MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by madars | 2025-11-23 18:32:20+00:00
Good background reading/watching - Terence Tao's "The Notorious Collatz conjecture" talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2p5eMWyaFs Slides: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/co...

I especially like how he highlights that Collatz conjecture shows that a simple dynamical system can have amazingly complex behavior; also 3n-1 variant has two known cycles - so "any proof of the Collatz conjecture must at some point use a property of the 3n+1 map that is not shared by the 3n-1 map." And this property can't be too general either - questions about FRACTRAN programs (of which Collatz conjecture is a special case) can encode the halting problem.

If you haven't seen it, FRACTRAN itself is amazing - https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP210-s23/madMath/Conway87.... and the paper is pure joy to read.
by lukan | 2025-11-23 18:32:43+00:00
"and he most likely made the choice that he felt was the least bad."

The least bad for him.

"mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny"
by IAmNotACellist | 2025-11-23 18:33:40+00:00
A more interesting question to me (and one where MSFT employees here would have some insight) is to what degree is Windows' recent ABYSMAL fucking quality the result of AI, outsourcing, or bad management? You can also feel the difference in healthy employees vs. unhealthy, when you switch between something like VSCode (polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, consistently improves) and Explorer (paleolithically slow, unstable, buggy, crashy, the worst version is always the latest).
by qgin | 2025-11-23 18:33:56+00:00
Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.

Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
by toast0 | 2025-11-23 18:33:57+00:00
You can't see everything from your own connection, but you can see a lot.

Take some pcaps of downloads that don't work. See if there's some common thing going on. Are you getting packets slowly with minimal loss or are there many missing packets? Does it seem like a path MTU issue [1]? Is the RTT reasonable?

Traceroutes from your side aren't the most helpful, but see what's the same and different between download IPs that work well and those that don't. If we assume congestion is from the internet to you, traceroutes from the download servers that don't work would be most useful, but that's hard to get. Sometimes you can find a hosting provider with test download urls and a looking glass, which can be pretty helpful if that's what you're experiencing.

Definitely look at ipv4 and ipv6. It's pretty common to get different routing between the same two endpoints on v4 and v6, so you get more debugging.

If it is a routing problem, be sure you're testing same IPs for download between native and VPN, if you download by hostname and the DNS resolves differently, try both IPs both ways... maybe you're just getting poor selection from DNS which can be addressed in different wayss. If your native DNS always gives you cross country servers and your VPN is local and gets local servers, there you go.

But if you do figure out the problem, you also need to find a way to escalate. Chances are phone support isn't going to be super helpful. Explore reddit to see if people get results there, find out what the replacement for dslreports is, etc.

Edit to add: when you do reach out, you want to share a concise summary and easy to repeat test; not so much all the research you did behind it. But ... that test should include multiple sources for the download or support will say it's a single site issue and close the ticket.

[1] I always blame PMTU, what does my test here show http://pmtud.enslaves.us/ If you don't get OK in all the boxes, that could be part of the problem... But that's usually slow start, not slow throughput after starting.
by varispeed | 2025-11-23 18:34:17+00:00
The toothbrush analogy still treats this like a question of personal trust. The real problem is that digital ID systems don’t rely on coercion. They rely on pleasure. Huxley saw this coming: people end up liking the structure that controls them, because it rewards compliant behaviour.

That’s the danger here. Not some cartoon dystopia on day one, but a system that trains people to associate state and corporate approval with comfort.

- You behaved correctly, here’s smoother access to services.

- You kept your “risk score” low, enjoy a discount.

- You shared more data, here’s a fast-track queue or a tax perk.

It’s not a boot on the neck. It’s a pat on the head.

And the public will flock to it, because it’s painless and convenient. Until it isn’t. These systems don’t reset when the government changes. They persist. The next administration can inherit a ready-made apparatus for mass categorisation, movement tracking, sanctions and exclusion. A list of “people who said X, lived at Y, travelled to Z” becomes a single query.

That’s why the UK context matters. The British state already leaks data, already sells access, already outsources core functions to corporations with zero accountability. Give them a unified identity spine and they won’t need to push you into a dystopia. People will march into it smiling, because it’ll start with freebies and frictionless services.

The risk isn’t today’s government. It’s the one after, or the one after that, inheriting a machine built for total visibility. That’s the part everyone pretending this is just “a matter of trust” refuses to acknowledge.
by time4tea | 2025-11-23 18:34:41+00:00
Been saying this for years!

All the security theatre!

False urgency is red flag when it comes to emails and sms.. I dont see why people don't see the same when it comes to dependency alerts.

The vast vast majority of alerts are totally useless, when it comes to your actual deployed system, unexploitable and irrelevant.

Rushing to update causes make-work, churn and loss of focus on the real.

Don't get me wrong, I love secure systems, but dependency theatre doesn't make it.

Very very occasionally, you'll get a high priority signal, and then yes act on it immediately. Your deployment systems should be designed so that this is just another release. No expedited short cuts, just another day.

Reducing dependencies, defense in depth, validation, type-safe, null-safe languages etc all good.. endless dependabot PRs with no understanding of the reason or impact, bad.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-11-23 18:34:54+00:00
I currently have to use macOS for work and despite it supporting minimizing windows (which Gnome does not) I almost never use it. Part of the reason is how minimized windows are unintuitive on macOS but part of the reason is also that if I don't currently need a window I will likely just put the one I need on top of it, or move to the desktop where the one I need it.
by simonw | 2025-11-23 18:35:02+00:00
Why is this post published in November 2025 talking about GPT-4?

I'm suspicious of their methodology:

> Open DevTools (F12), go to the Network tab, and interact with their AI feature. If you see: api.openai.com, api.anthropic.com, api.cohere.ai You’re looking at a wrapper. They might have middleware, but the AI isn’t theirs.

But... everyone knows that you shouldn't make requests directly to those hosts from your web frontend because doing so exposes your API key in a way that can be stolen by attackers.

If you have "middleware" that's likely to solve that particular problem - but then how can you investigate by intercepting traffic?

Something doesn't smell right about this investigation.

It does later say:

> I found 12 companies that left API keys in their frontend code.

So that's 12 companies, but what about the rest?
by blitz_skull | 2025-11-23 18:35:23+00:00
As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.

But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.
by Legend2440 | 2025-11-23 18:35:59+00:00
You see this happening right now with LLMs. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc are incredibly worried about being disrupted. But all they can really do is try to shoehorn AI into their existing products (OSes, search, social media), which is a difficult sell to their existing customers.

Ultimately, LLMs will probably find their place in a new product category instead.
by mbreese | 2025-11-23 18:36:42+00:00
Thank you for this.

So, basically -- it's a method for the MCP Server to display a UI element to the user allowing the user to perform some kind of action. Current, this UI will be an HTML iframe.

I think I got confused by their barchart example. I thought this would have been just as easily supported by the MCP server sending back a PNG/PDF of a barchart for the main interface to display (I also generally think of barcharts as static content). But, the idea of adding specific user interaction elements (buttons) helps to make the concept more clear to me.
by GeekyBear | 2025-11-23 18:37:19+00:00
> Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company.

The Zune wasn't consumer tech?

Windows 95 was definitely consumer tech.

Windows XP was about making the Windows NT line accessible for home users going forward.

Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
by attila-lendvai | 2025-11-23 18:37:20+00:00
back in the day when we wrote enterprise bullshit in common lisp (!), we had put together a proof of concept where we used delimited continuations to write business processes.

business processes were written in basically full common lisp with very few limitations, and with a few extra primitives to use (and 10x slower due to being interpreted, but that didn't matter at all). when a process reached a point where it was waiting for some external event (e.g. displaying a GUI for a user and waiting for their feedback, or sleeping until a deadline), then it got serialized into the (SQL) database.

it was pretty cool! when a user logged in, there was a list of processes waiting for him that he could click to see and interact with. all this with the transactional guarantees of the sql backend because the business objects were also stored in the same database.

https://github.com/hu-dwim/hu.dwim.delico was the continuation lib, hu.dwim.perec was the object relational mapper, and hu.dwim.serializer was used to turn CL objects into SQL blobs (with some properties extracted as reified SQL schema elements to be able to search for the suspended processes).
by jlongman | 2025-11-23 18:37:47+00:00
I had a longer reply but turfed it, but the global menu is based around muscle memory for eye and mouse locations. My personal experience sounds nothing like yours so I suspect we navigate very differently such that it impacts you far more than me.

I’m a heavy keyboard user so rotating apps and windows in apps means I always know where I am and don’t even notice the costs you’re talking about.
by charles_f | 2025-11-23 18:38:36+00:00
> It's ok not knowing or judging

> One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance"

Here's a funny thing, what I got from that story was that it must have been a hard and sad life for the dad, probably the mom, and especially a horrifying discovery for the mom. These are not judgments, but tidbits of empathy and sadness for all the parties involved. I didn't have to force myself into that, probably because it didn't clash with my personality or values.

If something made you tick and you want to condemn one of the people in the story, I'm wondering if forcing your brain into "accepting" would make any difference. The real question is what you feel for the other person. I think it might come out as a judgment if it clashes with your actual values and personality. If you don't recognize yourself and would have had a different approach, you might have a negative outlook on the people in the story.

I'm extremely lucky to be a straight dude in the progressive society of today's. Had I been a gay guy in the traditional Chinese culture of the 80s, I'd probably have had the same life as that dad, and employ some of the same strategies. So it's easy for me not to judge. But some people are more upfront, active, liberated, and for them it might be harder not to judge ; and I think that's fine.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-23 18:39:03+00:00
Naw, you're making a claim that's just not true.

The company will have some value left on default. E.g if it's a software company it will have the IP for the software etc pp

Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk with the loan is another story and thus I could now quote my previous comment in its entirety
by gavmor | 2025-11-23 18:40:05+00:00
I'd look to Peter Naur's 1985 paper, "Programming as Theory Building," to remind us that writing meaningful commit messages is essential insofar as it is the discipline that confirms and preserves the intellectual "theory" of our work, distinguishing it from mere text production. In Naur's view, programming is fundamentally the activity of builsing theory, which he defines as the knowledge a person must possess not only to intelligently perform tasks, but also to explain them, to answer queries about them, to argue about them, and so forth. The source code is merely an artifact, and neither machine code nor source code contains the wisdom of knowing how the program works, or more critically, why the program was written the way it was instead of some other way that would have accomplished the same task.

The act of composing a descriptive and concise commit message compels the programmer to transition from the task of "path-making" (writing code) to the intellectual work of explaining the process, which is necessary to grok the change completely.

Reviving the theory of an existing program is a difficult, cult-frustrating, and time-consuming effort. When theory-building is neglected, we lose the intellectual foundation that dictates the program's purpose and design, trapping future maintenance efforts in a costly, confusing cycle of trying to deduce intent from artifact alone
by WalterBright | 2025-11-23 18:40:27+00:00
He essentially invented the electric car industry. E cars before then were impractical and failures.

> There is no objective valuation

Value investing is Warren Buffett's style, which is generally a backwards looking approach. It's not good at predicting transformative technologies. Such was no good at predicting the success of, say, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
by close04 | 2025-11-23 18:41:30+00:00
> Even Azure, the new major revenue stream of Microsoft is built on Linux!

Exactly, and has been for some time now. MS wasn’t asleep at the wheel, they just stopped caring about your infra. The money’s in the cloud now, especially the SaaS you neither own nor control.

My question was if these large companies moving away from Windows are just clearing the last remnants of the OS rather than just now shifting their sizable Windows footprint to Linux.

I’m trying to understand what was OP reporting. On the user side almost nobody is moving their endpoints to Linux, on the DC side almost nobody has too many Windows machines left to move to Linux after years of already doing this. The trend was apparent for years and years.
by protimewaster | 2025-11-23 18:41:31+00:00
> The vast majority of steam games run just fine when not started via steam.

AFAIK many of them still rely on Steam, though. They'll run when you manually run the exe, but will they run on a machine that doesn't have Steam installed and doesn't have internet access? I know some will, but I'm skeptical that just being able to start the game from the exe means it's not linking in Steam services and will work in such a scenario.

> Family sharing works fine, and how is steam going to prevent you from giving your acct to your kids?

They've banned accounts in the past for being transferred. Why wouldn't they do that again? Also, doesn't it seem a bit silly that the solution to a service shortcoming is "just violate the rules of the service"? Why not just offer transfers and make the service better? And, AFAIK, you're probably technically violating copyright the same by transferring the account to your kids as you are by pirating. Your kids don't have a license to the game, only you do (and it's non-transferable).

Regarding family sharing, not all games support it. Additionally, that wasn't always an option (namely, back when Gabe made this statement). And that ties into another issue with Steam: you're at the mercy of what Valve chooses to do. If, in 2035, they decide that they're going to charge a monthly fee to access the games you bought, you're just up shit creek. If they decide to remove family sharing, drop support for your platform, etc. I don't understand why I would want a license I bought in 2006 to rely on a service's decisions in 2035.
by tremon | 2025-11-23 18:41:47+00:00
> we found that the engineers were automating things by writing their own scripts where in earlier days you might have to go to ask a CAD person to come and do something for you -- and that’s difficult to do. Much easier if the engineers can do it themselves and I think that all came about because we instituted Unix for the 386 design. Again if management knew what we were doing they wouldn’t have let us do it.

> He walked across the street from Santa Clara 4 to Amdahl and they had a Unix that ran on 370 computers. So he went over there and got a tape and brought it back, sent it over to Phoenix where the mainframes were and told 'em to load it. They did, not knowing what was on that tape because they never would have done it if they had known

It's wild to read that Intel's flagship product, the part that basically defined the next 40 years of computing, might have turned out very differently if management and/or IT knew what the engineers were doing.

Everything old is new again, I guess.
by FlyingAvatar | 2025-11-23 18:41:56+00:00
Disclaimer: I'm not the OP, and there are certainly places where using recursive type definitions is justified.

My interpretation of OP's point is that excessive complexity can be a "code smell" on its own. You want to use the solution to match the complexity of the job and both the team that is building it and the one that is likely to maintain it.

As amused as I am by the idea of a dev team being debased by the inelegance of basic bitch programming, the daily reality of the majority of software development in industry is "basic bitch" teams working on "basic bitch" problems. I would argue this is a significant reason why software development roles are so much at risk of being replaced by AI.

To me, it's similar to the choice one has as they improve their vocabulary. Knowing and using more esoteric words might allow adding nuance to ideas, but it also risks excluding others from understanding them or more wastefully can be used as intelligence signalling more than useful communication.

tldr: Complexity is important when it's required, but possibly detrimental when it's not.
by nine_k | 2025-11-23 18:42:09+00:00
In short: turn Emacs navigation into Vim-like navigation, make the editing modal, and thus make navigation hyper-efficient. (If you like the idea, I would suggest taking a look at evil-mode if you come from Vim, or god-mode and devil-mode if you already are used to Emacs.)

A few useful pieces of advice beside that, too. The workflow the author describes is not how I prefer to do things, but the author mentions a number of important capabilities to be aware of: operating at sexp level, subword motion, etc. Narrowing and folding, which I like to use, are not mentioned.

No mention of LSPs or compilers, but these are their own large topic.
by treis | 2025-11-23 18:42:10+00:00
I strongly disagree. The father passed on the same trauma he experienced to his own child. It makes it worse because he knows exactly how painful it is but did it anyways.

I'm watching my ex do the same thing to our kid. I understand it on a mechanical level. But on an emotional level I will never understand how you can look into the eyes of your child and hurt them.

The mechanics of it are what you see in the OP. I see it in my parents, my aunts/uncles, and my cousins. It's somewhere between denial and minimization. It's like a defense mechanism against the truth which is something like my father didn't love me enough to not severely damage me. "They did the best they could" is a common refrain. Ultimately that ends up being their justification for hurting their own kids.

There is a balance to hit here. Yes, we are all human and you can't expect perfection. What you can expect and what everyone deserves from their loved ones is for them to at all points try to and not hurt you. There's forgiveness for coming up short if there's effort and steady improvement.
by cameldrv | 2025-11-23 18:42:15+00:00
This more recently happened to IBM (as a computer manufacturer). If your platform is not accessible to hobbyists, the next generation will not be familiar with it, and when they go get a job, it probably won't be with the technology they don't know. Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes.
by t_mahmood | 2025-11-23 18:43:55+00:00
Well, I'll do a small experiment, working on my Surface Pro 3 (Yes, you read that right) which I am using as a Thin client to my desktop.

Just opened 14 workspace on it. Opened up terminals, text editor, disk usage tool on all the workspace.

gnome-shell is sitting on 154mb, and Firefox is 1.7GB. And I am not seeing any unacceptable performance degradation at all.

Put them in same workspace, memory usage seemed to increase slight to 168mb but no unacceptable lag.

I put all the window back on individual workspaces again, now memory usage went down to 163mb
by newsoftheday | 2025-11-23 18:43:55+00:00
> Who uses password encrypted keys anyway ?

Edit: I'm not suggesting an ssh key with a passphrase (or password) is better than what the article suggests; I'm only saying that adding a passphrase (or password) to an ssh key at least buys time to address the situation while the attacker is trying to break the encryption on the stolen key.

I am anti-Mac in every way, but I do use passphrase protected ssh keys so if someone were to get a copy of my ssh key, they would have to be able to break the encryption to use the key. I see a lot of devs using blank passphrases on their ssh keys, smh.

> sitting duck for unlimited automated password guessing attempts.

Using a passphrase on your ssh key has nothing to do with whether the ssh service is configured to allow or deny passwords.
by righthand | 2025-11-23 18:44:10+00:00
Because games are entertainment and this technology is not necessary for the betterment of humanity or enabling some kind of real technological progress, therefor it only really benefits who? Valve and really only in the short term. Once the contributions back are good enough, people will start to use the stack to cut Valve out. There for Valve only has incentive to contribute things that make their products great. If you enjoy playing older games on Linux because of Valve, that is only a side effect of the current efforts.

Do you understand now what I'm reading?