MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-25 08:31:59+00:00
>> Saying someone is your favorite X and someone is the greatest X are different things, you can think of someone as the greatest X and not like them (unlikely but possible).

> Agreed. That's my point.

You do? You agree, that "X is the greatest Y" is just a valid statement as "X is my favourite Y" and conveys different information? Wasn't my observation, but then the discussion is finished. Actually the former is a better statement on a discussion website, since it allows discussion, while the latter is basically a useless statement, that you can't even object to.

> We are talking about art.

So what. You can still discuss this. Also music is also a science and Bach did some important work in this direction. There are different tastes, but whether a given artist caters to a taste the best, is something you can discuss objectively. Also composing is a craftsmanship, and you can still discuss the craftsmanship even if you don't agree with the final work.

> X is the greatest author/writer/etc, X is the greatest painter, X is the greatest musician, X is the great film director, etc. If we can't even decide within a particular art form, who is the greatest, it even more laughable to say X is the greatest artist FULL STOP.

"hearsathought" is the greatest discusser! There I just did it. Doesn't seem to be impossible to me.

> it even more laughable to say X is the greatest artist FULL STOP.

Why? lordleft didn't even claim to talk for all humans.

>> In addition he [Bach] is also (jokingly) called the fifth evangelist, at least in Germany. Not sure, if this remark is known elsewhere.

> Who cares? It just proves my point.

How so? I don't get your point then, because to me it proves the opposite.

> Who cares?

A lot of people found it useful enough to spark a discussion and it is currently the first comment.

> He made the comment in the spirit of being a silly fanboy. Just like most respondents so far.

Nah, that's just your opinion. If you don't agree, it would have been more useful to give a contradicting argument, than to dismiss the statement as inexpressible a priori.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 08:32:37+00:00
They completely removed it from the installer GUI, yes.

But local-only Windows 11 still works with minimal interference. The most common ways are creating the install medium with Rufus (which has an option to create a local-only installation medium), or by manually dropping into the Windows Command Prompt during setup and running a single command ("ms-cxh:localonly")
by user34283 | 2025-11-25 08:33:02+00:00
In the past I used to pay for Netflix, Spotify, and even YT Premium.

However, they keep raising prices every year.

In the past Netflix 4K cost like $22 and with family sharing it was about $5 - totally acceptable.

Now they cracked down on family sharing in different households and charge $37. No way.

Spotify: they increased prices again last month to $20 USD for the individual subscription. I bought a 12 month Colombian gift card for $40 USD and activated via VPN. Should this stop working, I will unsubscribe entirely.

YT Premium: it's at $23 per month now. Considering they aren't producing movies themselves, I consider that one the most egregious pricing out of all three. They can absolutely forget it - I am unwilling to pay any more than $10 for it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-25 08:33:02+00:00
Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

It went way, way up during WWII and hasn't changed much since. And that's relative to GDP over a period that real GDP per capita increased significantly, i.e. government revenue in real dollars per capita is through the roof.

The US tax system has an evolved defect where the tax brackets are set in nominal dollars and then as inflation pushes everyone into the next highest bracket Congress periodically gets to claim credit for passing a "tax cut" without actually reducing the level of real government revenue -- indeed it has been going up enough to keep up with real GDP growth. And if you confuse that with an actual tax cut then you can write articles where "without the tax cut" there would be more revenue, but only because there is an implicit continuous tax increase baked into the tax code to allow Congress to repeatedly tell everyone that up is down.

It's not a revenue problem. Revenue is up. It's a spending problem.
by ted_dunning | 2025-11-25 08:33:22+00:00
This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem.

Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world".

The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem.

If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively.

So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.
by 0dayz | 2025-11-25 08:33:28+00:00
As a former hater of systemd it surprises me that people still have this disdain of systemd especially due to the so called "Unix philosophy", which in the Linux world mainly survives due to GNU writing GNUtils a rewriting of the Unix commands.

I remember embracing systemd funny enough due to when I was running alpine as my server and I had to write my own r script and boy did that quickly make me remember the awful times on freebsd debugging sh.
by Huppie | 2025-11-25 08:34:47+00:00
I know a teacher who basically only does open questions but since everything is digital nowadays students just use tools like Cluely [0] that run on the background and provide answers.

Since the testing tool they use does notice and register 'paste'-events they've resorted to simply assigning 0 points to every answer that was pasted.

A few of us have been telling her to move to in-class testing etc. but like you also notice everything in the school organization pushes for teaching productivity so this does require convincing management / school board etc. which is a slow(er) process.

[0] https://cluely.com/
by gonzobonzo | 2025-11-25 08:34:56+00:00
> I didn't use that word, and that's not what I'm concerned about.

That was what the "meaningless" comment you took issue with was about.

> My point is that an LLM is not inherently opinionated and challenging if you've just put it together accordingly.

But this isn't true, anymore than claiming "a video game is not inherently challenging if you've just put it together accordingly." Just because you created something or set up the scenario, doesn't mean it can't be challenging.
by f1shy | 2025-11-25 08:35:12+00:00
Linux > Windows

- Respect privacy - Is integrating better AI: no invasive AI, yet available if wanted - Usability and stability of UI and intefaces

MacOS and BSD [disclaimer: big fan of BSD] are somewhat stagnated. Depending on what you want to do, many open source projects are "linux first" what can be a problem (ask me how I know!)
by littlecranky67 | 2025-11-25 08:35:30+00:00
I used languagereactor.com for learning spanish for a while (a browser extensions that supplements netflix for language learning). It allows a second subtitle track, shows word translations on hover over the subtitle, and bookmark words to your vocab database with a single click. I exported the vocab after a few days into Anki to learn them. It is a bit finicky to setup and learn the tool, but overall good motivator to keep learning.

After about 6 months I became proficient enough to drop the extension and just watch now in plain spanish audio and - depending on the content - spanish subtitles.

Hebrew is a very niche language, so it won't fix the core problem that there is no hebrew-native content.
by Propelloni | 2025-11-25 08:35:42+00:00
That's a curious take. Today's Linux distributions are more reliable than ever with more long-term support than ever.

What changed is that you usually do not run a snowflake anymore which you carefully update to the next version in situ, but some amount of compute and storage. Today everything is blue-green and updates mean deploy, destroy behind a load balancer.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-25 08:35:54+00:00
Agree that it's ridiculous to talk about banning AI because some people misuse it, but the word preventable is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument. Preventable how? Chopping down all the coconut trees? Re-establishing the prohibition? Deciding prayers > healthcare?

Our society is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that death is inevitable. We've lost a lot of the rituals and traditions over the centuries that made facing it psychologically endurable. It probably isn't worth trying to prevent deaths from coconut trees.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-25 08:36:22+00:00
Here in Czechia, I lived in two cities with a great public transport system. Prague and Ostrava. Ostrava, despite being much poorer, is actually often voted to have the best system in CZ, because the management is really creative and diligent here and they often pull off miracles with a relatively small purse.

That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away.

Important factors that plague the entire system:

* fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible,

* driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it".

Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-25 08:36:47+00:00
As the other comment mentioned, is that Android is way ahead on app sandboxing and not doing things like exposing sudo to apps. Yes, apps can literally ask for your user's password using a fake dialog and then elevate to root and then do whatever. Even without root programs can spy on you by recording your screen, and mic. Programs can cryptolock your files or steal them (browser login information is a juicy target to steal). Android shuts down all of these kinds of malware by design. Apps can't escalate to root. Apps can't read or write to all of your files. Apps can't steal files from other apps. Apps have to ask for permission to record users. Apps can't see you have a root terminal up and start typing commands into it. Also in regards to writing APIs that are permissions Android makes it easy.
by hapless | 2025-11-25 08:36:57+00:00
This post sounded faintly crazy to me, so I went into a little wiki-hole consisting primarily of mailing lists and dev docs

Turns out, the main reason `pf` is non-portable is that half of it runs inside Berkeley-type network stacks, often in kernel space, but the remainder is in user space.

So the miserable single-threaded `pf` on OpenBSD is still, in some part, single-threaded on FreeBSD, but for certain rule-sets, you will get the benefits of FreeBSD's intensively re-entrant and multithreaded TCP/IP, because those parts of `pf` are embedded in the network stack.

So depending on workload, a given `pf` configuration on OpenBSD might be perfectly equal to its FreeBSD counterpart, or hundreds of times slower. I feel like this gives a lot of context to the OP's grousing around "10 gbps"

P.S. To confess my own biases: a port of a `pf` configuration to a platform where some rulesets are high performance and others are not, that would not be very attractive to me. An improvement, but not a solution. I would be looking to move to a Linux stack. Baby steps, I guess. I have done worse things to better people!

P.P.S. I suspect this coupling between a re-entrant TCP/IP stack and a single-threaded firewall process is also why FreeBSD `pf` is never even close to feature parity with its OpenBSD counterpart -- it is just easier to do new stuff with a simpler model
by jbs789 | 2025-11-25 08:38:16+00:00
That’s one narrative.

It’s typical for the foundation to settle before building on top of it.

Additionally do agree there is immense commercial pressure.

I’m quite curious how it all shakes out across the majors. If the foundation is relatively similar then the differentiator (and what they can charge) will determine their returns on this investment.

As a user, I love the competition and the evolution.

As an investor, am curious how it shakes out.
by chii | 2025-11-25 08:38:16+00:00
> how they ruined the opportunity presented

netflix didn't really ruin it themselves (at least, not completely) - the owner of the licensed content did, by wanting a bigger cut of the pie. Disney, for example, didn't feel they're paid enough, and so stopped licensing the content out to netflix and instead created a competing service.

I think this is a regulatory issue, because each piece of content is an effective island of monopoly. The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly. An example policy would be to force content production studios from exclusive licensing - only broad and available licensing (so any streaming service can pay a known price and obtain the content).

Something similar exists with cinemas and movie producers (of course not quite the same). Why couldn't the same or similar be for streaming?
by trashtester | 2025-11-25 08:38:46+00:00
Certainly, and I don't think anyone really doubts this.

Still, people are sometimes surprised by how DNA may affect more parts of behavior than they previously thought.

Not necessarily by directly coding for the behavior. In many cases, the DNA will just modulate how we learn from the environment. And if the environment is fairly constant, observed behavior can correlate more strongly with DNA that one might have expected.
by zkmon | 2025-11-25 08:39:23+00:00
It's not the students. It's the teachers and school using AI first, and publicly. Why does he talk about only students using AI?

Also, just like how calculators are allowed in the exam halls, why not allow AI usage in exams? In real-life job you are not going to avoid use of calculator or AI. So why test people in a different context? I think the tests should focus on the skills in using calculator and AI.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-25 08:39:39+00:00
That tracks with my experience, since I don't prefer the IDE, because I need a build system that generates unique IDs and conditionally compiles stuff and handles debug flags. Also it needs to be reproducible and run unattended. In addition a build system is way faster. Arduino almost spends half of the build time on reanalyzing the project files to find out, what it actually needs to do and then it creates build artifacts in a random location. That's all problems you don't have with a proper build system, so the build system ends up way faster. I think Arduino also doesn't support parallel compilation.
by chao- | 2025-11-25 08:40:05+00:00
I used btrfs for most of the 2010's. I nearly lost some data once, and was able to recover it. Afterwards, I moved to ZFS and never looked back.

btrfs may be great now, and more power to people who use it and are happy. However, I am so used to the ergonomics of ZFS (and zed, and ZFS integrated encryption) that I don't see a reason to migrate back.
by woolion | 2025-11-25 08:40:42+00:00
So, something I find particularly annoying about hn is that you can segment it into very different subgroups that may or may not interact with a particular post. So you may find that in one thread, anti-hype sentiment is very high, and a more reasonable comment would be downvoted, and the next day the same anti-AI posts on another thread would get strongly downvoted because the thread is dominated by the hype people. It's far from being uniform, and since some people might feel that they risk to burn karma by entering the wrong thread there's an amount of self-censorship that makes this effect stronger.

Do you have something like that to manage the group dynamics?

Also in terms of personalities, I'm guessing the most appropriate way to get the list of prompts would be to run an analysis on the hn dataset to classify user behaviour patterns and create the prompts according to this. Since you can match these to posts in thread, you can also get a rough approximation of the dynamics distribution. Did you do such an analysis?
by intended | 2025-11-25 08:41:01+00:00
Its really something to just casually say “all exams need to be in person”, reversing in a single move significant gains in education availability.

It may not be obvious in a country with smaller student to teacher ratios, but for a place like India, you never have enough teachers for students.

Being able to provide courses, and homework digitally, reduced the amount of work required to grade and review work.

Then to add insult to injury, AI is removing entry level roles, removing other chances for people to do work which is easy to verify, practice and learn from.

Yes, yes, eventually tool use will result in increases in GDP. Except our incentives are not to hire more teachers, build more schools, and improve educational outcomes. Those are all public goods, not private goods. We aren’t going to tax firms further, because commerce must be protected, yet we will socialize the costs to society.
by shaldengeki | 2025-11-25 08:41:23+00:00
> Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity?

Yes. For instance, Stripe uses Bazel internally for ~all of its builds. https://stripe.com/blog/fast-secure-builds-choose-two

For other users, you might peruse the Bazelcon 2025 schedule, which happened earlier this month: https://bazelcon2025.sched.com/
by mft_ | 2025-11-25 08:42:24+00:00
Forgive the basic questions, but you were using Spanish original videos, with first-order Spanish subtitles already available, then adding second (English?) subtitles via language reactor?

I ask because I went down this path a little to help my German learning, but struggled to find the right combination of videos at the right level with the right subtitles available. (I was trying to use free apps/services though).
by yorwba | 2025-11-25 08:43:24+00:00
If the text is written interactively on the canvas (as opposed to extraction from pixels) this task is known as "online handwriting recognition" ("online" because you can watch the text being formed incrementally, which makes it easier to e.g. distinguish individual strokes.)

I don't know what the state of the art is, but an old model for digitizer pens might not do so bad either.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 08:43:36+00:00
I share your fears, but I think the premise itself is valid. The project should be done, but fully Open Source.

I'd love to have Android (well, GrapheneOS) style sand-boxing for every app, I'd love to have it's granular permissions for every service. I'd love to have the battery management, the unified settings UI, the effortless disk encryption UX, ect. Who's using power, who's using data, who accessed the microphone 10 minutes ago?

Could this all be re-implemented in a Linux distribution? Sure, SE Linux is there. But it would take a long time to get to the same level of UX, and almost certainly fracture across different desktop environments.
by hapless | 2025-11-25 08:44:04+00:00
OpenBSD's pre-journaling FFS is ancient and creaky but also extremely robust

I am not sure there is a more robust, or simple, filesystem in use today. Most networking devices, including, yes, your UPS, use something like FFS to handle writeable media.

I am not accustomed to defending OpenBSD in any context. It is, in every way, a museum, an exhibition of clever works and past curiosities for the modern visitor.

But this is a deeply weird hill to die on. The "Fast File System," fifty years old and audited to no end, is your greatest fear? It ain't fast, and it's barely a "file system," but its robustness? indubitable. It is very reliably boring and slow. It is the cutting edge circa 2BSD

edit: I am mistaken, the FFS actually dates to 4.1BSD. It is only 44 years old, not 50. Pardon me for my error.
by goku12 | 2025-11-25 08:44:14+00:00
What exactly are you trying to prove here? Preemptive precautionary measures are definitely warranted in case of projects like these if the authorities demonstrate any sort of hostilities - especially from one with prior history of taking such actions.

Unlike the laws of physics, human laws encompass deliberate ambiguity meant for them to be escaped (with loopholes) or to be stretched as far as possible, without raising any alarms at the time of instituting them. The main purpose of the courts is to interpret the laws somewhat consistently in the face of such ambiguities. I can easily see how this particular law can be interpreted liberally enough to mandate backdoors. Your pedantic interpretation is not something they are going to care about or abide by. In the worst case, they'll just take the 'shoot first, ask later' approach. They'll just do what they like an then try to justify their actions when challenged. This has been the norm with even non-authoritarian administrations for ages. But the entire EU has been demonstrably gravitating towards this dystopian reality with their attempted chat control law.

Do you want the Graphene team to ignore any such possibilities and just stay put? In which world does that make any sense? And what's your point in brushing aside practically everyone else's concerns?
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-25 08:44:19+00:00
Not fully preventable, of course not. But reducible, certainly. Better cars aided by AI. Better diagnoses and healthcare aided by AI. Less addiction to cigarettes and alcohol through AI facilitated therapy. Less obesity due to better diet plans created by AI. I could go on. And that’s just one frame, there are plenty of non-AI solutions we could, and should, be focused on.

Really my broader point is we accept the tradeoff between technology/freedom and risk in almost everything, but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people.

And to your broader point, I agree our culture has distanced itself from death to an unhealthy degree. Ritual, grieving, and accepting the inevitable are important. We have done wrong to diminish that.

Coconut trees though, those are always going to cause trouble.
by darkwater | 2025-11-25 08:44:36+00:00
Epigenetics and mother's body influence feel - to me - like magic more or less the same. And the nature vs nurture regarding tastes developed either early or later on, well, as a father of 2 siblings who are radically different in certain tastes, I don't really know where I would have nurtured them into being different. I try to introspect a lot on that, maybe we did something but honestly... I don't think so.
by cyberax | 2025-11-25 08:45:12+00:00
Linux kernel is just waaaaayyyyy better than Windows, at this point. Better hardware support, better stability, more features. And it keeps getting better.

Windows kernel is not _bad_, but it's developed by far fewer people.

Linux also has systemd with its unified system resource management. I can slice and dice my system as I want between containers. Oh, and containers are also awesome (Windows has them, macOS doesn't).

Desktop environments are a matter of personal taste. I like my DE very minimal: status bar, quick launcher panel, and that's it.