MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdimitar | 2025-11-30 16:42:55+00:00
Your analogies don't work. Nobody pushes a cook or a bricklayer so hard that they cannot have a basic level of quality to their work. A meal that makes a customer sick or an entire floor of a building collapsing due to bad bricklaying is the limit the managers in those areas generally don't cross.

Not the case in commercial programming. If you manage to pull a heroic and still deliver something that does not fall over in a near-impossible deadline and with a lot of pressure then you are actually doing a huge disservice to yourself because the leadership will think "welp, obviously he can do it in those conditions" and next thing you know, next time around it will be even more difficult.

"Give them an inch, they will take a mile". Sadly this proverb very often applies to business people.

Most commercial programmers are extremely squeezed. I started daydreaming for another profession lately but yeah, ain't happening in my 40s with a very unstable financial situation.

I've read your sibling comments. It seems like you were on the other extreme and it does seem to me that now you are overcompensating by being too sympathetic with business and management. Whiplash effects are very understandable while one is still trying to find their balance. Still, don't give those people too much credit.
by spinity | 2025-11-30 16:43:13+00:00
Great point. It actually spins at about 10 rotations per second, so you can lightly stop it after 2–3 seconds and still get a perfectly random result. That said, some tabletop players raised another concern — in group play, someone could cheat by spinning it again after seeing the result. And that’s a fair point. But the ring is primarily designed as jewelry and a fidget piece. At only 2 mm thick, comfort and aesthetics come first. As a D20 tool, it’s best suited for solo TTRPG sessions where there's no dispute, and it works wonderfully in that context. So I completely agree it’s not a replacement for a traditional D20. It’s more of a D&D-themed accessory that happens to be functional in certain situations,Thank you so much!
by quirino | 2025-11-30 16:43:28+00:00
Small anecdote:

In the IEEEXTREME university programming competition there are ~10k participating teams.

Our university has a quite strong Competitive Programming program and the best teams usually rank in the top 100. Last year a team ranked 30 and it's wasn't even our strongest team (which didn't participate)

This year none of our teams was able to get in the top 1000. I would estimate close to 99% of the teams in the Top 1000 were using LLMs.

Last year they didn't seem to help much, but this year they rendered the competition pointless.

I've read blogs/seen videos of people who got in the AOC global leaderboard last year without using LLMs, but I think this year it wouldn't be possible at all.
by hk1337 | 2025-11-30 16:43:28+00:00
I might be one of the few that is intrigued by this being that it’s Java but this looks really neat. Does it do git repositories like gitea, GitHub, etc, or is it more of a project management site for the repositories? They describe it as “code review”, so I wasn’t sure.

I’m a little put off on the google connection but it seems like it could run rather independently.
by cmdoptesc | 2025-11-30 16:43:44+00:00
Those e-scooters are a red herring. Ring cameras on everyone's front door and automated license plate readers (ALPR) on police vehicles and Flock cameras throughout cities are bigger concerns in America.

Flock is already known to assist the government surveilling protestors:

- [CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45996860)

- [How Cops Are Using Flock Safety's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flo...)

- [Amazon has a form so police can get my (Ring) data without permission or a warrant](https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/14/23219419/amazon-ring-law-...)
by ryandrake | 2025-11-30 16:43:54+00:00
Unfortunately, for every "questionable relationship between the authorities and the industries they regulate' being exposed by citizen journalists and the power of the internet, there are 10 wild conspiracy theories with no basis in fact being spread. And for every 1 of those conspiracies being spread, there are 10 grifters out there making a buck selling products and services based around them. The Internet was a great idea that has not held up against stupidity and greed.
by singron | 2025-11-30 16:44:08+00:00
BTW the page mentions Alternate Styles, which is an obscure feature in firefox (View -> Page Styles). If you try it out, you will probably run into [0] and not be able to reset the style. The workaround is to open the page in a different tab, which will go back to the default style.

0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1943796
by DrierCycle | 2025-11-30 16:44:24+00:00
It's science under the creative boundary of binary/symbols. And as analog thinkers, we should be developing far greater tools than these glass ceilings. And yes, having finished the film, it's far more propagandic than it began as.

Science is exceeding the envelop of paradox, and what I see here is obeying the envelope in order to justify the binary as a path to AGI. It's not a path. The symbol is a bottleneck.
by capyba | 2025-11-30 16:44:52+00:00
Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.

Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.
by programjames | 2025-11-30 16:45:20+00:00
Seems like a momumental waste of energy being pushed as "hustling". Applying to college should be cooperative between you and the admissions office: asking, are we a good fit? Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.

Admissions are sort-of Pareto distributed, so most people admitted were on the edge of being rejected. Since there is a bit of noise in the process, this is why any one individual applying to 10x as many places of a similar tier will be more likely to get into one. But then when everyone does it, no one is more or less likely to get in except those that are actually cooperating with the admissions office. You're burning down the commons for a fleeting bit of warmth. Might I suggest installing a furnace in your house instead?
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-30 16:45:44+00:00
...I love the J.Rogers quote, absolute truth, master of wit. Thanks for the new quote to use as a bookmark in my personal copy of Atlas (not a book I recommend, young reader or old; nor do I agree with its overall cut-throat inspirationals).

If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC

[•] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA
by slashdev | 2025-11-30 16:46:11+00:00
You were downvoted for some reason I can't fathom, but I agree with you.

It's not an extinction level event (not for humans anyway, it may well be for many other species.) It's not a candidate for the great filter.

There will be migration, but over centuries, not a sudden exodus. There may be wars, but what's new.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-11-30 16:46:24+00:00
Reading this just makes me think of yesterday's post - vibe code in turbo mode, Gemini Antigravty wipes the entire storage drive partition because it missed a quotation in function code it wrote and ran without checking.

Edit: for those who don't frequent HN or reddit every day: https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1p82or6...
by anshumankmr | 2025-11-30 16:46:34+00:00
I mean this had to be obvious right... I just wonder of what the current TAM is, and how much can Open AI crack that.

Cause the problem is Gemini and Claude are not the default for anyone except us tech geeks and even then I default to ChatGPT most of the time, but I use Claude for coding.

Are they confident they can meet the revenue projections they have made like 200B by 2027 simply through this?
by maxvu | 2025-11-30 16:46:42+00:00
Running a home server seems relatively popular for all kinds of things. Search term "homelab" brings up a culture of people who seem largely IT-adjacent, prefer retired DC equipment, experiment with network configurations as a means of professional development and insist on running everything in VMs. Search term "self-hosted", on the other hand, seems to skew towards an enterprise of saturating a Raspberry Pi's CPU with half-hearted and unmaintained Python clones of popular SaaS products. In my experience — with both hardware and software vendoring — there is a bounty of reasonable options somewhere in between the two.
by amluto | 2025-11-30 16:46:46+00:00
Sure, that particular workflow is quite busted. But GitHub encourages this garbage design.

For example:

> GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.POSTHOG_BOT_GITHUB_TOKEN }}

In no particular order:

- The use of secrets like this should be either entirely invalid or strongly, strongly discouraged. If allowed at all, there should be some kind of explicit approval required for the workflow step that gets to use the secret. And a file in the branch’s tree should not count as approval.

- This particular disaster should at least have been spelled something like ${{ dynamic_secret.assign_reviewer }} where that operation creates a secret that can assign a reviewer and nothing else and that lasts for exactly as long as the workflow step runs.

- In an even better design, there would be no secret at all. One step runs the script and produces output and has no permissions:

- name: Run reviewer assignment script env: PR_NUMBER: ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} GITHUB_REPOSITORY: ${{ github.repository }} BASE_SHA: ${{ github.event.pull_request.base.sha }} HEAD_SHA: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }} input: worktree ro at cwd output: reviewer from /tmp/reviewer run: | node .github/scripts/assign-reviewers.js

I made up the syntax - that’s a read only view of “worktree” (a directory produced by a previous step) mounted at cwd. The output is a file at /tmp/reviewers that contains data henceforth known as “reviewer”. Then the next step isn’t a “run” — it’s something else entirely:

- name: Assign the reviewer env: PR_NUMBER: ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} REVIEWER: ${{ outputs.reviewer }} action: assign-reviewer

That last part is critical. This does not execute anything in the runner VM. It consumes the output from the previous step in the VM and then it … drumroll, please, because this is way too straightforward for GitHub … assigns the reviewer. No token, no secrets, no user-modifiable code, no weird side effects, no possibility of compromise due to a rootkit installed by a previous step into the VM, no containers spawned, no nothing. It just assigns a reviewer.

In this world, action workflows have no “write” permission ever. The repository config (actual config, not stuff in .github) gives a menu of allowed “actions”, and the owner checks the box so that this workflow may do “assign-reviewer”, and that’s it. If the box is checked, reviewers may be assigned. If not, they may not. Checking the box does not permit committing things or poisoning caches or submitting review comments or anything else - those are different checkboxes.

Oh, it costs GitHub less money, too, because it does not need to call out to the runner, and that isn’t free.
by ethbr1 | 2025-11-30 16:47:04+00:00
> This! A "silver lining" from the current adminstration is that we've become aware that we've left way to much to custom. It's time to put some laws in place to act as hard guard rails.

The US federal government had such laws -- they were implemented around 1910.

We rolled them back in the 60-80s in the interest of executive efficiency.

So it wouldn't be creating a novel check and balance, but rather returning to a previous configuration where the executive's powers are more devolved into strong independent balancing bodies via Congress.

(And no, the Supreme Court hasn't removed this possibility, because Congress hasn't passed intentional and unambiguous laws like this in 100+ years)
by bluefirebrand | 2025-11-30 16:47:51+00:00
You know there are lots of things that make software development more enjoyable

Having a private office instead of an open floor plan for instance

Or not working in the JIRA two week sprint format

Or not having to work with offshore teams that push the burden of quality control onto you

My point is I bet that the Google CEO (and basically every other software CEO) doesn't actually care if software development is enjoyable or not
by programjames | 2025-11-30 16:48:28+00:00
You lost something when every other person started doing the same thing. Now you have to write or review ten applications instead of one. Now you're going to get paid less because it cost $20k to hire you instead of $2k. Now your company is going to be filled with like-minded people, "hustlers", who do not know how to improve things themselves, just spray and pray until someone mistakenly rewards them.
by don-code | 2025-11-30 16:48:32+00:00
I likewise have a circa 1997 LaserJet that I refuse to give up. Both the printer and scanner still function flawlessly, every time I need them to - something that few printers today seem capable of.

I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through.

I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-30 16:48:59+00:00
Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more.

However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-30 16:49:14+00:00
I can't speak for the lasers but I will stand up for HP inkjets even though I own an Epson today.

Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low.

I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-30 16:49:33+00:00
>There is still $5K more _economic_ value created, in that +$5K went to people who might otherwise be jobless. They'll in turn spend that money at businesses in the private sector, reaching more people, and so on. If the man with the septic tank runs a coffee shop, he will see extra value from more coffee sales.

That's the grade school analysis and in reality we are all poorer for it.

If ten people pay $5k to avoid getting a substandard service that has a 1/10 chance of happening and will cost $20k to remediate if it does that is a massive loss to the overall economy because that money otherwise would've been spent elsewhere else.

This isn't just septics, it's every widget and service. And it's not just a government and tax problem (though those cases are frequently most flagrant). Private industry requirements cause the same problems.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-11-30 16:50:03+00:00
No, it's not.

First, it's not clear that a significant number of people were hoarding TP at all. The best info I've read suggests that the reason for shortages were changing usage patterns: people would have been pooping at work, but since they weren't going to work, they pooped at home. Thus, sales changed from bulk institutional packaging to retail consumer products. The shortage was because the pipeline for retail products emptied, and manufacturers couldn't switch gears and distribute the alternative fast enough.

Second, you have the timeline wrong. On February 29, the Surgeon General told the public to stop buying masks. On March 8, Fauci told 60 Minutes "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask."

Only later, during the week of March 16, 2020, toilet paper panic buying exploded. According to NCSolutions (a retail data tracker), toilet paper sales skyrocketed compared to the previous month. And as of April 19, 2020, almost half of U.S. grocery stores experienced stockouts of toilet paper at some point during the day.
by efortis | 2025-11-30 16:50:20+00:00
> Playing to win versus playing not to lose

I’ve been trying to verbalize the motives behind the best practices frontend dev influecers preach these days and now I think it’s something like that. Everytime someone falls from his bike we have to install another set of training wheels.

For example,

- We ditched classes in React because someone didn’t bind a handler. Now we have hooks with a ton of best practices.

- Someone got a cascading bug, now we have utility classes for combining two more manageable problems into one big problem.
by mvx64 | 2025-11-30 16:50:38+00:00
I know I am in the minority and my uses/needs/requirements are not average, but I am perfectly fine with running Xubuntu on the following hardware: 1) 4GB 2011 Thinkpad with HDD (yeah really) and 2) 4GB 2009 Phenom desktop (was Win10 until a month ago).

By fine I mean running all these at the same time: firefox with several tabs, development tools, Blender and GIMP. All snappy and fast. Even the HDD in the laptop is only an annoyance during/after a cold boot. Then it makes no difference. I daily drive both for the past 8-15 years. The laptop sits at ~10-15W idle and the i5 in it is a workhorse if needed.

Of course there are uses for better hardware, I am not dismissing upgrades. But the whole modern hw/sw situation is a giant shipwreck and a huge waste of resources/energy. I've tried very expensive new laptops for work (look up "embodied energy"), and Windows 11 right-click takes half a second to respond and Unity3D can take several minutes to boot up. It's really sad.

edit: To be honest I have to add a counter-example: streaming >=1080p60 video from YT is kind of a no-no, but that's related to the first sentence of my post.
by lazide | 2025-11-30 16:50:45+00:00
My white grandparents were poor Norwegian farmers that immigrated to North Dakota.

They benefitted about as much from what you’re describing as a modern day Nigerian immigrant was punished by it.

This is why racism is stupid and boring, because it tells you nothing useful. It’s a pointlessly broad brush to vilify or prop up someone.

Which is exactly why racism is stupid and bad. And why WASP as it is being used in this thread is self-contradictory and doesn’t even mean anything concrete except ‘white’, as has been demonstated with the various replies.

All this does is just prop up the Nazi types who can point to this kind of stupidity and go ‘see, this is why it’s good we fight back - white power’.
by hocuspocus | 2025-11-30 16:50:58+00:00
I'm not saying it played no role, but I think sbt's negative impact is overblown.

Maven is old and the DX isn't particularly stellar either. User friendly build tools are a relatively recent development in the programming language landscape. Hell, until uv, Python managed to be much worse than anything on the JVM.

I work at a company that used to do a lot in Scala, and I've seen the decline first hand. Lack of investment in basic upkeep and maintenance is the real killer. Bitrot hurts in Scala more than in Java. And sbt is not the biggest offender there.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-30 16:51:17+00:00
The current incarnation of direct to cell is a partnership with cell carriers. I expect that to continue. It’s really hard to get the frequencies you need without that, and you really need a conventional terrestrial network for populated areas. I don’t expect that to change. The bandwidth needed to cover a populated area from space fundamentally requires more size and power than a cell phone can provide.

Even if it does change, the satellite operator is still vulnerable to this. They can get away with it in countries that are largely excluded from the international order, as we see with Starlink in Iran. But try it in, say, France and it’ll be a different story, let alone the US. Even if you flee their jurisdiction, they’re not going to sit idly by while you operate pirate data connections in their territory.
by raffael_de | 2025-11-30 16:51:30+00:00
Is there a mesh network solution with very low bandwidth by design? "by design" meaning that participants of the network aren't able to increase their bandwidth beyond a defined upper limit. I'm thinking of a bandwidth of about 10kbps. The low bandwidth would practically eliminate problems around spamming and cp. The idea is a network that is only useful for exchanging texts/messages and accessing simple text based websites.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-30 16:51:55+00:00
> There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.

Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.

The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.

My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.

To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-30 16:52:26+00:00
But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...
by Arainach | 2025-11-30 16:52:58+00:00
The TP hoarding was indicative of known trends, not a shocking revelation about the state of American culture. Hoarding and gouging bottled water during hurricanes, ticket scalping at arenas, high frequency trading - our entire society is full of people whose first reaction to any piece of information is "how can I exploit this to take advantage of other people"?