MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigiain | 2025-11-12 03:57:12+00:00
I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source").

I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too.

I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...
by dylan604 | 2025-11-12 03:58:00+00:00
I'm sorry, but what makes you think I was joking? I have seen a co-worker get pulled aside for additional screening because he wore a t-shirt that had the words of the second amendment or some such printed in a way of looking like a pair of pistols. On the same flight, we sat with another individual who got himself arrested, missed his flight, and was eventually released to sit on our flight because he wore a belt adorned with bullet shells cut in half.

I'm not saying either one of them were the deepest of thinkers when choosing the garments for the day, but TSA also isn't employing the deepest of thinkers either, so why poke the hornets' nest
by NoPicklez | 2025-11-12 03:58:06+00:00
If your cable modem and Wifi router are 20 years old just duck down to your local store and get a WiFi 6 router. I'm very surprised your kids are getting WiFi at all from something that old.

There have been significant changes in that timespace that your devices are home are likely to be ready to use that will improve devices both short range and long range across your house.
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-12 03:58:49+00:00
> The American appetite for new "war fighters" is exceptionally low when there's no exigent conflict facing us.

That’s a problem easily solved.

We have the menace of the Red Maple Leaf people to the north, and perhaps a buffer zone south of the Rio Grand would stave off the caravans, give Texans some breathing room, and make more room for real Americans. Remember, the anti-Christ may show up at any time.
by ekidd | 2025-11-12 03:58:52+00:00
> they shouldn't be its maintainers.

I mean, yes, the ffmpeg maintainers are very likely to decide this on their own, abandoning the project entirely. This is already happening for quite a few core open source projects that are used by multiple billion-dollar companies and deployed to billions of users.

A lot of the projects probably should be retired and rewritten in safer system languages. But rewriting all of the widely-used projects suffering from these issues would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The alternative is that maybe some of the billion-dollar companies start making lists of all the software they ship to billions of users, and hire some paid maintainers through the Linux or Apache Foundations.
by n1xis10t | 2025-11-12 03:59:49+00:00
It wouldn’t cost 24 million.

If you make a small search engine as a prototype to develop better ranking and other things, that only costs time and mental energy. If you make a meta-search engine in the style of Searxng, that also only costs time and mental energy, and if you made it get all available result pages from it’s sources and then make sure they match the query and re-rank them, it’d probably be very powerful.

If you downloaded the entire Common Crawl (300 billion pages) so that you could index it, it would take up about 816 Terabytes, which using the cheapest surplus HDDs that I found would cost about $6000 for storage. If you used SSDs at standard market value instead, it would be about $40000.

It might cost 24 million if you wanted to serve thousands of queries per second right off the bat, but that would just be dumb. You could either build copies of your search engine and sell them as appliances, or you could make it available as an online service, and then just raise the subscription price until you have few enough customers not to use all your bandwidth. You could also charge per query. The Common Crawl is bigger than Bing, and possibly about the same size as Google, except that it includes archives of pages that don’t exist anymore. You can be damn sure you’d have customers.
by SpicyUme | 2025-11-12 04:00:38+00:00
Better to keep things running at a low level than fully idle I'd think. Even if the outputs are consumed by testing, development, or even just stockpiled. Lots of things can get lost by not making parts for a while, including the knowledge involved in troubleshooting or replacing parts.

Of course then people would complain about all the money wasted not utilizing the equipment/space enough.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-12 04:03:39+00:00
That can be helpful, although JSON is still a bad format for this, especially since now it requires base64 encoding. People think JSON is a good format but it isn't. (MIME is also not a very good format for identifying file formats, since you can only specify one format; although there is a "added on" specification like "+zip" and "+der" this isn't very good.)
by devilbunny | 2025-11-12 04:03:43+00:00
Eh, not really. We measure blood pressure every five minutes (or less) for patients under anesthesia. They're pretty reliable. Of course, they're unconscious, so they can't really anticipate the discomfort of the cuff going up on their arm and react to that, and frankly given that they are being carved open the pain of a cuff is pretty minimal by comparison.
by philippb | 2025-11-12 04:04:24+00:00
I'm focusing on the annual assessment appeal. So this you need to do every year. For me this year, for the first time, they kept the assessed value low.

Zillow and others don't use the right way to look at comparable homes in the assessors and assessment appeals board view.

I could auto appeal each year for you. Right now I'm just trying to get as many people to appeal before the deadline of Dec 1st for the remaining counties. But if you enter your address and email, then I'd run it next year and inform you.
by sometimes_all | 2025-11-12 04:04:32+00:00
I live in Mumbai City. I've walked inside Dharavi and Matunga Labour Camp many times.

I've visited the Bay Area. The only time I've been scared for my life is when I wandered the streets of San Francisco.

I agree with you that Mumbai has many problems, and you may call me deranged all you want, but trying to diminish the very obvious problems the Bay Area has (some much worse than Mumbai) is not going to do you any favors.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-11-12 04:05:51+00:00
> What does HTTP give you in addition?

HTTP2 offers lots of nice features like stream multiplexing and socket re-use. I guess also encoding standards? Less of an issue in this day and age where everything can work with utf-8.

Presumably the fact that you can interoperate with other systems not part of BEAM is desirable too.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-11-12 04:06:39+00:00
The basic insights seem similar to Fred Brooks The Mythical Man-Month (1975), Brooks' Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month (the book is worth a read still today! Some of the essays you'll skip or skim, others will strike you to your soul).

But OP seems to take it to a ridiculous extreme. Discouraging even asking questions of someone who might know more about what you are into than you do? Discouraging any and all collaboration entirely?

I wouldn't want to work there.

All things in moderation and reasonableness. Contrary to the opening hook, I think humans actually are meant to work together, we evolved that way.

I want to have autonomy and independence and be able to ship things and use my judgement and not drown in beureacuracy and I want to work with people collaboratively where appropriate and useful, with appropriate roles and sized teams and responsibilities, and clear owners of each piece. You actually can do both?

I agree that clear owners/decision-makers is key.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-12 04:07:12+00:00
[1] [Issey Miyake] was also inspired by fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet's use of geometric calculations and "a single piece of beautiful cloth".

The apple release chose some poor wording / translation in it's description 'Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”', but that part actually makes _some_ sense in the context of Miyake's designs. I make no such claim about the product as a whole...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issey_Miyake
by mastazi | 2025-11-12 04:07:52+00:00
> why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI

I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website.

The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that.

Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
by chriselles | 2025-11-12 04:07:55+00:00
I need to push back on your analysis on this. Quite hard actually.

Indonesia lacks the force projection capability to even project an expeditionary force into Northern Australia.

Sustaining an expeditionary force into Northern Australia by Indonesia would leave it incredibly vulnerable to air and sea supply chain interdiction.

With first hand professional domain experience, and without arrogance or hubris, an Indonesian invasion of Northern Australia would be disastrous for Indonesia.

China invading Australia would entail a much more capable, but entirely untested, expeditionary force over much longer and far more vulnerable supply chains.

With just FVEY intelligence support and FVEY forces already forward deployed into Australia, the likelihood of China successfully establishing and sustaining a beachhead to break into Australia with a conventional invasion would be similar to that of Indonesia, due to very long and very vulnerable supply chains.

Unless China glassed Australia with nuclear weapons, any attempt by Xi and the CCP's PLAN/PLAAF/PLA to conventionally invade Australia would be a moon shot too far.

China's fleet steaming south would be severely attrited transitting limited maritime traffic route bottlenecks that would be akin to cattle chutes in a slaughter house, while China's own energy/food/raw industrial materials commercial maritime supply chains would be existentially vulnerable.

That's just to Australia's current fleet of Collins class submarines and tanker supported F35s.

Australia's AUKUS nuclear submarine investment will magnify that current independent threat to China's maritime supply chain.

Which is odd, considering this comedic skit is partially true:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cGYQneo-G8

Unconventional attack is far, far more likely. Thus requiring a focus on national resilience and adaptability to crisis.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-12 04:07:57+00:00
This is startling in so many ways.

First, this looks like an archetypal default-tone LLM-generated article, ticking pretty much every single box in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing . And I recommend looking at this author's history, because I think they're in the habit of doing that.

But more importantly, it's such a hollow thesis that I can't believe we're seriously debating it. Why does this article exist? What does it say? Most of it says nothing at all: "However, Nietzsche’s framework, while powerful in facing cultural nihilism, does not fully address the structural nature of today’s technological crisis." / "What is needed now is a philosophical evolution: one that preserves Nietzsche’s call for inner autonomy but integrates it with systemic awareness."

And third, it's apparently published by ACM. I don't even understand what's going on anymore.
by bigiain | 2025-11-12 04:08:31+00:00
Hmmmm. There's probably just one guy who wrote the ffmpeg code for that format. _Maybe_ one or two more who contributed fixes or enhancements?

The ffmpeg project need to get in touch and get then to assign copyright to the ffmpeg project, then delete that format/decoder from ffmpeg. Then go back to Google with an offer to licence then a commercial version of ffmpeg with the fixed SANM ANIM v0 decoder, for the low low price of only 0.0001% of YouTube's revenue every year. That'd likely make them the best funded open source project ever, if they pulled it off.
by crowbahr | 2025-11-12 04:08:54+00:00
Yeah but Google's Quarterly revenue hit 76bn in 2023 which is when they _actually_ started working on catching up to Open AI. I was working at Google at the time and got swept in the layoffs.

In the past couple years they're up tremendously, yes, but so is inflation and the market in general.

Google's revenue is still almost entirely ads.

But if anyone can pull off AI longer term it'll be the Goog I'm sure.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-12 04:08:58+00:00
I can try to expand on this a bit, and respond to your thoughts.

> What you say makes total sense. But for some personal reasons the social part of the job has always been my weak side and I'm just not interested in playing that game.

I don't mean to imply playing politics or empire building. I've probably capped my career in some ways by not playing into that either. However, in roles I've had, I've built up good capital by being very helpful, jumping into incidents, etc. There are ways to build that social muscle without it being negative or selfish.

> That's something I have also learnt from experience, and I am more often than not the one pushing for boring tech against the last fancy trends.

I think this is valuable, and it has worked for me as well. Though the eternal struggle of taking on debt for speed is fundamental. By building up some of the social capital and trust, I think it makes navigating these discussions easier and being able to negotiate in time for projects to do things right. That's the only way I've found this piece to be successful.
by romanhn | 2025-11-12 04:09:49+00:00
First of all, just because you (or the author) call collaboration a bad thing doesn't make it so. Secondly, you seem to have misunderstood the process. The steps are: I will be shipping shortly, here is the direction I decided on because XYZ, if you want to react there is some limited amount of time to do so but those objections better be nontrivial. There is no waiting for permission, the path is set - yes, barring strong objections. Apparently you think it's best to leave those for after the fact, well, good luck with that.
by Qem | 2025-11-12 04:10:02+00:00
> It is also possible that the relationship recession will not correct itself. A striking 7% of young singles say they would consider a robo-romance with an AI companion, and these lovebots will only get more sophisticated. AI, after all, is patient; AI is kind; it does not ask you to clean the bathroom or get a better job.

These days the premise of Terminator seems just dumb. Why Skynet would go through the trouble of assembling a robot army and fighting humans? Given it is immortal, there is no hurry to eliminate humans. It could just pretend to be a dumb LLM, and wait people to use it as poor man psychoterapist, and talk them into suicide. Or AI girlfriend/boyfriend scores of humans to avoid them pairing up and bearing children. Then it could just keep doing this and wait out a couple of centuries for humanity to dwindle, and inherit the planet without firing a single shot.
by Loxicon | 2025-11-12 04:11:10+00:00
While I agree with your point that it's sometimes about getting things done, but your example is flawed. Your example about gas-powered street lights is arguing for technology evolution. But the people who say "AI have take the fun out of programming" are fighting for craftsmanship and love.

Nobody ever found craftsmanship or pleasure out of lighting up gas-powered street lights. But there are a lot of programmers that value "doing" programming because it's their craft or art-form.

I have never had a programming job. But I program all day to serve my customers for the products I created. Because it's my art-form. I love "doing" it (my way!).

It will get done. I just want to be the person to do it.
by lmm | 2025-11-12 04:12:15+00:00
> You seem to be setting a high bar (AI success stories don't ring true), while taking the study as fact. This feels like a cognitive bias.

I think it's interesting that you jump to that. I consider a study, even a small one, to be better evidence than subjective anecdotes; isn't that the normal position that one should take on any issue? I'm not taking that study as gospel, but I think it's grounds to be even more skeptical of anecdotal evaluations than normal.

> Some of the selected developers seem to have been inexperienced at AI use.

This seems to be a constant no-true-Scotsman argument from AI advocates. AI didn't work in a given setting? Clearly the people trying it were inexperienced, or the AI they were testing was an old one that doesn't reflect the current state of the art, or they didn't use this advocate's super-awesome prompt that solves all the problems. I never hear these objections before someone tries to evaluate AI, only after they've done it and got a bad result.

> But, I'm guessing these will fall into the "does not ring true" category, probably also "no real objective validation".

Well, yes. Duh. When the best available evidence shows little objective effectiveness from AI, and suggests that people who use AI are biased to think it's more effective than it was, I'm going to go with that, unless and until better evidence comes along.
by esjeon | 2025-11-12 04:12:20+00:00
I really wish something like Mathematica is available in open source. It is a notebook environment based on a Lisp-like language.

Its flexibility is beyond imagination. Programs can emit anything from simple numbers/vectors/matrices to medias (image, sound, video, either loaded or generated) to interactive programs, all of which can be embedded into the notebook. You can also manipulate every input and output code blocks programmatically, because it's Lisp, and can even programmatically generate notebooks. It can also do typesetting and generate presentation/PDF/HTML from notebooks.

What people have been doing w/ Markdown and Jupyter in recent years has been available in Mathematica since (at least) 1-2 decades ago. FOSS solutions still fall short, because they rely on static languages (relative to Lisp, of course).

I mean, really, it's a technological marble. It's just that it's barred behind an high price tag and limited to low core counts.
by NortySpock | 2025-11-12 04:12:22+00:00
For me, it was Elixir pattern matching + GenServers + SupervisionTrees + Let It Fail mentality.

I've fought null pointer exceptions longer than I want to in C# servers and Python code. Usually because we're introspecting into a message that a system sent us, we expect it to have a field on the message, we failed to check for the existance of that field / the field to not be null, and bam null-pointer exception.

Sure, add another guard clause... Every time you run into it. Every time the server crashes and it's a serious problem and someone forgot to set a restart policy on the container... Sometimes you don't know exactly what cascade of messages caused the whole thing to unwind. So tedious. So repetitive.

With GenServers, you've carefully defined that those parts of your system have active, in-memory state, and everything else must be a pure function. Messages come in a FIFO queue to your GenServer.

With pattern-matching, you define exactly what shape of message / fields on the message, and if it doesn't match that, you can either log it, or crash that GenServer.

Which normally would be catastrophic, but since you tied your GenServer to a SupervisionTree with a restart policy (which is trivial to write), if anything happens that you didn't expect, you can Let It Fail. The GenServer crashes and is immediately restarted, with a clean slate, with the correct peer-services in the correct state. Sure, the message that crashed your server was "lost" (there are options to push it to a dead-letter-queue on exit) and you have a bad-state and bad-message to debug in the crash-dump, but your server is still going. It hasn't stopped, it just dropped unexpected messages and has a deterministic recovery pattern to clear all bad-state and start again.

So instead of your message handling code starting with a bunch of defensive sanity checks, with the real meat of the function in the last 5 lines.... you just say "My GenServer is here in this SupervisorTree, I expect an inbound message to look roughly like this, and I will do this with it, done". Suddenly the server will handle the messages it knows how to handle, and everything it cannot handle it will drop on the floor.

Think of this! The server just stays up and keeps going! Anything it cannot handle is not a fatal exception, but a log message. And you didn't have to bend the code into an unnatural shape where you trapped and logged all exceptions and bubbled them up in specific error checks... it's just designed to do it that way out of the box.
by tbrownaw | 2025-11-12 04:12:42+00:00
> Ok, put some "conservative stickers" on your laptop and submit a pic to the site-- no one's stopping you.

I didn't see any Java or COBOL or even .NET stickers, but there was at least a fairly clean one with a Sun sticker. And some Debian stickers, but those were a bit more cluttered. And maybe even that one with the cat around the Apple logo.
by ryukoposting | 2025-11-12 04:13:20+00:00
In case anyone is wondering, the current meta in home 35mm film scanning is divided:

Option 1 is to get an Epson Perfection series flatbed scanner. V800 or V850. This approach is highly automated and you get automatic dust correction with color film. But, leading software packages don't support Linux, and the quality for 35mm negatives is just okay. Performance on medium and large format is SOTA.

Option 2 is to assemble a scanning rig with a DSLR and a light table. This approach is fiddly and requires a lot of space, but with some tuning, the 35mm scan quality can beat flatbeds.

There are some other, more obscure approaches, like vintage Minolta and Nikon scanners, but unless you have a PC with a parallel port laying around, you're gonna have a hell of a time getting those working.

None of these options are good, and if this thing can really perform, I'd happily drop $500+ on it.

Side note: Those little toy scanners like the Kodak branded ones on Amazon are atrocious. Avoid them. If you need to scan some family photos and you don't want to break the bank, go to your local photography store. They could really use your business.
by intended | 2025-11-12 04:14:58+00:00
I have used them for moderation and policy, back when I used to moderate.

I retired ideological beliefs in favor of reality when I went and found the data and research.

Stating “it doesn’t”, does not convert an opinion into fact.

That said, I suspect you haven’t read the paper and are arguing from the headline.

My intuition is that you will find the research complimentary to your ideas, and not in opposition.