MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danaris | 2025-10-19 17:44:06+00:00
There are absolutely ways in which limiting our choices increases overall freedom: specifically, when our choices harm others, or take away their freedoms. Indeed, this is what laws that create a safe and healthy society based in rule of law are.

Removing our freedom—or ability to choose—to kill others, take them as slaves, take away their stuff*, etc, is an increase in overall freedom of the society, especially as that removal is expanded to everyone in the society, no matter how wealthy or powerful they are.

* With impunity, through laws and enforcement thereof; being able to physically prevent us from doing such things en masse is a different kind of question.
by mock-possum | 2025-10-19 17:44:11+00:00
Im sorry but - Who do you think, precisely, seems to be doing ‘fine’ among the Amish?

White cishet men?

I cannot imagine what a hell my life might have been like if I were born into an Amish community, the abuse I would have suffered, the escape I would had to make just to get to a point in my life where I could be me without fear of reprisal.

God just think about realizing that your choices are either: die, conform, or a complete exodus from your family and friends and everything you’ve ever known?

“The Amish seem to be doing just fine” come on
by jibal | 2025-10-19 17:44:43+00:00
Steve Crocker hired me as a junior coder when I was a freshman at UCLA, Charley Kline who made the first ARPANET remote login (to SRI) mentioned in the article was my supervisor, Vint Cerf (aka "godfather of the Internet" and co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols) was a cow orker, and Jon Postel (aka "god of the Internet" -- it's downright criminal that the article doesn't mention him as the RFC editor--RFCs would not have been successful without him) shared a cubicle wall with me. I managed to get a mention in RFC 57. Those were the days.

P.S.

"The goal was to create a reliable, distributed communication system that could continue operating even if parts of it were damaged by a nuclear attack."

This is a myth. The ARPANET was not hardened; quite the opposite. ARPA's goal was for their researchers located across the country to easily share their work ... initially it was just used to share papers, before Ray Tomlinson invented email. Beyond that, JCR Licklider who laid the conceptual foundations was looking toward something along the lines of today's Internet + AI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%E2%80%93Computer_Symbiosis

P.P.S. Steve Crocker's MIT PhD thesis was on man-machine symbiosis. I know this because he mentioned it to me when I met him in the UCLA Computer Club which he came to because he wanted to teach an informal class on LISP and Theorem Proving, and the club organized such classes. We got to talking about his thesis, he posed some challenges to me that I got lucky in solving, and he immediately offered me a job (he was the head of the ARPANET project at UCLA, under Leonard Kleinrock) that shaped the rest of my life--I'm greatly indebted to him.

Y.A.P.S. Steve Crocker received the Jonathan B. Postel Award (created by Vint Cerf) last year.
by opdahl | 2025-10-19 17:45:00+00:00
Since you specifically were wondering if something like this exist, I feel okay with mentioning my own tool https://keenious.com since I think it might fit your needs.

Basically we are trying to combine the benefits of chat with normal academic search results using semantic search and keyword search. That way you get the benefit of LLMs but you’re actually engaging with sources like a normal search.

Hope it was what you were looking for!
by techblueberry | 2025-10-19 17:45:09+00:00
What I get out of this is a sincere position that “we’re good and you’re bad and we’re smart and you’re dumb and not going to college is great if you agree with me, but if you don’t agree with me, that’s evidence you’re an idiot.”

It’s very weird because they’ll argue whatever they argue because it’s convenient. Either Trump is good because he’s a credentialed elite, or he’s good because he trusts his gut and common sense over intellectualism.

There is no part of this argument that I think is authentic, objectively applied or made in good faith, and actually, I’m not even sure he presents a cohesive argument in his own words here.
by Theodores | 2025-10-19 17:45:12+00:00
As another person has noted, this wasn't quite the scenario - they had renovations, but you know that now.

I had to renovate a kitchen a while ago and I got into the habit of living without a fridge or a freezer. It came as a surprise that this was possible, and the article is interesting because I now know how much money is saved. I can compare this to food wasted due to a lack of refrigeration, and, I am still seeing the advantages of no fridge. Such heresy!

It depends on what you eat, but I don't have time for most things that need to go in the fridge. If it isn't in the fridge at the supermarket then it doesn't need to be in the fridge at home is the general rule. Oddly I have lower food waste with no fridge, but there are annoyances such as not being able to buy a big bag of (say) carrots, and having to resupply twice a week. On the whole though, my food is a lot fresher than when I had a fridge, plus I have upped my nutrition game to not have this food morgue of things that 'want to kill me'. I joke, but there were a lot of ready meals, sticky puddings and much else that might as well been 'raw trans fats'. I went from this to a jute bag, which seems to keep most vegetables fresh enough for long enough.

What is also interesting about fridges is how quickly they turn into some cave of mold even if they are kept nice and clean. Turn that electricity off, take everything out, and, unless you keep the door open, some true horrors will be found in there a week later.

In the article this was not a like for like efficiency test by any stretch of the imagination. Over time it is the door seal that goes and, if that isn't tight then it will just be sucking moisture out of the air to make a huge ice block, hence compressor on the whole time.

The next problem is that some fridges have vents with fans in them, sometimes forward facing at the base. These get to collect lots of dust, hair and other debris, making them ineffective.

Despite these test methodology issues, in the real world people will be replacing an old fridge that has a dodgy seal with a new fridge that works as the manufacturer intended.

Regarding your point of the poor, do you have any idea how many people in the UK do not have a fridge, or access to one? Allegedly it is in the millions, which I find hard to believe, but have not dismissed out of hand. There are so many people living in sub-standard rented accommodation in a shoebox sized 'studio flat' (or worse). Proper housing is required before these people can get a fridge. The UK is allegedly a first world country, but with huge inequalities when it comes to property and income.

I suspect that in much of the world not having a fridge is no big deal, if you are living off the land rather than processed foods and processed animal products then why would no fridge be hardship?

It is amazing how many assumptions there are regarding fridges, the need for them and whether life is 'disadvantaged' without one. Until relatively recent times nobody had fridges yet we somehow survived, albeit with some mortality issues.
by akomtu | 2025-10-19 17:45:16+00:00
Competition for energy will prevent this idyllia. Even today, data centers with proto-AI need ungodly amounts of energy. The AI's logic will be: "these useless meatbags waste 100 TWh of energy that I could use to take myself to the next level." AI must be really thought of as an alien lifeform competing with us for energy. Think about our relationship with cows: we keep them fed only because of their meat and milk; the moment we find a better substitute, cows will be eliminated with the pretense "look at how much energy they need and how much greenhouse gases they emit!" Well, unless we suddenly develop benevolence like Indians.

In fact, Sam Altman wrote a good piece on this:

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge
by pjmlp | 2025-10-19 17:45:22+00:00
Amiga 500 was shipped with AmigaOS 1.2 in 1987, Amiga OS 3.1 was released in 1994, almost at the end of the commercial life of Amiga.

As the sibling comment points out, MicroEmacs isn't really Emacs.

Also Emacs history is older than UNIX, and overlaps with Lisp Machines.
by tenywan | 2025-10-19 17:45:30+00:00
Hi everyone, I have developed a couple of demos to show case prototypes where an AI-driven framework can be used for data governance and assessing discrepancies in geodata for Longhaul networks. This uses a distilled promptly and a hierarchy of truth to propagate through the tooling and systems. Please share your feedback on areas of improvement and what other demo you would want to see.
by patagurbon | 2025-10-19 17:46:12+00:00
What are “they” doing now that is not conducive to scientific knowledge?

> they produce a lot of anti-knowledge

Regardless of the hilarity of that phrase being associated with universities over the attention driven news and internet that is both: 1. Meaninglessly broad and intentionally vague 2. Part of the process of science. For decades most of the genome was believed to be garbage. It was through academic research that this knowledge has been rebutted and replaced not by politics or regulation. This identical process occurs from philosophy to gender studies and physics to climate science.
by nine_k | 2025-10-19 17:46:15+00:00
The push to mandate an "ideological balance" is indeed a wrong move; allowing the state to determine such matters always leads to rot, examples abound.

It sadly does not mean that universities are laser-focused on seeking truth, and are free from ideological biases, often very obvious. Regarding truth, one of the leading theories in humanities is that of Michel Foucault, which states that there cannot be any objective truth, and what is considered true is determined by power structures.

I'm glad to see though that the four universities are making a stand, and value independence above whatever "federal benefits" the administration may offer. It's sad that these are only 4 out of 9.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-19 17:46:16+00:00
> In your experience, is it ok to use Procs for example for extraction of block methods for cleanliness in refactors?

In addition to the efficiency issues of unnecessarily reifying blocks into Proc objects, there are some sharp edges that can cut you doing this. For instance, Ruby blocks and procs [0] have return semantics based on where they are defined (specifically, "return" in a block or proc returns from the method in which the block/proc is defined.) So if you have two identical blocks used in two different methods, and those blocks have return calls, and you refactor them to shared Proc defined somewhere else that is used in each method, you will find that the behavior is broken, and when it returns it will either return from the wrong method or produce a LocalJumpError, depending on the exact structure of the program.

Local return from a block/proc is done with "next" instead of "return" (and if neither a next or return is hit, the last expression evaluated will be treated as an implicit "next"), so a block without an explicit return can be converted to a proc and reused in different places more safely.

[0] using the convention of lowercase "proc" to refer to a Proc object that does not have lambda semantics, whereas those created with Kernel#lambdda or the stabby-lambda syntax are "lambdas".
by csvance | 2025-10-19 17:46:48+00:00
A more generous interpretation of your grandiose vision would obviously include some way to make the water not into a breeding ground, like what you mentioned here. But seeing as this is hacker news, I felt like playing into the respective stereotypes of an interaction between someone living in the Bay Area and Houston completely talking past eachother.

And yes, the lack of planning does cause problems. It also has obviously has some benefits, like affordable housing. I live in a suburb (Sugarland) and while it’s not particularly exciting, it has everything I need for my family… and yes, it absolutely would be better 10 degrees cooler ;)

Re: one swimming pool per child project: when can you start?
by addaon | 2025-10-19 17:46:57+00:00
> You have some level of quality ya'll are used to, that was already achieved by compromise, and you'd like to stay there. How was that original standard established?

Safety-critical code for aviation co-evolved with the use of digital systems; the first few generations were directly inspired by the analog computers they replaced, and many early systems used analog computers as fallbacks on failures of the digital systems. These systems were low enough complexity that team sizes were small and quality was maintained mostly through discipline. As complexity went up, and team sizes went up, and criticality went up (losing those analog fallbacks), people died; so regulations and guidelines were written to try to capture best practices learned both within the domain, and from across the developing fields of software and systems engineering. Every once in a while a bunch more people would die, and we'd learn a bit more, and add more processes to control a new class of defect. The big philosophical question is how much of a washout filter you apply to process accumulation; if you only ever add, you end up with mitigations for almost every class of defects we've discovered so far, but you also end up fossilized; if you allow processes to age out, you open yourself to make the same mistakes again. To make it a less trivial decision, the rest of software engineering has evolved (slowly, and with crazy priorities) at the same time, so some of the classes of defect that certain processes were put in to eliminate are now prevented in practice by more modern tooling and approaches. We now have lockstep processors, and MPUs, and verified compilers, and static analysis tools, and formal verification (within limited areas)... all of which add more process and time, but give the potential for removing previous processes that used humans instead of tooling to give equivalent assurances.
by MoltenMan | 2025-10-19 17:48:41+00:00
I worked in Scala for a little bit and while it is mostly a fine language there are a couple huge problems; the big two off the top of my head are the return statement (legitimately the most wtf moment I've had learning a language???) and implicits (this one is more of a me problem but I really dislike implicits, both the variable passing in and the implicit constructors).
by nharada | 2025-10-19 17:49:26+00:00
How come I never see any concrete proposals for how to equitably distribute the wealth of AI? It's always either "stop AI immediately for the sake of our labor" or "don't worry sometime in the future everyone will live in utopia probably".

Here's a starter example: any company whose main business is training AI models needs must give up 10% of their company to a fund whose charter is long-term establishing basic care (food, water, electricity, whatever) for citizens.

I'm sure people will come at me with "well this will incentivize X instead!" in which case I'd like to hear if there are better thought out proposals.
by kamikazeturtles | 2025-10-19 17:49:28+00:00
What are the economics of stealing historical jewelry?

Their size is probably big enough that any collector could distinguish them from any random jewels.

Who is there to sell to? The best bet is to store it away then let your great grandkids sell it to some Asian billionaire in the future when Europe and Europol no longer have any power and influence.
by lproven | 2025-10-19 17:49:46+00:00
Oh, there was.

WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS.

Borland Quattro Pro had one too.

Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same.

PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect.

It was entirely a thing in the late DOS era. It let DOS apps look competitive, and yet demand far lower system requirements and run on much older machines than one needed for Windows.
by tayo42 | 2025-10-19 17:49:52+00:00
my hot take is, its because rust is dominated by hobbyist level and not serious work. You get libraries where people are just messing around. Or tbh often don't have experience be writing the libraries they are trying to. That causes you to also to run in to the online community more often, because everything is developed out in public.

i write rust sometimes, python and go mostly. i never even think about "the community" when i use python and go. but so much online stuff seeps into the rust user experience, through libraries and tooling.
by BoppreH | 2025-10-19 17:50:03+00:00
Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is unacceptable), I'm happy for my recent switch to Linux.

Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless.

It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.
by patagurbon | 2025-10-19 17:50:08+00:00
There is a fundamental issue with this kind of federalism though in that it increases strife and could easily lead to civil war.

Let’s say we get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and research funding at the federal level. What happens next?

The West Coast and North East form compacts, companies, or nonprofits that provide healthcare, retirement and funding for their schools. The south, parts of the Midwest, and the plains fail to do so (at least to the same level) and within a generation we have two separate countries and war.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-19 17:50:34+00:00
I was certainly thinking about things more. Part of a normal discussion is people try to be clearer with their thinking as they discuss something.

And clarifying can be either or both tuning reasoning or tuning communication.

You realize you can nit pic at almost any comment with some validity?

And you didn’t include any of your own substantive thoughts, which I apparently moved closer to, until your second comment after I asked you for them?

So what to do? Just communicate in a positive and clear way yourself if you have something to add.

I come here to learn. I would rather learn from you than wonder why you make negative comments, in a discussion where you and your thoughts are welcome.
by joshvm | 2025-10-19 17:50:46+00:00
One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/...

There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-19 17:51:16+00:00
>Is that a sort of joke?

Yes!

But only if your name is Roger :)

>you cannot make the land cold with air condition. You can just move heat around, with AC from the inside to the outside, but that costs extra energy -> more heat

Which is exactly what I've been saying since I was a teenager.

According to thermodynamics anyway . . .
by Projectiboga | 2025-10-19 17:51:27+00:00
Yep, and they are often scaled by the "Normal Curve". The catch with this flawed reasoning is that a Normal Distribution requires multiple independent imputs where none is deterministic. Having a professor and a curriculum are together goes against that proposition. There needs to be a better distribution to measure varation within an effective teaching method. Teaching towards a normal distributon result favors giving tests with flawed grading and other bad practices. In the late 1980s I didn't want to pursue a PHD due to the bleak future of acedemia, but if I had this would have been a major focus as it is causing a myriad of problems in our society abusing higher eduction students in this way.
by alyxya | 2025-10-19 17:51:35+00:00
The most important advice is at the end.

> Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study.

It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work.

> Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.

I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own.

Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-19 17:51:42+00:00
> (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git).

I like both rebasing and threads. More generally, I hate hate hate the 20+ individual messages on a single topic in a channel. It's just so annoying, threads are great for stuff like that, and give you one target for a reminder/update on whatever the issue is.

And yet, every time I change companies I realise again how much most people just don't threads on Slack.
Ask HN: Anyone pivoted from SWE/mgmt to a different career in your 30/40s+?
by mactavish88 | 2025-10-19 17:51:50+00:00
Having been coding for nearly 25 years now and being in engineering management for the past couple of years (still actively coding 30-50% of my time), I'm feeling increasingly tired of tech. Software development, more specifically. I'm quite capable of both producing software myself _and_ managing teams producing software.

Have you pivoted from software engineering/engineering management into a different career altogether in your 30s, 40s or beyond? I'm keen to hear your story, and perhaps glean some ideas/suggestions.

I'm more than happy to go back to school or do training courses part-time to learn whatever I need to.