MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-30 07:05:47+00:00
When used in a social context, "free" has a different meaning than in many other contexts. It does not mean, for example, "there is no cost for this thing". Rather, it means "the person receiving this thing is not responsible for paying the costs associated with it (at least not at the time)".

Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".

If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).
by abetusk | 2025-11-30 07:06:13+00:00
Restricting licenses in this way stops it from being libre/free/open source. A fundamental aspect of libre/free/open source is that it's possible to use in a commercial setting. The FSF FAQ addresses this point specifically [0].

If the author wants to abandon libre/free/open source licenses, they should state so explicitly. As it stands, the blog post is ambiguous about whether the author wants to abandon libre/free/open source for a proprietary license or whether they want to strip libre/free/open source licenses of their freedom. I don't follow alternative licenses of this sort but I've seen licenses that allow gratis use up until some threshold of users or income is reached. For example, the Unreal engine license has something along these lines [1].

If the author wants to remain libre/free/open source while mitigating bad behavior by large corporate actors, the AGPL is a fine choice as it legally coerces the copyleft even behind network based software. I'm not sure I have any hard evidence but I've heard that large corporate actors avoid the AGPL for this reason.

I'm a little incredulous that authors choose one of the most "business friendly" but least libre/free/open source (while still being FOSS) licenses and then are shocked when businesses use it without any thought to remuneration. I've seen a few instances of people providing software under and MIT license, such as the helmet.js package discussed in this blog post, and then regretting their decision.

The MIT license is used as a "business friendly" license that is still libre/free/open but doesn't have the copyleft clause to mitigate bad behavior. Why did you choose the MIT license in the first place? Why abandon other libre/free/open source license alternatives and go straight to a proprietary solution?

I don't even know how to begin to address the issue of who gets to decide who the "bad guys" are and who the "good guys" are.

In my opinion, the reason for the success of FOSS is because it's an answer to overly restrictive copyright by enriching the commons. The commons, by definition, is free for public use. If you don't agree with creating a rich commons so that everyone can benefit, that's absolutely your right, just please don't call it open source.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoMilitary

[1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license
by nebula8804 | 2025-11-30 07:06:23+00:00
I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself.

Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always leeway for students to chart their own path to success, it never really felt like Asia or Europe's systems where they place you in a bucket early on and thats it you are in there for life.

I graduated with an Engineering degree in the early 2010s and let me tell you, I really did do the bare minimum in a bunch of classes. It led me to tinker with junk computers that the school discarded which led me to dedicated school space in a lab to experiment which led to my first job and general success. Looking back not studying harder led to more trouble later on but the path still worked out because I jumped at some opportunities due to that path. If I were in asia, I would have probably not even be admitted or permanently weeded out after my first academic probation warning instead of being a decently successful software developer.

> Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen

Before that people dreamed of becoming a hollywood actor. It was the number one desired career for years. The bar is much lower for trying your luck at being a successful influencer than becoming an actor. The end result will be the same, many will try and flame out and then go do something else.

>Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.

You sound like you are thinking of the 1990s as your context. These days after movies the The Social Network, one of the most desired careers is in software development. This goal requires people to expend much more effort than prior generations pursuing other desired careers and many more kids are doing it! Techies are the boss now.
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by eyad_akeleh | 2025-11-30 07:06:50+00:00
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by avadodin | 2025-11-30 07:08:08+00:00
I agree with the sentiment in the sense that technology doesn't scale when you're like that Australian guy making everything from one-use mud and sticks. Some of it does but not a lot of it.

Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.

The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.

The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.

The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.

A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-30 07:08:19+00:00
These sort of derivative distros seem to be aimed at Windows 11 Refugees.

I am not a fan of these derivative distros and I would always recommend using one of the mainline distros e.g Debian, Arch, Fedora etc.

I am using Debian 13 for gaming and the most difficult thing I had to install was a backports kernel which improved performance in some games, in other games it made no difference at all.

Installing Steam and Lutris takes about 5 minutes and it yet another distro for what amounts to installing some applications. I find the biggest issues on Linux gaming is the applying individual workarounds in Steam, and getting wireless controllers to behave properly.
by nine_k | 2025-11-30 07:09:23+00:00
It is impossible to write a real "use for good, not evil" [1] license, because there's no formal, universally accepted notions of good and evil. While there are things that are universally considered good, or considered evil, the areas around them are large, nebulous, and are anything but clearly outlined. Hence legally avoiding the "anti-evil" license terms will always be a relatively easy option for a willing party. Moreover, there is a large range of issues and causes that are considered "good" by some and "evil" by others, so there will always be a controversy and disagreement even without any legal suits, where everyone would consider themselves sincerely right, not just technically correct while violating the spirit.

A weapon that only a lawful good character can wield is the stuff of fairy tales and board games, which do not reflect reality fully enough.

Unlike this, freedom is pretty well-defined, so e.g. GPL is upheld by courts.

[1]: https://www.json.org/license.html
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-30 07:09:52+00:00
We need better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life, distance, and/or bandwidth with a simplified interface. There's no sense wasting spectrum or having malfunctioning radio gear when it can be standardized and used more efficiently without an artificial, protectionist, hoarding monopoly (excluding particular essential, prioritized uses).

Proprietary mesh networks tend to become unusable garbage because they omit DoS, rate limits, and proper configuration for dense metropolitan uses, and tend to fail at investing in upkeep.
by maplethorpe | 2025-11-30 07:10:00+00:00
> LLM's are wrong way more often but are also more versatile than a calculator.

LLMs are wrong infinitely more than calculators, because calculators are never wrong (unless they're broken).

If you input "1 + 3" into your calculator and get "4", but you actually wanted to know the answer to "1 + 2", the calculator wasn't "wrong". It gave you the answer to the question you asked.

Now you might say "but that's what's happening with LLMs too! It gave you the wrong answer because you didn't ask the question right!" But an LLM isn't an all-seeing oracle. It can only interpolate between points in its training data. And if the correct answer isn't in its training data, then no amount of "using it with care" will produce the correct answer.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-30 07:10:17+00:00
I call bullshit on this.

There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.

Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.
by Maxion | 2025-11-30 07:10:19+00:00
I suspect that just like with Search, LLMs are used for a number of different action types. One being specifically web search, one being product search and so forth.

Within the web-search and product-search requests there is undoubtedly A LOT of overlap between peoples queries. It would not be unfeasible to have on nice long good answer generated by e.g. ChatGPT 5.1 cached, and first throw the initial user request into some kind of classifier and use a smaller LLM to judge whether the cached answer is close enough to the initial query.
by card_zero | 2025-11-30 07:12:56+00:00
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
by signatoremo | 2025-11-30 07:13:40+00:00
Your question is naming just one not coming from money. None of the people I listed did.

Wealthy background surely helps immensely, but other factors such as environment are vital as well. Google founders met at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the height of the dotcom era. That’s more important than their background.

Being wealthy is not the most important factor to one’s success. 50% of US population is middle class. Even if those I listed were all upper middle class, that would still be perhaps 5% of US population, or millions of people. Yet only a few rise to the top.
by cookiengineer | 2025-11-30 07:13:50+00:00
I've decided that I am done with all that social media crap. The only way to combat this digital amnesia problem is to selfhost again.

I also decided to build my website from scratch in Go, because this way I can allow people to download, share, and reuse content more easily. If my website goes down, I can offer a peer to peer client. If my wiki goes down, I can offer a prepared ZIM package.

(And yes, I'm also building my own ZIM search client/server hybrid because I don't like the way ZIM's search works)

In my case I had to do a bunch of things before, e.g. writing a Go WebASM bindings framework, fixing the webview/webview bindings, and rewriting my website so it can be hosted locally and in parts, too.

I separated the website, weblog, wiki and (markdown) editor on purpose, so that I can split up the wiki if need be.

The only thing I regret is having invested so much in social media to share knowledge. That time would've been better spent on just persisting it in a wiki.

Also I think LLMs are great tools for discovery and learning, if they would respect the given boundaries, and if the owners of said LLMs would pay for the caused traffic bandwidth. Which leads back to the point of why I'm creating a ZIM server that also has MCP support.
by monero-xmr | 2025-11-30 07:14:59+00:00
I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-30 07:15:00+00:00
They are being honest, you're just being pedantic. The fact that everyone pays taxes which ultimately pay for e.g. socialized health care/insurance or college-level education doesn't alter the fact that for the person receiving it, said good comes with no invoice, which is a conventional meaning of "free".

The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
by petesergeant | 2025-11-30 07:15:04+00:00
> The median grade at Harvard is an A

It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.

Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.
by fastshort | 2025-11-30 07:17:40+00:00
I built FastShort AI, a tool that turns text, scripts, or ideas into ready-to-post short videos (TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts) in a few minutes.

It automatically handles:

Visual generation

Voice-over

Captions & timing

Platform formatting

Optional auto-publishing

It aims to help creators and marketers produce short-form content quickly without editing skills.

Would love feedback from the community — what features matter most to you for short-form video creation tools?

Demo & details: https://fastshort.ai/
by GaryBluto | 2025-11-30 07:18:02+00:00
Why are there so many of these "specialized" hobby project Linux distros that people are using as daily drivers? Are people too lazy to use an operating system that they have to do even a minor amount of configuration to use? Do people really need every program built in?

Projects like this fit all the criteria of what I've nicknamed "Mastodon projects", because they always have either (or both) Mastodon and Discord links on their websites and are primarily developed by people with "alternative" social media accounts. They always implode within a few years due to some form of ridiculous community drama that other FOSS projects don't suffer from (because other open source projects usually have a somewhat serious "community", or lack of a cohesive one altogether).
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-30 07:18:06+00:00
Could cryptographic voting/blockchain, which is already a reality, be a part of this new system?

I believe it will, or something similar at least.

But I am a programmer, not a cryptographer. I'm not THE guy. I'm just some random bloke trying to think about something other than making money.

if this is a possibility then we as a people should start taking it seriously. Get open source standards, software and hardware (open chips) and put it to practice.

Though I'm sure the rich would hate this. So would anyone else who has a lot to gain from controlling public offices.
by alfanick | 2025-11-30 07:18:12+00:00
The more I read, the more confused I get. Either I live in some bubble, or I truly don't understand the world. It's a Linux distro based on Fedora, for gamers or smth - did all Linux gamers gather on HN today!? I'm not into gaming, hey I'm into Linux, I don't understand why this gets so much traction. Like yeah, I cannot comprehend that.
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by level09 | 2025-11-30 07:18:15+00:00
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by viccis | 2025-11-30 07:18:19+00:00
>Is this not rational behavior?

If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.

If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.

Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.
by bhawks | 2025-11-30 07:19:11+00:00
That ship sailed decades ago. Too much software and middleware expects GET to not have a body and who knows how itll break when you start sending one. Obviously you can do it today and it might work and then randomly break when the code between client and server changes.

Adding a new http method is the only way to support something like this safely. If something in between doesn't know what to do with QUERY it can just respond with a 501.

Fun fact - GET and HEAD are the only required methods one needs to implement to be an http server. It is a pretty low bar :)
by conductr | 2025-11-30 07:19:25+00:00
Tons of devs (CS grad devs that is) have made their career writing basic CRUD apps, iOS apps, or python stuff that probably doesn't scratch the surface of all the CS course work they did in their degree. It's just like everyone cramming for leetcode interviews but never using that stuff in the job. Being familiar with LLMs today will give you an advantage when they change tomorrow, you can adapt with the technology after college is over. Granted, there likely will be less devs needed but the demand for the highly skilled ones could be moving upwards as the demand for this new AI tech increases
by jackfranklyn | 2025-11-30 07:19:35+00:00
Yeah the immutability angle is the right instinct. The Step1Output approach is essentially what we landed on - each phase returns a typed result that gets composed into the final state. The tricky bit is when phase 7 needs to check something from phase 3's output to decide whether to run at all. You end up with either a growing "context" object that accumulates results, or a lot of explicit parameters threading through.

The discipline tax is real though. Pure functions are easier to test in isolation but harder to trace when you're debugging "why did this transaction get coded wrong" and the answer spans 6 different step outputs.