MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-11-14 18:14:07+00:00
I got my EPA 608 license from like two days of cramming and an online proctored test. Skillcat, was like $0 or $50 if you want the card. Can order unlimited refrigerants straight to my doorstep.

No place around me to install mini-splits for cheap so I just got the EPA 'licensing' and did it myself. As long as you don't offer the service commercially, in most states, I think that's all they need.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-14 18:14:07+00:00
There's been over a thousand memory safety CVEs in the kernel this year alone [0], the most recent published 2 days ago. Most of these aren't exploitable and are caught before stable, so I went to LWN instead and "scrolled down" until I saw an article that mentioned a memory safety vuln in stable kernels. "Scrolled down" is in quotes because there was no scrolling involved. Today's Friday security updates post links USN-7861-3 [1], which includes fixes for memory safety issues like CVE-2025-37838 [2].

[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/p...

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1046495/

[2] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-37838
by jerf | 2025-11-14 18:14:21+00:00
I think a lot of the pushiness is a frantic effort to keep the bubble inflated and keep the market out of the trough of disillusionment. It won't work. The trough of disillusionment is inevitable. There is no jumping straight from peak of inflated expectations straight to the slope of enlightenment, because the market fundamentally needs the cleansing action of the trough of disillusionment to shake out the theoreticals and the maybes and get to what actually works.

Hopefully after the pop rather than shoving it in our face they can return to advertising at us to use the things, and the things needing to prove themselves to get to real sales, rather than corporations getting 10% stock pumps in a day based on statistics about how "used" their AI stuff is while they don't tell the market how few people actually chose to use their AI stuff rather than just becoming a metric when it was pushed on them.
by gtowey | 2025-11-14 18:14:24+00:00
I agree. The comments in this thread don't seem to understand how skill trade work operates at all.

One truism is that any halfway decent tradesman always has about 10x the amount of work waiting for them as they can accomplish. People who can do the job well are always in demand.

Uber for plumbers would be a disaster because the only plumbers who have the free time for waiting around for on-call work are the ones who are terrible at their job.
by keeda | 2025-11-14 18:14:42+00:00
I dunno, ending with a short, punchy insight is a common way to make an impactful conclusion. It's the equivalent of a "hook" for concluding an article instead of opening. I do it often and see others (e.g. OpEds) use that tactic all the time.

I think we're getting into reverse slop discrimination territory now. LLMs have been trained on so much of what we consider "good writing", that actual good writing is now attributed by default to LLMs.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-11-14 18:14:42+00:00
I have been a happy user of AwesomeWM for years. I don't actually use the tiling layout all that much (I definitely do use it occasionally and find it useful, but usually I'm in floating or "monocle" mode). But in additional to tiling support, it is minimalist, keyboard-driven and infinitely configurable through Lua scripts which I really like. I think a lot of other tiling WMs are probably popular for similar reasons.
by danaris | 2025-11-14 18:15:14+00:00
...Which actually works out to trading one kind of stress for another. It's a false choice.

This is a systemic problem, and we cannot fix it with individualized solutions. For the vast majority of people, the only way to actually get ahead is to fix the system.

Tax the rich. Shatter the current massive income and wealth inequalities. Institute proper social safety nets. Provide for everyone, not just those deemed "deserving."
by mac-attack | 2025-11-14 18:15:15+00:00
> re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?

The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]

They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.

1. https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/01/time-to-uninstall-goog...
by midtake | 2025-11-14 18:15:35+00:00
I'm tired of software getting out of its lane. For an OS, I just want it to run shit. For a browser, load web shit. Why does it need to do AI?

Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.

I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.
by binoct | 2025-11-14 18:15:37+00:00
Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology.

There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.
by sroussey | 2025-11-14 18:15:39+00:00
I was CEO of a small startup called Network54 with about 4 million monthly users. It was a forum hosting service.

The early 2000s were the heyday of lawsuits. People would say something about someone and if that someone was rich they would sue. It happened often.

The attorneys would sue us, the domain registrar, the ISP, everyone.

Often the things said were true. But they would sue to find out who the people were.

People selling Ponzi schemes, CEOs of public companies trying to find what union employees to fire, it was all over the place.

We would fire to quash every time. File to move venues to CA which has anti-slap laws. Depositions in DC. It was very distracting and expensive.

Never lost. Made some people really mad that they didn’t get their way.

Now for criminal things, the opposite, sorry. Two person operation and the FBI walks in your office with a warrant, then yes sir let me see the warrant first. If no warrant, then sorry sir come back with a warrant but we will take this as a notice to soft delete not hard delete content.
by pramodbiligiri | 2025-11-14 18:15:47+00:00
Great article.

One thing I was wondering after looking at the list of items in the “Cursor agent produced a coding plan” image: do folks actually make such lists when developing a feature without AI assistants?

That list has items like “Create API endpoints for …”, “Write tests …”. If you’re working on a feature that’s within a single codebase and not involving dependencies on other systems or teams, isn’t that a lot of ceremony for what you’ll eventually end up doing anyway (and only likely to miss due to oversight)?

I see a downside to such lists, because when I see a dozen items lined up like that… who knows whether they’re all the right ones for the feature at hand? Or whether the feature needs some other change entirely, or whether you’ve figured out the right order to do them in?

Where I’ve seen such fine-grained lists have value is for task timeline estimation, but rarely for the actual implementation.
by sadeshmukh | 2025-11-14 18:15:58+00:00
That article has no relation to Hack Club whatsoever.

But that's beside the point - they provide rooms, plenty of food and snacks, workshops, and activities to do during breaks. Organizers are on-site at all times, and there is a live hotline for parents or kids to call at any time. "sit and code for 3 days straight" is a gross mischaracterization.

Here's an example of an event hosted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXWMr0gdLJA
by AlienRobot | 2025-11-14 18:15:59+00:00
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.

I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.

The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.

I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?

Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?

Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.

If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-14 18:16:10+00:00
Designing the board is a different business from designing the chip. You're negotiating with the DRAM fabs instead of the logic fabs, selling to a thousand retailers instead of a dozen integrators, etc. And once you've done all that, you do it more than once. ASRock isn't just making Nvidia GPUs, they're making AMD and Intel GPUs, motherboards, wireless routers, etc.

It's more efficient to have companies that specialize in making all kinds of boards than to make each of the companies making chips have to do that too. And it's a competitive market so the margins are low and the chip makers have little incentive to enter it when they can just have someone else do it for little money.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-11-14 18:16:27+00:00
> A lot of poor folks are having to stand in line for hours and hours to get food at a food bank due to [government] ineptitude

This is an element of the argument for dismantling the nanny bureaucracy and instead going to UBI / cash payments.

1. It doesn't waste time, both of the gov't employee, but also of the recipient.

2. The author could buy better food, or car parts, or a bus pass, or ... with what otherwise might have been a more or less forced purchase in a single category. The flexibility returns agency and self-help behavior into the hands of the recipient.

All this needs to be tempered against the progress[1] we are making against poverty. I know it's a lot to ask the poor to be patient, but I do think there's an element of knowing that a lot of good people are trying really hard to alleviate the situation can help with the mostly mental elements of the article

> No matter how fast you run or how high you jump you can never see the finish line. No matter how tired you are the ground keeps moving.

eg: this statement is not actually a fact, it's a mindset

Overall, this is a big big testament to the overall worldview that I think is missing, just how impactful choices actually are. Some of these kinds of stories start generations ago, some of them start with the individual themselves having spent excess in the past that could have taken them through the low times (kind of "a waste not, want not" scenario). Some folks had opportunity and squandered it. Some flipped tails (failing scenario) 20 times in a row... People don't really want to help the former, but definitely the latter.

[1] - https://x.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072/photo/1
by amluto | 2025-11-14 18:16:28+00:00
The math here is weird.

A Samsung 990 Pro reads at something like 50 Gbps and PCIe 4.0 x4 is quite a bit faster than that. You can get this speed with a queue depth that isn’t crazy, and you can have multiple NVMe operations in flight reading the same large Parquet file. Latency is in the tens of microseconds.

The consensus seems to be that S3 can read one object at somewhat under 1Gbps. You can probable scale that to the full speed of your NIC by reading multiple objects at once, but you may not be able to scale by reading one object in multiple overlapping ranges. Latency is in the milliseconds.

So, sure, an EC2 with a fast instance and massive multiple object parallelism can have 10x higher bandwidth than an NVMe device, but the amount of parallelism and latency tolerance needed is a couple orders of magnitude higher than NVMe. Meanwhile that NVMe device does not charge for read operations and costs a couple hundred dollars, once.

If you are so inclined, you can build an NVMEoF setup (at much much higher cost) that separates compute and storage and has excellent performance, but this is a nontrivial undertaking.
by dbspin | 2025-11-14 18:16:31+00:00
I'm not sure what this contributes? Not being rich and experiencing absolute poverty are radically different things. Of course, in America as everywhere else, there are millions who work sixty hour weeks and remain in poverty, often extreme poverty. Especially those undocumented, incarcerated or working in circumstances where minimum wages do not apply.

I wonder if you've examined your own evident anger and defensiveness and why you've responded in that way?
by efields | 2025-11-14 18:16:32+00:00
That depends. We got one paid for by the seller of our house and in the first year it paid for an HVAC repair and plumber. I renewed it once for $600/year and wound up getting our refrigerator replaced in-kind, probably a $1500-2000 machine.

I decided my luck had run out and so I _did not_ renew it again, and we haven't had any other issues that _would have been covered_ since then, so I think I played my cards right.

I don't think they are a scam, but they are an insurance product, and insurance products have a lot of detail that need to be understood before you can decide whether it meets your needs or not. It's not a panacea to home-ownership woes.
Ask HN: How do you handle logging and evaluation when training ML models?
by calepayson | 2025-11-14 18:16:45+00:00
Hi all, I'm currently in a few ML classes and, while they do a great job covering theory, they don't cover application. At least not past some basic implementations in a Jupyter Notebook.

One friction point I keep running into is how to handle logging and evaluation of the models. Right now I'm using Jupyter Notebook, I'll train the model, then produce a few graphs for different metrics with the test set.

This whole workflow seems to be the standard among the folks in my program but I can't shake the feeling that it seems vibes-based and sub optimal.

I've got a few projects coming up and I want to use them as a chance to improve my approach to training models. What method works for you? Are there any articles or libraries that you would recommend? What do you wish Jr. Engineers new about this?

Thanks!
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-11-14 18:16:47+00:00
> There is this mindset from folks that poor people must not be smart.

Ever since I was a child, that idea has been shoved down my throat. "The American Dream", "they're lazy", "they should work harder".

Spending some serious time in developing countries fixed that mentality up real quick. Being able to escape the circumstances you're born into is a rare privilege in any culture. And that aspect of life in USA seemed to end in the late 90s/early 2000s.
by mjr00 | 2025-11-14 18:16:48+00:00
Regardless of your feelings on Genshin/gacha (which I agree is predatory), the point is that the revenue of a single game developed by a few hundred people is currently making more money than an entire industry which is "worth" trillions of dollars, according to the stock market, and is, according to Sam Altman, so fundamentally important to the US economy that the US government is an insurer of last resort who will bail out AI companies if their stock price falls too much.
by sylware | 2025-11-14 18:16:50+00:00
"Verified" does not mean they will technically (and legally) support the game until its "EOS", unfortunately.

One unfortunate patch (past the "refund" time limit), valve proton side or game side, and compat is gone. And those patches do happen.

BTW, that's why I play only F2P games (without paying for any micro-transaction) via proton. Yep, PROTON = 0 BUCKS.

Valve won't provide that support: there is no way valve is going to hire tens to hundreds of advanced system devs in order to QA 100% of the "verified games" and fix their proton and/or contact the game devs to work on game patch fixes, that until those games go EOS. The other side is the game devs doing QA of their game on a linux box with proton anyway (which is 101 retarded if their game engine has already everything linux since they could build their game native linux distribution just there)... and I tell you as a system dev: fixing bugs on linux + proton is hell since there is the additional ultra-complex layer which is proton on top of the video game core software of elf/linux. This diarrhea of software engineering is what we can experience with enshitified corporate software.
by bluGill | 2025-11-14 18:17:05+00:00
It is reasonably sure that each party has a 90% chance of suing if they have rights. There is a 90% chance someone will send you a cease and desist just because all 3 are the type that will do it if they think they have rights. There is a reasonable chance more than 1 will send a cease and desist (some weaselly "we are still checking rights but if we have them your notice starts now - just enough to avoid fraud if it turns out they don't have rights)
by arw0n | 2025-11-14 18:17:20+00:00
At least the Rust compiler gives pretty good advice on what is going wrong. And for complete beginners, agentic AI can soften the pain a lot if used correctly. By used correctly I mean the following work flow:

1) Design in correspondence with AI. Let it criticise your ideas, give you suggestions on tools/libraries/techniques, and have concepts and syntax explained to you. Stay aware that these models are sycophantic yes-machines.

2) Implement yourself.

3) Debug in collaboration with AI. If you ask a question like "I'm getting [error], what are the most likely reasons for this happening?", you can save a lot of time finding the issue. Just make sure to also research why it is happening and how to solve it independently.

4) Let AI criticise your final result and let it offer suggestions on what to improve. Judge these critically yourself.

There is some worth in spending hours trying to fix a bug you don't understand, it builds resilience, helps you get familiar with a lot of language topics, and you probably won't make the same mistake again. But the above approach is a pretty good compromise of letting AI help where it excels, while still keeping enough control to actually learn something yourself.

I believe that Rust is the language benefiting the most from agentic AI, because the compiler is such a strong gate-keeper, and the documentation of almost all aspects of the language is comprehensive and clear. The biggest pain points of Rust are also reduced by AI: Front-loaded learning curve is softened, refactoring is something gen AI is actually decent at, and long compile times can be spent productively by already planning out the next steps.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-14 18:17:38+00:00
They're called sewage "lagoons" and work basically the same as septic systems from a environmental impact perspective. They only really work well in certain climates and even then you need to have enough spare land to just locate a sewage pond somewhere. Even in richer areas it was dirt common for schools and prisons (which aren't likely to be located in the center of town like other government stuff is) to have them way deeper into the 20th century than you'd expect since it's not like they were short on land (just use more taxpayer money).

Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.

The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-14 18:17:40+00:00
> Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so.

I think you're wrong with probably the same confidence you think you're not wrong. :)

At most, I'd say they didn't expect it to be as hard as it proved to be.

I totally agree that Google just didn't get it right, but all the things you describe, to me, fall under a mix of "they had to try", and "it was working for Facebook" (but also having to differentiate from Facebook at the same time, eg with circles).

(Disclaimer, I guess) I was working for Facebook when the whole Google Plus thing happened, and Facebook definitely saw it as a serious threat. I don't at all recall Facebook folks laughing it off as Google hubris, more like it was a long shot, but Google wasn't to be ignored.

Upvote for you regardless, because I think it's a solid take and an engaging comment.
by im3w1l | 2025-11-14 18:18:09+00:00
I feel like there should be a "sign-queer" integer. It's range is the intersection of unsigned and signed integers, in other words the high bit must be unset. Wrapping around on either end is illegal and should be diagnosed in debug builds. In production builds it may either be silently treated as an unsigned integer or generate a diagnostic.

Implicitly casting to either signed or unsigned integer is allowed and does not generate a warning.
by vdqtp3 | 2025-11-14 18:18:24+00:00
My mental poster child for "poor" is exactly this person. She had three kids (all in public school), lived in section 8 and worked part-time bagging groceries. The kids had nothing nice, clothes were all hand-me-down or donations with holes in them from being so old. No car, no health care, horrible dentistry to the point of becoming an emergency.

They had a bigger TV than my middle class family, a premium channel package, and ordered pizza not infrequently. I get all the arguments, but when you're working 20 hours a week and living off food stamps and subsidized housing you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor. The person described in TFA as being poor is rare at best.