MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-14 08:16:20+00:00
> On the other hand, maybe if the railways weren’t broken up the USA might have been crisscrossed with high speed rail by now.

Eh. The rails themselves are a natural monopoly in the same way roads are. It's one of the few things it makes sense to have the government build, or at least contract to have someone build, and then provide to everyone without restriction.

Meanwhile train cars and freight hauling and passenger service aren't any more of a natural monopoly than taxis or trucks. They get monopolized if someone is allowed to leverage a monopoly over the tracks into a monopoly over the rest of it, but that's unnecessary and undesirable. Separating them out allows the market that can be competitive to be competitive. Which is the same reason you don't want a tech monopoly leveraging it into control over ancillary markets that could otherwise be competitive.

There are two main reasons train service in the US is a shambles. The first is that the population density is too low, especially in the west. How many people do you expect to be riding a train from Boise to Des Moines on a regular basis? And the second is that truck drivers don't like freight rail, car companies don't like passenger rail and oil companies don't like either one, and they all lobby against anything that would make it better in the parts of the country where it could actually work. It's hard to make something good when there are millions of voters and billions of dollars trying to get it to suck.
by gschizas | 2025-11-14 08:17:29+00:00
A simple (and stupid) /time.aspx in VB.NET, because that's what was easily available:

<% Dim epochMilliseconds As Long = CLng((DateTime.UtcNow - New DateTime(1970, 1, 1)).TotalMilliseconds) Response.Write("{ ""epoch_ms"": " & epochMilliseconds & " }") %>

(you need to change "/time" to "/time.aspx" for the original HTML page to work)
by barcoder | 2025-11-14 08:17:29+00:00
MUDs taught about the real world from the confines of my bedroom. As a teenager I was giving responsibility through my guild and had to negotiate with adults from all around the world.

My main MUD was Discworld MUD which was started in 1991. I can't describe the excitement I felt on finding a game where the world continued when I was offline. Where I could go to make friends with the thrill of also making enemies.

It was the perfect place to escape to, which taught me about addiction and many aspects of myself.

My character is still alive after 20 something years and if I feel like logging in I'm sure there will be friendly faces who remember me.
by steve1977 | 2025-11-14 08:17:46+00:00
In my experience, many teams keep up with this by spending a lot of time keeping up with this and less time developing the actual product. Which, you probably guessed it, results in products much shittier than what we had 10 or 20 years ago.

But hey, it keeps a lot of people busy, which means it also keeps a lot of managers and consultants and trainers busy.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-11-14 08:17:50+00:00
The TL;DR:

> “Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and @SOUTHCOM, this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Hegseth said in a post on X.
by black_knight | 2025-11-14 08:18:31+00:00
Another place where dithering is useful in graphics is when you can’t do enough samples in every point to get a good estimation of some value. Add jitter to each sample and then blur, and then suddenly each point will be influenced by the samples made around them, giving higher fidelity.

I recently learned the slogan “Add jitter as close to the quantisation step as possible.” I realised that “quantisation step” is not just when clamping to a bit depth, but basically any time there is an if-test on a continuous value! This opens my mind to a lot of possible places to add dithering!
by blub | 2025-11-14 08:18:48+00:00
I peruse Android system code at work and their C++ code base is not designed for safety. It’s just typical C++ code as any large company would write it.

And for a large juicy target like Android, that won’t be good enough to stay ahead of the attackers long term.

Of course, tools like Fil-C or hardware-based security might make Rust vs. C or C++ moot.

Edit: your comment makes a good point. Shame that trigger-happy (c)rustaceans are downvoting everything in sight which is not praising this PR piece disguised as a technical blogpost.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-14 08:20:06+00:00
No. The idea that more bandwidth to the home=generically futuristic economy and outperformance is exactly the kind of bad central planning that makes socialist countries poor! It's the kind of mistake privatization was intended to fix (and did). The Soviets made the same mistake decades earlier when they overbuilt steel mills.

The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak.

Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.
by alentred | 2025-11-14 08:20:34+00:00
This gives me strong vibes of "The Lifecycle of the Software Objects" [1] by Ted Chiang. Next step is to put this digient AI into a Figure 03 robot [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...

[2] https://www.figure.ai/news/introducing-figure-03
by lelanthran | 2025-11-14 08:20:39+00:00
The problem with making universal assertions as opposed to existential assertions is that a single counterexample is all that is necessary to prove the assertion is incorrect or wrong.

> That's not what I'm arguing.

Okay; your argument is difficult to digest because, unlike most philosophy arguments, you neither lead nor end with the actual thesis; you present a book-length text as support for a thesis that is never stated.

> The argument is that "cogito ergo sum" is invalid, which is part of an argument against the existence of a "mind" above and beyond what the brain does in a living body. The atoms are all there is.

What's your thesis, then? "Cogito ergo sum is invalid" is hardly a thesis. Maybe you are asserting that there is no "mind" above and beyond the living brain, which will be a universal claim not an existential one.

If that is indeed your claim, then it's not a testable/falsifiable one anyway; you are going to require instead a sequence of premises that are each accepted by the audience you wish to sway, with intermediate conclusions that are likewise accepted by the audience, before you present your final conclusion based exclusively on the premises list.

A narrative is not a good way to present a philosophical argument, especially when it is a counter argument to an argument that was presented (even if only verbally at the time) in the standard logical format I described.

A better way to convince that any formally presented logic (as Cogito ergo sum was) is invalid (or unsound) is to attack the premises. It is not normal to ignore the premises of the original argument and present premises of your own.

(PS. It's been a long time since I was in a formal logic philosophy class and maybe things have changed, but they haven't (I hope!) changed so much that logic is completely thrown out the window in favour of narrative)
by jitl | 2025-11-14 08:20:42+00:00
imo if you are on a cloud like aws and using a config management system for mutable infra like puppet you are taking unnecessary complexity and living in the dark ages

> Generally speaking I think people need to be more comfortable with build packages for their operating system of choice and install applications that way. The it's mostly configuration that needs

why, it’s 2025, docker / container makes life so easy
by scuff3d | 2025-11-14 08:21:10+00:00
Even if you eliminate all of OpenAIs other costs besides inference they're still in the red. And they can't just stop training new models. That's like saying Honda can just quit designing new cars. They technically could, but it would destroy their business.

They have one method of monitization right now, and there is no clear evidence that their costs are suddenly going to decrease anytime soon. Despite claims to the contrary, no one has actually provided any evidence of a pathway to those costs magically cutting in half over the next few years.

The entire industry is being propped up by insane over investment and an obsession with growth at all costs. Investments will dry up sooner or later, and you can't grow forever.
by TrackerFF | 2025-11-14 08:21:36+00:00
You're getting a lot of flak for this, but I think it is a legitim question to ask. I have many different hobbies, and have worked in different industries, but software development / programming is sort of unique in how much people discuss it online.

My takes are:

1) There are a lot of IT workers in the world, and they're all online natives. So naturally they will discuss ideas, problems, etc. online. It is simply a huge community, compared to other professions.

2) Programming specifically is for many both a hobby and a profession. So being passionate about it compels many people to discuss it, just like others will do about their own hobbies.

3) Software is a very fast-moving area, and very diverse, so you will get many different takes on the same problems.

4) Posting is cheap. The second you've learned about something, like static vs dynamic typing, you can voice your opinion. And the opinions can range from beginners to CS experts, both with legit takes on the topic.

5) It is incredibly easy to reach out to other developers, with the various platforms and aggregators. In some fields it is almost impossible to connect / interact with other professionals in your field, unless you can get past the gatekeepers.

And the list goes on.
by benrutter | 2025-11-14 08:21:47+00:00
I beleive snowflake has its own distributed query engine, similar to say, big query.

It's a bit of a tricky comparison because snowflake, and a lot of other tools that get referred to as "modern data stack" are very vendor based. If you're using snowflake, you're probaby using it on snowflake provided architecture with a whole load of proprietary stuff. You can't "swap in" snowflake on the same hardware like you can with spark, daft, duckdb, polars etc.

That said, iirc benchmarks normally place it very similar to spark. It's distributed, so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't in the spark/daft ballpark rather than polars/duckdb.
by iggldiggl | 2025-11-14 08:22:20+00:00
> See that's what the intent system was originally designed to prevent.

> Your QR reader requires no media permission if it uses the standard file dialogs. Then it can only access files you select, during that session.

On the one hand, yes, good point, but it runs into the usual problem with strict sandboxing – it works for the simple default use case, but as soon as you want to do more advanced stuff, offer a nicer UI, etc. etc. it breaks down.

E.g. barcode scanners – yes, technically you could send a media capture intent to ask the camera app to capture a single photo without needing the camera permission yourself, but then you run into the problem that maybe the photo isn't suitable enough for successful barcode detection, so you have to ask the user to take another picture, and perhaps another, and another, and…

So much nicer to request the camera permission after all and then capture a live image stream and automatically re-run the detection algorithm until a code has been found.
by PhilippGille | 2025-11-14 08:23:23+00:00
Literally the second link in the article is "migrating to API Gateway" and points to https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/guides/

Which has this section about migration: https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/guides/migrating-from-ingres...

And this list of Gateway controllers: https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/implementations/
by anal_reactor | 2025-11-14 08:24:45+00:00
I feel like people's pride is getting in the way. On this website people want to present themselves as intelectuals, and anything that breaks this image is a big no-no. Nobody wants to watch slop, everyone wants quality content, yet for some curious, inexplicable reason that scientist all over the world scratch their heads over, most TV channels start as "The Learning Channel" and end up as TLC.

Regarding the second point, that's true, but I feel like we're focusing on worst examples instead of best examples. It's like, when I was a kid my parents would yell at me "you believe everything they say on the internet!" and then they would watch TV programs explaining why it's scientifically certain that the world would end in 2012. There's huge confirmation bias "AI-generated content bad" because you don't notice the good AI-generated content, or good use cases of low-quality content. Circling back to Boring History To Sleep, even if half of it is straight-up lies, that's completely irrelevant, because that's not the point here. The point here is to have the listener use their imagination and feel the general vibe of historical times. I distinctly remember listening to the slop and at some point really, really feeling like I was in some peasant's medieval hut. Even if the image I had was full of inaccuracies, that's completely fine, because AI allowed me to do something I'd never done before. If I ever want to fix my misconceptions I'll just watch more slop because if you listen to 100 different AI-generated podcasts on the same topic, each time it'll hallucinate in a different way, which means that truthful information is the only information that will consistently appear throughout majority of them, and that's what my brain will pick up.

> when life gives you lemons, make lemonade
by amne | 2025-11-14 08:24:53+00:00
That's like Karcher opening a megamall to sell all their offering, vacuums, pressure washers, floor washers, you name it .. and then you, Bosch, complaining you can't sell your vacuum in Karcher's megamall where all the people go.

What are you even saying?

Whereas google was letting Bosch sell vacuums in their megamall, but only if it uses Google dust filters and people buy only Google made dust filters and Bosch isn't allowed to sell their own dust filters in the megamall.
by throwaw12 | 2025-11-14 08:25:45+00:00
I am curious as well about this, we use Snowflake, but as a software engineer I want to understand how Spark/Databricks is different, what are we missing out?

How we work with data is simple, if SQL+dashboard solves the problem then we do it in Snowflake, if we need something more advanced, then code + bunch of SQL.

Pretty sure ML engineers work in different ways, but I don't know that side well
by general1465 | 2025-11-14 08:25:51+00:00
Here is the answer: https://www.motor1.com/news/774805/ford-ceo-complains-shorta...

Effectively you will either do the repair in the timeframe set by somebody from a desk, or you are not getting the 6 figure.

And I can already see pencil pushers making limits tighter when too many people would be able to fit in them. So only way to win is not play.
by mstipetic | 2025-11-14 08:25:56+00:00
I've been on some weird path of discovery of the internet and am loving it. Generating my own ambient sounds for work from freesound.org. Finding internet radio stations to stream. Music from bandcamp and https://www.nts.live/. Rediscovering RSS and building my own tooling on top of it. You just have to be deliberate and step away from the convenience of big aggregators and algorithms and there's a whole wonderful world out there.
by benrutter | 2025-11-14 08:26:39+00:00
I love this article! But I think this insight shouldn't be surprising. Distribution always has overheads, so if you can do things on a single machine it will almost always be faster.

I think a lot of engineers expect 100 computers to be faster than 1, because of the size comparison. But we're really looking at a process here, and a process shifting data between machines will almost always have to do more stuff, and therefore be slower.

Where spark/daft are needed is if you have 1tb of data or something crazy were a single machine isn't viable. If I'm honest though, I've seen a lot of occasions where someone thinks they have that happening, and none so far where they actually do.
by onion2k | 2025-11-14 08:26:46+00:00
I just find it hard to engage with anything AI-made, no matter how good

I don't think this is true for many people.

The best example is the movie industry. Hollywood was using AI (in the form of convolutional neural networks mostly) a decade ago to produce CGI effects for film. The younger versions of the actors in Captain America: Civil War (2016) was basically done with AI. No one outside of movie effects and CGI nerds really cared. They just enjoyed the film because the AI was done well.

When AI is done really well you can't tell. It's similar to good design. If something is designed well you don't notice. You only ever see bad design. Same for AI, you only see it when it's bad.

(Someone will now reply to say they thought the effects in Captain America were terrible, obviously. :) )
by ktallett | 2025-11-14 08:27:23+00:00
I have always been an offline only guy but I do see the need to build for the web. I feel small good at one thing tools are as useful as ever and can still have a place. The issue is people thinking every tool they need, use, or build, needs to incorporate the latest tech or reasoning behind it. A lot of needs have never changed, but the way we have met them for some reason has become far more complex and that is what needs to change.
by mrcsharp | 2025-11-14 08:27:47+00:00
> I still worry a bit about property authors who don’t follow the “cheap, non-side-effectful, externally cacheable” rules, though. Perhaps there are linters in property-ful languages which would help with that.

Definitely a problem when a developer goes rogue and breaks this rule. I'm not sure if there are linters that helper with this. I don't think either VS, Rider, or the .NET Compiler include any analyzers that complain about this. If they do, I haven't seen the warnings before. I generally tend to enforce this during code reviews with my team.
by alentred | 2025-11-14 08:27:59+00:00
Skeeball -> Virtual Skeeball -> Virtual virtual Skeeball

"Wow! I could've sworn I was really playing virtual Skeeball!"

--

In practice I think you would lose interest very quickly in any game should you do so. Games are carefully designed to balance the drudgery with action, and to control the complexity progression. Using AI would break both.
by dSebastien | 2025-11-14 08:28:41+00:00
This is just not true. My landing page doesn't have much if anything in common with Handy's and that was never the goal. I stated explicitly that I forked Handy for a reason, it's not a secret and I'm not ashamed of it.

Of course, most of what my app does now is very similar to Handy, but isn't it normal when you fork something? Discrepancies grow over time, not overnight. I've already implemented many things differently, and am working on features that will probably never be in Handy anyway. I have different goals and ideas.

Some people only see evil in starting from an open source project and building something proprietary. But isn't the whole point of the MIT license to have full freedom? I love open source and I actually intend to contribute back to Handy.

People who request features from open source projects might never get what they want or need if it doesn't align with the maintainers vision or if they don't have the bandwidth. Most of the time, open source software comes without any guarantees, without any support, ... Which is perfectly fine since it all comes for free. What I'm doing is building a commercial product, with actual support, and long-term commitment to my customers.

I'm a solopreneur, working hard on the side, trying to build a sustainable business. And working on a project like this for a long time without any revenue is not sustainable unless you have enough runway. I did that a few years back and don't intend to make the same mistake again (https://www.dsebastien.net/2021-01-04-20-months-in-2k-hours-...).

As an example, I'm very focused on Knowledge Management & Obsidian. Integrating first-class support in Knowii Voice AI for interacting with Obsidian is one of the short-term goals I have in mind. It's not something that would make sense to add to Handy, it's too niche. But it does make sense for my app and my customers because many of them are also into knowledge management and have been following me for a long while.

Anyways. I'll build my project, find people who want to support my work, and do my best to deliver what they want and need. Sorry if it goes against the common ideas that forking an open source project to build something proprietary is wrong, that forks should be open source and that they should be vastly different from day one or be free.
by 0x6d61646f | 2025-11-14 08:29:25+00:00
removing social media and focusing on the good parts of the internet is the best approach (and was even before AI trend)

you don't need social media, everybody as excuses as to why they're there, but none of them are real

self hosting saved most of the internet for me, from jellyfin for movies TV shows and movies to piped for YouTube

Degoogling and removing big tech from your life also helps a lot, changing from gmail to protonmail was a small change from the outside but it made how I interact with account creation and handling of my data so much more enjoyable

so I dont personally feel this way, but I dont engange with any part of the internet terrorized by AI (and human) slop
by jusssi | 2025-11-14 08:29:47+00:00
This is not a new problem. Anyone remember what booting Windows was like back in 2000? All the programs loading bunch of libraries from spinning rust, just to get their tiny, useless icon to the tray. Some would show banners as they started in the background, to remind they exist. It would take minutes from GUI first paint to all icons in the tray and system responsive again.

Btw, night mode on that site is brilliant. Also necessary, the yellow burns my eyes.
by praptak | 2025-11-14 08:32:06+00:00
"But on a day-to-day basis, if asked to recognize balanced parentheses?"

On day-to-day basis you will never encounter this problem in pure form. As the consequence the solutions are not good for the day-to-day stuff.

Even if you only are only writting a verifier (which is already a bit unrealistic), you'll need to say something more than "not balanced". Probably rather something along the lines of "closing brace without a matching opening at [position]" or "[n] unclosed parentheses at <end of stream>" which rules out the simple recursive regex approach (counter still works).
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-14 08:32:58+00:00
How sure are we that the "leak" wasn't someone decompiling it? Because if it was decompiled, then even if that post didn't happen someone else doing it was pretty inevitable.

As for any intact RSA trade secrets, I doubt any of them were all that special by the 20 year mark. A trade secret slows down innovation but it has to get pretty extreme before a software trade secret slows down innovation more than a patent. (And yes, sometimes you can build on someone else's patent without waiting for it to expire, but on average the delay to the progress of the arts is pretty big.)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-14 08:33:10+00:00
What does antitrust law have to do with "day 1"? So if Ford and GM are both already in all 50 states and then they try to divide up territory between them, that's illegal, but at the point when there were still areas one of them wasn't in, they could publicly announce a contractual agreement to not enter into the other's territory? That seems not just questionable but actively bad policy with an enormous perverse incentive.

And if you're going to say this:

> Because that's the law, like it or not.

I would ask you to point me to the text in the statute requiring the courts to do that.