MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acuozzo | 2025-11-18 19:40:44+00:00
> How do I understand what is important?

Operate under the assumption that the person on the other side of the conversation is under the delusion that every sentence they produce is gold.

Active listening = free points. Everyone wants to feel heard.

> but a struggling person might as well ask how they liked Sweden.

And sometimes this is the right question to ask, especially if the party on the other side of the conversation is giving cues suggesting that their memory of the accident is a painful one.

> I really struggled to even notice when it's "my turn" to talk.

Even highly-experienced conversationalists get this wrong at times. Sometimes the person with whom you're speaking has a weird cadence or is uncomfortable or...

---

Look, this is hard work. This requires literally years of deliberate practice, especially if you're on the Autism spectrum as both myself and my son are.

You will make mistakes. You will offend people. You will get depressed about having no charm/charisma. You will feel like the alien in the room.

Keep pushing forward. Force yourself to actively listen to conversations. Watch movies with magnetic characters and try to emulate their demeanor.

Don't beat yourself up. Embrace being the weird person for a while and find a group of weirdos just a bit less weird than yourself. Be vulnerable with them and get yourself a mentor. People, in my experience, love mentoring/teaching.

Just keep doing it. When you get good, it will pay dividends.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-18 19:41:13+00:00
I've been trying to grok this idea of - when does a bubble pop. Like in theory if everyone knows it's a bubble, that should cause it to pop, because people should be making their way to the exists, playing music chairs to get their money out early.

But as I try to sort of narrative the ideas behind bubbles and bursts, one thing I realize, is that I think in order for a bubble to burst, people essentially have to want it to burst(or the opposite have to want to not keep it going).

But like Bernie Madoff got caught because he couldn't keep paying dividends in his ponzi scheme, and people started withdrawing money. But in theory, even if everyone knew, if no one withdrew their money (and told the FCC) and he was able to use the current deposits to pay dividends a few years. The ponzi scheme didn't _have_ to end, the bubble didn't have to pop.

So I've been wondering, like if everyone knows AI is a bubble, what has to happen to have it collapse? Like if a price is what people are willing to pay, in order for Tesla to collapse, people have to decide they no longer want to pay $400 for Tesla shares. If they keep paying $400 for tesla shares, then it will continue to be worth $400.

So I've been trying to think, in the most simple terms, what would have to happen to have the AI bubble pop, and basically, as long as people perceive AI companies to have the biggest returns, and they don't want to move their money to another place with higher returns (similar to TSLA bulls) then the bubble won't pop.

And I guess that can keep happening as long as the economy keeps growing. And if circular deals are causing the stock market to keep rising, can they just go on like this forever?

The downside of course being, the starvation of investments in other parts of the economy, and giving up what may be better gains. It's game theory, as long as no one decides to stop playing the game, and say pull out all their money and put it into I dunno, bonds or GME, the music keeps playing?
by vineyardmike | 2025-11-18 19:41:18+00:00
The question is, a sell off for who?

If they’ve securitized and sold their data center buildout, will the big clouds and AI labs actually face any severe impact? While the sums are huge, most of these companies have the cash on hand to pay down the debt. The big AI labs have said their models earn enough to cover the cost to train themselves, just not the next one. This means they could at any time walk away from the compute spend for training.

With the heavy securitization of all these deals, will the “bubble pop” just hurt the financial industry?

If a company like CoreWeaver sees their SPV for a Microsoft-specific data center go bankrupt, that means MSFT decided to walk away from the deal. Red flag for the industry, but also a sign of fiscal restraint. Someone else can swoop in and buy the DC for cheap, while MSFT avoids the Opex hit. Seems like the losers will be whoever bought that SPV debt, which probably isn’t a tech company.
by simonw | 2025-11-18 19:41:25+00:00
The audio transcript exercise here is particularly interesting from a journalism perspective.

Summarizing a 3.5 hour council meeting is something of a holy grail of AI-assisted reporting. There are a LOT of meetings like that, and newspapers (especially smaller ones) can no longer afford to have a human reporter sit through them all.

I tried this prompt (against audio from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgJ7x7R6gy0):

Output a Markdown transcript of this meeting. Include speaker names and timestamps. Start with an outline of the key meeting sections, each with a title and summary and timestamp and list of participating names. Note in bold if anyone raised their voices, interrupted each other or had disagreements. Then follow with the full transcript.

Here's the result: https://gist.github.com/simonw/0b7bc23adb6698f376aebfd700943...

I'm not sure quite how to grade it here, especially since I haven't sat through the whole 3.5 hour meeting video myself.

It appears to have captured the gist of the meeting very well, but the fact that the transcript isn't close to an exact match to what was said - and the timestamps are incorrect - means it's very hard to trust the output. Could it have hallucinated things that didn't happen? Those can at least be spotted by digging into the video (or the YouTube transcript) to check that they occurred... but what about if there was a key point that Gemini 3 omitted entirely?
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-18 19:41:36+00:00
That makes sense, but sometimes it's even more confusing than that!

When I lived in Philadelphia here in the USA, it would vary street by street and block by block even when there were no ethnic or economic divides.

One block would have litter all over the place and the next one would be clean. To this day, I am still puzzled by that.

There are some very mundane possible explanations, probably due to a combination of pedestrian traffic patterns and wind. (My observation is that some % of litter, probably a large % IMO, is simply trash that blew out of trashcans as opposed to being intentionally discarded)

Still, I found it baffling and surprising
by ethmarks | 2025-11-18 19:42:23+00:00
Genuinely curious here: why is the desktop app so important?

I completely understand the appeal of having local and offline applications, but the ChatGPT desktop app doesn't work without an internet connection anyways. Is it just the convenience? Why is a dedicated desktop app so much better than just opening a browser tab or even using a PWA?

Also, have you looked into open-webui or Msty or other provider-agnostic LLM desktop apps? I personally use Msty with Gemini 2.5 Pro for complex tasks and Cerebras GLM 4.6 for fast tasks.
by gamesparkapp | 2025-11-18 19:42:49+00:00
I made a mobile first platform where people can use chat with AI to make games and record game content. People can also remix games others have created. These games are simple, but I've had a lot of fun making and playing on the platform. It's got some rough edges, i'm still working on it. But I'm hoping for some feedback. Hope players find it as enjoyable as I do and it can turn into something big.
by showerst | 2025-11-18 19:43:00+00:00
I have a couple of instances of this same pattern for various things that have been running for 5+ years, none of them have suffered downtime caused by the infrastructure. I use ansible scripts for the web servers, and the DO API or dashboard to provision the Load Balancer and Database. You can get it all hooked up in a half hour, and it really doesn't take any maintenance other than setting up good practices for rotating the web servers out for updates.

They wouldn't survive DO losing a DC, they're not so mission critical that it's worth the extra complexity to do that, and I don't recall DO losing a DC in the past 10 years or so.

They did stay up during this outage, which was apparently mostly concentrated on a different product called the 'global load balancer', which ironically is exactly the extra complexity I mentioned to in theory survive a DC outage.

Keep in mind these are "important" in the sense that they justify $100/mo on infra and monitoring, but not "life critical" in that an outage is gonna kill somebody or cost millions of bucks an hour. Once your traffic gets past a certain threshold, DO's costs don't scale that well and you're better off on a large distributed self-managed setup on Hetzner or buying into a stack like AWS.

To me their LB and DB products hit a real sweet spot -- better reliability than one box, and meaningfully less work than setting up a cluster with floating IP and heartbeats and all that for a very minimal price difference.
by apparent | 2025-11-18 19:43:04+00:00
> Both Rebble and Core Devices are for-profit companies, neither is a non-profit, so I'm not actually sure which you're referring to here.

Looks like Rebble is now a nonprofit?

> have evolved along the way from a loose collection of co-conspirators, to Rebble Alliance, LLC, to our current non-profit Rebble Foundation [1]

1: https://rebble.io/2025/10/09/rebbles-in-a-world-with-core.ht...
by asdefghyk | 2025-11-18 19:43:09+00:00
RE ".... get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver. ...." I had this idea too this annoyance too - but never implemented it.

One way to implement would be to mount a thin object , like a toothpick thickness and 1 or 2 cm long say on the mirror 90 degrees vertically to mirror surface , then (auto? ) adjust so their is no shadow from car's headlights that is behind.

Like lots of my other ideas , when i search for them , they already exist .maybe this one too

Found similar ideas already exist for car rear view mirrors .... ie Google finds ... ".... auto-dimming rearview mirror automatically adjusts to reduce glare from incident light by using sensors and an electrochromic gel layer...." However my google of words "...auto adjust reflecting mirror to face incident light...." FInd there is much discussion on Faceboot and REddit for people asking for "...mirrors that reflect very bright high been lights BACK at the driver BEHIND ...: Could not find a implementation though ... Maybe it should be an Arduino project ....
by kccqzy | 2025-11-18 19:43:45+00:00
Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD license states that all advertising materials must display an acknowledgement. It’s widely considered to be a mistake and nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it is madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was right.
by zahlman | 2025-11-18 19:44:25+00:00
In the 00s I saw so many C codebases with hand-rolled linked lists where dynamically resized arrays would be more appropriate, "should be big enough" static allocations with no real idea of how to determine that size, etc. Hardly anyone seemed to have a practical understanding of hashes. When you use a higher level language, you get steered towards the practical, fundamental data structures more or less automatically.
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-11-18 19:44:35+00:00
Did I say Israel has a right to do all these things? No, I did not. I described the situation and their reasoning. Now Israel does have a right to defend itself. Hamas, the government of Gaza, forfeited their relatively peaceful situation when they openly attacked Israel. That doesn't mean everything Israel does is unquestionable. There is plenty open to criticism. There is also a fog of war, and much is unknown now that will be revealed as time goes on. But that also doesn't mean that we should dismiss everythjng Israel says just because they say it. A little more nuamce and curiosity is the most ethical approach to this inherently morally bankrupt conflict.

The mere existence of a state per se is violent, and given that both Israel and Palestine insists on having mutually incompatible states over the same territory, there is no other option but endless bloodshed until both sides commit to a conciliatory settlement. Until that day, a day which may never come, since everyone is hellbent on egging their respective favored side on, things will simply continue as is until one or both sides are destroyed. Since Israel unquestionably has more power, it will likely survive. There is no morally unquestionable option, but I think anyone who has a stake in the livelihood of Palestinians would be interested in stopping the conflict as soon as possible and making a settlement, even an imperfect one. In such a quandry, the only ethical option is to remain open and curious, be willing to look at facts and evaluate claims instead of jumping to conclusions, and refrain from asserting an uncertain narrative as fact when there are competing narratives and counterexamples.
by hollerith | 2025-11-18 19:45:04+00:00
I wonder whether some fraction of the population has shit night vision and whether this fraction's preferences are driving this trend to too-bright headlights.

That would explain scenes on TV and in movies with very low "key", which to me are awful and frustrating because I cannot see anything, but maybe that is just how the (dimly-lit) scene would actually look in real life to the cinematographer or editor responsible for the visual design of the scene.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-18 19:45:14+00:00
> Why should the collective of voters..

They're accountable as individuals not as a collective. And it so happens, they are responsible for their government in a democracy but corporations aren't responsible for running countries.

> It’s perfectly valid to criticize corporations for their actions, regardless of the regulatory environment.

In the free speech sense, sure. But your criticism isn't founded on solid ground. You should expect corporations to do whatever they have to do within the bounds of the law to turn a profit. Their responsibility is to their investors and employees, they have no responsibility to the general public beyond that which is laid out in the law.

The increasing demand in corporations being part of the public/social moral consciousness is causing them to manipulate politics more and more, eroding what little voice the individuals have.

You're trying to live in a feudal society when you treat corporations like this.

If you're unhappy with the quality of Google's services, don't do business with them. If they broke the law, they should pay for it. But expecting them to be a beacon of morality is accepting that they have a role in society and government beyond mere revenue generating machines. And if you expect them to have that role, then you're also giving them the right to enforce that expectation as a matter of corporate policy instead of law. Corporate policies then become as powerful as law, and corporations have to interfere with matters of government policy on the basis of morality instead of business, so you now have an organization with lots of money and resources competing with individual voters.

And then people have the nerve to complain about PACs, money in politics, billionaire's influencing the government, bribery,etc.. you can't have it both ways. Either we have a country run partly by corporations, and a society driven and controlled by them, or we don't.
by johnmaguire | 2025-11-18 19:45:18+00:00
This thread started with OP calling Pebble rentseeking and used the subscription services as an example. I replied to point out that the subscription fees were used to fund services and development - they weren't profit. Then the thread went off the rails with some claiming that spending money is proof that Rebble is incompetent and others claiming that they shouldn't be whining about spending money (which they weren't) and I'm no longer clear what point you are trying to make.

Stated elsewhere in thread, I believe the primary concern is that Rebble will import the data into a separate, closed app store owned by Pebble, which Pebble will lock Rebble out of (i.e. block scraping and refuse to release this data), and then if Pebble goes bust again, Rebble is left with less than they started with.
by RajT88 | 2025-11-18 19:45:20+00:00
YES! I rented a Prius once, and this was my biggest complaint.

That big stupid bright-ass LCD screen which smugly ruined my night blindness by trumpeting constantly how fuel efficient it was made me feel less confident driving at night. Toyota is a smart and good company, and seems to have addressed this in newer Priuses (Prii?) by putting smaller, less bright LCD's and moving them further out of the way of your field of vision.
by apparent | 2025-11-18 19:45:34+00:00
I think the key question is whether the automated actions resulted in information being retained by Pebble. If it was just going through a motion and pulling some data (or pulling all data but only keeping some of it), then that would be consistent with Eric's story and not be the kind of scraping that Rebble is worried about. They're worried about the content being archived somewhere else, and they seem to think that happened. But did it?
by kragen | 2025-11-18 19:46:34+00:00
You can read Stroustrup's books and interviews, if the language design itself doesn't convey that message clearly enough; you don't have to guess what his intentions and motivations were. And, while I strongly disagree with you on how "special and notably distinct" primitive types are in C++, neither of us is claiming that C++ is less adherent to the principle that "everything is an object" than Java. You think it's a little more, and I think it's a lot more.

But we agree on the direction, and that direction is not "Java [did something] by deciding everything must be an object," but its opposite.
by 999900000999 | 2025-11-18 19:46:41+00:00
Oh lucky, another free AI beta.

I'm going to treat this like Kiro, and just use it until they start charging for it and then probably switch back to VS code with its built-in agent support.

Eventually they're going to do a rug pull, and instead of paying $10 a month for tons of AI code request, it's going to be two or $300 for that. The economics just aren't there to actually make a profit, hopefully before the rug pool happens local models on normal hardware will be fast enough.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-11-18 19:46:44+00:00
It literally does not matter how much they are connected out here in reality, the AI was to summarize the information in the article and that is exactly what it did.

>do you think the model did a bad job then in it's second response

Yes, very obviously it told you what you wanted to hear. This is behavior that should not be surprising to you.
by grigri907 | 2025-11-18 19:46:52+00:00
I would not at all be surprised if they are listening. But isn't a simpler explanation that your in-law was googling driveway options, clicked through a link to see what the heck airport grad tar even is, and then google saw you were in the same vicinity and guessed you'd have similar interests? I wonder how many other ads you had in common that week, or if he saw ads for the underwater basket weaving course you purchased, etc.
by diegof79 | 2025-11-18 19:47:03+00:00
You just described Eclipse RCP.

The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX.

When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks.

I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)
by modeless | 2025-11-18 19:47:16+00:00
Their original statement was "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data" that was scraped from the Pebble app store. So, explicitly not on the other services. I have to agree with other commenters that $200,000+ seems like an extravagant bill for hosting this data for 8 years with a web frontend and maybe 20,000 users.
by sfpotter | 2025-11-18 19:47:26+00:00
I'm not sure if you're just spamming this response all over this thread or if you're replying to what I wrote, but I do actually think there's a connection. I've also read and love this book, and it does push back on the "pragmatic" mentality espoused by The Pragmatic Programmer and other similar books.

I feel like this comes from Ousterhout's focus on actually building working systems. The Pragmatic books are much more focused on how one might get through the day as a programmer working at an org, but PoSD is focused on the ins and outs of building software well. I find that Pragmatic Programmer etc. have little to say about this, and when they do it's usually either trivial or fluff.

I'm not sure if Ousterhout is an "idealistic programmer" (I'm not even sure if this is the right term...), but I definitely feel like he's a fellow traveler...
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-11-18 19:47:58+00:00
I have read several cloudflare postmortems and my confidence in their systems is pretty low. They used to run their entire control plane out of a single datacenter which is amateur hour for a tech company that has over $60 billion in market cap.

I also don’t understand how it is uncharitable to compare them to crowdstrike as both companies run critical systems that affect a large number of people’s lives, and both companies seem to have outages at a similar rate (if anything, cloudflare breaks more often than crowdstrike).
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-18 19:48:02+00:00
I could have just the same I suppose, but their comment was about google being a balancing force in terms of competition and monopoly. it wasn't a praise of their moral character. They did what was best for their business and that turns out to be good for reducing monopolies. If it turned out to be monopolistic, I would be wondering what congress and the DOJ are doing about it, instead of criticizing Google for trying to turn a profit.
by johnmaguire | 2025-11-18 19:49:00+00:00
I think this is a bit of a disingenuous reading of the article when the surrounding text states:

> Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around. [...] And the App Store that we’ve built together is much more than it was when Pebble stopped existing. We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!

All of these things take time and money.
by brettgriffin | 2025-11-18 19:49:02+00:00
For the uninitiated, what's the subtext here? Is this about a trend in behavior of teens in Germany?

Asking for the same reason I asked OP my question. I was just in Berlin and, second only to Tokyo, I've never* seen such conscientious group of people, including teens.

* I'd actually place two other cities from that trip into the same #2 position: Zurich and Vienna.