MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noosphr | 2025-10-22 21:19:43+00:00
Big tech is suffering from the incumbents disease.

What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly.

Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up.

Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to maintenance mode, and start new orgs within the company that are as insulated from legacy as possible. This will not be an easy transition, and will probably fail. The alternative however is to definitely fail.

For example Google is in the amazing position that it's search can become a commodity that prints a modest amount of money forever as the default search engine for LLM queries, while at the same time their flagship product can be a search AI that uses those queries as citations for answers people look for.
by pavon | 2025-10-22 21:19:45+00:00
This is changing. Valve is actively working with hardware manufacturers to get SteamOS on a number of systems other than the Steam Deck. You can buy a Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS today[1], and Valve will be supporting SteamOS on the Asus ROG Ally in the future[2], whether Asus partners with them or not.

[1]https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/handheld/legion-go-s/len106g0...

[2]https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/13/24219469/valve-steamos-as...
by dekhn | 2025-10-22 21:20:29+00:00
Well, let's give a concrete example. I want to use an SaaS as part of my job. My manager knows this and supports it. In the process of me trying to sign up for the SaaS, I have to contact various groups in the company- the cost center folks to get an approval for spending the money to get the SaaS, the security folk to ensure we're not accidentally leaking IP to the outside world, the legal folks to make sure the contract negotiations go smoothly.

Why would the lawyer need to talk to my manager? I'm the person getting the job done, my manager is there to support me and to resolve conflicts in case of escalations. In the meantime, I'm going to explain patiently to the lawyer that the terms they are insisting on aren't necessary (I always listen carefully to what the lawyer says).
by roadside_picnic | 2025-10-22 21:20:54+00:00
This really downplays why people fight against "meaningless" work, it's not because of any philosophical grounds.

The real problem with meaningless work is it tends to be incredibly stressful. Because the underlying work creates no value, even locally (existentially of course it's all nil, but again, this isn't about that level of abstraction). The trouble with "no value" is that you also have no way know how to or even if you are doing your job "well".

Your description sounds pleasant, but my real experience with meaningless work is that it results in long hours worked, very aggressive office politics, and consistent insecurity around the future of your job and income.

The essence of "meaningless work" is captured very well in Kafka's The Trial. While their are brief moments where one can laugh at the absurdity of the situation, most of the time it sits in exact confrontation to the idyllic view of work you are proposing.
by karczex | 2025-10-22 21:21:22+00:00
Sometimes it's rather matter of sanity than time management. I once created systemd service which goes to company web page and downloads some files which I sometimes need. This script was pretty hacky, and writing it took me a lot of time - probably more than clicking manually on this page in the long run. But clicking it so annoying, that I feel it was totally worth.
by hadlock | 2025-10-22 21:21:41+00:00
I can see soap-opera-style, video-manga becoming a thing, where you get 5x20 minute episodes a week, and an ai-generated 30 min super cut of the week's "events" every saturday. What if DragonBallZ, but new episodes drop every morning before your morning commute? And for $30 a month you can do a choose your own adventure where at the end of each episode, the story splits off and you get an alternate history version, but conveniently rejoins the main story by the end of the week.

Three years ago we had a live streaming autogen-seinfeld twitch stream; some kind of coherent story telling via AI doesn't seem beyond reach today, the tools just haven't fully matured yet.
by DigitallyFidget | 2025-10-22 21:22:02+00:00
It really has. I had always tried to use Linux in the past, but gaming was always a fight, and the OS just never felt like it behaved reliable for daily usage for me, was always some little annoyance or bug or issue I'd run into and inevitably switch back to Windows for the sake of things just working without having to spend hours and days and weeks trying to fix issues. That was 10+ years ago. I finally decided to give it a go again, using an Arch based OS. I figured it's been a while, try something other than debian or SLES that I've been used to. Honestly, I kinda don't notice much difference in overall day to day use between gaming and day to day use on Linux versus previously being on Windows just a month ago. Everything kinda just works. The one thing I do notice is I use significantly less RAM, I seldom exceed 32gb as where I was regularly 40gb+ on Windows, and everything runs much better while I do the same day to day stuff as I always have. It's not a huge performance difference, but if I'm paying attention, yeah, I do notice my games tend to run better, and everything within the OS is far more responsive. As for all the linux a-holes out there, please STFU, I don't wanna hear "winblows sux" or "this distro is better", it's why I didn't specify what specific distro I use. That toxic fanboyism is what keeps people away from seeing it as a viable usable OS.

My rambling is really just to say: Yeah, linux has come a long way, especially for gaming and day to day use. The work Valve and others have done to make stuff just run and work is astonishing.
by jeffbee | 2025-10-22 21:22:18+00:00
Regen braking is how you can tell this was designed by a moron. The energy balance simply does not favor regenerative braking on a bicycle, especially a bicycle that flippantly ignores aerodynamics like this one does. A bicyclist loses roughly all of their energy to air resistance. It's not a truck. There is not substantial potential energy to be recaptured going down hills.
by freehorse | 2025-10-22 21:23:08+00:00
In 99.9% of cases defining legitimate use is simple. There should be legal consequences for data sharing that is not actual legitimate use. I see companies making absurd claims about what consent based on "legitimate interest" can mean. No, sharing data with advertising "partners" is not based on any legitimate interest. If these companies were getting some strong fines for illegal stuff like this, then they would cut the bs.
by kulahan | 2025-10-22 21:23:31+00:00
People who face reality and climb towards real growth are also suppressing their negative emotions, surviving, and moving on. Children are specifically different from adults because they don't have any emotional regulation. They just live fully in whatever emotion smacks them in the gut.

Just because you've got a scar doesn't mean it's bad, nor does it mean you haven't moved on if you haven't spent 6 months staring at the healing process. Some people heal quicker, some heal better, some heal slower, some heal worse. Like pretty much everything in biology, it's something of a spectrum.
by barbazoo | 2025-10-22 21:24:00+00:00
Not affiliated but I'm looking into converting my commuter bike with a kit from https://ebikes.ca. Seems to make more sense to turn any of the million bikes out there into an electric one using a reusable kit than buying a single purpose electric bike that will end up on the landfill once the company goes bust because no one wants to push around a bike that heavy.
by munk-a | 2025-10-22 21:24:06+00:00
My voice activated egg timer is amazing. There are millions of useful small tools that can be built to assist us in a day-to-day manner... I remain skeptical that anyone will come up with a miracle tool that can wholesale replace large sections of the labor market and I think that too much money is chasing after huge solutions where many small products will provide the majority of the gains we're going to get from this bubble.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-22 21:24:09+00:00
Thanks for sharing. And yes, once you experience something like that, you don't even need scientific evidence that the body keeps the score -- you've experienced it. You know it the same way you know the sky is blue.

And that's what's frustrating when people want to invalidate the whole thing. They just don't know -- they haven't experienced anything like it. But they act like they do know.

Now obviously, scientific validation of these things is important to better understand causes, mechanisms, and healing methods.

But when people claim that the body doesn't store trauma as muscular tension, it's just frustrating because it feels like willful ignorance. Whether they don't know the stories of millions of people like yourself, or choose not to believe them.
by biomcgary | 2025-10-22 21:24:22+00:00
The mind-body link is too important to get the causality wrong and The Body Keeps Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.

I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.

For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.
by cosmos0072 | 2025-10-22 21:25:22+00:00
I need this *so* often that I programmed my shell to execute 'cd ..' every time I press KP/ i.e. '/' on the keypad, without having to hit Return.

Other single-key bindings I use often are:

KP* executes 'ls'

KP- executes 'cd -'

KP+ executes 'make -j `nproc`'
by throwaway-aws9 | 2025-10-22 21:25:22+00:00
Right, but depending on your workload, compute might just be 1/3 to 1/2 of your spend. The remainder going on storage, networking (egress and internal between regions & AZs), LBs, and higher abstraction services (from queues to search to serverless).

Feels great to talk about 27-50% but turns out it's 9%-16% when all is said and done. You can get commitment savings on other services but you need higher spend.

Feels odd that big cloud gives better discounts to enterprise. They really don't cater to startups as much as they posture.
by pizlonator | 2025-10-22 21:25:50+00:00
No they're not.

The essence of functional languages is that names are created by lambdas, labmdas are first class, and names might not alias themselves (within the same scope, two references to X may be referencing two instances of X that have different values).

The essence of SSA is that names must-alias themselves (X referenced twice in the same scope will definitely give the same value).

There are lots of other interesting differences.

But perhaps the most important difference is just that when folks implement SSA, or CPS, or ANF, they end up with things that look radically different with little opportunity for skills transfer (if you're an SSA compiler hacker then you'll feel like a fish out of water in a CPS compiler).

Folks like to write these "cute" papers that say things that sound nice but aren't really true.
by conradludgate | 2025-10-22 21:25:54+00:00
I use git but I instead just keep all PRs stacked on top of each other and rebase when one is merged. If something is easy to review I push it down the stack. If something is harder to review I keep it at the top of the stack.

I don't open a PR for each commit, and we use squash commits at work which makes it harder to have this workflow but it still works fine for me.

I rebase only the leaf PR, and I have update-ref enabled to update the branch refs of all other branches in the stack. It works well. The only manual process is that I have to manually force push each branch afterwards.

Lastly, I use the `-x "cargo fmt" -x "cargo clippy"` feature when rebasing (which is missing in jj) to make sure the stack stays in a good state
by bitpush | 2025-10-22 21:26:09+00:00
> trusted with big, critical open source projects.

You talk as if the community has appointed Google to take care of these projects. Google is spending $$$ writing code and open sourcing it. Not the other way around.

And as with anything open source, if you dont like the direction of open source code - fork it.

If I have an open source project, you dont say 'bitpush cant be trusted with the project'.
by doctorwho42 | 2025-10-22 21:26:18+00:00
> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.

Thats the thing, they arent looking at the big picture or long term. They are looking to get a slice of the pie after seeing companies like Tesla and Uber milk the market for billions. In a market where everything from shelter to food is blowing up in cost, people struggle to provide/have a life similar to their parents.
by ctrlp | 2025-10-22 21:26:22+00:00
There is no such thing as the "rule of law." It is a political myth useful as an organizing principle for regime change or as a legitimizing myth for an established political class seeking stability, but that doesn't make Law sovereign. Political Will (in the form of those who control institutions) rules and makes the laws. The laws are "parchment barriers" if there is no political will with the force to impose laws.

It is 100% false that prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens law when we're talking above a certain low threshold of corruption. In those cases, it's up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way more overtly but same principle. The incentive to do so is to strengthen the legitimacy of that ruling class, not because the law says you must.

According to the Law, you and I are committing "Three Felonies a Day". If the law were en vigueur then you and I and everyone else would be prosecutable 1984-style. It's at the whim of The Prosecutor to decide whether or not to pursue. Sound good to you? Me neither. The only thing stopping that is politics. When the political will is on the side of prosecution, then there will be prosecutions. We saw this with some heavy-handedness during the early days of the GWOT, 2020, Covid, hate speech legislation, many such cases.

The point being, interpretation of laws is a point of political conflict, often very sharp-elbowed. Even in the cases where laws are unambiguously stated (rare), there's still interpretation of the evidence, which doesn't happen in a political vacuum. Who would disagree?

You don't have to look far in history to see the abuse of the legal system in politics. Watergate is a prime example. Uninformed people think Nixon committed crimes and had to go. Anyone who spends just a little time looking at the details of that episode understands it as a political coup executed using lawfare. Whatever you think of Nixon's politics, the facts support that he was taken down by the anti-communist hawks in the defense establishment, largely in consequence of his opening up China. (The reasons were anti-USSR but given that China subsequently went from an agrarian backwater to a global competitor, one could debate whether they were right for the wrong reasons.)

Impeachment as a check/balance was just recently burned in Congress as a political tool to remove a sitting president. Extremely shortsighted. Or perhaps it just exposed it as a paper tiger. I thought it was burned when it was used against Clinton but it was only singed. Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes.

What happened to the Roman Republic was overdetermined, but the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon". If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.
A question about memory management
by alex77456 | 2025-10-22 21:26:36+00:00
Not trying to start an argument - genuinely curious, and would like to hear from people more knowledgeable than me.

Every discussion about pagefile, swap, virtual memory, ssd wear, having exessive ram, etc, seemingly always boils down to "ssd's are cheap, you'll never run out of writes, please turn pagefile back on and stop worrying about it". I know the truth is somewhere in the middle, (and was not 'worrying' in the first place) so just couldn't go along with it.

(I'll simplify while keeping it truthful) I have 32 gb of ram. Disabled pagefile as an experiment. Allocated a 4gb ramdisk for personal use. Under heavy load, memory hungry apps were indeed occasionally crashing, leaving 'low virtual memory' event log entries. Ram usage never exceeded about 75%. From what i could find, lack of continuous allocation seems to be the culprit. So i added a 2gb pagefile on the same ramdisk. Not a single hiccup since.

I feel like i've been gaslit. Am I missing something? I'm not suggesting everyone to start disabling their pagefile/swap, but surely memory management could be better than what we have now? I've not tested on linux yet but have a feeling will see a similar result.
by jjk166 | 2025-10-22 21:26:46+00:00
No, JFK consulted extensively with the engineers beforehand. The end of the decade timeframe first came from a NASA study published February 7, 1961. Kennedy's budget had actually rejected the initial proposal from Webb to fund the moon program for an end of the decade moon mission just a few weeks prior to Gagarin's flight. A new proposal was put together and presented May 8, 1961 for Johnson by James Webb, Abe Hyatt, and Robert Seaman which pushed for a moon landing by end of decade. Von Braun was even more aggressive, telling Kennedy that it could be done by 1968.
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-22 21:26:48+00:00
In addition to the debug-toolbar, I'd really like people to know about https://github.com/jazzband/django-silk (no affiliation)

I just recently found it and it has been amazing. It logs all your requests and responses by default (but is quite configurable) as well as your SQL queries (and how many/how long they take), in an easily searchable database. It can even profile functions for you.

Makes it very to see at a glance what pages are slow for people, and why, so they can be optimized accordingly.
by anthk | 2025-10-22 21:27:12+00:00
Once you have gopher (magical.fish and soon a gopher->gemini bridge, thus gemini://gemi.dev will be available from gopher, and from that, the News Waffle) and irc -> bitlbee to the rest of the networks, you won't need the web at all.

I mean:

gopher->gemini->web via News Waffle, enough to read news sites and blogs

irc->bitlbee->IM and chat networks, from Mastodon to XMPP, Steam, Discord...
by zamadatix | 2025-10-22 21:27:19+00:00
I think that depends on how optimistic/pessimistic one is on how much more superior the models are going to get. If you're really pessimistic then there isn't all too much one company could do to be 2x or more ahead already. If you're really optimistic then it doesn't matter what anyone is doing today because it's about who finds the next 100x leap.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-22 21:27:20+00:00
There is nothing funnier about HN than the constant insistence that "The mainstream media is bad and lying to you" while voting random Substack and Medium writers with zero experience or training or authority to the front page.

That goes together nicely with everyone on HN insisting that HN commenters are "special" and "different" from people on the rest of the internet. I guess because we are more likely to like the color orange?

Most people insist they are above average drivers.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-10-22 21:27:28+00:00
While ex-FAIR people should have little problem finding a job, the market for paying research folks that level of TC and working on ambitious research projects, unless you're in a very-LLM specific space, is absolutely shrinking.

It certainly feels like the end of an era to see Meta increasingly diminishing the role of FAIR. Strategically it might not have been ideal for LeCun to be so openly and aggressively critical of the this current generation of AI (even if history will very likely prove him correct).
by hiq | 2025-10-22 21:27:32+00:00
Thanks for sharing. Why at home? Is it simply your main setup, so you got rid of external displays thanks to it? I'd have thought that in a situation where you can easily use regular displays, these were still preferable.

I'm surprised that you find it comfortable enough for 6+ hours, especially since you probably need to keep it plugged in. I thought the consensus was that for most users it was hard to keep them on even for just a whole movie.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-22 21:27:39+00:00
>Last Tuesday, I spent 20 minutes Googling "how to reverse an array in JavaScript" because I couldn't remember if it was .reverse() or .reversed() or .reverseArray().

It is normal to not remember this, I certainly agree do not. It is not normal to use a dev environment, where you need to use Google to answer this question.

Also Google does incredibly poorly on these types of questions, often linking absolute slop instead of the official documentation. Git for example has great documentation, but if you look for it through Google you get AI slop articles which answer your question in 30 paragraphs.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-22 21:27:53+00:00
The Quran is held by Muslims as 'the perfect word of God'. It is treated much differently than the Christian bible which gets somewhat loosely translated into many languages.

As the perfect word of God, quotations from it ARE THE PERFECT WORD OF GOD. How is talking about what someone believes is the exact and perfect words of God off limits/racist/bigoted? How is saying that 'Gods perfect representative on earth' having sex slaves makes me call the beliefs of followers of Islam in to question racist/bigoted? I want to know if someone is OK with sexual slavery. A religion that talks about when it gives out sex slaves/sex as a reward to good men makes me have questions about how someone who believes that sees women. Believe me, I struggle with it. The founders of my country were awful men who raped female slaves themselves. I struggle with how do I incorporate 'good parts' of their ideology when they were vile human beings. But I think it is important to challenge that, to ask that question, especially of myself and my nation. I can't imagine if that was my founding religious leader.

Asking 'what about Thomas Jefferson raping his understage slave' isn't being racist. It's legit 'how do you reconcile these things'. It's hugely informative.

Islam is a much more mainstream American religion than Scientology. There are only maybe 50,000 Scientologists in the US. There are around 3.5 million Muslims. I should be able to talk about Islam with at least the same criticality.

Please understand my culture is to challenge religions/religious people/politicians/admired figures, not just Muslims. Muslims, because they believe the Quran is the perfect word of God, are in a tough spot when their perfect word of God says things like lying or sexual slavery are OK. Just like Americans when their 'freedom fighter' founders also had literal sex slaves. But that does not mean we should not challenge. I get it's really hard for Muslims because they can't challenge 'the perfect word of God' but that doesn't make it bigoted/racist to say 'this person's religion says it is the perfect word of god that they can lie about this how do I know they are telling the truth'.

In the US, we reformed, we did away with slavery. We condemn the actions of our founders. Islam being the perfect word of God with it's perfect messenger on earth can't really condemn nor phase these things out. So how public political figures reconcile these things is very valid to bring up.