MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cm2187 | 2025-11-27 10:22:26+00:00
HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more durable than a new retail SSD, plus power loss protection and better performance.

The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power consumption will cost you more than that.
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-27 10:22:28+00:00
As a former JavaScript developer and current JavaScript hobbyist I see why this article’s language is deeply offensive. Most employed JavaScript developers absolutely suck at what they do and are highly sensitive about it. Everything other than praise is offensive. The surest indication of maturity is abandoning politeness in favor of evidence, empathy, or stronger arguments.

On the other hand Zig is often regarded as the fastest executing modern programming language. They have earned the ability to complain about performance like no one else. The article cites precise issues they have with GitHub.

Furthermore JavaScript, when not written by monkeys, is extremely fast which further qualifies their complaint. For example I have a large SPA that loads in the browser from across a network in around 0.065 seconds and achieves full rendering and state restoration in about 0.135 seconds. If I drop the largest one feature from that SPA I can get full rendering and state restoration in about 0.08 seconds. Your typical JavaScript developer, on the other hand, struggles to copy/paste code into a JSX template someone else defined with no idea how to measure performance. To me that’s what’s offensive.
by xxdd2ea | 2025-11-27 10:22:33+00:00
Yes it's good idea and nicely executed.

For the same reason I created a couple of projects with the same goal of lowering the barrier to entry to the linux kernel:

- an app to follow the UDP packet flow in the linux kernel source code: https://dmkskd.github.io/linux-kernel-network-stack-visualiz...

- a (hopefully) simple way to play with the linux kernel source code on a mac: https://github.com/dmkskd/linux-kernel-debugging-on-mac

Kudos to https://github.com/FlorentRevest for all his work in the space
by nlitened | 2025-11-27 10:22:54+00:00
> The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other

I’d think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and doing what’s right or on reaching consensus. There is some mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it’s usually right to have a reasonable consensus on what’s the right choice), but beyond some basic level there’s always tradeoff.

And for programming language designers, I really appreciate when they make the right long-term choices even if I don’t understand initially why they were made.
by creer | 2025-11-27 10:23:38+00:00
The very specific example you chose: payroll, shows how it can be difficult to incrementally step from small to huge. As you grow from town to national, you will run into all the disadvantages without really hitting the advantages. I feel that incremental does help you move from one level to one just a few above. But only if there are enough customers at these starting levels exactly.

When developing for towns, you will have all small random subsets of the variations imposed by year after year of legal changes BUT small sales. You will have to implement niche variations in arbitrary aspects for all the towns you have to support AND you will not have the customer size on which to amortize this work. Each new customer will bring a new arbitrary set of legal aspects to be met. Each new customer may be arbitrarily difficult to support.

By the time you reach national, you will have already covered most of the historical legal quirks - but that will have been done in one kludgy manner after another - and then you will hit one more set of legal quirks at the level of national organizations (some of them will have their very own laws). You will now have a very large budget to finalize things but you will be burdened by an illogical software base.

So I agree that you will need experience and subject matter experts that have worked at the various levels. BUT, now that you have this experience you now know the degree of flexibility that is required (you know where and what needs to be variable and quirk-friendly and how far the quirks can go = "any size") as well as size-related issues (mailing, transaction, user support volume) and you can now plan for all this AS YOU restart a new development from scratch. Because at this new "master" level you need both systematic flexibility AND relience at size.

Payroll is exactly the kind of topic where "adding features" will be "fun" - I mean bewildering - while you learn, but probably economically difficult to manage, until it kills you "as you climb up"?

You will be killed by a large software project that can afford to hire out a bunch of your subject matter specialists (or hires new ones) and uses them in a "from scratch" project. If you are lucky, this large project will be from the same company but only if you are lucky.

Now. AFTER you have done the one top level project - for one country -, you will probably be in a good situation to sell service to all kinds of organizations. Because you now have a system in which you can implement ridiculous quirks without breaking everything. And if you have done the job just right, you can onboard smaller customers (towns) economically enough that they can afford your solution.

That's different from where you deploy your solution first. Sure, deploy a national-design solution first at a subset of the target employees - although that does impose more requirements still: now you need to coexist with the legacy solutions. Which would be another hard to meet handicap when developing for towns first.
by kergonath | 2025-11-27 10:23:58+00:00
> the occupants were engaged in some nefarious activities; therefore the curtains are left open to show that the occupants have nothing to hide and are engaged only in wholesome activities.

That sounds utterly dystopian. Whose business is it if we want to shag in the morning?

It’s also completely self-defeating. Nobody can prove that they never did anything that someone else would disapprove. There are solid reasons behind the "innocent until proven guilty" principle.
by krisoft | 2025-11-27 10:24:09+00:00
> But for all the complex parts, the eval function is basically one bit (you crashed/not crashed)

It is not like crashed/not crashed is the only possible eval function.

It can be easily much more nuanced than that. The driving system should be able to predict how everyone will move next is a good sub-goal. Checking if you were in the positon of an other driver, seeing what they see would our code be driving the same way as them is also a good sub goal. (Obviously total alignment here is neither possible nor is it desireable.)

Other evaluation is to check if you forced anyone to change speed/swerve to avoid you. And then you can have synthetic scenairos for every time you approached a lane which had priority over you. You can add conflicting vehicles approaching (with different timings and speeds) and see if own vehicle notices and handles them correctly. (And “handles them correctly” is not a binary crashed/not crashed either, you can check if the vehicle inconvenienced the simulated vehicle.)
by Helmut10001 | 2025-11-27 10:24:48+00:00
I wouldn't say that being new is an absolute requirement. I recently upgraded my ZFS pool from SATA to SAS HDDs. Since SAS HDDs have much better firmware for early error detection and monitoring, I decided to buy 50% refurbished. Even if I lost half of them, I would still be safe. I also have offsite backups. This setup worked really well for me, and I feel completely confident that my data is safe while not wasting unnecessary resources. Whether to use new or used equipment therefore depends on the setup.
by voidUpdate | 2025-11-27 10:24:54+00:00
We know where it is right now, because we know which way it's going, how fast and that it isn't currently thrusting anywhere. its just going in a (straight?) line, so it's pretty easy to keep track of.

You can measure the speed of something towards/away from you by measuring the doppler shift of the signal (how much the frequency is increased or decreased compared to the expected frequency), and since the radio receivers will have to be very precisely pointed to get a good signal, you can also probably fine tune any estimates of position by wiggling the receivers around a little bit until you get the best signal. The signals are definitely getting degraded by noise etc, since it's so far away. That's why the communication speed is so slow, so they can make sure they got one bit before getting the next one. Some more mathsy details here https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...

But by having a very big antenna, and knowing exactly what you're looking for and where, it can help to filter out all the noise and get out the proper data
by gadders | 2025-11-27 10:25:00+00:00
What if the person complaining had spent all their life at a base level of 1000? Diagnosing off population base levels is a very blunt tool.

I don't disagree that there are some bad actors out there - the bar to getting it under 40 or 50 should be very high. But honestly, I think everyone's levels should be checked before being put on an SSRI for depression.

HRT is also a life-long treatment, no?
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-27 10:25:11+00:00
> Basically grades exist to decide who gets a laid back high paying job, and who has to work 2 low paying labor intensive job just to live paycheck to paycheck.

Rather:

Grades exist to decide who gets a stressful, but rather high-paying job, and who has to work 2 low paying labor intensive job just to live paycheck to paycheck.

Laid-back high-paying job (unluckily) barely exist.
by josephg | 2025-11-27 10:26:09+00:00
> Microsoft can afford to make these tools better; they just dont care.

They certainly have enough money, but can they actually improve it? Who could step in? How? Do you think more hiring would help? Or would it make it worse?

Leadership could try and step in by force. But they'd have to undermine whoever is running github actions to do so. It would be a huge, risky political move. And for what? Are they actually losing customers over gh actions? I doubt it. I'm just not sure anyone cares to spend that much political capital to "fix" something that is arguably not that broken.

Big companies also simply can't fix stuff that's broken internally. Its not a money thing. Its a culture & politics thing. Its a leadership thing.

For example, does anyone remember Google Code? It was a github-like code hosting service that predated github by many years. Compared to github, it was terrible. When github came out, google could have rewritten Code from the ground up to copy github's better design and better choices. (Kind of like android did with ios). But they didn't. Github kicked their butt for many years. But nothing happened. They couldn't fix it. Now google code is basically dead.

Or why didn't Adobe build a viable figma competitor? Why didn't microsoft make a successful iphone or ipad competitor? Why didn't intel win the contract to make the iphone CPU? These aren't money problems. Its something else.

I've only heard stories of a couple leaders who had the force of personality to fix problems like this. Like Steve Jobs. And Elon Musk pulls some wild stunts too. Frankly, I don't think I'd like to work under either of them.
by Vinnl | 2025-11-27 10:26:17+00:00
I think one problem we have (always had, but worse now that there are so many more opinions to be exposed to) is that we expect "society's" opinions to be consistent, despite being made up of millions of different people.

Of course there are going to be people telling others to be vulnerable and open, and of course there are also going to be people telling others not to complain because that's dumping their problems on other people.
by andrewingram | 2025-11-27 10:26:36+00:00
I'm always reminded of snap, crackle and pop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...) for this topic. Essentially it's not enough to just have continuous acceleration, you have to ease into it (low snap), you can probably go into further derivatives for ultra smoothness but maybe not worth it?
by marvinborner | 2025-11-27 10:26:39+00:00
This is quite different. Salvadori's work aims for optimal reduction of the full lambda calculus (which requires something called "bookkeeping"/"oracle"), while HOC works on optimal/parallel reduction of a certain subset of the lambda calculus.

Both approaches have been researched for a long time now, where HOC's subset is typically referred to as "abstract algorithm". For example, a version of the lambdas calculus where any variable can be used at most once (the "affine lambda calculus"), can be reduced optimally with interaction nets without requiring any bookkeeping.

The novel thing about Salvadori's work is that it develops a new (and better explained) bookkeeping mechanism.
by wooger | 2025-11-27 10:26:41+00:00
Oh, and I'll see your youtube and Raise you the Discovery Plus app (Maybe UK only?).

The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.

Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.
by menaerus | 2025-11-27 10:26:41+00:00
Yes, please then find those for now imaginative issues and drill through them? Sorry, but I haven't seen anyone in that MR calling out for technical deficiencies so this is just crying out loud in a public for no concrete reasons.

It's the same as if your colleague sitting next to you would not allow the MR to be merged for various political and not technical reasons - this is exactly what is happening here.
by oliwarner | 2025-11-27 10:26:46+00:00
Again, I'm not fighting the use of tools, rather their use as a substitute for knowledge.

Practically every educational institution is with me here, so uphill it may be, but it's an important battle for the future of mankind, and recognised as such. We've long joked about a quick slide into Idiocracy (2006), but substituting learning for what a LLM can answer for you is how you rapidly deskill and get there.

In this case, "ragequittah" up top doesn't know how their router/firewall is actually configured. That might work out okay for them but they (and people like them) don't even know what they don't know.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-11-27 10:26:48+00:00
Working within the limitations of a medium is a skill as old as time. Often work arounds for the limitations become design features that people come to expect. 3d prints typically use more chamfers than fillets for exactly this reason.

Most of the hobby grade printers are FDM, it's unlikely we'll evolve beyond the limitations of layer lines being a few tenths of a mm. UV resin printers however aren't ridiculously expensive and they have small enough layers that it's completely doable.
by fzeroracer | 2025-11-27 10:27:00+00:00
$100,000 isn't even 'rich' nowdays, that's below middle class especially if we're talking about an actual family unit. I can guarantee that if this research further stratified things into $100-200k, and $200k+ you would see the results continue to improve as people cross the threshold into middle class.

This survey can be seen as comparing people in poverty level income vs everyone else.
by ptx | 2025-11-27 10:27:05+00:00
So apparently they use Bluetooth to establish the connection and WiFi for the data transfer. This sounds a lot like the "Alternative MAC/PHY" feature which was added in Bluetooth 3.0 and then removed in Bluetooth 5.3 [1] due to low uptake.

Why didn't the standard Bluetooth way of doing this gain any traction? What was wrong with it?

[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Bluetoo...
by fainpul | 2025-11-27 10:27:07+00:00
> When using Fusion360 or SketchUp, you're used to drawing a "sketch" with a mouse or stylus and then extruding it to obtain a 3D volume. The approach to creating a volume with parametric modeling is completely different. Instead of "drawing in 3D", you code in 3D.

Minor correction: Fusion, FreeCAD and similar are parametric. It means you can alter the parameters of the created object after the fact and it rebuilds accordingly, as opposed to "destructive editing" like you have in something like Rhino 3D.
by stby | 2025-11-27 10:27:20+00:00
I actually quite like the UI of MS Office, but nevertheless I don't understand why so many competitors try to make clones. Say what you want, but MS has a huge head start here and everyone else is just making worse looking copies of the way MS Office looked years ago.

And of course, is this really the final form of office applications? Is it maybe time to just go back to the drawing board, think about workflows, the current state of technology, future trends, and build a UI that works maybe even better, looks cleaner, fits on more screens?
by biorach | 2025-11-27 10:27:39+00:00
Tip:

A list compiler should be relatively straightforward, as these things go. If you get the AI to write it you should actually read it, all of it, and understand it, to the point where you can add features and fix bugs yourself. There are many many resources on the subject. Only after this should you consider contributing to open source projects. And even then you need to be able to read and understand your contributions
by pjc50 | 2025-11-27 10:27:40+00:00
It's all second and third order effects. You'd then be less impressed if you found the zoom out toothpick video was itself just made with AI. And even less impressed if you zoom out further, and discover your entire feed is just different AI toothpick sculpture videos, because that's what went viral yesterday so now everybody has prompted one overnight.

There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a fatigue all of its own.
by dmichulke | 2025-11-27 10:29:24+00:00
When you say "capitalism" you mean poverty?

I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?

What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken. But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes, and you have those problems in socialism, too.
by creato | 2025-11-27 10:29:28+00:00
> One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.

Did you read the issue at hand?

This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these people for putting them in a position they are grossly unprepared for.
by swah | 2025-11-27 10:29:34+00:00
Similar 27 4k display on the office and another at home. Plug the Macbook and usually keep it closed. Would swap for an 5K ... if I won the lottery. Otherwise its perfectly fine.

I would love to test a 16" MBP to see if this kills the need for an external display.

Couldn't adapt to wide or bigger tvs, on my short lived tests..
by illwrks | 2025-11-27 10:29:38+00:00
In the “teenagers learn to drive in 10 hours” part… that’s active learning, but they have spent countless hours in their life in a car, on a bus or other forms of transport, even watching the shows and movies featuring driving, playing with toys and computer games etc. There is years of passive information absorbed already before that 10 hours of active learning begins.
by spurgu | 2025-11-27 10:30:05+00:00
What you're describing is how the process in the EU works. So in essence it is "the EU".

It doesn't seem to have any limits or restrictions on what it can do as an institution. It forced idiotic bottlecaps on all of us for shit's sake... and it has little consideration for privacy laws or constitutions of individuals, otherwise this proposal would've been thrown out automatically each time, if there was anything resembling constitutional values governing the EU's mandates.

It's like being governed by a neurotic unhinged monarch.
by rekoil | 2025-11-27 10:30:42+00:00
Fascinating. Could this method be used to boot iPhone OS 1.0 (or at least 1.1.1) on an iPhone 2G with 16GB NAND maybe?

The oldest iPhone OS that natively boots on my particular one is 1.1.4, 1.1.1 (which is the highest version number where you can trivially escape the OOBE via the emergency dialer) fails to initialise the FTL (flash translation layer), probably because the chip is sufficiently different from that used in the older phones.

It would bring me great joy to be able to relive emergency dialer hacktivation again, but I have lost that particular iPhone 2G, and only have this 16GB one left.
by Aerroon | 2025-11-27 10:31:37+00:00
Most democratic countries use the parliamentary system, where the party that wins elections creates the government through the prime minister. They are also the largest party in parliament.

Sure, the US does it differently, yet the parliament seems to often just not do anything and let courts legislate instead. Then you end up in this weird situation where the supreme court positions end up being extremely partisan to set the "correct" precedent.

Either way there's a lot of power in the executive in either system.
by dijit | 2025-11-27 10:32:02+00:00
I've got skin in this game: Grew up in UK's social services with undiagnosed mental health quirks; too "smart" for ADHD, too "social" for autism, per my assessors. Ended up in classes thick with neurodivergent kids, from non-verbal to quirky misfits. Plus, I've moderated an IRC community for 20 years, where text chats strip away nuance like a bad compression algorithm, leaving everything ripe for misinterpretation.

I'm sharing these facts not to "credential-dump", but to underscore: This comment comes from compassion, not condescension.

Vague CoCs bug me because they're well-intentioned landmines. Take "don't be an asshole"; it could mean "act in good faith" (why not just say that?), or morph into "don't seem condescending" based on who's reading.

Pair that with commitments to safe spaces for neurodivergence, like autism (where social cues in text can be a foggy maze), and you've got a recipe for unintended clashes.

An earnest comment misfires, gets flagged as jerkish, and boom: escalation via subjective enforcement.

I've flagged this before: good faith-vague inclusivity can ironically exclude through feelings-based policing, which is how communities often roll anyway. So, why not tighten rules for clarity? Swap "don't be an asshole" for "assume good intent and clarify misunderstandings." It'd make safe spaces safer for all, autists included.

I don't doubt I'll get a tirade of "how can you call Autistic people assholes" just like always, totally missing the point on purpose.