MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SmirkingRevenge | 2025-11-19 21:18:32+00:00
Yea, Perl thrived while there was no real alternative.

PHP arrived and ate into it's web app use-cases. Modperl wasn't great for hosted environments, to say the least.

Python matured and started eating into it's systems use-cases and eventually the web use-cases as well. And was just so much easier to work with and learn.

Perl was left with no real niche where it really shined, except one-liners and making poetry I guess
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-11-19 21:19:24+00:00
"we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AIwe can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI"

But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).

Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.
by vkou | 2025-11-19 21:19:30+00:00
The fallacy of the middle is a poison that extremists with power and media reach use to kill productive discourse.

People who don't care about the distinction between truth and falsehood understand this very well, and use it to its full potential. After all, the half-way point between truth and a wild, brazen, self-serving lie is... A self-serving lie.

The media has been largely complicit in this (Because controversy sells), but now we're getting this crap cemented in AI models. Wonderful.

---

The promise that hackers are making is that these systems will enhance our knowledge and understanding. The reality that they have delivered in a bullshit generator which serves its operators.
by cyode | 2025-11-19 21:19:43+00:00
The dandelion metaphor is also employed as cover art on a book I like called "Contagious: Why Things Catch On." by Jonah Berger.

I find it interesting that this article focuses on what communities will help an idea germinate and eventually go viral, vs. Contagious which focuses on qualities of the information itself that make it spreadable. The former is probably more impactful, but both play a role.

The book ends with a mnemonic summarizing what "steps" an idea should follow to be considered contagious:

[S] - Social currency (does sharing the idea make the "spreader" look good/smart/impressive)

[T] - Triggers (topics that come to mind frequently due to an environmental trigger. Case in point: the song Friday by Rebecca Black gets most of its streams on Fridays)

[E] - Emotion (obviously ideas that evoke an emotional response get more attention)

[P] - Public (whether or not info reaches others depends how public-facing the distribution channel is)

[P] - Practical Value (is the idea useful?)

[S] - Stories (if the format of the information follows a narrative, it sticks more with people and is also easier to retell)
by nofriend | 2025-11-19 21:20:19+00:00
This is such a laughable comment. Being in favour of a regulation - any regulation - is not part of the "hacker spirit". A hacker qua a hacker is interested in a regulation insofar as they can work around it, or exploit it to their ends, not to put one in place to directly achieve something. That's not to say all regulations are bad, or even that the GDPR is, just that HN being for or against it isn't proof of some demographic shift.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-19 21:20:47+00:00
Imagine a world where your ISP also separately provided an IRC messaging service. Why would you ever use that over actual IRC?

This is how I feel about SMS, and phone numbers too for that matter. They're still around for historical reasons, but if we started anew, I can't imagine we would build out that infrastructure separately from the greater internet, and if we would have, I can't think of a reason why.
by j2kun | 2025-11-19 21:20:55+00:00
Nobody is using this thread to actually talk about what's in the paper, just as a place to rant about short form videos... One question that comes to mind to me is: r=-.034 a reasonable effect size? Having seen many scatter plots of r values, 0.3 seems basically like random noise. Is this just falling into the same problem as all huge meta-studies, that there's way too much variability to get any kind of clear signal?

And why, for that matter, do we need science to tell us that SFV is bad and addictive? Isn't that patently obvious from our own lived experiences?
by tlamponi | 2025-11-19 21:21:06+00:00
PVE itself is still made of a lot of perl, but nowadays, we actually do almost everything new in rust.

We already support CPUsets and pinning for Container VMs, but definitively can be improved, especially if you mean something more automated/guided by the PVE stack.

If you have something more specific, ideally somewhat actionable, it would be great if you could create an enhancement request at https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/ so that we can actually keep track of these requests.
by donio | 2025-11-19 21:21:14+00:00
It's the opposite for me for one reason: hashtag follows!

There are very few people I want to follow for everything they have to say. I am interested in subjects, topics. Mastodon's hashtag follow feature gives me this. It's not perfect, you need to be on a relatively large instance to take full advantage of it (since it only picks up toots that make it to the instance) but it's still much, much better than no hashtag follow at all.
by ebbi | 2025-11-19 21:21:25+00:00
It's in everyday things.

Like this most recent headline from AppleInsider:

"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"

Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?

Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.

This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
by buildsjets | 2025-11-19 21:21:39+00:00
In a well engineered control system, any single failure will not result in a loss of control over the system.

Was a FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis) performed on the design prior to implementation in order to find the single points of failure, and identify and mitigate their system level effects?

Evidence at hand suggests "No."
by lbrito | 2025-11-19 21:21:53+00:00
Its been a long time since I took statistics courses, but aren't those r values rather low to conclude anything?

"Increased SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (moderate mean effect size, r = −.34), with attention (r = −.38) and inhibitory control (r = −.41) yielding the strongest associations. Similarly, increased SFV use was associated with poorer mental health (weak mean effect size, r = −.21), with stress (r = −.34) and anxiety (r = −.33)"
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-19 21:22:04+00:00
I'm sorry to belabor this but I'm genuinely not understanding what you're saying in this reply. I haven't operated large scale systems. I'm just an IT generalist and casual coder. I acknowledge I'm too inexperienced to even know what I don't know re: running large systems.

I read the parent poster as broadly suggesting configuration updates should have fitness tests applied and be deployed to minimize the blast radius when an update causes a malfunction. That makes intuitive sense to me. It seems like software should be subject to health checks after configuration updates, even if it's just to stop a deployment before it's widely distributed (let alone rolling-back to last-working configurations, etc).

Am I being thick-headed in thinking defensive strategies like those are a good idea? I'm reading your reply as arguing against those types of strategies. I'm also not understanding what you're suggesting as an alternative.

Again, I'm sorry to belabor this. I've replied once, deleted it, tried writing this a couple more times and given up, and now I'm finally pulling the trigger. It's really eating at me. I feel as though I must be deep down the Dunning-Kruger rabbit hole and really thinking "outside my lane".
by nxor | 2025-11-19 21:22:04+00:00
Funny enough, last I saw, shorts of course are less profitable than videos, because they can't carry as many ads, and supposedly advertisers would rather put their ads on longer videos anyway. This would imply they just want to stay relevant. After all, if they didn't make short form videos, someone somewhere would be convinced they are missing out (personally I find shorts a lot worse than long videos).
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-19 21:22:07+00:00
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.

Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.
by duskwuff | 2025-11-19 21:22:37+00:00
Not that anyone's even bothered knocking off their current generation products. The majority of Arduino clones are still using AVR or occasionally SAMD processors - Arduino's newer boards were never really accepted by the community. Some makers have even gone another direction entirely - ESP32-based development boards are popular, and there's a compatibility layer for using the Arduino IDE with those.
by ForHackernews | 2025-11-19 21:22:42+00:00
"Why aren't you impressed we installed a real live trained dancing grizzly bear in your bathroom!? Yes, I know nobody asked for that bear. Yes, I know the toilet still doesn't flush. Yes, I know the bear sometimes eats people trying to take a shower. Don't you understand?! I grew up using an OUTHOUSE! Have you seen the bear's colorful hat? That bear literally dances the macarena, you ingrates!"
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-19 21:23:05+00:00
>There are very, very few events which some people who run mission critical systems accept as force majeur. Most of those are of the scale "national emergency" or worse.

And why should anyone be surprised? It's been about 80 years since "The buck stops here."[0] had any real relevance. And more's the pity.

[0] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-buck-stops-here.html
Show HN: OctoDNS, Tools for managing DNS across multiple providers
by gardnr | 2025-11-19 21:23:06+00:00
After the major outages from AWS and Cloudflare, I began wondering how to make my own services more resilient.

Using nameservers from different providers is doable but a bit tricky to manage. OctoDNS helps automate keeping the zones synced so AWS, Cloudflare, etc. are all serving the same information.

In an age of centralized infrastructure, we can exploit the capabilities from the origins of the decentralized internet.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-19 21:23:25+00:00
Yes, those people were driving too fast.

>every additional foot of headlight distance certainly helps for spotting the glint of an eyeball on the side of the road.

Only if you are paying attention in the first place. The reality is that most people hitting deer and moose just are not, or the animal ran out in front of them and there was nothing that could have been done.

I dodged many a moose with half burned out incandescent bulbs in shitty sedans in the northest of rural new england.

Meanwhile the silly folks who have duct taped ten massive LED lightbars to their fenders still seem to be hitting moose up north, so I just don't buy the "I need more light" argument.

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2018-09...

Note how the DOT doesn't call out vehicle changes. Note also that despite the raw number being only a few thousand moose hits over a decade, you will consistently find that someone who has hit one moose is much more likely to have hit multiple moose.

They just aren't attentive drivers. Every single person up north has almost hit a moose. Only some of them routinely keep hitting moose. They are being saved by moose population control.
by bmelton | 2025-11-19 21:23:34+00:00
That was super helpful. I was assuming from skimming the text description that it was a failed crimp

A lot of people wildly under-crimp things, but marine vessels not only have nuanced wire requirements, but more stringent crimping requirements that the field at large frustratingly refuses to adhere to despite ABYC and other codes insisting on it
by dingnuts | 2025-11-19 21:23:52+00:00
It is a Linux distribution, it just turned out that "let me interrupt for a moment" meme was actually correct and what you wanted was a portable GNU distribution with an open kernel, and instead you got a Linux distribution with Google's user space and now instead of realizing the terminology was wrong from the get to you've misidentified the very trick Google played on us.

Turns out a kernel is just a kernel after all, and you really do want GNU+Linux, not just Linux.
by w_for_wumbo | 2025-11-19 21:24:00+00:00
This is what I wonder to, what is the end game? Advance technology so that we can have anything that we want, whenever we want it. Fly to distant galaxies. Increase the options available to us and our offspring. But ultimately, what will we gain from that? Is it to say that we did it or is it for the pleasure of the process? If it's for pleasure, then why have we made our processes so miserable for everyone involved? If it's to say that we did it, couldn't we not and say that we did? That's the whole point of fantasy. Is Elon using AI to supplement his own lack of imagination?

I could be wrong, this could be nonsense. I just can't make sense of it.
by amatecha | 2025-11-19 21:24:11+00:00
Oh yeah: If you host behind Cloudflare, you can basically expect your site/service is inaccessible by all of Spain every weekend or so: the government there decided to just completely cut off Cloudflare to stop illegal sports streaming sites. A couple posts about this:

https://daniel.es/blog/cloudflare-vs-la-liga/

https://harro.com/2025/06/06/is-blanket-ip-blocking-justifie...

https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo...

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/cloudflar...
by jacquesm | 2025-11-19 21:24:41+00:00
> My favorite collection recently was "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge". It spans his short fiction from 1965-2001.

I re-read that one just after he died. Amazing stuff.

> I've considered commissions many times, I go back and forth on it. I wouldn't want to put a commissioned story into a "Year's Best" anthology, just because I truly want it to be a "Year's Best" -- i.e. I need to evaluate ALL the stories published to the best of my ability and choose the best regardless of name recognition.

That's a good point. Otoh, 'best' is always going to be subjective and you could make it explicit: A novel short story by X and the best of Y.

> I could commission some and create a new themed book separate from the "Year's Best", but that's hit and miss. The main issue with commissions for me is that you never really know if the thing you're commissioning is going to turn out how you want. If the authors are well-known it will probably be good, but I've had many editor friends commission stuff that was just phoned in.

Ok. That's probably a matter of having an authentic connection to the writers whose work you would like to commission.

I used to run 'daz.com', as a community for people interested in music, much like Musicbrainz, with connections between bands through collaborations and shared individuals to help discover new music. As a side project I thought of commissioning a piece of music. This really opened my eyes to what it costs to produce a high quality piece and that was priced right out of the ballpark but what struck me is that the few artists that I had contact with all had already used the site and had made sure that their own record there was accurate. This was amazing and made me quite happy, even so, they had pretty high standards and when all was said and done it went nowhere. We did manage to raise the profile of a few artists whose work was otherwise less known and I made a number of very interesting contacts.

I'm not going to name drop anybody but suffice to say that I found it amazing that you could just reach out to A-list artists and get a well thought out and very helpful response.
by necovek | 2025-11-19 21:24:54+00:00
The big one that's often ignored are collation tables: while there's the default in ISO 10646 IIRC, each region-language combo might have their specific overrides (imagine "ss" being sorted as a separate letter in German, and not as after "sr" and before "st", so it would be sa..., sb..., sr..., st..., ssa..., ssb... etc); and then Austrian German might have a different phonebook ordering.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-19 21:25:06+00:00
Guess what, it's also common to buy kids clothing that lets them fit in, a haircut that lets them fit in, and let them watch the movies and TV shows other kids are watching so they can fit in. Kids want to fit in, in order to make friends, and it's healthy to make that easier than put arbitrary obstacles in their way.

And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.
by tormeh | 2025-11-19 21:25:06+00:00
These correlations are not good, obviously, but in which direction does the causality go? As someone with attention issues, I've had to remove these apps from my home screen and disable notifications because I can't handle them well. I suspect I might be more susceptible to SFV due to attention issues, rather than SFVs causing any change. It's a lousy way to spend time, though.
by themafia | 2025-11-19 21:25:15+00:00
I am unimpressed with it. If I wanted to steal code off stack overflow I can do that myself. Another layer of indirection has negative value.

I can generate images that are difficult to use commercially. I can analyze something with AI but I can't confidently use that output in any setting that matters.

For people who are attempting to engage in profitable work then AI is miserably unimpressive. I don't know what planet this guy is living on. Time is money. Flowery emails and off axis summaries can only create a waste of that time.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-19 21:25:25+00:00
> sneaking its way into where it's not wanted

This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.

Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.

All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.

And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.
by SirHumphrey | 2025-11-19 21:25:28+00:00
I would caution against reading too much at this stage, even though the researchers were very careful to talk about only correlation, a lot of people here seem to read causation. This are population studies so the variables are not independent.

The argument became a bit unpopular because it has been (ab)used by smoking companies and gambling establishments but while an addictive substance can addict anybody, who gets addicted is not random. Watching of TikTok reals is a time wasting and dopamine inducing behavior - while I don't doubt they are bad and I avoid them, you may also be selecting for depressed or lonely people.

This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-11-19 21:25:28+00:00
I see you are debating lisps ergonomics, but that doesn't dismiss the paradigm. Erlang Haskell and Prolog has far better syntax readability, so I don't see this as really relevant in discussing the alternative to Von Neuman.

There are other ergonomics issues beyond syntax that pose issues to adoption (Haskell in production has become something of a running gag). Moving the paradigm into a mixed language alongside procedural code seem to help a lot in seeing its adoption in recent years. (swift, rust, python, c++)
by bungle | 2025-11-19 21:25:40+00:00
System outputting the configuration file failed (it could check the size and/or content and stop right away), but also a system importing the file failed. These usually sound simple/stupid in a hindsight. I am not a fan of everything centralising to a few hands. As in bad situation, they can also be weaponised or attacked. And in good situation their blast radius is just too big and a bit random, in this case global.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-11-19 21:25:43+00:00
You answered your own question.

Datacenters hire companies to do this on their behalf, as they don't have the internal know-how to do this. Even the big cloud companies do this.

They're on 3-5 year cycles, yet the hardware life has a good 8 years in it. The reseller sifts through what comes out, sees what is still alive, scraps what isn't, and resells the rest.

What you don't understand is this isn't a one way relationship. If you're a major cloud company, your hardware probably already is worthless. Meta (and other companies) use a non-standard case and rack "standard" called Open Compute (OCP)... there is no resale market for these, as normal datacenters use normal racks with normal cases. Meta has to pay a company to dispose of these and lose 100% of their investment.

But lets say we go to someone else that does use standard hardware, and the rest of the industry buys this stuff up (to maintain existing fleets that don't need upgraded yet, not everybody is on some ridiculous 3-5 year churn), the company you partnered with to deal with your e-waste is likely to either give you a much better rate or even pay you for your hardware (if it is in high demand).

These enterprise inference machines have zero resale value. Even the OCP stuff I mentioned above has a small market (theres a few smaller datacenters out there toying with OCP due to it having better density, but aren't willing to buy new to test it out), but there is no market for these inference SBCs.

See my sibling comment to this for more information on why the SBCs are uniquely weird.
by jancsika | 2025-11-19 21:25:58+00:00
> If they dislike it, they can fork my project and go away.

I definitely agree with you here. Forking, almost by definition, means the "D" in BDFL is a joke. The author pretending that "D" is deadly serious is an incredibly counterproductive and passive-aggressive way to express their concern.

Still, the question remains-- if your project has more than a single developer, have you communicated to your project members who you think has the best knowledge and ability to take over after you're gone? If the only developer is you then the question is moot. Otherwise, it's false modesty to pretend that's none of your business.
by lossolo | 2025-11-19 21:26:13+00:00
LLMs can "edit" code, but as you say, they do it differently from diffusion models. They operate directly on long text sequences and use much more context, which is one reason they currently work better for coding. Diffusion models for code aren't a new idea, people have tried different designs, but so far they tend to underperform autoregressive LLMs, probably because denoising over discrete tokens is harder to make work than straightforward next token prediction.