MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-30 03:36:22+00:00
> 3. Ethics matter. I don't believe there's any life after this one, but I find myself ruminating on what I've done. In 2015, I had a lot of interaction with a startup incubator you know well, and ended up sitting in the discussions and planning around banning and erasing a young programmer we considered a threat to our financial interests, due to his concerns about authoritarianism in technology. In retrospect, he was harmless, but an example had to be made. The decision was made to ban him here, try to get him fired though I don't know if we succeeded, and attack him with sockpuppets on Reddit, and it seems to have worked because you don't hear his name much.

There's something a bit odd about confessing that you were part of an institutional attempt to cancel a specific person, without naming the person or what their specific concerns were, or what specific institution this was; and also claiming that the reason you regret this now is because they were "harmless" rather than "correct".

Someone who in 2015 was concerned about "authoritarianism in technology" possibly came from a cluster of political perspectives that is relatively close to my own; and also possibly came from a cluster of political perspectives that I am relatively opposed to. It's hard to tell which from just that wording and the fact that someone with institutional power in 2015 wanted to cancel them.

I'm certainly curious for more details about exactly what happened here. I imagine it would compromise your anonymity to say more, and depending on the details it might even be bad for that person.
by h00kwurm | 2025-11-30 03:36:50+00:00
I don’t disagree that technology is allowing a new low bar for minimal allowable effort. This is true in a world where the same technology could enable one to deliver amazing things. I’m speaking more generally and I think you describe the exact problem in your clarification which boils down to “people are chasing money and doing whatever it takes in ML, where the money currently is”. I was stopping at the fact that “people […] chasing money and doing whatever it takes” has become the general personal pursuit, quality/depth/care be damned.
Tell HN: Hh.ht – the scripting language that can hot-patch itself in 3 ms
by chunpulee | 2025-11-30 03:37:02+00:00
[main.ht] {}{ linux = loadlib("lib/hlinux/hlinux.so");

old = { "abc": 100 }{ printf("%d\n", this.abc); this.abc += 1; }; while true { if old.abc == 105 { new = loadht("src/a.ht"); codecpy(old, new); } old(); linux.sleep(1); if old.abc > 120 { break; } }

}

[a.ht] { "abc": 100 }{ printf("%d\n", this.abc); this.abc += 2; }

result: 100 101 102 103 104 105 107 109 111 113 115 117 119

https://github.com/chunpulee/hh.ht
by crossbody | 2025-11-30 03:37:46+00:00
The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?

My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.

It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.
by jswelker | 2025-11-30 03:37:46+00:00
Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents.

People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.

People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.

And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-30 03:37:55+00:00
I can't speak for the 9070XT specifically (I'm on a 7800XT myself), but the thing with Linux in general is that nVidia can be a PITA sometimes and exhibit weird issues like your menu lag. If you want a first-class Linux experience then go all-AMD. I run Linux on four different classes of all-AMD computers (desktop, laptop, mini-PC and handheld) and have literally zero issues. In particular, I've been running Bazzite for about three years on two of my systems (PC and laptop) and it's been rock solid. Three years of updates and upgrades, with only one hiccup this one time on my PC (which wasn't a big deal either since I had pinned a good image versions to my boot menu, so I always have a good image I could boot into).
by pandaman | 2025-11-30 03:38:10+00:00
>No, nobody I know has had their bike stolen. I am acknowledging that bikes are sometimes stolen.

This argument makes even less sense then. You proclaim that stealing bike parts is an absurd idea and never happens based on the people you know, yet now you say that you don't know any people whose bike was stolen? If you believe things that don't happen to people you know are absurd and don't happen, then should not you be consistent and believe that bikes don't get stolen? Or, if you admit that bikes get stolen, even though not from the people you know, then should not you also be open to the idea that bike parts get stolen too, even though not from the people you know?

>And no, the DA does not withhold prosecution for theft based on ones housing status.

That could be very true and DA does not charge any bike thieves regardless of their housing status, but still the effect is the same - homeless bike thieves are never charged and convicted (using "never" statistically, probably there are some convictions but nowhere close enough to make bike theft dangerous for the criminals). Since you seem unaware: drive around and observe homeless riding bikes and guiding another one or two. Sometimes you can even see bolt cutters on them. Do you think they do this on the way from their bolt-cutting job to the bike-valet job?
by jandrese | 2025-11-30 03:38:54+00:00
So if the big idea is to have a data center outside of legal jurisdictions why not build a floating data center in the Southern Pacific Ocean? You can power it with floating solar panels provide data via Starlink or a regular communication satellite and still be outside of the law. You might say that it will be vulnerable to pirates, but practically speaking nobody is going down there. Sure you will have to deal with weather, but overall the problems are way easier to solve than building an orbital data center.

But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.
by crabmusket | 2025-11-30 03:39:53+00:00
Two thoughts.

Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed an idea on an episode of The Exponent (https://exponent.fm/) the idea of a "principle stack", and at which "layer" of the stack it's appropriate to address different societal issues. I wish I could find the episode again, it was quite a few years ago. The upshot being... maybe software licensing isn't the right place to address e.g. income inequality?

On the other hand, I definitely encourage tech workers (and all workers) to think about their place in the world and whether their work aligns with their personal values. I think the existence of free and open source software is a fantastic thing, but I think we should continue to evaluate whether it is in danger, or whether it could be better, or whether our efforts might be applied to something else.

For example, I'd love to see co-ops developing shared-source infrastructure based on principles of mutuality, which the sector is built upon anyway. The co-op principles already include cooperative and communitarian ideas which mesh really well with some aspects of open-source software development. But co-ops aren't about just giving everything away either. There could be a real new approach to building a software commons for mutual businesses, rather than a kind of freedom-washed way for big tech companies to benefit from free labour.
by handoflixue | 2025-11-30 03:40:39+00:00
It seems like CC-BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) works perfectly for this: Anyone is allowed to use it, but they have to credit you, and they can't use it for commercial purposes.

You're still free to license it out commercially on other terms, the open-source community gets to make use of it as they please, and it ensures you're credited.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-30 03:41:03+00:00
I have thrown away (in hindsight) amazing lottery tickets a hilarious number of times. Despite that poor track record, I have been able to grind out an enviable life sans lottery ticket. Showing up and being hungry is a huge part of the game. I’ve also had to reboot my career relatively late, which isn’t a place you want to be but it isn’t a death sentence if you don’t want it to be.

While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.
by tstrimple | 2025-11-30 03:42:50+00:00
I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into space in order to cool it is like putting a computer inside of a thermos to cool it. It makes zero fucking sense. There is nowhere for the heat to actually radiate to so it stays inside.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-30 03:42:53+00:00
> People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.

Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.

>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.

Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-30 03:43:08+00:00
> As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.

Agreed. That's why I don't believe in that. And actually that's kind of what I'm criticizing: the fake science used to judge peoples behavior.

But I do know we're way WAY more similar than our cultures would have us believe.

> I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".

I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible. Just like we generate mathematical proofs that underpin technologies which handle our worlds economy. But the creation of an incorruptible democracy can ONLY be done by the people who benefit from it. As in, the rich would never help us do it, only the poor. In fact, the rich would probably view us as enemies if we seriously tried.
by astura | 2025-11-30 03:43:14+00:00
From his dad's Wikipedia page:

>His lucrative engineering business took on "large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base." He also owned an auto parts store, at least half a share in an emerald mine, and even "one of the biggest houses in Pretoria."[12] His ex-wife Maye's book recalls that at the time of their divorce in 1979, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.[13]

Elon was 8 in 1979.
by zbentley | 2025-11-30 03:43:27+00:00
The opposite is true. Containwrization systems were built into operating systems as security features. The whole “Linux packaging is a hellscape of self-induced problems, so let’s duct tape a squashfs onto the side of this new security isolation system and call it a deployment primitive” use case we now call “containers” came later and is a fairly inelegant and wasteful way to avoid needing to solve the packaging hellscape problem. It’s valuable to many! But definitely is the square peg to the round hole (security isolation layer) of setns and chroot and friends.
by jalapenos | 2025-11-30 03:45:23+00:00
Good, give it ten years and she'll be some nobody, with only news articles from 10 years ago to feed her ego.

If they'd wanted the money pissed away on performative altruism they'd have done that in the will by trust.

Way to put up a middle finger to those who worked hard to build it all and wanted you to inherit it
by torton | 2025-11-30 03:45:59+00:00
On your desktop/laptop, most tasks probably don't run inside VMs or containers. Perhaps some applications use Flatpak or snaps or similar, but the default state for many currently popular Linux distributions is "no sandboxing of any kind".

Linux holds on to a negligible share of the overall desktop market OS, but it is marginally more popular among tech savvy people, which have plenty of disposable income, meaning the platform has steadily growing interest for malware authors and distributors despite its relatively low usage.
by redohmy | 2025-11-30 03:46:07+00:00
Q3 update: Global DRAM revenue jumped 30.9% QoQ to $41.4B, driven by higher contract prices, increased bit shipments, and growing HBM volumes. Micron led growth with 53.2% QoQ revenue increase, while Samsung and SK Hynix also saw strong gains. Inventories are tight, and TrendForce forecasts Q4 contract prices to surge 50–55%, confirming a strong upward cycle across DRAM and HBM markets.
by Animats | 2025-11-30 03:46:56+00:00
Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.

The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...
by queenkjuul | 2025-11-30 03:46:58+00:00
Bike theft is rare, parts theft is even rarer. Idk what you don't get.

Bike thieves are charged, regardless of housing. Why would their housing affect that?

I can't say I've ever seen a homeless person riding a bike with other bikes in tow. There are plenty of homeless people i see around, though, so I'm not convinced you're describing a real problem.

It's also very unsettling that you won't refer to them as homeless people.

eta: even the rabid inner-suburb Facebook boomers here who never shut up about the homeless people in my area have never brought up the things you're describing, I've never seen any such information in local media, which is always happy to say anything and everything negative about homeless people. I have zero reason to think homeless people are more likely to steal bikes, nor less likely to be prosecuted for doing so; far as i can tell, neither do you
by hedora | 2025-11-30 03:47:11+00:00
Single event upsets are already commonplace at sea level well below data center scale.

The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.

I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.

It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.
by jjmarr | 2025-11-30 03:48:29+00:00
> Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary.

If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".

In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
by busymom0 | 2025-11-30 03:48:32+00:00
This is very interesting:

> The Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students (SEEDS) allowed students the opportunity to grow control and experimental tomato seeds that had been exposed on LDEF comparing and reporting the results. 12.5 million seeds were flown, and students from elementary to graduate school returned 8000 reports to NASA. The L.A. Times misreported that a DNA mutation from space exposure could yield a poisonous fruit. Whilst incorrect, the report served to raise awareness of the experiment and generate discussion.[17] Space seeds germinated sooner and grew faster than the control seeds. They were also more porous than terrestrial seeds.

Wonder why?
by seneca | 2025-11-30 03:48:57+00:00
> Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.

I believe the primary reason is to attain credentials in pursuit of access to more lucrative employment prospects. I think your 1 and 2 are both significant factors, but they are quite far behind the pursuit of credentials.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-30 03:49:41+00:00
I run modded Skyrim (SE) via Steam on Bazzite, and it works fine. I just installed Vortex inside the same Proton prefix as Skyrim, installed all my mods via Vortex (and made sure there weren't any conflicts) and it all worked fine. I think I might've had to install .NET as well to get Vortex going, it's been a while so I don't recall, but there should be some update guide somewhere.

RE Anti-cheat, it's not ALL of them, it's only kernel-based ones. For eg, BattlEye, EAC, VAC, and nProtect Gameguard all work just fine, but of course, the game studio will need to enable that support. Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, Fall Guys etc all use anticheat and they work fine.

RE KDE, I haven't experienced most of those issues. I don't use Konsole (Ghostty is far better anyways). As for Discord, Equibop is a far better client compared to official.

RE GNOME, unfortunately GNOME and KDE have never really gotten along, personally I avoid GNOME/GTK apps are far as possible.
by stack_framer | 2025-11-30 03:51:47+00:00
I dropped out after my university added various "studies" courses to the required list.

I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-30 03:52:02+00:00
> Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.

here is the comment posted before your comment that denigrates whole movement with it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090463

> I was around when Clippy was introduced. It was universally hated. If anything, Clippy would be a good mascot for intrusive AI tools and services that harvest our data without regard for our privacy, not least because Clippy constantly monitored user actions just so that it could interrupt them.

It would but funnily enough new MS mascot for that, Mico, perfectly encompasses the AI movement with being amorphous, soulless blob
by GMoromisato | 2025-11-30 03:52:11+00:00
There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS.

The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.

All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.

And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).

Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-30 03:53:07+00:00
IDK, man, I hear Christians talk about people being misguided (spiritually) all the time. In fact I think they're the ones who say it the most.

But I actually meant it as a sort of drive (spirit), not wholly about belief (spiritual).

But also, you must take into consideration all the ill effects of poverty. Such as crime, lack of education, lack of opportunities, the emotional faults of poverty, unchecked mental health problems, anger, frustration, ills with socialization, etc. All of the effects derived from poverty. All of these get bunched up into a single shallow view of the poor: "they're just like that" - kinda tone.

While the rich get the material wealth and the status-privilege of their families, the rich are assumed to be valuable.

This is literally what the article is talking about, albeit within a more aristocratic context.
by venturecruelty | 2025-11-30 03:53:13+00:00
Just going to point out that this is semantic hair-splitting that usually comes from opponents of governments providing for the social welfare. Not saying you're doing that, but it's a thing that happens.

And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-30 03:54:10+00:00
I think it is useful to point out that the conditions under which those loans make any sense are incredibly narrow. It is far from the norm because it doesn’t pencil out in pure financial math. Wealthy people are not stupid, and the notion that this is being widely used as a tax avoidance measure tacitly makes that assumption. Studies seem to indicate that the prevalence is so low as to round to zero. There are many practical reasons to do it at the margin as a cashflow management exercise but not as a way of generating tax-free income.

The interest on those loans is taxed as income which feeds back into the model.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-30 03:55:17+00:00
>I don't believe that faith is an out, or that you can apologize or donate your way out of past behaviors. You will always be the person who has done what you have done.

Although you can't completely undo the past, you can choose to do things to make it right. People do change. Your attitude is self-defeating and is setting you up to act on more bad impulses in the future.