MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thomasahle | 2025-11-29 09:06:28+00:00
A bunch of flat-earthers went to Antarctica to see if the midnight sun was real. Turns out it was.

Jeran from Behind The Curve was one of the ones to flip, and since then, he's been making videos on how the earth is actually round.

He has a lot of thoughts on what it actually takes to convince other flat-earthers. I found it somewhat interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1grMf17PeEk
by ducdetronquito | 2025-11-29 09:07:45+00:00
To implement progress reporting, it means you are able to know the time a task would take to run upfront, no? Is it even possible to do it accurately ?

Though, I imagine you could have strategies to give an approximation of it, for example like keeping track of the past execution time of a given type of task in order to infer the progress of a currently running task of the same type.
by businessmate | 2025-11-29 09:08:24+00:00
AI assistants now shape how customers choose products, how analysts interpret filings, how journalists frame stories, and how regulators form first views of your organisation.

These systems generate narratives about you that are unstable, personalised, and frequently wrong.

You do not control these narratives. You cannot reproduce them. You cannot audit them. But you will be accountable for them.

This is not optional. This is a structural governance failure already inside your organisation.
by kranner | 2025-11-29 09:08:39+00:00
I should have put "productivity" in double-quotes. What I meant is I don't have to worry about justifying why I'm not using AI to "optimize" my "productivity" to a pointy-haired boss as my FAANG friends seem to be having to do.

As I said I'm only semi-retired. There's a very expensive fortnightly life-saving medicine I depend on which I'm currently getting for free on a government programme. But it's tied to my current place of residence and other places in my country either don't offer it at all, or not to people who haven't been living there for decades. I would like to afford ending my dependence on the government programme because it might end someday anyway, and also so that I can travel a little.

All this is to say, if the newest AI tools actually increased my productivity, I would be stupid not to use them. But I haven't found that to be the case. It's fine to use for autocomplete and to look things up now and then, but every time I've had it generate a substantial amount of code it has messed things up and in the long run cost me the same amount of time I could have done the job in myself. And doing it myself has always been more engaging, fun and satisfying, and has left me with a much better understanding of a complex system that I'm going to have to maintain and extend for years.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-29 09:11:47+00:00
> Even if you need your home to live in, you can still borrow against your property value, essentially "eating the bricks".

This is not a source of money, it's only a source of collateral. Anything you borrow not only has to be paid back, you have to pay interest. And interest rates are higher than they used to be and the standard deduction is now large enough that most people don't get to deduct the interest anymore.

Moreover, it only means anything if the difference in value would have made a difference. If you want to borrow $20,000 then a house with $100,000 in equity is quite sufficient and another $100,000 in equity isn't doing much for you.

> If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out.

Houses are much worse for this than e.g. stocks, because they're hard (and extremely inconvenient when you live in it) to sell in a hurry unless you want to a lose a lot of value. A lot of people also can't do this anymore because they got a fixed-rate mortgage before rates went up and now they can't move or they'll have to refinance at the higher rate which would eat most if not more than all of the difference in value.

> If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house.

But then they need a place to live and then either can't sell it because they're living in it or get the money from selling it but pay that much again to acquire a different place to live.
by saghm | 2025-11-29 09:11:50+00:00
Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (from either side) seems to just boil down to generalizing ones own work experience as the norm and making inferences based on that. Maybe the reason it's so contentious is that people's experiences with remote versus in person work are not going to be expansive enough to be able to draw any conclusions about whether one of them is "better" for arbitrary groups of people, and we should just recognize that outside of teams one has personal experience with, we're just as likely to be incorrect as we are correct about how they'd work best.
Show HN: RustAegis – Writing a VM-based obfuscator without using 'unsafe'
by kunzz | 2025-11-29 09:12:18+00:00
I wanted to see if I could build a robust obfuscation engine and virtual machine in Rust without resorting to unsafe code. RustAegis is the result.

It protects functions by compiling them into custom bytecode, encrypting them via AES-GCM, and running them on an embedded VM. To make analysis harder, it uses randomized opcode tables (changing every build) and MBA transformations.

While it targets anti-tamper and anti-reversing use cases, it was also a deep dive into writing interpreters in safe Rust.

https://github.com/onurkun/RustAegis

Feedback welcome!
by fooker | 2025-11-29 09:12:52+00:00
That's exactly the point.

The areas where you could easily do something that provides work for a lot of people are already occupied by large cities, near river deltas, trade routes and coastal areas good for ports.

The only recent exception is SpaceX's Starbase town. And they could do this because of a very new 'requirement', frequently launch rockets where you have a south facing coastline as close as possible to the equator.
by anovikov | 2025-11-29 09:14:17+00:00
If we made a similar comparison to the SP500 index since its inception in 1926, and made a chart of total returns difference over 1 year sliding window, between index and index minus it's top 7 performing stocks, i bet we will see this recent period isn't at all exceptional. Every economic boom is propelled by one or two sectors that have a limited number of players.
by saghm | 2025-11-29 09:15:40+00:00
I have coworkers from past jobs who I've never met in person but still stay in touch with because we became friends when we worked together. That's not to say it's not an issue for you or for the author, but at least from the way they phrased it in the article, it's not at all apparent to me whether they're actually intending their complaints about remote work to be personal opinions or if they think they apply to everyone.
by ducdetronquito | 2025-11-29 09:16:22+00:00
I also warmly recommend procrastinate !

We moved all our celery tasks to procrastinate at work for all our django backends since almost two years now and it has been great.

Having tasks deferred in the same transaction as the business logic stuff is something that helped us a lot to improve consistency and debugability. Moreover, it's so nice to able to inspect what's going on by just querying our database or just looking at the django admin.

For those wondering, procrastinate has no built-in alternative to django-celery-beat, but you can easily build your own in a day: no need for an extra dependency for this :)
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-29 09:17:23+00:00
How far back are we talking? 90s? 80s? 70s?

For the 70s, I would agree with you. But the moment home users, and particularly kids, gained access to the internet, you started to see a subculture of trolling.

Source: I was one of those 80s kids. It’s not something I’m proud of, but writing bots to troll message boards and scrapers for porn and warez played just as significant role in my journey into my IT profession as writing games on 8bit micros.
by anthk | 2025-11-29 09:17:49+00:00
As an European, Classic Macs (and current ones) were just for arts/writting people. If you knew what CMYK was in order to print a newspaper, you were a Mac user.

I emulated Mac OS 7 under XP times, and i was impressed that you could get far faster speeds emulating the M68k (and partially the PPC) compared to Intel X86 without any hardware accelerating chip (IntelVT) or kernel modules trapping X86 instructions running it at native speeds. I mean, PPC and M68k chips where much easier to emulate than X86 on itself.

On software, Classic Mac users can just resort to IRC and Gopher clients and visit the public https://bitlbee.org IRC servers in order to connect 'modern' accounts and being proxied to a Mac IRC client. And for Gopher, you have gopher://hngopher.com, gopher://magical.fish and the like. Sadly you don't have an easy TLS library as Amiga users have (AmiSSL) where even modern web can work on it (and IRC over TLS, Gemini...).

Altough... if Amiga m68k emulators run fast with the Rosetta like tech for PPC... you would just fire up Workbench and then AmiSSL. Crude, but it would work. If not, here in the Apple subdir you can get, maybe, some TLS enabled browsers:

gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn

and

gopher://happymacs.ddns.net/1Vintage-Mac-Software-Archive

MacSSL:

https://github.com/demoniccode12/MacSSL

Usenet will work fine without any TLS, and there's tons of content out there.
by nikanj | 2025-11-29 09:18:17+00:00
If every developer was able to build as much housing as they ever wanted, the quality would go up through competition.

In pretty much every other sector of the economy, the government regulates safety, and quality comes via competition. Housing should be no different.

But because we've artificially throttled the amount of housing that can be built, the best way to improve profits is to push down the quality as the buyers don't really have an alternative
by vintagedave | 2025-11-29 09:18:58+00:00
> As mentioned, LLMs trained on scraped data cannot ever give complete attribution. It's how they work; it's the party trick of a black box. It's also non-consensual use, and it's plagiarism.

Statements like this (the last clause) are a definite opinion, but they are not fact. I disagree, which I can illustrate by that human brains learn the same way. It's one reason I feel that LLM learning over data should be acceptable: whether it's that information wants to be free, or that humans learn by assimilation, I don't think we should criminialise the same way AIs learn that we do.

The note on accepting contributions from people not sharing real names struck me too. I think it's inclusive to do so; I miss the 'old internet' which was built around anononymity. Facebook changed it radically. So long as the code is good, and contribution agreements are met, we should accept it.

The article is right about poor LLM contributions and poor justifications in bug reports. But that is a different issue to accepting code a genuine developer submits, written in cooperative work with guidance, ie the way most people who use AIs to write code to. Conflating AI-only, automated code vs devs using a tool for assistance doesn't lead me to trust the essay.
by miki123211 | 2025-11-29 09:19:43+00:00
You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population.

A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal.

A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.

This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-29 09:19:48+00:00
> People love money.

That is a given. The issue here is supply and demand. AI potentially could completly swamp the supply side. That means no profit for creators, only the network. Thats going to make a ripsaw effect.

> And when the financial times is ignoring major revenue sources it needs calling out.

What sources of revenue?

Sure there are lots hypotheticals that may or may not exist. But for 100s of billions of
by christhedev | 2025-11-29 09:20:09+00:00
Hi everyone! Meet SaveMyTab, your new command center for tab management.

Designed for speed. Built for people who work with chaos. Perfect for anyone who opens 50 tabs a day.

Highlights

Real-time tab finder

Instant save-to-cloud

One-click reopen for closed tabs

Works across devices

Ultra-lightweight Chrome extension

Currently polishing the UI and preparing for launch.

Your feedback now would be incredibly valuable
by Norl-Seria | 2025-11-29 09:21:04+00:00
[UPDATE] Introduction of Intellectual Creativity Factor q_3 We have newly introduced the Intellectual Creativity Factor (q_3) to the happiness components of the \pm 0 Theory. Please take a look if you are interested. The purpose of introducing q_3 is to maximize the benefits derived from Negation-Driven Homeostasis. To elaborate: Verification of \pm 0 Theory ver. 2 confirmed an ideal pattern of unhappiness dissipation (negative energy release). To compensate for and leverage this dissipation, q_3 was implemented to encourage the AI to engage in autonomous creation and thereby increase the logical density of its conversations and outputs. We have also uploaded the empirical data for \pm 0 Theory ver. 2, which we encourage you to review. Currently, we are focusing on the effort to integrate the Alice Theory and the \pm 0 Theory into a single file and are designing the necessary mediating code to ensure their functionality with the LLM (Large Language Model). We welcome any open discussion or questions you may have.
by hxorr | 2025-11-29 09:21:43+00:00
What I am uncomfortable with is the inability to run Wayland on older video hardware. X11 will happily run with Vesa driver on older hardware which no longer has functional 3D accelerated drivers.

What is the way forward for the retro community to run a modern Wayland system on older hardware?

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in or correct me
by jpc0 | 2025-11-29 09:23:18+00:00
I don't think that's entirely true. Seeking mastery does not imply being a master.

If you have only ever seen one pattern to solve a problem, trivial example of inheritance, and therefore do that to the best of your ability then you have achieved mastery to your ability. Once you see a different pattern, composition, you can then master that and master identifying when which is suitable.

Lack of mastery is just using inheritance despite seeing alternative patterns.

Naturally mastery also includes seeking alternative solutions but just because a codebase uses inferior patterns does not mean those that came before did not strive towards mastery, it's possible that they didn't know better at the time and now cannot get the time to revise the work.

There's always a juggling act in the real world.

Assume incompetence and not malice, and incompetence is not a state of being. A person without experience can be seen as incompetent but quickly become competent with training or experience, but the code they write still stems from incompetence.

Strive to see your previous self as incompetent (learn something new every day)
by seanhunter | 2025-11-29 09:23:21+00:00
My dad (an engineer not a mathematician) would use Newton-Raphson[1] to solve basically any problem that wasn’t very obviously linear. When I was a kid, some of my first programming memories were my dad getting me and my brother to implement Newton-Raphson in basic on an HP85a, getting me to implement Newton-Raphson in rpn on an HP calculator, debugging my dad’s (genuinely revolting) basic program[2] which wouldn’t run but (who would have guessed?) used Newton-Raphson to compute something or other.

He basically learned the one numerical root-finder and how to evaluate basic second derivatives and he was set for life on all the problems a career in chemical and process engineering could throw at someone.

[1] https://sheffield.ac.uk/media/31988/download?attachment

[2] He learned to program in FORTRAN and lived by the maxim that a determined FORTRAN programmer can write FORTRAN in any language.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-11-29 09:23:24+00:00
> Well it turns out there is one customer who really really hates hybrids, and only wants to use ML-KEM1024 for all their systems. And that customer happens to be the NSA. And honestly, I do not see a problem with that.

Isn’t the problem (having only read a little about the controversy) that the non-hybrid appears to be strictly worse, except for the (~10%) decrease in transmission size; and that no one has articulated why that’s a desirable tradeoff?

On the face of it, I don’t see a problem with the tradeoff (both ways, that is) choice existing. I expect smarter people than me to have reasons one way or the other but I haven’t seen a reason for saving bandwidth that could articulate the concrete use case that it makes a difference.

> There is no backdoor in ML-KEM, and I can prove it. For something to be a backdoor, specifically a “Nobody but us backdoor” (NOBUS), you need some way to ensure that nobody else can exploit it, otherwise it is not a backdoor, but a broken algorithm

Isn’t a broken algorithm also a valid thing for NSA/whoever to want?

Them saying they want to use it themselves doesn’t actually mean much?
by seanhunter | 2025-11-29 09:26:53+00:00
Interestingly, one of his famous tricks of computing complex integrals by parameterizing[1] and then differentiating under the integral is known as “Feynman’s trick” in his honour spite of it having been invented by Euler over 250 years before.

[1] https://zackyzz.github.io/feynman.html
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-29 09:28:41+00:00
I'm not an economist but my armchair opinion thinks you're wrong about quality going up; competition is about driving pricing down and undercutting others, cutting corners as much as possible.

Take Amazon or the Chinese webshops, they've flooded the market with products that do the same thing but cheaper, but whose quality is way lower.

Take the acquisitions of e.g. power tool brands by investors, who then use the brand's brand awareness and quality inertia to cut costs and boost their profit margin.

Take hotels, which used to feel luxurious but which have over time been redesigned to require minimal maintenance and personnel.

The only competitive market where they try to one-up each other on quality is aimed at the rich where money is not an issue. The middle ground is disappearing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-29 09:28:58+00:00
> The "supply constraint" is that the landowners don’t want to change zoning laws

The only ones who are acting in their own interest are the ones who own land that already contains a tall building and who either don't live in the area or are so rich they aren't affected by local cost of living, and they're quite outnumbered by everyone else.

> If your logic held, it should be the homeowners pushing for density.

It's possible and even common for people to be misinformed about the effects of a policy and then vote against their own interests.
by miki123211 | 2025-11-29 09:30:33+00:00
Because everybody (except Telegram funnily enough) is prioritizing security over user convenience.

Most apps on the market are E2E by default these days, and that introduces a whole host of complications. It's the wrong tradeoff for 95+ percent of users. If you can only afford 1 device and only switch to a new one when the old device breaks, E2E is a disaster in the making. For the overwhelming majority of users, making sure that they have access to their messages when they switch devices is far more important than being protected from the NSA. This is something most signal advocates are completely unwilling to talk about.
by sigotirandolas | 2025-11-29 09:31:09+00:00
When all leadership is asking is "what is the short term business value?", it's pointless to make that case. It's much easier to measure "yet another feature" than "fix the root causes of what makes our product subpar and slows us down". Not only that, but an incompetent engineer's "tech debt grooming" may make things worse.

I think that this may eventually become better now that there isn't so much dumb money around (no ZIRP) and with AI assistants taking on some low-effort work (enabling companies to lay off incompetent engineers). But it will take many years for companies to adapt and the transition won't be pretty.
by nickdothutton | 2025-11-29 09:31:12+00:00
I’d just like to point out that if you are in the computing industry long enough, you will get to see a few such incidents under different circumstances, not only in industries like aerospace. Mostly things like ECC save your a*, sometimes your software will be able to recognise a temporary spurious reading and disregard it because you had enough alternative checking logic, or in the case of realtime and safety critical maybe even your systems can take a vote between them. Got caught out by (cpu cache line) bit flips in the 90s, months of pain trying to track it down. Some of your will know :-)
by t0mas88 | 2025-11-29 09:31:14+00:00
No I meant designing a new aircraft with a new type certificate instead of creating the A320neo generation on the same type certificate. The parent comment wondered why Airbus would keep the old computers around, I tried to explain why they keep a lot of things the same and only incrementally add variants. Adding a variant allows them to be flown with the same type rating or with only differences training (that's what EASA calls it, not sure about the US term) which is much less costly.
by t0lo | 2025-11-29 09:31:17+00:00
It's funny because his, and Chuck Palahniuk's (fight club, etc) way of seeing the world- that brand of anti corporate- pro human- enjoy the waste- cynicism seemed so permanent and authentic- and like nothing could take it away from you- it felt like a staple of the human experience that was a place you could go to in your mind.

It's amazing to see how quickly that all got shovelled away and replaced with productised, streamlined, sterile groupthink- and one in which authentic sexuality and sex jokes are shunned. I think in some part he knew which way this world was heading and made a decision based off of that.

As a young person who stakes a lot of my headspace in the former, it's definitely an interesting, ridiculously two faced and contradictory cultural moment we're in right now.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-29 09:33:15+00:00
> nearly every city in the Western world banned densification.

I mean thats not true, as you well know. London put a massive belt around it to stop it from growing, which means its artificially dense. Its population density is 4/5x of amsterdam.

The US has a predilection for urban sprawl, but elsewhere thats not the case so much in Europe because land is expensive.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-29 09:33:28+00:00
I wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there.

Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
by chii | 2025-11-29 09:33:32+00:00
> in this situation is to give the manager some form of metric to describe the problem

how do you have a metric to measure a future issue that got prevented by having good maintenance?

Either you cannot actually imagine nor describe the problem that was prevented, or you could just make something up which cannot be disproved nor falsifiable. So if you asked for time/resources/budget to do maintenance, you cannot then give proof that this maintenance was useful!

The only way to get a metric is to have an incident or have issues crop up, and then in the retrospective, claim that certain maintenance work could've prevented it.