MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nobody9999 | 2025-10-30 00:59:37+00:00
>The problem is, this is exactly what many of them wanted, and now they're just trying to cover their ass because the revolution didn't work out the way they expected.

That's as may be, but if you give these folks the room to act differently next time, at least some of them will. Which might well be enough to turn the tide in the next elections.

As such, writing off everyone who didn't support exactly what you support as a racist, fascistic, bloodthirsty scumbag who should be put down isn't the best strategy.

I'm incensed by what's been going on and I never supported Trump or his (now) hangers on. That said, I'm sure that you and I disagree about a bunch of things. Does that make me an unredeemably evil human being?

In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree about much more than they disagree. Your "othering" of folks is just as bad as those who "other" folks who believe what you do.

No. This isn't a "both sides" argument. Rather it's a "your fellow Americans are humans too and mostly want the same things. Why don't we agree on those things and work to come to amicable resolutions where possible?" kind of argument.
by zzzeek | 2025-10-30 00:59:45+00:00
I know, this is just how it is I guess . Those of us mystified what the big problem is with virtualenv and pip and why we all have to use a tool distributed by a for profit company and it's not even written in python will just have to start a little club or something

I guess this is mostly about data science code and maybe people who publish software in those communities are just doing very poor packaging, so this idea of a "lock file" that freezes absolutely everything with zero chance for any kind of variation is useful. Certainly the worst packaged code I've ever seen with very brittle links to certain python versions and all that is typically some ML sort of thing, so yeah.

This is all anathema to those of us who know how to package and publish software.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-30 01:00:47+00:00
I wonder if you have more ”grit” than Sugar Ray Leonard, one of the greatest boxers of all time. His fight with Roberto Duran are legendary.

As so many boxers (and many athletes for that matter) he was addicted to drugs and alcohol for many years. Probably sexual abuse he suffered as a kid had something to do with it. He was able to quit, but I think cold shower and a run in the morning was not quite enough to do it.

Nobody just starts abusing their body with chemicals. It is not difficult to quit, you can stay off your Jones for months, but if you do nothing to the demons that made you enter the 36th chamber in the first place, you are going to slip sooner or later. It takes more than a splash of cold water on the face.

Marcus Aurelius was literally a god and the emperor of the world. He prob had little bit more resources to help gim other than stoism. Similarly if you have loving family and friends, a good therapist and some sort of medication,you canmaybe wim the fight with the devil that gets you to use. Training and getting used to being uncomfortable surely helps, but you won’t kick anything for long only with them.

Therefore these drugs won’t be a solution either. Are you going to use them rest of your life? Whatever it is that makes you want to drink, smoke, shoot, gamble or whatever is still going to be there. Bit used together with therapy and loving environment might help. Of course, most addicts have no access to any of these resources.
by drdaeman | 2025-10-30 01:01:25+00:00
> Do you really need a queue? (Alternative: periodic polling of a DB)

In my experience it’s not the reads, but the writes that are hard to scale up. Reading is cheap and can be sometimes done off a replica. Writing to a PostgreSQL at high sustained rate requires careful tuning and designs. A stream of UPDATEs can be very painful, INSERTs aren’t cheap, and even a batched COPY blocks can be tricky.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-30 01:02:00+00:00
In most cases I would say you are correct, but this would be an extremely rare exception. OpenAI has about 7000 employees, and has raised a round at a $500B valuation with a realistic shot at a $1T valuation at IPO. That's a range of $70-140M of equity value per employee. So if employees hold 10% (and that's a low estimate) it's an average of $7-14M per employee. So for the average employee leaving CA before IPO would be a $1 million benefit over paying CA cap gains taxes.

Of course that isn't distributed remotely evenly and a lot of employees have not nearly enough to want to leave CA over taxes or just don't want to leave CA for other reasons. But OpenAI could easily say "HQ is moving to Austin. All employees must relocate and will be given $1M relocation bonuses." And the part left unsaid would be "Failure to comply means you lose 7 figures of options." Take rate on that would be >95%.
by thayne | 2025-10-30 01:02:54+00:00
Ok, suppose the current standard treatment is A. You have a new treatment B that is 100x cheaper than B, and doesn't trigger allergic reactions that some people have to A. You test against A, and the B group has slightly worse outcomes overall than A. Does that mean that B is useless? What if it is almost as effective, but it's lower cost means more people would be able to use it?

"better" is not a total order, one treatment may be better in some ways and worse in other ways. Especially if you include things like cost and availability.
by worik | 2025-10-30 01:03:06+00:00
> Yes, and it's a good thing

It is. I have seen the data

But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them

In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps

So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
by weddpros | 2025-10-30 01:03:46+00:00
I got unemployment assistance, I'm french and lived in France at that time. Be it family, savings or social security, I didn't take a year of vacation. I was trying to pivot to another activity which is difficult in itself, more so after a stroke.

Also before you tell me how good social security is in France :-) you must know my doctor likely caused or amplified the stroke by giving me the wrong treatment at the wrong time, and by not telling me to go to the hospital before 3 full days... and then they let me out. I returned urgently the week after, when a neuro-surgeon freaked out.
by eru | 2025-10-30 01:04:04+00:00
I wouldn't call a bluff a lie. In the sense that you can tell anyone who asks honestly about your general policy around bluffing and that would not diminish how well your bluffs work. In contrast with lying, where you going around and saying "Oh, yeah, I tend to lie around 10% of the time." would backfire quite a bit.

In game theory, the point of bluffing is not so much to make money from your bluff directly, but to mask when you are playing a genuinely good hand.

> [...] it's required to play some ranges, sometimes as if they were a different range; [...]

Why the mental gymnastics? Just say what the optimal play for 'some ranges' is, and then play that. The extra indirection in explanation might be useful for human intuition, but I'm not sure the machine needs that dressing up.

> LLMs produce the most likely response from the input embeddings. [...]

If I wanted to have my LLM play poker, I would ask it suggest me probabilities for what to play next, and then sample from there, instead of using the next-token sampler in the LLM to directly tell you the action you should take.

(But I'm not sure that's what the original article is doing.)

> The problem in poker is that a good amount of the tokens in the sequence are masked and/or controlled by a villain who is actively trying to deceive.

> Human text doesn't have a latent space that's written about enough and thoroughly enough to have poker solved in there.

I agree with both. Though it's still a fun exercise to pit contemporary off-the-shelf LLMs against each other here.

And perhaps add a purpose built poker bot to the mix as a benchmark. And also try with and without access to an external random sampler (like I suggested above). Or with and without access to eg being able to run freshly written Python code.
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-30 01:04:07+00:00
I ask ChatGPT and Grok questions about Latin and Greek all the time, and they'll brazenly invent sources, quoting them in Greek or Latin. As an example (an actual example), I asked ChatGPT to round up all the poetry that, like Catullus' sparrow and Statius' parrot, dealt with birds. It hallucinated a bird poem by Callimachus that it claimed was the prototype and gave me not only an English translation but a Greek original—that never existed. It just plain lied. I have zero faith in any fact about the ancient world that comes from an LLM.

On the other hand, LLMs do a great job translating between languages, which is probably why they can vibe code. They catch some grammar errors, too, although not all of them, and even some stylistic errors, so it's useful to run Greek compositions through them. Ask it about linguistic questions ("Which Greek verbs other than ἀφίημι violate Grassman's law?"), though, and it will spew a bunch of irrelevant examples that don't pertain, because it doesn't actually understand what it's doing, just predicting tokens.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-30 01:04:12+00:00
> [Comment, sarcastically:] not facts [but] variations in magnetic flux

I disagree, you're conflating two different things here:

1. There's a difference between an answer N which was reached by a good/reliable f(x)=N process, versus the same answer reached by using a flawed/unreliable g(x)=N process.

2. There's a difference between the platonic information/concept versus how it happens to reach you via symbols and atoms and photons.

In other words, TFA is focused on how the result is reached, but your response concerns how a result is expressed.

_______

Imagine I took a pen and wrote down "3+4=", then I rolled dice (2d6) which totaled to 7, causing me to complete the equation as "3+4=7".

That's a (#1) problem, isn't it? While it happens to be textually "correct", the process is flawed in a way that taints the result. When you object that my process stinks because "you're just rolling dice", that's a good objection, rather than a "reductive non-sequitur."

Meanwhile, I doubt anybody is remotely worried about (#2) stuff, like how the equation would "just" be subjective sensations of electrical signals from reflected photons from ink molecules on cellulose.
by protocolture | 2025-10-30 01:04:25+00:00
Mikrotik will let you do a lot of this without downloading new code, but you are correct. In my experience people find a simple vuln, log in, enable the blind proxy feature, and then use your network to evade netflix region blocking until you realise.

Cambiums shell from memory is much further locked down. IIRC you need a possibly predictable password form cambo to do get full root shell on a lot of devices.
by underlipton | 2025-10-30 01:04:34+00:00
Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.
by yodsanklai | 2025-10-30 01:04:57+00:00
My company is starting to enable AI-assisted interviewing.

There was a lot of push towards this but I think it's counter productive and will make interviewing even more random and hard to evaluate.

LLMs aren't a magic wand that save you from learning how to code. And we can assume that anybody who can code, can also use an LLM, so this isn't a skill we need to assess (same reason that we didn't allow for googling answers before LLM was a thing).
by tmtvl | 2025-10-30 01:05:26+00:00
Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.

Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.

Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
by giobox | 2025-10-30 01:05:30+00:00
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.

So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.

NT supported quite a few architectures:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms

"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...

NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
by ecshafer | 2025-10-30 01:05:52+00:00
There are a LOT more bad windows admins than bad unix admins though. The floor of being a unix admin is so much higher that it already filters out a lot of people. There are so many MSPs and small businesses with a windows admin that does everything through a console its crazy. You are right its all about the admin, but on average, the average linux admin is far more comfortable scripting than the windows admin.
by XorNot | 2025-10-30 01:06:05+00:00
Theres going to be a very entertaining set of mental gymnastics people will start doing once China's emissions growth peaks and starts falling compared to the US. They're building a lot of renewables, a lot of nuclear plants and are very obviously tooling up to replicate fusion from whoever nails it.

Whereas the US is trying to increase its fossil fuel industry and cancelling renewable projects.
by acdha | 2025-10-30 01:06:21+00:00
You’re right in general but it has been striking to see how much the current Republican response has flipped from what we heard for years after the Elian Gonzalez case, where Giuliani described the BORTAC agents as “storm troopers” and the outage is credited with flipping Florida for Bush in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jim_Goldman_and_Elian_Gon...
by gnabgib | 2025-10-30 01:06:34+00:00
You've never needed, there's nothing new these days, just as many poorly configured apps that assume they're on a root path.

Reverse proxies are terrible to configure, add processing overhead to every request, violate security boundaries (cookies, localstore, CSP and other security headers are now shared) and introduce new bugs (rewrite didn't know a header, HTML element, JS variable, CSS text should/shouldn't be adjusted).
by UniverseHacker | 2025-10-30 01:06:38+00:00
I agree with all of what you said, and I'd argue that the stoics including Aurelius probably would have as well. Leaning into discomfort is just a step that can help you actually do things like get therapy and be present and engaged in a loving environment. At least for me that's the case- I have seemed to need all of those things together as a system to really thrive in life, not just one or the other.

CBT and ACT are modern therapy methods based on stoic methods, very widely used, and very effective for regular people that aren't emperors.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-10-30 01:07:03+00:00
I agree with all of that context about virtualenv and venv, but it all seems orthogonal to my point. I still can’t see a case where you would want the default Python behavior (global dependencies).

> This is a strange way of thinking about it IMO. If you're trying to obtain Python libraries, it's normally because you already have Python, and want to obtain libraries that are compatible with the Python you already have, so that you can write Python code that uses the libraries and works under that Python.

“normally” is biased by what the tooling supports. If Python tooling supported pinning to an interpreter by default then perhaps it would seem more normal?

I write a lot of Go these days, and the libs pin to a version of Go. When you build a project, the toolchain will resolve and (if necessary) install the necessary Go dependency just like all of the other dependencies. It’s a very natural and pleasant workflow.
by nodesocket | 2025-10-30 01:08:18+00:00
“ $600/month for NAT gateways”

I build my own NAT instances from Debian Trixie with Packer. The configuration is literally a few lines:

sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ens5 -j MASQUERADE sudo iptables -F FORWARD sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i ens5 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A FORWARD -o ens5 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables-save | sudo tee /etc/iptables/rules.v4 > /dev/null
by mikeiz404 | 2025-10-30 01:08:36+00:00
I think the post's argument is that we are on the way to something akin to China's social credit system (but not there yet).

> What we have aren't unified social credit systems…yet. They're fragmented behavioral scoring networks that don't directly communicate. Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems. The question isn't whether we have Chinese-style social credit now (because we don't). The question is whether we're building toward it without acknowledging what we're creating.
by Bender | 2025-10-30 01:08:48+00:00
So long as you have one big-and-flat /etc/hosts everywhere

I get where you are coming from and in a small to almost medium company that might work but at some point there will eventually be conflicts when networks and environments managed by many different teams will start to conflict or not be able to resolve things until someone opens a ticket to update the other departments Infrastructure as a Service. In my experience teams and orgs want to have control over their thing and while they could logically all share commit access to a big flat thing it will start to introduce artificial problems.

I could be wrong. Perhaps in your company it will work out just fine. As nobody here on HN knows the logical and physical structure of your company maybe pull a meeting together consisting of leaders from each team/org that currently influence DNS records and ask them to pick apart your idea after documenting it in a way everyone can visually understand how the code repositories and multi-department git permissions would be laid out and how each team would be able to independently add, change and delete records whenever they need to and review audit logs both in the repositories and possibly on each node. My views could be skewed by all the politics that naturally occur as organizations grow. For what it's worth I was in a company that had multi-data-center wide /etc/hosts and it was just dandy when the company was small. We outgrew that by the second iteration of our data-centers.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-10-30 01:09:19+00:00
This is not people’s fault individually, but rather in aggregate (ie government). The places that have good train infrastructure that is legitimately an alternative to driving are very few and far between in the US. It’s just not an option for most people. And people can’t just all move to the places where it is an option, because housing and jobs are already strained in those places negating many of the benefits.
by Crespyl | 2025-10-30 01:09:31+00:00
IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.

The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.

That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?

The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
by pms | 2025-10-30 01:09:55+00:00
That's a great point. I agree that's a danger, but please note DSA doesn't cede the control of content to government, but rather it creates an institution of (national) Digital Service Coordinators (DSCs) that decide whether a researcher's access to data is well-reasoned. In most cases that institution will be in a different country (the country of company's EU's HQs) than the researcher. That said, there could be malicious players involved, e.g., researchers and respective DSCs secretly recruited by a government to influence elections. This, however, sounds implausible, since in principle both the DSCs and researchers are independent from national governments.

Also, we can have depolarized recommendation algorithms. We don't need to go back all the way to timelines.
by Daiz | 2025-10-30 01:10:07+00:00
Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.
by karmakaze | 2025-10-30 01:10:17+00:00
If you haven't read about the CHICKEN lisp gc, ask your fave AI "How does the CHICKEN lisp Cheney on the M.T.A. garbage collector work?" It allocates heap objects on the stack and when out of stack, starts a new heap/stack copying live objects. Everything runs as continuations which is the reference to the song with similar lyrics. Since both stack and recent heap objects are contiguous it has great CPU cache use.
by wubrr | 2025-10-30 01:10:30+00:00
> Exhibit A for Covid having not changed this is the continuing supremacy of Silicon Valley (tech)

You mean like when China built chatgpt 4 in a weekend and open-sourced it for giggles?

> Shenzhen (manufacturing)

..or you mean how US manufacturing 'clusters' almost completely disappeared/replaced by Chinese ones?

> Proximity to investors. Proximity to customers. Proximity to a skilled employee pool. Proxomity to acquirers.

Right, cause you have to physically pet every investor on the head to fundraise, your remote employees must be in san fran cause network latency interferes with their windows remote desktop workflow, and, for some reason, you have to be physically close to your customers when you're selling your web-only llm wrapper saas.
by collinmanderson | 2025-10-30 01:10:38+00:00
> I can only conclude, that the author of the article, and perhaps even the organization they work in, is unaware of other tools that did the job long before uv. If they really value reproducibility that much, how come they didn't look into the matter before? Things much have been really hastily stitched together, if no one ever looked at existing tooling before, and only now they make things reproducible.

Yes, Poetry has had lock files for years, and pyenv has been able to manage installations, but uv is "an incredibly powerful simplification" that makes it easy to do everything really well with just one tool.