MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by octagons | 2025-11-14 17:49:07+00:00
I’ve been running an Incus cluster of 3 fairly beefy servers for about a year now. It’s my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to setup a new virtualized environment.

One of my favorite features is how you can tag different cluster members for different architectures. In the same cluster, I can have traditional dual-socket x86 servers with a dozen DIMM slots as well as Raspberry Pis. The architecture tagging lets me strategize execution of ARM-based container workloads to be only on the Pis, or opt to run them via QEMU on the x86 platforms if that makes more sense in a particular scenario. Since I deal with a lot of embedded firmware, this offers a nice, flexible platform.

Stephen Graeber is also a long time contributor to the LXC project and his reasoning behind this fork and other changes are quite sound. I hope the project sees continued success. Stephen’s business model of offering consulting services for Incus systems also seems quite sound.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-14 17:49:27+00:00
I understand the sentiment. I grew up lower middle class but with financially illiterate and neglectful parents and had a great deal of food scarcity and other things that caused me to leave home at 17. It was really difficult. The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.

What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.

A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."

I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
by lbrito | 2025-11-14 17:49:58+00:00
That is a great point and probably the most valuable take out of this discussion.

We often use wealth as a proxy to well-being, but these kinds of posts shatter that concept. The author is, objectively, _not_ unwealthy. He has a credit card, a large car and a house. But still he struggles and is not well. Well-being is not just wealth, it is also (and more importantly) social safety.
by krapp | 2025-11-14 17:50:19+00:00
Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is.

And the right definitely believes that people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."

And then there's "Cultural Marxism" (a conspiracy theory about the nefarious communist influence of Jews in academia), the "groomer" panic (a conspiracy theory that transgender identity is a cover for organized pedophile rings) white replacement theory, DEI, China anything and countless other conspiracies the right believes in that are based on some kind of racial or gender essentialism or prejudice.

The left has its share of that too, but the distinction you're trying to draw here makes no sense.
by rsyring | 2025-11-14 17:50:20+00:00
> The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”

There are more options than the "mindsets" given in the article. It is legitimate to ask someone who believes they are poor why they are poor. Maybe they truly are. But maybe they aren't and they just don't know it.

Questioning whether or not someone has a higher earning potential does not imply they are currently lazy.
by wffurr | 2025-11-14 17:50:23+00:00
The fact that they are working so hard to retrofit a GC into the V8 C++ code IMO calls into question their premise for not using Rust, namely that the majority of V8 security flaws are in the JIT generated code, not V8 itself. That always seemed to be a flimsy excuse to keep using an insecure language for what is supposed to be a very secure language runtime for untrusted code, but now it’s laughable on its face.
by triclops200 | 2025-11-14 17:50:24+00:00
This article assumes that concepts are somehow precise coordinates within a single language; that's not the case, at best, speakers of a language mutually approximate a relatively consistent representation, but like, look at a word like yeet or whatever: we decided as a society on its meaning while it was being developed, as it were. Furthermore, it never rigorously defines what it means by translation. It claims 上京 is a single basis meaning moving to Tokyo, for example, but that isn't even an accurate translation: the individual components represent superior/greater/above and Tokyo and as an idiomatic phrase it represents the concept of moving to the capital for a better life. Something like "moving on up" or the like in some vernaculars of English, and idioms translating to idioms is a form of translation. It's disingenuous to represent the first concept as a single basis but not the second. Similarly, it claims mono no aware (物の哀れ) is unable to be translated, but, again, more literally "translated" is saying "the sorrow within things" character by character, and, only as an idiom has the full contextual understanding. It's not really a single point even if it's rather accurately located in a hypothetical embedding space by Japanese speakers. Imo, an English translation of the concept is "everything is dust in the wind", only 2 more individual conceptual units than the original Japanese phrase, and 3 of them are mainly just connecting words, but it's understood as a similar idiom/concept, here.

Concepts are only usefully distinguished by context and use.

By the author's own argumentation: nothing is translatable (or, generally, even communicatable) unless it has a fixed relative configuration to all other concepts that is precisely equivalent. In practice, we handle the fuzziness as part of communication and its useless to try and define a concept as untranslatable unless you're also of the camp that nothing is ever communicated (in which case, this response to the author's post is completely useless as nobody could possibly understand it enough internally for it to be useful. If you've read this far, congrats on squaring the circle somehow)
by adrian_b | 2025-11-14 17:50:30+00:00
You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns.

These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages.

There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted.

Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball, "bullet train" and so on.

This kind of compound words are almost never translatable, but they are frequently borrowed from one language to another and during the borrowing process sometimes the component words are translated, but the result is not a translated word, it is a new word that is added to the destination language.
by webdood90 | 2025-11-14 17:50:33+00:00
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?

I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.

Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?

IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
by lelandbatey | 2025-11-14 17:50:40+00:00
Looking at a video demo of Niri for an example: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

Conceptually, it's like an infinite 2D canvas windows, divided into strips (strip is a workspace), and you then scroll through an infinite ribbon of windows in each strip.

Seems interesting, but also slower and less flexible than traditional tiling WMs (least of all because of the slow scrolling animations, but also because it seems to prefer scrolling instead of jumping-towards).

Like most of the 'tiling with gaps' patches I see, these feel like trying to look fancy without necessarily delivering big value. I'd be interested to hear why people want a scrolling WM. Is it merely more visually pleasing?
by pwg | 2025-11-14 17:50:57+00:00
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.

Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
by wolttam | 2025-11-14 17:51:06+00:00
Niri has been really nice over the last week since I moved to it. It has allowed me to get down to ~2 persistent workspaces instead of the usual 5-6.

Workspace 1: Browser, Email, Music

Workspace 2: Running project, editor(s)

On sway/i3 I always had these things split across multiple workspaces it could get tedious switching between them at times.
by cryzinger | 2025-11-14 17:51:10+00:00
AFAIK no one's figured out how to get Linux on it yet, but the Daylight Computer otherwise fits that ticket for me. I have mine set up with a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse and a no-name tablet stand :)

The benefit I think people don't understand about these low-fi writing setups is that it's much harder to _idly goof off_. There are times where I truly want to read or write, but if I'm on a computer it's too easy for muscle memory to kick in and start typing one of many distracting URLs into the address bar. My tablet is a much more constrained experience, and the screen is monochrome; last time I sat down to write on it, I actually had Google Docs open for three or four hours straight.
by raldu | 2025-11-14 17:51:39+00:00
I miss the very calming, cold, solid, metal feeling of desktop software.

Log back in after a vacation, and everything's still there.

A window with "maybe" resizable panels and a menu, and that's it.

The Web used to be the "documents."

For a technology that's been built for documents, all the navigation, footer, and header of any modern app feel like a "hack" compared to elegance of what desktop used to be.

In an old-fashioned desktop application, anything that gets "synchronized" is by choice, and rather feels like magic.

In a web app, even the UI is not a given.

We are forced to stay logged to an "Massively Online Revenue Platform Generation" games, and it keeps getting disconnected, and is laggy.

So "Let's replace the Cloud with self-hosted alternatives," right? -- Good luck with added effort and complexity of config, maintenance, network, db, bugs, updates, and the pain of "admin accounts" in first setup.

We used to have the client and server functionality baked together in any major desktop software that used to connect to FTP, IRC, P2P, Mail, and to each other.

Today it's accounts... Accounts. It's accounts all the way "up."

We used to own the data, and the software.

Now it's full-scale surveillance and dispossession.
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-14 17:51:55+00:00
They are miles better than the ordinary machine translators. That's all that matters, because I can't afford a personal human translator to browse the web.

Human translation is obviously better, but not by much, especially on the web. I know because I'm testing LLMs for pretty complex translations all the time, in languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally communicate with me in my native language using an LLM. It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop generation, as the input is from a human.

That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his hard work with a worse version, which is terrible but not related to the point I'm making.
by tech_ken | 2025-11-14 17:52:12+00:00
> With the emergence of AI in science, we are witnessing the prelude to a curious inversion – our human ability to instrumentally control nature is beginning to outpace human understanding of nature, and in some instances, appears possible without understanding at all.

A while ago I read "Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend and there's a section that really stuck with me, where he talks about the "myth" of Galileo. His point is that Galileo serves as sort of the mythological prototype of a scientist, and that by picking at the loose ends of the myth one can identify some contradictory elements of the popular conception of "scientific method". One of his main points of contention is Galileo's faith in the telescope, his novel implementation of bleeding edge optics technology. Feyerebend argues that Galileo invented the telescope as primarily a military invention, it revolutionized the capabilities of artillery guns (and specifically naval artillary). Having secured his finances with some wealthy patrons, he then began to hunt for nobler uses of his new tool, and landed on astronomy.

Feyerabend's point (and what I'm slowly working up to) is that applying this new (and untested) military tool to what was a very ancient and venerable domain of inquiry was actually kind of scandalous. Up until that point all human knowledge of astronomy had been generated by direct observation of the phenomenon; by introducing this new tool between the human and the stars Galileo was creating a layer of separation which had never been there before, and this was the source of much of the contemporary controversy that led to his original censure. It was one thing to base your cosmology on what could be detected by the human eye, but it seemed very "wrong" (especially to the church) to insert an unfeeling lump of metal and glass into what had before been a very "pure" interaction, which was totally comprehensible to the typical educated human.

I feel like this article is expressing a very similar fear, and I furthermore think that it's kind of "missing the point" in the same way. Human comprehension is frequently augmented by technologly; no human can truly "understand" a gravitational wave experientially. At best we understand the n-th order 'signs' that the phenomenon imprints on the tools we construct. I'd argue that LLMs play a similar role in their application in math, for example. It's about widening our sensor array, more than it is delegating the knowledge work to a robot apprentice.
by jimbokun | 2025-11-14 17:52:13+00:00
I think LLMs as a replacement for Google, Stack Overflow, etc. is a no brainer. As long as you can get to the source documents when you need them, and train yourself to sniff out hallucinations.

(We already do this constantly in categorizing human generated bullshit information and useful information constantly. So learning to do something similar with LLM output is not necessarily worse, just different.)

What's silly at this point is replacing a human entirely with an LLM. LLMs are still fundamentally unsuited for those tasks, although they may be in the future with some significant break throughs.
by mandevil | 2025-11-14 17:52:18+00:00
They would need to prove that they have the rights to it to win court, yes. The chances of Activision actually pulling the trigger and suing if you made a remastered version are definitely less than 50-50. They'd have to actually have owned the rights in the first place, they still have the documentation to prove it, and that they'd find a suit a profitable idea? Let's say it's a 1/3 chance. That means if you publish it, you'd have a 2/3 chance of not getting sued by Activision, that can have a positive E(V) if you just go ahead and YOLO it.

But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-14 17:52:22+00:00
This is talking about philosophical liberalism.

It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.

It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.

It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.

To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
by lynndotpy | 2025-11-14 17:52:36+00:00
While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to increasingly being a luxury.

The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.
by pksebben | 2025-11-14 17:52:47+00:00
You're right, of course. These models have deficiencies in their understanding related to the sophistication of the text encoder and it's relationship to the underlying tokenizer.

Which is exactly why the current discourse is about 'who does it best' (IMO, the flux series is top dog here. No one else currently strikes the proper balance between following style / composition / text rendering quite as well). That said, even flux is pretty tricky to prompt - it's really, really easy to step on your own toes here - for example, by giving conflicting(ish) prompts "The scene is shot from a high angle. We see the bottom of a passenger jet".

Talking to designers has the same problem. "I want a nice, clean logo of a distressed dog head. It should be sharp with a gritty feel". For the person defining the spec, they actually do have a vision that fits each criteria in some way, but it's unclear which parts apply to what.
by Philpax | 2025-11-14 17:53:00+00:00
Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason.

Type-checking keybindings is cute, but you're going to discover that the keybinding doesn't work when you go to use it, so how much time are you really saving? That's not helped by the fact that many WMs/compositors have validators for their configs, so you're getting much of the same benefit with much less trouble.

For reference, Niri's config is very approachable: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-c...
by neuralkoi | 2025-11-14 17:53:04+00:00
“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
by robbomacrae | 2025-11-14 17:53:17+00:00
Yeah that sounds reasonable. I've been thinking about how to make it more modular. I'll make it so that base TalkiTo doesn't need any heavy libraries.

EDIT: also to be clear whisper doesn't run or even download the model unless it's selected and the user confirms the DL. This can be configured. Google cloud has a free ASR option and ASR can be switched off completely.
by alaxhn | 2025-11-14 17:53:21+00:00
The article directly mentions that the author has done complete engine rebuilds. Mechanics who can do things like engine rebuilds (efficiently) can crack six figures in a MCOL area although this industry does tend to expect quite a bit of work (e.g. 50 hours a week probably and not just M-F). Similarly the about page of the author mentions that they didn't like working in tech and left. The author seems to have all of the tools to make well above the median national salary and afford the proverbial white picket fence house with a wife and two kids. Therefore it seems that the author is making a choice to be poor and many of us would find this choice questionable. Coupled with the author stating things like "Should I kill myself for capitalism" this reads like a fairly typical far-left rant against the inhumanity of actually having to work for a living. The author should check their privilege. There are many rungs below what the author describes and people in this environment would kill for the job of doing engine rebuilds 50 hours per week to earn a six figure salary and support their family.

Hey Dom we all find work tough a good chunk of the time and none of us would do it without the paycheck so we aren't exactly feeling sympathy that you don't like it and are choosing to force your family to live in miserable conditions because you don't want to embrace the grind.