MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldPeas | 2025-11-17 19:23:27+00:00
I already use a-shell to run python scripts that fetch media, news summaries, server dashboards etc. It's really a shame I can't actually do what I want like with android where I could make custom permanent free apps for myself and do what I pleased throughout the system, executing binaries that interfaced with the real fs or remuxing video, rsyncing to my server.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-17 19:23:32+00:00
The best statement of virtue ethics is contained in Alasdair Macintyre’s _After Virtue_. It’s a metaethical foundation that argues that both deontology and utilitarianism are incoherent and have failed to explain what some unitary “the good” is, and that ancient notions of “virtues” (some of which have filtered down to present day) can capture facets of that good better.

The big advantage of virtue ethics from my point of view is that humans have unarguably evolved cognitive mechanisms for evaluating some virtues (“loyalty”, “friendship”, “moderation”, etc.) but nobody seriously argues that we have a similarly built-in notion of “utility”.
by kevinsync | 2025-11-17 19:23:47+00:00
I already wrote something else in here, but one other thought I had afterwards was related to IKEA carts -- they have four 360-degree casters, which makes them extra prone to just flying in literally any direction with a bit of wind if they're not returned to the corrals. Strangely enough, I rarely ever encounter an abandoned cart there, or full corrals; they're almost always empty! Curious if IKEA policy is far more rigorous than a grocery store on cart retrieval and return.
by iLemming | 2025-11-17 19:24:05+00:00
> I wrote a lot of lisp making Emacs work

Share the Emacs packages you wrote. I'm saying this unironically - someone might be interested to keep improving them, maybe they'd find some interesting ideas to extract from them. Don't be like some ungrateful jerk who benefited from communal work for years when it suited them and then has nothing to leave but grumpy resentment when they're done.
by mort96 | 2025-11-17 19:24:10+00:00
I work with embedded Linux stuff and MCU stuff where we make a significant number of units. Even in an IPv6 world, there's no way each of those would get their own public static IPv6 address with an associated DNS record just for the purpose of being able to spin up a debug web interface. It's explicitly desirable for these devices to not be reachable through the public Internet.
by theamk | 2025-11-17 19:24:25+00:00
As author correctly says, C succeeded because "its abstractions align with how processors actually work [...] When you write x = y + z, there's no hidden complexity.".

And then they propose an async runtime with tons of complexity... "a state machine that runs on Linux via io_uring, Windows via IOCP, browsers via WebAssembly," - that's mountains of runtime code to present a model that is nowhere close to how programs actually work.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this in general, high-level languages are very useful. But then why try to tie this to C? It is yet another async-based language.
by navanchauhan | 2025-11-17 19:24:39+00:00
Are the primitives not already there?[0]

I don't see why we cannot build an app that when connected to an external monitor switches to a "Desktop Environment". Maybe, even a hacked version of UTM[1] that exposes a fully functional OS on the monitor.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/presenting-c...

[1] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
by ngruhn | 2025-11-17 19:24:39+00:00
> I think the initial assumption that that definition is good and harmless is just wrong.

Why? The alternative is to donate to sexy causes that make you feel good:

- disaster relief and then forget about once it's not in the news anymore

- school uniforms for children when they can't even do their homework because they can't afford lighting at home

- literal team of full time body guards for the last member of some species
by phantasmish | 2025-11-17 19:24:46+00:00
… and I tend to think of it as the safest route to doing OK at consequentialism, too, myself. The point is still basically good outcomes, but it short-circuits the problems that tend to come up when one starts trying to maximize utility/good, by saying “that shit’s too complicated, just be a good person” (to oversimplify and omit the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” parts)

Like you’re probably not going to start with any halfway-mainstream virtue ethics text and find yourself pondering how much you’d have to be paid to donate enough to make it net-good to be a low-level worker at an extermination camp. No dude, don’t work at extermination camps, who cares how many mosquito nets you buy? Don’t do that.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-11-17 19:24:56+00:00
I also think that this is the central cause of a wide variety of domestic/cute adaptations. There are too many separate features to believe that raccoons and dogs and cats and a dozen other species all select for these same elements independently.

I no longer have the book on hand, but read a few months ago that this correlation between juvenile traits and domestication was one of the main theses of Barrett's "Supernormal Stimuli" in Chapter 4. She cited a few studies of fox domestication [1], [2] and other works to support these theories.

[1]: https://courses.washington.edu/anmind/Trut%20on%20the%20Russ...

[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(05)...
Paywall as a Service
by gethly | 2025-11-17 19:25:03+00:00
Gethly, a hosting and sales platform for digital content creators, just added a new exciting feature - paywall as a service. It allows content creators to host their content outside of the platform, while the platform still provides all the functionality for handling finances, subscriptions, access control...

More in the blog post: https://gethly.com/blog/paywall-as-a-service
by dang | 2025-11-17 19:25:03+00:00
Related. Others?

Honda Needs a Tune-Up (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178878 - April 2022 (2 comments)

Honda Needs a Tune-Up (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16546673 - March 2018 (6 comments)

Honda Needs a Tune Up (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10641272 - Nov 2015 (1 comment)
by retrac | 2025-11-17 19:25:31+00:00
Since no one else has noted it: they show rail lines and only rail. No roads on those maps. This includes some quite obscure ones like the railway between Labrador and Sept-Iles, Quebec. (It has almost no traffic and it serves a small town and a mine and it's not connected to the rest of the North American system.) Similarly they depict sections of rail in Canada that were out of service many years before this map was published. So they're quite out of date. To not show that Canada is linked by rail with the USA at Detroit is a definite oversight, too.

Seeing through the lens of railroads is probably an artifact of both ideology and the economic reality in North Korea. And maybe also the implicitly military purpose of these maps.
by simianwords | 2025-11-17 19:25:50+00:00
An update: there seems to be a critical error in the reporting of metrics in this book for the water issue. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mis....

I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.

The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:

https://x.com/_KarenHao/status/1990412118584144113
by glenstein | 2025-11-17 19:25:55+00:00
I actually think I agree with this, but nevertheless people can refer to EA and mean by it the totality of sociological dynamics surrounding it, including its population of proponents and their histories.

I actually think EA is conceptually perfectly fine within its scope of analysis (once you start listing examples, e.g. mosquito nets to prevent malaria, I think they're hard to dispute), and the desire to throw out the conceptual baby with the bathwater of its adherents is an unfortunate demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I think it's like how some predatory pickup artists do the work of being proto-feminists (or perhaps more to the point, how actual feminists can nevertheless be people who engage in the very kinds of harms studied by the subject matter). I wouldn't want to make feminism answer for such creatures as definitionally built into the core concept.
Ask HN: What part of your work do you present?
by benry1 | 2025-11-17 19:26:04+00:00
We work in our codebases daily, so we have a very connected and detailed view of how our systems work. I would like to present some of my work, but I have a hard time thinking about what would make a good presentation. Some topics seem too small or obvious to be worth half an hour, and others seem impossible to explain in only half an hour. Rarely anything inbetween.

When you choose to give a presentation, how do you decide which part of the system to present? Do you find it hard to decouple the presentation from the context of why you had to build the system?
by GeekyBear | 2025-11-17 19:26:13+00:00
Just remember to remain wary of the cute ones.

> Raccoons are a rabies reservoir in the eastern United States, extending from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Appalachian Mountain range. Within these areas, 10% of raccoons that expose people or pets have rabies, making them one of the highest rabies-risks in the United States.

https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/php/protecting-public-health/inde...
by tavavex | 2025-11-17 19:26:27+00:00
> People are busy, some people have kids

Unless you're "having kids" in the sense that you're about to give birth to one, saving 30-60 seconds isn't going to make a difference in your day. It's like trying to optimize your travel timing so you can stop at fewer red lights. Maybe it gives someone the illusion of efficiency, but no one is really saving any time.

Most people who leave carts don't mind them blocking others' paths. If you're going out of your way to push one over the curb and into the muddy grass, you might as well have parked it in the designated spot by now.

Where I am, large enough stores have dedicated "outside" employees, most of whose time is be spent pushing carts. For them it's not a fun change of pace, it's just their job. If everyone put their carts back in an orderly fashion, they would need to do less weaving in parking lot traffic and trudging through horrible weather than they otherwise have to. Sure, "it's their job", but I don't want to make it even harder, especially considering how much they tend to be paid.
by brettgriffin | 2025-11-17 19:26:36+00:00
> Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm

Nobody who does this is not aware that returning the shopping card is the normal, expected, and 'right' behavior. There just isn't a moral hazard that prevents them from doing the wrong behavior.

I think there is a larger philosophical/moral question of WHY should someone do the 'right' thing in the absense of a moral hazard. It's something I've thought a lot about over the last couple of years.

As the 4chan Shopping car theory points out, the cost of leaving the cart is zero. And the benefit is the saved time/energy. Why shouldn't a rational self-optimizing person leave the cart there? Why shouldn't they hold the subway door open to catch the train? Why shouldn't they pull up the very front of the offramp and merge at the last second? Zero cost, all benefit.

I have a self-motto of 'do the right thing' in virtually anything I do. In those examples, I'd return the carts, wouldn't hold a train door open, and would miss an exit and turn around.

But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?
by indigodaddy | 2025-11-17 19:26:47+00:00
Back in the day (10-12 years ago) at a telecom/cable we accomplished this with F5 Big IP GSLB DNS (and later migrated to A10's GSLB equivalent devices) as the auth DNS server for services/zones that required or were suitable for HA. (I can't totally remember but I'm guessing we must have had a pretty low TTL for this).

Had no idea that Route 53 had this sort of functionality
by eduction | 2025-11-17 19:26:47+00:00
Shallow. Especially “ The era of XML is in the past… now it's dead.”

That’s not an argument against the merits of XML, it’s just a fashion declaration.

It’s also wrong. Podcasting boils down to XML files. It even heavily uses XML’s extension mechanism. XML is the basis for RSS and Atom. XML is the basis for LibreOffice and modern Microsoft Office files. XML is at the core of the epub digital book standard. And on and on.

XML may not be ideal for config (reasonable people can disagree on the topic) but it’s not dead.

It’s also interesting that he declares JSON “won” then adds a bunch of XML features to it like ordered entries and not having to quote element/attribute names.

JSON “won” for web apis - e.g. browser-server data interchange. It is not, and was never claimed to be, good for serial documents like config, or for when you need an extensible format (the “X” in XML). It’s fine for what it is, and so is XML, which, when it “won”, was similarly overused, like for web apis.
by iamnothere | 2025-11-17 19:27:05+00:00
> I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.

The great thing about the “job creation” theory of antisocial behavior is that it justifies all kinds of things, from graffiti to dumping to stealing decorative plants from the local park. Why bother following implicit (or even explicit) rules if there is no consequence? Surely it won’t have any consequences in the long run!
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-11-17 19:28:21+00:00
Dogs are certainly better at looking intelligent. I think dogs, being a more social animal, are more eager to please, and so are willing to be trained.

Cats can vary wildly. One of my cats seems dumb as a box of rocks and haven't even grasped the idea of object permanence. If she's tracking a laser, and I move it around a corner, she can't figure out where it went. She goes from intense staring and tracking to standing up and looking around, confused. When I bring the laser back around the corner, she's instantly back to squatting and tracking it.
by dijit | 2025-11-17 19:28:41+00:00
You should talk to a network engineer before making claims like this. There are mechanisms to curtail DDOS attacks at origin.

For a few reasons (political, economical) there’s little will to enact them, these attacks are so few and far between and you can pay your way out of them in most cases, so the incentives aren’t there for ISPs (whom are a commodity judged primarily on price and bandwidth)
by ndiddy | 2025-11-17 19:29:21+00:00
All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and the hardware is now basically useless. It's possible to run mainline Linux on it, but you can't do anything with the GPU since that requires a special one-off driver that never got upstreamed.
by ashdksnndck | 2025-11-17 19:29:30+00:00
Redis and Elasticsearch were both built by Israelis, and there is also Israeli code in important projects like the Linux kernel. And of course, also Israeli contributions in closed-source tech like CUDA. Avoiding all of that is a pretty tall order. But if you want to impair your systems by purifying them based on national origin of the contributors, have at it.
by F7F7F7 | 2025-11-17 19:29:46+00:00
I'm a heavy Terminal user and run everything from local LLMs to full stack dev (react/python). I dibble and dabble in Blender, Unreal, and Logic Pro. I aimlessly browse the web looking for recipes, 3d printing files, shopping, HN, whatever. I'll occasionally spin up Age of Empire II locally or play some quick games via GeForceNow. I'm in full control of my Synology and Qnap NAS servers and the shit ton of media that's on it.

And I do all of that on my Mac. My 4090 rig is strictly for gaming with my son and my Proxmox Linux retired thin client rigs are for running my household on HA.

Please tell me what I'm missing out on by using a Mac OS device as my daily driver.
by counters | 2025-11-17 19:29:54+00:00
> By having better dispersed ensemble forecasts, we can more quickly address observation gaps that may be needed to better solidify certain patterns or outcomes, which will lead to more accurate deterministic forecasts.

Sorry - not sure this is a reasonable take-away. The models here are all still initialized from analysis performed by ECMWF; Google is not running an in-house data assimilation product for this. So there's no feedback mechanism between ensemble spread/uncertainty and the observation itself in this stack. The output of this system could be interrogated using something like Ensemble Sensitivity Analysis, but there's nothing novel about that and we can do that with existing ensemble forecast systems.
by RobinL | 2025-11-17 19:30:07+00:00
> many of EA's most notorious supporters.

The fact they're notorious makes them a biased sample.

My guess is for the majority of people interested in EA - the typical supporter who is not super wealthy or well known - the two central ideas are:

- For people living in wealthy countries, giving some % of your income makes little difference to your life, but can potentially make a big difference to someone else's

- We should carefully decide which charities to give to, because some are far more effective than others.

That's pretty much it - essentially the message in Peter Singer's book: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/.

I would describe myself as an EA, but all that means to me is really the two points above. It certainly isn't anything like an indulgence that morally offsets poor behaviour elsewhere
by cogman10 | 2025-11-17 19:30:11+00:00
I'm a parent with a child with profound autism. You leave your kid in the car for the 30 seconds it takes to return the cart. It's never been an issue and the kiddo is perfectly content waiting for a short period while I walk the cart back.

My god, people act like there's kidnappers at every grocery store just waiting for this one moment to abduct a child.
by startupsfail | 2025-11-17 19:30:20+00:00
When I was growing up 90-ies, a mix of using public metro and buses to roam the city (since I was in second grade, when I was allowed to take metro to do afterschool karate) and spending summers in various countryside locations where my grandparents resided was a good mix.

I disagree that the kids need or want to roam without grownups all the time. Grownups are not the problem. Kids are fun for the parents, the company of parents and their peers is kinda amazing.

Systems and institutions are the problem. When kids are stuck in the daycare or school, in a very limited space, grownups are stuck at the office and grandparents are in a different state for tax purposes - that is the problem.

I don't know if this is true, but Patagonia claimed at some point that they used to maintain daycares and allow kids to roam the campus...
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-17 19:30:55+00:00
Do they really though?

I asked a used car salesman once, "what do you do to these cars after you get them" and he said "nothing." They get them from the auction and put them on the lot.

Now maybe some dealers do a little more. I am a bottom-feeder when it comes to cars. But stands to reason that any money they spend on the car is less profit for them when they sell it.
Building Startups
by Zachabdelilah | 2025-11-17 19:31:00+00:00
Im a jr dev in college. just kind of got into the startup world and honestly i will say ive been having lots of fun learning and building projects. If any seniors in the game have some advice for me please send it my way. After College I really want to try out the Levels.io lifestyle thing. I dont think I want to go SF and focus my entire life raising vc.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-17 19:31:04+00:00
> I think "good will hunting" is a bad example.

Communication is important. But good, honest discussion is possible if people really want it. It's like bargaining/negotiation: if you really want to be at the table, you will stay at the table and try to understand the other people.

Which bring us to the single most pernicious type of "movie logic" in real life: when we see people as enemies before trying to understand them.
by vlz | 2025-11-17 19:31:43+00:00
There is algorithmic art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

> From one point of view, for a work of art to be considered algorithmic art, its creation must include a process based on an algorithm devised by the artist. An artist may also select parameters and interact as the composition is generated. Here, an algorithm is simply a detailed recipe for the design and possibly execution of an artwork […]

Creating art by AI certainly also uses an algorithm to some extent but it cannot be said to have devised that algorithm and arguably also not to clearly define all parameters to the algorithm.
by ploxiln | 2025-11-17 19:32:09+00:00
The "Sony Xperia 5 V" (I have the previous "Sony Xperia 5 IV") has a headphone jack, takes a uSD card, and is somewhat compact. (And no silly camera cutout in the screen, it's in a reasonably small bezel.)

EDIT: also see the Xperia 10 VII for a phone that isn't 2 years old (I haven't been keeping up, I buy phones to use for 4+ years)
by cstrahan | 2025-11-17 19:32:12+00:00
> Is that just bad implementation? Where are the wasted tokens?

How wouldn't it be wasteful?

I'll try to summarize a couple sources:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mc...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/

Here's what Anthropic has to say about it: As MCP usage scales, there are two common patterns that can increase agent cost and latency:

Tool definitions overload the context window; Intermediate tool results consume additional tokens. [...] Tool descriptions occupy more context window space, increasing response time and costs. In cases where agents are connected to thousands of tools, they’ll need to process hundreds of thousands of tokens before reading a request. [...] Most MCP clients allow models to directly call MCP tools. For example, you might ask your agent: "Download my meeting transcript from Google Drive and attach it to the Salesforce lead." The model will make calls like: TOOL CALL: gdrive.getDocument(documentId: "abc123") → returns "Discussed Q4 goals...\n[full transcript text]" (loaded into model context) TOOL CALL: salesforce.updateRecord( objectType: "SalesMeeting", recordId: "00Q5f000001abcXYZ", data: { "Notes": "Discussed Q4 goals...\n[full transcript text written out]" } ) (model needs to write entire transcript into context again) Every intermediate result must pass through the model. In this example, the full call transcript flows through twice. For a 2-hour sales meeting, that could mean processing an additional 50,000 tokens. Even larger documents may exceed context window limits, breaking the workflow. With large documents or complex data structures, models may be more likely to make mistakes when copying data between tool calls.

Now, if you were to instead have the LLM write code, that code can perform whatever filtering/aggregation/transformation etc that it needs, without having to round-trip from LLM to tool(s), back and forth, and the only tokens that are consumed are those of the final result. What happens with MCP? All of the text of each MCP call is flooded into the context, only for the LLM to have to make sense of what it just read to then either regurgitate that out into a file to post process (very likely with differences/"hallucinations" slipped in), or in the usual case (I'm personifying the LLM here for rhetorical purposes) it simply tries to reason about what it read to give you the filtered/aggregated/transformed/etc result you're looking for -- again, very likely with mistakes made.