MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-20 17:23:12+00:00
It's only really NixOS as far as I know that doesn't ever put bash in /bin/bash (as far as Linux distributions go). But, on the other hand, there are quite a few distros (or at least flavours of distros) which don't ship bash by default (alpine, minimal versions of most distros, and embedded-Linux focused stuff if you count it). I imagine the most common "installation" of Linux is userspace in a container (yeah I know there's no kernel there, but nobody who talks about "Linux" broadly speaking specifically cares about the kernel) and a good chunk of those will be minimal with no bash.

Bash has to be explicitly installed on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD (I think, haven't used it in a while) and probably a bunch of others. And in all of those cases (that I know of) it doesn't end up in /bin/bash once installed.

The default bash shipped on macs is so abhorrently ancient that it would be strictly better if it didn't exist because it would reduce the number of people who think bash scripts I write are broken (they're not broken, they just inevitably depend on some bash 4+ feature). Moreover, hardcoding /bin/bash as your shebang in this case will prevent anyone from remediating this problem by installing a non-ancient bash because the old one in /bin/bash will still get used.
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-20 17:24:32+00:00
They’re really going after all the jobs, eh?

Seriously though, I can’t imagine a) anyone thinking it’s wise to plop a current LLM product into a toddler’s unsupervised hands, or b) anyone assuming the teddy bear they just bought their child could be guiding them to weapons and discussing sexual topics. I think most responsible parents ‘get’ that you can’t just let kids roam free on the internet, but I think LLMs are enough of a context switch that people don’t make the connection intuitively.
by batisteo | 2025-11-20 17:24:37+00:00
> there doesn't appear to be a proper split between ~/.cache (always-removable cached data) ~/.config (configuration) and ~/.local/share

If that’s true, the title of the issue (and blog post) is quite untrue. Shoving everything in ~/.config is different than following the XDG Base Directory spec.

At least it’s one dotfile less that’s polluting my home.
by treis | 2025-11-20 17:24:41+00:00
This is and has been happening everywhere in the US except for the expensive coastal metros and maybe Chicago. What you're asking for comprises the vast majority of house that's been built in the last 10 years in my city. Dozens of 5-10 story apartment complexes with nothing bigger than a 2BR.

HN and people like the guy that wrote this article live in a bubble. There's plenty of cheap housing available in most of the country. It's people renting out rooms for $5-700 a month in a suburban house.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-11-20 17:25:20+00:00
This is a really great article. The root causes of our problems have been the destruction of affordable housing.

Even back in 2007 when the housing crisis was only just starting to become noticible and we didn't yet have a full blown fentanyl crisis people that worked closely in low income communities were hitting the panic button about the implications of the destruction of existing SROs and other low income housing. Despite occasionally building new social housing buildings, the pace of destruction of existing affordable housing was so great that the city was net losing housing that low income people could afford.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/

> “The City of Vancouver has finally acknowledged that we are losing more low-income housing than we are building, and that vacancy rates are functionally zero,” said housing activist David Eby, of Pivot Legal Society.

(Irony here is that the activist quoted here, David Eby, is now Premier of the Province. Has he built a remarkable amount of low income housing? Nope!)
by rincebrain | 2025-11-20 17:25:24+00:00
11, I think, is what happened when they wanted to push breaking changes that customers who pay for LTSC wanted to avoid for the entire lifetime of 10.

My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.

In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-20 17:25:25+00:00
Yes, it's absolutely a "death by a half dozen gunmen" situation (the phrase "a thousand cuts" doesn't really imply the appropriate level of culpability for this situation IMO).

The reason we see these simplistic narrative is because nobody wants to blame their pet favorite regulation for having any hand in it.

A great example is HOAs. Everyone wants to complain that they stand in the way of diversification of housing stock or use of land (they do). Nobody wants to address the fact that they're infinitely more prevalent than they would otherwise be as a side effect of environmental regulation and often their absurd rules were a condition of approval of the development in question in the first place.
by steveBK123 | 2025-11-20 17:25:33+00:00
The overprotective tenant laws also exacerbate the problem they are trying to solve.

Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time & eat more rapid price cuts while trying to sell it than try to be a single unit landlord in NYC.

Likewise small time landlords are going to be much pickier about who they let rent from them, in possibly discriminatory ways. It's a much lower risk than having a bad tenant occupy your unit, fail to pay rent, cost you legal fees and possibly damage unit on way out after 6 months.

A landlord is not going to take a chance on a drug addict in recovery or other higher risk tenant in this context.
by qsort | 2025-11-20 17:25:48+00:00
I'm sure this is plenty useful for less experienced people, but the "smart" hacks read a bit like:

Hack 1: Don't Use The Obviously Wrong Data Structure For Your Problem!

Hack 2: Don't Have The Computer Do Useless Stuff!

Hack 3: Don't Allocate Memory When You Don't Need To!

And now, a word from our sponsor: AI! Use AI to help AI build AI with AI, now with 15% more AI! Only with AI! Ask your doctor if AI is right for you!

It's worth pointing out that a few of them are Python-specific. Compilers can inline code, there's usually no need to manually inline functions in most languages, that's Python being Python. Which scope the function is from being important is quintessentially Python being Python.

The major gains in Python come from... not using Python. Essentially you have to rewrite your code around the fact that numpy and pandas are the ones really doing the work behind the curtain (e.g. aggressively vectorize, use algorithms that can use vectorization well rather than "normal" ones). Number 8 of the list hints at that.
by d-us-vb | 2025-11-20 17:26:22+00:00
Watterson explicitly stated that the names have no relation to the characters' personalities or philosophical views. As someone familiar with John Calvin's views and writings, I can say safely that Calvin is not much in any way similar in personality or spirit to anything John Calvin ever taught or expressed. At best, Watterson is projecting the typical libertine caricature of John Calvin as a cantankerous and disagreeable curmudgeon onto the character. John Calvin was in reality quite progressive for his time, and by all impressions did all that he did out of love for those around them in line with a plain reading of scripture. But to see him that way requires nuance that seems to be lost on the anti-religious.
by billti | 2025-11-20 17:26:27+00:00
> Also, code that compiles with older CUDA toolkit versions may not compile with newer CUDA toolkit versions. Newer hardware may require a CUDA toolkit version that is newer than what the project maintainer intended.

This is the part I find confusing, especially as NVIDIA doesn't make it easy to find and download the old toolkits. Is this effectively saying that just choosing the right --arch and --code flags isn't enough to support older versions? But that as it statically links in the runtime library (by default) that newer toolkits may produce code that just won't run on older drivers? In other words, is it true that to support old hardware you need to download and use old CUDA Toolkits, regardless of nvcc flags? (And to support newer hardware you may need to compile with newer toolkits).

That's how I read it, which seems unfortunate.
by quuxplusone | 2025-11-20 17:26:28+00:00
The URL here is "web.archive.org/sry", which I suspect is always an error page; the question is what parts of the Internet Archive are currently redirecting to that page at any given moment.

I can confirm that the Internet Archive's whole archived-books collection was throwing errors for me yesterday (2025-11-19), and today, while it's ostensibly back up, certain tranches of material are no longer available. For example, these six issues of the Saturday Evening Post from October–November 1925 are no longer available. (I focus on these because they're the ones in which John Philip Sousa's memoir "Keeping Time" was serialized, so I have their URLs handy. I suspect that there's nothing special about these six and really the entire collection of the Saturday Evening Post is lost.)

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

Also these books which existed as recently as a year ago (detected by following hyperlinks from some of my transcribed works: I'd say no more than 1 in 10 is lost now, but still, it's disturbing that any are lost):

- https://archive.org/details/vidademigueldece00pell

- https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora02boiauoft — this was Volume 2 of "Orlando Innamorato." Meanwhile Volume 1 remains available: https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora01boia

Archived-book searches right now (2025-11-20 about 12:30pm New York time) are failing with "Error details: backend_request search: The search backend encountered an exception (the FTS API request failed, the error reported was: HTTP 502)".

Reports of as-yet-unexplained losses in various areas of the archive:

- (3:48am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442021/why-my-newspaper-scans-were...

- (8:46am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442036/maigret-removed
by bayindirh | 2025-11-20 17:27:29+00:00
No, I get the polishing from normal, yet high quality paper. Think Rhodia or similar class, not Tomoe River or similar.

I deliberately polished a nib once, on rough brown paper. Not Lamy, but a Pilot Metropolitan.

You can polish a Lamy by regularly using it. It becomes evident in a couple of months, and becomes buttery smooth in a year. No special treatment is necessary.
by tstrimple | 2025-11-20 17:27:36+00:00
I'm fully managing multiple NixOS installs via CC. I set out to do it just as an experiment, but it's been working great and I've expanded usage. When I switched my desktop from Windows back to NixOS last night, the first thing I did was enable SSH and setup keys so my NAS can access my desktop and Claude Code has made every single configuration.nix change for me. I also use Claude Code to orchestrate my local LLM setup. It makes recommendation on local models and facilitates downloads when provided a huggingface API token.

My next experiments will entail using Claude Code to bootstrap some local LLM agents exposed as CC commands so not all of my system work will need to round trip to claude.ai to be completed.
by culturing | 2025-11-20 17:28:13+00:00
Hi HN, posting from an alt to keep this poetry project anonymous. I envision this site as the work itself. I often write about philosophical and historical themes that I think this community might appreciate, and there are some interesting technical details. This one is about love.

Feel free to explore, or visit here to learn more: https://poems.culturing.net/about/

Thanks

P.S. the code is on github: https://github.com/culturing/poems
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-20 17:28:14+00:00
I have a fairly Ivy-League family, including a number of teachers and professors (I'm the redneck engineer).

This guy is in a league of his own. Pretty stunning.

I would be quite surprised if "any college professor" is at the same level.

That said, I am also very much a "maker and doer." I spent my career amongst folks sort of like him, but focused on producing stuff. He would have knocked most of them, into a cocked hat.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-20 17:28:38+00:00
I kinda wonder… I mean, we mostly didn’t use the kitchen in my dorm (I only became aware of it because dummies set off the fire alarms using it).

A person might be fine, like in a typical dorm, with a microwave, microfridge, and electric kettle.

Especially if there was a low-cost cafeteria in the lobby.

People live in the city because they want to eat out, right? We should start at the realistic assumption for typical city-dweller behavioral patterns, not, like, take a suburban house and try to randomly time-multiplex part of it…
by sgarland | 2025-11-20 17:29:47+00:00
Except it isn’t nearly as fast as it claims [0]. And in real-world tests, I have never found it to beat RDS.

You can get an insane amount of performance out of a well-tuned MySQL or Postgres instance, especially if you’ve designed your schema to exploit your RDBMS’ strengths (e.g. taking advantage of InnoDB’s clustering index to minimize page fetches for N:M relationships).

And if you really need high performance, you use an instance with node-local NVMe storage (and deal with the ephemerality, of course).

0: https://hackmysql.com/are-aurora-performance-claims-true/
by rincebrain | 2025-11-20 17:30:02+00:00
The largest problem with dealing with humans is handling both good and bad faith cases.

In particular, if you can't rely on the escalation path being willing to rule a lawsuit is "bloody stupid" if you offer, say, a discount on "all fruits" and someone tries to argue milk is a fruit, then you wind up with endless escalations of rules lawyering and perverse effects.
by evanjrowley | 2025-11-20 17:30:29+00:00
The answer to your 2nd question might be Google's custom silicon: https://blog.google/products/pixel/tensor-g5-pixel-10/

The answer to your first question may simply be they want to sell more Pixel 10 phones.

The investment into custom silicon is more likely to pay off when new and exiting features are exclusive to the newer platform.
by tim333 | 2025-11-20 17:30:51+00:00
I don't buy the bullshit thing if you use a dictionary version of bullshit:

>to talk nonsense to especially with the intention of deceiving or misleading https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bullshit

like say Musk saying there'd be a million robotaxis on the road by next year in 2020. Gemini 2.5 getting the riddle wrong seems an honest mistake - a confused guess rather than an intention to deceive.

Slightly related, Hinton was amusing accusing Gary Marcus of confabulating rather than the LLMs https://youtu.be/d7ltNiRrDHQ
by parliament32 | 2025-11-20 17:31:11+00:00
> I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it

The lack of business case is the most likely culprit. "You want to put engineering resources into something that only the $100/mo guys are going to use?"

You might be tempted to think "but my big org will use that", but I can guarantee compliance will shut it down -- you will never be permitted to enable a feature that intentionally causes hard downtime when (some external factor) happens.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-20 17:31:40+00:00
"Naive google shows it saves you about 600 a month"

What does it cost? Otherwise, this is like saying I saved $100 buying a pair of shoes on sale. Property tax is a major component of most property expenses (maybe not for schools). Even dorm rooms tend to run over $500/mo. That's not cheap for most people, especially the homeless population. If we look at most mortgages, property taxes are 25%+ of a monthly payment in many cases. Even in apartments the tenants are paying this indirectly.
by f1shy | 2025-11-20 17:31:49+00:00
There are countries in the world where homeless are pretty good hidden, by means of extreme expensive welfare, or are moved away from big cities, or at least touristic centers.

I have no idea in Japan. As I was there I saw extremely poor people (deduced from cloths and lack of hygiene) I doubt they had an own house. Even worst, I saw middle-class neighborhoods that I would associate with a favela in Brazil (albeit very clean and organized, each flat was smaller than a space in Rio.
by swirljak | 2025-11-20 17:32:12+00:00
I wrote a short preprint arguing that LLM hallucinations aren’t an artifact of scale but a consequence of an “open-loop” architecture. Transformers optimize for internal coherence, not grounding. I propose an “Epistemic Loop” to distinguish primary data from latent recombination. Before the next paper, where I plan to outline a functional design for the Epistemic Loop Architecture (ELA), I’d be grateful for any critical feedback and discussion on the ontological assumptions presented here.
by bilal4hmed | 2025-11-20 17:32:42+00:00
not supported right now, but seems they might be able to make it work in the future

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-quick-share-...

To ensure a seamless experience for both Android and iOS users, Quick Share currently works with AirDrop's "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode. This feature does not use a workaround; the connection is direct and peer-to-peer, meaning your data is never routed through a server, shared content is never logged, and no extra data is shared. As with "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode on any device when you’re sharing between non-contacts, you can ensure you're sharing with the right person by confirming their device name on your screen with them in person.

This implementation using "Everyone for 10 minutes” mode is just the first step in seamless cross-platform sharing, and we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-11-20 17:32:59+00:00
Scepticism taught in schools. Demonstrate manipulation on kids and conclude that even educated, intelligent minds can get entangled when they let their guard down.

> We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.

Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.

I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.

On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.

And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?

Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.
by zahlman | 2025-11-20 17:33:40+00:00
> what can you do besides copy, modify, and return a new object?

You can directly produce a modified copy, rather than using a mutating operation to implement the modifications.

It should be noted that "return a modified copy" algorithms can be much more efficient than "mutate the existing data" ones. For example, consider the case of removing multiple elements from a list, specified by a predicate. The version of this code that treats the input as immutable, producing a modified copy, can perform a single pass:

def without(source, predicate): return [e for e in source if not predicate(e)]

whereas mutating code can easily end up with quadratic runtime — and also be difficult to get right:

def remove_which(source, predicate): i = 0 while i < len(source): if predicate(source[i]): # Each deletion requires O(n) elements to shift position. del source[i] else: # The index increment must be conditional, # since removing an element shifts the next one # and that shifted element must also be considered. i += 1
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-20 17:35:00+00:00
>People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?

No? Having a usable kitchen does not mean you cannot eat at restaurants, and surely a good portion of people who like to eat at restaurants also want to be able to cook at home sometimes, if only to save money. This is not even going into the fact that eating at restaurants is almost always unhealthy.
by rurp | 2025-11-20 17:35:20+00:00
Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.

It's honestly a tricky problem. Many of these tenant laws do cause a lot of harm and ultimately hurt renters more than they help. But at the same time there is an endless well of landlords abusing people who have very few avenues to defend themselves.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 17:36:18+00:00
> I was able to kick him out without notice.

Do you mean have him forcibly removed by the police? Or just terminate his rental agreement?

Depending on the location, there’s a difference between being able to tell someone their contract is terminated and they have to leave versus actually having legal standing to have them removed.

The tenants who abuse the laws know that they can just refuse to leave and nothing can be done for so many days. In the last case I heard of, the tenant knew this and waited until a day or two before the clock ran out to actually leave, despite being declared unwelcome and asked to leave many weeks prior.
by andrewla | 2025-11-20 17:36:47+00:00
SROs still exist even in NYC; I used to live not far from one in Brooklyn that got bought and redeveloped. At one point in NYC there was a push for what they called "student living" or something, which was basically an SRO -- shared kitchens and bathrooms, etc., but all the ones I was aware of were made into city-run homeless shelters in the 2010s.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-11-20 17:37:02+00:00
I’m the same age and also read C&H voraciously. Looking back I was (to a point) blueprinted on the kid, but mostly by virtue of being a single child, smart and alienated from most of my peers at school. I wish Susie gave me the time of day. Calvin wasn’t a role model, he was an accurate portrayal. (To a point)