MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MagicMoonlight | 2025-10-08 12:41:19+00:00
We’re definitely in the pre-war era. It’s like when Britain was trying to negotiate with Hitler while rearming in the background.

China is going to attack pearl harbour in the hopes that a sudden unexpected attack will cripple the pacific fleet and knock America out of the war. It won’t work, we’ll go through hell again. But every time these places think it will work, and they don’t factor in the fact that they are completely reliant on foreign trade for their economy.

Russia is pretty much in war economy now, they have no choice but to escalate and invade Eastern Europe. They have no chance of winning, but that never matters to crazy people.
by alphazard | 2025-10-08 12:42:08+00:00
This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions before a decision is made and before the consequences are revealed. Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the right answer was easily accessible. There's probably some people who got this right who could take a shot at running things, but you can't know without having the dissenting opinions in writing ahead of time.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-08 12:42:13+00:00
I agree with the first.

For the second, Synology has an option to apply important updates automatically, where I think that means infrequent security updates, not routine DSM version bumps. I interpret the new option to mean something like still installing the updates, but after a number of days have passed, presumably to give you time to cancel it if the news blows up with stories of bricked machines.
by hansmayer | 2025-10-08 12:42:19+00:00
If you take money for what it should be - a measure of work invested towards achieving a result, then yes, I suppose we could get a lot done with people employed out of that 50B working towards the goal of ending the world hunger. Heck, I'd even argue building a moon base with that money would have been a better investment than the crap the "magnificent 7" is pushing on us.
by Theodores | 2025-10-08 12:42:55+00:00
The cooking hypothesis is not well known, however, from what I understand, this was when we went from having big guts and average brains to small guts and big brains. The fossil record of primates is far from complete, but roughly speaking, we have been eating cooked food for a million years.

The stone tools that predate this by a few million years reinforce the cooked food hypothesis in this 'chicken or egg' situation.
by mallowdram | 2025-10-08 12:43:36+00:00
Shows a complete lack of understanding of how childrens' skills are developed.

Intelligence is built from various sequences.

1. Path integrations. The ability to test without supervision and coaching movements beyond the scope of eyesight, aided by landmarks, without the use of breadcrumbs or maps.

2. Short-cuts. The ability to use the above to create short-cuts in the unmapped and unsupervised, unaided paths.

3. Vicarious trial-and-error. The ability to learn both from mistakes and idiosyncratic choices that develop unique solutions.

And there are MANY others like this in the motor and cognitive mapping system built from sharp wave ripples.

This software is the equivalent of brainwashing experience into mechanical reproducibility. It's the latests tech horror show.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-08 12:44:12+00:00
This is why I have standardised on Obsidian as my data storage along with Datasette[0] (by simonw) for larger data amounts.

Watch a movie? Add a page to Obsidian with the movie title as the note title, run a python script and boom it has all of the metadata filled up along with everything relevant from TMDB and it's a pretty card with a cover image on my Movies Base.

If Obsidian turns Evil Corporate, my workflow will still be the same, the editor just changes. I'll miss Bases, but all of my own automation is a bunch of external scripts that modify markdown.

[0] https://datasette.io
by sjw987 | 2025-10-08 12:44:15+00:00
Task management apps are crutches. If any part of their role is to inspire change in somebody, it's not going to happen. All that you do is make people reliant on them, and everything disappears when the app is no longer around. They're best for reference (day-to-day and team coordination).

The concept of a task management app for children is dystopian. It's treating them like office workers from the beginning, and considering the example given is the typical chess, piano, Chinese lessons, it's just overloading the child for exhaustion.

Parents should be parenting their children. Limiting their exposure to things, including screens and the internet, and disciplining a child to study or work are part of a parents purview. I can't see why people even have children if they delegate all of their parenting responsibilities to screens and software.
by narrator | 2025-10-08 12:44:55+00:00
I think the problem with most average left of center people who want to be agreeable and civic minded is they have total incredulity at the government would actually do anything really screwed up, especially as they are so "moral" with their performative political correctness. How can someone who cares about the rights of minority groups act so tyrannically? There's always a glitch though somewhere, and people assume pious in one dimension, pious in all dimensions.
by grantcarthew | 2025-10-08 12:45:20+00:00
I've used it to read authenticated pages with Chromium. It can be run as a headless browser and convert the HTML to markdown, but I generally open Chromium, authenticate to the system, then allow the CLI agent to interact with the page.

https://github.com/grantcarthew/scripts/blob/main/get-webpag...
by throawayonthe | 2025-10-08 12:45:58+00:00
the article is more-or-less fine, but the headline is ridiculous

> one-man ... campaign

it's a website that drafts an email for you, and then you send it yourself. it's an organizational tool, yes, but broad involvement is sorta the point

> spam campaign

gross mischaracterization, citizens sending emails to their govt representative for legitimate purposes - making their political opinion known to the politician - is not spam under any sane definition
by kstrauser | 2025-10-08 12:45:59+00:00
I don’t think that’s true. They apparently thought that was their business, but it’s not what their customers think it is. And having that much of a mismatch between what you think you’re selling and what everyone else thinks you’re selling often ends very badly.

For example, Kodak thought they were in the business of selling film. Their customers thought they were a company that sold ways to take photos. Kodak ignored what their customers wanted, the ability to take photos easily, in favor of their desire to sell more film. That cost them dearly when digital cameras took over.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-08 12:46:12+00:00
My rule of thumb, and its likely not the industry standard is, if I cannot maintain the code should all AI disappear, I don't use the code. I am able to tackle impostor syndrome that sometimes hits when I touch things that are new or unknown to me, and ask an LLM to give me sources and reasons and even explain it like I'm a five year old.

The LLM will not save you when everything is on fire and you need to fix things. The context window is simply not big enough. It could be your last change, it could also be a change six months ago that is lost in the weeds.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-08 12:46:46+00:00
I agree that it's a tragedy, XML had so much standardization, tooling, validation, etc available, it was great. But people used it for configuration and manually writing it, which sucked.

15 years later and JSON still is still very far from the standardization and tooling that XML had at the time.

It reminds me of the NoSQL thing from back then too, oversimplified it was "what if we chuck JSON blobs in a key/value store?". It took years to realize that relational databases and SQL weren't actually that bad, and / or that NoSQL had a long term cost.
by leokennis | 2025-10-08 12:46:53+00:00
I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project".

DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
by mathgeek | 2025-10-08 12:47:10+00:00
> Why would a philosopher be a good source for this instead of an anthropologist, an economist, a statistician, or a student of comparative revolutions?

(Not commenting on the actual claim above you.) Philosophers often make popular sources for supporting evidence because you can find a philosopher that supports most any position. Your question is exactly the one that should be asked as there are usually more objective sources.
by panick21_ | 2025-10-08 12:47:28+00:00
This is just factually false. If you think central banks only look at those your are either uniformed or willingly ignorant.

For the media it might be a bit more true if you only consider short term news media. But what do expect, them to do a 3h 'state of the economy' everyday? Tons of other media is covering lots of things.
by 542354234235 | 2025-10-08 12:48:39+00:00
But the NSA isn't your local police department. Your risk from the NSA is, at the very least, different than from your local cops, and almost certainly smaller. In my day to day life, I am not worried about being jammed up by the NSA, I am worried about some local police department.

I am also less worried about some random NSA analyst going rogue to come after me. If the NSA is going to abuse its power, it is probably going to be as a whole institution. But some local cop breaking the law because he has a hair up his ass about someone happens literally every day.
by fasbiner | 2025-10-08 12:49:15+00:00
This is terribly self-important and extrapolatory. Canada is a place that allowed private for-profit institutions to sell an unlimited number of student vouchers that made the associated visa shall-issue.

These are trivial to overstay without oversight and millions of people have. Regardless of the relative merits of this policy, it certainly isn't what canadians voted for or even permitted public discussion of beforehand. Combine this with the social welfare state unraveling and the government suggesting disabled citizens to kill themselves after their benefits are cut, and it's had a sharply radicalizing effect.

So the government is panicking, trying to crack down, and will no doubt propel some dubious populist to power who can handily win simply by reading an opinion polls and not denouncing the majority of the public, in public.

What light? What eventual winning? Stop watching children's movies and reading children's books.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-10-08 12:49:19+00:00
> More philosophically, life got busy, and I no longer have the mental capacity and willingness to maintain something like a Synology. The only large content I back up are my family’s photos and I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent.

I'm more or less in the same situation.

I no longer use a NAS for my "daily driver", and as such it made sense to skip Synology and instead go for the cheaper option, which in my case was the UNAS Pro (only model available at the time).

Next to it sits an "old" Mac Mini M1, which hosts my Plex server, with storage provided by the UNAS over 10Gbps ethernet.

Everything else i might at some point in time have used the Synology for, has instead been delegated to iCloud. Documents, photos, and everything in between is stored there, and each laptop makes a backup with Arq backup to the NAS as well as another cloud provider.

My NAS today is literally just an advanced USB drive attached to a server, and that was also part of my considerations at the time, just getting a DAS and plugging that into the Mac Mini M1, but ultimately the UNAS Pro (with 10Gbps networking) was cheaper than a Thunderbolt DAS, and i already had a switch capable of 10Gbps.

I made a similar "journey" some years back, where i removed pretty much everything cabled from the network, and instead moved everything to WiFi, and instead doubling down on providing "the best" wifi experience i could, which today means WiFi 7 with 2.5Gbps uplinks, hence the 10Gbps switch.

My network is 100% private. I don't expose ports to the internet, meaning maintenance is no longer a "must do" task. The only access is via Wireguard, which can be done with an always on profile that routes traffic for that specific subnet, but more realistically is mostly never used. The most remote streaming is done via a site to site VPN from my summerhouse to my house, where i can stream Plex over.
by hansvm | 2025-10-08 12:50:01+00:00
Thankfully, yelling like an angry foreman is more effective on LLMs than people.

> Get your fucking act together, and stop with the bullshit comments, shipping unfinished code, and towering mess of abstractions. I've seen you code properly before. You're an expert for God's sake. One more mistake, and you're fired. Fix it, now!
by spankibalt | 2025-10-08 12:50:06+00:00
> "[...] A dialogue between well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, and everyone else should just shut up and take it?"

Why, yes... that's exactly what the types of outfits like the European People's Party [1] expect on many things. But year after year these incompetent grouches get the majority of votes. And that's before one has to deal with the full-blown far right, fascists, and the like (e. g. ESN [2], PfE [3], et cetera).

1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People's_Party]

2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_of_Sovereign_Nations_Gr...]

3. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriots_for_Europe]
by Fischgericht | 2025-10-08 12:50:07+00:00
Last self-reply on this, I promise:

If I would have to GUESS here is the explanation to this incorrect story:

AFAIK there is not SATA SSD vendor left on the market besides some left-over stock put into enclosures by some chinese companies. This means Synology will no longer have the option to force you to buy "compatible" SSDs, because they themselves can not source them.

So my GUESS (not backed up by proper research) is: They had to lift this requirement in hiding because they made it impossible to follow their extortion instructions.
by graemep | 2025-10-08 12:50:55+00:00
If pensions come from government funds it matters if you are looking at the impact on the economy. The taxes pensioners paid have presumably been spent, so while their past contribution is an argument for their entitlement to pensions, it does not solve the problem of where the money will come from.

Its even worse in the UK where we have a special additional income tax (NI) on earned income (things like investment income are exempt), that is higher on people with low to moderate incomes, that is primarily used to pay (current) pensions (a little bit is set aside for future pensions, but there is only enough set aside for less an an year of payments).
by kstrauser | 2025-10-08 12:50:59+00:00
That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog. Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone actually used and liked it. It worked alright but the client apps were/are a giant leap behind alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.

But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
by kasey_junk | 2025-10-08 12:51:19+00:00
Fwiw I’m an ai proponent who loves that flow state you are describing. Programming literally was the first time I found it as a youth and I’ve been addicted to it since then.

But it’s such a small part of my professional life. Most of what I do is chores and answering simple questions and planning for small iterations on the original thing or setting up a slightly different variant.

Llm’s have freed me of so much of that! Now I outsource most of that work to the llms and greedily keep the deep flow inducing work for myself.

And I have a new tool to explain to management why we are investing in all the tooling and processes that we know lead to quality, because the llms are catnip for the managerial mind.
by hollerith | 2025-10-08 12:52:25+00:00
I wouldn't talk that way to an LLM for fear of its bleeding over into my interactions with people.

Back when computer performance was increasing faster than it is now and was more important to the user experience, a friend upgraded to a faster computer and suddenly became more impatient with me. He seemed to have expected my response time to have drastically decreased just like his computer's did.
Show HN: Context Saver – Privacy-First AI Chat Organizer (Multi-LLM)
by junhyun82 | 2025-10-08 12:52:49+00:00
Context Saver is a privacy-first Chrome extension/app that organizes your AI chat workflows effortlessly. Perfect for devs and founders wrestling with long, complex AI sessions. Try the MVP live and let us know what you think!
by krschacht | 2025-10-08 12:52:51+00:00
Simon, I think this is a good distinction. Another possible term could be: “agent engineering management” or simply “agent managing.”

I am deep in this and one important way in which managing agents is different than managing people is that micro-managing can be your friend. With human engineering colleagues, you need to allow for a healthy degree of “that’s now how I would have written the code, but it’s a reasonable way to write it.” But if my agent writes the test file in the exact same way I do, I can both review and maintain the code more easily.

I have a bunch of short markdown doc files in which I give very specific instructions for how I like code organized: much stricter than I would ever do for a colleague. I’ll tell the agent, “now add tests to this model and follow @unit_tests.md” This file specifies exactly how I like tests named, what order I like them written in the file, etc. I have docs for: models.md, controllers.md, concerns.md, and fixtures.md.
by jordanb | 2025-10-08 12:53:06+00:00
It's really amazing how I quoted a repair shop owner saying the problem is parts availability and got two responses basically saying "nuh uh."

I have a more recent personal experience. My parents refrigerator went out. The repair man came out and diagnosed it as a bad inverter board and he'd get the part and come back in a few days. Great! The next day he calls my dad and tells him the part isn't available from the manufacturer so he can't actually fix it.

So I helped my dad go on an internet search and we eventually found an aftermarket (counterfeit?) board and installed it ourselves. My parents were thrilled they didn't have to buy a new refrigerator, but the repair guy got paid for the diagnosis but didn't make any money for the repair. I don't know if that's a long term sustainable business.
by skybrian | 2025-10-08 12:53:10+00:00
It sounds like some people who are running multiple AI tasks in parallel might be risking burnout because they think they need to keep machines busy. But this is a symptom of systems that don’t run fast enough to be interactive.

If compiles take ten minutes then sure, you’re going to want to do something else while waiting. If they take two seconds, you stop caring about keeping the machine busy because it’s impossible. It’s perfectly normal for computers to be idle waiting on you most of the time.
by jalapenos | 2025-10-08 12:55:10+00:00
Check this out:

> Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy.

What part of authoritarianism is pro-freedom again?

Democracy was obviously never pro-freedom - it's explicitly about the 51% taking freedom from the 49%.

I'm just confused how this twisted leftist publication has managed the mental acrobatics to claim pro-freedom means pro-authoritarianism.
by pdimitar | 2025-10-08 12:55:34+00:00
Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in very different directions, hence this dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder.

Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small (or big) fans, and all that.

And don't get me wrong, I love tinkering myself but after reading people's experiences for a while I just thought to myself "Why all this trouble? Get a $250 - $400 mini PC off of Amazon / eBay / AliExpress and put a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD and you have something 20x more powerful and with 100x the storage space".

Again, I love me some tinkering. But nowadays I want to get something out of it in the end. Like the mini PC I bought that I want to dedicate only to a PiHole even if it's a 50x overkill for it. Might add some firewalling / VLAN management capabilities to it down the line.

So yep, for education RPi and Arduino (+ its derivatives) seem mostly unbeaten.
by hodgesrm | 2025-10-08 12:55:35+00:00
Thank you for this post. I don't write much code as I'm currently mostly managing people but I read it constantly. I also do product management. LLMs are very effective at locating and explaining things in complex code bases. I use Copilot to help me research the current implementation and check assumptions. I'm working to extend out in exactly the directions you describe.
by j45 | 2025-10-08 12:56:09+00:00
Well, this was a pretty myopic decision.

You can't ever buy a NAS without having complete flexibility in drives, both in the short and long term, because the claims of hard drive manufacturers can't ever be trusted until verified individually, per drive model..

Western Digital lied about their drives having SMR instead of CMR as their RED drives were marketed for NAS usage: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-class-action-lawsuit-sm...

Add to that how one model of a hard drive from a manufacturer will be invincible, while another model next to it will have huge issues.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...

I hear Synology has nice gear, it has always been pretty nice when I interacted with it. I own a different brand just through deciding to have a NAS with more flexibility that I could grow into if I wanted.
by nekusar | 2025-10-08 12:56:28+00:00
Is a storage server that far fetched these days?

Im seeing prices now around $10/TB for storage. Not fast, sure, but with 8 x 16TB disks, you get 128TB storage, and with RAID6 96TB. And thats only $1300

And if you architect the storage server right, you can use NFS on that and do all your exports to various docker containers and VMs. Proxmox makes setting this up pretty painless.

And if you have money to burn and want screaming fast, go with some of the NVME drives and combined cards. Then you can do this near-solid state and also reduce your form factor a LOT.

We're in the middle of basically every major "service company" enshittifying or already done so. Services are getting worse, costs are going up, and they're slow-boiling everyone to extract as much money from both customers and businesses. So, running this stuff yourself is the only way to retain your freedom and control.
by queuebert | 2025-10-08 12:56:39+00:00
1. Very few people these days understand the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. And then converting fonts and character sets on the internet adds another layer of error generation. We could settle on using a single '-' for hyphen and en-dash and a ' -- ' for em-dashes in fonts that don't have a ligature, but that hasn't carried down from the typewriter days for some reason. Microsoft Word is probably a big part of why.

2. No excuse for this.