MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by candl | 2025-11-25 05:15:23+00:00
What features have you used for shaping with pf/FreeBSD? I remember (around 8ish years ago) using dummynet with pf, but it wasn't supported out of the box and I used some patches from the mailing lists for this purpose. It wasn't perfect, at times buggy. Back then ipfw had better support for such features, but I didn't like the syntax just as much as iptables. I eventually settled on Linux as I have grown to understand iptables (I hate that nftables is the brand new thing with entirely different syntax to learn again... and even requires more work upfront because basic chains are not preconfigured...) but traffic shaping sucked big time on linux, I never understood the tc tool to be effective, it's just too arcane. I always admired pf, especially on OpenBSD since it had more features but the single threaded nature killed it for any serious usage for me.
by tdeck | 2025-11-25 05:15:52+00:00
> If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-making and heavy lifting.

They will do anything but let users make decisions about their own computers that they own. If having agency is so great, why does every Windows version take more of it away from me?
by palmotea | 2025-11-25 05:18:23+00:00
> If there's a widespread and growing heroin epidemic that's already left 1/3 of society addicted, and a small group of people are able to get off of it by switching to cigarettes, I'm not going to start lecturing them about how it's a terrible idea because cigarettes are unhealthy.

> Is it ideal? Not at all. But it's certainly a lesser poison.

1. I do not accept your premise that a retreat into solipsistic relationships with a sycophantic chatbots is healthier than "the stuff currently happening with dating at the moment." If you want me to believe that, you're going to have to be more specific about what that "stuff" is.

2. Even accepting your premise, it's more like online dating is heroin and AI chatbots are crack cocaine. Is crack a "lesser poison" than heroin? Maybe, but it's still so fucking bad that whatever relative difference is meaningless.
by crustaceansoup | 2025-11-25 05:18:38+00:00
You can make an LLM play pretend at being opinionated and challenging. But it's still an LLM. It's still being sycophantic: it's only "challenging" because that's what you want.

And the prompt / context is going to leak into its output and affect what it says, whether you want it to or not, because that's just how LLMs work, so it never really has its own opinions about anything at all.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-25 05:18:49+00:00
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029561 with 44 comments. Same author and topic with paraphrased text: starts with "I have spent my career distrusting the obvious." and "I felt sick." and has a heading "The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poor" later on.
by gitaarik | 2025-11-25 05:18:55+00:00
Indeed. And pharmaceutical companies will never do studies for medicines they cannot patent. And you can't patent natural medicines, only synthetic. So only the synthetic ones that are created by them are being studied and are the only "proven" medicine.

Convenient not?

Maybe we should have an independent institute backed by citizens, that does these studies, for both natural and synthetic medicines.

But that would destroy the pharmaceutical industry.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-25 05:22:22+00:00
> There have been studies this year implying that some brain functions rely on quantum interactions.

I'm not in the camp of "the brain is solved science", but come on. All of chemistry depends on quantum interactions and that didn't stop us from understanding a lot of it. It just means we're solving a different set of equations.

It's a big leap to go from "brain electrochemistry is described by quantum mechanics" to "the essence of consciousness / human soul is hiding in the quantum realm and therefore can't be measured or replicated".
by bn-l | 2025-11-25 05:23:51+00:00
I tried vscode with copilot again after a year of cursor.

It’s faster but the LLM aspect is unusable. The diffing is still slow as molasses and the chat is very slow also. LLM wise it’s a joke vs cursor. But it is less laggy (because cursor is basically vibe coded crapware that they release multiple bug fixes for per day for the errors they introduce into production on every single release)
by bhattisatish | 2025-11-25 05:23:58+00:00
A beautiful pop book that gives a glimpse on types are designed. (https://www.kellianderson.com/books/alphabetinmotion.html) In this age of generative AI and ebooks, this book is a very pleasant surprise. I loved the whole feel of the book, interactivity, ...

Thought yc crowd will appreciate this one :-)

I discovered the book via Adam Savage's youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKCcqlJnZcA)

The kickstarter page has more details and videos with regards to the book (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kelli/alphabet-in-motio...)
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-25 05:25:02+00:00
> When I hear women whine about domestic labor I have to mention that single men and women do practically the same labor, for themselves alone, and washing clothes or cooking is much easier to do for multiple people than for one person.

That last part is very much not true, perhaps especially when children are involved.

> Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max.

Maybe if you are very bad at recognizing work.

> without worrying about money

Not earning money in outside labor is not the same as not worrying about, and managing, money.
by bob1029 | 2025-11-25 05:25:39+00:00
I left the industry because it is soul crushing for anyone who wants to try new ideas.

I also had a pager strapped to me 24/7/365. Finding a US backup for a UI developed in an obscure language owned by a Japanese IT company proved to be quite challenging. I bet they're still using it to this day and just managing it from Korea now. The risk of rewriting or refactoring some of this stuff is measured in 10-11 figures.
by golem14 | 2025-11-25 05:28:54+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikesimoncasey_our-team-at-re...?

How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?

Also, consumer prices _have_ risen (mine included), but it's not clear that this is only because AI. While EV charging is not at the scale of all data centers combined, it seems to grow even faster than the datacenter's consumption, and is expected to eclipse the latter around 2030. Maybe sooner due to missing solar incentives.

Also, to rant on: According to [1], an average Gemini query costs about 0.01 cents (Figure 2 - say 6000 queries per kWh at 60 cents/kWh, which is probably more than the industrial consumers pay). The same paper says one other providers is not off by that much. I dare say that at least for me, I definitely save a lot of time and effort with these queries than I'd traditionally have to (go to library, manually find sources on the web, etc), so arguably, responsibly used, AI is really quite environmentally friendly.

Finally: Large data centers and their load is actually a bit fungible, so they can be used to stabilize the grid, as described in [2].

I would think it would be best if there were more transparency on where the costs come from and how they can be externalized fairly. To give one instance, Tesla could easily [3] change their software to monitor global grid status and adjust charging rates. Did it happen ? Not that I know. That could have a huge effect on grid stability. With PowerShare, I understand that vehicles can also send energy back to power the house - hence, also offload the grid.

[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358514...

[3] that's most likely a wild exaggeration
by palmotea | 2025-11-25 05:30:34+00:00
>> That's the default chatbot behavior. Many of these people appear to be creating their own personalities for the chatbots, and it's not too difficult to make an opinionated and challenging chatbot, or one that mimics someone who has their own experiences. Though designing one's ideal partner certainly raises some questions, and I wouldn't be surprised if many are picking sycophantic over challenging.

> You can make an LLM play pretend at being opinionated and challenging. But it's still an LLM. It's still being sycophantic: it's only "challenging" because that's what you want.

Also: if someone makes it "challenging" it's only going to be "challenging" with the scare quotes, it's not actually going to be challenging. Would anyone deliberately, consciously program in a real challenge and put up with all the negative feelings a real challenge would cause and invest that kind of mental energy for a chatbot?

It's like stepping on a thorn. Sometimes you step on one and you've got to deal with the pain, but no sane person is going to go out stepping on thorns deliberately because of that.
by stuxnet79 | 2025-11-25 05:30:36+00:00
Serious question, now that there is evidence that Pixel phones are corrupting the actual jpegs what is the best way to safely store smartphone photos now? I usually back them up to an external drive every 6 months or so but wondering if someone has a better process for this.

I mean it's nice that photos are immediately uploaded to the cloud once they are taken but I read that Google Photos does not do 1:1 backups. Apparently the cloud photos are compressed & are worse quality
by palmotea | 2025-11-25 05:31:34+00:00
> not the person you were talking to but I think for well over 50% of young men, dating apps are simply an exercise in further reducing one's self worth.

It totally get that, but dating apps != dating. If dating apps don't work, do something else (that isn't a chatbot).

If tech dug you into a hole, tech isn't going to dig you out. It'll only dig you deeper.
by small_scombrus | 2025-11-25 05:33:10+00:00
> All it would take is forcing an artificial CPU slowdown

Technically, yes. But for many large tech companies it would require a large organisational mindset shift to go from more features is more promotions is more money to good, stable product with well maintained codebase is better and THAT would require a dramatic shift away from line must go up to something more sustainable and less investor/stock obsessed.
by eviks | 2025-11-25 05:34:14+00:00
Interesting, looks like another opportunity for Chrome to avoid the Safari mistake

> slow. There's some suggestion that the Apple implementation is running on a single core, so maybe there's room for improvement.

Though their own old attempt was even worse

> of the old behind-a-flag Chromium JPEG XL decoder, and it's over 500% slower (6x) to decode than AVIF.
by doodlebugging | 2025-11-25 05:37:43+00:00
Very interesting that you suggest corn booze in addition to wine. Chicha was a traditional fermented drink made from corn (maize) and other grain crops. It was fermented in large ceramic vessels according to this source [0]. One of the links I had earlier to the wine making showed ceramic vessels that looked consistently sized and shaped and I think it is possible that they are in a traditional design. I wonder whether anyone has tried fitting a similar modern vessel into one of the holes after excavating to near it's original design.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicha

I did find another recent paper that suggests that the site was part of an Inca tribute collection system where everyone's tributes would be tallied. It is a very interesting paper and offers another plausible use case for the site in the context of what they have already found in the area. [1]

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300501765_The_Stran...

Perhaps tributes were paid in grain, or liquid products. Near the end of the paper they note that:

>In either regard, the line of holes at Monte Sierpe would have provided an ideal place to deposit tribute, where it could be easily recorded by the accountants of the Inca state (quipucamayoc) on site and then transported to Tambo Colorado or wherever the Inca authorities desired.

This valley was an important valley along the ancient Inca road so it makes sense that they would need a place to store things for distribution or to accumulate them for tributes.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-11-25 05:38:14+00:00
> but dating apps != dating

tell that to a world that had devices put infront of them at a young age where dating is tindr.

> If tech dug you into a hole, tech isn't going to dig you out. It'll only dig you deeper.

There are ways to scratch certain itches that insulate one from the negative effects that typically come from the traditional IRL ways of doing so. For people already scarred by mental health issues (possibly in part due to "growing up" using apps) the immediate digital itch scratch is a lot easier, with more predictable outcomes then the arduous IRL path.
by wavemode | 2025-11-25 05:39:38+00:00
The philosophy of fixing bugs first before implementing new features is not that the bugs you're fixing must be more "important" than the new features.

In fact, that's exactly the mindset that "bugs first" is designed to prevent. If you have a mindset where a bug has to be more important than a feature in order to get prioritized, then you will breed a culture in which bugs are rarely prioritized, if ever. (Especially if fixing them would be time-consuming.)

This is for the simple reason that, in isolation, any individual feature can almost always be argued to be more important than any individual bug which could've been worked on instead. Yet, in the aggregate, once you've dumped 50 individual low-priority bugs into the backlog, they all add up to a horrendous experience for the user.

It's sort of like running a restaurant. Cooking food is how we make money, but you still have to clean the floors. If you keep putting it off to get the food out faster, eventually you're going to be knee-deep in shit.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-25 05:41:12+00:00
> managing your own bank of SSDs

If I have enough data to need multiple SSDs (more than 8TB) then the cloud cost is not going to be substantially less. B2 is going to be above $500 a year.

I can manage to plug a backup SSD into a phone charger a couple times a year, or leave it plugged into one when it's not in my computer being updated. Even if I rate that handful of minutes of labor per year at a gratuitous $100, I'm still saving money well before the 18 month mark.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-25 05:42:13+00:00
I went on to describe positive side effects that are user visible. Users will see benefits but it's not in the form of UI necessarily. There are a lot of projects that companies take on that never reach end customers, but they help make the organization more efficient and capable which is why they are funded. I've never met someone who created a project purely to fund their own promotion. People genuinely care about trying to make a positive impact.
by xp84 | 2025-11-25 05:42:27+00:00
True, and things that manifest only on old/slow hardware or on bad internet are the worst kind for this, since 100% of developers who have any say in the matter would never accept such circumstances at all, so they’re always approaching every issue with multi-gigabit speeds, zero latency, and this year’s $3,000 Mac. “What do you mean the page loads slowly?”
by DocTomoe | 2025-11-25 05:44:15+00:00
We do see - from 'crazy cat lady' to 'incel', from 'where have all the good men gone' to the rapid decline of the numbers of 25-year-olds who have had sexual experiences, not to mention from the 'loneliness epidemic' that has several governments, especially in Europe, alarmed enough to make it an agenda pointt: No, they would not. Not all of them. Not even a majority.

AI in these cases is just a better 'litter of 50 cats', a better, less-destructive, less-suffering-creating fantasy.
by akomtu | 2025-11-25 05:45:06+00:00
Occam's razor is just a search heuristic when we try to find something in the woods at night blindfolded. It's a rule of thumb that says "when there is so many possibilities to explore, start with the simplest ones first, otherwise we'll surely get lost." But it's a mistake to use the Occam's razor as a law of nature and think that if we can't see anything in the dark over there, then there must be nothing there.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-11-25 05:45:29+00:00
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
by DocTomoe | 2025-11-25 05:46:43+00:00
Ah, 'suffering builds character'. I haven't had that one in a while.

Maybe we should not want to get prepared for RealPeople™ if all they can do is break us and disappoint us.

"But RealPeople™ can also elevate, surprise, and enchant you!" you may intervene. They sure than. An still, some may decide no longer to go for new rounds of Russian roulette. Someone like that is not a lesser person, they still have real™ enjoyment in a hundred other aspects in their life from music to being a food nerd. they just don't make their happiness dependant on volatile actors.

AI chatbots as relationship replacements are, in many ways, flight simulators:

Are they 'the real thing'? Nah, sitting in a real Cessna almost always beats a computer screen and a keyboard.

Are they always a worse situation than 'the real thing'? Simulators sure beat reality when reality is 'dual engine flameout halfway over the North Pacific'

Are they cheaper? YES, significantly!

Are they 'good enough'? For many, they are.

Are they 'syncophantic'? Yes, insofar as that circumstances are decided beforehand. A 'real' pilot doesn't get to choose 'blue skies, little sheep clouds in the sky', they only get to chosen not to fly that day. And the standard weather settings? Not exactly 'hurricane, category 5'.

Are they available, while real flight is not, to some or all members of the public? Generally yes. The simulator doesn't make you have a current medical.

Are they removing pilots/humans from 'the scene'? No, not really. In fact, many pilots fly simulators for risk-free training of extreme situations.

Your argument is basically 'A flight simulator won’t teach you what it feels like when the engine coughs for real at 1000 ft above ground and your hands shake on the yoke.'. No, it doesn't. An frankly, there are experiences you can live without - especially those you may not survive (emotionally).

Society has always had the tendency to pathologize those who do not pursue a sexual relationship as lesser humans. (Especially) single women that were too happy in the medevieal age? Witches that needed burning. Guy who preferred reading to dancing? A 'weirdo and a creep'. English knows 'master' for the unmarried, 'incomplete' man, an 'mister' for the one who got married. And today? those who are incapable or unwilling to participate in the dating scene are branded 'girlfailure' or 'incel' - with the latter group considered a walking security risk. Let's not add to the stigma by playing another tune for the 'oh, everyone must get out there' scene.
by ares623 | 2025-11-25 05:48:10+00:00
I wish one of these lawsuits would present as evidence the marketing and ads about how ChatGPT is amazing and definitely 100% knows what it’s doing when it comes to coding tasks.

They shouldn’t be able to pick and choose how capable the models are. It’s either a PhD level savant best friend offering therapy at your darkest times or not.
by fy20 | 2025-11-25 05:50:10+00:00
Whoa there, you don't need to be so sadistic to your team. It's not GraphQL, but having a document describing how your API works, including types, that is important.

I expect you could achieve the same with a comprehensive OpenAPI specification. If you want something a bit stricter I guess SOAP would work too, LLMs love XML after all.
by saghm | 2025-11-25 05:52:27+00:00
Even before I got to the point where I decided I didn't like inheritance, I distinctly recall having conversations about how I felt that using inheritance for anything other than polymorphism didn't usually end up with particularly clean code. I can remember a conversation about this at least as far back as the summer after my freshman year of college, and I don't think I was aware of the idea of "composition" yet, because I remember phrasing my point as something like "inheritance shouldn't be used for 'code-sharing', only for polymorphism".
by bombcar | 2025-11-25 05:52:42+00:00
Yeah people talk about GT:NH being this super tedious hard pack, but it actually has tons and tons of quality of life fixes to the various mods that make it up - and voiding materials is something that is almost nearly gone (iirc very early on a single block, even steam, losing power would lose the materials, which made learning early steam (especially the alloy smelter) really painful).
by bombcar | 2025-11-25 05:54:10+00:00
It's extremely well polished, and I've played enough that it's nearly impossible for me to play Minecraft without playing GT:NH, as the moment I start a vanilla play through I find myself adding mods to make it easier and then I realize I'm just rebuilding GT:NH - badly.

It really is about the journey; GT:NH isn't played to be won - instead, the win condition is continually moved out so you can keep playing.
by rimunroe | 2025-11-25 05:54:37+00:00
>> "Want to feel old? Yes."

> No you don't.

Maybe I missed something but I don’t know what you’re quoting or paraphrasing. In the comic the guy is saying he’s glad they’re getting old together, not that he’s glad they feel old. I don’t want to speak for my brother, but it seems weird to assume he is unfamiliar with what aging entails. Personally, I’m thrilled my sister-in-law is getting to experience the pains of aging instead of late stage cancer treatment.
by kachapopopow | 2025-11-25 05:56:25+00:00
try cosmic desktop since it was made to be similar to gnome - it's maintained by system76 and is shaping up to be one of the most polished desktops out there, gnome has been feeling like it's going downwards for a while. I can't comment too much tho since I am too used to KDE at the moment and tiling support is just not there yet compared to KWin.
by wavemode | 2025-11-25 05:58:23+00:00
A bug report does not mean that someone "wants" the software to do X, but rather that they -expect- the software to do X. If that expectation is correct, it's a bug, and if it's not correct then it's a feature request.

Most software is not formally specified, so it's not technically guaranteed that we can prove whether that expectation is correct or not. But, there is usually a collective understanding, reinforced by the software's own interface (e.g. "the button says Do X but I click it and X doesn't happen"), the documentation, and/or general technological norms (e.g. "it crashed" or "when I type text sometimes it disappears and I have to start over").

There are occasional ambiguous cases, but in practice these are uncommon in a well-run organization, and generally the job of a product manager is to have the final say on such matters via consultation with relevant stakeholders, contracts, etc.
People as Intelligence vs. People as Biology. Thoughts?
by marksun130 | 2025-11-25 05:59:24+00:00
I have been thinking about this new research direction for AI all year. I believe it is an error to even call the field AI rather than just simply intelligence or machine intelligence, as the framing largely influences how people approach this.

We have literally been transferring different aspects of human intelligence to the machines and we are probably very close to being able to transfer everything now. Then we could build entities that simultaneously capture the best parts of humanity while doing away with the saddest ones.

What about intelligent, ethical and 'almost' immortal machines that can survive anywhere?