MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-17 17:05:09+00:00
The number of times I've had something break is not an opinion.

You claimed that anything but systemd would "fail all the time", I pointed out that in many years of using other options I've never had them do that.

The most egregious systemd bug I've hit was it just freezing on shutdown, with zero error message or even warnings; there's nothing a user should be able to do to produce that outcome that's a "skill issue" and not a bug. In any event, you're just making up claims without evidence.
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-17 17:05:22+00:00
> JavaScript is better than XSLT in every way

Obviously not in every way. XSLT is declarative and builds pretty naturally off of HTML for someone who doesn't know any programming languages. It gives a very low-effort but fairly high power (especially considering its neglect) on-ramp to templated web pages with no build steps or special server software (e.g. PHP, Ruby) that you need to maintain. It's an extremely natural fit if you want to add new custom HTML elements. You link a template just like you link a CSS file to reuse styles. Obvious.

The equivalent Javascript functionality's documentation[0] starts going on about classes and callbacks and shadow DOM, which is by contrast not at all approachable for someone who just wants to make a web page. Obviously Javascript is necessary if you want to make a web application, but those are incredibly rare, and it's expected that you'll need a programmer if you need to make an application.

Part of the death of the open web is that the companies that control the web's direction don't care about empowering individuals to do simple things in a simple way without their involvement. Since there's no simple, open way to make your own page that people can subscribe to (RSS support having been removed from browsers instead of expanded upon for e.g. a live home page), everyone needs to be on e.g. Facebook.

It's the same with how they make it a pain to just copy your music onto your phone or backup your photos off of it, but instead you can pay them monthly for streaming and cloud storage.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...
by observationist | 2025-11-17 17:05:27+00:00
Tell Germany to make their own internet, make their own AI companies, give them a pat on the back, then block the entire EU.

Nasty little bureaucratic tyrants. EU needs to get their shit together or they're going to be quibbling over crumbs while the rest of the globe feasts. I'm not inclined to entertain any sort of bailout, either.
by dcminter | 2025-11-17 17:05:49+00:00
Yes, exactly that, and some of the steps required removing kaptan (?) tape over rather fragile looking wires.

I think it used to be more or less "undo screw, remove cover, remove keyboard" ... with other parts being under the keyboard rather than vice versa. It's been a long time though.

One thing in favour of Lenovo and Thinkpad then and now is that you can download all the field service guides - so at least one isn't guessing which worryingly fragile part to remove next. Another point in favour of ex-corporate devices.
by michaelmior | 2025-11-17 17:06:48+00:00
With a little work, it's sometimes surprising how easy things are to repair. My TV died a few years ago and just refused to power on. I don't really know much about electronics, but I assumed since there were no lights of any kind that it was probably a bad power supply. I opened it up and it turns out the power supply is a separate board with an easily detachable cable. I ordered a new one for less than $40 on eBay by looking at the part number and it only took a few minutes to replace and saved me several hundred dollars.

I'd imagine someone more familiar with electronics possibly could have figured out what specific component was wrong and replaced only that for an even smaller fraction of the cost.
by didibus | 2025-11-17 17:06:50+00:00
Is that just bad implementation? Where are the wasted tokens?

I noticed your second issue, but to me it's just from bad implementation. For some reason people keep exposing generic overlapping tools from multiple MCP servers.

I don't know that MCP causes this issue, any vendor offering a "tools API" if they shove to many APIs it would bloat things up.
Google Workspace has the pieces for a shared inbox, why no solution, Google?
by mareksotak | 2025-11-17 17:06:55+00:00
Google Workspace has had all the primitives needed for a proper shared inbox for years... labels, filters, threads, Drive, permissions, Groups,... Everything you’d expect as the foundation for a collaborative support workflow already exists.

But for some reason, Google has never shipped an actual shared inbox product that ties these pieces together.

Most teams I know end up with the same workaround: forward emails out of Gmail into yet another vendor. And with each hop, another third party gains access to customer data. It’s a strange situation, considering Workspace is supposed to be the communication core for companies.

Recently Google “announced” a shared inbox feature, but after digging into it, it looks like the same mailbox delegation system that has been around for years, simply repackaged as something new. Google does this surprisingly often.

What’s frustrating is the announcement itself, and the fact that Google has already built 95% of what’s needed for a real shared inbox. The last 5%, the part that would make it coherent and genuinely useful, never seems to arrive (like with other use cases).

That’s why we don’t really use Google Workspace to get actual team work done. All the pieces exist, but they’re not connected into anything that supports real collaboration or aligns with how modern teams actually work.

I’m not sure what the product philosophy behind Workspace is these days, but from the outside it feels increasingly disconnected from how teams actually work, and often seems to be trying to catch up in the wrong way, rather than being innovative. Has Google lost the plot here?
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-17 17:07:34+00:00
Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation".

Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants.

In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable.

To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants.

That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants.

If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.
by andrewl-hn | 2025-11-17 17:07:46+00:00
Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer.

Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.
by bentt | 2025-11-17 17:08:14+00:00
Hey I just want to respond to this because I didn't mean to say what you heard.

What I meant was that I think we're going through an extinction event for programmers of adaptability below a certain threshold. What will get a programmer through this period is going to be a drive and passion for the act of growing and a deep interest in the field. That's because change is here and the "jobs" are threatened.

One thing I've learned about AI coding is that you have to know what you want, and you need to ask for it. That's the condition where AI coding works. It does not do well with ambiguity and moonshots.

So ambiguity and moonshots are still the domain of the humans. Anyone with a repeatable job that's a slog is likely to find themselves on the sidelines soon if they don't adapt.

> "They clocked in, clocked out and went on about their lives."

Yeah, these folks are going to have a tough time. I don't wish it upon them, but that's where we're headed. And so if a person is just choosing programming because they want stability and a good job primarily, I say they should avoid it.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-17 17:08:26+00:00
If you, at any point, have developed a system that relies on an LLM having the "right" opinion or else millions die, regardless of what that opinion is, you have failed a thousand times over and should have stopped long ago.

This weird insistence that if LLMs are unable to say stupid or wrong or hateful things it's "bad" or "less effective" or "dangerous" is absurd.

Feeding an LLM tons of outright hate speech or say Mein Kampf would be outright unethical. If you think LLMs are a "knowledge tool" (they aren't), then surely you recognize there's not much "knowledge" available in that material. It's a waste of compute.

Don't build a system that relies on an LLM being able to say the N word and none of this matters. Don't rely on an LLM to be able to do anything to save a million lives.

It just generates tokens FFS.

There is no point! An LLM doesn't have "opinions" anymore than y=mx+b does! It has weights. It has biases. There are real terms for what the statistical model is.

>As a result, it might generate responses that mirror the most dramatic claims it encountered, such as portraying misgendering as “the worst thing ever.”

And this is somehow worth caring about?

Claude doesn't put that in my code. Why should anyone care? Why are you expecting the "average redditor" bot to do useful things?
by ben_w | 2025-11-17 17:08:35+00:00
Imagine if literally all 108 of the data centres in Arizona moved next door to you at the same time.

*All* 108, *combined*, use the water of 3000 people.

3000 people is less than half of Cambridge Science Park: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cambridge+Science+Park/@52...

In order, I'd be worried about the electricity, the traffic, the policing (because it's suddenly filled with dense high-value equipment), the noise of the cooling systems, the impact on local scenic views, and the likelihood of enough protestors (for all the obvious reasons) to be directly disruptive to locals even when well-behaved.

But water? Nope.

The Tesla Gigafactory in Brandenburg originally called for 1.8 million cubic meters or 475 million gallons, which would have been half of all 108 the data centres in Arizona combined. Of course, then demand for Teslas in Germany went down, so they never actually used that much, but that's the scale difference here: one single (big) factory is on par with half an entire state's worth of DCs.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-11-17 17:08:48+00:00
The chip in general is fast, it builds llvm in ~12m or so. Whisper on it is at least real time but I only ran the stream binary before sending the box away to SC25. I'm expecting it to need some work to exploit the zero copy the APU permits. So it probably will be fast but isn't just yet, at least on my toolchain.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-17 17:08:57+00:00
You have to keep developing new things to see what proves useful in the long-run.

When you have something that's been around for a long time and still shows virtually no usage, it's fine to pull the plug. It's a kind of evolution. You can kill things that are proven to be unpopular, while building things and giving them the time to see if they become popular.

That's what product feature iteration is.
by fwip | 2025-11-17 17:09:02+00:00
Sure, there's no guy with a gun forcing you to read it.

But we're on a site about sharing content for intellectual discussion, right? So when people keep posting the same garbage without labeling it, and you figure it halfway though the article, it's frustrating to find out you wasted your time.

To use your soup analogy: imagine this was a website to share restaurants. You see a cool new Korean place upvoted, so you stop by there for lunch sometime. You sit down, you order, and then ten minutes later, Al comes out with his trademark thin, watery soup again.

In that scenario, it's entirely reasonable to leave a comment, "Ugh, don't bother with this place, it's just Al and his shitty soup again."
by Pet_Ant | 2025-11-17 17:09:10+00:00
JavaScript is ever evolving and it means you need to stick to one of the two browsers (WebKit or Firefox) and keep upgrading. XSLT hasn't changed in years. It's an actual standard instead of an evolving one.

I know that other independent browsers that I used to use back in the day just gave up because the pace of divergence pushed by the major implementations meant that it wasn't feasible to keep up independently.

I still miss Konqueror.
by pragma_x | 2025-11-17 17:09:16+00:00
Same. It's a solid four-note ARP that sticks to a fixed set of musical keys. You literally can't make bad sounding music with this.

A more grown-up version of this would be 16 notes, with variable length patterns (4-16?), and a "swing" function. A little bit of I/O mux under the hood and I bet this design could be expanded in that way. Or maybe you just daisy-chain multiple sequencers?
by milesvp | 2025-11-17 17:09:55+00:00
What’s interesting about this, is there are actually game theoretic repercussions to what the author is expressing. By making implicit knowledge explicit it changes entire game trees. You no longer play the i think that he thinks that I think that he thinks… branch, and you are literally changing expected payouts as a result.

Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.
by paulpauper | 2025-11-17 17:10:04+00:00
In response, a bunch of people have shrieked that he is a billionaire (he was not then, though perhaps he had Aristotelian billionaire potentiality?), that he is six foot three (he probably was tall back then too), and that he is good looking. Or perhaps effective meeting and dating strategies have changed?

that is sorta the rub...
by Demiurge | 2025-11-17 17:10:14+00:00
I'm genuinely curious about that. But, this says a lot more about how different these standards are. FTP really needed a good successor, which it never really got. So, there is a strong use case, but technical deficiency to the protocol. So, FTP was overcome by a meriad of web forms and web drive sites, as a way to fill the gap. Still, resumable chunked uploads are really hard to implement from scratch, even now.

Dropping XSLT is about something different. It's not bad an in an obvious way. It's things like code complexity vs applicability. It's definitely not as clear of an argument to me, and I haven't touched XSLT in the past 20 years of web development, so I am not sure about the trade-offs.
by Joeboy | 2025-11-17 17:10:21+00:00
It's not kid friendly, but in case anybody's interested I just wrote up how I made a simple "hardware" synth by bodging together a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and I2S audio module, total cost around £10 on Amazon UK.

The hardware's very cheap and easy. The "default" synthesis is pretty simple but also pretty hackable (in Rust) if you want to customize it.

https://github.com/Joeboy/oxynth/
by mareksotak | 2025-11-17 17:10:27+00:00
For context, this post comes out of a mix of frustration and curiosity. I work in product, and what drives me a bit crazy here is that all the foundational pieces for a shared inbox are sitting right there in Workspace. You can almost see how it could click together with "relatively small connective tissue" (of course, easy to say, I know nothing about their architecture).

It’s genuinely hard to understand the product reasoning when the missing pieces seem more about integration than invention.

Would actually love to hear from people who’ve worked inside Google or on Workspace: What stops this from becoming a real product targeting use cases people want? Is it technical debt, org structure, misaligned incentives, or something else?
by kakacik | 2025-11-17 17:11:36+00:00
Nah its the corporate greed and disregard for avoiding amoral behavior at the first place, since clearly its punished much less than rewards are (just look at all the slaps on the wrist of FAANGs and similar), then followed by race to the bottom with the price.

Economies of scale do bring costs of everything much further than stealing user's data can, but good luck explaining some long term vision to C-suites who only care about short term bonuses.
by melded | 2025-11-17 17:12:00+00:00
from what i understand, they dont really have the self-awareness/agency to do this kind of thing on purpose as a response to abliteration (although if they end up having to converse on topics for which there was no data in their training dataset, they will produce incorrect and random information, but not for lack of "trying").

but with some (unmodified) models ive tried (i dont remember names unfortunately) it definitely seemed like they werent trained to outright refuse things but answer poorly instead. so it is my impression that that is indeed a strategy that some model producers use?

(if anyone can debunk this id be interested in hearing it, im only superficially familiar with the methods in use, and this is basically a guess about what would explain why those models behaved the way they did.)
by brudgers | 2025-11-17 17:12:06+00:00
combining them can be annoying

The strong design opinions about how the Pocket Operators interact with other musical gear are a big part of why I haven’t had high enthusiasm for using the small PO’s when I’ve had small PO’s.

For me, Volca’s are a similar ecosystem but to a lesser extent…maybe because the Monotrons sit lower in Korg’s product portfolio while the PO’s are rock bottom of TE’s product line.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-11-17 17:12:13+00:00
The thing that cities provide that's harder to access in the countryside is exposure to people other than you, with different (not necessarily incompatible) perspectives and value systems. I think it's actually really important for kids to be exposed to people that disagree with their parents and learn that people can disagree with their parents while still being reasonable, kind people that their parents more or less trust in their presence.

Rural and suburban communities are far more likely to be a monoculture than cities, which, if you're not careful, can make your child's social development trickier.

It's by no means universal or impossible, just a consideration I don't see verbalized a whole lot.
by lunias | 2025-11-17 17:12:18+00:00
For me it's mostly the characters and the narratives that feel "less real" than they used to. Something about seeing the same actor, in the same role and doing the same things, but 30 years older doesn't really sell the realism. Similarly, a new actor in an old role doesn't really either. We've lost a lot of novelty, real life is much more spontaneous whereas movies are increasingly contrived.
by rubyn00bie | 2025-11-17 17:12:56+00:00
This is true, it’s not an individual datapoint. When smartphones, like the iPhone, originally debuted carriers had a conniption fit because they couldn’t preload a ton of garbage apps to help subsidize the cost. Apple has been able to avoid this, but for your average smartphone this is absolutely how both the manufacturer and carrier are able to sell them so cheaply.

Every experience may not be as bad as the one the OP had, but it’s surely well within reality. Both carriers and handset manufacturers are glad to sell anything and everything about someone to make a quick buck. They’ve literally been doing it for 25+ years.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-17 17:13:18+00:00
>Mozilla bent over to Google's pressure to kill off RSS by removing the “Live Bookmarks” features from the browser

They both were just responding to similar market demands because end users didn't want to use RSS. Users want to use social media instead.

>This is a trillion-dollar ad company who has been actively destroying the open web for over a decade

Google has both done more for and invested more into progressing the open web than anyone else.

>The WHATWG aim is to turn the Web into an application delivery platform

This is what web developers want and browsers our reacting to the natural demands of developers, who are reacting to demands of users. It was an evolutionary process that got it to that state.

>but with their dependency on the Blink rendering engine, controlled by Google, they won't be able to do anything but cave

Blink is open source and modular. Maintaining a fork is much less effort than the alternative of maintaining a different browser engine.
by squigz | 2025-11-17 17:13:38+00:00
I'm just guessing but it might have to do with the concerns raised by the first commenter in the reply by textfiles (Jason Scott) in that reddit thread

tl;dr seems to be they received a massive (71,000 tapes) archive that hasn't seen any activity or communication in 7 years.

If you read further in the thread, you'll also find other concerns about Jason's reliability
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-17 17:13:41+00:00
This is entirely because "we" insist on search being free. This means Google needs to find other ways to pay for it, which creates a different set of incentives.

If we somehow paid directly for search, then Google's incentives would be to make search good so that we'd be happy customers and come back again, rather than find devious ways to show us more ads.

Most people put up with the current search experience because they'd rather have "free" than "good" and we see this attitude in all sorts of other markets as well, where we pay for cheap products that fail over and over rather than paying once (but more) for something good, or we trade our personal information and privacy for a discount.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-11-17 17:14:28+00:00
The LLM is doing what its lawyers asked it to do. It has no responsibility for a room full of disadvantaged indigenous people that might be or probably won't be be murdered by a psychotic, none whatsoever. but it absolutely 100% must deliver on the shareholder value and if it uses that racial epithet it opens the makers to litigation. When has such litigation ever been good for shareholder value?

Yet another example of don't hate the player, hate the game IMO. And no I'm not joking, this is how the world works now. And we built it. Don't mistake that for me liking the world the way it is.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-17 17:14:44+00:00
People with paranoid delusions seem to draw from a very small pool of problems that they want to solve: you hear from a lot of people who want to explain the mass ratio of the electron and proton [1] or think the world needs some great innovation in quantum gravity or solved P=NP: you never hear from a lunatic that they cracked the code for superconductivity in cuprates or discovered a better algorithm for writing parser generators.

For me the excessive interest in IQ scores and "genius" by some people is an indicator that these people think they are an undiscovered genius. It's a manifestation of the upper left part of this diagram

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113189883152005058

which describes a personality organization that involves a developmental arrest which could possibility involve some 'neurodivergence' that doesn't allow a person to develop a whole self so instead you have this thing like a bunch of little kids in a trenchcoat.

[1] has little to do with 'fundamental physics' because the proton is not an elementary particle