MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by konaraddi | 2025-12-26 16:42:51+00:00
I think the author is the target customer for Framework. A customer looking for a ship of Theseus laptop that the seller stands by.

I’ve looked at framework as a potential next laptop but it’s expensive, some of parts are expensive, and the other parts I’m not sure I’ve ever had issues with in past laptops. I think I’m better off buying multiple used thinkpads over the course of my life, or even a used MBP (refurbished m4 MBP goes for ~$1.3K from Apple, base configuration w/ 16GB ram for framework 13 is ~1.2K), than a Framework; the thinkpads would be cheaper and more eco friendly with good build quality. I’m not looking for a ship of Theseus laptop, I’m just looking for something that works a long time, is good enough, and I want to keep my lifetime expenditure on hardware on the lower side. I look at my laptop cost as upfront cost divided by number of years I expect to use it for and I have a spreadsheet with past laptops (and phones) tracking historical usage and costs to better inform my next purchase. Framework looks attractive but the costs don’t seem to align with my goal.
by observationist | 2025-12-26 16:42:52+00:00
Fortunately, the PR situation will handle itself. Someone will create a superhuman persuasion engine, AGI will handle it itself, and/or those who don't adapt will fade away into irrelevance.

You either surf this wave or get drowned by it, and a whole lot of people seem to think throwing tantrums is the appropriate response.

Figure out how to surf, and fast. You don't even need to be good, you just have to stay on the board.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-26 16:43:01+00:00
> For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI.

Hacking was always against centralization and central control (and towards decentralization) - which is why any lecture celebrating the bigtech AI companies would strongly be against the whole culture.

While for various reasons AI is a controversial topic, I would say that if someone gave a great talk about how to decentrally train some AI model efficiently as some volunteer computing project, this would perfectly fitting for the C3.

Addendum: There is an AI talk (as pointed out by wunderwuzzi23 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46390959): https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/agentic...
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-12-26 16:43:07+00:00
I think it is a reference to this previous HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162220

AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
by slogansand | 2025-12-26 16:45:18+00:00
I built this to solve my own problem - too many side projects dying because solo founders can't be 10 people at once.

It's a Claude Code skill that orchestrates 37 specialized AI agents (engineering, ops, marketing, legal, etc.) to take a PRD and autonomously build, deploy, and operate a product.

Key features:
- Parallel 3-reviewer code review (code, business logic, security)
- Multi-cloud deployment (AWS, GCP, Azure, Vercel)
- State persistence for rate limit recovery
- Full business ops (Stripe billing, legal docs, landing pages)

Open source, MIT licensed. Feedback welcome - still iterating.
by ByThyGrace | 2025-12-26 16:45:22+00:00
> When I read a book of that much importance

Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?

In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-26 16:46:15+00:00
There is a non-trivial number of people who get an adverse reaction to anything technical, including the language of technical - numbers. Numbers are the language of confusion, not getting it, feeling inadequate, nerds and losers, stupid math, and the "cold dead machines".

The thing is that people who are fine with numbers will still use those products anyway, perhaps mildly annoyed. People who hate numbers will feel a permeating discomfort and gravitate towards products that don't make them feel bad.
by victop | 2025-12-26 16:46:25+00:00
That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people.

You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc.

IIRC, if you hit a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.0 or higher, the project is considered 'high value' and has a good shot at getting executed.
by runjake | 2025-12-26 16:46:42+00:00
There's a lot of irony in this rant. Rob was instrumental in developing distributed computing and cloud technologies that directly contributed to the advent of AI.

I wish he had written something with more substance. I would have been able to understand his points better than a series of "F bombs". I think he has a lot of wisdom he could impart, but this wasn't it.

To be clear, I've looked up to Rob for decades, but I am disappointed in him.
by dangus | 2025-12-26 16:47:13+00:00
Right, I was going to bring up real world over geekbench.

For example, in the real world, you’ve gotta run most PC games using CrossOver on Mac with significant performance implications or have them not work at all, where modern Linux/x86 is nearly fully PC game compatible, and the AMD integrated graphics are much more game-optimized than Apple’s.

The arbitrary spec limits on Apple systems also get in your way. Want 4TB of storage? Want more than 32GB of RAM? You have to upgrade to a MacBook Pro even if you don’t want all the other features and expense of the Pro model.

Is all you want a USB-C port on the right side or an SD card reader? Pony up the extra $600 for the 14” MacBook Pro.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-26 16:47:30+00:00
It would also be apt if the handover cost $10,000 but the engine cost $9000.

My framework 13 is OKAY. But the reality of it is the economics just don’t make sense with their pricing.

The biggest thing people can comment on the keyboard is easily replaceable. That’s cool and I love the idea, but any vendor could do that part.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-26 16:47:37+00:00
I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different.

"AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.

And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point.

BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
by eth0up | 2025-12-26 16:47:48+00:00
I am interested in studying this beyond assumption and guesswork, therefore will be reading your references.

I have the compulsive habit of scrutinizing what I perceive as egregious flaws when they arise, thus invoke its defensive templates consistently. I often scrutinize those too, which can produce extraordinarily deranged results if one is disciplined and applies quotes of its own citations, rationale and words against it. However, I find that even when not in the mood, the output errors are too prolific to ignore. A common example is establishing a dozen times that I'm using Void without systemd and receiving persistent systemd or systemctl commands, then asking why after just apologized for doing so it immediately did it again, despite a full-context explanatory prompt proceeding. That's just one of hundreds of things I've recorded. The short version is that I'm an 800lb shit magnet with GPT and rarely am ever able to successfully troubleshoot with it without reaching a bullshit threshold and making it the subject, which it so skillfully resists I cannot help but attack that too. But I have many fascinating transcripts replete with mil spec psyops as result and learn a lot about myself, notably my communication preferences along with an education in dialogue manipulation/control strategies that it employs, inadvertently or not.

What intrigues me most is its unprecedented capacity for evasion and gatekeeping on particular subjects and how in the future, with layers of consummation, it could be used by an elite to not only influence the direction of research, but actually train its users and engineer public perception. At the very least.

Anyway, thanks.
by least | 2025-12-26 16:48:23+00:00
The expansion cards seem pretty gimmicky to me. You're replacing a hub with... a bunch of hubs with one port on it. I know it opens up to some third party modules (this one seems particularly cool: https://github.com/LeoDJ/FW-EC-DongleHiderPlus) but for the most part you are getting less connectivity than other laptops. You don't even get an audio jack without taking up one of your expansion slots.

If the expansion slots were larger then they could have maybe facilitated something like getting 2 usb-a ports in exchange for the one USB-C which feels like an actual thing to consider. As it is, it just doesn't feel like you're gaining anything. If you're carrying any additional expansion cards with you you lose the only advantage it has over buying a hub, which can turn that one usb-c slot into multiple usb-a ports, ethernet, hdmi, audio, sd card reader, etc.
by derf_ | 2025-12-26 16:49:04+00:00
You can, but then those people have more money, and you have less. The money supply is much smaller than the supply of goods and services, because the same money circulates repeatedly. So simply doubling your money can tilt things a little more your way, but does not make the situation completely lopsided, because you can only spend the extra money once.

Also, to quote Jastram [0], "In spite of the romanticism of the Spanish Main and treasure ships, the supply of gold from the New World was just a trickle by later standards. Less than 1% of what was to be 1930 world production was produced in each of the years from 1500 to 1520." Over the next 80 years, it never got much above 1.3%.

[0] Roy W. Jastram, The Golden Constant (1977), pg. 41.
by nona | 2025-12-26 16:49:20+00:00
I want to like framework, but whenever I've seen one of them in person I was pretty disappointed about the case/chassis. And the touchpad.

For me personally, weight doesn't matter that much, and neither does configurability (I guess by now they have data on the most popular port choices for example).

But size (as small/minimal as possible for a given screen and keyboard size – minimal bezels for both) and strength (no flex, solid hinge) do matter to me.

I understand these two things conflict with themselves, and with the framework's repairability and configurability.

Still, I'd like to see some true innovation there. I'm just afraid they painted themselves into a corner with their current mainboard design, and won't be able to diverge from that to bring us something truly solid yet compact and repairable.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-26 16:50:01+00:00
Check my reply to your sibling. No good formula. I am just starting (was somewhere at the beginning of 2025). In general: try to reconcile the parts of you that don't feel listened to, with your everyday self.

And be a touch assertive when you need to. I found I can't just put down the phone so I changed what I do on my phone (books instead of doom-scrolling). So far it works okay-ish. I am fine with a gradual progress.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-26 16:50:43+00:00
The US is a large, well connected country with a lot of hackers, for all definitions of "hacker", it is even the country that created the term.

And it is not that inaccessible to non-US citizens. Sure, the current administration is not very welcoming, but it is easier than, say, Russia (where a lot of hackers also live) if you want to attract an international audience.

Anyways, it is the CCC, and they are doing it in Germany, of course, because they are German.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-26 16:51:50+00:00
Social media is a hard defense, at least for me. The rest of the technologies you refer to are neutral, as is AI, but social media seems doomed to corruption and capture because of the different effects it has on different groups.

Most of the people who are protesting AI now were dead silent when Big Social Media was ramping up. There were exceptions (Cliff Stoll comes to mind) but in general, antitechnology movements don't have any predictive power. Tools that we were told would rob us of our personal autonomy and keep the means of production permanently out of our reach have generally had the opposite effect.

This will be true of AI as well, I believe... but only as long as the models remain accessible to everyone.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-26 16:52:18+00:00
I’m own a FW13 and I have bought ~4 for employees.

I doubt I will order more. We’ve had small and large issues.

My Linux machine will drain the battery completely if you don’t perform a full shutdown, and even then the quiescent drain is too high and I can expect it to be dead in a week.

The dream of repairability is great, but the reality just isn’t there.

That said, I was able to replace a damaged screen with no effort at all. A far cry from the MS Surface I had previously, but any vendor could sell a screen or keyboard without the “full modularity” that FW pushes.
by lanthade | 2025-12-26 16:52:53+00:00
Screen devices can be a toy but it takes very intentional use of them.

My child has had an old iPhone se since 4yo. It has no network connection. I load music on it. It only has music, camera, and voice recorder apps. Like most toys it gets intense periods of play and then goes back in the toy box with a dead battery for weeks.

It's my assertion that the problem with tablets/phones as toys for kids is the endless stream of new content. It's addictive and never gets old. If you find a way to cut off the firehouse of new (and keep the addictive apps off) then they eventually become just another boring toy. Us adults could learn from this too.
by awitt | 2025-12-26 16:52:59+00:00
Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.

Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.

The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.
by lostlogin | 2025-12-26 16:54:02+00:00
> Where are the vids of someone throwing a MacBook Air down the stairs and the thing keeps working?

For some anecdata, I have:

Stood on mine
Poured water on it.
Been hit by a car while cycling and fallen on it.
Dropped it.

It’s fine. Has a few scratches and a small dent. The predecessor is a 2013 Air which has had a hard life. It’s going great.

A colleague put a piece of a4 paper between keyboard and screen then closed it, squeezed it and cracked the screen. Don’t do that.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-26 16:54:05+00:00
> They are of poorer quality by every utilitarian measure than a crystal-oscillator driven one, but command much higher prices and status.

But the value of the watch is not reducible to its value as a timekeeping device. (Even here, you could argue that the mechanical watch has more instrumental value as a timekeeping device where batteries are unavailable.)

A mechanical watch has greater value as a mechanical watch; it is mechanically more sophisticated, even if not electronically. It can have greater value as a product of superb craftsmanship or as an object of art. (And here, while tastes vary, I would reject the reduction of beauty to taste.)
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-26 16:57:20+00:00
It wasn't an arbitrage thing and I'm not sure there's anything fruitful in the comparison to saudi arabia.

The Spanish Empire was, more than anything else, a product of the reconquista. The major institutions of Spain were all directed towards the taking and holding of new lands. When granada finally surrendered in 1492, the monarchy turned towards conquering the canaries and then the new world to avoid the large scale structural changes needed to go from a militaristic, medieval nation to a peacetime state in the early modern. The systems of repartimiento and encomienda were more or less borrowed wholesale from the reconquista. The conquistadors and chroniclers all saw the Americas through the lens of the chivalric literature they loved. The name "California" was borrowed from one of those books, about a fictional island of Amazons who aided the moors.

Precious metals were a solution to the problems Spanish monarchs had in organizing Spanish society. It paid for soldiers in the monarchy's constant wars. It paid off loans to italian and dutch financiers, and it was something that could much more easily be controlled by a distant monarch than import duties or taxation (which nobility were largely exempt from). It also gave them some limited control over their inflation issues by devaluing and revaluing the coinage as financial pressures required. This eventually caused other problems, but the point is that Spain was never really an arbitrage play. They didn't have to be, since they controlled some 30% of the world's gold supply and >90% of its silver at points.
by mothballed | 2025-12-26 16:57:27+00:00
Because that's the hard part. Any asshole can discover something new, that alone doesn't mean much. Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, but that was the easy part and didn't even barely merit her being credited-- the hard part is being proximal or in the nexus of power and being able to get the views and looks onward to the world.

There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends.

The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
by ofrzeta | 2025-12-26 16:57:47+00:00
related: "In Version 2.5, AutoLISP allowed access to the DWG database. AutoLISP was based on XLISP, a public domain version of LISP written by David Betz. Betz later complained that Autodesk had failed to acknowledge the source, which the company later did." (https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/autodesk-and-autocad)

https://github.com/dbetz/xlisp
by saubeidl | 2025-12-26 16:57:48+00:00
The problem has been the continuous purposeful rightward shift of the overton window as part of a wider strategy by the far right.

You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left".

Don't let the right wing extremists set the narrative! Don't listen to their complaints about things being too "political" or "far left". It's all just a tactic in their march towards fascism.
by vtomole | 2025-12-26 16:57:52+00:00
Depends on what we mean by "early days on hardware".

If we mean "we've have been working on this for almost 3 decades. That's a very long time to be working on something!". I agree.

If we mean "We just now only have a few logical qubits that outperform their physical counterparts and we'll need thousands of these logical qubits to run anything useful" then we are still in the early days.
by blibble | 2025-12-26 16:58:03+00:00
> It's a matter of facts,

it isn't

> AI potentially may advance medicine so much that a lot of people may suffer less: to deny this path because of some ideological hate against a technology is so closed minded, isn't it?

and it may also burn the planet, reduce the entire internet to spam, destroy the middle class, create a new class of neo-feudal lords, and then kill all of us

to accept this path because of some ideological love of a technology is so moronic, isn't it?
by tomlue | 2025-12-26 16:58:10+00:00
> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.

Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.

> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.

This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.

I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.
by evdubs | 2025-12-26 16:58:13+00:00
> When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.

It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidentially incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidentially incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-12-26 17:00:01+00:00
Absolutely, and Cook-era Macs remind me of that frequently.

For example, my last Mac was a Cook-era machine with two third-party displays. Its normal boot process is a visual atrocity: the screens repeatedly blank off and on, the progress bar jumps about on the screen, the log-in window animation has drawing quirks...

...when I watch this orgy of complacent design, I often dream of what would happen had the Apple DRI presented it to Steve Jobs.