MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jecel | 2025-10-27 18:04:58+00:00
The early microcomputer market had three kinds of companies:

- those with organic growth, where the sales of products financed the development of new products: MITS, IMSAI, Sphere, Ohio Scientific, SWTPC, Cromemco, Processor Technology, etc

- those that were part of a larger company: Radio Shack, Commodore, Texas Instruments and Atari-Warner

- those that were financed by venture capital: Apple

In retrospect, the companies in the first group were doomed to not become an Apple. Later on we got many more venture capital based computer companies, with Compaq among the most famous.

In the case of Sphere it had many more problems than just how it was financed. They got an early reputation for not delivering at all or shipping non working products.

What was special about Sphere was that from a technical point of view it was a generation ahead of the competition: with a built-in screen it was more like a Commodore Pet or a Radio Shack TRS-80 from 1977 than like the boxes with LEDs and toggle switches from its peers in 1975.
by bg24 | 2025-10-27 18:05:03+00:00
"I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work" => I think LLM is not doing the precise arithmetic. It is the agent with lots of knowledge (skills) and tools. Precise deterministic work is done by tools (deterministic code). Skills brings domain knowledge and how to sequence a task. Agent executes it. LLM predicts the next token.
by voakbasda | 2025-10-27 18:05:27+00:00
You are misinformed. I regularly eat our retired dairy cows. They taste absolutely excellent, but they were raised on pasture and ate top quality feed.

Dairy cows from commercial confinement dairies are a different matter. They eat almost exclusively grain and develop horrible health problems.

Yet the same can be said of any meat produced in a CAFO, when compared to that produced on most small farms. Garbage in, garbage out.
by 0x6c6f6c | 2025-10-27 18:06:07+00:00
I absolutely have used AI to scaffold reproduction scenarios, but I'm still validating everything is actually reproducing the bug I ran into before submitting.

It's 90% AI, but that 90% was almost entirely boilerplate and would have taken me a good chunk of time to do for little gain other than the fact I did it.
by rustystump | 2025-10-27 18:06:18+00:00
I have tried this. It doesnt work. Why? A human’s unique style when executed has a pattern but in each work there are “experiments” that deviate from the pattern. These deviations are how we evolve stylistically. AI cannot emulate this, it only picks up on a tiny bit of the pattern so while it may repeat a few beats of the song, it falls far short of the whole.

This is why heavily assisted ai writing is still slop. That fundamental learning that is baked in is gone. It is the same reason why corporate speak is so hated. It is basically intentional slop.
by dfxm12 | 2025-10-27 18:06:19+00:00
Maybe it is possible when you have a sane social safety net. If I don't work and I get sick, I will not be able to afford treatment. If I need a loan for a new car (might be necessary to find a new job) or home repairs, and they see I'm not working. I will not be approved.

The US is systemically anti worker.
by pdyc | 2025-10-27 18:06:27+00:00
I have just launched a product (easyanalytica.com) to create dashboards from spreadsheets, and Excel is on my to-do list of formats to be supported. However, I'm having second thoughts. Although, from the description, it seems like it would be more helpful on the modeling side rather than the presentation side. I guess I'll have to wait until it's publicly available
by duxup | 2025-10-27 18:06:33+00:00
I took my family to Disney World not long ago. We're at the hotel after a long day at one of the parks and my oldest son is lying in bed talking to me. He finishes a sentence and immediately begins snoring. I walk over and pull his phone out of his hands and they were stuck just like in these photos.

It is one of my favorite photos of him.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-27 18:07:16+00:00
I've been leaning that direction more and more every year. ESM loading in browsers is really good at this point (with and without HTTP/2+). Bundle-free living is nice now.

Even frameworks with more dependencies bundling/vendoring just your dependencies at package upgrade time and using an importmap to load them is a good experience.

I'm not giving up Typescript at this point, but Typescript configured to modern `"target"` options where it is doing mostly just type stripping is a good experience, especially in a simple `--watch` loop.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-10-27 18:07:50+00:00
We may be talking about two different things. When you say "Past actions may have consequences, but you are always free to act differently now.", I believe you mean that as in "just because you have ordered chocolate ice cream every time in the past does not mean it's impossible for you to order vanilla the next time", yes?

Whereas what I am talking about is "all of your past experiences, the circumstances of your birth, your genetic predispositions and the weather in Myanmar, have created a world-state in which you choose chocolate today. By definition, you will choose chocolate."

My point is that there is no "you" which makes choices in the present, independent from the circumstances which created it.
by jackdoe | 2025-10-27 18:07:52+00:00
I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with before:2022.

I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration.

I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans, but now I think the ship has sailed.

Today a colleague was sharing their screen on google docs and a big "USE GEMINI AI TO WRITE THE DOCUMENT" button was front and center. I am fairly certain that by end of year most words you read will be tokens.

I am working towards moving my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist, and after that just using local indexes with some datahorading. (squid, wikipedia, SO, rfcs, libc, kernel.git etc)

Maybe in the future we just exchange local copies of our local "internet" via sdcards, like in Cuba's Sneakernet[1] El Paquete Semenal[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
by photonthug | 2025-10-27 18:08:35+00:00
As something of a technophile myself.. I see a lot more value in arguments that highlight totally ridiculous core assumptions rather than focusing on some kind of "humans first and only!" perspectives. Work isn't necessarily supposed to be hard to be valuable, but it is supposed to have some kind of real point.

In the dating scenario what's really absurd and disgusting isn't actually the artificiality of toys.. it's the ritualistic aspect of the unnecessary preamble, because you could skip straight to tea and talk if that is the point. We write messages from bullet points, ask AI to pad them out uselessly with "professional" sounding fluff, and then on the other side someone is summarizing them back to bullet points? That's insane even if it was lossless, just normalize and promote simple communications. Similarly if an AI review was any value-add for AI PR's, it can be bolted on to the code-gen phase. If editors/reviewers have value in book publishing, they should read the books and opine and do the gate-keeping we supposedly need them for instead of telling authors to bring their own audience, etc etc. I think maybe the focus on rituals, optics, and posturing is a big part of what really makes individual people or whole professions obsolete
by varenc | 2025-10-27 18:08:42+00:00
Hah never thought I'd be compared to that legendary comment! It hits home for me because I worked at Dropbox for years. I did at least qualify that I couldn't in good conscience recommend my setup to non-techies :)

If you don't want a baby camera system that's also a part-time hobby...Nanit does seem like the best option. I just lament that the best option requires giving up so much.
by natebrennand | 2025-10-27 18:10:06+00:00
> Finally, let’s revisit that global state problem. After the contagious deadlock bug, we concluded we need to evolve past a single cluster. So we took on a project we call “regionalization”, which creates a two-level database scheme. Each region we operate in runs a Corrosion cluster with fine-grained data about every Fly Machine in the region. The global cluster then maps applications to regions, which is sufficient to make forwarding decisions at our edge proxies.

This tier approach makes a lot of sense to mitigate the scaling limit per corrosion node. Can you share how much data you wind up tracking in each tier in practice?

How concise is the entry for each application -> [regions] table? Does the constraint of running this on every node mean that this creates a global limit for number of applications? It also seems like the region level database would have a regional limit for the number of Fly machines too?
by drdaeman | 2025-10-27 18:10:19+00:00
What binary distinctions and naive definitions are you possibly talking about?

To give you some context:

Before writing that comment, I looked up a dictionary entry for "tampering", to be sure my knowledge of the ordinary meaning of the word is correct.

Then I looked up and did a quick cursory check on a bunch of laws that included the word, focusing on (but not limiting to) those that mentioned tampering with an aircraft or machinery, or tampering with communications technology of some sort.

During that check I found that everything I found either explicitly mentioned or implied making changes of some sort: alteration, removal, damage, concealment, obstruction, etc.. So while I haven't found an explicit legal definition I hoped for, I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that legal concept of tampering would generally conform to the dictionary definition in this regard.

And thus down the thread I made a suggestion that it's unlikely (no binary here) to apply to the situation. So I asked "how?", to see if I'm missing something, explaining that I personally don't see how "tampering" is applicable.

Yet, your comment suggests me that I wrote something wrong. While I recognize the "vehicle" example (that I happen to know about) is not entirely dissimilar to the "tampering" here, I'm still missing your point.
by PhilipRoman | 2025-10-27 18:10:58+00:00
I read this a while ago and was looking forward to the mess that would happen with these default Alpine configurations (after setting non-UTC localtime)

0 2 * * * run-parts /etc/periodic/daily 0 3 * * 6 run-parts /etc/periodic/weekly

It appears that busybox cron is smart enough to handle it and only ran the jobs once.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-27 18:11:03+00:00
Bro, get out of the city or just look at a map, America is absolutely enormous. There is no shortage of land to let cows graze on. Feedlots for cattle aren't even necessary at all, they're only used to increase profit.

What's really asinine is that you have such strong opinions about a subject you know nothing about and demand that other people do research for you.
by latexr | 2025-10-27 18:11:32+00:00
> Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read?

It’s not a literal suggestion. “Might as well” is a well known idiom in the English language.

The point is that if you’re not going to give the reader the result of your research and opinions and instead will just post whatever the LLM spits out, you’re not providing any value. If you gave the reader the prompt, they could pass it through an LLM themselves and get the same result (or probably not, because LLMs have no issue with making up different crap for the same prompt, but that just underscores the pointlessness of posting what the LLM regurgitated in the first place).
by realityfactchex | 2025-10-27 18:11:33+00:00
> relevant survey data

Based on a cursory look, keywords can include "smartphone-only internet users" and "large-screen computer ownership".

The American Community Survey asks questions related to that (income, computing devices). Comparing states, the poorer the residents of a state, the smaller the percent of households with regular computers ("large-screen computer ownership"), per "Computer Ownership and the Digital Divide" (Mihaylova and Whitacre, 2025) [0, 1, 2].

Also, Pew runs surveys on income and device usage ("smartphone-only"). Again, the lower the income, the higher the proportion that is smartphone-only [3, 4].

[0] Chart: https://files.catbox.moe/emdada.png

[1] Paper, "Census Data with Brian Whitacre.pdf": https://files.catbox.moe/1ttgee.pdf

[2] Web: https://www.benton.org/blog/computer-ownership-and-digital-d...

[3] Pew chart: https://files.catbox.moe/fs62tf.png

[4] Pew web: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
by lossolo | 2025-10-27 18:12:11+00:00
Last time, I gave claude an invoice and asked it to change one item on it, it did so nicely and gave me the new invoice. Good thing I noticed it had also changed the bank account number..

The more complicated the spreadsheet and the more dependencies it has, the greater the room for error. These are probabilistic machines. You can use them, I use them all the time for different things, but you need to treat them like employees you can't even trust to copy a bank account number correctly.
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-27 18:13:34+00:00
> Article makes a huge deal about humming/buzzing but there’s no way that’s a real thing right?

There's going to be variation based on how the data center is constructed.

The ones I've seen (which is certainly not all of them, so take it with a grain of salt) in the geographic area that this particular article is about are closed buildings that should be pretty well noise regulated individually, but that's not always the case -- some companies (like Marathon/MARA) have data centers using what are effectively open air designs that don't contain sound very well at all and can easily generate significant noise pollution around them.

And some companies (eg. xAI/grok) are a bit of a hybrid where the main part of the data center is enclosed but they park many loud methane turbines outside of the building for power and those make a lot of noise (and air pollutants).

The basic TL;DR is that it is possible to build data centers that aren't an absolute nuisance to the population around them, but there are plenty of data centers out there that don't meet that goal. And the more these companies try to scale up quickly to meet their perceived "AI" needs, the worse things are getting in terms of noise pollution, air pollution and competing for resources (like water and energy) with local residents, etc.
by photomatt | 2025-10-27 18:13:38+00:00
Arguable that I started WordPress and both personally funded or through Automattic contributed more to it than any other entity in the world? Others of course can say they're WordPress makers, but you can't deny Automattic from being called that.

The GPL is a license for the source code to be open and free. No one has ever implied it defines anything else about how the software is used or interacts wit the world.

So what that they allegedly lied by saying and marketing they were giving back while not actually doing it? That's like saying you're cleaning a river while secretly dumping toxic sludge in it.

So what on degrading the experience? Imagine WordPress was a car, say a BMW Mini, and you're a dealer that buys Minis but then resell them without air-conditioning, safety features like airbags, or a dozen other things a reasonable person would expect from a Mini. But then you spend tens of millions of dollars marketing it as a Mini, actually charging more than most other dealers, but people get in and say this seems a bit odd, basic things don't work. Does that degrade the Mini brand and trademark? Quite a bit. (Again, trademarks have nothing to do with the GPL.) What you call something and how you market it matters, that's why we have large government agencies and laws to protect against this.

I've heard you say before "Change anything in WordPress, there's nothing you can do that I can't undo." Guess what gets broken when revisions are completely turned off: undo. If you want it back on you have to contact customer support for permission. For something you paid 20+/mo for and maybe even thought it was the official WordPress Engine thing.
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-27 18:13:50+00:00
You could have the reset script check the timezone of the user before actually performing the reset, and have this script run at least once an hour to make sure you get close to accurate for most people (some timezones only differ by less than an hour though!).

But also, if the user can change the timezone themselves, now you have a condition where the user could keep their quota at bay for a very long time (if not forever) if they keep changing their timezone accordingly.
by pants2 | 2025-10-27 18:14:06+00:00
HOWEVER, if I had to steelman the "unfairly persecuted" argument, I'd say that the $4B fine + prison sentence was much harsher than what the DOJ did to traditional banks engaging in the same thing. HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan, and others have all been found guilty of similar AML violations, possibly for more serious offences, and NOBODY went to prison, and the fines were much smaller.

So while the fines/jail were much harsher on Binance than other tradfi offenders, I think most would have rather seen someone from HSBC go to jail for laundering cartel money, vs CZ getting pardoned.

But if the 'ol "slap on the wrist" treated crypto similarly to tradfi, CZ would not have gone to jail - i.e. Binance was unfairly targeted by the previous administration.
by foldr | 2025-10-27 18:14:25+00:00
If these exceptional people are making it necessary for me to work very long hours too, then it’s fair enough for me to complain about that, no? Very few of the people you are talking about are curing cancer (so to speak), so why are the rest of us required to be grateful to them?

Let’s look at it another way. Someone who’s willing to work an 80 hour week for the same pay that I get is roughly equivalent to someone who’ll do my job for half the pay (leaving aside the dubious productivity benefits of long hours). Should I be grateful for the existence of such a person? We do not usually romanticize people who are willing to do professional jobs for low compensation. Why romanticize people who work crazy hours? If I voluntarily took a 50% pay cut, would you wax lyrical about how the world needs more exceptional people like me?

> And such teams are just vastly more effective and can do stuff in a weekend that a traditional committee-based process would not get done in a year.

Here you’re conflating two different things. Small agile teams that have the freedom to work without bureaucratic overhead are great, but there is no inherent need for them to work crazy hours. If anything, long hours are often a symptom of an environment where people are judged on how long they stay in the office rather than on the quality of their work.
by matja | 2025-10-27 18:15:10+00:00
Seems to me the real problem here is not the timezone (there's legitimate business needs to run something daily at a specific localtime...) but having multiple instances of a cron job that overlap, in which case it should wait until the previous is done or not start at all. At least prefix a job with "flock -n" if it doesn't/can't handle that.
by ok_dad | 2025-10-27 18:15:11+00:00
The main idea of what I am saying is that some entity could have kicked things off, for whatever reason, and not be able to stop or control it. Perhaps they were just like you or I, and they released some tech which formed the universe as we know it today. Perhaps they are outside of this universe and cannot see into it or control it, perhaps they were inside and were obliterated, perhaps they are still here somewhere sitting around waiting for the universe to end, who knows! Everyone expects a god to be all-powerful or something, but they could be some mortal being who only had a lot of power for a moment when they knocked over the first domino. We probably can't know how the universe started, in any case, so this is all just brainstorming for new sci-fi and fantasy novels at this point.
by godelski | 2025-10-27 18:15:58+00:00
> But once that’s done, why not?

Do you have the same understanding of the code?

Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us have the same understanding of the code somebody else wrote. It's just a fact that you understand the code you wrote better than code you didn't.

I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's different. But there's a deeper understanding to code you wrote, right? You might write something one way because you had an idea to try something in the future based on an idea to had while finding some bug. Or you might write it some way because some obscure part of the codebase. Or maybe because you have intuition about the customer.

But when AI writes the code, who has responsibility over it? Where can I go to ask why some choice was made? That's important context I need to write code with you as a team. That's important context a (good) engineering manager needs to ensure you're on the right direction. If you respond "well that's what the AI did" then how that any different from the intern saying "that's how I did it at the last place." It's a non-answer, and infuriating. You could also try to bullshit an answer, guessing why the AI did that (helpful since you promoted it), but you're still guessing and now being disingenuous. It's a bit more helpful, but still not very helpful. It's incredibly rude to your coworkers to just bullshit. Personally I'd rather someone say "I don't know" and truthfully I respect them more for that. (I actually really do respect people that can admit they don't know something. Especially in our field where egos are quite high. It's can be a mark of trust that's *very* valuable)

Sure, the AI can read the whole codebase, but you have hundreds or thousands of hours in that codebase. Don't sell yourself short.

Honestly I don't mind the AI acting as a reviewer to be a check before you submit a PR, but it just doesn't have the context to write good code. AI tries to write code like a junior, fixing the obvious problem that's right in front of you. But it doesn't fix the subtle problems that come with foresight. No, I want you to stumble through that code because while you write code you're also debugging and designing. Your brain works in parallel, right? I bet it does even if you don't know it. I want you stumbling through because that struggling is helping you learn more about the code and the context that isn't explicitly written. I want you to develop ideas and gain insights.

But AI writing code? That's like measuring how good a developer is by the number of lines of code they write. I'll take quality over quantity any day of the week. Quality makes the business run better and waste fewer dollars debugging the spaghetti and duct tape called "tech debt".
by kergonath | 2025-10-27 18:16:05+00:00
I had one of those <3 Loved the thing, I spent many nights playing Warcraft, SimCity and tinkering with Kaleidoscope on the thing.

I got a B&W G3 years later, when they became reasonably cheap second-hand, as a revenge for the envy back when they were top of the line.
by jpadkins | 2025-10-27 18:16:10+00:00
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/collections/president-trum... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Reconstruction

It is obvious that demolishing is the first step in new construction, and has been done before to the White House. You can't give all the context in a single sentence. You can avoid bias or wording that attempts to sway the audience (propaganda).

There is no praise or value judgement on the ballroom. The neutral PoV statement is "Microsoft donated to a new ball room for the White House east wing."