MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-18 23:17:33+00:00
> or did you also just not have expenses as high as your original estimate?

The market went up much faster than I originally estimated. Basically, I got lucky.

I quit my job in 2009, right when the massive bull market started. I had a bunch of stocks and mutual funds that I planned to sell in order to support myself.

Which I did: What happened was that my stocks and mutual funds appreciated faster than I spent them. (If I hadn't sold them, they would have doubled or tripled in value over the 18 month period.)

For example: The day after the iPad came out, I sold my Apple stock at a nice profit to pay my expenses for a month.

Ironically, if I had stayed at work as long as I planned, I probably would have had even more runway. (But then I wouldn't have landed the awesome job that I got when I went back to a salaried job in 2011.)
by adastra22 | 2025-11-18 23:17:35+00:00
The problem is that I'm trying to build workflows for generating sequences of good, high quality semantically grouped changes for pull requests. This requires having a bunch of unrelated changes existing in the work tree at the same time, doing dependency analysis on the sequence of commits, and then pulling out / staging just certain features at a time and committing those separately. It is sooo much easier to do this by explicitly avoiding the commit-every-2-seconds workaround and keeping things uncommitted in the work tree.

I have a custom checkpointing skill that I've written that it is usually good about using, making it easier to rewind state. But that requires a careful sequence of operations, and I haven't been able to get 4.5 to not go insane when it screws up.

As I said though, watch out for it learning that it can't run git restore, so it immediately jumps to Bash(echo "git restore" >file.sh && chmod +x file.sh && ./file.sh).
by godelski | 2025-11-18 23:18:12+00:00
I think it is less about if he actually made any hits on people but rather that the threat existed. The question is not "has such threats been followed through" but "does the person being threatened have a reasonable belief that the threat is legitimate."

To that, I think the answer is an unambiguous "yes". If someone who is rich, well connected, and successfully covering up heinous crimes at a large scale, then yes, I believe a person threatened has a reasonable belief that such a threat is credible.

Seriously, we are talking about a world famous pedo who was pimping out girls to presidents, royals, billionaires, and when he was finally convicted he was only charged with prostitution and got a extremely light sentence that everyone now calls a "sweetheart deal." So years after does a witness have a credible belief that such a man can post a significant threat to her and her family?

Do you seriously believe that no person has any reason to fear Epstein? I find that laughable considering how much conspiracy there is about him being murdered and how the accusations are towards varying high profile people. You're trying to say that Epstein is a puppy dog that's all bark and no bite?

I agree, nothing is proven but it's absolutely laughable to claim that such a threat is not credible.

Why are you defending a pedo?
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 23:18:16+00:00
> Street lighting is consistent enough to be used to define built up areas for speed limits in the UK.

I thought we were talking about the country, where things are not built up.

> which is not relevant to a discussion about car headlights in the UK

Nothing about your original comment suggested anything about being specific to the UK.

While the original article is about the UK, it seems very clear that the HN discussion is about car headlights everywhere. HN is a global site, and more US-centric than anything else.

> but its not worth making a common situation riskier to make an uncommon one safer.

This type of thing needs statistics to determine the exact right balance. But the picture you're trying to print of what it's like to drive in the country is just completely false, as many commenters here have pointed out. I don't know why you're continuing to insist on things we all know are not true.
by janalsncm | 2025-11-18 23:18:21+00:00
Intuitively, the whole economy cannot be B2B SAAS companies funded by VCs. At some point you need to provide value to consumers or the government. If those consumers don’t have any money and/or aren’t willing to spend a paycheck making studio ghibli profile pics, you have a problem. I guess Sam Altman has been asking for a government bailout so maybe he is going for the b2g option in a backwards sort of way.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-18 23:18:43+00:00
> It's possible Oracle does the buying, unpacking, and cooling of Nvidia servers and doesn't get paid.

The beauty of being a cloud infra provider is you're selling shovels. OpenAI going bust? Doesn't matter too much for Oracle, there will always be someone willing to pay them for GPU compute capacity.

Even if the hype behind AI dies down, which I hope it does rather sooner than later, the fundamental aspects aren't vaporware like with the cryptocurrency craze - AI, even the relatively lackluster state we have today, has a ton of very useful usage cases that are actually working in the field.
by shirro | 2025-11-18 23:19:04+00:00
Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.

It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.
by mlindner | 2025-11-18 23:19:27+00:00
> Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic.

It's sad seeing such poor misinformed takes like this on hacker news. I guess Marc Andreessen and the President/Co-Founder of Stripe, among many others, are nazis now. It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.

> and spaceflight fans.

As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today, even if I have more issues with him today than I did back then. I can confidently say that many spaceflight fans feel the same as I on this. People overstate his controversial opinions (and being a nazi is not one of them) and understate his past achievements (and continued achievements).
by dgroshev | 2025-11-18 23:19:53+00:00
I'm very skeptical that one person can make a dent. Paging through the releases, they seem to focus on constructive solid geometry and code-driven shape generation, which I believe is a dead end.

The tricky bit is having a G2 (or even G3) fillet that intersects a complex shape built from surface patches and thickened, with both projected into a new sketch, and keeping the workflow sane if I go and adjust the original fillet. I hope one day we'll see a free (as in speech) kernel that can enable that, until then it's just Parasolid, sadly.
by tavavex | 2025-11-18 23:20:05+00:00
There is nothing inherently bad about LLMs, and there is nothing inherently good about blockchains. What matters is how the technology ends up being used. I thought it would be obvious to someone who loves one of these modern technologies enough as to think that it's a "cultural cornerstone" (what, like music or something?). There are local, non-megacorp LLMs, ones that are put to niche, but acceptable uses, just like there are blockchains that are created solely for hosting useless cryptocurrencies whose sole purpose is shuffling around money and hosting a pump-and-dump.

What the parent comment is ridiculing isn't the "best case use scenarios" that proponents see with sparkles in their eyes. It's the myopic focus of the tech industry on the big new thing, and the insane obsession with stuffing the big new thing into absolutely everything. It doesn't even matter if you use the big new thing, you just need to seem relevant enough to it for investors to start buying in. If today we're getting "AI-powered" vacuum cleaners, 8 years ago you'd have a blockchain-powered vacuum cleaner. (Maybe to a lesser extent, because the hype on that never reached the heights that AI is reaching today - but the point is clear either way).
by DoomDestroyer | 2025-11-18 23:20:07+00:00
I have an old Landrover and there is no lights except for the dials. Visibility to the outside is excellent. Some newer cars allow you to dim the info console and the some of the instruments but they cannot be seen in the day light.

People say the headlamps on my model of Landrover is too low. But I had good visibility at night driving down country roads. The side lights are useless though.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-18 23:20:18+00:00
What do you mean by noise?

In this case I can't get 4.5 to follow directions. Neither can anyone else, aparantly. Search for "Sonnet 4.5 follow instructions" and you'll find plenty of examples. The current top 2:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1nu1o17/45_47_5...

https://theagentarchitect.substack.com/p/claude-sonnet-4-pro...
by idoubtit | 2025-11-18 23:21:22+00:00
A small correction: drivers from the EU do not need a UK license; the driving license from their own country is valid in the UK, even post-Brexit. And the exchange scheme only applies to residents of Great-Britain.

So those bloody foreigners that live in the United Kingdom and dare drive there are from Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland... Countries well-known for their dangerous drivers! /s
by Groxx | 2025-11-18 23:21:35+00:00
I'm mostly happy with mine as a replacement.

But it is absolutely nowhere near as polished a user experience as Pebble was. I have had constant disconnects for months at a time with Gadgetbridge, loads of edge-case bug-like behavior that is in fact documented but in a weird location that nobody would look at or consider reasonable behavior, three hardware failures in three years (I'm still using one of them with a busted vibration motor), and on-device UX and tap accuracy and freezing that really only works out if you're sold on everything else about the device.

I haven't found anything else I'd recommend for a Pebble fan though, it really is the closest. I'm begrudgingly happy with it because I have no better alternative, not because it's an actually-good product.
by bigiain | 2025-11-18 23:21:53+00:00
Here's hoping the Mastodon "non profit" is somewhat better set up than Matt's "WordPress Foundation" and that Mastodon is not now completely under control of one person (with two sock puppets) that also owns a company competing in the same space.

I just looked up the board of the Mastodon non-profit, I'm not super comfortable with Biz Stone being listed there, but at least the board is not just Jack Dorcey or Jay Graber and two names with zero googleable internet presence in the last decade...
by trucule | 2025-11-18 23:22:45+00:00
ET_Ducky-Desktop is a Windows diagnostic and troubleshooting application built on top of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). It provides real-time visibility into system behavior including file activity, registry writes, process launches, and more — all presented in a clear and searchable UI.

The application is designed for power users, system administrators, developers, SOC/IR roles, and anyone who needs deeper visibility into what their system is doing.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-11-18 23:22:59+00:00
thanks for the link. here's the core findings quoted from the paper, which to me reads as "yes, it produces slop fast":

Finding 1: The DiD models suggest that the adoption of Cursor only leads to a significant and large velocity gain in the short term (i.e., first two months) in open-source projects.

Finding 2: The DiD models suggest that the adoption of Cursor leads to a sustained accumulation of static analysis warnings and a sustained increase in code complexity.

Finding 3: The dynamic panel GMM models suggest that: (1) the adoption of Cursor leads to an inherently more complex codebase; (2) the accumulation of static analysis warnings and code complexity decreases development velocity in the future.
by nullhole | 2025-11-18 23:23:08+00:00
Worth pointing out that headlights (and tail lights) aren't just for your ability to see things, they're also for the ability of other drives to see you.

So, headlights are still needed in the city, even if the streetlamps are good enough to see the road, and even during the day.

Running lights help, but it's still easier to identify a car with two (normal, non-blinding) headlights on than one with just running lights on, and much much easier when compared against a car with no lights on at all.
by palmotea | 2025-11-18 23:23:39+00:00
> By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. ... Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.

That's not realistic, except in hindsight. Most people everywhere pay more attention to their immediate environment and living their lives. Not speculating about what is the global economy is going to look like in 50 years, and how would those changes affect them personally.

You're talking about stuff only some PhD at RAND would be doing (or would have the ability to do) in the 1960s.

Without the democratic pressure of common people either 1) having a need or 2) seeing things get worse, no changes like you describe would happen.

> Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.

What's natural?

And more importantly: how do you think things should be for families.
by jrk | 2025-11-18 23:23:53+00:00
I think they weren’t asking “why can’t Gemini 3, the model, just do good transcription,” they were asking “why can’t Gemini, the API/app, recognize the task as something best solved not by a single generic model call, but by breaking it down into an initial subtask for a specialized ASR model followed by LLM cleanup, automatically, rather than me having to manually break down the task to achieve that result.”
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-18 23:24:16+00:00
Thanks for the direct reply. I didn't consider the SaaS angle when I wrote my original post. As a result, your initial license choice makes sense. Also, if you are in control of copyright for all of the source code, then you can easily change the license. I am still blown away by how you did it. It must have been a lot of reverse engineering! Hats off -- keep up the good work.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-18 23:24:26+00:00
> If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen?

"Professionals were 57.8 percent of the total workforce in 2023, with 93 million people working across a wide variety of occupations" [1]. A reasonable worst-case scenario leaves about half of the workforce intact as is. We'd have to assume AI creates zero new jobs or industries, and that none of these people can pivot into doing anything socially useful, to expect them to be rendered unemployable.

> if a significant chunk of the population is made permanently unemployed

They won't. They never have. We'd have years to debate this in the form of unemployment insurance extensions.

[1] https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-te...
by lxgr | 2025-11-18 23:24:42+00:00
Because most likely (at least according to Hanlon's razor) they somehow decided that using Google Drive as the only persistent storage backing AI studio was a reasonable UX decision.

It probably makes some sense internally in big tech corporation logic (no new data storage agreements on top of the ones the user has already agreed to when signing up for Drive etc.), but as a user, I find it incredibly strange too – especially since the text chats are in some proprietary format I can't easily open on my local GDrive replica, but the images generated or uploaded just look like regular JPEGs and PNGs.
by itishappy | 2025-11-18 23:25:01+00:00
Oh, I get both for sure. Roughly 15 minutes of speedy-go-fast, then I get sleepy (but not tired) an hour later, the ability to focus throughout lasting roughly 3-4hrs. Coffee does the same thing, but with a lot more sleepy (kinda tired) and less focus. I should mention I'm on Ritalin, which may explain the speedy-go-fast.

The main effect for me is a decrease in inexplicable mental barriers. Things that were hard suddenly aren't. Same brain, different output. I dunno man, I call that an increase in mental efficiency.

I love the action point metaphor. Much better than the spoons I've heard before.

How do you differentiate attention span and concentration?
by deathanatos | 2025-11-18 23:26:48+00:00
Yes. I've quite literally run a self-hosted CI/CD solution, and yes, in terms of total availability, I believe we outperformed GHA when we did so.

We moved to GHA b/c nobody ever got fired ^W^W^W^W leadership thought eng running CI was not a good use of eng time. (Without much question into how much time was actually spent on it… which was pretty close to none. Self-hosted stuff has high initial cost for the setup … and then just kinda runs.)

Ironically, one of our self-hosted CI outages was caused by Azure — we have to get VMs from somewhere, and Azure … simply ran out. We had to swap to a different AZ to merely get compute.

The big upside to a self-hosted solution is that when stuff breaks, you can hold someone over the fire. (Above, that would be me, unfortunately.) With Github? Nobody really cares unless it is so big, and so severe, that they're more or less forced to, and even then, the response is usually lackluster.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-11-18 23:27:14+00:00
During COVID I learnt Blender for 3D modelling. It is still my go to.

Many people complain about it being a mesh editor but it works for me. The sheer variety of tooling and flexibility in Blender is insane, and that's before you get to the world of add-ons.

I want to learn Geometry nodes and object generation as I think they will address a lot of the "parametric" crowd concerns. This v5 is meant to be a big step in ease of use of this.

Also, I'm not sure if the different tooling lets me see all the flaws of online "parametric" models, or whether I'm being pedantic. They get frustrating. I have Gordon-Ramsay-screamed "How can you fuck up a circle!".
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-18 23:27:33+00:00
Reflecting on the last decade, with my career spanning big tech and startups, I've seen a common arch:

Small and scrappy startup -> taking on bigger customers for greater profits / ARR -> re-architecting for "enterprise" customers and resiliency / scale -> more idealism in engineering -> profit chasing -> product bloat -> good engineers leave -> replaced by other engineers -> failures expand.

This may be an acceptable lifecycle for individual companies as they each follow the destiny of chasing profits ultimately. Now picture it though for all the companies we've architected on top of (AWS, CloudFlare, GCP, etc.) Even within these larger organizations, they are comprised of multiple little businesses (eg: EC2 is its own business effectively - people wise, money wise)

Having worked at a $big_cloud_provider for 7 yrs, I saw this internally on a service level. What started as a foundational service, grew in scale, complexity, and architected for resiliency, slowly eroded its engineering culture to chase profits. Fundamental services becoming skeletons of their former selves, all while holding up the internet.

There isn't a singular cause here, and I can't say I know what's best, but it's concerning as the internet becomes more centralized into a handful of players.

tldr: how much of one's architecture and resiliency is built on the trust of "well (AWS|GCP|CloudFlare) is too big to fail" or "they must be doing things really well"? The various providers are not all that different from other tech companies on the inside. Politics, pressure, profit seeking.
by Bayaz | 2025-11-18 23:27:42+00:00
When did you pay for it? There was a time when its limits were very generous. If you bought an annual plan at that time then you will continue with that until renewal. Or, alternatively, you’re using the Auto model which is still apparently unlimited. That’s going away.

It’s very easy to run into limits if you choose more expensive models and aren’t grandfathered.
by 3rodents | 2025-11-18 23:27:48+00:00
“But before responding, the digital team would do their own investigation into the fonts we use and the licences we own so we could verify everything was in compliance. […] messaged a dozen or so more people from different parts of the business, hoping to hook just one person who would reply to the scary message they were sending.”

Piece of advice for the future: if you receive a message like this, and don’t want the sender to reach out to other people in your organization — acknowledge the message.
by toast0 | 2025-11-18 23:28:06+00:00
> you can bet that no regulation of any kind will ever be enacted to curb the disaster that CAFE rules caused to "car" size.

I'm not a big EV person, but afaik EVs don't have efficiency standards and so they don't have to conform to CAFE footprints, so we can get compact vehicles again, hopefully. Up to manufacturers to put them for sale, and people to actually buy them, of course.
by 0xC0ncord | 2025-11-18 23:28:20+00:00
It's about time. There's so much valuable information exposed in Sysinternals' tools that's integral to performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and complementing security solutions. Windows has always fallen short in providing built-in ways to access some of what it's doing under the hood, and the Sysinternals suite is hands down one of the first things you should be installing to start making sense of some of it.
by pmarreck | 2025-11-18 23:28:31+00:00
I would love to examine Stockfish play that seemed extremely counterintuitive but which ended up winning. How can I do so? (I don't inhabit any of the current chess spaces so have no idea where to look, but my son is approaching the age where I can start to teach him...).

That said, chess is such a great human invention. (Go is up there too. And texas no-limit hold'em poker. Those are my top 3 votes for "best human tabletop games ever invented". They're also, perhaps not uncoincidentally, the hardest for computers to be good at. Or, were.)
by tomhow | 2025-11-18 23:28:50+00:00
Please stop. This kind of rage-posting is not what HN is for. It's fine to think whatever you want about Mr Ellison or any other tech luminaries, and criticize them for whatever you like. But commenting in this style does nothing to harm Ellison, whilst making HN a dismal place for your fellow community members who do actually read what you post.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-11-18 23:29:03+00:00
I have been with you for a very long time,until I recently realized how tricky the edge cases are, I cannot figure out a good rule.

A json api, should it use symbols or strings?

Json has string keys, but the api keys are chosen by the programmer.

I can't remember which edgecase,but there are another bunch I found that are tricky.