MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pksebben | 2025-11-26 15:55:55+00:00
Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure.

I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take.

Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the internet, so were processing chips, so was software. This is the power of the byte - it shrinks progressively and multiplies infinitely - thus making it inherently diffuse and populist (at the end of the day). It's not the relationship to our cultural standards that causes this - it's baked right into the structure of the underlying system. Computing systems are like sand - you can melt them into a tower of glass, but those are fragile and will inevitably become sand once again. Sand is famously difficult to hold in a tight grasp.

I won't say that we should stop fighting against the entrenchment of powers like OpenAI - fine, that's potentially a worthy fight and if that's what you want to focus on go ahead. However, if you really want to hack the planet, democratize power and distribute control, what you have to be doing is working towards smaller local models, distributed training, and finding an alternative to backprop that can compete without the same functional costs.

We are this close to having a guide in our pocket that can help us understand the machine better. Forget having AI "do the work" for you, it can help you to grok the deeper parts of the system such that you can hack them better - and if we're to come out of this tectonic shift in tech with our heads above water, we absolutely need to create models that cannot be owned by the guy with the $5B datacenter.

Deepseek shows us the glimmer of a way forward. We have to take it. The megacorp AI is already here to stay, and the only panacea is an AI that they cannot control. It all comes down to whether or not you genuinely believe that the way of the hacker can overcome the monolith. I, for one, am a believer.

0 - https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
Show HN: Local Notes History – Privacy-first Notes manager
by alohaTool | 2025-11-26 15:56:19+00:00
I built a notes history manager that stores everything locally in your browser (IndexedDB). No server, no tracking, no accounts.

Features:

Search through your notes history Tag and organize notes Version history with visual diffs Optional password encryption Dark/sepia themes Export/import your data

It's just a single HTML file (~30KB), so you can download it and run it locally, or use it at https://anan.guru I made this because I wanted notes history on my work machine without installing software or sending my data to the cloud. Figured others might find it useful too. The UI is inspired by Swiss design principles – clean, functional, minimal. Open to feedback!
by paddleon | 2025-11-26 15:56:29+00:00
Just imagine the incalculable wealth if you could store the energy of the sun in, say, plants, which would release the fresh mist during the night, build the health of the soil, and enable mobile life forms to carry the energy around to move it to other locations.

North Africa was the breadbasket of Rome, filled with life and water. Then we turned it into a desert.
by acedTrex | 2025-11-26 15:56:31+00:00
I consider the devaluation of the craft to be completely independent from the professional occupation of software.

Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling. People that I do not consider smart enough or to have put enough work in to output the things that they have nor do they really understand it themselves.

It is of course the new reality and now we all have to go find new markers/things to judge peoples output by. Thats the devaluation of the craft itself.

For what its worth, this devaluation has happened many times in this field. ASM, Compilers, managed gc languages, the cloud, abstractions have continually opened up the field to people the old timers consider unworthy.

LLMs are a unique twist on that standard pattern.
by jabl | 2025-11-26 15:56:51+00:00
> And even with perfect insulation, you will loose approximately 30 to 40% of heat in your piping.

At least here in Finland the norm is losses in the range of 5-20%, with the upper end of the scale for smaller scale networks with smaller diameter piping and low flow rate. In the larger cities losses are closer to the low end of that scale.

In the summer when the consumption is very low (essentially only hot tap water production) losses can rise up to 50%.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-26 15:57:00+00:00
This has been suggested before for a permanent station "on" Venus, floating in its atmosphere.

The atmosphere is caustic, but that's just a design material issue. By maintaining a positive pressure, small punctures would just be a loss to O2 supplies; crew wouldn't need any special safety equipment to patch the holes.

Energy could be obtained via solar, chemical engines, or both. Temperature could be controlled by hovering at a spot near the day/night horizon; since the day sid is too hot and the night side too cold, there exists a Goldilocks region.

Venus is generally closer than Mars, with a weak magnetic field that would help reduce radiation (along with the atmosphere).
by grafmax | 2025-11-26 15:57:35+00:00
> They are Russian propaganda, Mearsheimer most notably. His books are financed by the Russian government.

The closest thing I could find about this was that in one of his books he acknowledges partial financing of this one book from a small prize from a Russian internet forum. That’s all I could find. Chomsky and Sachs supposedly fall under this umbrella too, according to you. Presumably criticizing American foreign policy is equivalent to Russian propaganda in your view.

Nor are any of the conspiracy theories you attribute to them something I could find evidence of.

My point there in my comment about these three holding these views was that this isn’t simply Russian fake news. It’s held by some reputable scholars as well. Your response is to claim these scholars too are Russian propagandists, bolstering your case with outright fabrications.

The US leadership openly refers to Ukraine as a proxy war. I do think it’s worth listening to critics of US foreign policy in that context, and not limiting our information diet to European politicians.
by novia | 2025-11-26 15:57:35+00:00
My source was this article which broke the RealPage story three years ago:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

> For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.

...

> Apartment managers can reject the software’s suggestions, but as many as 90% are adopted, according to former RealPage employees.
by aembleton | 2025-11-26 15:57:45+00:00
If you've already got uBlockOrigin then you can add this to it instead of another extension. Add these filters:

youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(max-width:265px; !important;) youtube.com##.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title:style(display:inline; !important;)
by rcarr | 2025-11-26 15:57:59+00:00
The thing is, it is not 2007/2008 any more. The US government is holding record amounts of debt and countries around the world are now trying to become independent of it. This includes its bond markets on which the dollar relies upon to give it its reserve currency status, which in turn is what gives it its power to print money and bail industries out. If something happens that requires Big Tech to be bailed out and international bond holders decide the US is no longer reliable, it could very well end up triggering the collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the downfall of the US as we know it.
by friendzis | 2025-11-26 15:58:30+00:00
Query: LibraGPT, create a plan for my trip to Italia

Response: Book a car at <totally not an ad> and it will be waiting for you at arrival terminal, drive to Napoli and stay at <totally not an ad> with an amazing view. There's an amazing <totally not an ad> place that serves grandma's favorite carbonara! Do you want me to make the bookings with a totally not fake 20% discount?
by rokumar510 | 2025-11-26 15:59:29+00:00
OP here.

I've been consulting for Series B startups and kept running into the same wall: we needed to see where money was being wasted in the cluster, but installing tools like Kubecost or CastAI required a 3-month security review process because they install persistent agents/pods.

So I built a lightweight, client-side tool to do a "15-minute audit" without installing anything in the cluster.

How it works:

It runs locally using your existing kubectl context (read-only).

It grabs kubectl top metrics (usage) and compares them to deployments (requests/limits).

It calculates the cost gap using standard cloud pricing (AWS/GCP/Azure).

It prints the monthly waste total directly to your terminal.

Privacy: Pod names are hashed locally (SHA256) before any output. The analysis logic runs entirely on your machine (or client-side in the web viewer). No data leaves your laptop unless you explicitly choose to share it.

It's MIT licensed. I'd love feedback on the waste calculation logic—specifically, is a 20% safety buffer on memory requests too aggressive for production workloads?

Repo is here: https://github.com/WozzHQ/wozz
by Aurornis | 2025-11-26 15:59:41+00:00
Unfortunately that’s not true any more. TRT over prescribing is a major problem right now.

Studies of TRT patients have even shown that 1/4 of TRT patients may not have had their testosterone levels measured before being prescribed TRT: (Source https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6406807/ ) Completely unacceptable given how cheap testosterone testing is, but its happening.

TRT clinics have also become a big business. Their business model relies on prescribing TRT to anyone and then charging them monthly or quarterly to continue receiving those prescriptions, which as the parent comment noted become physically necessary after TRT causes the testes to atrophy.

The trick the clinics are using now is “diagnosing by symptoms”. They have a long list of “symptoms of low T” and the patient is basically prompted to check off enough boxes to justify TRT. It’s the same model as the medical marijuana card businesses where you can go in and the doctor will “find” a reason to give you the prescription.

It’s a real problem when combined with social media influencers who tell people that everything is a symptom of low testosterone and TRT will fix it.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-26 15:59:42+00:00
> There are a bunch of people from FB at OpenAI, so they could staff an adtech team internally I think

Well they have Fidji, so she could definitely recruit enough people to make it work.

> with having "higher" ambitions (at least not the typical ads machine ala FB/Google)

Everyone has higher ambitions till the bills come due. Instagram was once going to only have thoughtfully artisan brand content and now it's just DR (like every other place on the Internet).

> At least the description is not at all about building an adtech platform inside OpenAI, it's about optimizing their marketing spend (which being a big brand, makes sense).

The job description has both, suggesting that they're hedging their bets. They want someone to build attribution systems which is both wildly, wildly ambitious and not necessary unless they want to sell ads.

> I bet they could wire up Meta ads platform to buy on ChatGPT, saving themselves a decade of building a solid buying platform for marketers.

Wouldn't work. The Meta ads system is so tuned for feed based ranking that I suspect they wouldn't gain much from this approach.
by phiand | 2025-11-26 15:59:44+00:00
If you've ever built an accounting integration, you already know the truth: it’s expensive, slow, brittle, and you end up rebuilding the same thing.

At Bluebook, we've spent years in the trenches integrating systems like QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct and more. And the deeper we went, the clearer it became:

Solving accounting integrations can’t be a one-team job. It takes a community.

That's why we're exploring open-sourcing our integrations.

If you’re in the community wrestling with the same integration pain, building, maintaining, or depending on accounting APIs, we’d really love to speak with you. Please ping us.
by perelin | 2025-11-26 16:00:08+00:00
As a GLP-1 user im really surprised that this is newsworthy. The mechanism of how these drugs lead to weight loss is appetite reduction. On GLP-1s -> less appetite, off GLPS-1s -> more appetite. Given the general health benefits that are being observed with GLP1-s the only reason to get off them is costs imo. They are absurdly expensive. Hope this will change in the next 10 years with patents running out and generics being available for cheap. The actual cost of production seem to be quite low. Gray/black market has them available for around a tenth of the otc price.
by notTooFarGone | 2025-11-26 16:00:14+00:00
people care if there is noone able to fix the software or adjust it.

Think of old SAP systems with a million obscure customization - any medium to large codebase that is mostly vibe coded is instantly legacy code.

In your hole analogy: People don't care if a mine is dug by a bot or planned by humans until there is structural integrity issues or tunnels that are collapsing and nobody is able to read the map properly.
by lkey | 2025-11-26 16:02:17+00:00
The body yearns for its prior homeostasis. This is true when you lose weight with a strict diet. It's true when you lose it using a medication.

The struggle doesn't stop when you stop losing. My personal experience was that it takes about 2 years for the new 'normal' to kick in. (I lost 60lbs when I was in my early 20s and kept it off until today. The 'after' period was as taxing as the 'losing' period, but in a different way)

At that point only can you 'relax' a bit around your body's cravings for calories.

This has already been studied extensively:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5764193/

It's not the worst thing in the world to be on a medication for a couple years rather than a few months, but long-term study of this class of drugs is certainly warranted and necessary.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-26 16:02:26+00:00
Even with good latency, most of my connection was taken up by TCP retransmissions at that bandwidth because of an over-eager (standard) SSH client. I can't imagine the TCP stack on an Amiga doing much better in the same scenario.

Not exactly the same scenario of course, but I'd expect you'd need a custom SSH client willing to wait with small enough packets to keep the latency acceptable.
by silveraxe93 | 2025-11-26 16:02:38+00:00
2025 US defense budget is $849.8 billion[1].

Had a look and:

>In total, OpenAI aims to invest approximately $1.4 trillion in computing infrastructure – encompassing Google Cloud, Nvidia chips, and data center expansions.

Huh yeah fair. That's more than the yearly defense budget. Absurd. Though I'm sure it's not _yearly_

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-26 16:02:39+00:00
I'm sorry, but the idiocy that was crypto-hype can't be dismissed this easily. It's hard to make a prediction on AI because things are moving so fast and the technology is actually useful, so I wouldn't fault anyone for being wrong in retrospect. But when it comes to NFTs: if you bought into that stuff you are either a sucker or a scammer and in both cases your future opinions can be safely discarded.
by DennisP | 2025-11-26 16:02:41+00:00
To wit: my brother has never worked as a developer and has just a limited knowledge of python. In the past few days, he's designed, vibe-coded, and deployed a four-player online chess game, in about four hours of actual work, using Google's Antigravity. I looked at the code when it was partly done, and it was pretty good.

The gatekeepers wouldn't consider him a hacker, but that's kinda what he is now.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-11-26 16:02:41+00:00
> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality.

I think, by definition, Luddites or neo-Luddites or whatever you want to call them are reactionaries but I think that's kind of orthogonal to being "progressive." Not sure where progressive comes in.

> All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this.

I think that's maybe part of the problem? We shouldn't try to automate the busy work, we should acknowledge that it doesn't matter and stop doing it. In this regard, AI addresses a symptom but does not cure the underlying illness caused by dysfunctional systems. It just shifts work over so we get to a point where AI generated output is being analyzed by an AI and the only "winner" is Anthropic or Google or whoever you paid for those tokens.

> These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

I don't believe for a second that a gaggle of tumblrinas are more harmful to society than a single Sam Altman, lol.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-26 16:03:20+00:00
> It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads.

Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-11-26 16:03:58+00:00
Open source library development has to follow very tight sets of style adherence because of its extremely distributed nature, and the degree to which feature development is as much the design of new standards as it is writing working code. I would imagine that it is perhaps the kind of programming least well suited to AI assistance.

AI speeds me up a tremendous amount in my day job as a product engineer.
by randyTriptalker | 2025-11-26 16:04:00+00:00
I like to build psychological tests, but they tend to pigeonhole you into a type, which is static. I wanted to build one that would measure how people change from day to day. Emisary is a 10-dimensional metric (not a diagnostic test) that describes not what you ARE, but how you're perceived by others.

As a use case for this, I built this site, which prompts users to write about pressing, top of mind moments from their lives and then analyzes them to provide a response to how they are likely perceived by others.

These pointillistic impressions are collated into personality trend reports. It's built as a SAAS, but if you sign up with promo code 'Seriously?' you can use it free for a year. Would be interested in better use cases of this underlying metric. Thx.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-26 16:04:06+00:00
The housing problem is a lot like the medical problem but with a 30-50yr head start to the regulatory capture.

You've got what was at one point a broadly accessible necessity, various degrees of government subsidy and market intervention, a bunch of ancillary industries trying to get their place on the coattails enshrined in law, etc, etc. Then that feedback loop was let to run for a couple generations and you get the current shit.

And it can't easily or promptly be cut back because it's such a huge fraction of commerce (slavery was 12% gdp in its day for comparison) that so many people would take a haircut that you'd start a war if you tried to do anything decisive. But on some level you have to, because to quote Tucker Carlson. "there's more to a national economy than real-estate and high finance" (specifically selected to be inflammatory, not like he's anywhere near the only one saying this).
by tasty_freeze | 2025-11-26 16:04:28+00:00
I learned to code in the late 70s on computers using BASIC, then got into Z80 assembly language. Sure, the games were wrote back then were nothing like today's 10GB, $100M+ multi-year projects, but they were still extremely exciting because expectations were much lower back then.

Anyway, the point I'm getting to was it was glorious to understand what every bit of every register and every I/O register did. There were NO interposing layers of software that you didn't write yourself or didn't understand completely. I even wrote a disassembler for the BASIC ROM and spend many hours studying it so I could take advantage of useful subroutines. People even published books that had that all mapped out for you (something like "Secrets of the TRS-80 ROM Decoded").

Recently I have been helping a couple teenagers in my neighborhood learn Python a couple hours a week. After installing Python and going through the foundational syntax, you bet I had them write many of those same games. Even though it was ASCII monsters chasing their character on the screen, they loved it.

It was similar to this, except it was real-time with a larger playfield:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/1g6sd5q/way_ba...
by Argonaut998 | 2025-11-26 16:04:43+00:00
It’s no different from people who undergo gastric bypass surgery. Those with food addictions/habits manifest them elsewhere such as gambling, or if they are seriously addicted, they continue to eat which bursts their band.

My wife is back devouring cookies after being on mounjaro for 4 months. Thankfully she lost most weight all by herself so wasn’t totally reliant on the medication. But it’s crazy how noticeable the difference of one’s eating habits when on and off it.
by jeffbee | 2025-11-26 16:05:02+00:00
Yeah I mean I don't know how to tell you this but that's not a source. Rental managers leave units vacant all the time, hoping for an unrealistic price. It's certainly possible and even consistent with those claims that realpage clients were no worse than general property managers in this regard. They may have even been more willing to accept lower prices based on the realpage recommendations.
by loudmax | 2025-11-26 16:05:33+00:00
I find it baffling how bad Netflix's recommendation engine is. I can understand YouTube's priorities being skewed toward slop because their business model is delivering ads. It's not surprising that you have to fight the algorithm to find worthwhile content among the garbage on YouTube.

Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.

When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the additional household plan. What struck me was that the user interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads. We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a few dollars more for the non-ads version.

In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet. If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the perverse incentives are a catastrophe.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-26 16:05:50+00:00
You could just... make a subreddit for it, right? Youtube videos still have URLs that can be linked to from anywhere.

On your personalized level: Don't let the algorithm work against you; instead, help it work for you. If you're being inundated with NBA videos and want fewer of them, then pick one or more of them and declare that you're "Not interested." This slows the flood of any over-abundant topic.