MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lowsong | 2025-10-31 00:08:06+00:00
What is it about large language models that makes otherwise intelligent and curious people assign them these magical properties. There's no evidence, at all, that we're on the path to AGI. The very idea that non-biological consciousness is even possible is an unknown. Yet we've seen these statistical language models spit out convincing text and people fall over themselves to conclude that we're on the path to sentience.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-31 00:08:10+00:00
Some jobs provide healthcare, many don't.

Many people here, if they are not educated, are forced to work manual labor jobs. Those jobs will always work you under full-time, so they don't have to give you insurance. Usually that means you have to work another job.

People who haven't lived that life just don't get. It just doesn't click in your head.

You can work 60 hours a week and just barely make rent and food. Not only can you do it, I think most people are. And there's nothing you can do. There is no higher paying job waiting for you somewhere, because you don't have a college degree.

How're you gonna get a college degree when you work 60 hours a week? Hm? You're not. You're stuck. Your best shot, really, is to work up through management. That's why you'll see people working at the same restaurant for 20 years.

They must be so stupid, why don't they get a real job? No, actually, that's probably their best bet.
by ilidur | 2025-10-31 00:08:30+00:00
KiCad sounds to me like a great target for a project based Nix Shell install.

Always have the right version for it "locked". It works well with most tools except those that save stuff in the .config folder as it messes up isolation.

If you find the nix language daunting, for basic stuff like nix shell setup its easy but also LLMs are good for it.
by sfRattan | 2025-10-31 00:08:36+00:00
GNOME 3+ developers put themselves in the inevitable (and unenviable) position of defending every decision to death because they limited the user's ability to make many, many decisions that were possible in previous versions.

There's nothing wrong with an opinionated desktop environment or even an opinionated Linux distribution. But, prior to GNOME 3, the project was highly configurable. Now it is not.

When people start up new highly opinionated projects (e.g. crunchbang, Omarchy), the feedback is generally more positive because those who try it and stick with it are the ones who like the project's opinions. The people who don't like those opinions just stop using it. There isn't a large, established base of longstanding users who are invested in workflows, features, and options.
by WJW | 2025-10-31 00:08:53+00:00
Kinda depends on how you define "accountability" of course, but rejecting paying customers is usually frowned upon in business. You want your KYC processes to be conservative enough not to get fined, but not so conservative that you lose out on potential revenue.

If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
by verdverm | 2025-10-31 00:09:06+00:00
We don't use rebase at all, it's forbidden.

Since jj does not have branches, it sounds like we are forced into the rebase environment?

With git, I can push my changes without a force, regardless of what the work I build on does

I think jj's biggest challenge to adoption or replacing git is not technical, it's that it requires people changing how they think about and perform a very central act of their non-coding activities. CUE suffers from this as well. The biggest pushback I hear is about being able to wrap their heads around it. Devs seem to be largely burnt out on tooling changes right now, we left that hype cycle as the ai/agent cycle was emerging

> I don't believe there's any circumstance where your work is silently rebased on top of other work, or anything else that fits this description.

This sounds like merge conflicts are "shifted-left"? Today we see merge conflicts when a PR is opened and devs fix as needed. With jj it sounds like they couldn't push until the merge fix is resolved. Many times it's not important to deal with that straight away and the dev can continue to get their task done, see builds and results for their changes, etc...

Is this "shift-left" of conflict resolution an accurate way to describe jj's approach / philosophy?
by pier25 | 2025-10-31 00:09:18+00:00
Avoid dependencies with less than 1M downloads per week. Prefer dependencies that have zero dependencies like Hono or Zod.

https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=hono

https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=zod

Recently I switched to Bun in part because many dependencies are already included (db driver, s3 client, etc) that you'd need to download with Node or Deno.
by tsoukase | 2025-10-31 00:09:57+00:00
By some napkin calc, Google has some billions of customers globally and about low hundred billions annual net income, so makes about 15-20$ per user.

With Google I enjoy free full web service coverage (search, mail and the other popular products), a huge video site, a phone ecosystem and now AI, which otherwise would cost me hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. Let advertisers and paying developers subsidise this free web service world offer (and by ad blocking you avoid "being the product").
by Panzer04 | 2025-10-31 00:10:35+00:00
The person who is going to bother adding stuff to a piece of software is almost certainly by definition a power-user.

This means they want to add features they couldn't get anywhere else, and already know how to use the existing UI. Onboarding new users is just not their problem or something they care about - They are interested in their own utility, because they aren't getting paid to care about someone else's.

It's not a "nerd" thing.
by otterley | 2025-10-31 00:11:44+00:00
I’m a bit confused about this:

“The storage device driver exposes Fluid Storage volumes as standard Linux block devices mountable with filesystems such as ext4 or xfs. It...allows volumes to be resized dynamically while online.”

Yet an xfs file system cannot be shrunk at all, and an ext4 filesystem cannot be shrunk without first unmounting it.

Are you simply doing thin provisioning of these volumes, so they appear to be massive but aren’t really? I see later that you say you account for storage based on actual consumption.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-10-31 00:12:23+00:00
If we're going to fully enclose and automate them anyway, we can probably have the cars going much faster and closer together, and save energy (and make it easier and safer to keep them that close together) by having cars going the same direction attach together. And the automation would be easier if we just had like different sets of cars on fixed tracks, with splits for when people need to go different ways. And at that point why do you even own your own car, they should probably be owned and operated by the government or a large public corporation. And...
by cyphar | 2025-10-31 00:13:29+00:00
Rightly or wrongly, large companies are very averse to using AGPL software even if it would cause them very little additional burden to comply with the AGPL. Lots of projects use this cynically to help sell proprietary licenses (the proof of this is self-evident -- many such projects have CLAs and were happy to switch to a proprietary license that is even less favourable to enterprises than the AGPL as soon as it was available).

Again, I'm happy to use AGPL software, I just disagree that the intent here is that different to any of the other projects that switched to the proprietary BSL.
by lysace | 2025-10-31 00:15:35+00:00
In practice it's a combination of:

a) wanting to soon expand this scheme to catch criminal gang communication (violent narco-related crime is exploding in e.g. some northern EU countries) [center-right goal]

b) wanting to make people more nervous about what they post online (immigration vs crime etc is a hot topic that many want to cool down). [center-left goal]

I suppose that there might also be some naive idealists that primarily care about the stated goal.
by metalman | 2025-10-31 00:16:18+00:00
bit more north and east here in Nova Scotia, but this summer broke all records for heat and dryness, in the south facing slope in the back padock at my place the ground dryed so much that it started to open up cracks, months of no rain, forest fires, land use bans with 25k$ fines the plus sides are the most glorious fall display of the leaves turning coulors, ever, and many of the critters have had very high survival rates for there little ones
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-31 00:16:34+00:00
I wrote it in an evening so it’s disaster code. I might clean it up and make it public this holiday break.

The dailies are a minimum requirement if they want screen time.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on video game incentives and disincentives and was incredibly careful not to teach the wrong thing. The very minimum behaviour we want to enshrine as routines. Everything else is treated as a bonus. Some days they get no coins and that’s fine. Points are never taken away. Coins are spent however they want.
by Twirrim | 2025-10-31 00:17:19+00:00
I've been experimenting over the past year or so, and keep trying to visualise things. Part of this spun out from the fact that I can dream (I rarely seem to, or at least remember them), but when I do, I remember that it was a vivid real thing.

I actually feel like I'm closer than ever to getting towards visualisation. I've gone from a rock solid "zero" to "solid feeling, occasional split-second flash of something"

For most of the time with this exercise I was aiming for something simple. A red triangle in a blue square, but I'm not convinced that was an effective approach, I seem to be getting closer to the mark trying to picture something real.
by dan_linder | 2025-10-31 00:18:05+00:00
I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team).

Man I was jealous!
by bigglywiggler | 2025-10-31 00:18:41+00:00
I am a qualified mechanic. I no longer work in the field but I did for many years. Typically, when people 'trust their instincts as a user' they are fantastically wrong. Off by a mile. They have little to no idea how a car works besides youtube videos and forum posts which are full of inaccuracies or outright nonsense and they don't want to pay for diagnosis.

So when they would come in asking for a specific part to be replaced with no context I used to tell them that we wouldn't do that until we did a diagnosis. This is because if we did do as they asked and, like in most cases, it turned out that they were wrong they would then become indignant and ask why we didn't do diagnosis for free to tell them that they were wrong.

Diagnosis takes time and, therefore, costs money. If the user was capable of it then they would also be capable enough to carry out the repair. If they're capable of carrying out the diagnosis and the repair then they wouldn't be coming to me. This has proved to be true over many years for everyone from kids with their first car to accountants and even electrical engineers working on complex systems for large corporations as their occupation. That last one is particularly surprising considering that an engineer should know the bounds of their knowledge and understand how maintenance, diagnosis and repair work on a conceptual level.

Don't trust your instincts in areas where you have no understanding. Either learn and gain the understanding or accept that paying an expert is part of owning something that requires maintenance and repair.
by jaredhallen | 2025-10-31 00:18:52+00:00
I think what you're driving at can be more generalized as users bringing solutions when it would be more productive for them to bring problems. This is something I focus on pretty seriously in IT. The tricky part is to get the message across without coming across as unhelpful, arrogant, or obstructive. It often helps to ask them to describe what they're trying to achieve, or what they need. But however you approach the discussion, it must come across as a sincere desire to help.
by runarberg | 2025-10-31 00:19:08+00:00
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731539 - 2 days ago; 525 comments

So this is Amazons first filing in a much broader layoff scheme. Giving us a hint into where the rest of the layoffs are likely to occur.

> A detailed list[1] included with the state filing shows a wide array of impacted roles, including software engineers, program managers, product managers, and designers, as well as a significant number of recruiters and human resources staff.

1: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/amazon-w...
by villedespommes | 2025-10-31 00:20:11+00:00
The parent doesn't mention FAANG at all.

> The word balance never came up. Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.

In his next comment he explicitly confirms he wasn't even comparing to the FAANG companies but to his very own "crème de la crème" set of companies.

> I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.

That was the context and this context was just so unrealistic and absurd.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-31 00:20:13+00:00
For more on why banks might drop customers in a seemingly-capricious way: "Debanking (And Debunking)" - https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Prior HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476
by adsharma | 2025-10-31 00:20:57+00:00
One of the problems with Ceph is that it doesn't operate at the highest possible throughput or the lowest possible latency point.

DAOS seemed promising a couple of years ago. But in terms of popularity it seems to be stuck. No Ubuntu packages, no wide spread deployment, Optane got killed.

Yet the NVMe + metadata approach seemed promising.

Would love to see more databases fork it to do what you need from it.

Or if folks have looked at it and decided not to do it, an analysis of why would be super interesting.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-10-31 00:20:58+00:00
> If we take "Israel" out of the equation

Then this whole story would disintegrate.

I am baffled by the manufactured outrage this story is generating. "oh no. <country> is sidestepping the NSA which we loudly proclaim to be evil at every opportunity, and (gasp) imposing their own conditions and bullying gigantic tech companies which are even more evil."

This from the same group of people who insist that europe should host their own data.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-31 00:21:41+00:00
You're meeting humans in interviews? That's already a big step up in this market.

The core negotiations are the same as always: know your worth , and only do it if you're willing to walk away from the job. But it's much harder to get that ability these days for many.

The only additional wisdom is to track layoff history these days. Getting an offer now may not mean you'll have that job in a year.
by ashishb | 2025-10-31 00:22:09+00:00
> That seems a bit excessive to sandbox a command that really just downloads arbitrary code you are going to execute immediately afterwards anyways?

I won't execute that code directly on my machine. I will always execute it inside the Docker container. Why do you want to run commands like `vite` or `eslint` directly on your machine? Why do they need access to anything outside the current directory?
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-31 00:22:14+00:00
I think it's like seeing shapes in clouds. Some people just fundamentally can't decouple how a thing looks from what it is. And not in that they literally believe chatgpt is a real sentient being, but deep down there's a subconscious bias. Babbling nonsense included, LLMs look intelligent, or very nearly so. The abrupt appearance of very sophisticated generative models in the public consciousness and the velocity with which they've improved is genuinely difficult to understand. It's incredibly easy to form the fallacious conclusion that these models can keep improving without bound.

The fact that LLMs are really not fit for AGI is a technical detail divorced from the feelings about LLMs. You have to be a pretty technical person to understand AI enough to know that. LLMs as AGI is what people are being sold. There's mass economic hysteria about LLMs, and rationality left the equation a long time ago.
by fletchowns | 2025-10-31 00:22:16+00:00
> Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)

If you want to let somebody know you can't talk right now but you will call them back in 10 minutes, this makes it possible without having them use another quarter (coin currency in US) to call you back in 10 minutes, or requiring them to feed quarters in while you wait on hold for 10 minutes.

Also plenty of other reasons that we've all seen in spy movies :)
by tinfoilhatter | 2025-10-31 00:22:37+00:00
Well I don't really understand the difference between the words family and bloodline, because what is a family besides a lineage of people connected by blood? Just for clarity - I am referring to Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his descendants who have been and continue to be involved in central banking. I am most definitely not referring to all Jewish / Ashkenazi Jewish people, any ethnicity or anyone with the last name Rothschild who isn't or hasn't been involved in central banking and orchestrating wars.

Thank you for pointing this out. I'll try to be more careful in my choice of words moving forward.
by brooke2k | 2025-10-31 00:22:48+00:00
Making it relative to countries is useful because that is the delination along which policy is made.

Making it relative to people, IMO, only serves to obscure the fact that the US/China/etc are by far the biggest producers of emissions.

Writing climate policy with them in mind makes more sense than pushing for somewhere like Monaco to reduce emissions, even if their emissions per person are high.
by anyfoo | 2025-10-31 00:23:00+00:00
Even if they do (and I honestly have no idea), isn't it the frequency, i.e. the output of the basilar membrane in the ear, and not a sample in time of the actual sound wave which would correspond to a short-time frequency transform, that gets sampled here?

And the basilar membrane seems like a pretty un-discrete (in time, not in frequency) process to me. But I'm not 100% sure.

Sure, if you go small enough, you end up with discrete structures sooner or later (molecules, atoms, quantum if you go far down enough and everything breaks apart anyway), but without knowing anything, the sensitivity of this whole process still seems better modeled as continuous rather than discrete, the scale at which that happens seems just too small to me.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-31 00:23:33+00:00
They were indicted, were they convicted?

My point wasn't whether a state can claim jurisdiction or whether they might even win in their local court.

They need to be able to actually try the case. For a foreigner charged with a crime they would need to be caught on US soil or extradited by a country willing to cooperate. For businesses it generally comes down to leverage the government may have on corporate assets or similarly arresting business leaders should they be caught on US soil (or whatever country is indicting them).

Governments can claim jurisdiction, they can't always enforce it and other countries don't always agree on that jurisdictional claim.
by tsoukase | 2025-10-31 00:23:52+00:00
The open source UIs initially seem alien, complicated or obscure related to similar to closed-source Windows' ones. The reason is OSS projects are built by developers primarily FOR developers and not for regular users. The design principle of "Don't surprise me" and other artistic and ergonomic ones are not met. Examples are Gimp and other content editors like Handbrake, Firefox vs chrome in mobile only, even IDEs.

BUT with time and a variable effort a regular user can get accustomed to the new philosophy and be successful. Either by persistant use, by using different OSS apps in series or by touching the command line. Happy user of Firefox, Libre office, Avidemux, Virt-manager (sic)
by ashishb | 2025-10-31 00:24:17+00:00
> Also I can recommend pnpm, it has stopped executing lifecycle scripts by default so you can whitelist which ones to run.

Imagine you are in a 50-person team that maintains 10 JavaScript projects, which one is easier?

- Switch all projects to `pnpm`? That means switching CI, and deployment processes as well - Change the way *you* run `npm` on your machine and let your colleagues know to do the same

I find the second to be a lot easier.
by dan_linder | 2025-10-31 00:24:49+00:00
> Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)

Mostly for the humor value for an on-air radio show. I’m sure were pre-arranged just to make sure they got something usable, but I can see the occasion where a random person walking by and hearing the pay phone RINGING would cause them to pause. As a teenager I would have picked it up in a heartbeat (even not having heard the radio shows).

As for other “purposes” I’ve seen some crime/drama shows where the bad guy tells someone to go to the corner pay phone and answer it when it rings at a specific time. Horrible idea now as the phone systems would easily record the number that called it, but up until the early 2000’s it would be one option. Today I would guess dropping a burner phone in an envelope for the “victim” would be a more likely movie trope…

(Source: I’m from the US and remember a few radio stations doing this in the 1980’s and 1990’s.)
by Theodores | 2025-10-31 00:25:07+00:00
My fictional British phone number is:

01 811 8055

This used to be the BBC number for call ins, particularly the kids TV show 'Swap Shop', but also for so much else during the 1970s and 1980s.

This number was retired in 1990 when the London ran out of phone numbers and switched to two different prefixes, 071 and 081. The former was advertised on TV as 'Inner London' and the latter as 'Greater London'. This bit of marketing kept everyone happy.

There was still a problem with numbers and the need to go for eleven digits. Hence, in 1995, the codes for London changed again, to 0171 and 0181. This was PHONEDAY.

But still, more numbers were needed, plus the tech behind the scenes was ever-evolving. Hence, in 2000, the numbers changed again for London, for everything to start with 020, so 0171 became 0207 and 0181 became 0208.

But then everyone got mobile phones and we no longer heard about how the economy was growing so quickly that we had this apparent incessant need for even more phone numbers. Furthermore, mobile phones had contacts built into them, so there was no need to remember phone numbers, which was just as well as eleven digits were not so easy to memorise, particularly when the prefixes had changed around so much.

Hence, my personal choice of fictional number. Apart from anything else, it enables me to see how well forms are validated, plus 01 811 8055 is only going to ever be recognised as a 'famous' number by Brits over a certain age.