MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrweasel | 2025-11-26 16:45:58+00:00
The stock market will lose faith in AI companies, which will crash the stock price of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia and CoreWeave. Investors will lose billions, many of those investors are pension funds. Any AI projects that aren't already profitable will shutdown.

And, because AI is currently what prevents the US economy from being in a recession (at least that what some people speculate), the US economy will stumble, which means that everyone else will to.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-11-26 16:45:59+00:00
> Economic waves never hit one sector and stop.

Unless they do, or are severely weakened. Consider the net worth of the 1% over the last few decades. Even corrected for inflation, its growth is staggering. The wealth gap is widening, and that wealth came from somewhere.

So yes, when there is an economic boom, investment happens. However, the growth of that top %1 tells me that they've been taking more and more off the top. Sure, some near the bottom may win with the decreased labor costs and whatnot, but my point is less and less do every cycle.

Full disclosure: I'm not an economist. Hell, I probably have a highschool-level of econ knowledge at best, so this should probably be taken as a "common-sense" take on it, which I already know often fails spectacularly when economics is at play. So I'm more than open to be corrected here.
by hermitcrab | 2025-11-26 16:46:10+00:00
>By then, the general public and the branch managers themselves finally joined Computer Weekly’s reporters (who had doggedly reported on Horizon’s problems since 2008) in the knowledge that there was something seriously wrong with Horizon’s software.

Computer Weekly first broke the story, for which they deserve much credit. But I believe Private Eye did much of the long term campaigning.
by andai | 2025-11-26 16:46:22+00:00
I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me.

I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice.

I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :)

For straightforward stuff, they can handle it.

For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up.

--

To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...)

I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151
by vee-kay | 2025-11-26 16:46:33+00:00
This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA

We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite all the vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
by munificent | 2025-11-26 16:47:08+00:00
So much of the world, especially the world we see today around corporate leadership and national politics makes much more sense once you realize this fundamental law:

People who desire infinite power only want it because it gives them the power to avoid consequences, not because they want both the power and the consequences.

The people who believe that with great power comes great consequences are exactly the people who don't want great power because they don't want the weight of those consequences. The only people who see that bargain and think "sign me up!" are the ones who intend to drop the consequences on the floor.
by fatbird | 2025-11-26 16:47:18+00:00
There's nothing wrong with technical debt per se. As with all debt, the problem is incurring it without a plan or means to pay it off. Debt based financing is the engine of modern capitalism.

Gradual growth to large scale implies an ongoing refactoring cost--that's the price of paying off the technical debt that got you started and built initial success in small scale rollouts. As long as you keep "servicing" your debt (which can include throwing away an earlier chunk and building a more scalable replacement with the lessons learned), you're doing fine.

The magic words here to management/product owners is "we built it that way the first time because it got us running quickly and taught us what we need to know to build the scalable version. If we'd tried to go for the scalable version first, we wouldn't have known foo, bar and baz, and we'd have failed and wouldn't have learned anything."
by omoikane | 2025-11-26 16:47:29+00:00
I wonder if we can go the reverse direction, where instead of launching more probes from Earth to serve as relays, the spacecraft would launch physical media toward Earth packed with whatever data it has collected. Given advancements in data storage density, we could achieve higher bandwidth than what's possible with radios.

The logistics would be difficult since it involves catch those flying media, especially if the spacecraft were ejecting them as a form of propulsion, they might not even be flying toward Earth. I was just thinking how early spy satellites would drop physical film, and maybe there are some old ideas like those that are still worth trying today.
by eitally | 2025-11-26 16:47:30+00:00
Fwiw, I have a masters in operations research as a focus area within an industrial engineering degree, and spent 15 years working in manufacturing systems with a focus on test automation & quality. Traditional SPC/SQC analysis is, and will remain, king -- at least for some time. That can potentially evolve on high-vol/low-mix scenarios that lend themselves more easily to training models on anomaly detection, but especially for complex product manufacturing in high-mix factories that's not the case. It's far better to let your test/quality engineers do their jobs and figure out statistical controls on their own.

Among other reasons, this is largely true because acceptable ranges for different anomaly & defect types can vary significantly for different revs of a single product, or even sub-revs (things that are tied to an ECO but don't result in incrementing the product rev), or -- more crucially -- the line the product is manufactured on. One thing that's notoriously tricky to troubleshoot without being physically onsite is whether a defect is because of a machine, because of a person, or because of faulty piece parts/material.

Understanding and knowing how to apply traditional statistical analysis to these problems -- and also designing useful data structures to store all the data you're collecting -- is far more valuable right now than trying to shoehorn in an AI model to do this work.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-26 16:47:40+00:00
Your rebuttal is literally "nuh uh." You asked for a source, you were given a source: documentation that shows RealPage discouraged landlords from negotiating, and landlords admitting to not negotiating. COULD they have negotiated? Sure, and a unicorn COULD be orbiting Saturn with 5,000 homes in tow, trying to figure out the optimal thrust vector to come to Earth. Anything COULD happen, but we know what DID happen: RealPage and services like it have enabled landlords to collude with dubious legality on rent prices, and rent prices went up as a result. The most predictable outcome.
by mh- | 2025-11-26 16:47:48+00:00
Right. That's not a novel idea, and this is a well-trod area of concern. That's why these FTC rules have been around for many years.

edit: to be clear, I am saying that in the absence of clear disclosures, that would run afoul of current FTC rules. And historically they have been quick to react to novel ways of misleading consumers.
by vee-kay | 2025-11-26 16:47:51+00:00
This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA

We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite all the vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
by vikingerik | 2025-11-26 16:47:57+00:00
That happened because Voyager 2 went over Neptune's north pole rather than an equatorial trajectory. Both to get a look at a giant planet's polar regions, and because that would get it closest to the moon Triton. So Voyager 2's trajectory got bent southward out of the ecliptic plane as a result of that.

While I'm here: why didn't Voyager 2 continue to slingshot to Pluto? The answer is that its trajectory would have had to bend by about 90° at Neptune, which would have required an apex closer to Neptune's center of mass than the planet's own radius - it would have crashed into the planet instead.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-26 16:48:17+00:00
OS and IDE wars are something people take pretty seriously in their teens and very early careers, and eventually become more agnostic about after they realize it's not going to be the end-all predictor of coworker code quality. It predicts something for sure, but not strictly skill-level.

Language-preference wars stick around until mid-career for some, and again it predicts something. But still, serious people are not likely to get bogged down in pointless arguments about nearly equivalent alternatives at least (yaml vs json; python vs ruby).

Shallow takes on AI (whether they are pro or anti) are definitely higher stakes than all this, bad decisions could be more lasting and more damaging. But the real difference to my mind is.. AI "influencers" (again, pro or anti) are a very real thing in a way that doesn't happen with OS / language discussions. People listen, they want confirmation of biases.

I mean there's always advocates and pundits doing motivated reasoning, but usually it's corporate or individuals with clear vested interests that are trying to short-circuit inquiry and critical thinking. It's new that so many would-be practitioners in the field are eager to sabotage and colonize themselves, and forcing a situation where honest evaluations and merit-based discussion of engineering realities are impossible
by caycep | 2025-11-26 16:49:13+00:00
I wonder about this...I had thought I would be on PCIe 5.0 by now but I'm still on my AM4 PCIe 4.0 board since AM5 and PCIe 5.0 seem...glitchy and heat prone. And apparently I'm still not saturating PCIe 4.0...
by lanstin | 2025-11-26 16:49:15+00:00
In 1997 I was working on an integration between AOL and Circuit City (ha I outlived them both) to enable free AOL accounts for people buying PCs or some such; about a week before launch I changed the data returned from encoding spaces as "+" to "%20" and broke their integration (perl script). Very upsetting for them, and I felt bad.

I also had some weird bug when we started registrations from German accounts and I didn't handle umlauts (or UTF-16 with nuls in the string) in passwords properly.
by etamponi | 2025-11-26 16:49:48+00:00
I might try to explain with some examples.

1) it would really be nice to renovate that old house in the city center of an old Italian town! Oh but hold and behold: you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. And it would cost twice as much as building a new one. And the new one would have better insulation and a modern layout, and be exactly like you want. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve an existing thing.

2) it would really be nice to fix that car from the '60ies. Oh but hold and behold: the design doesn't really allow you to have all the safety measures of modern cars. And the maximum speed is going go be 65mph on a good day. And it's going to cost you twice as much as a new car, OR you'd have to learn tons of mechanical stuff to be able to fix it yourself. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve existing things.

3) it's just more fun to build new things (at least for some people). It's open source. People do this for free, to learn and enjoy their time. They can do whatever they want, and they decided to go with the shiny new thing. Is it better than fixing and improving an existing technology? I don't know. But apparently it's more fun! :)
by wiether | 2025-11-26 16:49:54+00:00
> IMHO near term a lot of that stuff might start showing up in advertising and news content, the whole media industry is going to be a massive consumer of this stuff.

One of the candidate for mayor of New York ran a whole AI video ad campaign.

Half of the real estate listings have AI remodeled pictures.

Probably a quarter of the printed ads I see each day are AI generated.

It will only increase, but it's already here.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-11-26 16:50:14+00:00
> I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places

I'm not surprised at all anymore.

I constantly feel like the majority of voices on this site are in favor of maximizing their own lives no matter the cost to everyone else. After all, that's the ethos that is dominating the tech industry these days

I know I'm bitter. All I ever wanted was to hang out with cool people working on cool stuff. Where's that website these days? It sure isn't this one
by voidfunc | 2025-11-26 16:50:20+00:00
OSS is an intersection of commercial and hobbyist programmers and agendas. If youre a hobbyist you may prefer to spend time working on green field rather than the existing. This eventually culminates in some new stuff replacing the old.

Not saying that is what happened here, but sometimes the answer is because the old one is just not fun to work on anymore.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-26 16:51:00+00:00
One didn't even wait, they immediately tried to sub-contract the work out to a third party and make a transition from a consultant to a consultancy company. I had to be clear that they are hired as named person and I very much do care about who does the work.While not FANG comp it was ~2x the market rates, statistically I think they'd have a hard time matching that somewhere else. I think in part because I was offering these rates they got rather excited about the perceived opportunity in being a consultancy company, i.e. the appetite grows with the eating. I'm not sure if it's something that could be solved with more money, I guess in theory with FANG money but it's not like those companies are without their dysfunctions. With LLMs I can solve the same problem with far less money.
by timonoko | 2025-11-26 16:51:22+00:00
Å is in Finnish Keyboards, but totally useless. F12 is easily accessible in Hacker's Keyboard. ∆ is in Gboard.

There no gui, you use openscad to generate STL and view that in Android STL-viewer. You can automatize it so that it is almost like the real thing.

file_to_watch=$1 last_modified=$(stat -c %Y "$file_to_watch") while true; do current_modified=$(stat -c %Y "$file_to_watch") if [ "$last_modified" != "$current_modified" ]; then openscad $1 -o $1.stl last_modified="$current_modified" fi sleep 1 # Check every second done
by gary_0 | 2025-11-26 16:52:04+00:00
> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it

1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications.

2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy.

The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix those two issues is Wayland.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-26 16:52:32+00:00
> Image, video, and other content generation is going to become more important and companies will be spending on that. We've seen some impressive improvements there.

They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it.

Like at the moment its great because its essentially free, but paying >200billion?

Are we assuming that we can automate the equivalent of instagram, netflix/disney and whatsapp and make advertising revenue?

I think the unmentioned pivot is into robotics, which seems to have actual tangible value (ie automation of things that are hard to do now)

but still 200billion in r&d
by caycep | 2025-11-26 16:52:44+00:00
Well...Cyberpunk for example. It will run on a 3070 but look like shit...on my 4k monitor, if I want the gorgeous photorealism of the game, the $2000 (formerly $700 pre-crypto/AI) GPU still gets about ~40 FPS with some stuttering if you don't turn on the fake AI generated frames...
by xp84 | 2025-11-26 16:52:51+00:00
This is very true. A lot of corpsites of SaaS and similar companies run wordpress - i think because it's easy to find a "web developer" who can build very impressive custom themes that you wouldn't even know are blogs. My last company was paying about $500 a month to various "Professional Wordpress Hosting" companies to host their .com -- and they all had spotty downtime records because they were serving everything dynamically. My strategy to fix these has always been to install a "static site generation" plugin, stick the wordpress instance itself on a cheap host behind an IP restriction, and have the site generator plugin publish the site (on every change, which is never even that often) to some static hosting (S3, etc). Saves 99% of the cost and makes the site 50x faster and able to handle infinite traffic. But most companies don't seem to do this, and individual blogs are even less likely to.
by GrumpyGoblin | 2025-11-26 16:53:03+00:00
You require "statistical calculations" to support the notion that a sample size of 4000 people in two countries, two of the most modernized and affluent nations on the planet at that, is too small for a study to conclude how the human brain works across billions of people alive today across the world, Much less in human history? How about common sense?

Ok, let's do some math.

Approximately 108 to 117 billion humans are estimated to have lived in human history. Let's take 110 billion (the low end) for our purposes.

4,000 / 110,000,000,000 = 0.000003636%

Let's just go with people living today, which is approximately 8 billion (the low end).

4000 / 8 billion = 0.00005%

Not sure if that covers the "statistical" part of your requirement, but it covers the "calculations" part.

I myself would be hesitant to make claims about knowing how neurons and brains and ages work based on a sample size of pessimistically 0.000003636% or even optimistically 0.00005% of the human population and their brains.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-11-26 16:53:10+00:00
X11 is not really fixable, architecturally. This wasn't some authority saying "X11 is over, stop working on it." It was the X11 developers and DE and WM developers who work directly with the protocol deciding that it's untenable to fix, and something new is actually the right call. That's the important thing that many people are missing: the X11 developers ARE the Wayland developers, and they actually have good reasons.

Nobody is stopping you from pulling together a group and working on all this free software, forging forth on Xorg, and forking or maintaining the DEs to work with X11 as long as you want to maintain it. I think the group of people who wants to do that will be quite small, because I've really only seen the sentiment from people who have never actually hacked on an X11 codebase and worked with the protocols themselves. You can want X11 to stay alive, but you can't really demand the people who don't want to work on it anymore to keep working on it.
by paulddraper | 2025-11-26 16:53:10+00:00
This is why consensus will never produce innovation.

OpenAI has many plausible monetization avenues. (Whether it will execute on them -- a fair question. But acting like they just don't exist is low IQ.)

Take ONE example: online shopping.

Online shopping is $6-7 trillion per year, growing 7% annually.

Suppose ChatGPT captures 10% of that with a 5% fee. (Marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart charge 15%. Ebay is 5%.) That's $200B over five years.
by squigz | 2025-11-26 16:53:13+00:00
> If they can figure out how to get the right kickbacks/referrals without compromising user trust and really nail the search and aggregation of data this could be a real money-maker.

As another commenter points out, "not compromising user trust" seems at odds with "money-maker" in the long-term. Surely Google and other large tech companies have demonstrated that to you at this point? I don't understand why so many people think OpenAI or any of them will be any different?
by flipgimble | 2025-11-26 16:53:23+00:00
The content on YouTube should qualify it to be preserved as a treasure of humanity. Think of all the college lectures, conference proceedings, sporting events, citizen journalism, podcasts that are the backbone of new communities and cultural revolutions. It is the modern version of public access TV and expresses a close to compelte spectrum of human interests.

At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness.

and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.
by cyrc | 2025-11-26 16:53:26+00:00
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/optimizations-fo...

From the website; Optimizations for windowed games improves gaming on your PC by using a new presentation model for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 games that appear in a window or in a borderless window.

When these optimizations are used, games that originally use the legacy blt-model presentation can use the newer flip-model presentation instead (if the game is compatible). This results in lower frame latency and lets you use other newer gaming features; for example, Auto HDR, and variable refresh rate (for displays that support it).

It is checked by default. Hope it helps.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-26 16:53:29+00:00
> All that said, the actual workday is absolutely filled with busy work that no one really wants to do, and the refusal of a loud minority to engage with that fact is what's leading to this.

The attitude and push back from this loud minority has always been weird to me. Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages.

The opportunity to outsource even more of the 'busywork' is great. Isn't this was technology is supposed to do? Automate away the boring stuff?

The only reasoning I can think of is that the most vocal opponents work in careers where that same busywork is actually most of their job, and so they are naturally worried about their future.