MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by input_sh | 2025-11-26 18:13:01+00:00
Oh that's easy: as soon as China gets good enough to compete at any market seen as vital, "the west" either makes up some nebulous national security threat to cut them off or imposes high enough import taxes to make the home-made versions cheaper in comparison. The same way "the west" has done it with cars, phones, and social media in recent years.

There is no free market competition between "the west" and China, they're two completely separate markets for a reason. You're only allowed to cross that isle in a limited capacity, as soon as you get big enough to be seen as a legit threat, you're getting cut off. Works both ways, Tesla can sell in China, but they can't beat BYD. Apple can sell iPhones, but only because their market share is not big enough to matter.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-11-26 18:13:18+00:00
Yeah the thing about having principles is that if the principle depends on a qualitative assessment, then the principle has to be flexible as the quality that you are assessing changes. If AI was still at 2023 levels and was improving very gradually every few years like versions of Windows then I'd understand the general sentiment on here, but the rate of improvement in AI models is alarmingly fast, and assumptions about what AI "is good for" have 6-month max expiration dates.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:13:28+00:00
Software engineering just comes really easily to my brain, somehow. Most of these days is spent designing, architecturing and managing various things, it takes time, but in the end of the day I don't feel like "Ugh I just wanna sleep and die" probably ever. Maybe when we've spent 10+ hours trying to bring back a platform after production downtime, but a regular day? My brain is as fine as ever when I come back home.

Contrast that with working as a out-call nurse, which isn't just physically taxing as you need to actually use your body multiple times per day for various things, but people (especially when you visit them in their homes, seemingly) can be really mean, weird and just draining on you. Not to mention when people get seriously hurt, and you need to be strong when they're screaming of pain, and finally when people die, even strangers, just is really taxing no matter what methods you use for trying to come back from that.

It's just really hard for me to complain about software development and how taxing it can be, when my life experience put me through so much before I even got to be a professional developer.
by Survived | 2025-11-26 18:13:44+00:00
Good or bad, converting craft work to production work is not making the craft worker more productive, it's eliminating the craft worker.

The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work.

The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.
by codedokode | 2025-11-26 18:14:04+00:00
Interesting, from the thread I learned that Apple have removed "advanced data protection" in UK [1]. I think, is is available even in Russia, but not in UK. That's why you cannot rely on commercial companies protecting your data - they are always ok with negotiating secret deals behind the closed doors. The only ones who are on your side are unpaid open-source volunteer developers.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo
by podgietaru | 2025-11-26 18:14:19+00:00
I mean, on your Cloud point I think AWS' moat might arguably be a set of deep integrations between services, and friendly API's that allow developers to quickly integrate and iterate.

If AWS' was still just EC2, and S3 then I would argue they had very little moat indeed.

Now, when it comes to Generative AI models, we will need to see where the dust settles. But open-weight alternatives have shown that you can get a decent level of performance on consumer grade hardware.

Training AI is absolutely a task that needs deep pockets, and heavy scale. If we settle into a world where improvements are iterative, the tooling is largely interoperable... Then OpenAI are going to have to start finding ways of making money that are not providing API access to a model. They will have to build a moat. And that moat may well be a deep set of integrations, and an ecosystem that makes moving away hard, as it arguably is with the cloud.
by Bloating | 2025-11-26 18:14:24+00:00
I've had the auras at least since a teenager, but not headaches. Thought is was completely normal, 'til a neurologist said No and that I has having vestibular migraines. Blood pressure was always on the low side of normal.

Family history of migraines and seizures, which some hypothesize have the same root causes. Would be interesting to see GLP-1 tests on epilepsy.
by borski | 2025-11-26 18:14:33+00:00
> Keep in mind that a lot of the benefits go away once patients come off GLP-1 and we have not seen any studies yet on what happens to people who come off it for long term effects.

Not if they increase muscle mass and change their lifestyle, like every physician (and the FDA/pharma companies) recommend.

> It may in fact make things even worse and for a lot of people, they may have to stay on it for the rest of their lives.

It does not. And some people may.

You know what’s worse than taking a GLP-1 forever? Obesity or metabolic syndrome killing you before you get to “forever.”
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 18:14:36+00:00
It is the aggregate they pay that counts here, not the individual payments.

A better comparison would be to compare this to airline passengers paying for their tickets, they pay a few hundred bucks in the expectation that they will arrive at their destination.

Besides, it is not the customers that determine Cloudflare's business model, Cloudflare does. Note that their whole business is to prevent outages and that as soon as they become the cause of an outage they have invalidated their whole reason for existence. Of course you could then turn this into a statistical argument that as long as they prevent more outages than they cause that they are a net benefit but that's not what this discussion is about, it is first and foremost about the standard of development they are held up against.

Ericsson identified similar issues in their offering long ago and created a very capable solution and I'm wondering if that would not have been a better choice for this kind of project, even if it would have resulted in more resource consumption.
by OwenGrumbles | 2025-11-26 18:14:57+00:00
I was wondering if there really is a huge difference between GNU coreutils and BSD coreutils. I was wondering because lots of linux applications have been ported to freebsd, and I was wondering if ports have to take a huge amount of time out of there day rewriting to use BSD coreutils. And if i was to switch, how much would my workflows be impacted. (Technical Answers Welcome)
by dweinus | 2025-11-26 18:15:08+00:00
This is a bad-faith argument, but even if I were to indulge it: human artists can/do get sued for mimicing the works of others for profit, which AI precisely does. Secondly, many of the works in question have explicit copyright terms that prohibit derivative works. They have built a multi-billion dollar industry on scaled theft. I don't see a more charitable interpretation.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-26 18:16:03+00:00
Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835

The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.)

For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users.

But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy.

(Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
by sunaookami | 2025-11-26 18:16:08+00:00
>How has it morphed into a wierd political institution

Von der Leyen, an autocratic fascist that is ruining this continent. She failed to push her agenda in Germany so she "failed upwards". Even how she got this position was highly controversial and went against the top candidate principle. The EU commission is exceeding their competencies. The EU is not democratic, there is no parliamentary oversight, the parliament can't even introduce legislative proposals. No one can vote for the EU commission, only the parliament can vote for or against all the proposed candidates (not one by one). Parliament is essentially a rubber stamp for the commission.

I could be jailed for this comment btw.
by TomasBM | 2025-11-26 18:16:32+00:00
I haven't followed the particular situation, but if it's as you say it, I agree that's bad company policy not to allow opting-out.

It's still a leap to conclude that "HQ in a neutral country" equates to or results in "Russian influence". The obvious stepping stones between the announcement and the conclusion of the parent comment would need to be that: A) Kagi (intends to) hires many employees of Russian origin, who B) live in Belgrade and C) also evidently and publicly hold imperialist views, which D) have an effect on the company and its product.
by joshuamorton | 2025-11-26 18:16:44+00:00
I had a former coworker who moved from the medical device industry to similar-to-cloudflare-web software. While he had some appreciation for the validation and intense QA they did (they didn't use formal methods, just heavy QA and deep specs), it became very clear to him very clearly that those approaches don't work with speed-of-release as a concern (his development cycles were annual, not weekly or daily). And they absolutely don't work in contexts where user-abuse or reactivity are necessary. The contexts are just totally different.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:17:37+00:00
> Do other professions expect you to work during personal time? At least blue collar people are done when they get told they're done

No, and after my first programming job, neither does it happen in development. Make sure you join the right place, have the right boss, and set expectations up front, and you too can surely avoid it if it's important to you :) Usually you can throw in "work/life balance" somehow to gauge how they feel about it.

And yes, plenty of blue collar people are expected to be available during your personal time, for various reasons. Sometimes just quick questions (especially if you're a manager and you're having time off), sometimes emergencies that requires you to head on over to the place. Ask anyone who owned or even just managed a restaurant about that specific thing, and maybe you'll be surprised.
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-26 18:18:08+00:00
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.

Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-11-26 18:18:14+00:00
Not to mention that perfectly normalizing a database always incurs join overhead that limits horizontal scalability. In fact, denormalization is required to achieve scale (with a trade-off).

I’m not sure how formal verification would’ve prevented this issue from happening. In my experience, it’s unusual to have to specify a database name in the query. How could have formal verification covered this outcome?

The recommendations don’t make sense saying that the query needed DISTINCT and LIMIT. Don’t forget that the incoming data was different (r0 and default did not return the same exact data, this is why the config files more than doubled in size), so using DISTINCT would have led to uncertain blending of data, producing neither result and hiding the double-database read altogether. Secondly, LIMIT only makes sense to use in conjunction with a failure circuit breaker (if LIMIT items is returned, fail the query). When does it make business-logic sense to LIMIT the query-in-question’s result? And do you think the authors would have known how to set the LIMIT to not exceed the configuration file consumers’ limitations?

The article says: > “You can’t reliably catch that with more tests or rollouts or flags. You prevent it by construction—through analytical design.”

That’s the big design up front fallacy. Of course you can catch it reliably with more tests, and limit the damage with flags and rollouts. There’s zero guarantee that the analytical design would’ve caught this up front.
by minkeymaniac | 2025-11-26 18:19:23+00:00
Yep, it doubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM I upgraded my PC by adding 64GB.. two Fridays ago I sold the 32 GB I took out for the same amount of what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
by shagie | 2025-11-26 18:19:26+00:00
It might have from time to time... but it had limited ability to track.

As I type this, DNS Now is currently receiving data from Voyager 1. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html

https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj for a screen shot of the relevant data.

The antenna data is https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/
by bena | 2025-11-26 18:19:33+00:00
Yes, it's incredibly easy to do these things once you've done all these other, incredibly difficult things first.

The furthest a human has been is 250k miles (far side of the moon). The fastest a human has traveled is only 0.0037% the speed of light.

The ISS is about 260 miles from the Earth. At that height, the gravity is actually roughly the same as on the surface, it's only because it is in constant freefall that you experience weightlessness on it.

Mars is 140 million miles away. And not exactly hospitable.

I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet.

All of those incredibly difficult things we have not even begun to do are the technical reasons we have not gone interstellar and may be the reason we will never do so.

And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is gone.
by mrweasel | 2025-11-26 18:19:47+00:00
Ignoring what Slashdot was like specifically: A lot more optimistic, a lot of hope and positive views of what the future would bring. The internet felt bigger, as if there was more to discover, even if it's larger now. More stupid, more fun. May it was just because I was younger.

It was also the year of the Linux on the desktop.
by rvz | 2025-11-26 18:20:37+00:00
Scaleway has some of the best prices for cloud Mac Minis and has better deals than the scam that is AWS's overpriced cloud Mac Minis.

Going with AWS for cloud Mac Minis is the quickest way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what to do with it and to flush as much cash down the drain as quickly as possible.
by fragmede | 2025-11-26 18:20:50+00:00
> it seems to me that SSD firmware has to be more complex than HDD firmware

I think they’re complicated in different ways. A hard desk drive has to have an electromagnet powered up in a motor that arm that moves and reads the magnetic balance of the part of the drive under the read head and correlate that to something? Oh, and there are multiple read heads. Seems ridiculously complex!
by razingeden | 2025-11-26 18:20:50+00:00
that $18,000-$24,000 bloomberg terminal had a 300bps modem

it took longer to generate a page of content or get a complete answer than a free LLM takes on an i5 CPU.

(ex: llamaGPTJ for linux CLI)

its missing live market data and news but incorporating that with something akin to openrouter would be trivial.
by sosodev | 2025-11-26 18:20:58+00:00
I'm fairly certain that it's happening right now. There is no threshold that LLMs need to "break through" to see adoption. The number of non-technical using them to write software is growing every day.

I was working freelance through late 2023 - mid 2025 and the shift seemed quite obvious to me. Other freelancers, agency managers, etc that I talked to could see it too. The volume of clients, and their expectations, is changing very rapidly in that space.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-26 18:21:03+00:00
I’ve been seeing you blazing this trail since the incident and it feels short sighted and reductive.

Rust is built on forcing the developer to acknowledge the complexity of reality. Unwrap acknowledges said complexity with a perfectly valid decision.

There are a few warts from early days like indexing and the ”as” operator where the easy path is doing the wrong thing.

But unwraps or expects are where Rust shines. Throwing up your hands is a perfectly reasonable response.

With your approach, what should Cloudflare have done?

Return an error, log it and return a 500 result due to invalid config? They could fail open, but then that opens another enormous can of worms.

There simply are no good options.

The issue rests upstream where deployments and effects between disparate services needs to be mapped and managed.

Which is a truly hard problem, rather than blaming the final piece throwing up its hand when given an invalid config.
by lousken | 2025-11-26 18:21:12+00:00
These apps do have GUI, don't you know? Xwayland doesn't solve their issues.

Imagine you have Cisco VPN and you want to connect - you connect and then close the dialog. It is just gone. Why? On wayland no tray icon is shown.

Now imagine you have Fortigate VPN and you want to connect - you enter the IP address and click connect but nothing really happens. Why? No confirmation dialog was ever displayed in wayland.

Now imagine you have palo alto vpn and you try to connect ... good luck.

Can you work around that by using CLI? Yes, but this is THE issue with wayland. Until critical business apps work, x11 version must be supported, otherwise plasma is only useful for gamers and those that do not have to use their pc for work. I am not against switching to wayland, I just want a reasonable roadmap, not something like - we are going to break your major apps next time you upgrade.

edit: I just mentioned VPNs because they are the first in line when it comes to work from home. Don't let me start on remote support or remote control apps.
by swores | 2025-11-26 18:21:23+00:00
You’ve given numbers for how fast New Horizons launched, and for how fast Voyager 1 got thanks to the 1-in-175-years boost, but is there an easy way to actually compare them?

IE either what speed Voyager 1 launched at excluding the gravity assists, or what speed New Horizons would have reached if it were launched 175 years after Voyager 1 (to take advantage of the same gravity assists)?
by vl | 2025-11-26 18:21:36+00:00
EC2 and S3 moat comes from extreme economies of scale. Only Google and Microsoft can compete. You would never be able to achieve S3 profitability because you are not going to get same hardware deals, same peering agreements, same data center optimization advantages. On top of that there is extremely optimized software stack (S3 runs at ~98% utilization, capacity deployed just couple weeks in advance, i.e. if they don’t install new storage, they will run out of capacity in a month).
by bloppe | 2025-11-26 18:21:50+00:00
The AWS moat is a web of bespoke product lock-in and exorbitant egress fees. Switching cloud providers can be a huge hassle if you didn't architect your whole system to be as vendor-agnostic as possible.

If OpenAI eliminated their free tier today, how many customers would actually stick around instead is going to Google's free AI? It's way easier to swap out a model. I use multiple models every day until the free frontier tokens run out, then I switch.

That said, idk why Claude seems to be the only one that does decent agents, but that's not exactly a moat; it's just product superiority. Google and OAI offer the same exact product (albeit at a slightly lower level of quality) and switching is effortless.
by chuckadams | 2025-11-26 18:22:12+00:00
Nothing says "prompt interactively" like Ctrl-U. I mean, it literally stands for "universal argument", which is basically "do this command, but different". Defaulting to "insert four times" because why not? Mysterious :^)

Like I said I used emacs for a quarter century, wrote quite a bit of elisp for doing my job, and I still miss some of those things, but I've made do with perl scripts. I still pop up emacs for quick edits now and again, but I long ago gave up trying to force it into the shape of a full-blown IDE.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-26 18:22:13+00:00
Now compare that to these founders.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

How many of them do you think started their companies out of “passion”?

Some of the ones I spotted checked had a couple of non technical founders looking for a “founding engineer” that they could underpay with the promise of “equity” that would probably be worthless.
by amulyabaral | 2025-11-26 18:22:24+00:00
I've been experimenting with minimalism by tracking every non-consumable purchase (clothing, electronics, etc.) for a few years. There's no clear patterns in the spending habits that have emerged yet, but the practice itself has been surprisingly effective at curbing unnecessary/impulse buys. I finally got around to visualizing the data this week and wanted to share with you guys.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-11-26 18:22:49+00:00
The thing that got me was always referring to Scaleway in the third person. e.g. this read like the response I get when I ask AI to review code:

> Scaleway’s solution to that problem was ingenious: embedding a Raspberry Pi module with each Mac mini.

(I realize this may be an artifact of a corporate style guide, but I'd much prefer "Our solution to that problem was embedding . . ." Both because the "was ingenious" doesn't add a ton and reads like puffery and because this is Scaleway's own blog and referring to yourself in the third person is grating.)
by api | 2025-11-26 18:23:29+00:00
This is why a lot of modern leftists are anti-tech. Tech destroys jobs. If we are going to maintain the fiction that full employment is necessary for a modern civilization, everyone has to have a job, and for that to be true we have to restrict our technological progress.

Which is really just making a ton of people waste their time doing bullshit work. I fail to see how this is progressive.
by nradov | 2025-11-26 18:23:58+00:00
The moat for any frontier LLM developer will be access to proprietary training data. OpenAI is spending some of their cash to license exclusive rights to third party data, and also hiring human experts in certain fields just to create more internal training data. Of course their competitors are also doing the same. We may end up in a situation where each LLM ends up superior in some domains and inferior in others depending on access to high quality training data.