MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonp888 | 2025-11-29 06:36:50+00:00
This system works by launching an official Windows image in Docker and then making an RDP connection to it. There are a couple of others too now like WinBoat

What all of them avoid mentioning is that the images were intended by Microsoft for test and development purposes on Windows and the license clearly states you need a valid Windows license to use them: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows#license

I wonder if Microsoft will take some action to enforce this if these projects become popular.

Edit: This comment is incorrect, see below comment from doctorpangloss
by odie5533 | 2025-11-29 06:37:00+00:00
Migrated Celery to Argo Workflows. No wisdom as it was straightforward. You lose a lot startup speed though, so it's not a drop-in replacement and is only a good choice for long-running workflows. Celery was easier than Argo Workflows. Celery is really easy to get started with. I like Airflow the best, but it's closer to Argo Workflows in terms of more long-lived workflows. I hope to try Hatchet soon. I've read Temporal is even harder to manage.
by advael | 2025-11-29 06:37:07+00:00
I don't know if the balance of evidence supports significant changes in sexuality and eroticism or not, but I think the way you've made the case that it doesn't here is unconvincing. Consumption of erotic content on the internet and actually engaging in sexuality as a participant are drastically different matters and both the sign and magnitude of any correlation between them is hard to pin down. From my own anecdotal perspective, there's a weak but significant anticorrelation between how much porn/erotica people consume on the internet and how much they engage in sex or kink or even relationships with other people. Maybe the sample of people I've met isn't indicative, but I would say neither is anything you're using as supporting evidence here
by quickslowdown | 2025-11-29 06:37:09+00:00
What client app are you using for Matrix? I really love the idea of switching over to it, or something similar, after Discord's IPO. We tried Revolt, which is now apparently called Stoat Chat, but the 2 killer features with Discord are its screen sharing & noise cancelling. Some of the screen sharing "extras" I could do without, but using Element we found that background noise cancelling is awful. You can hear every seat readjustment, things in other rooms in the person's background, loud breathing, people eating...it's awful.
by pmontra | 2025-11-29 06:40:58+00:00
A customer of mine has two projects. One running on their own hardware, Django + Celery. The other one running on AWS EC2, Django alone.

In the first one we use Celery to run some jobs that may last from a few seconds to some minutes. In the other one we create a new VM and make it run the job and we make it self destroy on job termination. The communication is over a shared database and SQS queues.

We have periodic problems with celery: workers losing connection with RabbitMQ, Celery itself getting stuck, gevent issues maybe caused by C libraries but we can't be sure (we use prefork for some workers but not for everything)

We had no problems with EC2 VMs. By the way, we use VirtualBox to simulate EC2 locally: a Python class encapsulates the API to start the VMs and does it with boto3 in production and with VBoxManage in development.

What I don't understand is: it's always Linux, amd64, RabbitMQ but my other customer using Rails and Sidekiq has no problems and they run many more jobs. There is something in the concurrency stack inside Celery that is too fragile.
by treyd | 2025-11-29 06:45:14+00:00
> It’s not exactly pushing google’s ad agenda.

Maybe not their ad agenda, but certainly one of their agendas. Specifically, the agenda they have to get young, inexperienced developers prepared for specifically the software development practices they employ internally.

It was directly stated that "Go is not for clever developers" and that their target is recent graduates with limited experience. It punishes you for trying to think about what you're building and to design sophisticated software, relying more on brute force. It doesn't encourage you to reach higher.
by BanditDefender | 2025-11-29 06:45:51+00:00
Those aren't mutually exclusive, stimulus and bodily perception enable higher-level thoughts about the physical world. Once I was driving a big cheap pickup with a heavy load on an interstate, and a rear tire violently blew out, causing the truck to sway violently. I operated entirely by feel + my 3D mental model of a moving truck to discern what and where went wrong and how to safely pull over. It was too fast and too difficult for any stupid words to get in the way.

I am glad humans are meaningfully smarter than chimps, and not merely more vocal. Helen Keller herself seemed to think that learning language finally helped her understand what this weird language thing was:

I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!

It is not like she was constantly dehydrated because she didn't understand what water was. She realized even a somewhat open-ended concept like "water" could be given a name by virtue of being recognizable via stimulus and bodily perception. That in and of itself is quite a high-level thought!
by rsync | 2025-11-29 06:46:11+00:00
Both unsophisticated lay observers and capital/owners tend to fault operators ... for different reasons.

Accident studies and, in particular, books like _Normal Accidents_[1] push back on this assumptions:

"... It made the case for examining technological failures as the product of highly interacting systems, and highlighted organizational and management factors as the main causes of failures. Technological disasters could no longer be ascribed to isolated equipment malfunction, operator error, or acts of God."

It is well accepted - and I believe - that there were a multitude of operator errors during the Air France 447 flight but none of them were unpredictable or exotic and the system they were tasked with operating was poorly designed and unhelpfully hid layers of complexity that suddenly re-emerged during tremendous "production pressure".

But don't take my word for it - I appeal to authority[2]:

"Automation dependent pilots allowed their airplanes to get much closer to the edge of the envelope than they should have ..."[3].

or:

@ 14:15: "... we see automation dependent crews, lacking confidence in their own ability to fly an airplane are turning to ther autopilot ..."[4].

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

[2] Captain Vanderburgh

[3] Children of Magenta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTwB94yOrRQ

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
by adamcharnock | 2025-11-29 06:47:25+00:00
Something about queuing systems that often gets me is that they can start to seem like the wrong abstraction as soon as one has tasks that enqueue additional tasks. Particularly when features start growing, and double particularly when modelling business processes.

This is because the code enqueuing the task needs to be aware of what happens next, which breaks separation of concerns. Why should the user sign-up code have to know that a report generation job now needs queuing?

Really what starts to make more sense to me is to fire off events. Code can say, "this thing just happened", and let other code decide if it wants to listen. When then makes it an event stream rather than a queue, with consumer groups at al.

I made the (now unmaintained) project https://lightbus.org around this, and it did work really well for our use case. Hopefully someone has now created something better.

So I'd say this: before grabbing for a task queue, take a moment to think about what you're actually modelling. But be careful of the event streaming rabbit-hole!
by npodbielski | 2025-11-29 06:48:16+00:00
> I've known people that just demand to know things about you, and simply can't understand that you have boundaries and that there's information which is simply none of their business.

Are they your friends or family? Like I can not imagine some social interaction that goes beyond those frames. Friends or family usually do know you pretty well, they do not need to ask. Other people? Usually firm: 'None of your business' is enough to mark end of conversation.

Since usually, culture is imported to my side of the globe several years later, this makes me afraid for my kids. Will they have to fight peers like that? Will they become like that? This makes me wondering if I should not ban social media at my home till they grown up :D
by themafia | 2025-11-29 06:49:02+00:00
> relied on the sun shining directly overhead on wells in different cities.

It was just one city actually. The critical piece is that the city's northern latitude was nearly identical to the Earth's angle of axial tilt. Which also means that this shadow phenomenon only occurs during the Summer Solstice.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/shs-physical-science/x04...
by odie5533 | 2025-11-29 06:51:02+00:00
But you can create a dedicated DB cluster and Redis cache in AWS in 3 clicks. And then you have point in time recovery, replication, automatic failover, and guaranteed uptime. What happens when it's 3 AM and your Pocketbase server crashes?

Supabase uses Postgres. I don't see a strong reason to prefer Pocketbase to Supabase for commercial applications. Supabase has a generous free tier and you can scale or self-host.
by qball | 2025-11-29 06:51:39+00:00
>Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades.

No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.

While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).

An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).

So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-29 06:53:27+00:00
I'm finding the bad developers just do vibe coding because it is a shortcut. You look like an expert but you are not.

Ultimately, it's about business value not amazing hand written code. Let the business profit judge whether it's good or bad to use generated code.

Further more, people always talk about LLM generated code but don't talk about LLM assisted testing, bug finding, automated documentation, etc. It can help increase code quality and reliability too - not just velocity. It's up to good software leaders in the company to set guidelines. Companies who can't do this also couldn't write good code before LLMs anyway.
by OscarCunningham | 2025-11-29 06:53:52+00:00
One thing this doesn't take into account (and the paper acknowledges this) is that the characters are assigned by picking cards from a deck. So the two players cannot have the same character.

Taking this into account would make the game much more complicated, because it can introduce an element of bluff.

For a simple example, imagine that there are only 5 characters. On your first turn you know the opponent doesn't have the same card as you, so you've got 4 options remaining. You'd like to ask a question that splits them into 2+2, but if you do this then the card you're holding will make one of the groups into a 3. Your opponent will know that your card is one of the 3, so you've effectively given them a head start. Instead you might sometimes want to split the options 3+2 with your card in the 2, as a bluff.

How often you want to do this must be described by some Nash equilibrium probabilities. It would be interesting to set up a linear programming solver to find these exactly, but so far I haven't had time to set this up. I don't know if it would be practical to solve the full version of the game with 24 characters.
by anonnon | 2025-11-29 06:54:20+00:00
> I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified.

I'm surprised a woman this. What a weirdo. Also, go walk outside a little, and notice how obese, voluntarily disfigured (e.g., with tattoos), and otherwise repulsive the average American is in 2025. I can't imagine internet surveillance did more than that to kill eroticism.

EDIT: I also think lack of shame or embarrassment, and the ubiquity of porn, and the resulting desensitization to sexuality, are under appreciated. Things that people would keep as secrets 20 years ago are now blasted out on social media like it's no big deal. If some technology professional has a leather fetish, for example, that is not something you or I should have to know about them, yet there it is on their Twitter or Mastodon anyway. If you criticize them for it, then you're "kink shaming."
by imiric | 2025-11-29 06:56:31+00:00
> They can't remove it. They gave it to you. They just don't have to keep giving you more stuff.

Who is "they" in this context?

A permissive license allows anyone to take someone else's work, profit from it, and never contribute back to the original project. For someone advocating for fairness, it's remarkable how you ignore this very real and common scenario.

> Many people think they're owed more software, including fixes to software, without compensating the laborer. That worldview is the real problem.

Compensation is orthogonal to F/LOSS. Authors are free to choose whatever income streams they like, and many successful businesses have been built around F/LOSS. Whoever is expecting people to work without compensation is being unreasonable, of course.

But F/LOSS as a social movement goes beyond a mere financial transaction. It works on the basis of mutual trust, where if I share something you find valuable, then the acceptable "payment" for that work is for you to do the same. This collaborative effort is how the highest quality products are produced.

The irony of your point is that a permissive license allows precisely the scenario you're arguing against. We've seen corporations profit from the work of others without compensating them for it. So much so, that OSS projects are forced to roll back their permissive licenses, often going too far in the other direction, to where they can no longer be labeled as "Open Source". E.g. Elastic: Apache -> SSPL -> AGPL; Redis: BSD -> SSPL; HashiCorp: MPL -> BSL; etc.

That is the actual problem which copyleft licenses prevent.
by aeternum | 2025-11-29 06:56:56+00:00
Seems more correct to say with different choices rather than the right choices.

For example plenty of energy likely means far more nuclear reactors, and the unfortunately truth is that most can be used to breed plutonium, so while we could be living with energy abundance, we also at least slightly increase the chance of global nuclear war. (IMO probably still worth it but it's no longer a super clear right/wrong).

With food, the problem is not producing it, it's the distribution. You aren't going to get it distributed in many countries that need it without overthrowing governments which will include lots of killing and bombing. Now it being the right choice to feed everyone is much murkier.
by hamstergene | 2025-11-29 06:57:12+00:00
A great opportunity to bring up that a robot that operates 100% locally and is located within Bluetooth range has never needed a cloud account, has never had to become unavailable whenever AWS goes down, and certainly doesn't have to be reduced to a manual dud when its company ceases to exist. I wonder what whoever produced such "Systems Design" would have to say to customers now.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-11-29 06:57:15+00:00
They are standing on the shoulders of giants. There's nothing wrong with the ideals and the motivation, but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?

And all of that culminates with: Could the level of technology and the internet reach the state it is today without big tech? And if not, was the price we paid to get here worth it?
by chanux | 2025-11-29 06:59:21+00:00
I know how to fix this but I'm not "allowed to" can eat away at you easily. Then there are things that I know how I might fix but I wouldn't realistically be able to because it's all a lot to take on, there will almost never be enough time and hands to get it done, within the set constraints.

This is due to the way how incentives are aligned. Systems that are powering things for, say a decade at least but worked on Quarterly basis.

Why is this alive and well, then? Because it doesn't actually matter as long as money keeps rolling in. It is also possible that the losses caused by or efficiency not achieved do not show up in the accounts.
by northlondoner | 2025-11-29 07:02:48+00:00
blubber, I think there might be some misconceptions. Just for the record.

R is not actually competing with those languages. R's design purpose is different. it is a general purpose computational language for scientists. There are FFIs (Foreign Function Interfaces) for all those languages.

R-Kotlin-Jave: https://journal.r-project.org/articles/RJ-2018-066/ R-Rust: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/using_rust.html R-C# : https://github.com/Open-Systems-Pharmacology/rsharp/

R is supporting C integration natively anyhow (see Chambers's book.

Regarding VB reference. VB was used in finance a lot to do some advanced maths. just a side remark.
by rglullis | 2025-11-29 07:03:20+00:00
> said that I was soliciting donations

They didn't do that. They were not actively promoting creators. it was the opposite. They were letting people mark someone as a potential recipient of contributions as a way to bootstrap their network.

> just because Chrome has the capability to coerce consent does not mean we should be surrendering our consent to anyone and everyone.

Your bias is showing.

Brave did not "coerce" anything to anyone. Their crypto stuff is opt-in. The ad blocker is opt-in.

Rationalize all you want, if you think that is justified to have a website blocking a browser like Brave because "of what they do to users", then it should be a moral imperative to help others to stop using chrome, edge and Safari.
by f1shy | 2025-11-29 07:05:42+00:00
Of topic for the thread, but on for the comment: I was working in an automotive project 3 years ago. It was all about safety, and one hypothesis was the processor could get overloaded. I was astonished no one in a grouo of 20 “senior sw architecs” had any idea about the concept of load shedding. The proposed solution was “in that case, reboot”.

Mind you whatever came out of that project is rolling on the street today.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-29 07:06:06+00:00
This is evidently not the whole story with regards to AI energy usage - training costs, data center buildout costs and the ongoing fierce competition between the providers all add up to a very significant carbon footprint for the AI industry as a whole.

Yes but movie making is also energy intensive - people, sets, cameras, shooting, rendering, editing, etc.

AI should still produce a lot more carbon but AI is suppose to help humanity advance faster and make humanity more productive. Movies and shows are mostly entertainment. So the extra carbon footprint should be worth it.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-11-29 07:06:42+00:00
All over Germany. As a student, I donated blood plasma which was way more lucrative (until the US banned plasma imports and killed the market). You can donate plasma more often (up to 5 times in 14 days), and IIRC I got 17€ per session, 30€ for every 3rd session, and 50€ for every 5th session. Yes, they had a consitency-reward schema going on in order to get you engaged and keep coming back. Plus, also wanted to thwart off people in financial needs that desperately need money the next day (like drug addicts).
Show HN: VidBee – A cross-platform video downloader with RSS auto-download
by nexmoe | 2025-11-29 07:07:45+00:00
I built VidBee, a cross-platform video downloader (macOS / Windows / Linux) designed around one idea: fully automated downloads. Most GUI wrappers still require manual actions, so VidBee uses RSS feeds to watch channels/playlists and fetch new videos automatically in the background.

Why I made it: I follow long-form creators and wanted a hands-off workflow: subscribe once, get new videos saved automatically, organized and ready. Existing tools felt either too heavy or too manual.

Key features: - Full automation via RSS: monitor feeds and auto-download new videos - Clean, minimal UI with fast startup - Auto-renaming, folder rules, and library organization - Parallel downloads powered by yt-dlp - macOS/Windows/Linux builds

Compared to Downie, JDownloader, and typical yt-dlp GUIs: VidBee focuses on true automation instead of manual "copy link → paste → choose options" flows.
by moepstar | 2025-11-29 07:07:54+00:00
Well, it appears that Neato/Vorwerk robots are not supported - at least they're not listed on https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

> Please note that this list is exhaustive. These are the supported robots. Robots not on this list are not supported by Valetudo. If your robot is not on this list, it is not supported.

From what i gathered so far, Valetudo is actually no custom firmware but modified vendor firmware? So, not sure if anyone related to the project has any interest and capability to reverse that...
by davedx | 2025-11-29 07:09:29+00:00
> we use Sentence Transformers (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) as our default (solid all-around performer for speed and retrieval, English-only).

Huh, interesting. I might be building a German-language RAG at some point in my future and I never even considered that some models might not support German at all. Does anyone have any experience here? Do many models underperform or not support non-English languages?
by hxtk | 2025-11-29 07:11:00+00:00
Patent != copyright. You can patent an algorithm (e.g., Adaptive Replacement Caching, which was scheduled to go into public domain this year but unfortunately got renewed successfully) but when it gets to the level of an actual specific implementation, it's a matter of copyright law.

It's why black-box clones where you look at an application and just try to make one with the same externally-observable behavior without looking at the code is legal (as long as you don't recycle copyrighted assets like images or icons) but can be infringing if you reuse any of the actual source code.

This was an issue that got settled early on and got covered in my SWE ethics class in college, but then more recently was re-tried in Oracle v Google in the case of Google cloning the Java standard library for the Android SDK.

I have no idea how copyright applies here. StackOverflow has a rule in their terms of use that all the user-generated content there is redistributable under some kind of creative commons license that makes it easy to reuse. Perhaps HN has a similar rule? Not that I'm aware of, though.