MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanskarix | 2025-10-30 06:23:48+00:00
The common thread in many responses here is *reducing decision fatigue*. Whether it's checklists, clean workspace, scheduling meetings early, or aggressive filtering—it's all about removing micro-decisions so your brain can actually focus on the work.

My biggest unlock has been ruthlessly protecting "deep work blocks" on my calendar. Not just blocking time, but treating those blocks as sacred. No meetings, no "quick calls," no exceptions. If someone tries to schedule over it, I move heaven and earth to find another time.

The killer insight: *context-switching isn't just about switching tasks, it's about switching between maker mode and manager mode.* Even checking a single Slack message can pull you out of flow for 20+ minutes. Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" essay nailed this years ago, but we keep forgetting it.

Since I'm building a scheduling tool right now, I think about this constantly—how do we design systems that protect focus instead of fragmenting it? Most scheduling tools optimize for "maximize meetings packed into calendars." The better question is: how do we help people create MORE uninterrupted time?

Anyone here use calendar/scheduling tools specifically to CREATE boundaries rather than fill time?
by culi | 2025-10-30 06:23:52+00:00
> Or you're building an "app" [...] So go full-on with the client-side rendering

I wish companies would take this a step further still and just build a PWA. This gives you access to so many web APIs that can further simplify your stack.

I agree that it's bewildering to see how many companies reach for Nextjs for webapps that don't need SEO optimization but some of the more complex rendering strategies can still be useful for web apps as well. Even for PWAs
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-30 06:24:15+00:00
I'm not a physicist by any means but I was just thinking something similar only a few minutes ago... that humans (or anything) ageing probably only exists as a function of the passage of time, but if all matter stopped moving, even in an isolated area, there is seemingly no longer a passage of time there. So maybe time itself only exists insofar as our ability to measure relative changes to matter.

A crazy thought I had in my sleep: What if dark matter only exists as a random noise generator to keep the simulation from halting? /s

My brain is weird.
by est | 2025-10-30 06:24:17+00:00
I listened to the Hinton podcast few days ago, he mentioned (IIRC) that "analog" AIs are bad because the models can not be transfered/duplicated in a lossless way, like in .gguf format, every analog system is built differently you have to re-learn/re-train again somehow

Does TSUs have to same issue?
by measurablefunc | 2025-10-30 06:24:32+00:00
I am willing to grant that time is indeed an illusion b/c we do not have perfect perception of reality but it seems like all these new developments are squirreling time away into another part of the theory by calling it something else like "dynamics", "rule application", "evolution", etc. The physically relevant relations happen one way or another & whatever they're calling the deltas between the new primitive states & their evolution is still referring to some coordinate (whether implicit or not) that is essentially the same thing as time.

Moreover, it's pretty obvious that when they're describing the theory they can not avoid evoking temporal language & metaphors so it's difficult to take them seriously when even they can't avoid describing what's going on w/o referring to time.
by antics | 2025-10-30 06:24:45+00:00
Any time something costs trillionths of a cent to do, there is an enormous economic incentive to turn literally everything you can into that thing. Since the 50s “that thing” has been arithmetic, and as a result, we’ve just spent 70 years trying to turn everything from HR records to images into arithmetic.

Whether “that thing” is about to be sampling is not for me to say. The probability is certainly not 0 though.
by BatteryMountain | 2025-10-30 06:24:58+00:00
It's not to deprive them of understanding the adult world or free expression, it about the protecting them from the cesspool that is the internet. The pace at which kids are consuming information and maturing too early. Many of their "firsts" experiences being online. Your child being blackmailed by some online troll is not teaching them to understand the online world - they are actively being traumatised. It is parents responsibility to teach their children about the adult world - not the internet's (being other kids, companies, trolls, predators, propaganda machines, ads...).

You can explore your identity independently of parental supervision just fine without the internet. I'd much rather have my kids have 5 good friends in real life and spend time together offline, than 500 online (10 of which are predators) while they are spending all their time in their bedrooms or in front of screens.

How would you not have survived to adulthood without the internet? You know how that sounds right? Billions of kids have grown up without the internet just fine (and hello poverty?).
by sanskarix | 2025-10-30 06:25:01+00:00
As someone building a SaaS product launching soon, outages like this are incredibly instructive—though also terrifying.

The "cold start" analogy resonates. As an indie builder, I'm constantly making decisions that optimize for "ship fast" vs "what happens when this breaks." The reality is: you can't architect for every failure mode when you're a team of 1-2 people.

But here's what's fascinating about this analysis: the recommendation for control theory and circuit breakers isn't just for AWS-scale systems. Even small products benefit from graceful degradation patterns. The difference is—at AWS scale, a metastable failure can cascade for 14 hours. At indie scale, you just... lose customers and never know why.

The talent exodus point is also concerning. If even AWS—with their resources and institutional knowledge—can struggle when senior folks leave, what chance do startups have? This is why I'm increasingly convinced that boring, well-documented tech stacks matter more than cutting-edge ones. When you're solo, you need to be able to debug at 2am without digging through undocumented microservice chains.

Question: For those running prod systems, how do you balance "dogfooding" (running on your own infra) vs "use boring, reliable stuff" (like AWS for your control plane)? Is there a middle ground?
by Swizec | 2025-10-30 06:26:05+00:00
> Why is a router a thing that needs to be continually rebuilt and tinkered with. Did we not learn ages ago how routers should work?

Nyes. The biggest innovation in the past 5 years has been routers that can coordinate loading data because they’re perfectly positioned to know what you’re about to access.

This is a hard problem that we’ve been solving forever. It feels like super tedious formulaic work to write an optimized SQL query or series of API requests that fetches all the necessary data with the fewest possible lookups. So we try to automate it with a sufficiently smart compiler of some sort. Query planners inside a database, ORMs, graphql, routers, memory managing compilers, it’s all chasing the same dream – what if the computer Just Knew the quickest way to grab just the right amount of data.
by aryonoco | 2025-10-30 06:26:41+00:00
Microsoft technically delivered something very close to OS/2’s “Personalities” in Windows NT 4. They called it "Environment subsystems". Each subsystem could run applications written for different operating systems, the 3 available ones were Win32, OS/2 and POSIX. Then there was the "Integral subsystem", which operated system-specific functions on behalf of environment subsystems.

But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning.

In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU).

I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
by skissane | 2025-10-30 06:27:00+00:00
Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
by hobofan | 2025-10-30 06:28:01+00:00
For customer facing streaming sites they also don't seem to be the clear default choice. I think dropout.tv is one of the few "secondary streaming services" to still be with Vimeo (and with the strong overlap in their networks I'm sure they got a good deal), while many other ones like Nebula evaluated them but went with other providers.

It looks like the majority of their business is in employee training portals for megacorps.
by clhodapp | 2025-10-30 06:28:01+00:00
It's not that I think they owe me (or any one specific individual) some specific material value, it's that I don't believe they should be allowed to "take the money and run" after amassing it under the guise of being a charity. Their options should be to continue their mission or to donate their assets to other charities that might be able to further their original mission. Anything less is an affront to those that donated, those that the charity was supposed to support (which is everyone), and any customer that believed their dollars were being spent on a product under the management of a charity.

While it's true that we don't tax investments, we do tax gifts past a dollar value threshold, which is what donations become when nonprofit status drops away.
by ragequittah | 2025-10-30 06:28:47+00:00
If it works for you keep it up. As someone who finds video games an art form I find the 'avoidance to do better things' quite similar to someone who might avoid reading or watching movies as a hobby.

I suppose if you just play the same game day in and day out and it has no real substance (which admittedly is probably the largest gaming segment) it might be a good thing to get rid of the habit. But some games are masterpieces and they often hit very different than other mediums because you are the protagonist making choices. In my opinion some of the best stories come in the form of games and I find it a real shame there's a portion of the population who think they're a complete waste of time.

I think there's also something to be said here about being addicted to work. I know such people and it's just as sad even if it's what society expects of them.
by userbinator | 2025-10-30 06:28:55+00:00
It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.

The keyword being "some".

Yes, there are those who can use OOP responsibly, but in my (fortunately short) experience with Enterprise Java, they are outnumbered by the cargo-cult dogma of architecture astronauts who advocate a "more is better" approach to abstraction and design patterns. That's how you end up with things like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-30 06:29:04+00:00
> In normal operation of EC2, the DWFM maintains a large number (~10^6) of active leases against physical servers and a very small number (~10^2) of broken leases, the latter of which the manager is actively attempting to reestablish.

It sounds like fixing broken leases takes a lot more work than renewing functional leases? Funnily enough, there is already an AWS blog post about specifically preventing these types of issues: https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/reliability-and-cons...
by ntkhan | 2025-10-30 06:29:39+00:00
You're welcome. The details shared with many other legends/traditions claim is also usually incorrect, particularly "god x was also crucified, rose from the dead, born of a virgin, had twelve dsiciples" etc. Usually these types of claims can be tied back to very specific films/books etc. For example the film 'Zeitgeist' makes wild assertions about Jesus & Horus sharing key details which have been debunked many times over. This is so common that there is a popular YouTube video that satirizes the concept called 'Horus Ruins Christmas' by LutheranSatire.

I agree, no Church council was free of politics. Not an issue for me though: the Church's stated mission is to teach the nations to obey all that God commanded. (Mat 28:19) That sort of mission is going to get political one way or another.

I don't find the evidence for the theology to be lacking at all: the eucharistic miracles in Tixla, Mexico and Legnica, Poland happened this century. There was also the miracle of the sun at Fatima. Daniel 2 was written hundred of years before Christianity and predicts that the Roman Empire would be absorbed by the kingdom of God. That same kingdom which would start small and slowly cover the earth: this fits basically exactly with the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian state and now Christianity covers the globe. That's just one of many fulfilled prophecies. I don't see how a naturalistic explanation is adequate for repeated knowledge of the future over the course of hundreds of years or the repeated eyewitness testimony of people seeing these miracles.
by BatteryMountain | 2025-10-30 06:31:52+00:00
Okay so let your kids own guns, sign contracts, do sex work / use drugs, buy & use alcohol/cigarettes, let them drive your car without supervision.

I'm no authoritarian - simply the parents need to take responsibility for their kids & their actions, how they spend their time, what they allow into their minds.

Most countries child laws states that the parents (esp the mother) are ultimately for their children’s welfare. Remember that kids cannot consent - the parents carry that responsibility.

Oh and I'm not averse to children at all.

Maybe american culture is just rotten to the core and how you raise your kids is just bewildering and gross to outsiders. At this point I feel that american parents are fully consenting to whatever is happening to your kids (being brain raped by tiktok/instagram/snap/fb/youtube/porn and others ("news")).
by Leherenn | 2025-10-30 06:31:53+00:00
Grit, or willpower, or whatever you want to name it isn't a unique, constant value. There are plenty of athletes who could spent hours training every day but are overcome by addictions. People who grind at work but cannot fill paperwork to save their life. That will diligently do something for months then stops after an unexpected interruption.

There's probably generally a bit of correlation. But just because someone can be very focused and go to extreme lengths in one aspect of their life doesn't mean they can consistently do it in every aspect of their life.
by davydm | 2025-10-30 06:32:32+00:00
As far as cloud providers go - sure. We've had numerous "wats" with AWS, but I don't think it would have been better at, say, Azure.

I do think we'd have avoided a lot of trouble by investing in our own servers rather than paying more in the long run for a cloud provider which will always come with more risk (more moving parts), and _by definition_ has to cost more than DIY in the long run because otherwise cloud providers wouldn't make money.

The one problem I have is the over-reliance on the big dogs - so an AWS DNS oopsie (which aren't as rare as I'd like - unrare enough that there are memes about it) causes so many things to break on the internet. Not just my work stuff - I couldn't play Helldivers either because GameGuard apparently relies on AWS too. Slack has issues. Even Tailscale, which is supposed to not rely on AWS, apparently does in some respect - when AWS was being dodgy, so was Tailscale.

There's a huge warning buried in this key-man reliance.
by ggm | 2025-10-30 06:32:56+00:00
If you're willing to work in this space, there's probably a cohort who would like to put a shot in the hole and make it go off. The simulations are good, but people have life goals and "working on a bomb including setting one off" is probably there.

Unless there are some shot holes prepped, there is a bit of engineering to get there first. "As quickly as possible" is slow, unless you repudiate the other treaty and do an above ground or underwater shot which the US hasn't done since 1992 and even then it was basically a buried one. It hasn't done an underwater test for far longer.
by HaZeust | 2025-10-30 06:32:58+00:00
It's not hard to get into the library of congress? It's purposely extremely easy. I forgot who it was, but there was one big right-wing talk show host that would end all of his segments by saying it's being added to the Library of Congress as if it's an exclusive accolade, and people rightfully called him out on his shit for how easy it is to do that
by Jackson__ | 2025-10-30 06:33:46+00:00
As someone who has spent decidedly too many hours in Aegisubs to create at least somewhat decent subtitles, for projects which have long ago gone the way of the DMCA, these changes feel quite insulting. ASS has been a perfectly cromulent subtitle format and should've been widely adopted.

Though on a related topic, on Netflix it is not just the subtitling that is bad, the translations are awful too. They are cutting every corner so hard I fear they might become a circle.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-10-30 06:33:46+00:00
It's optional to the point that you can write single-threaded version without any io.async/io.concurrent, but you will need to pass the io parameter around, if you want to do I/O. You are mistaking what is called "async" here for what other languages call async/await. It's a very different concept. Async in this context means just "spawn this function in a background, but if you can't, just run it right now".
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-30 06:34:36+00:00
> are you asserting this is the way things should work, or how they do work, or both?

How it does and, to a limited degree, how it should.

If you donate to or volunteer for a non-profit, you have non-pecuniary interest in how they are run.

If you're sold a product that's promised to be made in a certain way, you do too. If you paid for--much less used without paying--a service because you thought it was ethical per some definition, but aren't similarly bound in other purchases in your life, or otherwise can't show this is a value you consistently follow (and so, in being denied it here, have been damaged), I'm not sure any functional economy can work where anyone has a free option to take back a purchase--or much less, non-monetary use--at any time in the future because they feel--but can't materially demonstrate--betrayal.

Like, maybe if Stallman used ChatGPT he could credibly claim he wouldn't have used it if it hadn't marketed its claims around goodness. But I'm deeply sceptical a rando has the same standing.
by BatteryMountain | 2025-10-30 06:36:24+00:00
A child cannot enter into a contract (ToS) with a company as they are minors. Whats strange is that american companies can get away with interacting with children, lawmakers/politicians ignore it, parents ignore it...seems like this is what everyone wants and consents to.

Remember a company is just a building filled with people. People are exploiting & profiting off your kids, not companies.
by k310 | 2025-10-30 06:36:34+00:00
I would rather use Jupyter Notebooks, a sort of "excel within python" rather than the converse. And it exists today. I have Carnets running on an ipad, "trusted", with no dependence on Microsoft services.

> Rather than executing the Python code on your local PC, Excel sends it to the cloud, where it is processed in a secure environment managed by Microsoft.

Microsoft is increasingly following the Sun "Sunray" model, IMO. "Azure is the computer."
by Zarathruster | 2025-10-30 06:37:01+00:00
> 2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.

I get that you might not like it, but it sure beats the option you didn't list:

4. Has auto-generated subtitles for the dub that fail in dramatic and distracting ways, especially for proper nouns or any kind of show-specific invented terminology
by __mharrison__ | 2025-10-30 06:37:04+00:00
I've been a long time use of Grammarly. I have used it for most of my books. I have a 150 week long streak using it. I've used it as an example of good ux for AI.

Now I'm considering vibe coding a replacement that just does grammar fixing...

Ironic, because I don't want the AI writing, only the grammar checking
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-30 06:37:32+00:00
It certainly seems that way. Thanks for connecting the dots for the rest of the class.

From Wired’s coverage of the events in TFA:

https://www.wired.com/story/peter-williams-trenchant-trade-s... | https://archive.is/xuVuY

> According to the US attorney overseeing the case, Tejpal S. Chawla, the FBI alerted L3 Trenchant sometime in 2024 that some of its software had leaked. As TechCrunch reported last week, Trenchant was <investigating an alleged leak of its hacking tools>[0] by employees—an investigation that Williams, then general manager of the firm, oversaw, prosecutors said during Wednesday’s hearing.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/21/apple-alerts-exploit-devel... | https://archive.is/4l1xC

> A month before he received Apple’s threat notification, when Gibson was still working at Trenchant, he said he was invited to go to the company’s London office for a team-building event.

> When Gibson arrived February 3, he was immediately summoned into a meeting room to speak via video call with Peter Williams, Trenchant’s then-general manager who was known inside the company as “Doogie.” (In 2018, defense contractor L3Harris acquired zero-day makers Azimuth and Linchpin Labs, two sister startups that merged to become Trenchant.)

> Williams told Gibson the company suspected he was double employed and was thus suspending him. All of Gibson’s work devices would be confiscated and analyzed as part of an internal investigation into the allegations. Williams could not be reached for comment.

The TechCrunch article above, previously on HN:

Apple alerts exploit developer that his iPhone was targeted with gov spyware - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45657302 (Oct 21, 2025 / 290 points / 144 comments)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-30 06:37:33+00:00
> that rule clearly states that the government can't take legal action against a citizen for saying something the government doesn't like. The CA government retaliating against OpenAI for its CEO threatening to leave the state would clearly violate this rule

What? Conspiracy to commit a crime is punishable. If you're credibly threatening to do something that could be unlawful, the state can pursue that. Altman, of all people, is not being punished for his speech. Nor has he any track record of free speech bona fides to stand on.
by dagss | 2025-10-30 06:37:52+00:00
I really believe this is the way: Event log tables in SQL. I have been doing it a lot.

A downside is the lack of tooling client side. For many using Kafka is worth it simply for the tooling in libraries consumer side.

If you just want to write an event handler function there is a lot of boilerplate to manage around it. (Persisting read cursors etc)

We introduced a company standard for one service pulling events from another service that fit well together with events stored in SQL.

https://github.com/vippsas/feedapi-spec

Nowhere close to Kafka's maturity in client side tooling but it is an approach for how a library stack could be built on top making this convenient and have the same library toolset support many storage engines. (On the server/storage side, Postgres is of course as mature as Kafka...)
by zdragnar | 2025-10-30 06:37:55+00:00
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.

Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.