MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by M95D | 2025-10-11 17:30:47+00:00
There is no 2. There is: 1. Scary events (plural) 2. Collapse

> What was the cause of the agricultural issues?

Weather. Possibly weather + water.

> How do we know there isn't a solution?

There is, we can't afford it: Hurricane-proof greenhouses for all crops everywhere.

> We do rationing, we curb new births,

How? Like managing COVID, only for food and sex this time? OMG! You'll have civil war in every city, town and village, which will cripple production even further => faster collapse.

> we find alternate ways to produce

Yeah, it's called subsistence agriculture [1] after 99% of the population dies of famine and crime (killed for their food).

> we optimize the system [...]

What system? There is no system anymore.

> we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem

Guns, we mobilize lots of guns. Those damned farmers won't work hard enough! We'll make them work!

Let me paint a more clear picture:

Adverse weather events => lots of crops destroyed => news inflated scary, as they usually are => huge price increase even before harvest time (of what remains) => hoarding => less food to buy, even higher prices => more news => desperate hoarding => even less food to buy => crime for food from warehouses/stores => even less food to buy => crime for hoarded food => people killed => more scary news (for real this time) => cities run out of food => mass migration from cities to farm country => pillaging of remaining crops, harvest by non-farmers in destructive/wasteful ways => even less food => even more desperate crime for food => mass death

Somewhere in that chain, the army intervenes, which hoard food for themselves first, are unable to manage efficient distribution of food to everyone, kill and get killed by hungry mobs => more death and news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture
by nohojake | 2025-10-11 17:31:25+00:00
I’m the CEO of Noho Labs, a stealth startup in NYC.

We’re working with three major hedge funds as design partners and are now hiring two more founding full-stack engineers (ideally w/ AI agent experience) to help build v1.

Comp + equity: materially above market

If you’re someone who: * Acts like an owner, and wants to be incentivized like one * Wants to play for a big outcome * Plays team-first and checks your ego at the door * Operates structured and fast, focusing on the 20% that really matters and shipping quickly * Communicates crisply - clear problem, insight, action in every interaction * Improves every week

Reach out: hello@noholabs.ai We’re open to remote for the right candidate.
by comprev | 2025-10-11 17:32:39+00:00
When I was a contractor I had set deliverables for projects and written agreement on payments for these milestones. One project might have 5-6 milestones.

95% of the time it worked well and the milestones gave an opportunity to review progress with the client, perhaps even a change of direction. On several occasions it lead to extensions (more features) or new projects in the future.

As a self employed contractor (cloud infrastructure), who got badly burned in the past, the key was to have deliverables which were self contained but still required the next chunk of work to be of any use in the bigger picture.

The financial loss for me was only the most recent deliverable should the client decide to ghost me. I did happen unfortunately.

From my perspective, I liked working on multiple sequential deliverables rather than one final one. I appreciate that infrastructure might be more flexible than other areas and often contractors only have one final deliverable.
by gruez | 2025-10-11 17:32:52+00:00
>This is rooted in the assumption that capitalism provides what people want, rather than the worst that they will still accept.

Can you really say people "want" more expensive/unique/non-frozen food when they choose the cheap one every time? It's like with flights. People complain about how shitty flying is, but most people are also sorting by price and buying the cheapest.
by edmundsparrow | 2025-10-11 17:33:30+00:00
The most impressive software is often born out of constraint.

I recently completed development on a project called GnokeStation, an open-source webdesktop, with a story that I believe is a testament to what's possible with just a phone.

GnokeStation is a unique, ultralight, and highly modular webdesktop environment. It’s designed to function primarily as an HMI (Human-Machine Interface) for industrial dashboards, but its core technical achievement is its minimal resource footprint.

It’s fast, has minimal overhead, and is perfect for low-spec hardware like older computers and Single-Board Computers (SBCs).

The Origin Story: Coded on an Infinix The reason GnokeStation is so resource-efficient is because I developed and managed the entire code pipeline using nothing but an Infinix Hot 12 Play phone in a rural Nigerian village.

This meant writing, debugging, testing, and managing versions without access to a traditional IDE, a powerful laptop, or reliable power infrastructure. It was a true exercise in constraints-driven development.

The project shows that sophisticated software doesn't require a high-end setup. It demonstrates the immense power and utility of mobile devices as standalone development platforms, even for complex web desktop environments.

The Mission of Accessibility My goal with GnokeStation is to champion accessibility. By being ultra-light and browser-based, it lowers the barrier to entry for users worldwide who have limited access to high-end computing or stable, high-speed internet. It's a decentralized solution built to run efficiently anywhere.

I invite anyone interested in web desktop tech, open-source projects, or constraints-driven development to check it out.

Next phase - I've got more apps rolling in.

Live Demo: https://GnokeStation.netlify.app
by trod1234 | 2025-10-11 17:33:37+00:00
> There should be a concept....

There is. It is called ponzi, and its illegal, but in most cases its become indirect enough in the consequences without proper guard rails/accountability that its now allowed by most publicly traded business today (through clever deception).

Generally, it involves three phases:

1st: Front-loaded benefits in CapEx funding meeting customer/investor expectations regardless of cost.

2nd: Inflection point of momentum where CapEx falls off, a brief period where income meets costs.

3rd: Enshittification - momentum/acceleration reverses to the negative, failure of services as the system is continually hollowed out and cost exceeds income.

This is seen in the S-growth or S-adoption curves in business starting to become visible towards the late 1970s and progressively increasing exponentially thereafter in time.

Most companies jettison (sell/off or merge) or close down services before they hit the 3rd stage where the service objectively can be seen as unprofitable by associated investors. The ones that don't are state-funded apparatus.

This concept drives almost everything we see today in modern society and in the market there are parallels and indirect consequences fully described back in the 1950's by Mises with regards to money-printing regardless of its form (i.e. debt that is not reserve backed (Basel3), synthetic shares, paper warrants (Comex), Bonds (with reporting loophole hold to maturity), flier miles, credit card rewards, etc).

The structure and its flaws remain foundationally intractable. This is how you profit and grow bigger off destroying the market. Eventually consolidation leaves state apparatus in place of a market.

No market can compete with slave labor, which is what state-funded apparatus use indirectly through money-printing/currency debasement. Its not considered a tax, and its not given willingly. Its extracted labor.

Those that have lived through these times see the drastic reduction of options in available products that have naturally sieved to the point where shortages are now regularly occuring (for those with a discerning eye). There are a lot of moving factors, but the structure and their inevitable trends are well known structures, at least in certain circles.

In seriousness, the totality of Socio-economic collapse is more probable than a lot of other potential futures, as a result of this. Collapse has happened many times throughout history in relation to money-printing.

Always before, we were not in ecological overshoot for our population, let alone being in this state for 2 full generations. Catton/Malthus paint a grim picture of the outcomes but no one of action pays attention to these things. Its all largely drowned out by the noise of bots.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-11 17:34:02+00:00
I saw a documentary that made the case that the Twin Towers' design was compromised from the beginning. The original design called for pillars at the corners, but the designers wanted open floor plans, so the city could be seen from anywhere in the offices. (Makes me wonder if the terrorists did more research than we would think)

I'm sure there are some civil engineers in here who would just love to weigh in so now I wait. :)
Show HN: App to read things you don't have time to & send to your inbox
by thomoliverz | 2025-10-11 17:34:13+00:00
During the week I see 1000+ things I want to read but don’t have time to.

I’m also subscribed to 100+ newsletters, none of which I read, or have time to read.

So I made a product that reads the things you don’t have time to, puts them all into a personalized briefing, and sends them straight to your inbox (whenever you want).

It’s called Read Fast and you can try it here (7-day free trial): https://read-fast.replit.app

Grateful for feedback!
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-11 17:34:51+00:00
I find that analogy weak.

Picking a Linux distribution is a commitment, and if I want to change it out I have a lot of work to do, much of which is unwinding my own work that was distro dependent.

Changing out an agent setup is as easy as installing an IDE, and if I don’t like it I can go back easily. My work is not dependent on the setup - the value I get is transactional, and the quirks of each model or agent approach are not difficult to learn or live without.

All of which suggests that selling ease of use to someone like me will be pointless. I’m sure there are clueless F500 managers out there who might go for it. But a business model based on selling to people who don’t know anything isn’t very durable.
by tombert | 2025-10-11 17:35:52+00:00
The fact that they released an app in such a horribly broken state in 2023 (with such horrible UX with behavior that literally no one wants their phone to have) still says a lot about their development process and does not speak well for what they think is "production ready". They attached their name on it, they didn't say it was "alpha" or "beta", and as the saying goes, you only get one chance at making a first impression.

Again, this isn't weird, this is how everyone acts. If you got food poisoning at a restaurant the first time you went, you might not be inclined to go back to that restaurant even if someone tells you "I swear man, it's gotten better, they wash their hands now!"

This isn't a rag-tag team of people working in their basement for fun. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company and as such it's not wrong to compare them to Google or Apple.
by zahlman | 2025-10-11 17:36:34+00:00
Found via https://discuss.python.org/t/_/104294 . This thread also offers the previously submitted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41629698) proposal https://kristoff.it/blog/python-training-wheels/ , which cites my calculation re the economic value of all this bandwidth. (PyPI bandwidth use has roughly doubled again in the last two years, to my understanding.)

It'd be nice to be able to track down all the CI system inefficiencies out there, too, and the biggest culprits, along with just setting up local caches. Rather than repeatedly grabbing the same pinned dependencies for testing and building, it would be far better to just bake them into the necessary container image. (Or even just do things locally, in a way that takes advantage of local caches.)

I've previously strenuously objected to the notion that an Internet connection can be relied upon for build processes, or that it should be necessary for building without a carefully thought-out reason. I like to test by deliberately disabling the network connection, in fact. The most secure and reproducible builds will use tools and artifacts you already have, after all.
by JasonSage | 2025-10-11 17:38:15+00:00
I have to agree. My experience working on a team with mixed levels of seniority and coding experience is that everybody got some increase in productivity and some increase in quality.

The ones who spend more time developing their agentic coding as a skillset have gotten much better results.

In our team people are also more willing to respond to feedback because nitpicks and requests to restructure/rearchitect are evaluated on merit instead of how time-consuming or boring they would have been to take on.
by kristopherleads | 2025-10-11 17:38:19+00:00
That federation piece is super interesting. I'm actually giving a talk in Sweden this week about machine learning/AI training in the age of data sovereignty, and my suggestion was two-fold - better and more widespread adoption of things like Homomorphic Encryption and more federated systems that can distribute access and data in sovereign systems. This is a pretty important evolution in that direction!
by Brian_K_White | 2025-10-11 17:38:30+00:00
Can I even use a usb serial port yet after how many years? (Possibly by now but how long did it take, and does it actually work well?)

It is stupid in that it's not really any kind of subsystem, it's just a vm. VMs have their uses, but it's basically just an app.

The reason hardware such as my usb serial example (or any serial) worked on wsl1 was because it actually was a subsystem.
by prmph | 2025-10-11 17:39:45+00:00
This might be an unpopular opinion, but, apart from that 9/11 was a terrible act, I think the twin towers kind of dominated the NYC skyline in a way that was not good.

By themselves they were impressive, but, jutting out of the ground as they did, without peer, made for a jarring skyline. The fact that they did not taper and were twin made it worse.

The new tower is much better integrated into NYC skyline aesthetically. A shame I did not visit before returning to Ghana a couple of years ago.
by petermcneeley | 2025-10-11 17:40:17+00:00
Yes this is just the GPU programming model without the hw perks (subgroups etc). Im impressed if he came up with it on his own but its pretty clear from the article that he didnt.

The GPU model works because the GPU is just wide SIMD with automagical scheduling.

To apply this to the CPU might be misguided unless you use SIMD aka like ISPC.
by 827a | 2025-10-11 17:40:52+00:00
I've done three 500 mile trips with it this year, and on one of these trips I challenged myself to never disengage, except when within just a few meters of the superchargers, home, or the destination. It did it. And the other two, I probably disengaged only a couple times on the other trips, mostly for stylistic reasons ("I wouldn't drive in the left lane here, that's a bit aggressive" kind of stuff). All in all I have ~6,000 FSD miles this year I'd estimate. Day-to-day, every once in a while if the lane markers are faded or something it might take the wrong lane across intersections, but its supremely good at making mistakes safely and recovering.

Its so good that its boring now. I show it to people and they're amazed for the first ten minutes, then they forget about it. "Wait, you weren't driving? That was the car?" It just works. I've literally fallen asleep, accidentally, for a very short time (it has attention monitoring, but its not good). There's an initial moment of panic when I woke up & realized that happened, but then I was like... why? That panic felt like a trauma relic my mind has held on to from driving other cars. In this car, there was zero risk. It was no different than the 500 mile zero-interaction journey I had done the month before. It doesn't need me in the drivers seat.

The only thing it struggles with is when there's debris on the road, or potholes. It'll usually just hit it. But even this is improving; yesterday I noticed a squirrel running across the road, and the car very subtly applied the brakes, before the squirrel cleared the other side, and the car continued at its normal speed. It was exactly what I would have done; maybe the squirrel doubles-back, so you need to prep your speed to be in a place where you can brake. It might have, if the squirrel had decided to do this. I have no doubt they will iron these problems out, because a year ago the list of "situations it struggles with" would have been this entire post.

But if you're not interacting with this technology every day, you have no idea. The future is here, its just not evenly distributed. But, these things have a way of happening slowly, then all at once.
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2025-10-11 17:40:53+00:00
> we should now bet that Venezuela should expect big turmoil in the coming years

That much is obvious, given that:

- There are ongoing sanctions against the country by USA

- USA has a portion of its fleet just off Venezuale's shore, killing people in boats

- USA has an active $50 million reward for information leading to arrest of Venezuela's current president

- Current president's main rival is being internationally propped-up in the midst of all of the above, most recently by having the Nobel peace prize awarded to her

- That main rival has publicly supported US imperialism, promises privatization of Venezuela's energy resources, has called for US regime change in Venezuela, and is strongly Zionist and supporting a genocide

So, yes, Venezuela should expect big turmoil in the coming years.
by nemomarx | 2025-10-11 17:41:33+00:00
I think it's kind of a lemon market effect. I could pay 50 more for a flight but how do I know I'll have more leg room anyway? Maybe they'll just upcharge me. Same for restaurants if you're a traveler and don't have time to get familiar with the reputation.

You can go off marketing, but every place will try to present it's food as unique and well crafted even if it's premade.
by hansmayer | 2025-10-11 17:41:36+00:00
Nothing to do with ego, but you may want to check your own projections, you know how when you speak of the others, you mainly speak of yourself (Jung or Freud, not sure). No need to be bitter about not having the grind and focus to become an engineer yourself, it is after all much harder than say, earning an MBA and you should be OK with whatever you turned out to be. Not to mention that the tools themselves, were in fact built by engineers and not by the "rest of the population", like yourself. Now having said that, I am early adopter myself, was happy to pay the premium costs for my entire company, if the tool was any kind of amplifier. But the crap just does not work. Recently the quality is degrading so much that we simply reduced it to using it for simple consultation - and we only do it because unfortunately the search has been ruined. Otherwise most of the folks both internally and externally that I know using these tools would be happy to just go back to google search and SO. Unfortunately that's not an option. Also see if your second argument makes any sense at all. Maybe it comes out of a lacking math background? Firstly, you don't need two zeroes to get a zero out at the end of the multiplication. And secondly, if an average engineer is a zero, what are folks like you then? But again, it maybe just your own projections...
by kragen | 2025-10-11 17:41:47+00:00
There are a lot of levels of "not a fast PC", though.

My power budget for the Zorzpad is one milliwatt, at which I think the Ambiq Apollo3 (an ARM Cortex-M4F) can deliver 20 MIPS, roughly equivalent to a Pentium-100 or a SPARC 5. It has 384KiB of RAM. The uConsole (https://www.clockworkpi.com/uconsole ?) has at a minimum a 64-bit 1GHz RISC-V processor, on the order of 800 MIPS, 40 times as fast. Ambiq doesn't make ARM64 hardware.

My theory here (and maybe this is just the inflexibility of old age, treating my own experiences as gospel) is that there's a kind of phase transition in personal computers along the path between, say, a PDP-8 or an Altair, and a SPARC 1 or a 486:

‣ PDP-8 or Altair (≈0.01 MIPS, ≈0.01 MB RAM): self-hosted development is almost impossible; you need a big computer like a PDP-10 to compile the operating system, although the small computer is capable enough to run an assembler, a BASIC interpreter, and non-optimizing compilers for languages like Fortran. Applications like word processing and spreadsheets can be sort of approximated.

‣ IBM PC, Apple //GS, or PDP-11/70 (≈0.1 MIPS, ≈0.1 MB RAM): self-hosted development is comfortable and responsive in languages like C or Pascal. Viable applications include things like 2-D mechanical CAD, word processing, version control, and spreadsheets. GUIs are clunky because redrawing the entire low-resolution screen takes a second or so.

‣ Macintosh 512K, Sun 3/60, 80486 (≈1 MIPS, ≈1 MB RAM): mouse-driven GUIs have reached basically the same form we use them in today on the desktop. Self-hosted development is the only way to go, and higher-level languages like PostScript, Emacs Lisp, Tcl, HyperTalk, Visual Basic, and Perl are popular. Viable applications include things like VLSI simulation, 3-D modeling, and Web browsers.

So somewhere in that range there's a phase transition between "basically a peripheral of a larger computer" and "GUI workstation".

The Apollo3, being a microcontroller, is balanced like a microcontroller rather than a personal computer: 100 MIPS (with FPU), but only 0.4 MB RAM. So it has the RAM of an Amiga 500 or a Mac 512, but the CPU speed of a SPARC 5, a Pentium 60, or a PowerMac 8100. (See https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html.) My speculation is that, coupled with the much faster mass storage speeds available with NAND Flash, this ought to be enough for a comfortable self-hosted development experience. I mean, I wrote GUI apps and browsed the Web on a SPARC 5 and a 5x86-133. I suspect that the structure of the system software will have to be significantly different.

(See https://rossumblog.com/ for some examples of what people have done with small microcontrollers that are capable of running on low power.)

But the uConsole will still be on the order of 10 times faster, and consequently (if we hold the underlying implementation technology constant) dissipate on the order of 10 times as much energy. Considering that it's using conventional CMOS instead of Ambiq's subthreshold process, the ratio is probably closer to 50:1.