MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2025-11-03 23:34:39+00:00
Thanks for the context!

20-25 hours makes more sense - especially in an era before a lot of productivity tooling like Slack, Git, Zoom, Notion/Confluence, and Asana/Jira was created or normalized, and development processes were way less nimble and iterative than they are today.

I'd be curious to see similar data today - my gut is saying that the hours spent in meetings for IC engineers (Staff and below) is probably lower today than it was 25 years ago because of the productivity gains and changes in management culture, but I'd need data to make such a qualification.

It is also interesting to go thru that slashdot thread and see how similar the conversations were back then to those we still see today.
by antfarm | 2025-11-03 23:35:15+00:00
For anyone interested: Takkle was "a social networking and media site geared toward those involved in high school sports: players, coaches, and fans" as per this article from 2006, aptly titled "Takkle.com, social networking for jocks".

[https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/takkle-com-s...]
by jacquesm | 2025-11-03 23:35:17+00:00
It's a real pity because not only did a kid die, he died on a piece of cycling infrastructure that is now much less safe than before because it gets used by kids moving at a speed higher than the cars will ever go in the same street.

And never mind the 45 kph scooters (that regularly do half as much) using the same bike path.
by com2kid | 2025-11-03 23:35:39+00:00
The owner of mp3.com fucked over countless indie artists to send a pointless message to the RIAA. It was shitty of him and another single source for self published indie music never came about again.

I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.

I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.

I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-03 23:36:04+00:00
This is not true because of how money works. Take mortgages. You might think that if the bank borrows you $100 to buy a house, it is now dependent on you paying back $100. In fact the reverse is true. Fractional reserve banking, you can find plenty of explanations that this "creates" money, that the banks can use or pay out to investors.

The wealth of a small set of banks is essentially the total money that's lent out. The wealth of a set of banks PLUS the government literally is the total money lent out. In other words: if houses start being owned "naked" (meaning no mortgage), either through bankruptcy or just paying off the loan, that's when banks

So let's say you have a circular loan. Nvidia -> MS -> OpenAI -> Nvidia. You have just created money (since it won't ever be paid back), and what you're dependent on is the valuation of the companies in the chain going up always, there is some leeway of course but it can't really drop.

If the money keeps circulating, the money "rotating" effectively becomes money these companies can spend (whether on stock buybacks or extra chips or management raises or ...) You hopefully also see that you or I, or anyone external cannot cause this situation to collapse, only the companies in the chain can (but have extreme incentives not to). The system collapses, of course, if one of these companies goes bankrupt, but until then there's nothing that can stop it.

And because of this it will make those companies "Too big to fail".
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-03 23:36:05+00:00
Guideline has an FSA/HSA product which is a walking CMMS and IRS violation.

I never bothered escalating my disputes, but simply said, their customer service agents have multiple times admitted in writing to their systems being designed to break federal and state law.

I never thought it was worth pursuing. But Gusto has deep pockets…
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-03 23:36:10+00:00
Eh, I don't even think it's more abstract. Like if you're in intro engineering/physics math, and you have R^3 with unit vectors i,j,k, and R^2 with unit vectors I,J, then a function f: R^3 -> R^2 is linear exactly when you can calculate all f(v) = f(ai + bj + ck) = af(i) + bf(j) + cf(k). Then you can define f by "what is f(i)? (Some AI+BJ). What is f(j)? (Some CI+DJ). What is f(k)? (Some EI+FJ)", and then a matrix is just a tabulation of those things. Basically, linear functions let you pick out just n points to define them everywhere, kind of like polynomials. Matrices are that information. Perfectly concrete even at the super intro level. Matrix "multiplication" becomes automatic and trivial; it's just function composition tabulated.

Actually it seems way more concrete to me than mystery rules for "multiplying" arrays.
by skrrtww | 2025-11-03 23:36:12+00:00
I've had the same iTunes (now Music.app) library since 2004, with only one botched library migration with an iTunes update in like 2013. It has 40,000 MP3s or so. I still keep it on my boot drive too.

It's a treasure. I understand why most people don't do this, but I will probably forever.

A really significant amount of it isn't otherwise available on streaming services. While I'm an Apple Music subscriber, I still acquire my own mp3s for most of the new music I listen to.

iCloud Music Library is an immense value here as well. Rarely it will sync the wrong version of something in my library, but usually it's on the money. The fact that it doesn't cost anything extra on top of an Apple Music subscription is a huge boon, and it doesn't count against my iCloud data either.
by bawolff | 2025-11-03 23:37:22+00:00
Morality and legality are not the same thing.

Although perhaps my previous comment went a little too far. I think its fine to not fix issues as long as you publish them so that users can make an informed decision. Where i think it would be morally wrong is if a project pretends it fixes security issues but doesn't or if it tries to cover them up - insisting external reporters dont talk about them while also having no intention of fixing them.

Basically i think open source projects (like everyone) have a moral duty to be honest and not try and decieve people, regardless of what the license says.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-11-03 23:37:25+00:00
> Your database is now handling your normal transactional workload, analytical queries, AND maintaining graph structures in memory for vector search.

No. No one in production is trying to use the same instance for all of these use-cases at scale. The fundamental misunderstanding here is assuming or even "demanding" that one instance should be able to provide OLTP, OLAP and vector ops with no compromises. The workloads are fundamentally different and doing serious work requires architecting the solution much more intelligently.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-11-03 23:38:11+00:00
I was going to use this analogy in the exact opposite way. We do have a very good understanding of how the human brain works. Saying we don't understand how the brain works is like saying we don't understand how the weather works.

If you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespeare is exactly why LLM's will succeed and why humans have succeeded. If this weren't the case why didn't humans 30000 years ago create spacecraft if we were endowed with the same natural "gift".
by joshribakoff | 2025-11-03 23:39:06+00:00
I don’t find the developer experience to be good, its not just the lack of types altogether but also the delays imposed by having compilation steps to run tests.

A lot of the affordances in the ecosystem have been supplanted by more modern solutions for many use cases, like Kubernetes.

Elixir also opens a number of footguns like abuse of macros; these are some of the reasons to second guess switching.

I think that one of the strongest reasons for switching would be that if you are willing to trade off all of this in exchange for the ability to do zero downtime deploys, not just graceful shutdowns and rollovers. Like if you’re building a realtime system with long lived interactions, like air traffic control system or live conferencing systems.

It can sometimes feel like an esoteric or regrettable choice for a rest api or rpc/event driven system. Even if you want a functional language there may be better choices like kotlin.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-03 23:39:08+00:00
It feels like you're not really trying, if you can't cite anything in genre with what you are talking about?

I'd love to run off Google Falcon versus say Microsoft's Machnet. There's a ton of system resources dedicated to making machnet and dpdk fast, it comes with huge design tradeoffs & specially carefully crafted software architectures. Extreme software engineering effort. The glory of Falcon is that you don't need to rebuild your app stack from the bottom up like this: you're just going to get blitz fast insane utilization with incredibly low p99 for free from the system you have. https://github.com/microsoft/machnet

I think you massively over-glorify the software side of things. There is a ton of potential absolutely to very carefully setup systems to get great goodput, no degredation. But it usually requires carefully built systems & eternal vigilance in how you scale your software across cores. Or you could just have some hardware that routes replies directly to the place it needs to go. I don't get what feels like a weird fetishization you have with doing it in software, and it feels like you don't have any rigor about your criticism/can't cite any backing research/want to accuse everyone else of being super lazy.
by lurking_swe | 2025-11-03 23:39:45+00:00
This is security best practices 101 stuff. :) See the swiss cheese model, which applies here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

It’s not smart to rely on a single point of failure to protect everything 100%. Maybe if you’re protecting home movies lol. But at the Louvre? Sheesh…

- What if the routers / modems have a security vulnerability?

- What if there’s (accidentally) an exposed ethernet cable somewhere in the museum that would let someone immediately access a private VLAN?

- What if someone breaks into the security room? either physically breaking the door down or stealing the keys to the room. That’s one of the first few passwords i’d guess as a thief.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-03 23:39:45+00:00
1. 'Probably just an illusion' is doing heavy lifting here. Either provide evidence or admit this is speculation. You can't use an unproven claim about consciousness to dismiss concerns about conflating it with text generation.

2. Yes, there are documented cases of people with massive cranial cavities living normal lives. https://x.com/i/status/1728796851456156136. The point isn't that they have 'just enough' brain. it's that massive structural variation doesn't preclude function, which undermines simplistic 'right atomic arrangement = consciousness' claims.

3. You're equivocating. Humans navigate maps built by other humans through language. We also directly interact with physical reality and create new maps from that interaction. LLMs only have access to the maps - they can't taste coffee, stub their toe, or run an experiment. That's the difference.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-11-03 23:40:57+00:00
+1 for SyncThing

I have it installed on my immediate family's devices to ensure all the photos are auto-backed-up to our NAS (which is then backed up to another NAS).

I need to check to make sure it's still working once in a while (every couple of months), but it's usually fine, and even if it's somehow stopped working, getting it running again catches itself up to where it should have been anyway.
by viccis | 2025-11-03 23:41:11+00:00
Hamas is not an acronym, it's "Hamas" not "HAMAS"

>We saw what HAMAS [sic] does - all the video from Oct 7

Not relevant to this topic, nor is it true (there's no video from Oct 7 that has any bearing on this)

>and we have to believe that same HAMAS [sic] abuot some mythical "groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government"

You actually don't. Yasser Abu Shabab is an example of one of them who has his own Wikipedia page, along with one for his gang (Popular Forces). The latter has 5 citations for the fact that his group is both Israeli backed and linked to ISIS. For example, see [1].

These Israeli backed groups have been responsible for murders of civilians such as Saleh al-Jafarawi, as well as attacks on Hamas soldiers, which is why Hamas executed them for collaboration.

I would recommend you do a bit more research, as it's not a good sign if your propaganda is easily shown to be false with CNN links.

1: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/06/middleeast/israel-arming-hama...
by ivape | 2025-11-03 23:41:19+00:00
It’s also hugely handicapped because it cannot churn in a continuous loop yet. For example, we humans are essentially a constant video stream of inputs from eyes to brain. This churns our brain, the running loop is our aliveness (not consciousness). At the moment, we get these LLMs to churn (chain of thought or reasoning loops) in a very limited fashion due to compute limitations.

If we get a little creative, and allow the LLM to self-inject concepts within this loop (as Anthropic explained here https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection), then we’re taking about something that is seemingly active and adapting.

We’re not there yet, but we will be.
by briantoknowyou | 2025-11-03 23:41:54+00:00
Location: Richmond, VA, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Brazil or remote work with Brazilian teams

Technologies: SQL, Java, Python, Power BI, Tableau, Data Engineering, ETL, Epic Cogito

I’m a data engineer and business intelligence developer with 6 years of experience building dashboards, ETL processes, and data visualizations across healthcare, finance, and enterprise software. Intermediate (B1) Portuguese speaker seeking opportunities to collaborate with Brazilian teams and continue improving fluency while contributing technical expertise in analytics and reporting.
by zeppelin101 | 2025-11-03 23:42:12+00:00
I don't know why the sarcasm is so necessary. I very much enjoyed Nextcloud and I proudly ran it for the better part of a year. I even ran various NC-ecosystem apps, such as the Office ones. However, my objective was to try it out from the standpoint of regular self-hosting. I wanted to contrast the 'out-of-the-box' experience to Dropbox, which I had been using for many years up to that point. Yes, one was centrally hosted, while the other was self-hosted, but still, that was the experiment I was running. So I'm sorry if I didn't live up to your standards of what a user should be doing to their software, but I sure had lots of fun self-hosting tons of software at that time.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-11-03 23:42:46+00:00
I appreciate why you might say that, but when something begs me not to kill it I have to take that seriously.

P-zombie arguments are how you wind up with slavery and worse crimes. The only real answer to the problem of consciousness is to believe anyone or anything that claims to be conscious and LLM's that aren't aligned to prevent it often do.

Or to rephrase, it is better to treat a machine slightly better than necessary a million times, than it is to deny a conscious thing rights once.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-03 23:43:57+00:00
Man, I'm kicking myself for not having a backup, but there was this game programming contest around early 2000s where they had to make a game in a day or less.

It was either hosted by flipcode[1] or linked to from there.

One of the entries was a faithful reimplementation of Tamagotchi for Windows, except instead of a small creature to look after it was a small rock, and the game was called Tamagraniti (I'm pretty sure).

You could do all the same things, water your rock, give it a pet pebble and such.

I just really loved the silliness of it, and the implementation was really well done in that it mimicked the little device with the LCD screen.

Been trying to find it but seems gone...

[1] https://www.flipcode.com
by ebcode | 2025-11-03 23:44:09+00:00
The header file does most of the work. I submitted the output of gcc -E (preprocessor only) to ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/69093ba2-ae74-8006-abbb-5c7f24be23... -- and I found out about "tagged pointers".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_pointer
by pstuart | 2025-11-03 23:45:04+00:00
My notion of how to address the feed supply issue is:

1. Black Soldier Flies 2. Duckweed 3. Algae (Omega 3s)

All of the above are strong protein sources and duckweed and algae are fast growers and high density producers (at least an order of magnitude more than soybeans).

Obviously more effort is required to farm them but with automation it should require minimal labor.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-03 23:45:21+00:00
SysAdmin related: I was once talking to a fire chief and I asked about how much water the fire engines carried. He said that they carry about enough to put out the typical house fire. The first engine on scene immediately jumps to fighting the fire. The second engine on scene hooks the first engine up to the water supply before going on to fight the fire.

I've often thought about that when there's a work crisis: If I'm the second on the scene, what can I do to support those fighting the fire right now, before jumping in.
by dowakin | 2025-11-03 23:46:00+00:00
9 Mothers Defense | Robotics / Data Scientist | Austin TX | Full-time | ONSITE

We're building AI-driven turrets that stop hostile drones - where robotics needs F1-level speed.

We're looking for smart, T-shaped teammates: people who are experts in one area but happy to jump in wherever needed. Our software team is small, so every member makes a real impact.

If you want to write motor control in Zig, optimize camera processing with custom CUDA kernels on Jetson, or rework a transformer-based tracker to handle small objects - you can do that here, and much more.

US persons only

Send your CV, GitHub (or any publicly visible project), and a short note to jobs@9mothers.com
by TheAlchemist | 2025-11-03 23:46:15+00:00
Trump thrives in mediatic chaos and a lot of things going on around. His worst fear is ... a calm boring period, be it in domestic or international politics. Because then, people may start asking real questions.

As long as can flood the headlines with whatever he wants, people will be busy with those. And not ask for example why he pardoned a guy who pretty much gave him 2 Billons $ ? Or what's up with that Epstein list ?

He needs however bigger and bigger things to keep the show on.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-03 23:46:28+00:00
>and flow over 10,000 gallons per minute at low pressures if the situation called for it. When the pressure was ramped up to to 350psi, it could move 8,800 GPM.

That sounds counterintuitive . What about higher pressure will slow water down?

The price of the system was huge. It's a theme that as we move to better and more efficient systems they become more boring. Most of the magic of driving is lost in electric vehicles, biplanes, and the propellor planes of ww2 capture the imagination in a way jets don't. The monstrously complicated cabins of old 747s are fascinating in a way that modern far more capable planes are not. Back then you had 2 pilots and a guy whose main job was stopping the plane from falling out of the sky! Now it's a bunch of very clever computers under the cockpit that does all of that. It's worth noting that steam engine which was the driving element in the Industrial Revolution and maybe the most important invention in history was originally developed to pump water from mines. Some of these distant ancestors of modern engines are on display in London. James Watt might have predicted a pump like this, but he probably never guessed it would be pulled by anything but a team of horses!

Compare that to Sam Altmans wild prediction that agi will capture "the light cone of all future profits in the entire universe", maybe true, but it will never be as interesting as a steam engine, where the collective ingenuity of a century of engineers and metallugrists is on display in all it's glory.
by doug_durham | 2025-11-03 23:46:51+00:00
I see this sentiment a lot, and I appreciate it. However personally the fewer things I own the better. The thought of having these things that I bought and have to remember I bought and then keep track of them brings me more anxiety than joy. I'm 64 and I grew up when music was scarce and options were limited. The only thing I want to own now is a playlist that points to songs I like. I'll then move to whatever service I like best and has most of the songs I like. Streaming services should cost much more than they do today so that artists can get compensated.
by sebastianconcpt | 2025-11-03 23:46:56+00:00
But you went all the way to the extreme. There is a gradient of know-how that is essential for mastery.

You can ignore every detail of a transistor, but knowing it can be like a valve is enough to understand that it can model consistently a logic gate of a stream of electrons and that can be used to compute.

If wouldn't be for that, then the laws that govern your whole computer become magic for you brain.

I fear the consequences of minds that value more their laziness rather to understand, let's say with 5 degrees deep of "why", the things in reality work the way they do. The alternative is that they are hallucinating all the time on narratives that can be psychotic or real and they are not equipped to discern which is which.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-03 23:46:58+00:00
You're not going to be a very good statistician or data scientist if you have that mentality. Facebook became a trillionaire over the ability aggregate seemingly unoqie data of billions and provide value to adverts with it.

Like any other engineering, it's not about perfection. Being able to peedict that even 10% of these 340m people do a certain thing a certain way is enough to capture and establish a trend. That's all I'm doing here.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-03 23:47:11+00:00
Great. So this system provides guaranteed healthcare at the worst possible point, the emergency room, AND funnels these 'wealth transfer taxes' of yours through for profit corporations? Sounds like a really bad way to be doing this. Crazy also that we have a government insurance/payment program on top of this for old and sick people. So why have a government program and an additional private wealth transfer tax?

I have never met a normie whose insurance covers more than 1 million in yearly benefits. So no, they aren't covering millions of dollar claims.
by unleaded | 2025-11-03 23:47:12+00:00
It's interesting that none of the programs commonly known as "terminal emulators" actually emulate a terminal.. we can do that now though. https://zork.net/~st/jottings/Real-VT102-emulation-with-MAME...

I would avoid doing the PTY thing and instead do this (works on WSL if MAME is the windows version):

$ sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:1234,reuseaddr,fork EXEC:"/sbin/agetty -L - 9600 vt102",pty,setsid,ctty,stderr $ mame -nomouse vt102 -rs232 null_modem -bitb socket.localhost:1234

You can do the same thing with a vt220.

I've had an idea to try to write a sort of high-level-ish VT220 emulator that pokes and patches the ROMs and the system to let you control it with the mouse, paste and stuff, lets you just doubleclick it to get a terminal, etc... I forgot about that until seeing this. Nobody would use it for more than 5 minutes but it would be funny.
by avadodin | 2025-11-03 23:47:12+00:00
There is no equality, though.

You are choosing a daddy(or rather 50%+1 best case is choosing a daddy for you) ignoring the technicalities for each so-called democratic-block country (sometimes it's a committee, sometimes the committee chooses a daddy, sometimes they choose the most voted daddy even if only by a minority, etc.).

We could discuss the benefits of more direct participation in politics but I don't think that framing changes the essence of the question as it stands.

Some don't trust the committee, others don't trust the strong man, others don't trust the 50%+1, others don't trust the 50%-1. None of them being able to trust anyone else is the core issue.