bubble, as I was sure Microsoft is irrelevant for many years, and I’m quite surprised each time I hear they’re not bankrupt.

But still, it’s not very difficult mindset that you have to choose from ‘responsible’ (for the lack of a better word) hardware developers. Oftentimes it’s ‘just buy another piece of hardware’ thing. As a grand example, it looks like current M-generation Macs are all awesome and all, but I value Linux so much more that I’d rather have an obviously worse hardware than deal with Windows or even modern-day macOS.

Apart from that, I see zero issues with Linux, it just works. And is very efficient, aesthetically pleasing (mostly), and has not-so-bad UX.