MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j_walter | 2025-11-26 18:53:26+00:00
> Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation. Compare that to the Moon (1.3 seconds), Mars (up to 4 minutes), and Pluto (nearly 7 hours).

These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a response.
by uticus | 2025-11-26 18:53:50+00:00
> ...eliminating the health insurance industry and moving to some form of socialized system...

I empathize with the struggles from the hassle and bloat. But what is it about socialized healthcare that is so dynamically opposed to insurance? In my experience insurance has a lot of attributes that mimic socialized healthcare: exclusivity to actual care, (intention of) spreading risk, and very very regulated.

Seems to me insurance is "socialized health care, lite version." But I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.
by bena | 2025-11-26 18:54:46+00:00
First, what's the return on that?

You are talking about massive investments to shoot off into space never to return. Who's paying for that? The only way you do that is if you're so fucked, it's your only option and the profit in it is the leaving.

Not to mention, we need to solve the problems of living in space. Which we haven't yet. According to NASA. The space people.

And it very well could be an insurmountable problem. We do not know. We do know that living in microgravity fucks you up. We know that radiation fucks you up. But we don't even know all the types of radiation one might encounter.

> But if you get to the point where you are turning the asteroid belt into O'Neill cylinders

That right there is an example of "solve this impossibly hard problem and the rest is easy". We are nowhere near doing anything close to that.
by touisteur | 2025-11-26 18:54:47+00:00
I'm OK pondering the right use for the tool for as long as it'll take for the dust to settle. And I'm OK too trying some of it myself. What I resent is the pervasive request/pressure to use it everywhere right now, or 'be left out'.

My biggest gripe with the hype, as there's so much talk of craftmanship here, is: most programmers I've met hate doing code reviews and a good proportion prefer rewriting to reading and understanding other people's code. Now suddenly everyone is to be a prompter and astute reviewer of a flood of code they didn't write and now that you have the tool you should be faster faster faster or there's a problem with you.
by brooke2k | 2025-11-26 18:55:11+00:00
Nope. Off the top of my head, I've had serious issues (crashing, visual glitching, extreme lag, etc) running OpenMW and Minecraft on XWayland, both of which were resolved entirely by switching to X11. There have been many others too, those are just at the front of my mind because they were the most recent.

Oh, also Godot has a lot of issues on Wayland at the moment, specifically the Godot editor. I spent a long time trying to figure those out, because if I'm developing I would really rather be in a Wayland session where my DPI stuff works much better, but ultimately I resigned to just running the Godot editor only under an X11 session.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-11-26 18:55:38+00:00
- If microsoft bundles copilot to their standard office product, you become a company that pays for AI even if you didn't opt in

- Accidentally tapping the AI mode on the Google search will count as an AI search. DDG doesn't even wait for you to tap and triggers an AI response. Still counts as AI use even if you didn't mean to use

- OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have been advertising heavily (usage will naturally go up)

- Scammers using GenAI to scam increases AI usage and GenAI is GREAT for scammers

- Using AI after a meeting to get a summary is nice but not to enough to make a visible impact in a company output. Most AI usages fall in this bucket

This tech was sold as a civilisation defining. Not GPT-X but the GPT that is out now. Tech that was "ready to join the workforce" while the reality is that these tools are not reliable in the sense he implied. They are not "workers" and won't change the output of your average company in any significant way.

Sweet talking investors is easy, but walking the talk is another thing altogether. Your average business has no interest or time in supervising a worker that at random times behaves unpredictably and doesn't learn not to make mistakes when told off.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 18:55:47+00:00
I posted about why this is important for distributed systems engineering:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060907

Malloc is fine. We can and do monitor that. It's these undetectable runtime logic problems that are land mines.

In distributed systems, these can cause contagion and broad outages. Recovering can be very difficult and involve hours of complex steps across dozens of teams. Meanwhile you're losing millions, or even hundreds of billions, of dollars for you and your customers.

Someone unwrapping() a Serde wire message or incorrectly indexing a payload should not cause an entire fleet to crash. The tools should require the engineer handle these problems with language features such as Result<>.

Presently, who knows if your downstream library dependency unwrap()s under the hood?

This is a big deal and there could be a very simple and effective fix.

The Cloudflare outage was a multi-billion dollar outage. I have personally been involved in multiple hundred million dollar outages at fintechs, so forgive me for being passionate about this.
by oytis | 2025-11-26 18:55:48+00:00
IDK, to me it looks that hacker culture has always been progressive, it's just definition of what is progressive has changed somewhat.

But hacker culture always sought to empower an individual (especially a smart, tech-savvy individual) against corporations, and rejection of gen AI seems reasonable in this light.

If hacker culture wasn't luddite, it's because of the widespread belief that the new digital technology does empower the individual. It's very hard to believe the same about LLMs, unless your salary depends on it
by anon7725 | 2025-11-26 18:56:47+00:00
Growth in the PC market and internet usage had a substantial bottom-up component. The PC, even without connectivity, was useful for word processing, games, etc. Families stretched their budgets to buy one in the 80's and 90's.

The internet famously doubled in connectivity every 100 days during its expansion era. Its usefulness was blindingly obvious - there was no need for management to send out emails warning that they were monitoring internet usage, and you'd better make sure that you were using it enough. Can you imagine!

We are at a remarkable point in tech. The least-informed people in an organization (execs) are pushing a technology onto their organizations. A jaw-droppingly enormous amount of capital is being deployed in essentially a "pushing on a rope" scenario.
by rvnx | 2025-11-26 18:56:49+00:00
There is a big compliance issue as well, in many corporations, AI is strictly forbidden so employees will claim they do not use AI at all, but they do.

Medical doctors as well, officially 0%, reality ?

Also many programmers hide the truth, because it is quite difficult to justify their salary (that was priced from the pre-AI times when programming was much more difficult).
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-26 18:57:05+00:00
As a Staff+ Engineer -- Principal in a couple of weeks -- for me it's about "batteries included", support availability, and ability to hire.

Using a cloud platform means that while your needs are small, you're overpaying. Where it pays off is when you have a new requirement that needs to be met quickly.

I've done my share of managing database instances in the past. I can spin up a new RDS Postgres instance in much less time than I can configure one from scratch, though. Do we need a read replica? Multi-site failover? Do we need to connect it to Okta, or Formal, so we can stand up a process to provision access to specific databases, tables, or even columns? All of those things I can do significantly faster and more quickly on AWS than I can do it by hand.

What if a NoSQL database is the right solution for us? I have much less experience adminning those, so will either have to allocate a fair amount of my time to skill up or hire someone who already has those skills.

Need a scheduled task? Sure, I could set up a Jenkins server somewhere and we could use that... or we could just add an ECS scheduled task to our existing cluster.

Need an API endpoint to handle inbound Zoom events and forward them to an internal queue? Sure, I can set up a new VPC for that... that'll be a couple of days... or we whip up a Lambda, hook it up to API Gateway, and be up and running in a couple of hours.

AWS helps me do more in less time - and my time is a cost to the business. It's also extremely flexible, and will let us add things far more quickly than we otherwise could.

IMO, the correct comparison isn't "what would it cost to run this platform on Hetzner?" - it's "What would it cost to run it, plus what would cost to acquire the talent to build it, plus retain that talent to maintain it?"

AWS isn't competing with other infrastructure providers. They're competing with other providers and the salaries of the engineers you need to make them work.
by t43562 | 2025-11-26 18:57:13+00:00
To be cynical, what's the point? You'll get employed and forced to be a part of them by circumstances.

Your company's root priorites are probably at odds with writing good software.

One Japanese company, not going to name names, kept trying to treat software as a depreciating asset. I didn't really understand well but the long and short was that fixing things that were supposed to be "done" was bad for the accounting. New things, however were good.

How can you run a software company like that? But they did and got the kind of outcome you'd expect. Japan made the laws this way and gets software to match.
by jandrese | 2025-11-26 18:57:20+00:00
75k years of reliable operation for complex machines operating in a hostile environment is a different story. This includes organic life. You can't just bottle everything up and wake up thousands of years in the future, you will be under constant bombardment by high energy particles, micrometeorites, and the relentless cold vacuum of space with no access to new raw material or energy for almost the entire trip.

If you can make that kind of trip the question becomes why bother? You could have used the same technology (actually a much easier version of the tech since you will have access to external resources and don't need to attach enormous engines to get it moving and then stopping at the destination) to use the almost unlimited space in your home solar system instead.

Unless your sun is literally about to explode it is hard to make the argument for the incredibly difficult and long journey to a neighboring solar system.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-11-26 18:57:22+00:00
You'll find this surprising, but Suno is completely and utterly incapable of generating ambient music like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsA-jxQsx8I

It simply doesn't get it. This sort of thing probably wasn't in its training data.

The really interesting thing is that when I upload something like that track, and tell it to compose something similar, it usually gives me an error and refunds my credits.

Also, and this is far more mainstream, both Suno and ElevenLabs are totally incapable of generating anything like, e.g., Darkthrone's "Transylvanian Hunger." Music that is intentionally unpolished is anathema to them.

I could go on. There are lots. I think that they understand melody and harmony, but they don't understand atmosphere, just in general...
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 | 2025-11-26 18:57:44+00:00
TFA has a point that it should never have happened, and that CF software engineering practices are likely to blame.

But a BCNF (or 5NF or whatever) database without nullable columns wouldn't have prevented it. Formally verified code might have but that remains a pipe dream for any significant code base.

The proposed cure is worse than the disease.
by torginus | 2025-11-26 18:57:59+00:00
In my experience LLMs suck at (product) recommendations - I was looking for books with certain themes, asked ChatGPT 5, the answer was vague, generic and didn't fit the bill. At another time I writing an essay and was looking for famous figures to cite as examples of an archetype, and ChatGPT's answers were barely related.

In both cases, LLMs gave me examples that were generally famous, but very tangentially related to the subject at hand (at times, ChatGPT was reaching or straight up made up stuff).

I don't know why it has this bias, but it certainly does.
Show HN: Just-Claude: Sync just recipes with Claude Skills
by jjfoooo4 | 2025-11-26 18:58:15+00:00
A lot of Claude Skills I add are useful to human devs as well. I've gotten into the practice of keeping useful commands in just recipes, but have had the minor annoyance of keeping Claude Code up to date on what's available there.

This package automatically syncs just commands to Claude Skills, so devs can keep useful commands in one place.
by morkalork | 2025-11-26 18:58:18+00:00
It sounds like their employer is on the outs and in a bone-headed move to save on cost, is replacing the author's team and tech with some piece of crap vibe coded SaaS product.

They are expressing their (and their team's) bitterness over losing their jobs to something of such obvious poor quality.

I can empathize with this view. Seems like people's standards are a lot lower than they let on, and slop-ware is apparently A-OK at the right price point. Sad. But as the author points out, there will be legal consequences..
by lenkite | 2025-11-26 18:58:18+00:00
ON HN, just a couple of years ago, a famous Rust programmer said that it is OK to use unwrap. Rustaceans supported this position. Cloudflare merely followed the community standard.

Using unwrap() in Rust is Okay

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32385102 https://burntsushi.net/unwrap/
by katmannthree | 2025-11-26 18:58:19+00:00
If you want to go off trying to predict the cycle I’d suspect ag/weather tech. Political complexity aside it appears to be the biggest thing we’ll need to work on in the coming decades if we want to sustain the planet’s carrying capacity.

Probably more likely though to be something novel that few took seriously before it demonstrates utility. And this is the issue for QC, we already know what it’s useful for: a handful of niche search algorithms. It’s a bit like fusion in that even if you work out the (very significant) engineering issues you’re left with something that while useful is far from transformative.
by Sesse__ | 2025-11-26 18:58:36+00:00
> A single core webserver serving static files isn't going to be much faster than 1 ms per file, so you're around 1k rps. And that's assuming you files are all cached.

What “is” is this? Already in 2005, I was serving images at >3k qps on a single core of my server, without any tuning at all. Now we're 20 years later, with much faster TCP stacks and much faster cores.
by lateforwork | 2025-11-26 18:58:39+00:00
> Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy.

Lets compare to the adoption of the internet. Mosaic was released in 1993. Businesses adopted the internet progressively during the 90s, starting slow but accelerating toward the decade's end with broad adoption of the internet as a business necessity by 2000.

Three years is a ridiculously small amount of time for businesses to make dramatic changes.
by overfeed | 2025-11-26 18:58:44+00:00
> you are on the nerd algorithm and there is a sport algorithm and some others but probably like 10 algorithms not 5000 like they try to say

If you've ever tried TikTok, you'll realize their FYP will narrow you down to a highly specific nerd/sport niche pretty quickly. There's isn't a single nerd algorithm, but a whole taxonomy.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-26 18:59:41+00:00
I don't want to be all "did you read the article?" since that's against guidelines, but the text of the article (the stuff in between the graphics and ads) is kind of about exactly that.

Adoption was widespread at first but seems to have hit a ceiling and stayed there for a while now. Meanwhile, there's been little evidence of major changes to net productivity or profitability where AI has been piloted. Nobody is pulling away with radical growth/efficiency for having adopted AI, and in fact the entire market of actual goods and services is mostly still just stagnating outside of the speculative investment being poured into AI itself.

Investment isn't just about making a bet on whether an company/industry will go up or down, but about making the right bet about how much it will do so over what period of time. The scale of AI investment over the last few years was making the bet that AI adoption would keep growing very very fast and would revolutionize the productivity and profitability of the firms that integrated it. That's not happening yet, which suggests the bet may have been too big or too fast, leaving a lot of investors in an increasingly uncomfortable position.
by greenavocado | 2025-11-26 19:00:01+00:00
KeepassXC (a must-have application and dealbreaker) is still broken on Wayland.

The recommended "solution" is to edit the .desktop file to resemble the following:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 keepassxc

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973
by _pdp_ | 2025-11-26 19:00:20+00:00
The vast majority of vibe-coded apps are subpar because they're not built by experienced developers who understand proper software engineering practices.

However...

while I risk sounding like the discussions in r/vibecoding, I am convinced that it is absolutely possible to create high-quality, entirely machine-generated applications. And yes it bothers me as well because I am also invested my craft.

What I found is that the key isn't in how you prompt the LLMs but in the comprehensive tooling and guardrails you build around the development process. This includes custom ESLint rules, specific type constraints, custom MCPs, and even tailored VSCode plugins. It works. Not fully autonomously, but effectively enough that you often only need to perform a final review before deployment.

I have no doubt in my mind that the majority of software will be written by machines but only after the right guardrails are set in place - not just better models, magic prompts and fingers crossed.
by notpeter | 2025-11-26 19:01:29+00:00
This is what MacStadium does. Here's a drawer design for the previous gen intel macs:

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687e650a56916806eaaf8f62/...

You can find a bunch more detail in their related patent filings:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240397658A1/en?q=(%22m...
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-26 19:03:39+00:00
Grocery stores offer free samples and if you walk in, take a free sample, and leave, you are violating no laws, you are not morally depraved, and the store does not consider that a problem.

This is true even when that free sample has "rules" like "not for adults" on a jar of cookies.

Grocery stores often purposely price things below cost to get you in the door. If you go to your local grocer, buy a hundred subsidized Turkeys and nothing else, you have again committed no crime or moral violation even though you have explicitly cost the company money and they wanted you to buy other things.

Terrestrial FM radio and TV broadcasts have existed for decades and both provide ample case law. You are just wrong, and Google knew that when they bought Youtube.

Google also regularly reduces the ad pay out to Creators and increases their own take. Google can fuck off.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-11-26 19:04:16+00:00
I'm like 99.99999% sure that the usage of non standard characters, em dash, fancy quotes, "it's not X, it's Y" etc was clearly done on purpose from the very beginning and pushed for by various parties who have a strong vested interest in monitoring who is using AI and how it's being used.

I kneel Hideo Kojima. You saw this all coming: https://youtu.be/PnnP4sA80D8
by lenkite | 2025-11-26 19:04:40+00:00
PRC just needs to sponsor a "Voice of China" and pay ¥¥¥/$$$/€€€/₹₹₹ to "journalists" and seed the web with millions of "China is Great" articles. Make sure to have 10k "contributors" on Wikipedia too. (I think they already do this).

Also use the NPM registry - put CCP slogans in the terminal! They will come in billions of ingestible build logs.

Problem will be easily solved.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-11-26 19:05:11+00:00
> Is DWPD Still a Useful SSD Spec?

Yes.

You need years from that SSD? Buy a drive with DWPD > 3.

You are a cheap ass and have the money only for a DWPD 0.3 drive? Replace it every year.

You are not sure what your usage would be? Over-provision by buying a bigger drive than you need.

And while we are at it: no, leaving >= 25% of the drive empty for the drives > 480GB is just idiotic. Either buy a bigger drive or use a common sense - even 10% of a 480GB drive is 48Gb already, for a 2048GB drive it's 204GB.
by cpburns2009 | 2025-11-26 19:05:12+00:00
> "it does what it’s supposed to do"

That's the crux of the problem. Many proponents of LLMs over promise the capabilities, and then deny the underperformance through semantics. LLMs are "reliable" only if you're talking about the algorithms behind the scene and you ignore the marketing. Going off the marketing they are unreliable, incorrect, and do not do what they're "supposed to do".
by gtowey | 2025-11-26 19:05:17+00:00
It's the engagement fallacy all over again.

Companies are shoving AI into everything and making it intrusive into everyone's workflow. Thus they can show how "adoption" is increasing!

But adoption and engagement don't equal productive, useful results. In my experience it simply doesn't and the bottom is going to fall out on all these adoption metrics when people see the productivity gains aren't real.

The only place I've seen real utility is for coding. All other tasks, such as Gemini for document writing, produces something that's about 80% ok, and 20% errors and garbage. The work of going back through with a fine toothed comb to root out the garbage is actually more work and less productive than any simply writing the darn thing from scratch.

I fear that the future of AI driven productivity is going to push a mountain of shoddy work into the mainstream. Imagine if the loan documents for your new car had all the qualities of a spam email. It's going to be a nightmare for the administrative world to untangle what is real from the AI slop.
by motbus3 | 2025-11-26 19:05:24+00:00
> Somehow, I need to keep the tech coasting in its last days while migrating all the data that I can.

I mean. What they are going to do if your time expires? Give you a bad evaluation because they didn't plan the change correctly?

But something tells me your company might be in a much worse situation than you might know. They might just doing cost cuts everywhere to stay afloat. Or maybe they are just greedy too...
by amulyabaral | 2025-11-26 19:06:01+00:00
In 2021 I bought 12 different types of printing blanks (iirc it cost $150 for everything) of various fits, gsm and fabrics to test my preferences and then stuck with the tshirt I preferred the most. Donated/worn out the rest, and only purchased the one I liked moving forward. I've been lucky with other purchases but those were also guided by gear recommendations from niche subreddits and picking whatever was on discount among them. And because I buy them on a discount, it's usually not THAT big of a hit to the pockets after reselling them if I don't like them for whatever reason (other than durability which there's no getting around to. seams, stitching, materials etc are a good tell, however).

There's always some randomness, for example I once had to rush to H&M for an emergency blazer when I showed up to an university event in a tshirt and the Queen of Denmark arrived. I got a bit drunk that evening but I remember I walked home in the evening without it.