MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sixtyj | 2025-10-21 20:02:02+00:00
Many books on the subject are very much "doomsayers" or "preppers" style.

The Roman Empire has been crumbling for 400 years, so it's likely that we won't experience the collapse of society as described in most history books either - life is too short for that. Unless a black swan comes along…

To answer your question, I like to come back to the book because it's written in the style of Dan Brown :) - short, punchy chapters. And it still makes sense (to me).
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-21 20:02:41+00:00
I'm the same as you. In my case, the monitor I grew up with was a monochrome screen with a slight sepia hue - I have never been able to find a similar CRT on eBay or elsewhere.

What completes the experience is the sounds, lights and loading times. When I push the power button, I want to hear all the familiar clicks and whirls followed by the loud BIOS POST beep, immediately followed by the sound of the floppy drive coming to life. I do NOT want a flash media drive, I want a slow, mechanical HDD where things actually takes times to load, and you get to hear the familiar disk spinning and access sounds. And the lights, don't forget those little LEDs which accompanied the sounds, like a conductor conducting an orchestra.

And you know what I miss the most? It's the modem. I miss the dialup sounds. I miss being able to tell what speed I'd be getting connected at based on the sounds. I miss the BBSes and telnet servers of the era. And IRC. And the early web, free of bloated modern Javascript. And apps - real apps coded in ASM/C/C++ that prioritised efficiency and produced tiny binaries that ran without needing a million dependencies. And operating systems that fit an entire GUI desktop in 1.44MB...
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-21 20:02:49+00:00
They also killed three astronauts in the process and had to stop the program and reevaluate their whole approach to safety.

The risk of people dying is sometimes an acceptable risk. We accept it every time a firefighter goes into a burning building. Is a national vanity project like Moon missions worth the risk? Maybe then, when it was novel and inspirational, but now, when it's a retro throwback and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist Chinese?
by isoprophlex | 2025-10-21 20:03:02+00:00
Mozilla did an expose a while back on what's hidden in those terms, IIRC. Things like "we want to know do you use the heated seats" (okay... useful free market research maybe) but also "we store personality profiles including your sexual preferences"

Somewhere I hope a PM is deliberating the intricacies of automotive teledildonics. I hope.
by andrewf | 2025-10-21 20:03:46+00:00
Australia hand-counts. In a federal election, a voter will typically cast a preferential vote for the lower house, and a more complicated proportional vote for 3 senate seats. Rarely, they'll vote on 1 or 2 propositions ("referenda"). This seems comparable to a federal US ballot (first-past-the-post votes for house/senate/president).

The US casts 10 times as many votes - so it seems reasonable for the US to hire 10 times as many poll workers? Hand-counting is O(n) i.e. constant per-capita, and it scales horizontally.

Local and state ballots in the US can feature tens of elected positions and propositions, I could imagine hand-counting them to be quite expensive.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-21 20:04:02+00:00
Peter Beck says that "we like the black."

The tiny Electron is entirely carbon, isn't it?

Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest automated fiber placement machine known to exist:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zmJdJIlPOr4
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-21 20:04:04+00:00
The value of information is determined by the person using it

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

In the world of so-called "tech" companies, who use public information found on the www as "bait" to attract potential ad targets for data collection, surveillance and sometimes programmatic, targeted advertising, the information may have a value to those companies, for that purpose. They might measure that value by how popular the information is amongst www users

But I'm referring to the value of information published on Wikipedia to www users, not so-called "tech" companies who seek to intermediate access to free, public information that they did not themselves produce
by stego-tech | 2025-10-21 20:04:15+00:00
I can kinda sympathize with the guy, as I got fucked over in Defense contracting in a not-dissimilar fashion a lifetime ago. These companies reel you in with decently-sized (or even outrageously-large) pay packages and promises of doing “good work”, bleed you of your energy and time for their profits, then shove you out the door and blame you for anything that went wrong (especially if you try to act honestly and report wrongdoing - that’s a one-way ticket out the fucking door and into blackball territory).

Nobody should be doing work for these scumbags, but people will always fall for their spiels and grifts, unfortunately, out of some naive sense of “doing good” or “getting the bad guys”. It’s always just “leopards ate my face”, though.
by kulahan | 2025-10-21 20:04:42+00:00
I cannot imagine any scenario where we're just 100-200 years away from "no more tech" that isn't purely total nuclear destruction. Even then, we'd probably be so close to getting back to a technological civilization that it'd be a blip in the radar at best if we're talking about a society that far away.

We lost 150 years of progress? That's okay, we had 800 more years to advance before the aliens showed up or whatever.

It's such a weird thing I see so many people assuming. We were down to like 16,000 humans on Earth at one point, and that was before we'd developed things that you could theoretically scavenge and jumpstart your tech.

People need to stop doomscrolling; I'm certain this is depression projected.
by MisterTea | 2025-10-21 20:04:43+00:00
> but the question is why do all the companies buy into their full ecosystem,

Old manager I had one told me: "I wish Microsoft made all the software in the world because it works so well together!" He was the guy who bought our company a one-way ticket to O365. He was also woefully tech ignorant and could barley drive software outside of office programs.
by dmitrygr | 2025-10-21 20:05:34+00:00
I stopped contributing money, and then stopped trusting and using Wikipedia after I saw how wrong they are on a subject I am well-informed on personally (ARM architecture), and how fast they revert properly-cited 100% factually correct changes (literally citing the arm architecture manual).

How could I trust them on things I do not know, if I know for a fact they are unrepentantly wrong about things I do know?
by keybored | 2025-10-21 20:05:49+00:00
Part of the reason why I'm not a "maker" is because my mind gets ahead of me with all the things that I would need to do in order to do things properly. So the article starts out interesting and then gets more and more, well, not exactly stressful but I get a bit weary by it.

Not that I would aspire to implement a general-purpose database. But even smaller tasks can make my mind spin too much.
by senordevnyc | 2025-10-21 20:05:57+00:00
Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!

I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?

But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-21 20:06:11+00:00
It only proves nothing if you didn't bother reading it (which you words "wall of text" imply) and didn't check any of the links proving what I said. Instead of dismissing everything by handwaving, please tell me which specific points I made that you disagree with, and what is your evidence?

How long have you been using Emacs, yourself? If you just got started a few years ago, then that excuses your ignorance of history (but not your unwillingness to learn), but there is a LOT of well documented history about Emacs on the Mac, and all those links you didn't bother following prove it.

You can't win an argument by being ignorant of history, claiming tl;dr, and refusing to look at the evidence. That's just conceding my points by default. Can you do any better than that?
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-21 20:06:20+00:00
I am sure the astronauts know and accept the risks, but does that really mean the public should be funding such reckless activities? They can go paragliding or base jumping on their own dime if they want an adrenaline rush.

The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?
by rurp | 2025-10-21 20:06:35+00:00
The incentive to talk about going to Mars is that it's great propaganda for nerds. It gets people interested in the company and willing to work hard for below market pay. Actually going to Mars doesn't make any sense in the foreseeable future. The idea that we're going to setup a colony on the planet in a few years is a fun fantasy, not a serious plan.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-21 20:07:28+00:00
Most states (I don't have all fifty states' laws in my head) have a sample recount process; they generally trust the machine numbers but they will randomly sample some percent of precincts for a detailed hand-audit count. Any attempt to generally infect electronic systems falls afoul of this back-stop.

In addition, most states have a mechanism by which a candidate can formally challenge the results in a precinct, forcing a hand-recount. This usually has some kind of onus on the requester (I believe in PA for example you have to put up a bounty and if the hand recount results come out to the same result as the previous tabulation the state keeps the bounty as payment for the added cost of the forced audit). However, it is an option (and, most notably, not an option that anyone who claimed shenanigans in 2016 or 2024 exercised).

The problem of election integrity doesn't exist in a vacuum and didn't pop up overnight in 2016; states have been working the issue for a couple centuries and have a pretty good system. But it's a system that requires some detailed statistics and process control theory to understand, so I'm not surprised the median voter doesn't get it. There is, perhaps, a case to be made that for that reason alone we should go to manual, but someone's gonna have to spend the money on that if we're going to do it; it's going to be drastically more expensive than electronically-facilitated counting. And, indeed, people will have to accept that human counters will be less accurate than machine counters (because they're human; we don't train "computers" anymore as a discipline).
by skirmish | 2025-10-21 20:07:56+00:00
A quick search found this example 18 second video generated on 3090: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1kp5jb8/da...

I am pretty sure what you want is doable on a 5090 with some effort but it will not be just a text prompt to video. More like input key frames as images and interpolate video between them.
Show HN: RunOS – Run Your Own Cloud on Your Own Infra
by tylerreed | 2025-10-21 20:08:22+00:00
RunOS lets you run your application stack on any infrastructure - cloud VMs, bare metal, or on-premises - without vendor lock-in.

What it does: - One-click deployment of 20+ production-ready services (PostgreSQL, Kafka, MinIO, etc.) with security hardening, backups, and HA by default.

- Git-based app deployment with automatic Docker builds, SSL certificates, and Kubernetes orchestration.

- Infrastructure portability - switch between providers without code changes.

- Automatic service discovery and integration between your apps and services.

Built on Kubernetes but hides the complexity. You get container orchestration benefits without the configuration overhead.

Looking for feedback on: - Platform UX and onboarding experience - Which VPS providers to prioritize - Which services to add next

Try it: https://runos.com
by kulahan | 2025-10-21 20:08:41+00:00
The Catholic church answered this question ages ago. I assume the other major religions did too. It's really not concerning at all to the institution; the major problem would be with people who don't actually understand their own religion.

Granted, this would be a lot of people, but I think it'd be a midrange of "kinda religious, but not enough to dive in"-types who are mostly freaking out over the revelation.
by jcrawfordor | 2025-10-21 20:08:48+00:00
KCNSC is a large organization that will have hundreds of distinct networks at different risk and control levels. Every variation of "public internet" to "single-site air-gapped network" probably exists there, including many levels in between like multi-site secure networks and networks with limited internet connectivity. Many networks air airgapped, this sometimes means that they consist of a small number of assets in a single room, and it sometimes means that they have connectivity to airgapped enclaves of AWS and hundreds of other military, government, and contractor sites. All of these controls will have been determined by a combination of risk scoring, compliance policies, legal requirements, office politics, and happenstance. Multiple contracting authorities will periodically audit many of these networks against various standards, which may or may not allow connectivity to specific other networks depending on risk levels. Connectivity between networks is sometimes controlled by NSA accredited cross-domain solutions and multi-level security systems that enforce complex policy, in other cases it's controlled by an administrative assistant with a DVD burner. There will be case-by-case risk analysis decisions made for specific systems, ultimately signed off by a government official who may or may not have read them. Inevitably some of these will appear reasonable and cautious in retrospect and others will not.

The root fault with this article, and the resulting discussion, is the extent to which it generalizes over one of the larger organizations in a very complex part of the defense industrial complex. Many parts of KCNSC's operations are absolutely not exposed by this incident. Other parts absolutely are. Determining which fall into which category, and to what extent that is acceptable, keeps quite a few people employed.
by caconym_ | 2025-10-21 20:09:01+00:00
Apollo was funded at a much higher fraction of the national budget, and I believe in inflation-adjusted dollars the cost is comparable but generally higher depending on how you measure it.

Funding makes it happen. Fund it, it will happen. Don't fund it, it won't happen. American space exploration has been chronically underfunded relative to its ambitions, which is why all we have to show for our manned exploration programs since STS (edit: or including it, if you like!) is a string of broken promises. I am hopeful that Artemis will get there, but I am simply telling you the shape of reality as it currently exists—a shape that doesn't care about your definition of "reasonable" in this context. I also don't think we will beat the Chinese unless something major changes.
by nneonneo | 2025-10-21 20:09:30+00:00
God, Teams is absolutely miserable. Video calling on Teams makes you appreciate just how well Zoom works.

Teams macOS client? Crashes on startup, even after clearing all of my user data.

Teams iOS client? You can join a call by a link, but you can't see the call UI because it's behind the login window.

Teams on Firefox? No video support for years, and most recently just glitches out and shows an empty page when trying to join.

Teams on Chrome? Tried joining a meeting, and was told by the organizers that they couldn't admit me because the button wasn't doing anything.

I've had all four of these things happen within the last month, and it's made me want to tear my hair out. I get that none of these are "Microsoft Edge/native Windows client", but they could at least pretend to care about other platforms...
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-21 20:10:09+00:00
Side gripe:

I'm sitting here with a very performant computer running its native web browser.

It's ridiculous that I kept losing my place in that article because the page kept getting shifted to fit yet another damn ad (there were at least three in-view at all times as I was looking at it) onto the screen.

Either make the ads fast and don't load the page until they're all there, or better yet, admit that online content isn't a way to make your private equity group even more obscenely rich, and cut back on the monetization that you put on it.
by cyberax | 2025-10-21 20:10:13+00:00
The easiest way to provide some resilience to the build process is to add a pull-through cache using AWS ECR. It might backfire due to egress costs, though, if you're building outside the AWS infrastructure.

It's actually an interesting exercise to enumerate _all_ the external dependencies. But yeah, avoiding them all seems to be less than helpful for the vast majority of users.
Ask HN: How did the yesterdays AWS us-east-1 outage affect your org?
by geoffbp | 2025-10-21 20:10:20+00:00
In relation to yesterday’s AWS region outage, I am interested in stories people have about how it affected their day.

It should not need to include company names but just details about failure scenarios, debugging, workarounds, incident response, things that worked / didn’t work etc.
by jimbokun | 2025-10-21 20:10:21+00:00
You owe your cushy job and big paycheck entirely to those tech-fetishists that came before you.

Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced. What’s to stop the Project Manager from vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?
by qmr | 2025-10-21 20:10:37+00:00
I think you meant wary.

wear·y /ˈwirē/ adjective 1. feeling or showing extreme tiredness, especially as a result of excessive exertion. "he gave a long, weary sigh" 2. reluctant to see or experience any more of; tired of. "she was weary of their constant arguments" verb 1. cause to become tired. "she was wearied by her persistent cough" 2. grow tired of or bored with. "she wearied of the sameness of her life"

/ˈwerē/ adjective feeling or showing caution about possible dangers or problems. "dogs that have been mistreated often remain very wary of strangers"
by yunwal | 2025-10-21 20:11:00+00:00
> The more interesting part for me (esp as a computer vision at heart who is temporarily masquerading as a natural language person) is whether pixels are better inputs to LLMs than text. Whether text tokens are wasteful and just terrible, at the input.

> Maybe it makes more sense that all inputs to LLMs should only ever be images.

So, what, every time I want to ask an LLM a question I paint a picture? I mean at that point why not just say "all input to LLMs should be embeddings"?
by anon291 | 2025-10-21 20:11:17+00:00
> This is the part I’m not fully understanding. Are you saying it’s because the US is forced to spend more on defense leaving fewer resources to reduce inequality? I don’t see how suspect people like Musk are a necessary outcome of this paradigm... I do get that there is an insane amount of money pumped into the military-industrial complex thoug

My claim is that America's technical dominance is due to its defense spending which leads to their being a larger economy and thus more inequality as some players win and some lose. Inequality means the rich get richer which is a thing that happens in a self propelling economy.

We see the same thing in other independent nations like China, India, and Russia who, unlike Europe and the anglosphere, have independent markets.

No it's not impossible to have a market the size of ours with less inequality. You could have more people all of whom are poorer. But for our population yes. We are the richest nation in the history of the world. The onus is actually on you to show beyond a reasonable doubt it can be done another way. The data we do have indicate that, even per capita, it would be impossible unless we had another country willing to spend money to alleviate our own governments mandate.

> That’s a really interesting argument that I hadn’t considered

With all due respect, then maybe you should sit and listen? Because this has been the main rallying cry of all the MAGA politicians. Look, I'm not even a huge Trump fan ( I voted for him once, but don't really like him, and still don't and hope we can all overcome this time as a country). But like, the Democrats simply don't listen.

Many poor Americans are mad America's funds go to help other countries while our own domestic needs are unmet. Meanwhile, those countries lecture us. While many here may have thought Vance's insistence that Zelensky thank America was asinine and crude, to many Americans, it expressed decades of frustration with European fecklessness. Were it not for the fact that most Americans trace ancestry to Europe, I think Europe would be much less developed.
by Levitating | 2025-10-21 20:11:23+00:00
I do mark his words. He also said he would revolutionize travel in LA (by reinventing the metro). He also said rocket travel would replace air travel. He also said we'd have a martian colony by now.

There's a website dedicated to the empty promises Elon has made. Can't find it though, anyone remember?

Edit: https://elonmusk.today/
by raincole | 2025-10-21 20:11:29+00:00
> Can we formalize that abstraction such that the prompt is an exact specification, just, at a super high level

Every time people attempted on this they ended up with a programming language that is harder to use than usual programming languages.

SQL was marketed as "fourth-generation programming language."

Two other examples that come to mind: Github Actions, and node-based visual programming.
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-21 20:11:40+00:00
> And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs.

I'd love to see your citations on that.

Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.

Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).

At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.

You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.

"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Ref to start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI