MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexfoo | 2025-12-01 14:43:40+00:00
Either Russia (8am) or West Coast US (9pm) would be my preferred options.

Sadly it's 5am for me as I'm in the UK.

In 8 years I can say I've never once tried to be awake at 5am in order to do the puzzle. The one time I happened to still be awake at 5am during AoC I was quite spectacularly drunk so looking at AoC would have been utterly pointless.

Anything before 6.45am and I'm hopefully asleep. 7am isn't great as 7am-8am I'm usually trying to get my kid up, fed and out the door to go to school. Weekends are for not waking up at 7am if I don't need to.

9am or later and it messes with the working day too much.

Looking back at my submission times from 2017 onwards (I only found AoC in 2017 so did 2015/2016 retrospectively) I've only got two submissions under 02:xx:xx (e.g. 7am for me). Both were around 6.42am so I guess I was up a bit earlier that day (6.30am) and was waiting for my kid to wake up and managed to get part 1 done quickly.

My usual plan was to get my kid out of the door sometime between 7.30am and 8am and then work on AoC until I started work around 9am. If I hadn't finished it then I'd get a bit more time during my lunch hour and, if still not finished, find some time in the evening after work and family time.

Out of the 400 submissions from 2017-2024 inclusive I've only got 20 that are marked as ">24h" and many of these were days where I was out for the entire day with my wife/kid so I didn't get to even look at the problem until the next day. Only 4 of them are where I submitted part 1 within 24h but part 2 slipped beyond 24h.

Enormous understatement: I were unencumbered by wife/kids then my life would be quite a bit different.
by zzzeek | 2025-12-01 14:43:44+00:00
"Joe Biden won the 2020 election" is not a "left wing" notion (or if you're looking for a more hefty one, "vaccines do not cause autism"). it is objective fact. the "left wing" has nothing to do with this, it's about the "right wing" has decided to reject objective fact as part of their ideological platform.
by mtlynch | 2025-12-01 14:43:55+00:00
bergie shared this in the general Meshtastic thread[0] the other day, but I thought it deserved its own thread. It's the best real-world report I've seen of someone using LoRa (long range radio) for off-grid communications.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46096067
by jchw | 2025-12-01 14:44:48+00:00
In a healthier ecosystem with many stakeholders and sponsors this is less of a concern. However, instead of Matrix Foundation gaining more independence, it seems like almost everything moved out of the Matrix Foundation and into a for-profit company. Clearly, things didn't go according to plan.

Most of us just running homeservers are just random people who have no power over this situation and not enough money to make a dent in their budget needs. For us, Matrix was sold as an open E2EE chat system, and we bought in. Does us buying in do anything for Matrix Foundation/Element? I dunno. Maybe it helps sell Matrix to get broader adoption. Either way, we took a gamble on it, potentially instead of other solutions.

Now the free and open source Matrix homeserver has to compete with a closed source commercial one. I sort of hope there's a happy ending on this one, but it sure looks dicey to me right now.
by bluGill | 2025-12-01 14:45:15+00:00
> All we needed was an extra pre space to set WHICH address space - ie. '0' is the old internet in 0.0.0.0.10 --- backwards compatible, not dual stack, no privacy nightmare, etc

That is what we have in ipv6. What you write sounds good/easy on paper, but when you look at how networks are really implemented you realize it is impossible to do that. Networks packets have to obey the laws of bits and bytes and there isn't any place to put that extra 0 in ipv4: no matter what you have to create a new ipv6. They did write a standard for how to send ipv4 addresses in ipv6, but anyone who doesn't have ipv6 themselves can't use that and so we must dual stack until everyone transitions.
by wonderwonder | 2025-12-01 14:45:24+00:00
"Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that"

The market is literally telling them what it wants and potential customers are asking them for work but they are declining it from "a moral standpoint"

and instead blaming "a combination of limping economies, tariffs, even more political instability and a severe cost of living crisis"

This is a failure of leadership at the company. Adapt or die, your bank account doesn't care about your moral redlines.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-01 14:45:26+00:00
I worked on some very large very emergency contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine management implementations during covid. Someone on one of my teams ended up in an inpatient facility after a breakdown. Having senior leadership break down in tears on calls was unusual but not unheard of during that time either. Analysts and others at that level went from ok to very not ok in about 90 days. No one cares about consultants, they get ground to dust and then replaced with another team. I was paid well but it was a tough time.
by atq2119 | 2025-12-01 14:45:32+00:00
We're all groping around in the dark here, but something that could have happened is a tokenizer artifact.

The vocabularies I've seen tend to prefer tokens that start with a space. It feels somewhat plausible to me that an LLM sampling would "accidentally" pick the " Hello" token over the "Hello" token, leading to D:\ Hello in the command. And then that gets parsed as deleting the drive.

I've seen similar issues in GitHub Copilot where it tried to generate field accessors and ended up producing an unidiomatic "base.foo. bar" with an extra space in there.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-01 14:45:34+00:00
I posted calculations. $170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month before health insurance. To save $100K a year since only some of it would be pretax means you are living off of around $1600 a month.

And while I work remotely, remote jobs are getting more scarce and more competitive. Every job gets hundreds of applications within the curse few hours.
by pmasson | 2025-12-01 14:45:47+00:00
As a former medical and scientific illustrator, learning a software package (Photoshop or GIMP) really isn't as crucial as learning principles and practices of art, design, and graphics. Color theory, negative space, composition, etc., are critical to production and apply to any media one chooses to work in: oil on canvas, pen and ink, or computers.

The other issue is access. Again, from an art/graphics/design perspective, costs associated with proprietary software can limit some students from even participating in art/graphics/design programs. Adobe Creative Suite is US$69.99/mo or US$840/yr.
by pogue | 2025-12-01 14:46:23+00:00
I'm sick of having so many different messaging apps. Everyone is using a different one, so you have to download another app, signup for something, figure out how to configure it & etc etc.

We need a modern Trillian or Pidgin that just connects to and talks to everything. To be fair, Pidgin still has lots of plugins for many different chat protocols. I don't know how well maintained they are and if they work consistently.

https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-12-01 14:47:07+00:00
> The only thing that I don't really understand is the decision on data replication. If a user on server A joins a room on server B, recent room data is copied from server B to server A and then kept in sync on both servers.

The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally. This has the advantage/disadvantage of making it hard for the underlying infrastructure to exert control over the hosted communities, and seems to have become a distinguishing feature of federation.

My experience of Matrix as a possible replacement for Discord has led me to believe it's mostly a disadvantage since it leads to gross misalignments between the communities in top and the infrastructure providers underneath. I consider e.g. Discourse to be much healthier (although I would like to see an app for Discourse so that my Discourse communities behave more like Discord/Slack servers) and it's frustrating to me that there hasn't been a clear "Discourse for chat" emerge to replace Discord.
by vrighter | 2025-12-01 14:47:37+00:00
"While we can’t promise all problems will be completely gone"

They could promise to drop support for it once the wayland one reaches feature parity. If any "significant issues" remain, then it's simply not ready for release.

I hate this modern trend of releasing stuff before it is done. And in the commercial space we are now moving on to releasing stuff before they even get started on development. Selling promises. "Buy our shit now and we promise that next year it will be able to do X!"
by pmarreck | 2025-12-01 14:47:45+00:00
I remember trying to install Valorant for the first time, and its ridiculously invasive anticheat kernel mod (or whatever it's called) gave me my first blue (or was it red??) screen I'd seen on Windows in years.

Immediately uninstalled it and haven't ever played Valorant to this day. Fuck that crap, if your community is so toxic that you need a rootkit to keep cheaters at bay, then maybe it's more of a community problem than a technological one. And yes, if this means that you have to block all of China in order to do so, then that is still a community problem. Put your rootkits on your Chinese servers, separate them out, and let the cheaters fight amongst themselves.
by akolbe | 2025-12-01 14:47:47+00:00
One good thing is that unlike AI, Wikipedia at least allows you to see how an article grew. Yes, for the most part you only see pseudonyms in the edit history, but they represent individual editors with discernible interests and biases, whereas an AI-based 'pedia is a black box.

You can argue with Wikipedians; with an AI-'pedia, not so much.
Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?
by ferguess_k | 2025-12-01 14:47:48+00:00
I have been purchasing used/new Lenovo/Dell laptops for the last 7 years, and I have noticed that the build quality of recent models is concerning.

Lenovo: Ex-company gave me a NEW Carbon X1 around 2019, and the battery only lasted for less than a year (!). On the other side, I bought a used 2017 470S from the same company, added more RAM, didn't touch anything including the SSD, and I'm still using it in daily coding. I did buy a new battery last month so technically the old batteries lasted for about 7-8 years.

Dell: I bought 3 laptops + 1 desktop from Dell Refurbished (So the quality should be consistent). 2 laptops + 1 desktop are older models, and 1 is Precision 5550 (2021) that I bought last December. Everything works fine, except for the 5550, which has issues with battery (dropped from 31% to 4% in a few seconds) and (more deadly) charging port (doesn't charge from time to time). Even if I bought it new in 2021, I would be surprised that it only lasted for a bit over 4 years.

The other issue is that 5550 uses USB-C ports. I blame on myself not checking it closely before the purchase. I really hate those ports. Why is everyone copying from Mac?

What's my option? I can't really justify the 2,000+ CAD price point for a new laptop, especially if it lasts less than 5 years. I'd prefer a "low-end" workstation with 32GB memory, but because of the price point I can only afford a 16GB non-workstation one. I don't do gaming any more but I still prefer a good integrated video card. I can't afford Framework and other Linux laptops because they are expensive and usually don't operate in Canada so delivery is expensive too.

I did buy a used Macbook Pro M1 16GB (2021) from my current company last month. I haven't used it but I'm confident that the hardware is good. The problem is I don't really like the software, so I figured I still need a Linux box.

Did you find any sweet spot?
by cjonas | 2025-12-01 14:48:19+00:00
My point is there are plenty of cases where you would send the same PII through a server-less function or internal API (IE PATCH /user/profile). The concerns about logging or bugs are the same in both instances. You could make a case that using a masking tool like this would make it easier to share full production logs, but there are plenty of other ways to secure logs that don't involve modifying the runtime behavior.
by nshelia | 2025-12-01 14:48:30+00:00
I was one of the protesters during the December 2024 events. It was deadly. Nothing worked against the gas — even if you had a $100 mask and multiple layers of goggles, your whole face and eyes would still burn like hell. Tear drops helped very little. We also had a big protest in October this year, and from what I heard from friends, it was far worse, and you could smell the gas from a kilometer away.
by ryandv | 2025-12-01 14:48:31+00:00
Holy fuck. I should just grow coconuts or something in the remote Philippines.

> Most software engineers never use any comp sci theory at all, but especially not graph theory or shit like Dijkstras algorithms, DFS, BFS etc.

But we are talking about Advent of Code here, which is a set of fairly contrived, theoretical, in vitro learning problems that you don't really see in the real software engineering world either.

> The prompt "Proof." ?

See this paper on the Stoer-Wagner min-cut algorithm from graph theory, for the last problem in a previous year's Advent of Code: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~ac/Teach/CS105-Winter05/Handou...

> I have a computer science education and I have no idea what you're talking about.

A post-secondary computer science education? I don't mean bootcamp. I mean a course of study in mathematics.
by belorn | 2025-12-01 14:48:41+00:00
Religious conflict is old enough to gone through every kind of modern and non-modern ideology, including freedom of speech and humans rights. Why would the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which has been ongoing since late 19th century, be a major driver in west ideology?

It is not a suddenly adaptation of authoritarian, anti-free speech, anti-human rights. Die Gedanken sind frei demonstrates that people been fighting for freedom of speech since the middle ages.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-01 14:49:10+00:00
Right, I understand all of that, but the indisputable reality is that such a preference requires actions from other people to be satisfied. That's just what it is - in office work requires people working... in an office.

This isn't a reaction on my end, I'm just explaining where the value judgment of the preference comes from. It's intrisincally a "closed" preference, and people don't like that generally.

You are not in a position of power to exercise said preference, you rely on the goodwill of your company. That's fine, but still, you exert some influence. People are listening, and some of them do have the power to exert that control. So when you say "I like that control", it makes people a little nervous.

And, onto my whole "does this actually require in office work" point:

> find that I dislike giving up room in my small house for work. And I dislike having no separation between work and home.

This is that. None of these preferences require in office work, that's just a close enough proxy. I would argue these are more obtainable in a WFH environment, because the cost savings of WFH can easily afford you a dedicated office space away from home.

Because, again, one is open, and one is closed. So with the open one you can just do that.
by friendzis | 2025-12-01 14:49:29+00:00
> DevOps should take care of the constant battle between Devs and Operations

In practice there is no way to relay "query fubar, fix" back, because we are much agile, very scrum: feature is done when the ticket is closed, new tickets are handled by product owners. Reality is antithesis of that double Ouroboros.

In practice developers write code, devops deploy "teh clouds" (writing yamls is the deving part) and we throw moar servers at some cloud db when performance becomes sub-par.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-01 14:49:36+00:00
If that other program were generating commands to run on your machine by design and you configured it to run without your confirmation, then you should definitely feel a lil sheepish and share some of the blame.

This isnt like Spotify deleting your disk.

I run Claude Code with full permission bypass and I’d definitely feel some shame if it nuked my ssd.
by jjav | 2025-12-01 14:49:42+00:00
> Individual deductibles are limited by law to ~$6500 even on the worst plans.

Deductibles can be higher, but more importantly it's very important to undertand that "out of pocket maximum" does not mean the same thing to normal people vs the insurance companies.

One would think that a 10K/yr "out of pocket maximum" means in the worst case scenario you may have to pay 10K/yr and then insurance covers the rest. Which wouldn't be that bad.

If that were true the US wouldn't have the epidemic of people going bankrupt over medical costs.

What really happens is you get hit with a 200K bill from a hospital visit and the insurance company decides unilaterally they don't really feel like paying based on some obscure technicality, so then that amount does not count towards your "out of pocket maximum". So now you're on the hook for the 200K, good luck.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-01 14:49:45+00:00
Yes, I 100% agree. Open Source is a lot more about not paying than about liberty.

This is exactly the tradeoff that we had made in the industry a couple of decades ago. We could have pushed all-in on Stallman's vision and the FSF's definition of Free Software, but we (collectively) decided that it's more important to get the practical benefits of having all these repos up there on GitHub and us not suing each other over copyright infringement. It's absolutely legitimate to say that we made the wrong choice, and I might agree, but a choice was made, and Open Source != Free Software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
by ckemere | 2025-12-01 14:50:31+00:00
Hot take - the private doctors tell you they are great but the public doctors can often be spectacular because their motives are not primarily economic.

For example, the absolute best diagnosticians in Houston are at the public hospital primarily serving Medicaid and Harris Health patients. Super evidence based, order tests for differential diagnosis not to make $$. Passionate about what they do. In a unexplained emergency my doctor friends would go there to be diagnosed and then the fancy privates to be treated.
by wonderwonder | 2025-12-01 14:50:38+00:00
I think that's OP's point though, Ai can do it better now. No searching, no looking. Just drop your question into Ai with your exact data or function and 10 seconds later you have a working solution. Stackoverflow is great but Ai is just better for most people.

Instead of running a google query or searching in Stackoverflow you just need a chatGPT, Claude or your Ai of choice open in a browser. Copy and paste.
by inglor_cz | 2025-12-01 14:50:50+00:00
Hmm. Ironically, the party most likely to abolish such laws is probably Reform.

Tories have done approximately nothing, Labour is an old mother lode of speech policing and the Greens with all their postmodern sensitivities plus deference to Islam don't look particularly promising as well.

Once upon a time, Lib Dems were strong on civic freedoms... but I can't remember them doing anything in this regard during the Cameron coalition government.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-01 14:51:18+00:00
Yeah. It's unfortunate that they seem so intent on digging in their heels about this one issue of water use. Precisely because AI is so important, we should want to make sure we're clear on the facts and have the right context for them! And the larger point that AI is likely to consolidate power in the hands of increasingly few people and corporations is well worth making (although, that story can be told for most critical technologies , from the steam engine to the telegraph to the transistor, and I don't think Hao's framing of Empire/Colonialism is really the right way to look at it at all). I think there are plenty of books to be written about the social impact of AI from a more balanced, empirical, less ideological perspective.
by ben_w | 2025-12-01 14:51:55+00:00
> But the proposals in the article defining "subversion" to include environmental activism, independence movements, or criticism of UK policy show how quickly these things expand beyond their original scope.

Yes, but I wouldn't put "independence movements" in that list. Much as I'm relaxed about the Welsh and Scots' independence movements, for Northern Ireland to do whatever it wants including the current kicking-can-down-road approach, and for any future potential from the Cornish and London vague aspirations that nobody currently takes seriously…

… if I was a hostile foreign power, then I would absolutely support all of those campaigns. And more. (Independence for Langstone! :P)
by hopelite | 2025-12-01 14:52:16+00:00
You are mistaken to think that zealots can be reasoned with. They have been conditioned to react upon anything “Russia” like a Pavlovian cue, a command of the trained animal. They are a herd that moves as a herd, based on cues of lead animals. No amount of proof or evidence will ever dissuade them from a position that the herd is moving in. They cannot reason on their own and lack the courage to separate, let alone say something that the herd disapproves of, lest they be expelled from the herd and ganged up on.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-01 14:52:25+00:00
<< over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole

Fucking this. What I tend to see is petty 'my guy good, not my guy bad' approach. All I want is even enforcement of existing rules on everyone. As it stands, to your point, only the least moral ship, because they don't even consider hesitating.
by troyvit | 2025-12-01 14:52:45+00:00
So if America invades Venezuela should we all stop using google? Should we have stopped using google when the U.S. invaded Iraq and killed 150,000 people[1]?

Should we stop using products imported from China for the cultural genocide they've perpetrated against the Uyghurs?[2]

Is Yandex Russia?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...