MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oakesm9 | 2025-10-08 11:47:05+00:00
For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less.

For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured.

For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course).

For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it.

For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
by adrian_b | 2025-10-08 11:47:17+00:00
I do not think that it makes sense to call the Communist governments as "left".

Almost all Communist governments did not obtain the power by a political fight between "right" and "left", but by being installed in power by foreign invaders (in most cases by Russians).

Typically the first action of all Communist governments has been to imprison and/or kill all "leftist" politicians of that country, this having a higher priority than any actions taken against "right-wing" politicians.

Even in Russia, the Bolsheviks and Lenin obtained the power only due to the support of the German war enemies, which they paid back by removing Russia from the war.

The Communists that have been in power have never been any kind of "right" or "left" politicians, they have been just a class of hereditary parasites that have exploited those societies, by controlling everything that was of any value in that country, while claiming that they do this for the good of all people.

The Western politicians are crooks who succeed to fool the feeble minds into voting them. I contrast, the Eastern communists were just slave masters, who did not need any kind of skill, except of displaying loyalty to their immediate boss.
by bapak | 2025-10-08 11:47:27+00:00
> > Their business is selling hard drives.

> Then either they or you are confused. They make the NAS, not the drives.

No you are. You don't have to make something in order to sell it. Composing materials is a business. Selling packages is a business.

You may choose to make your own bundles at home, some don't have the time and/or skill to do so.

You're acting like this isn't normal business administration: companies push products, companies adjust offerings depending on demand. Ask Oracle how they're still in business and raking in billions.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-08 11:47:49+00:00
Absolute hero, and a slap in the face to many commenters here who seem to believe that individuals can’t have a political impact through the clever application of technology. Fairly simple technology at that. A good comparison is the deflock.me site that seems to be successfully raising awareness of widespread surveillance.

Note that this technology complemented ongoing campaigns rather than standing alone; that’s important. It would be difficult to have an impact by building a tool in isolation.
by eugmill | 2025-10-08 11:48:02+00:00
Isn't the current state of thing such that it's really hard to tell? I think the METR study showed that self-reported productivity boosts aren't necessarily reliable.

I have been messing with vibe engineering on a solo project and I have such a hard time telling if there's an improvement. It's this feeling of "what's faster, one lead engineer coding or one lead engineer guiding 3 energetic but naive interns"?
by mcphage | 2025-10-08 11:48:04+00:00
> Joachim's campaign is blocking more traditional lobbyists and campaigners, too, they said. Mieke Schuurman, director at child rights group Eurochild, said the group’s messages are no longer reaching policymakers, who “increasingly respond with automated replies.”

So, previously they could blow off people like Mieke personally, and now they're getting too many messages to be able to do that. That seems like a pretty clear win.
by tyleo | 2025-10-08 11:48:35+00:00
I think this is a malice vs stupidity thing.

I think Altman—and most billionaires it’s in fashion to dislike r.n.—truly mean well. It seems closer to cult-like thinking. Most folks joining a cult are trying to improve their lives. They end up in a thought bubble though that often leads to worse decision making.

I think AI is useful but I don’t think it’s the multi-trillion dollar cash geyser the some of these billionaires are hoping for.
by anonymars | 2025-10-08 11:48:42+00:00
> What do you think that means for the second person?

I think it means the same thing for #1, #2, and me: "Windows 10's days are numbered" means "unfortunately we can't effectively stay on it for a whole lot longer because more and more of the ecosystem is dropping support." #2 was rejoining #1, not disagreeing. All 3 of us prefer Windows 10 over 11.

The fact that things have stopped supporting it doesn't mean it's immediately unusable today, it means it's getting increasingly difficult and thus...its days are numbered.

There will come a point when it's too impractical, and the writing is on the wall that's going to happen a lot sooner than years from now.
by merelysounds | 2025-10-08 11:49:24+00:00
This is a popular question, the most common answer I’ve seen is:

> Commas exist mostly to help JSON be human-readable. They have no real syntactic purpose as one could make their own notation without the commas and it'd work just fine.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/36104693

Elsewhere such commas can be optional, e.g. in clojure: https://guide.clojure.style/#opt-commas-in-map-literals
by wahern | 2025-10-08 11:49:52+00:00
Trailing commas were common in language design long before JSON or even JavaScript existed as it simplifies machine generation of code while being comparatively trivial to handle in a parser, so a net win.

The convenience it offers for diffing is just a manifestation of the positive interaction with grammars and language tools. The convention of humans using trailing commas in lists, along with one item per line, is relatively new, though. Stylistically, this used to be frowned upon as long definition lists made source files longer, slower to scroll through, and worsened code locality from the perspective of someone using, e.g., a 25 row terminal.
by PlasmonOwl | 2025-10-08 11:50:04+00:00
What do you mean boring? MOFs are a fascinating area of chemistry. Outside of nature, they are most likely our best example of rationally designed nanoscale systems. In chemistry, rational design - that based on rules - is a rare thing. Molecules bump around and stick together in unpredictable ways, but MOFs allow us to create very well defined nanoscale frameworks. They’re famously tricky, though!
by mixologist | 2025-10-08 11:50:04+00:00
Be mindful of the context these posts are created in. Don't take the current echo chamber to heart.

For decades now, we are trying to lower the barrier to entry in software development. We created Python, web frameworks and mobile development so easily accessible that you can become software developer by completing a short online boot camp. There is a lot of software developers posting here now who, 20 years ago, would not even consider this job because it would be way over their abilities.

This forum is equivalent if you had a forum about civil transportation that gathers airline pilots and uber drivers. Technically, they both do the same work. Just like in that forum, uber drivers would outnumber airline pilots and skew the topics related to their experience, here we get pushed topics about new frameworks, and AI assisted tools.

When I started working professionally 20 years ago, you could only get job in big companies working on big projects. No one else could afford a cost of custom software. Today, we reduced development costs and we have a huge pool of potential customers who can now afford services of software developers. Web shops, gambling sites, porn sites... This is the majority of software development work today. Boring repetitive tasks of gluing some imported modules together.

Serious development work didn't disappear. It is just not talked about here. There is still a need people who know what they are doing.

My advise is that if you want a satisfying development career, steer clear of latest hypes and don't go blindly following techbro lemmings. And most importantly, don't take career advice from anyone who finds his job so unsatisfying and tedious that he is trying to make AI do it for him. That's a major red flag.
by pm90 | 2025-10-08 11:50:12+00:00
To summarize:

* questionable demand for AI products make the DC investments risky (makes sense)

* DCs being built in “remote” areas with cheap land may become obsolete/replaced by other DCs making use of said cheap land (questionable; DCs can upgrade cheaper than building a new one)

* financing for DCs used to be from Big Tech but is now spread out among private equity, sovereign wealth funds etc increasing the exposure of the economy to failure of these investments (again, questionable, unless they are being financed by bank loans)

The most salient concern seems to be a lack of demand. I don’t see why that would change in the future.
by Thundernerd | 2025-10-08 11:51:08+00:00
I have a couple of suggestions:

1. The url for the website doesn't seem to work, it should most likely be this: https://pro1234123.github.io/Mylinux

2. I would recommend going more in depth about what this distro is doing different versus others. The current list of bullet points are very generic and don't really explain anything.

3. Maybe you could make more use of the repository itself to upload all the scripts that you've been using or something along those lines to create this distro. Lots of people want to be able to see into the inner workings and maybe tinker with it themselves!

Anyhow, good luck with the project :)
by incomingpain | 2025-10-08 11:51:20+00:00
https://imgur.com/a/382mtPr

It was linked in the TLDR newsletter on monday.

(myglobalenv) steve@bird:~/PycharmProjects/netflow$ ls aggregator.py data netflow settings.py assets database.py notifications.py sniper.py config.py Dockerfile opencode.json start.sh context_manager.py integration.py __pycache__ tcpports.py context.py largflow.py README.md dashboard.py main.py requirements.txt (myglobalenv) steve@bird:~/PycharmProjects/netflow$ pyscn check . Running quality check... Complexity analysis failed: [INVALID_INPUT] no Python files found in the specified paths Dead code analysis failed: [INVALID_INPUT] no Python files found in the specified paths Clone detection failed: no Python files found in the specified paths Error: analysis failed with errors Usage: pyscn check [files...] [flags]

Flags: --allow-dead-code Allow dead code (don't fail) -c, --config string Configuration file path -h, --help help for check --max-complexity int Maximum allowed complexity (default 10) -q, --quiet Suppress output unless issues found --skip-clones Skip clone detection

Global Flags: -v, --verbose Enable verbose output

-v doesnt give me anything neither.
by danaris | 2025-10-08 11:51:29+00:00
No, the best way would be to have legislation and regulation that mandates that level of service.

"Voting with your wallet" cannot solve every issue, and that's never been more true than today. Rampant hyperconsolidation means that there are no longer enough companies providing these products and services to have any real hope of being able to just switch to one that does what you need. Furthermore, even if you can find a solution that lets you stop giving them money—like switching to Linux—those solutions are not sufficient for the vast majority of people and institutions, and there's no way for enough to switch to actually hurt the megacorporations.

And even if it did start to hurt them, what do you think would happen? They'd say "oh, our bad, we'll be real nicey-nice now!"?

No; they'd flex their money muscles and find ways to make sure those institutional customers switched back.

The only ways to solve these problems are a) better regulations mandating an acceptable level of service and customer protection, and b) serious antitrust with real teeth. Break 'em up.

Unfortunately, neither of those are going to happen in the current political...situation.
by jdietrich | 2025-10-08 11:51:34+00:00
To be fair, the atmospheric engine was just barely practical for pumping water out of mines. Newcomen sold over a hundred of them, but they were rapidly replaced by Watt engines or retrofitted with a new cylinder and a separate condenser. The atmospheric engine was however far too inefficient for use as a locomotive engine, or as a replacement for water power in most industrial applications.
by lossolo | 2025-10-08 11:51:41+00:00
In our experience, it depends on the task and the language. In the case of trivial or boilerplate code, even if someone pushes 3k-4k lines of code in one day, it's manageable because you can just go through it. However, 3k lines of interconnected modules, complex interactions, and intricate logic require a lot of brainpower and time to review properly and in most cases, there are multiple bugs, edge cases that haven't been considered, and other issues scattered throughout the code.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-08 11:51:50+00:00
>Still frustrating that Politico still implies that the bill has any power to stop CSAM, given that everyone who wants to trade it will obviously just use another layer of encryption.

MSM today has no choice but to parrot or echo the opinions of those in power if they want to stay in business otherwise they get shut down for $REASON witch can be any of the following labels: hate speech, misinformation, fake news, woke left, radical right wing, Putin supporters, etc. Just spin the roulette and pick one.

>What is a dialog, then? A dialogue between well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, and everyone else should just shut up and take it?

Yes, that's precisely how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtdbF-nRJqs
by pseidemann | 2025-10-08 11:52:13+00:00
You are conflating "use" and "control". I mean literal proper control of a computer, meaning the human controls (also programs), and especially understands, every aspect of what the computer is doing and can do. This is what a real AGI would be capable of, presumably. This includes knowledge of how programs are executed or how networks and protocols work, among a lot of other low-level things.
by simonw | 2025-10-08 11:52:13+00:00
Google's "AI overviews" are one of the worst LLM-powered features on the market today, they're genuinely damaging the reputation of the whole industry.

Meanwhile I've started using ChatGPT GPT-5 search as my default search engine! A year ago I would have laugher at the idea: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/

And Google themselves have an "AI mode" which is a different league of quality from "AI overviews", I wrote about that one here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/7/ai-mode/

This is new. AI search tools almost universally sucked until OpenAI's release of o3 in April this year.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-08 11:53:04+00:00
Try parsing this:

{ foo :"bar" baz :"bak" quux :[ a,b,c,d ] lol :9.7E+42 }

Ref: https://www.json.org/json-en.html, but without commas. It's line noise. Commas allow a nice visual anchor.
by cornholio | 2025-10-08 11:53:04+00:00
The economic notion is called marginal profitability. Better sales are a good thing if the marginal profit is positive, ie, each extra unit sold still increases the overall profit, so in your example it's still profitable if the new model brings $1.5 profit per unit, and you stop only when the marginal profit per unit turns negative.

In tech the model is often misleading, since the large investments to improve the product are not just a question of current profitability, but an existential need. Your existing product line is rapidly becoming obsolete and even if it's profitable today, it won't be for too long. History is full of cautionary tales of companies that hamstrung innovation to not compete against their cash cows, only to be slaughtered by their competition next sales season. One more to the pile.
by coisnepe | 2025-10-08 11:53:23+00:00
As someone else mentioned here, I'd wager a large part of Synology customers were people who'd have had the technical ability to setup their own NAS server but didn't want to bother, instead electing a "setup and forget" solution. I know that's who I was when I bought my first Syno DS several years ago.

A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpriced, outdated hardware that weren't worth DSM's ease of use. Got Ubiquiti's UNAS with a couple of HDDs, a Beelink mini PC, and for a little time and roughly the same budget of a DS, got something far superior in specs and basically matching in ease of use.
by justbees | 2025-10-08 11:53:38+00:00
I'm getting really great results in a VERY old (very large) codebase by having discussion with the LLM (I'm using Claude code) and making detailed roadmaps for new features or converting old features to new more useable/modern code. This means FE and BE changes usually at the same time.

I think a lot of the points you make are exactly what I'm trying to do.

- start with a detailed roadmap (created by the ai from a prompt and written to a file)

- discuss/adjust the roadmap and give more details where needed

- analyze existing features for coding style/patterns, reusable code, existing endpoints etc. (write this to a file as well)

- adjust that as needed for the new feature/converted feature - did it miss something? Is there some specific way this needs to be done it couldn't have known?

- step through the roadmap and give feedback at each step (I may need to step in and make changes - I may realize we missed a step, or that there's some funky thing we need to do specifically for this codebase that I forgot about - let the LLM know what the changes are and make sure it understands why those changes were made so it won't repeat bad patterns. i.e. write the change to the .md files to document the update)

- write tests to make sure everything was covered... etc etc

Basically all the things you would normally WANT do but often aren't given enough time to do. Or the things you would need to do to get a new dev up to speed on a project and then give feedback on their code.

I know I've been accomplishing a lot more than I could do on my own. It really is like managing another dev or maybe like pair programming? Walk through the problem, decide on a solution, iterate over that solution until you're happy with the decided path - but all of that can take ~20 minutes as opposed to hours of meetings. And the end result is factors of time less than if I was doing it on my own.

I recently did a task that was allotted 40 hours in less than 2 working days - so probably close to 10-12 hours after adjusting for meetings and other workday blah blah blah. And the 40 hour allotment wasn't padded. It was a big task, but doing the roadmap > detailed structure including directory structure - what should be in each file etc etc cut the time down dramatically.

I would NOT be able to do this if I the human didn't understand the code extremely well and didn't make a detailed plan. We'd just end up with more bad code or bad & non-working code.
by simonw | 2025-10-08 11:53:42+00:00
Heroku and Vercel and Render all have features that can do this. You can wire up your own for other hosting providers using a lot of scripting on top of GitHub Actions.

Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-rev...

Vercel: https://vercel.com/docs/deployments/environments#preview-env...

Render: https://render.com/docs/service-previews
by girvo | 2025-10-08 11:53:43+00:00
I am, but in a very narrow focus: mostly examining our existing codebase as a more powerful but fuzzier search, and a system to then generate a plan to implement and approach which I tweak.

I sometimes use it to scaffold out some boilerplate for tests, but never tests themselves: no matter what I try it always ends up writing the useless straight-jacket "change alert" style tests that break on any change to the unit under test, which I despise.
by mnky9800n | 2025-10-08 11:54:02+00:00
I also think that managing a coding agent isnt like managing a person. a person is creative, they will come up with ways that challenge whatever idea you have and that usually makes the project better. A coding agent never challenges you, mostly just does whatever you want, and you don't end up having any kind of intellectual person to person engagement that is why working on teams can be fun. So it kind of isolates you. And I think the primary reason all this happens is because marketing people have decided to call all of these coding agents "Artificial Intelligence" instead of "Dev Tools". And instead of calling it "Security" they now call it "AI Alignment". And instead of calling it "data schema" or "Spec sheet" they call it "managing the AI context". So now, we are all biased to see these things as some kind of entity that we can treat something like a colleague and we all bought this idea because the tool can chat with you. But it isn't a colleague, it doesn't think and feel, it doesn't provide intellectual engagement, it simply is a lossy, noisy tool to try and translate human language into computer language whether its python or machine code.
by pdimitar | 2025-10-08 11:54:06+00:00
Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware.

And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly).

And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
by mcphage | 2025-10-08 11:54:13+00:00
> you have to grant people agency and accept that things spend money and time on things that are valuable to them

We're talking about companies here, not people. And yet, it is kinda true—companies spend time and money on things that are valuable to the people at high level positions in the company and board. But that isn't the same as companies spending time and money on things that are valuable to the company.
by baobun | 2025-10-08 11:54:30+00:00
"spam" is a grave mischaracterization, at that. It's a tool assisting citizens to voice their concerns to their elected representatives.

I also feel uneasy about Politico putting the lights on the creator this way and stopping short of doxxing them when they clearly wish to have their identity unknown and could face threats from having their personals broadcasted.

It's also telling that the two opponents to the bill named in the article are Musk and WhatsApp - hardly the most sympathetic picks for the Politico audience.
by raincole | 2025-10-08 11:54:38+00:00
JSON is one of the most iconic tragedies that happened in software development.

It's not that JSON itself is bad, but it's obviously for machines to author, not for humans.

- No comment

- No trailing comma

- No multi-line string

It's a terrible format to type manually. However, we just shrugged and said "at least it's not XML" and started writing it manually anyway.

And later we finally realized comments are not optional, so we got JSON5, JSONC, etc...