MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akulkarni | 2025-10-30 16:04:51+00:00
Yeah, I know what you mean. I used to roll my eyes every time someone said “agentic,” too. But after using Claude Code myself, and seeing how our best engineers build with it, I changed my mind. Agents aren’t hype, they’re genuinely useful, make us more productive, and honestly, fun to work with. I’ve learned to approach this with curiosity rather than skepticism.
by bluGill | 2025-10-30 16:05:06+00:00
That young you should be investing in a 527 education account not a ROTH retirement account. Education is a much better ROI when you are young than anything else. As you get older the value of education decreases. In generally the cross over is sometime in your early/mid 20s (Could be as young as 16 if you don't do well in school, or as old as 35 for things like medical doctor)

If you don't live in the US you will have different options, but the idea still applies
by dspillett | 2025-10-30 16:05:07+00:00
I've seen an installer get confused by the presence of an EFI partition on the stick, and not correctly create one on the target drive. There are probably ways to get around that, but I just made a separate USB stick for the installer (I had a spare stick floating around, and the tools handy (including on at least one of the live CDs on the ventoy stick)) and retried that way, which was probably faster than researching another method.
by mdrzn | 2025-10-30 16:05:32+00:00
These lyrics are from the song "Don't Look Now" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. The lines are a poetic way of saying that the work of taking coal from the mine, harvesting salt, and nurturing a tree is the task of other people, often those in the "working class", not the "you" and "me" of the song, who are implied to be in a privileged position
by tock | 2025-10-30 16:05:37+00:00
Climate change isn't driven by human defined borders either. It's driven by total CO2 emissions. If a per-capita rate is non sensical then border based emissions are even more non sensical. Greenland only emits 0.001% of the total. Greenland is 12000x a better country than the US wow. This is exactly why per-capita is used.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-30 16:05:44+00:00
> Your money has to go somewhere or it will rot to inflation.

Inflation is mainly created by this act of "putting your money somewhere". For most people, this "somewhere" means loans. Money is being loaned out to people, spent, deposited back into the bank, and loaned out again, on and on it goes until $1,000 turns into $100,000 in circulation, not a cent of it real until all loans are paid back.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-30 16:06:02+00:00
Seems much better than was feared, though I haven't yet downloaded and tried the new version and there's still plenty of room for things to decay in the future.

It requiring an account (and thus, internet connectivity) to use is offputting, though. That is a prime enabler of enshittification, since it allows Canva to force updates that users may not necessarily desire. Hopefully it's easy to reverse engineer so old versions can be preserved and remain functional.
by jaggs | 2025-10-30 16:06:22+00:00
>> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy. That’s really all it takes.

One of the truest things I've read on HN. I've also tried to visit this concept with a small free image app I made (https://gerry7.itch.io/cool-banana). Did it for myself really, but thought others might find it useful too. Fed up with too many options.
by yanhangyhy | 2025-10-30 16:07:09+00:00
For our mindset, we love AFD. Not saying we have interests connected to them, but they seems at least have an action plan , not like Merz and the president of Franchise. The industry decline of German is a hot topic on Chinese internet these days

I really like a book by Foucault that discusses the origins of the modern state. He argued that the modern state could only originate in the West because only there did a balance of power among large states form, generating sufficient competition. In contrast, during China's Ming and Qing dynasties, it maintained an overwhelming advantage over its surroundings, thus lacking the impetus for reform. But now everything is different. The world is not a rational free-trade world. The EU has only two choices: either re-integrate into a unified empire, or disband and learn the survival strategies of smaller states—not taking sides and cooperating with both China and the US, or something like ASEAN. Its current loose alliance is the worst possible choice.
by treetalker | 2025-10-30 16:07:30+00:00
Not that I don't have my own complaints about FedEx/Kinkos, but there is another way. Go to the counter. Ask for the branch's email address for printing. Email the file (or Dropbox link) with instructions. When it's done, they'll notify you. Go pay and leave with your print job.

Also, on iPad this website is difficult to read because the text flows into the black part of the background. I hope the zines look better.
by griffzhowl | 2025-10-30 16:08:47+00:00
In my view there is such a perspective: quantum mechanics. So far as we know its predictions are valid for all observers.

But what that means is that we have to readjust our classical conceptions about what a "property of a system" is.

The word "property" in general is just a logical concept, and doesn't carry any intrinsic ontological implications. There can be mathematical properties, physical properties, properties of thoughts and dreams etc., and this way of talking about things doesn't by itself imply any specific ontological interpretation. It's just a feature of the structure of language.

About physical properties specifically, if we derive our concept of physical property from quantum mechanics, instead of trying to retain the inadequate classical meaning, then physical properties are exactly those represented by the state vector: e.g. its projections on to each of the basis vectors corresponding to some observable.

True, as is well-known from the Bell and Kochen-Specker theorems, we can't consistently say that a quantum state has some specific value of its observables independently of interactions with other systems, but this is just the classical conception of a physical property (formalized, e.g., by a real-valued function on phase space).

But quantum mechanics doesn't thereby force us to say that a physical system has no definite properties. Instead, we can reconfigure our conception of physical property to make it compatible with quantum mechanics.

Then in general the properties of quantum states are probabilistic (at least some of them - the dimension of its state space, for example, is not), but the theory unambiguously assigns to a state the probabilities that the various possible measurement outcomes will be observed. These probabilities are among that state's properties, and all indications are that these probabilities are objective features of the state, independently of our ways of representing the state.

In fact the dependence goes in the other direction: this (objectively) probabilistic character of quantum states (among other things, like the quantization of energy exchanges) is what forced us to change the way we think of physical states.
by superkuh | 2025-10-30 16:09:13+00:00
One problem with .onion is that it is not for casual sites or people trying to build lasting communities. The Tor Project only prioritizes security and they can and have and will again wipe out the entire tor web to nothing if they feel it is required by security. They have full control of the network. No v2 tor sites exist anymore, none of the communities, they were are just wiped out by the Tor Project because only their security use case matters. They care nothing for communities that use their software. Do not try to build communities on Tor .onion. It'll just be made inaccessible some day. All the hyperlinks will become useless. All the databases of sites, all the discussions, just gone. Because the tor project cannot abide potential lax security of older protocols.

.onion is not a way to own your domain. Even though you may have the private key and no one else does, the true owners of your domain remain the tor project themselves, as they can make it inaccessible to tor clients any time they want. They have before, they will again. And they aren't going to listen to any community feedback about it. Tor .onion is only for people that don't care about longevity or links working. Only for people who have 'security' as their number 1 and only concern.

I wasted a decade building my personal sites and casual communities on .onion. I won't be fooled again. A dot com or org is just as much mine as a .onion is, unfortunately, and at least those don't all disappear every 10 years.
by turnsout | 2025-10-30 16:09:26+00:00
As an Affinity user, I'm interested to try this out (just downloaded). I'm surprised they tried to put it all in one app. Affinity Publisher is quite different from Affinity Photo for example.

Edit: Just checked out the app. They essentially put Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher together in one app, switchable from a tab. Honestly, it's executed well. I hope it stays free—these apps are legitimately useful replacements for their Adobe equivalents.
by ploxiln | 2025-10-30 16:09:53+00:00
It probably applies better to users of software, e.g. 80% of users use just 20% of the features in Postgres (or MS Word). This probably only works, roughly, when the number of features is very large and the number of users is very large, and it's still very very rough, kinda obviously. (It could well be 80% / 5% in these cases!)

For very simple software, most users use all the features. For very specialized software, there's very few users, and they use all the features.

> The claim is that it handles 80%+ of their use cases with 20% of the development effort. (Pareto Principle)

This is different units entirely! Development effort? How is this the Pareto Principle at all?

(To the GP's point, would "ls" cover 80% of the use cases of "cut" with 20% of the effort? Or would MS Word cover 80% of the use cases of postgresql with 20% of the effort? Because the scientific Pareto Principle tells us so?)

Hey, it's really not important, just an idea that with Postgres you can cover a lot of use cases with a lot less effort than configuring/maintaining a Kafka cluster on the side, and that's plausible. It's just that some "nerds" who care about being "technically correct" object to using the term "pareto principle" to sound scientific here, that bit is just nonsense.
by jonas21 | 2025-10-30 16:10:01+00:00
Well, yes. Compared to most countries that have signed this treaty, the US has excellent protections for PII and data privacy.

But that's beside the point. The most objectionable parts are about state surveillance and the potential for human rights abuses.

For example, here's what the EFF had to say about it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/effs-concerns-about-un...
by Arrath | 2025-10-30 16:10:12+00:00
Its funny for me, born and raised in the endless river valleys of the PNW, that I am so used to this topology that I'm much more comfortable in cities with an "opposite valley wall" (even if it's a building facade on the other side of the street and not the next row of hills a couple miles distant) in sight, than I am in Florida, on islands, or other big flatlands areas with nothing at all to break up the great sweep of the horizon.
by viktorcode | 2025-10-30 16:10:29+00:00
My reply is a counterpoint to the statement that banks, government services and streaming services require excessive control over my device. They aren't, as they all can run in a browser, which sandboxes them from the OS. That's it.

And I guess people who downvoted my counterpoint thought that it means that all services on the planet have very well functioning browser version, judging by their comments. Some don't, some do. But no one of them "requires" excessive access a native app can provide.

Some may want to have it, for some browser version is simply not a priority. But nobody needs to have additional info for those services to function.
by kjksf | 2025-10-30 16:10:41+00:00
Microsoft, being a U.S. company, had no choice in the matter. U.S. imposed sanctions on the guy. One component of sanctions is "Prohibition on U.S. persons (individuals or entities) conducting business or transactions with Khan."

If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan."

So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.
by GrumpyGoblin | 2025-10-30 16:10:57+00:00
There is another aspect that many people aren't discussing, the communication aspect.

For a medium to large organization with independent programs that need to talk to each other, Kafka provides an essential capability that would be much slower and higher risk with Postgres.

Standardizing the flow of information across an organization is difficult. Kafka is crucial for that. To achieve that in Postgres would require either a shared database which is inherently risky or would require a customized API for access which introduces another layer of performance bottleneck and build/maintenance cost and decreases development productivity/performance. So you have a double whammy of performance degradation with an API. And for multiple consumers operating against the same events (for example: write to storage, perform action, send to data lake), with a database you need a magnitude more access, so N*X with N being the number of consumers multiplied by the query to consume. With three consumers you're tripling your database queries, which adds up fast across topics. Now you need to start fixing indexes and creating views and other workload to keep performance optimal. And at some point you're just poorly recreating Kafka in a database.

The common denominator in every "which is better" debate is always use case. This article seems like it would primariy apply to small organizations or limited consumer need. And yea, at that point why are you using events in the first place? Use a single API or database and be done with it. This is where the buzzword thing is relevant. If you're using Kafka for your single team, single database, small organization, it's overkill.

Side note: Someone mentioned Postgres as an audit log. Oh god. Done it. It was a nightmare. Ended up migrating to pub/sub with long-term storage in Mongo. which solved significant performance issues. Audit log is inheritently write once read many. There is no advantage to storing in a relational database.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-30 16:11:01+00:00
The Sentinelese monitoring program run by the government in India the works to enforce no contact rules relies on open source in it's causal chain.

My mother did remote tribal work in the brasilian interior, she grew up on the Amazon, I personally know well off Ruby devs who grew up unable to even read.

Whether you are against intervention or pro intervention, all across that spectrum, whatever your luxury belief may be, everyone is impacted by open-source.

Open source is an insane force multiplier, not just for production but for the entire training and r&d pipeline as well.
by hansvm | 2025-10-30 16:11:06+00:00
But the reason emissions happen is for per-inhabitant benefits. It's a very reasonable idea [0] to set a per-inhabitant goal and criticize countries exceeding that threshold (which the US would still fail at, but I'm arguing against the metric itself rather than US faults).

Take your position to something of an extreme -- the Vatican could open up 200 coal power plants for its holy Bitcoin operations and still be sufficiently less impactful to CO2 than the US that nobody would target them during climate talks. Rephrased from the other direction, each US citizen would blow their CO2 budget by buying a shirt per decade to get down to the Vatican's levels.

That's a common mental failure mode, analogous to the sorites paradox. Countries are made up of many small actors and decisions, and pretending otherwise is unlikely to help you achieve your goals.

[0] Mostly -- transitive effects like one country generating all the goods another country uses are harder to account for. Assuming we could measure perfectly though...
by skwee357 | 2025-10-30 16:11:09+00:00
Kind of a bummer. I paid for Affinity tools some time ago, but I guess my license is now worth trash, and if I want to use the new Affinity tools, I need to have "Canva account".

I mean, free tools are good. But I smell a road to enshittification (for example, by offering Affinity for free so you create Canva account, then they push Canva AI or whatever BS to you little by little, and in the end deprecate affinity so you would move to Canva web Pro Ultra Version with 90% off for the first 3 months). Could be wrong, will see I guess.

[Edit] Just to clarify something. It's not like I expect to pay for a license and get updates forever, but from what it seems like from other comments, the original apps are being removed from the App Store, meaning that the "free Affinity" is "Canva Flavored" Affinity, rather than the original tools.
by gpm | 2025-10-30 16:11:22+00:00
I'm under the impression that seed only effects anything if temperature > 0. Or more specifically that the LLM given a sequence of input tokens deterministically outputs the probability for each possible next token, and then the only source of randomness is in the procedure for selecting which of those next tokens to use. And that temperature = 0 means the procedure is "select the most likely one" with no randomness at all.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-30 16:11:24+00:00
I am actually happy reading that though. As in it's literally the authors of the tool stating "hey we have a lot of binary blob drivers, what can we do to replace these?". He then audits them and links to build instructions.

As in yeah there's precompiled binaries in this. But it's audited and each binary itself has a link to build instructions. What they are not doing is actually building everything from scratch in their build process. Ok that's a pain to do and i get it. But... i don't see anyone slipping in an unaccounted for binary here right? If every binary itself has a "here's how to build this from scratch" documentation and source it seems ok to me.
by danaris | 2025-10-30 16:11:39+00:00
Sure. But this is exactly why we'd be better off with open-source software, hardware, etc, managed and maintained in a distributed fashion by nonprofits in many different countries. (I have no idea if there's legally such a thing as a "multinational nonprofit", though certainly such things exist in practice—eg, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders.)

Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable.

Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
by squeedles | 2025-10-30 16:12:19+00:00
Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.
by maldie | 2025-10-30 16:12:20+00:00
Yes, disassembling and tinkering with microwave is almost the only easily available thing I would not recommend at all because it seems so ordinary but actual danger is way too high and hidden. Even if you know exactly the dangers, it takes only one distracted move, just being tired or too complacent to end really badly. Like even some medium time disconnected and expectedly safe units can have real nasty shock in them when discharge resistor is faulty, that failure mode does not usually kill but not recommended.
by kmacdough | 2025-10-30 16:12:21+00:00
The problem is as aforementioned players pressure users and government, they can make certain aspects of the economy entirely inaccessible to unapproved platforms. Netflix and co can simply refuse to support streaming on devices which aren't hardware locked. Banks can refuse to do business. Sure banks have in person locations, but they've become fewer and more backed up.

One certain thresholds are reached, little can be done even for the committed outcast.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-30 16:12:48+00:00
Good points! And the period since 2010 has been mostly up and to the right.

While the housing market as a whole may go up, the likelihood that any individual house will go up probably varies more.

How do you get that much leverage from a brokerage to invest in equities? In the US we have something called Reg T, which basically says brokerages can only lend at 2:1 against securities in most cases.

Even most leveraged ETFs will generally stop at 3X.
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-30 16:13:12+00:00
I think that’s a really unfair portrayal of Microsoft’s product management. They spend a lot of time— even more than on some of the things you listed — creating GUI frameworks to ignore, injecting creepy analytics for their war on privacy, obfuscating those analytics and stymieing users efforts to avoid them, and figuring out terrifying new definitions for the word experience.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-30 16:13:24+00:00
No problem. Some people post a few times per day, I post every few months. Anyway, if you post your own work and about a similar topic, it's better to wait some time. (Let's say a week? A month? I don't remember any hard rule about that.)

Also, posting only one is better to have all the discussion in one thread. There is always someone that has some level of advanced knowledge in the topic and is easy to get insightful comments in a single post.

PS: Have you seen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45712620 ? Probably as far from Gröbner Bases as possible, but it got a nice technical discussion.
by rkeene2 | 2025-10-30 16:13:38+00:00
There is a good reason though, right? My understanding is that local ordinances require very frequent window inspections (following a highly publicized death), so to perform those inspections they need the scaffolding to protect the under-walking pedestrians from the inspectors. Because they are so frequent, it's cheaper to just leave the scaffolding up and take it down and put it up for every inspection.

With drones becoming more common and robust, though, it will hopefully soon be easier and faster to do the inspections and so the scaffolding may become cheaper to remove and replace each cycle