MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ziml77 | 2025-11-21 05:09:56+00:00
It's just plain lazy devs. They do that crap on Windows too despite having conventions for where the stuff goes since Windows 98 (though Photos and Videos folders were introduced with XP, and Game Saves with Vista).

The folder for config is even older. CSIDL_APPDATA has been able to be used to get the path to the AppData folder since the update for Windows 95 that added Internet Explorer 4.0.
by autoexec | 2025-11-21 05:11:00+00:00
> The firm starts to underpay those better workers who kept their jobs, akin to making them pay for being “chosen.” Consequently, profits do not decline and may even increase.

> “Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’”

This is exactly what unions are for. Any time there are enough skilled workers avilable that a company can let good employees go as a warning to others not to complain about substandard wages it's clear that the imbalance of power has resulted in exploitation. There is strength in numbers though which is why companies go to great lengths to convince people that you all alone negotiating with a huge corporation of people who have more money and resources than you'll ever see in your lifetime and who can replace you with someone else easily is somehow totally fair. No matter how special they might make you feel, you are almost always disposable to them and they will drop you at any time and for any reason, even if it's just to make an example out of you to keep your ex-coworkers in fear.

For the very few employees out there who actually are totally indispensable, any sane company would be looking for your replacement immediately because there's no telling what might happen to you or when. No company should fail because one employee dies in a car cash or gets a cancer diagnosis. Until you are also replaceable the company isn't safe. They'll pay you handsomely to keep you, right up until the moment they don't have to.
by davidgay | 2025-11-21 05:11:10+00:00
> Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the

You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).
by dmix | 2025-11-21 05:11:29+00:00
I've often wondered how much of the western homeless crisis is due to not allowing ghettos/slums to exist, the last place the very poor could afford rent. Cities have essentially made them illegal over the past 30yrs. Once it gentrifies it's gone. Including even large blocks of subsidized apartment buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes

All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight up fail.

Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-21 05:12:19+00:00
There are a lot of “fications” afoot. Qatar is donating that jet to Trump and allegedly also funds Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. There is the odd mystery of Trump being soft on China and not enforcing the TikTok ban, suggesting he perhaps is compromised by them in some way. There’s also the corporate side of influence, like Tim Cook giving Trump that gold award. Ironically AIPAC is the least offensive influence since it’s just private American citizens donating, rather than a foreign head of state bribing the president or controlling domestic news media.
by sadid | 2025-11-21 05:12:23+00:00
yes, but on this n-gram vs transformers; if you consider more general paradigm, self attention mechanism is basically a special form of a graph neural networks [1].

[1] Bridging Graph Neural Networks and Large Language Models: A Survey and Unified Perspective https://infoscience.epfl.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/7e6f8...
by themafia | 2025-11-21 05:12:31+00:00
> The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland.

I've never seen this documented.

> It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt.

So we have people who want to create features but do not want to pay for technical debt. So.. they create more technical debt? Is there some indication that the wisdom of the crowd is particularly valuable here?

> I would have to imagine that if the Xorg developers thought they could fix Xorg, they would do that instead of making a new thing.

It seems like all the paid developers are working on Wayland while many of the volunteers are working hard to continue Xorg despite all the sponsored efforts to artificially shutter the project.

The article authors main complaint seems to be that distributions forced users to choose between one or the other when, at this point in history, there are zero good reasons to have done that.

Open source used to be about choice. Now it's about paid interests bullying you out of that choice. And Hacker News readily defends this in the name of modernity for it's own sake. It's truly a bizarre outcome to me.
by jMyles | 2025-11-21 05:13:45+00:00
First of all, in much of the US, you don't need a license to carry a gun in public. I'm not saying that's good or bad - I don't love it, but it's the current state of things.

But... is there a right to generalized mechanics in the same sense as general computing? General computing is the right to think - is your right to think limited to what your brain is capable of right now? Is it OK to exercise to increase your capacity? Is it OK to take supplements and drugs for this purpose? Is it OK to offload some thinking to a device you own?

Of course. These are fundamental, bedrock needs of a free information age society. You can think _anything_ you want. Thoughts, perhaps by definition, don't harm or imperil others.

But can you arbitrarily craft any machine you want? I mean, no. Like the right to your thoughts, you can craft what you like as long as it doesn't harm or imperil others. Unlike thoughts, some machines do certainly do this.

We have long had a legal and philosophical distinction between arms and ordnance for this reason. We recognize that the right to bear arms create a decentralization of the capacity for violence. But the right to bear ordnance does not. Also, in practical terms, manufacturing ordnance in secret is often difficult (and in fact, it is relieving to know how difficult it is to make nuclear weapons in secret - so much so that it seems to be _less_ possible with each passing year - in part due to the proliferation of eyes/cameras!).

So yeah, I think you can have totally philosophically and legally consistent limits on manufacturing without also having to limit thought / computation / perception.
by laotree | 2025-11-21 05:14:17+00:00
Attempt to reproduce the Cloudflare 2025-11-18 outage.

Cloudflare's incident report is written clearly and explicitly, so based on my own understanding, I’m going to try reproducing this outage. Already completed:

CK cluster Permission change triggering data doubling Cache propagation Unaffected proxy services Proxy services with bot score errors

TODO:

unwrap panic during pre-allocation of cache Full demonstration of the entire outage process

https://github.com/Laotree/reproduce_cf20251118
by komali2 | 2025-11-21 05:14:19+00:00
My buddy had his septic tank drained last week. He's feeling burnt out as a software engineer and had idly did a bit of a job hunt as an experiment, sending out 70 applications, mostly to larger companies. He has a phenomenal resume, not top .1%, maybe more like top 5-10% in NYC/Bay Area markets, but also has a long line of previous managers that'll sing his praises all day. Despite that, all blanket rejections, not even a callback for a 30m screen.

Anyway, he's talking with the septic tank guy and AI comes up and my buddy asks if dude is worried at all. The guy says, "yeah I figure somewhere out there, there'll always be some shittank that the robots can't get to, and they'll have to call me."

So folks worst case scenario we just empty septic tanks!
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-21 05:14:40+00:00
Given billionaire LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's willingness to directly influence the LA Times' editorial (spiking 2024 Harris endorsement) and news (AI-generated "bias meter"), one has to wonder if this article is the result of some billionaire-level feud Soon-Shiong and Schmidt are conducting.

Of course if Schmidt does have the backdoor described by the paper, it's well past time to leave gmail and google docs. That's not tolerable.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-11-21 05:14:52+00:00
That’s a strange thing to say. If I wasn’t self employed, I’d pick the job that pays more (Laravel) instead of the job that (according to you) is 100x more available.

And who really cares about bloat anyway? Hardware is super cheap nowadays. People are expensive. So why not use a framework that enables you to be (in your terms) 100x more productive?

On top of that, you’re arguing about languages and frameworks you’re not even familiar with. Why does your opinion matter at all?
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-21 05:14:52+00:00
> it's really measuring a self-reported belief that they struggled (or not) due to (in)sufficient education

Thanks for pointing this out. Common sense also suggests that humans having lived and thrived for a long time before youth sex education existed, so if there are “modern” relationship struggles, it must be some other factor and not the absence of a new education practice.
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-11-21 05:16:22+00:00
I left work late tonight and again saw in the parking lot a car with sheets inside the windows and the engine running. Someone who can’t afford Boston metro housing prices is sleeping in their car.

If I recall correctly, the strongest correlation with homelessness is housing prices. SROs used to be a way to keep people at the bottom of the market housed. Now it’s a Toyota Camry.

Progressive New Englanders hold their NIMBYism close to the heart and would rather someone sleep in a car (or worse) than allow sufficient amount of housing to keep prices down.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-21 05:16:43+00:00
> Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription holders.

Can you explain what do you think is wrong with that?

> An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers of users have been deprived access to the commodity.

What a questionable assertion. Your whole argument is that businesses that were not compliant had to close, but somehow you chose to frame them as compliant?

And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public is being deprived of? Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that pose a health risk? That's hardly something anyone would complain about.

> Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the black market where no safety or quality checks are conducted.

No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.

Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem of people selling hazardous products that don't comply with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!

The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is their incoherence driven by despair.
by komali2 | 2025-11-21 05:18:23+00:00
People often say this kind of argument is in opposition to regulation and in favor to deregulation, but lemme play devil's advocate and say, why is it not an argument in favor of stronger, centralized, simplified regulation, aka what they got going on over in the PRC? Sure it's nice having the ability for a blue city in a red state in a blue federal government all keeping each other from getting anything done, but on the other hand, seems there's something to be said for a government that can say "there should be a train here. We will cut a hole through your building now to make that happen."
by wodenokoto | 2025-11-21 05:18:27+00:00
I'd say one of the main differences is that a Markov chain trained over N-grams works on discreet n-grams. Therefore the markov chain cannot tell the difference between two contexts never seen in training. They will both be the "unknown"-token.

An LLM will see a bunch of smaller tokens in a novel order and interpret that.
by RussianCow | 2025-11-21 05:18:46+00:00
This. I use Linux as my primary OS (with KDE) and my main complaint, by far, is the email/calendar situation. Mail.app simultaneously just works and gets out of my way, and I haven't seen a Linux email client come close to replicating that.

Every few years I convince myself I'll create a better email client for Linux, and I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of how complicated email is. Maybe someday I'll take a sabatical and actually do it...
by jholdn | 2025-11-21 05:18:48+00:00
My experience with consulting firms is there are two paths for high performers. Either you move into a sales/relationship focused role (which there are fairly limited slots for) or you move client side and probably buy from your old employer. The good workers do well either way (when I say move client side, I mean to high level positions - importantly one with control over a budget to afford consultants) and the consultancy makes money both ways.
by man8alexd | 2025-11-21 05:20:03+00:00
> the need for visuals in the seconds before the explosion led to a choice to visualise it like the top of a boiling kettle.

And this is the lie. Before they pressed the AZ-5 button: (quote from INSAG-7 report) "the parameters of the unit were controlled, remained within the limits expected for the operating conditions concerned, and did not require any intervention on the part of the personnel."

There was no drama in the control room, everything was mostly calm and "business as usual".

The Soviets invented the story "these youkels at Chernobyl did unauthorized experiment, disabled all safety mechanisms, broke all the rules and blew up our big beautiful reactor." This story was presented at the IAEA meeting in Vienna in 1986 by Legasov himself and published as the INSAG-1 report. The miniseries repeats this story but shifts all the blame to evil Dyatlov.

After the Soviet Union fell, the updated report INSAG-7 was published in 1992, which I quoted above.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-21 05:20:39+00:00
Thanks but my point still stands: there's no entry-level roles, whether it's "Linux" or a Linux-based "DevOps" role. I'm actually working in a windows-based mostly-DevOps type role, but we use almost zero opensource tools and it's very Microsoft centric.

The closest Linux-y roles that I might have a shot at getting into are "cloud engineer" type roles, with a heavy emphasis on AWS - and I hate AWS with a passion (just as much as I hate Azure).

Regardless, the biggest issue is getting that interview call - now in the age of AI, people are faking their CVs and companies are getting flooded with hundreds or thousands of junk applications, so getting that interview call - especially when you don't meet their professional experience requirements - is next to impossible. I could have all the Kuberneres certs in the world, but what's the point if I get filtered out right at the first stage?
by thesz | 2025-11-21 05:21:14+00:00
> A markov chain model will literally have a matrix entry for every possible combination of inputs.

The less frequent prefixes are usually pruned away and there is a penalty score to add to go to the shorter prefix. In the end, all words are included into the model's prediction and typical n-gram SRILM model is able to generate "the pig with dragon head," also with small probability.

Even if you think about Markov Chain information as a tensor (not matrix), the computation of probabilities is not a single lookup, but a series of folds.
by palmotea | 2025-11-21 05:21:42+00:00
> At this point, asking whether Miller is a card-carrying Nazi, or just pals around with them and espouses their beliefs, is a distinction without a difference. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

I think you're conflating white supremacy with Naziism. They're not the same thing. All Nazis are white supremacists, but not all white supremacists are Nazis.
by komali2 | 2025-11-21 05:22:10+00:00
Sure, but the fundamental premise is that good corporations are seeking to generate profits, and good governments are seeking to provide for their constituents.

A corporation that doesn't prioritize profits isn't a good corporation. You wouldn't buy stock in it. A government that isn't prioritizing its constituents is a bad one, you wouldn't vote for it.

Everything else is implementation detail but it's obvious that governments need to check corporate power because otherwise the inevitable end game is a corpotocracy ruling over factory towns of debt slaves.
by codedokode | 2025-11-21 05:23:04+00:00
> The way Unix works, a directory is a file, so if you can write in a directory you'll also be able to move directories around

Well, maybe this should be changed, or we could just use the sticky bit.

Other users, except for primary user, can use /ubuntu24/home/. Primary user uses the root of hard drive however they want.

> because it'll also search all the other system subdirectories too.

It's already a pain because /home contains lots of system files, caches etc. And it would not be difficult to add a flag "skip system files".
by josephg | 2025-11-21 05:24:04+00:00
> we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.

Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.

Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.

That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.

We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.
by fithisux | 2025-11-21 05:24:27+00:00
Apple releases part of the source code of XNU, it would make much more sense to me, to re-create something like the original Darwin CD out of this for x86-64.

There are a number of MacOS CLI tools and drivers for x86_64.

It may be a motivation to continue work.

Even commercially it could be something interesting.

I am not sure if it is easier though.

PureDarwin seems to do very slow progress.
by brokenmachine | 2025-11-21 05:25:44+00:00
I tried out zoxide and fzf ctrl-r history on linux (zsh) recently. Game changers.

Where is zoxide for my phone? Why is there so little innovation?

Trillion dollar companies can't come up with a single new thing. Or rather, won't come up with a single new thing because they're just useless rent seekers.

It's absolutely pathetic.
by tamimio | 2025-11-21 05:26:04+00:00
Either fired or just leaving by themselves. My theory: it has to do with middle managers, who mostly are less capable in technicalities, not smart enough, and aren't born leaders otherwise they would have been doing their own business, so they prey on those good ones since they have nothing to do all day except politics and scheming around compared to the others who spend most of their day building or doing actual work.
by sameklund | 2025-11-21 05:26:20+00:00
It seems that your claim is that “this is how it should be” and also “this is how it is/has been” - not sure if you are referring to a specific region, considering the parent comment, but assuming you mean the tech industry in general, this seems patently false.

This is not a description of how talented, or smart, or “good at something” someone is. You are describing how risk-averse someone is, as well as how able to survive failure. The latter is slightly different from the former, although related. Someone not able to survive failure at all (due to having no savings, for example, or perhaps someone who has high monthly fixed costs) ought to have a low tolerance for risk, but they might still have a lower threshold for what they consider risky relative to someone else.

I’ve met plenty of talented/smart/etc people in each of these groups, and also plenty of the opposite. To be fair, my experience is anecdotal and biased, although I would reasonably expect such a pattern to continue.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-21 05:26:36+00:00
> There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.

I think you're confused. I'll explain why.

Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around with bald tyres.

However, said countries also allow the sale of tyres for track and competitive use, as long as they are clearly sold as not road-legal and for competitive use only.

So, no. You can buy track tyres. You just can't expect to drive with them when you're dropping off your kids at school and not get a fine.

Also, it should be noted that some motorsport competition ban or restrict the use of slick tyres.