MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smaudet | 2025-10-29 13:18:07+00:00
> Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.

Except, this not really a choice or a reasonable work around.

Phones are still somewhat expensive, not to mention a time-sink to maintain. Try explaining to your parents or even close relatives that they need to abandon the phone they either spent $$$($) on our spend a $$ monthly on that they should really buy another $$$($) phone and use their "official" device like a company card.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-29 13:18:36+00:00
>> But, $100/year for personal use??

> The subscription comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage. Look up how much 1TB of storage costs usually

Depends on what kind of storage you need, of course, but I can get a 16TB (decimal) 3.5" USB hard drive for $250 on Amazon.
by kubanczyk | 2025-10-29 13:19:14+00:00
Nah. The error is the royal "we". We tolerate <subjective judgement>, We enforce <subjective judgement>. And above all, We require everyone to be nice and cultured.

The actual power-wielder who regulates these things is a government (or rather its justice system), a warlord, nowadays maybe an AGI, but definitely not society and not "We, users of orange social media". These mechanisms work for thousands of years, paradoxes gonna paradox.
by vintermann | 2025-10-29 13:19:47+00:00
Aha, so there are ex-Surface developers working on this too! That's reassuring actually. Yeah, the boardgame demos of Surface were gorgeous, and I was definitively disappointed that this cool technology didn't "arrive" even as the years went by. Wishing you all good luck, and I may have to see how hard it is to get my hands on one of these...
by array_key_first | 2025-10-29 13:20:00+00:00
This is all a farce, because eventually the content must be decoded. Because our eyeballs must view it.

It doesn't matter if the OS doesn't prevent copying. The stream, in plaintext, exists and can be copied. Which is what pirates do.

The only way around this is skipping the TV and projecting the encrypted stream into your brain where it is then decoded by a Netflix Approved neurolink module.
by jerf | 2025-10-29 13:20:15+00:00
"Ultimately I found that visualizing large graphs is rarely helpful in practice; they can certainly look nice for some well defined graphs, but I rarely saw well defined graphs in the wild."

Yes, I'm with you: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2025/on_layers_and_boxes_and_lines...

Since writing that I'm finding my frustration at the inability of diagrams to link out or be linked into is growing. In hindsight it seems a super obvious way of using diagrams in a useful manner and nothing supports it worth a crap, even things that really ought to like Mermaid (which permits out links in text but holds it at arm's length (requiring you to set the diagram to "unsafe"[1]) and as near I can tell in a quick search never mentions this as a thing you can do in its docs, and still has no particular support I can find for linking in to a graph). This has turned into a "can't unsee" for me.

(Obviously I have not used every diagramming solution ever, so maybe there is something out there that supports linking in and/or out, and I'd love to hear about it... however, bear in mind I'm looking for what you might call "first class" support, that is, a feature clearly considered important in the design phase of the project, not the sort of accidental-combination-of-features accidental support that Mermaid half has, if you flip some obscure settings to "lower security" somewhere.)

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41960529/how-to-add-a-li...
by clickety_clack | 2025-10-29 13:20:26+00:00
I think the loss of agency due to the aggregation of safety rules and features is an underrated force in society for the worse. It bleeds into things like chat control and locking down of our devices, and it’s something that the wrong politicians are only too happy to take advantage of.

There are masses of people who have never felt the exhilaration of throwing themselves into life and finding that they have built-in tools to deal with it.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 13:20:39+00:00
> We build software

Right, doesn't that include figuring out the right and best way of running it, regardless if it runs on client machines or deployed on servers?

At least I take "software engineering" to mean the full end-to-end process, from "Figure out the right thing to build" to "runs great wherever it's meant to run". I'm not a monkey that builds software on my machine and then hands it off to some deployment engineer who doesn't understand what they're deploying. If I'm building server software, part of my job is ensuring it's deployed in the right environment and runs perfectly there too.
by rs186 | 2025-10-29 13:20:52+00:00
Well, it's just they think it's business-friendly.

From EPL:

> If a Contributor Distributes the Program in any form, then: a) the Program must also be made available as Source Code, in accordance with section 3.2 ...

Except in startups that really embrace the idea of open source, no "serious" company will offer any portion of their source code under EPL license, even if that's just the modified/derived part of it. Not a chance.

For most companies, in reality, there are only two types of licenses -- copyleft and permissive, no middle ground. You either don't touch it with a 10 foot pole or do whatever you want as long as you copy and paste the attributions.
by Steltek | 2025-10-29 13:21:10+00:00
Here's a question, what if the executable was thoroughly sandboxed? Like Firecracker level with virtualization? And once you're there, what's the difference between that and a webapp?

I don't think apps are going away so users need to have a switch that says, "I don't trust this company with anything". Extremely limited Internet access, no notifications, no background activity at all, nothing. It needs to be like apps for the 2nd gen iPhone: so completely neutered that webapps look like Star Trek level technology.
by valenterry | 2025-10-29 13:21:11+00:00
Nope, that is precisely what pure functional programming is about: to turn actions like "draw something to the screen" into regular values that you can store into a variable, pass around, return from a function and so on.

It's not an utopia. It will eventually happen and it will replace how react.js currently works. effect.website will probably be the foundation.
by pjerem | 2025-10-29 13:21:36+00:00
> "just use a second phone" cannot be the answer because 99% of people will just scoff at that.

Here we are talking about installing PostmarketOS/Linux on a smartphone. The next milestone is not to get everyone on it. First we need a base of early adopters that are willing to use it despite the drawbacks. The more user those alternatives will get, the more they will be developed, the better it will get.

Sure, for the next years, it will be way behind Android or iOS in terms of ease of use, but that's the price to pay to get back control on the device you own that is probably the main computer you use everyday.

For me that's not worse than using Linux in the early 2000s, and like Linux in the early 2000s, it may even be _fun_ to be an early adopter of Linux on the smartphone.

Now we don't need to migrate everyone to PostmarketOS, we _just_ need an alternative OS for at least the ones who are willing to play with it.
by saubeidl | 2025-10-29 13:21:57+00:00
Now you're moving the goal posts by post-facto introducing all sorts of qualifiers.

Fact of the matter is, neither the US President nor the EU Commission are directly elected. Both are appointed with one layer of indirection between them and a direct vote.

Either we call both elected or we call both unelected. To do so for one, but not the other is anti-European propaganda.
by spwa4 | 2025-10-29 13:22:45+00:00
There is also the factor that the idea that you don't need administrators for AWS is bullshit. Cool idea, bro. Go to your favorite jobs portal. Search for "devops" ... 1000s of jobs. I click on the first link.

Well, well, they have a whole team doing "devops administration" on AWS and require extra people. So not having the money for an in-house team ... no AWS for you.

I've worked for 2 large-ish firms in the past 3 years. One huge telco, one "medium" telco (still 100s of people). BOTH had a team just for AWS IAM administration. Only for that one thing, because that was company-wide (and was regularly demonstrated to be a single point of failure). And they had AWS administrator teams, yes teams, for every department (even HR had one, though in the medium telco all management had a shared team, but the networking and development departments still had their own AWS teams, who, btw, also did IAM. The company-wide IAM team maintained an AWS IAM and some solution they'd bought that also worked for their windows domain and ticketing system (I hate you IBM remedy), and eqiupment ordering portal and ...)

AND there were "devops" positions on every development team, and on the network engineering team, and even a small one for the building "technics" team.

Oh and they both had an internal cluster on top of AWS, part on-premise, part rented DC space, which did at least half the compute work (but presumably a lot less of the weird edge-cases), that one ran the company services that are just insane on AWS like any kind of video.
by xg15 | 2025-10-29 13:23:11+00:00
It's a really cool idea! Watch out for AI mistakes though, especially when generating content in a foreign language. I see one mistake in the "Time Short Form Game" image where the image has "habl" for what should probably mean "halb".

Also, I'm not sure if converting between 5 digit numbers and words is a good starting task, unless you want to dive right in with German's (in)famous word chaining ability.
by smaudet | 2025-10-29 13:23:33+00:00
> Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously.

Because the market has failed, and we have a duopoly. There are many reasons for that, but, this is the exact sort of time a govt must step in - when something becomes a utility, it needs to be regulated as such.

I agree, I don't really want to enshrine Google/Apple into law, however if they are makers of an operating system that is used like a common utility, they should be regulated as such.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-29 13:23:38+00:00
If you are destitute for any length of time these days you'll likely wind up entrapped by various sorts of welfare systems one of which probably has some sort of cliff you can't scale on your way out. If it's not the food stamps that gets ya it's sec8.

If you were totally destitute in 1900 or 1800 you might starve. But the costs incurred on your way back up were more like steps than cliffs.
by delichon | 2025-10-29 13:23:39+00:00
I'm terrified by the possibility of a stroke that would disable me, not in a way that would let me write here about my experience with it, but leaving me dependent on the care of others. I'd prefer to shuffle off of this mortal coil, but such a sudden event may not allow that choice. So I fantasize about writing a suicide program that would take care of business if I fail to pass a bespoke Turing (delichon) test. But I doubt my ability to write that with enough nines of reliability to be willing to deploy it. I tried to implant that algorithm into my brother, but he declines to go to prison for me, the jerk. If I live long enough maybe AI tech will become reliable enough for this application, but I doubt it will be soon.
by hibikir | 2025-10-29 13:24:03+00:00
And don't forget the real crux of the problem: Do I even know whether a specialist is good or not? Hiring experts is really difficult if you don't have the skill in the topic, and if you do, you either not need an expert, or you will be biased towards those that agree with you.

It's not even limited to sysadmins, or in tech. How do you know whether a mechanic is very good, or iffy? Is a financial advisor giving you good advice, or basically robbing you? It's not as if many companies are going to hire 4 business units worth of on prem admins, and then decide which one does better after running for 3 years, or something empirical like that. You might be the poor sob that hires the very expensive, yet incompetent and out of date specialist, whose only remaining good skill is selling confidence to employers.
by ksec | 2025-10-29 13:24:22+00:00
Many other points. When the Cloud Started, they offered great value in adjacent product and services. Scaling was painful, getting bare metal hardware have long lead time, provisioning takes time. DC was not of as high quality, Network wasn't as redundant. A lot of these today are much less of an issue.

In 2010 you could only get 64 Core Xeon CPU coming in 8 Sockets, or maximum or 8 Core per socket. And that is ignoring NUMA issues. Today you could get 256 Core per socket that is at least twice as fast per core. What used to be 64 Server could now be fitted into 1. And by 2030, it would be closer to 100 to 1 ratio. Not to mention Software on Server has gotten a lot faster compared to 2010. PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, ASP or even Perl. If we added up everything I wouldn't be surprised we are 200 or 300 to 1 ratio compared to 2010.

I am pretty sure there is some version of Oxide in the pipeline that will catch up to latest Zen CPU Core. If a server isn't enough, a few Oxide Rack should fit 99% of Internet companies usage.
by submeta | 2025-10-29 13:24:26+00:00
There is so much hidden cost in maintaining your own bare metal infrastructure. I am always astounded by how people overlook the massive opportunity cost involved in not only setting up, securing, and maintaining your bare metal infrastructure, but also make it state of the art, including best practices, making sure you have required uptime, monitoring and intervening if necessary. - I work in a highly regulated market with 700 coworkers, our IT maintains an endless amount of VMs. And you cannot imagine how much more work they have to do compared to a setup where you spin up services in AWS or Azure. And destroy it when you don’t need it. No updates, no patches. No misconfiguration. Not every company uses automation either (chef, ansible and whatnot)
by graemep | 2025-10-29 13:24:34+00:00
> If you're worried about a for-profit company having sway over your computer, Ubuntu is not really the choice to make.

Why not? The point is not to not have anything supplied by a business. The point is to avoid being controlled by a business.

Ubuntu does not have the same hold over your computer that Google has over your phone. The software is open source. You can switch distros easily as it does not have lock-in.
by BirAdam | 2025-10-29 13:24:38+00:00
I'm not either. I used to do fully managed hosting solutions at a datacenter. I had to do everything from hardware through debugging customer applications. Now, people pay me to do the same but on cloud platforms and the occasional on-prem stuff. In general, the younger people I've come across have no idea how to set anything up. They've always just used awscli, the AWS Console, or terraform. I've even been ridiculed for suggesting people not use AWS. Thing is, public cloud really killed my passion for the industry in general.

Beyond public cloud being bad for the planet, I also hate that it drains companies of money, centralizes everyone's risk, and helps to entrench Amazon as yet another tech oligarchic fiefdom. For most people, these things just don't matter apparently.
by pingoo101010 | 2025-10-29 13:24:39+00:00
Many startups and companies couldn't exist if there was only AWS (or GCP / Azure) due to how much they overcharge.

For example, we couldn't offer free GeoIP downloads[0] if we were charged the outrageous $0.09 / GB, and the same is true for companies serving AI models or game assets.

But what makes me almost sick is how slow is the cloud. From network-attached disks to overcrowded CPUs, everything is so slooooow.

My experience is that the cloud is a good thing between 0-10,000 $ / month. But you should seriously consider renting bare-metal servers or owning your own after that. You can "over-provision" as much as you want when you get 10-20x (real numbers) the performance for 25% of the price.

[0] https://downloads.pingoo.io
by WalterGillman | 2025-10-29 13:24:39+00:00
I wonder how much it would take to break mine.

https://github.com/waltergillman/xorshift_sbox

I have not been blessed by an education so I can't be eloquent and write proofs and papers and stuff but it passes PractRand for 4GB with only 32 bits of state.

Not very fast on modern computers, I will concede.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-29 13:24:46+00:00
I got this far down in the comments before I realized that this subject was such a big deal to everyone because, for them, their phones are what they use to interact with websites. It's bizarre. Last year I needed to watch a video to do a simple furnace repair, and I could not watch it on my phone... I'd have to keep going back to my desk to watch it there, and then return to do the fix.

Even the laptop's difficult to do much on unless I have it plugged into the dock and the two monitors.

I'm not sure when everyone and myself diverged, but it feels pretty strange.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-10-29 13:24:47+00:00
Simplicity is the most underrated attribute of a well-designed system.

There is a tendency for smart people to want to build complex solutions when often, the best solution is one that simple.

We had a dev recently write a whole source generation library to verify configuration at application startup. I pointed out that it would only save -- at most -- 14ms over a reflection based approach and that our application at startup is rolling over nodes in K8s and not a serverless function where cold starts matter.

It went from a 1600 line PR to a 60 line PR.
by MisterTea | 2025-10-29 13:24:51+00:00
> It is interesting though how this same conversation doesn't exist in the same way in other areas of computing like video game consoles or other embedded computing devices ...

Well that is the consumers choice. A friend who has no desire to mess with computers and said hands down he will spend money on a console any day of the week because all he . He has a desktop and a laptop but rarely games on them.

Me, I don't buy game consoles because it kills me to own a powerful compute device that is crippled by the manufacturer to only run certain blessed software. No thanks. I prefer to game on open platforms like my Linux PC running open source games (e.g. gzdoom), DOSbox, Steam games and so on.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-29 13:25:26+00:00
simple answer is grid frequency in europe is 50hz, in the US and Canada it's 60hz.

Early TV's synchronised to the grid frequency (and drew the entire screen on each cycle) - also remember TV's where analogue to start with (and operated at large voltages/transformers) so if they didn't sync with the grid electrical noise becomes a big problem with the power supply.

In monitor terms it reduced jitter.
by smaudet | 2025-10-29 13:26:13+00:00
Eh, I disagree.

You can never catch all "bad actors". Sure, you can make a best effort, but govts are not efficient/usually work better at doing one thing, not 100 - they should be regulating the common platform not all actors on it.

Anyways, that's just as bad as what Google's trying to do.

> that, through developer laziness, refuse to launch on alternative platforms.

Android Dev is (relatively) quite difficult. The code and UI elements do not translate easily to other platforms. If a solitary developer (keep in mind, they may be a volunteer doing things in their free time, or just someone scratching a personal itch) does not then go out, purchase multiple other pieces of hardware, and write the application on multiple other platforms, that is not "developer laziness", rather that is a high cost to entry creating practical hurdles.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-10-29 13:26:13+00:00
It's really only anecdotal — I observed this as a popular meme between ~2015-2020.

I say "meme" because I believe this is how the information spreads — I think people in that particular clique suggest it to each other and it becomes a form of in-group signalling rather than an earnest attempt to improve the accessibility of information.

I'm wary now of straying into argumentum ad ignorantiam territory, but I think my observation is consistent with yours insofar as the "inclusivity" community I'm referring to doesn't have much overlap with the accessibility community; the latter being more an applied science project, and the former being more about humanities and social theory.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 13:26:16+00:00
Technology has a ratchet effect at scale - as a solution becomes widely adopted, it switches from being a convenience to being a necessity, because people start building more stuff on top of it. It's as true of to-the-minute accurate clocks as it is of smartphone banking.

You can still run a version of Word from 2004. It's fine, if all you need is to write some thoughts down for yourself. But the moment you need to collaborate with other people via a Word document, you'll find it difficult without the modern version with all its user-hostile aspects - and more importantly, other people will find you difficult to work with.

Same applies to other software, web and smartphones, and to everything else in life - the further you deviate from the mainstream, the costlier it is for you. Deviate too much, and you just become a social outcast.
by lossolo | 2025-10-29 13:26:21+00:00
These concerns are exaggerated. I've been running on Hetzner, OVH and friends for 20 years. During that time I've had only two issues, one about 15 years ago when a PSU failed on one of the servers, and another a few years ago when an OVH data center caught fire and one of the servers went down. There have been no other hardware issues. YMMV.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-29 13:28:28+00:00
> How does one connect a lamp to 3-phase power?

You typically connect 1/3 of lamps on one phase, one third on another and so on.

In the UK we use a 230V single phase system for most things (industrial/commercial often use 400V) (if all three phases are in use it's 400V - you may see it as 415V but we harmonised with Europe to 400V) so lighting expects that 230V anyway, you still have a common ground, you just run the live for each phase to the lamp/light.

Power delivery to homes is in effect a single phase out of a three phase supply with each house (often but not always) wired in sequence, so house 1 is Phase 1, house 2 is Phase 2, house 3 is Phase 3, house 4 is phase 1 and repeat.

We have standard colors for this as well (as do most jurisdictions), neutral is always blue but the phases are Brown, Black and Grey

When I trained as an industrial electrician they where different colors, they changed in 2006 so that just makes me feel old (used to be Red, Yellow, Blue with Black for Neutral).
by baq | 2025-10-29 13:29:01+00:00
> Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs

I'd like to +1 here - it's an understated risk if you've got datacenter-scale workloads. But! You can host a lot of compute on a couple racks nowadays, so IMHO it's a problem only if you're too successful and get complacent. In the datacenter, creative destruction is a must and crucially finance must be made to understand this, or they'll give you budget targets which can only mean ossification.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-29 13:29:04+00:00
Reminds me in grad school doing the Fizeau experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizeau%27s_measurement_of_the_...

in the Physics 510 lab, the idea is that you send light through a system of mirrors through such a long path that a slot in a rotating disc (or a mirror) can move enough to block the light or maybe not block the light if it can rotate all the way to the next opening. Unlike Fizeau we did it entirely indoors and the experiment depends on empty space.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-10-29 13:29:25+00:00
For now, my banking app actually runs on GrapheneOS. My digital identity app that it requires to log in does not, but luckily my government also offers an NFC chip that I can just scan instead.

Two phones is such an unsatisfactory solution because it will be too impractical, too expensive, or both, for the vast majority of people.