MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-20 00:01:52+00:00
> If it is solely up to one person that is a failure in and of itself.

I would agree. The so-called bus factor has been common knowledge in the industries in question for literal decades now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

> An early instance of this sort of query was when Michael McLay publicly asked, in 1994, what would happen to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were to be hit by a bus.

http://legacy.python.org/search/hypermail/python-1994q2/1040...
by Reason077 | 2025-10-20 00:04:16+00:00
The laminated glass did not fully break. It appears only the inner layer shattered, and cabin pressure was not lost.

It has happened before that cockpit windows have failed at altitude resulting in explosive decompression, and the plane still landed successfully. For example, British Airways Flight 5390:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-20 00:05:25+00:00
Grab something that ships with Linux and has Linux support from the vendor you buy it from. Also, get somewhat recent AMD hardware without a dGPU.

If you spend some time tweaking some settings and tuning drivers, I've been able to squeeze 10-12hrs out of an 16t Zen 3 laptop on 7nm node, and 8-12hrs out of a 16t Zen 4 refresh laptop on a 4nm node. You should be able to squeeze more out of a Zen 5 refresh with efficiency cores on a smaller node.

Out of the box, Linux is configured for the widest compatibility, and that means not enabling or tuning all settings for optimal battery life. Getting good battery life is achievable, just expect to do some tweaking.

For example:

- Using the amd_pstate in active mode

- TuneD (or power-profiles-daemon, but it's less comprehensive)

- powertop --auto-tune

- ASPM in powersave mode

- WiFi/BT driver power management

- Tweaking amdgpu power management settings

- Adjusting brightness/backlight timeout

- Downclocking & undervolting CPU/APU

- Also look into the kernel's thermal governors

TuneD + powertop will take care of most of that for you automatically, modern Linux distros enable amd_pstate in active mode by default, there are tools for automating GPU powersaving, and backlight behavior has a GUI in DEs.

See:

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Category:Power_management

- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Power_management

- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/index.html

- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/pm/devices...

- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/thermal/in...
by duxup | 2025-10-20 00:05:55+00:00
They talk about the cost of living and salaries, but that's been the case for a LONG time.

I remember working tech support for a company acquired by a company in the valley. They had a tech support team too and we were added. They were twice our size ... and they were horrendous at their jobs. We outperformed them at significantly lower cost to the company. At one point the head of engineering caught wind of a possible new issue and asked "Please assign those tickets to people in Minnesota." But it never seemed to matter, nobody with authority wanted to out their department as unnecessarily expensive.

Maybe those numbers matter now, but I'm skeptical.
by weitendorf | 2025-10-20 00:06:23+00:00
I interpret it differently - the author is arguing that in becoming increasingly free of the hardship and consequences brought by lack of choice, we became increasingly disconnected from others because we didn't have to rely on them. But that doesn't have anything to do with milk, or mean we're not free. People actively exercise their freedom every time they choose personal convenience and optionality over other people.

It's not the lack of freedom, but an outcome of it that the author finds undesirable - same with their argument that the amount of choice is so overwhelming that it begets freedom. I've been to the grocery store enough to just get what I like and get it out - you either have to willfully participate in it to let something that unimportant overwhelm you, or think your inability to not get overwhelmed is universal or important enough to not realize that some people want those options more than you, or just are unbothered by it.

If you allow yourself to participate in something meaningful then you just won't care about having so many unimportant decision to make, because you'll choose to not think about them, even if it means you have to accept that there might be even worse outcomes than picking the wrong carton of milk. Personally, I believe that it's what might actually help the author get over whatever it is that causes them to point the finger at having too many options - find something where your decisions matter.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-10-20 00:06:39+00:00
I remember reading (or watching) about these shower heads and IIRC, there is very little current making it's way into the water (or at least it wasn't traveling very far down the streaming water to reach the bather, I don't remember the details).

I reckon if the mineral content were just right, it might not end so well though.
by RiverStone | 2025-10-20 00:06:46+00:00
The government does tell you the information it has. Most people don’t realize this and therefore aren’t optimizing their taxes, but it is a trick known by accountants.

Each year, you should file an extension and then wait for your IRS to publish its transcript (in May I believe) that shows all the wage/income and other info the IRS has on you.
by shadowpho | 2025-10-20 00:08:05+00:00
SBC are easier to program for, you can trivially ssh in later and fix/update things.

Meanwhile mcu are… tricky.

For an example I wanted to measure co2 level. It took me about a week to write it in raspberry pi zero w2. It captures data, stores it in sqlite, then every so often transfers to Postgres.

To do the same in esp32 took a couple months ( including storage and updates)
by bigyabai | 2025-10-20 00:08:18+00:00
They're federal agents, not presidential mercenaries. When you work for the federal government, you must obey checks-and-balances even if you don't agree with the politics. We have a whole Watergate scandal to prove it.

Washington D.C. is an at-will employment state. If they feel violated because their job requires a bodycam, they can take their vast litany of talents to any private enterprise that's willing to pay for their retinue. Nobody should go to jail because they don't want to wear a bodycam, after all.
by em-bee | 2025-10-20 00:09:10+00:00
a forum is just a webinterface for a mailinglist.

they are both messages in threads. what's different is the presentation.

some of the forums i use support both seamlessly, and i can choose which interface i prefer.

of course for the issue we are discussing, presentation is what matters. but, for most forums i do not believe they would have made it any easier to not miss a message. just look at hackernews. it is actually quite difficult to track which messages i have not read yet, (even if there is a marker on what's new) and it is therefore very easy to miss some.

that is not the case with email. because my mail client tracks the rad/unread status for each message. the problem with RMS has nothing to do with the form of a mailing list but with his particular async style of accessing the internet.
by nextos | 2025-10-20 00:10:50+00:00
The process for the patent to lapse in Canada is quite long, and you get warning letters once deadlines are close.

There is also a possibility of a paying a late fee and, finally, there is also a reinstatement process.

NN could have missed all these, but they would have to be a really dysfunctional organization. Definitely not a low bus-factor situation.
by bijant | 2025-10-20 00:11:05+00:00
He was making a valid philosophical point in order to defend the legacy of his late best friend and mentor who did not get a chance to defend himself and got caught up in the Epstein drama. It's human and understandable and the political equivalent of offing yourself. Stallman never much cared for other peoples opinions or (office) politics. While the secrecy surrounding the Epstein files makes it impossible to know what (if anything) Minsky knew about Epsteins conduct or whether he participated in any of the criminal acts surrounding Epstein there have never been any allegations against Stallman and personally I do not think he has any actual interest in sexual reproduction and would not waste his time interacting with people that do not actively work in GNU / Free Software.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-10-20 00:11:54+00:00
Most of Google's value is the moat they've built around the things that bring in money... their advertising market, google play store, vertical integration, etc. See also Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism.

Building even a tiny fraction of those moats is mind-bogglingly difficult. Building a third of that moat is insanely hard. To claim that the AI industry's "expected endgame moat size" is one-third of Google's current moat is a ludicrous prediction. You'd be better off playing the lottery than making that bet.

I would be happy to bet against this if I could do it without making a Keynes-wager (that I can remain solvent longer than markets remain irrational), but I see no way to do so. Put options expire, futures can be force-liquidated by margin calls, and short sales have unlimited downside risk.
by doodlebugging | 2025-10-20 00:12:27+00:00
We are nearly at the peak of the annual Orionid meteor shower. [0] There should be a higher probability of encountering meteor debris during this period than during periods where there are no meteor showers in progress. We are passing through the debris from Halley's Comet right now and for about another two weeks.

[0]https://www.space.com/stargazing/meteor-showers/orionid-mete...
by mrcsharp | 2025-10-20 00:13:51+00:00
One interesting quote I found in [1]:

"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."

[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026
by neoCrimeLabs | 2025-10-20 00:14:24+00:00
We're driving as many apps as possible to containers, and replacing most of our virtual infrastructure with Talos Linux [1] which is a reasonably hardened OS dedicated to Kubernetes hosting. I strongly recommend using the terraform provider to help manage at scale. The docs seem a little sparse for beginners, but if you already know kubernetes concepts, it's pretty easy to pick up. If you know flux style gitups talhelper+sops is far better than naked talosctl. We're also trying to migrate off of IAAS provided kubernetes and migrate to talos within instances. It's an effort to reduce dependency on specific IAAS while also minimizing number of technologies we need to support.

We're driving anything that cannot be containerized to lift and shift to IAAS and forcing the app owners to pay for it out of their budget as motivation to modernize. They have to explain to the board why their spending increased and they are still on legacy.

- [1] - https://www.talos.dev/
by kragen | 2025-10-20 00:14:50+00:00
Yes. The US Department of Commerce has been litigating this every year for over a decade, with a deep dive into what kinds of "subsidies" the top Chinese solar producers might be receiving, including deeply implausible kinds of subsidies, and as I recall one of the "subsidies" they were supposedly receiving was that their employees assembling solar panels were working for lower wages than electronics assembly employees in Indonesia. These investigations, carried out under a "guilty until proven innocent" standard (called "adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available") end up with a quantitative "countervailing duty" to apply to compensate for the "subsidies" as precisely as possible.

You can be certain that forced labor would be considered a "subsidy", although I don't recall ever having seen it mentioned in these filings, so my inference is that it's not a significant factor.

The last one I examined in any detail was https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14..., which imposed a 10.33% countervailing duty on Jinko panels, a 14.27% countervailing duty on Risen panels, and a 12.61% countervailing duty on all other PRC panels. This was enough to ensure that under 1% of panels sold in the US were Chinese solar panels.

But we're talking about competitiveness with fossil fuels here, which are about 200% more expensive than solar power, not 14.27%.
by taink | 2025-10-20 00:15:38+00:00
It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.

The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".

The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.
by em-bee | 2025-10-20 00:16:43+00:00
it's not the existence of threads that are the problem but their presentation. instead of hidden threads i'd prefer to be able to quote an message and have it shown inline. the fact that threads are so hidden is a major reason to avoid using them (for me at least)

alternatives:

discord has inline quoting and threads. treads are a bit more visible.

zulip creates a new thread for every message because it prompts you to set a topic, and then you browse the messages by topic.
by xivzgrev | 2025-10-20 00:16:56+00:00
It's not so black and white - it depends on the scale

We as a society get to decide what is done in our society. If robots replace a few jobs but make goods cheaper for everyone that's a net positive for society.

If robots replace EVERYONE's job, where everyone has no income anymore that's clearly a huge negative for society and it should be prevented.
by robotresearcher | 2025-10-20 00:19:10+00:00
My grandfather worked with Flowers at the Post Office. They worked on many aspects of digital telecoms for the decades after the war, leading to the world's first digital PCM telephone exchange 'Empress' in London around 1968, and System X nationally in 1980.

Around 1986 my high school class did a trip to the town telephone exchange to see the building full of mechanical rotary switch gear that was about to be thrown out, to be replaced by a single 19" rack that contained the digital equivalent.

I have copies of some of Grandpa's UK patents including baud rate conversion and other essential components.
by zellyn | 2025-10-20 00:19:46+00:00
I once tried to start enumerating gate types for Trinary.

In binary, with two inputs, there are 2^2 = 4 total possible inputs (00, 01, 10, 11). Different gate types can give different outputs for each of those four inputs: each output can be 0 or 1, so that's 2^4 == 16 different possible gate types. (0, 1, A, B, not A, not B, AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR, A and not B, B and not A, A or not B, B or not A)

In ternary, with two inputs, there are 3^2 = 9 total possible inputs, so 3^9 = 19,683. I'm sure there are some really sensible ones in there, but damn that's a huge search space. That's where I gave up that time around! :-)
by stego-tech | 2025-10-20 00:21:07+00:00
At PriorCo, I did a slide deck presentation of our options at the time (2023/2024) and pitched essentially three pathways: stay on VMware, move to Apache Cloudstack, or move to Nutanix. The deck was roundly ignored in favor of a lift-and-shift to AWS for remaining infrastructure.

If I were running the migration, my preferred pathway would’ve been to Apache Cloudstack. We had the expertise to pull it off, and it would’ve freed us from vendor partners. Nutanix was really only on the list purely from its technology portfolio; its lack of profitability and shifting towards SaaS for features like cost analysis meant that we’d be moving into a similarly bad situation as VMware at the time (wholly beholden to their business priorities instead of our own), which I didn’t care for.

There’s a lot of options out there, most of which are built atop either KVM/QEMU or OpenStack. Virtuozzo’s offerings impressed me, but the lack of a “comprehensive” product was a turnoff. Oxide was incredibly interesting from a simplicity and integration perspective, but the appetite wasn’t there to try a startup’s product. Microsoft and Oracle were both ruled out due to higher costs and more onerous licensing than VMware/Broadcom, while IBM/OpenShift were ruled out as our private cloud estate was 100% VMs with only ~20% of our internal products capable of containerization support.

The biggest advice I can give is to understand your workload today, and determine options accordingly. Everyone’s pitching K8s and containers, but if your estate is majority VMs, then a lot of those options just aren’t worthwhile.
by steveBK123 | 2025-10-20 00:22:06+00:00
Yes, and the current zoning / city council / NIMBYism death triangle means most development is poorly located.

In expensive parts of Northwest Brooklyn & Queens, the waterfront which is a 15 minute walk to the subway was zoned to put up a ton of 40+ story residential towers. It's far enough away that many of them run private shuttle busses to the subway.

Meanwhile the subway station (Bedford Ave particularly) that you walk to from said waterfront is surrounded by 3-4 story buildings.. as is most of the walk there.

The difference is there were already people in those 3-4 story buildings to show up to city council meetings & whine about any zoning changes, unlike the previously industrial water front.
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by ojr | 2025-10-20 00:22:39+00:00
I wanted to start working on the SEO of my app. The other tools on the market were very expensive. As a hacker I had an itch to make my own lightweight tool that can integrate Google Search Console data or get website data from crawling a url using Google's Gemini. After the report is made the user can chat with a chatbot that is contextually grounded with the report. I found the answers given from the chatbot more helpful from the answers from a general purpose LLM. Context makes a big difference.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-10-20 00:24:33+00:00
Yes of course, and nixpkgs (nixos) already does, although unfortunately not for this particular package.

The XZ backdoor was possible because people stick generated code (autoconf's output), which is totally impractical to audit, into the source tarballs.

In nixpkgs, all you have to do is add `autoreconfHook` to the `nativeBuildInputs` and all that stuff gets regenerated at build time. Sadly this is not the default behavior yet.
by krapp | 2025-10-20 00:25:17+00:00
>personally I do not think he has any actual interest in sexual reproduction and would not waste his time interacting with people that do not actively work in GNU / Free Software

I'm getting my one lick in because I know litigating this will be futile, people will defend RMS to the bitter end regardless of what he says or does, and I'll probably just be flagged for my trouble.

RMS blogged many times over many years about his beliefs that child pornography and pedophilia should be legal and socially acceptable. He also has a history of creepy behavior around women. He clearly is not asexual.

If RMS wasn't a part of Epstein's shit, it's only because he wasn't sociable enough to fit in with that crowd, not because he wouldn't be into it.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-20 00:28:36+00:00
The price in Canada is ~$175 USD month for name brand Ozempic where I am with no coupons, or other discounts. I see prices in the US around $800+/month.

That is significantly cheaper than the US, and cheaper than other GLP-1 class drugs up here, arguably reasonable. Is the supposition that they would have been forced to charge even less? If so, why are their competitors who kept their patents not charging more?

Counterpoint: Mounjaro/Tirzepatide did keep their patent protection. They are able to, and do, charge significantly more.
by eek2121 | 2025-10-20 00:28:56+00:00
That is actually done for a reason. If you are old enough you'll understand why.

A combination of terrible antivirus software combined with really dumb ideas on the internet created a situation where a whole bunch of folks were disabling antivirus and other security features, which was leading to huge security issues across billions of devices. That, and malicious software figured out how to disable security measures as well, so Microsoft went nuclear and they do everything possible to reset things to defaults.

Of course, other teams saw this and Microsoft sometimes resets settings to things it unrelated to security, which just pisses everyone off.

Overall, they are doing a horrible job. They actually pushed me back onto Linux (likely for good, since all my software now works without compromises), and I've seen quite an uptick of folks who've done the same. Valve has made this easier by all their hard work getting games to "just work".

I'm under no illusion that Linux will gain significant market share overnight, however, things are shifting.
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-20 00:30:21+00:00
Something that the XZ back door made me realise is that the fundamental difference between proprietary and open source software is not the price or source availability for most of its users — no not developers! — it is the reputation and protected brand of the former and the anonymity of the latter.

We have no clue who “Jia Tan” is, a name certain to be a pseudonym. Nobody has seen his face. He never provided ID to a HR department. He pays no taxes to a government that links these transactions to him. There is no way to hold his feet to the fire for misdeeds.

The open source ecosystem of tools and libraries is built by hundreds of thousands of contributors, most of whom are identified by nothing more than an email. Just a string of characters. For all we know, they’re hyper-intelligent aliens subtly corrupting our computer systems, preparing the planet for invasion! I mean… that’s facetious, but seriously… how would we know if it was or wasn’t the case!? We can’t!

We have a scenario where the only protection is peer review: but we’ve seen that fail over and over systematically. Glaring errors get published in science journals all of the time. Not just the XZ attack but also Heartbleed - an innocent error - occurred because of a lack of adequate peer review.

I could waffle on about the psychology of “ownership” and how it mixes badly with anonymity and outside input, but I don’t want this to turn into war and peace.

The point is that the fundamental issue from the “outside” looking in as a potential user is that things go wrong and then the perpetrators can’t be punished so there is virtually no disincentive to try again and again.

Jia Tan is almost certainly a state-sponsored attacker. A paid professional, whose job appears to be to infect open source with back doors. The XZ attack was very much a slow burn, a part time effort. If he’s a full time employee, how may more irons did he have on the fire! Dozens? Hundreds!?

What about his colleagues? Certainly he’s not the one and only such hacker! What about other countries doing the same with their own staff of hackers?

The popular thinking has been that “Microsoft bad, open source good”, but imagine Jia Tan trying to pull something like this off with the source of Windows Server! He’d have to get employed, work in a cubicle farm, and then if caught in the act, evade arrest!

That’s a scary difference.