MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lammy | 2025-11-13 19:08:04+00:00
I do not want to be in the business of key management. This is not something that needed encryption. More encryption ≠ better than.

I also dual-boot Windows and that's a whole additional can of worms; not sure it would even be possible to self-key that. Microsoft's documentation explicitly mentions OEMs and ODMs and not individual end users: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-13 19:08:18+00:00
> It's ok that developers don't use Windows.

Sure. Except once upon a time ago, Microsoft was really big on dogfooding and it definitively was not ok for Microsoft's developers to not use Windows.

Seeing their employees using macs on stage at conferences sends a very clear message "don't bother with Windows. It isn't even good enough for our own staff to use."

What happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"? Ballmer was not a good CEO, but he understood at least that dev & enthusiast mindshare = your product being chosen and recommended elsewhere.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-13 19:08:28+00:00
> I bought the hardware, therefore I have the right to modify and repair. Natural right, full stop.

There is absolutely nothing "natural" about trading your pile of government promises for the right to call government men with guns and sticks if you are alienated from the option to physically control an object. Your natural right is to control what you can defend.

Rights are what we decide them to be. Or rather, what people in power decide them to be, i.e. people who hold and issue large amounts of government promises, and recruit and direct the most men with guns and sticks.
by incomingpain | 2025-11-13 19:09:14+00:00
>shifted their views or approaches to software architecture & design with the prevalence of AI / LLMs in the workplace now.

I'm far more willing to try new libraries or new frameworks.

>Personally, I've found that the paradigm of "sharp knives in the drawer" can lead to some pretty nasty output from LLMs; it's felt to me like the higher the ambiguity the higher the variance in quality.

I learnt this one when trying to do video game programming. The models just arent as competent at more niche programming.

Something to also add to your list. Context management seems to make me want to break out to utility files. Keep your files small and the llm will agentically only be looking at smaller files. Using up less context overall. Rarely does an LLM need to have the entire project in context, but better yet the smaller you keep files, the more reliable it becomes. As accuracy is lost the higher the context because it tends to forget about context.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-11-13 19:09:39+00:00
Well classically the EU has been a supporter of free expression, human rights, and all that jazz but lately that seems to mean a lot less to them.

> Russia, sure they’re actively fighting against our allies. China?

I assume this is a joke because China is actively helping Russia with weapons, intelligence, and Zelenskiy has even stated China is actively manufacturing weapons inside Russia for Russian use in Ukraine.
by jmadeano | 2025-11-13 19:10:10+00:00
> I don't understand why we need VC-backed extensions to filter sites, these tools have existed for a long time under open-source codebases and community-driven blocklists.

The VCs didn't fund us for this, we pivoted. (shhh don't tell them (edit: /s))

> I think it's better to use Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey. Rules are deterministic, you have full control, and you don't have to worry about monetization or malicious data collection in the future.

When you do a generation, the result is a deterministic script. You can even go to the options page and read the code for it yourself. From my experience though, writing a GM script from scratch is a massive pain. We just make that much more accessible.

> I really recommend against this. The AI spin doesn't add much since most sites have had rules that work for years, they don't change that often. Please don't build up this type of dependence on a company for regular browsing.

You're not wrong that rules can be robust. However, this extension has enabled me to build helpers that I never would have thought to implement by hand. E.g. on this page "highlight threads where jmadeano has not replied" -> super useful if I can generate it in a few seconds but a huge waste of time if I had to implement it myself.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-13 19:10:56+00:00
You're choosing the questions that have framing issues:

> more than 50% of Americans believe there is at least some competition, or a lot of competition in every sector of the economy that would be relevant to this discussion.

We're talking about Google and Apple but the relevant category would be "technology companies". Do phone platforms or mobile app distribution stores have "a lot of competition"? It's hard to see how anybody could think that. Do games and AI and web hosting? Sure they do. But they're lumping them all together.

They're also using "some competition" as the second-to-highest amount of competition even though that term could reasonably apply to a market where one company has 90% market share but not 100%, and it's confusingly similar to "not much competition". And they're somehow showing oil and gas as having less competition than telecommunications when oil and gas is a textbook fungible commodity and telecommunications is Comcast. That question has issues.

> And that most Americans believe that bigger companies tend to have lower prices than smaller ones.

This is the thing where Walmart has lower prices than the mom and pop. That doesn't imply that Walmart has better quality or service than a smaller company, and it doesn't imply that Walmart is operating in a consolidated market. Retail is objectively competitive in most areas.

Whereas when a big company is in a consolidated market, "big companies tend to have lower prices" doesn't hold and you get Google and Apple extracting 30%.

Moreover, the relevant part of that link was this part: More than two thirds of people, including the majority of both parties, support antitrust laws, six times as many people think they're not strict enough than think they're too strict and significantly more people agree with "the government should break up big tech" than disagree.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-11-13 19:11:00+00:00
> Sadly my workflow of using `!` to get back to my terminal and things like `!make` or `!cargo build` is fucked in neovim. So I do a lot of ctrl-z and the a lot of killing stopped processes I forgot I suspended. I've complained about this in various threads and chats, but the developers aren't interested in letting us use the old vim `!` which is super lame.

I'm sorry... what?? I still use vim as I haven't found a reason to jump to neovim, but you're telling me external commands don't work properly? That's wild.
by nozzlegear | 2025-11-13 19:11:04+00:00
> Take medical. The usual procedure if they need to scan your insurance info is to feed one or two cards through a scanner thingie.

It's the usual procedure but as far as I know there's no requirement to do it. All they really need is your policy number, your name and any other pertinent insurance info. I routinely go to places without my insurance cards and just recite the info for them which they write down.
by Robelkidin | 2025-11-13 19:11:11+00:00
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by simonw | 2025-11-13 19:11:16+00:00
I like the Python library that accompanies this: https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg

I added a CLI to it (using Gemini CLI) and submitted a PR, you can run that like so:

GEMINI_API_KEY="..." \ uv run --with https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/archive/d6b9d5bbefa1e2ffc3b09086bc0a3ad70ca4ef22.zip \ python -m gemimg "a racoon holding a hand written sign that says I love trash"

Result in this comment: https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/pull/7#issuecomment-3529...
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-11-13 19:11:39+00:00
> The US has nothing to offer Europe except LNG that Europe cannot produce itself, or obtain from China at better price or quality. Canada has ~200 years of LNG reserves and can ship to Europe from LNG Canada.

This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline.
by axus | 2025-11-13 19:11:40+00:00
I click Windows 11 "Start" button and under Recommended it has the last 6 files I opened. Click "More", and there's a list of files for the last two weeks with dates, and timestamps for the last week. So they've already got this idea covered.

We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.

Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.
by canucktrash669 | 2025-11-13 19:11:45+00:00
At some point our cross-AZ traffic for Elasticsearch replication at AWS was more expensive than what we'd pay to host the whole cluster replicated across multiple baremetal Hetzner servers.

Could we have done better with more sensible configs? Was it silly to cluster ES cross-AZ? Maybe. Point is that if you don't police every single detail of your platform at AWS/GCP and the like, their made-up charges will bleed your startup and grease their stock price.
Ask HN: Container+persistent storage: Cheapest and easiest for non-techie to run
by etherus | 2025-11-13 19:11:53+00:00
Original title: Container + persistent storage: Cheapest and easiest for someone else to manage?

I have a rails app which is containerised (agnostic, but currently Docker) and (currently) uses the disk service for active storage (it has attachments). Are there any SaaS providers that would make this easy for someone not super technical to manage, w.r.t. pushing changes from a fork and providing cheap persistent storage (S3 compatible + a sql-compatible database option OR disk). I feel this is something that will require a level of compromise (e.g. splitting across multiple services) since this is a big ask. Initial setup can be more complicated as I can help with the transition, but should have good-enough support options ongoingly. I expect them to be able to pick up a lot. Any input much appreciated. Thank you!
by peetle | 2025-11-13 19:12:01+00:00
In my own experience, nano banana still has the tendency to:

- make massive, seemingly random edits to images - adjust image scale - make very fine grained but pervasive detail changes obvious in an image diff

For instance, I have found that nano-banana will sporadically add a (convincing) fireplace to a room or new garage behind a house. This happens even with explicit "ALL CAPS" instructions not to do so. This happens sporadically, even when the temperature is set to zero, and makes it impossible to build a reliable app.

Has anyone had a better experience?
by kataklasm | 2025-11-13 19:12:06+00:00
Can't say that's entirely true for me ('02). If my [ employer, supervisor, ... ] provides me with logical, traceable tasks with their context properly laid out, I can totally put a ton of effort into providing meticulous, well thought out solutions, that are as good as it gets under the provided constraints. It's the non-sensical (be it actually non-sensical or just not understood enough because of unprovided context) tasks that make me not care.
by zkmon | 2025-11-13 19:12:19+00:00
That's still a chaotic composition of thoughts, not driven by any identified structure or symmetry of the situation.

Why a program is needed? What constraints lead to the existence of that need? Why didn't human interactions need a program or thinking in math? Why do computers use 0s and 1s? You need to start there and systematically derive other concepts, that are tightly linked and have a purpose driven by the pre-existing context.
by qdotme | 2025-11-13 19:12:31+00:00
IANAL; but - jurisdiction dependent.

Some have "interoperability exceptions" - so if you have been granted a license to something, you can reuse it in different context (so for instance you could run Microsoft Office on WINE even if Microsoft's license forbids it).

Some have restrictions on redistribution (but the builds just using the blobs from the old filesystem are fine).

A lot of that is in the gray area, and for that very reason many builds don't actually redistribute blobs - they extract and reuse them live.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-13 19:13:24+00:00
Yes, if it works (and that's a big if).

For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.

Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%

or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"

Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.

It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.
by bloppe | 2025-11-13 19:13:30+00:00
Alaska is effectively a one-party state. At the federal level, you almost always need compromise to clear a filibuster, and it's easier to find compromise if you can draw on more subjects. Maybe the Democrats get cheaper health care while the Republicans get a giant bust of Trump installed on the former site of the Lincoln memorial. Neither measure would pass in isolation, but together they might.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-11-13 19:13:51+00:00
For anyone who devs C++ on Windows because they still prefer visual studio over having to manage cmake on Linux, I've found meson to be a much friendlier build system and has really good integration with VSCode.

And if you're like me and hate bourne-like shells (sh, bash, zsh), powershell works on linux and mac and there's also nushell and fish, which have nicer syntax but I've had compatibility issues in the past
by jchw | 2025-11-13 19:14:01+00:00
I am not getting tons of issues with Zed going out of sync all the time. I wonder if the issue is it silently having issues watching the filesystem due to open fd limits.

I've noticed that not only does it sync but it even will recognize if I rename the folder a workspace is in.

But then, I've run into a couple of strange issues that tell me there is more polish needed:

- Sometimes upon using LSP refactor, it seems like if a bunch of files get renamed, the open buffers will get screwed up somehow. Like, I'll hit save and it will write to the old filename! It's not actually a huge problem, as I can close the buffers, delete whatever excess files I accidentally create, and re-open them without error, but it is confusing as hell.

- I have indeed had issues with the file view not always updating when files are added externally, however it is not constantly. I usually just reload workspace when this happens. It is a minor frustration, but I had many minor recurring frustrations with both VS Code and Neovim before too, so I don't consider it a deal breaker.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-13 19:14:06+00:00
> What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores

Thanks for the well thought out response. If possible, can you make this a post as well? It provides a lot of context I and others were not aware of.

I wish this was the messaging used by UCs back then. As an outsider, it felt like the primary driver was the "equity" portion. But maybe it was just an issue of the loudest voices being the most heard.

> Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.

That tracks. I guess the messaging that evolved around equity may have just been coincidence due to the overlapping timelines, and the perception of a causal relationship formed.

> people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.

Sorry to start a separate conversation, but what other metric can you use then? SAT/ACT with academic achievement in HS in comparison to peers seems to provide the best bang for buck while ensuring some base amount of meritocracy.

Extracurriculars inherently skew towards those with money and free time, essays themselves skew towards those who have the time to edit and massage them (eg. My HS's AP Lang Class always turned into a college essay editing class during application season), and recruitment directly from feeder schools like 50-70 years ago as well as legacy admissions is inherently unequal.

Personally, I'd rather we leverage open admissions with weeder programs similar to what is leveraged in Germany because that at least allows us to sidestep sorting and gives everyone an equal chance to take a shot.
by rtkwe | 2025-11-13 19:14:20+00:00
More likely is that some linux distro like SteamOS gets a large enough install base that it actually makes sense as a target and these big platforms make their anti-cheat work on at least that distro. As unfortunate as it is not having a very strong anti-cheat or a system like Valve's VAC ban to detect and lock cheaters out leads to really shitty online experiences in public lobbies for PVP games.
by neilv | 2025-11-13 19:15:00+00:00
Corporate ethics-wise, Canonical is vastly better than Microsoft.

But I prefer Debian Stable, for reasons both pragmatic and on-principle:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...

(Or people can go to a confusing download page: https://www.debian.org/distrib/ )
by hamdingers | 2025-11-13 19:15:13+00:00
> the "war on drugs" has been a miserable failure that has been, for the most part, a footgun.

It has accomplished everything its proponents hoped for and much more.

"You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”

- John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Richard Nixon
by matt-p | 2025-11-13 19:15:19+00:00
It's interesting; the current state of the railways is clearly a complete joke but 10-15 years ago, my perception at least, was that it was basically a OK and working system. The stats are only a bit worse now than they were then, I wonder why the massive perception gap.

2014 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proportion-of-tra... Now https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passeng...
by nartho | 2025-11-13 19:15:29+00:00
I wouldn't call it the last frontier. Gaming works well enough for me to not have to worry about.

I am, however, obligated to keep a Windows partition around because I do music production. If there are good DAWs that run natively on Linux, almost all plugins won't run on Linux. Everything plugin that runs as standalone or anything similar is guaranteed to not work on Linux.

I am thinking about getting a Mac mini for music production only, seems it's probably the lesser of 2 evils
by dijit | 2025-11-13 19:15:31+00:00
This is incorrect on all counts and it strikes me as scary that its the top comment.

Train workers consistently strike, not because they are not well paid (though nowhere near airline pilots- though that is in free-fall), but because cuts to staff lead to safety issues.

The profits of the train system has never been higher, and the salaries of workers has stagnated in real terms for more than a decade.
by btilly | 2025-11-13 19:16:10+00:00
Sure.

There has long been a narrative that persistent gaps on standardized tests are due to racism. This narrative has been strengthened by the fact that actual racists have seized on these gaps to argue that various minorities really are stupid. See The Bell Curve. As a result, simply arguing for standardized tests being effective has long been seen by some as a sign that you are a racist.

This did not stop universities from using standardized testing for admissions. But during COVID, they couldn't do testing. So universities had to drop the tests. Administration quickly noticed that it is a lot easier to achieve diversity goals (that's the D in DEI) if you stop including data that makes disadvantaged minorities look worse.

Coming out of COVID, testing started again. Some universities, like MIT, immediately began requiring tests again. Others, like Harvard and Yale, became test optional - you could report it, but didn't have to. But the entire University of California system took the extreme of saying that you can't report your tests at all.

Test optional universities were forced to face the reality that the students who chose to report test results performed significantly better in class than those who didn't. Countering that, the lawsuit SFFA v. Harvard created pressure against race based admissions to achieve diversity goals. (Harvard lost that in 2023.) This strengthened the conflict between testing and diversity goals. And for those on the diversity side, made existing narratives about the tests being racist more appealing.

Universities have had different responses. For example Harvard reinstated test requirements in 2024. Yale still hasn't. And the UC system has doubled down on no tests allowed.

This is a frustration for my son because he scored in the top 1% on the SATs. He believes that he would have gotten into a better university if he was allowed to use his SAT score. When he arrived, upperclassmen were admitted due to tests, and his class wasn't. My son saw the difference in quality.

And so, surrounded by the narrative that the tests were racist, my son doubled down on, "The tests are fair, and the world in general would be better off if people like me received opportunity based on our actual potential to make good use of it."