MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cvoss | 2025-11-02 21:56:50+00:00
It is always with great fear and trepidation that I install the drivers for my discrete GPU on my Ubuntu system and configure the system to use it. The state of affairs might be better these days, but I remember it rarely working and having a high likelihood of horribly breaking the configuration, and trying to rectify it in the terminal while frantically searching forums on my phone.
by ewuhic | 2025-11-02 21:58:09+00:00
Dare I suggest you use NixOS, or even better, https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS, so you

1) get a working setup in minutes by following just https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Jovian_NixOS;

2) if something does not work, you don't start from scratch next time you have an urge to try again;

3) have best-in-class community support;

4) overcome lack of apps by plugging into nixpkgs - the biggest repo of packages out there among all the distros.

Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.
by bobthepanda | 2025-11-02 21:58:15+00:00
The problem with dams is that for the most part in the West all the good sites near population centers have been taken. In developing countries you have the issue of new dams potentially making older downstream ones less useful, which is now a real conflict point with Egypt vs Sudan vs Ethiopia, Afghanistan vs Iran, China vs India and SEA, etc.

In addition, because silt will back up in reservoirs there are an increasing amount of old dams where removal makes more sense than spending more money on dredging and maintaining the dam; and with droughts becoming more common hydro is not as reliable for baseload anymore.
Show HN: I made a free Prompt Optimizer extension for perfect prompts instantly
by norocvit | 2025-11-02 21:58:31+00:00
Every prompt optimizer extension uses a freemium model and provides very limited free quota. That was very frustating so I built my own extension. It uses the Google API key, which offers a generous free tier that's more than enough for personal use (50 to 1000 RPD depending on the model), and it's available for everyone.
by shmeeed | 2025-11-02 21:59:19+00:00
It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-02 21:59:27+00:00
It's more that people have started realizing that governments and big tech have been playing this game for a long time, where instead of doing the work of using the huge resources they have to build useful infrastructure with the technolgies that we already have, they prefer to invest in useless new tech, coincidentally being sold by their own cronies. And they often have the nerve to do this while claiming that problems that are solved everywhere else in the world, and have been for 50-100 years, are somehow almost insurmountable.
by delichon | 2025-11-02 21:59:38+00:00
I'd guess that Heinlein was aware of it and scaled it up in his imagination.

The Roads must roll — they are the arteries of the nation. When they stop, everything stops. Factories idle, food rots, men starve. The nation cannot live without its Roads. A thousand feet wide, level as a floor, strip after strip moving past in ordered procession. The slow strips on the outside moved at five miles an hour; the inner ones faster and faster, until the express strip in the center rushed past at a hundred miles an hour. -- The Roads Must Roll, Astounding Science Fiction, June 1940.

https://ia601208.us.archive.org/32/items/calibre_library_178...
by scott_w | 2025-11-02 21:59:40+00:00
> That's it: about 4 hours of work and produced something this person had asked for a year prior, and that people were already spending hours each day doing!

This leads to the exact problem OP brings up: who fixes it if it breaks? If it becomes critical, now other priorities go unhandled as a person or team are dragged into resolution.

I’ll bring a couple more counter arguments:

- When I was running an internal enablement team, I reckon I had 12 months worth of work of these simple requests at any given point in time.

- Even that time saving might not be worth it, if it means those 4 hours could have been spent building something the company can sell (which for a SaaS product, is literally millions over its lifetime).

Just to be clear, I’m not saying you did the wrong thing at all. Hell, I’ve done this stuff myself. I’m just pointing out it’s not as easy as “just spend 4 hours on it and it’s done!” I’d go on but I think I’d just end up regurgitating the article.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-02 21:59:58+00:00
I would not at all be surprised that there are examples out there, although I don't know of them. Tying the game state to the render loop is decision made very deep in the game engine, so you'd have to do extensive modifications to change any of the mainstream engines to do something else. Not worth the effort.

But a greenfield code shouldn't be perpetuating this mistake.
by griffzhowl | 2025-11-02 22:01:32+00:00
Thanks, I had a look at Maudlin's book. It seems the distinction between signaling and causation is that there might be some kind of nonlocal causation that we can't control and so can't use to send a signal.

Local causation is defined as in Bell's Theory of Local Beables, as the probability distribution for values at spacelike separated regions only being correlated with respect to the overlaps in their past lightcones. Or to put it the other way around, there's nonlocal causation if the probability distribution of values in one region depends on values in a spacelike separated region. That's what I'd call nonlocal correlation rather than causation but I guess that's just terminological.

This looks like a pertinent paper from Das but I haven't read through it yet

Arrival Time Distributions of Spin-1/2 Particles (2018) https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07141
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-02 22:02:35+00:00
> mandated under Biden and whose results came under Biden

You missed the part where the original mandate was along party lines with Democrats supporting it and Republicans not, to investigate how the Trump administration handled the pandemic response. Republicans took control of the House and then redefined the agenda to be their own partisan viewpoint, to confirm what they already believed about gain-of-function and lab leak theories. They produced a nice Big Beautiful Report with a debatable connection to facts, which is not surprising in the least.

> before the truth finally came up to light

If you are looking to politicians for the truth...
by hecifato | 2025-11-02 22:02:38+00:00
> That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world.

I feel that as a Linux user. I really like Linux, I use it on my desktop and it runs all my servers. Delving into forum posts to find some solution to a specific problem can be exhausting. Sometimes you get a top result from like 2011 and it is out of date so you then need to spend X minutes trying to look up something more recent.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-02 22:02:44+00:00
Basically any time I'm like "huh, that's weird," even if it is not a bug, I bisect and see when that behavior was introduced. Because (1) this is trivial and no work to do (`git bisect run` is completely autonomous), and (2) it gets me to the commit that introduces the change, which has all the context that might tell me why it is acting that way.

Nothing annoys me more than a codebase with broken commits that break git bisect.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-02 22:02:45+00:00
For most laws the badness is inherent in the act. Intentionally killing someone is illegal because killing someone is bad and we're basically just giving you an out if it was unintentional, i.e. accidental killings aren't murder.

The problem here is that accessing a computer is a completely normal and unproblematic thing to do on purpose, so the intent requirement isn't doing much without knowing what "authorization" is supposed to mean but that's the part that isn't clear.
by saubeidl | 2025-11-02 22:03:47+00:00
> In the rare cases where violent revolution didn't fuck over everyone but the rich, it was because the previous aristocracy left a lot of develoment cards on the table.

I'd argue this is generally why revolutions happen in the first place, because the masses are miserable while the aristocracy lives a life of excess.

In related news:

Exhibit A: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-stamps-snap-benefits-cuts-...

Exhibit B: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1omlsyg/trumps_ela...

I'd further argue that there's plenty of "development cards", as you call them, left on the table in the US. Medical care being paywalled is an obvious one. Homelessness is at a historic high [0]. 13.5% of households are food insecure [1].

All of those problems could be fixed by simply redistributing resources from a few oligarchs.

I'm not sure what to make of your point about voting - I'm not quite sure I understand how that's related to the success of a post-revolution society.

> This is a terrible way to end if you're arguing in good faith.

So is calling people that disagree with you idiot, but I am actually enjoying the discussion, so lets not get petty here.

My point was a bigger one about Cuban society having these achievements despite being constantly undermined by its superpower neighbor. The same neighbor that presumably educated you? It was an attempt to point out a conflict of interest in said education system, not meant to be a personal attack.

[0] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/homelessness-at-a-record-h... [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
by twic | 2025-11-02 22:04:21+00:00
The majority of popular PvP shooters use anti-cheat which does not work on Proton, so "almost all modern games" seems like overselling it to me.

But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.
by Leftium | 2025-11-02 22:05:10+00:00
This was the motivating idea for Epicenter Assistant[1] (Prompt your AI coding agent while carrying boxes of pizza home)

- Connect to your opencode sessions via a web interface, connecting via a secure tunnel.

- (Optionally) use a transcription app to prompt the coding agent. (Since typing code is more difficult on a phone.)

I'm not sure if Epicenter Assistant will be developed any further...

Vanilla opencode has a feature for sharing web links to sessions, but these are read-only.[2]

[1]: https://github.com/epicenter-md/epicenter/tree/main/apps/sh

[2]: https://opencode.ai/docs/share/
by al_borland | 2025-11-02 22:05:16+00:00
I like that the fence moves with it. It seems like more of a complete vision than the moving sidewalks we have today, which always look like they were just dropped into a hallway.

We also seem to be unable to perfectly match food and hand speed these days. I’m not sure if this is a “feature” somehow, but it bothers me a lot. They didn’t seem to have this issue with the floor and fence, as far as I could tell.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-11-02 22:05:32+00:00
> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.

[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
by gmueckl | 2025-11-02 22:05:36+00:00
Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive.

Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
by gleenn | 2025-11-02 22:05:46+00:00
Which makes Clojure extra tempting because there is a bit of a infectious way to get Clojure i to corporations when you are always just handing the ops guys a "Java" we app bundled as a jar but secretly inside it's all Clojure compiled classfiles that work perfectly run on many JVM-based web servers with no additional effort.

I think Rich even alludes to this fact in one of his talks where it would be disallowed to run Ruby/Python/Rust whatever but it's Java then it's a know entity.
by coach_taha | 2025-11-02 22:06:18+00:00
Senior Engineering Manager. CS grad. Data, storage, cloud. 20+ years at the same company.

She came to me looking for a new role.

Four interviews before we met. Two failed. Two she never showed up for.

She thought she needed motivation. A goals doc. A practice plan.

I gave her both. She didn’t show up.

It wasn’t a failure of willpower. It was a systems error.

And it got worse.

By July, she wasn’t even a manager anymore.

By October, she was L6 at Google.

I wrote about what happened in between.

"The Debugging of Geeta Sharma"
by rainsford | 2025-11-02 22:07:16+00:00
I admit this is subjective, but they're giant ugly concrete chimney-like structures spewing stuff into the air. Sure, intellectually I know it's just water vapor and they're form is dictated by their function, but they look like they belong in some pollution riddled dystopian hellscape.

I'm actually pro-nuclear power, but the cooling towers are a pretty significant eyesore and a non-trivial downside. But apparently some people hate the way wind turbines look while I think they're sleek and futuristic looking, so taste as ever is subjective.
by tombert | 2025-11-02 22:09:01+00:00
My abandoned PhD was in formal methods and I find dependent types to be pretty neat, but every time I've tried using a dependently typed language for anything it's always been an uphill battle.

When I used to do F# for a living, I was really pushing for using F*, but it was impossible to get any buy-in from coworkers because the learning curve was comparatively steep. I probably should have pushed a bit more, but I figured that I'd potentially have more success trying to push people to use TLA+ (though that was also unsuccessful).

That was unsuccessful as well, and I've come to the (admittedly very cynical conclusion) that software engineers, generally speaking, will never learn anything new if it involves "math" in any way, shape, or form. Once I realized that, it became much easier to lower my expectations of my coworkers.
by laxd | 2025-11-02 22:09:11+00:00
Addendum: I've used FreeBSD as my daily driver (I hate that term) since around 2004. Including through cs/math university. With Windows in a VM for "I need it". The longer I've used it the more I'm annoyed by the trivialities of Linux distro management. And the bugs that happens between ill fitting parts composed by underfunded distro developers.

And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.

My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depends on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.
by Scoundreller | 2025-11-02 22:09:40+00:00
No matter what, the canopy solar system will be more expensive than ground mounting. You have to build for more wind loading. For a car to crash into it and not fall over. And now that the public is around, build that much stronger to never fall over. And secure the wiring that much better against the public.

Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.

> Parking lots are horrible. They're butt ugly heat islands that take up way too much space.

I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.

My personal thought is to saturate rooftops before going for the poorer ROI parking lot PV canopies.
by akerl_ | 2025-11-02 22:09:48+00:00
Message board nerds spend a lot of digital ink debating the clarity of what “authorization” means in the CFAA. It’s not clear to me that actual courts or juries find it to be that complicated, relative to other areas of criminal law.

I don’t know if it’s that tech people are just predisposed to try to over complicate, or that legal terminology tends to have definitions that are separate from the tech/colloquial usage of terms. But looking at contemporary usage the CFAA, I don’t actually think “was this hacking or just using the computer like normal” is that hard to figure out.
by somat | 2025-11-02 22:09:52+00:00
I think where obsd really shines is in the small infrastructure department, name servers, routers, time servers, web servers, mail servers. Obsd boxes tend to be easy to administrate, predicable and most importantly boring. It is a great system to build the back end of your small business or home network.

Personally I think it also makes for a very nice desktop system. But I like my desktops thin, a tiling window manager and lots of terminals. If you enjoy fat desktops, there may be a bit more friction. One reason I like it for desktop use more than other systems is that the software packaging feel higher quality. It is not a huge difference. mainly I have found obsd packages to more reliably work when installed. and those heroic obsd package maintainers tend to put a note in /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/ that will get you started.
by recursivegirth | 2025-11-02 22:10:41+00:00
I’ve thought about this too. As an unmedicated ADHDer, context switching is a big struggle. I often check Reddit while researching or coding, but end up doomscrolling.

I use LeechBlock with limited overrides (15 minutes max) for when I actually need access, and add a 15-second delay for certain domains. That combo keeps me from disabling it while still annoying enough to curb mindless browsing.

Do you have any data on how many credits someone typically uses per day, week, or month? I’m wondering if it’s worth installing on my work profile, or if it’d be more useful for personal use.
by bawolff | 2025-11-02 22:10:58+00:00
By the same token nobody has the duty to responsibly disclose security bugs. The entire premise of responsible disclosure is that security researchers give time for upstream projects to fix security issues by privately reporting the issues, in exchange the maintainers graciously accept the reports. Its a deal that benefits maintainers much more than it benefits researchers. If ffmpeg doesn't want that deal, then google should go the full disclosure route.

> If you want the security issue to be fixed,

There is no indication that google actually cared much whether the issue got fixed or not. It seems like the course of events is that they noticed something looked wrong with the code so they filed a bug. That's it.

> willing to pay for them to fix.

Should ffmpeg pay for security researchers time to find these issues? The market price for that is much much much higher than the price to fix bugs.

If you were to pay someone to do vulnerability testing in ffmpeg with sufficient skill to find this issue, it would probably cost you in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at least.
by boothby | 2025-11-02 22:11:14+00:00
As always, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And if we take Conservative talking points in good faith, proctective trade policies buttress the economy in the long term. Right?

But I think you're wrong about the extractive side -- Canada has huge rare earth reserves, and while tapping into them does require an investment of time and effort, there's no reason we couldn't compete with China there.

And don't even get me started on how unattractive Canadian oil is on the international market. The same "can't compete with China" flavor of argument should apply just as well there if it makes any real sense.
by toast0 | 2025-11-02 22:11:28+00:00
X11 has options for tear free video playback; it's not in the base protocol, and not all drivers offer it, etc, but it's acheivable. Fundamentally, you need to send the next frame to the server and ask it to switch frames during vblank (+/- notification), on today's systems, this is more of a coordination problem than a technical one; there's plenty of video ram to go around to double/tripple buffer.

HDR would fit in the X11 model of many bit depths, however the specifics don't really; afaik, X11 has a maximum bitdepth of 32 for pixel values, which means either limiting to 2-bits of alpha channel or using palettes (I think I saw that indexed colors can be defined with 16-bits per channel). An extension might be possible (with everything that brings), but I think the ship has sailed.

I agree that Wayland's security model prevents some undesirable interactions that X11 allows, but it also prevents or makes difficult some desirable interactions, so it's a mixed bag.
by LiquidPolymer | 2025-11-02 22:11:55+00:00
I love the kid who is hamming it up at the bottom of the frame. I've been a photographer/videographer for my entire professional career and have run into this kid many, many times. Adults exhibit this behavior too but it is usually much more moderated.

This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.
by nine_k | 2025-11-02 22:11:55+00:00
«The Jabber Zeus name is derived from the malware they used — a custom version of the ZeuS banking trojan — that stole banking login credentials and would send the group a Jabber instant message each time a new victim entered a one-time passcode at a financial institution website. The gang targeted mostly small to mid-sized businesses, and they were an early pioneer of so-called “man-in-the-browser” attacks, malware that can silently intercept any data that victims submit in a web-based form.»
by curtisblaine | 2025-11-02 22:12:08+00:00
In Klondike, not being able to drag out a card from the ordered pile + the app automatically moving cards there is seriously limiting. The odd thing is that you can manually undo automatic moves, but you need to press "undo" to every move because they will be re-played the next turn. Additionally, the auto-moves are buggy and they don't always work at the very end, where they probably make more sense.
by Jach | 2025-11-02 22:12:45+00:00
The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys.

I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.