MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-01 03:06:26+00:00
As I’ve already said in my initial comment, this is not the whole story. (I acknowledge it is the official story, but I want to say the official story, at best, creatively omits some of the facts.)

NTVDM as it existed Windows NT (3.1 through 10) for i386 leveraged V86 mode. NTVDM on Windows NT (e.g. 4.0) for MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha, on the other hand, already had[1] a 16-bit x86 emulator, which was merely ifdefed out of the i386 version (making the latter much leaner).

Is it fair of Microsoft to not care to resurrect that nearly decade-old code (as of Windows XP x64 when it first became relevant)? Yes. Is it also fair to say that they would not, in fact, need to write a complete emulator from scratch to preserve their commitment to backwards compatibility, because they had already done that? Also yes.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060525-04/?p=31...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-01 03:06:31+00:00
I will allow my past comments to speak for themselves a bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38857170

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38857228

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38857476

> I will eat crow if it comes to light that this was entirely unavoidable on 23andme's part. (me)

> You won’t have to. They could have forced MFA and been done with it. That doesn’t make it their fault that they didn’t. It just means they could have done better and assumed that at least some users (read: most) are ignorant about best practices with sensitive data. It’s not something they would be legally culpable for, though.

This class action and the £2.3M extracted by a UK regulator sure feels like legal culpability. There must be consequences, otherwise nothing will change. I accept some action vs no action, when perfect is out of reach. We are building systems, requiring constant tuning and improvement.

Closing the loop on this provides an immutable case study on this topic.

(i manage and am responsible for systems that protect enterprise and customer data for millions of customers at a fintech, I take this work seriously, because someone should; if you want better behavior, we need better legal tools to go after corporations for these failures, intentional or not)
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-01 03:06:52+00:00
I believe you’re in the minority here. Perhaps your experience is different because of your skill set or the market you’re in. Anyone that I know personally who got laid off (in tech) took at least 6 months to find a job. I don’t know about anyone else but that to me is pretty brutal. More so as the people getting laid off are mid career, some with kids.

Edit: Add to the above that companies like Walmart are seeing an uptick in high wage earners becoming their customers, and McDonalds seeing a shrinking population of low-wage customers.

It’s easy to infer the rest from there. People who used to do well are cutting expenses and those who were already struggling are..I seriously don’t know what they’re doing. Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs.

Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-16/mcdonalds-...
by AstroNutt | 2025-12-01 03:08:05+00:00
Believe it or not, I've been in construction/remodeling for 35 years. We currently have 3 home remodels going on at the moment with more down the road. I've never experienced a slow down. Even during COVID.

I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.
by flossposse | 2025-12-01 03:09:22+00:00
A security camera, on its own, doesn't tell the grocery store who you are. There was a time when CCTV didn't even exist and yet we still had commerce.

"What we've got" isn't "the best we can do". There absolutely are better possibilities that would protect consumers. The best way to ensure we never get to experience those better systems is to shrug our shoulders and passively accept whatever treatment we receive.
by benmw333 | 2025-12-01 03:09:29+00:00
bf related, I bought: 1) trail mix 2) licorice 3) books on diy house / carpentry

not bf related but happened this week: 1) cv axles for my car ~500 and will install myself

i am employed and just make it into 6 figures $110k, which apparently is poverty level now if you have a few dependents. i consider myself fortunate.
by foobarbecue | 2025-12-01 03:10:02+00:00
Funny how this is exactly the documentation you'd need to make it easy for a human to work with the codebase. Perhaps this'll be the greatest thing about LLMs -- they force people to write developer guides for their code. Of course, people are going to ask an LLM to write the CLAUDE.md and then it'll just be more slop...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-01 03:10:22+00:00
Here's 12 Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!) challenges, straight from the day job:

1. Get a user to stop logging in as root. 2. Get all users to stop sharing the same login and password for all servers. 3. Get a user to upgrade their app's dependencies to versions newer than 2010. 4. Get a user to use configuration management rather than scp'ing config files from their laptop to the server. 5. Get a user to bake immutable images w/configuration rather than using configuration management. 6. Get a user to switch from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. 7. Get a user to stop keeping one file with all production secrets in S3, and use a secrets vault instead. 8. Convince a user (and management) you need to buy new servers, because although "we haven't had one go down in years", every one has faulty power supply, hard drive, network card, RAM, etc, and the hardware's so old you can't find spare parts. 9. Get management to give you the authority to force users to rotate their AWS access keys which are 8 years old. 10. Get a user to stop using the aws root account's access keys for their application. 11. Get a user to build their application in a container. 12. Get a user to deploy their application without you.

After you complete each one, you get a glass of scotch. Happy Holidays!
by CWuestefeld | 2025-12-01 03:10:49+00:00
I don't even know how to understand the latter part of your reply. I don't understand how you can argue that we should FULLY (and I take that word from you) shut out those who appear to be cranks because, through some magic, their argument will win out because it has some magical property that will make it heard despite the only one speaking it being gagged.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-01 03:10:53+00:00
People do not live in land, they live in floorspace.

Of course well located land is special and will never behave like a durable good. But whether there exist 250 sqft of livable residential floorspace or 250,000 sqft of livable floorspace on that land is at the moment, an entirely political decision that we can reverse at any time.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-12-01 03:10:54+00:00
That's valid, if just barely, when it comes to art, poetry or music.

In most other matters, it is invalid, unless we're reckless in how we interpret "something to it".

Like, there was something to the practice of slavery: it was popular in the South! ...and yet I'm comfortable making a value judgement about it.

If the point of the internet is to popularize Flat Earth Theory or whatever, then I have a feeling humanity would be better off without the internet.
by jameslk | 2025-12-01 03:11:37+00:00
Yeah it’s pretty weird that there’s a need to write this article about it, when there’s plenty of other sites that are detestable if not more. And yet, this causes a Streisand effect. The site hasn’t been around for more than a couple of months and yet it keeps getting free airtime and backlinks from controversy of its existence. LLMs trained on the web pick up the utterances of the name all over the place and assign it some notoriety. And then, weirdly, people wonder why the site is showing up in their search/prompt results

If I were an evil billionaire I guess I’d create/buy media companies just to talk negatively about myself and my projects because it’s apparently a very effective way to get attention. Just play two sides against each other who have an emotional urge to keep saying my name
by jdlshore | 2025-12-01 03:11:41+00:00
Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992.

Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”

The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.

Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.

Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.
by tgma | 2025-12-01 03:12:25+00:00
Again, you are assuming a normal situation. The point is the country itself is operating (or has a heavy grip and perhaps even subsidizes) the backend CDN and enforcing that stuff in a rudimentary way.

"TLS between backend connections" usually involves termination and decryption on the frontend webserver and re-encryption of the upstream traffic, whatever it may be.
by mroche | 2025-12-01 03:12:46+00:00
I found gitea's interface to be so unusably bad that i switched to full-fat GitLab.

Was this Gitea pre-UI redesign or after? 1.23 introduced some major UI overhauls, with additional changes in the following releases. Forejo currently represents the Gitea 1.22 UI, reminiscent of earlier GitHub design.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-01 03:13:14+00:00
>> We've had automated theorem proving since the 60s.

> By that logic, we've had LLMs since the 60s!

From a bit earlier[0], actually:

Progressing to the 1950s and 60s We saw the development of the first language models.

Were those "large"? I'm sure at the time they were thought to be so.

0 - https://ai-researchstudies.com/history-of-large-language-mod...
by LexiMax | 2025-12-01 03:13:33+00:00
Conservapedia already exists if you care about the politics involved.

Grokipedia is just a lazy low-effort vanity project of an unlikable billionaire. And that's a sentiment I've seen from conservatives and liberals.

EDIT: I think it's worth mentioning that tech oligarchs once pretended to be progressive because it was the "in" thing to do. They are now pretending to be conservative because it's the "in" thing to do.

But the truth is that they have no real morals and only believe in their own wealth and power. Even if you think their politics align with yours, it is only a temporary convenience, they will discard you as sure as they discarded liberals.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-01 03:13:44+00:00
I think it's fair to consider remote push-based as the "default" Ansible setup against which one measures. In my experience, the #1 talking point people use to praise Ansible is that you don't need to install anything locally, just remotely push configs over ssh. Therefore, it seems fair to consider that the typical Ansible setup. Maybe the community has pivoted, but in the past at least that was my experience.
by yoyo250 | 2025-12-01 03:14:14+00:00
It looks more realistic than zmrlft/GreenWall.

zmrlft's approach involves creating private repositories and more for drawing graphics.

This uses AI to provide codebases that appear complete, even with full CI/CD workflows(If it can run).

Maybe I could try contributing to a codebase with different GitHub accounts, creating a bunch of confusing and useless code that looks like a Microhard, Zeta or Goggle repository......
by b112 | 2025-12-01 03:15:42+00:00
FTC looks like its legislation is from the 70s, yet it is still being done in TV and movies.

Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.

Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.

One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.

Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...
by loganhood | 2025-12-01 03:16:27+00:00
> It is almost 2026 and really only a matter of time before AI papers over all those little cracks it currently has, and truly delivers on the promise of vibe-coding. So the question now becomes, do you really want to learn that new language and become a newbie again at this late a stage?

AI-assisted coding - not full-blown vibecoding, but having an AI agent generate code under close direction, supervision, and review - allows me to work competently in a bigger set of languages/frameworks than ever before. In particular, in the last year I've written quite a bit of Typescript and Python without ever having learned those languages properly. They're both close enough to Ruby - a language I do know well - that I can read the code and understand what it does; or ask the AI questions when I see a language idiom I don't know.

Maybe, given enough time, I'll accidentally learn some new languages this way!
by graemefawcett | 2025-12-01 03:16:51+00:00
I posted the Rspec version of this earlier this week on Obie's keynote on Ruby + TDD + AI.

I've been working on a project to turn markdown into a computational substrate, sort of Skills+. It embeds the computation in the act of reading the file so you don't have to teach anything (or anyone) how to do anything other than read the data on the page along with the instructions on what to do with it. It seemed the simplest way of interacting with a bunch of machines that really love to read and write text.

I use a combination of reference manuals and user guides to replace the specs as a description of intent for the input to the process. They need to be written and accurate anyways and if they're the input to the process, then how can they not be. After all

requirements = specs = user stories = tests = code = manuals = reference guides = runbooks

They're all different projections of the same intent and they tend to be rather difficult to keep in sync, so why not compress them?

https://tech.lgbt/@graeme/115642072183519873

This lets one artifact play all of the roles in the process, or for anything non-trivial, you can use compositional vectors like ${interpolation:for-data.values}, {{include:other:sections-as.whole-units}} or run special ```graphnode:my-funky-cold-medina:fetch fences that execute code found on other nodes and feed the output through middleware to transform and transpile it into the parent document.

Think of it like Rack for your thoughts.

I threw the AST thing on it because I'd been playing with that node and thought a symbol table would be useful for two reasons. Hard to hallucinate a symbol table that's being created deterministically and if I've got it, it saves scanning entire files when I'm just looking for a method.

New computing paradigms sometimes require new new tools.

I think you're absolutely right about the rest of it. LLM assisted development is the process of narrowing the solution space by contextual constraints and then verifying the outcome matches the intent. We need to develop tools on both ends of that spectrum in order to take full advantage of them.

Try /really/ telling one what you want next time, instead of how to do it. See if your results are any better
by owlbite | 2025-12-01 03:17:36+00:00
This book provides a high level overview of many methods without (on a quick skim) really hinting at the practical usage. Basically this reads as a encyclopedia to me, whereas Nocedal and Wright is more of an introductory graduate course going into significantly more detail on a smaller selection of algorithms (generally those that are more commonly used).

Picking on what I'd consider one of the major workhorse methods of continous constrained optimization, Interior Point Methods get a 2-3 page super high level summary in this book. Nocedal and Wright give an entire chapter on the topic (~25 pages) (which of course still is probably insufficient detail to implement anything like a competitive solver).
by chanux | 2025-12-01 03:18:22+00:00
I looked into this recently. But came up with.. nothing that worked me.

I think I was looking for something like Migadu[1] for git hosting. Cheap, private and for personal use. The best option is probably to self host.

I tried to fish out some ideas with an ASK HN thread but it did not get any attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011054

I have started putting my new stuff in Codeberg. Some of the private projects have manually update private mirrors on GCP (free so far).

[1] https://migadu.com/pricing/
The HA developers are insane
by justsomedumbass | 2025-12-01 03:18:44+00:00
The level of difficulty in setting up a device with HA is ridiculous. I'm a computer tech for 30 years, and I have to pull my hair out to make anything work with that system. How non-tech people are supposed to deal with it is unimaginable. It's not straightforward, easy, simple, intuitive, or really useful since it requires a PHD to operate.
by breve | 2025-12-01 03:19:09+00:00
They care.

When the US government acts in an erratic, unreliable, and untrustworthy manner, large organisations naturally look to de-risk their infrastructure and supply chains by removing American products and services from them:

https://dub.uu.nl/en/news/can-dutch-universities-do-without-...

It's the same reason many countries don't want Chinese products in their telecommunications infrastructure. They don't trust what the Chinese government will do, or rather they do trust that the Chinese government will do things that aren't in their best interests:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63764450
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-01 03:19:18+00:00
> but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary

Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all the more rage in the coming years, unexperienced hires will prove many times more costly. (10x garbage with agents).

So companies are going to concentrate their worker base even more with experienced folks. They need fewer of them. Yes. But quality matters more than ever.

I really feel bad for the new graduates. For no fault of their own, the bar went up so high. Unless they’re a child prodigy doing some coding projects on the side since the age of 10 - no one will hire them. So how will they ever gain the experience they need?

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a reinvention of coding schools - that will now focus on fundamental and industry knowledge - imparted by other veterans, instead of teaching applied skills.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-01 03:19:32+00:00
> Musk isn’t writing the articles, Grok is.

The AI is necessarily biased based on what it's trained on, and the prompt it uses. Most of the time, there is a plausible deniability at play, which is what tech oligarchs rely upon to shape your world.

Thankfully in the case of Grok, we know for a material fact that it uses a biased prompt because Twitter users have tricked it into being repeated publicly.
by butvacuum | 2025-12-01 03:19:46+00:00
My question was rhetorical and intended to point out that granting an exception for 'good' software to do a bad thing is just allowing bad actor to do the bad thing.

Then, when the exception has to be revoked, the backlash is massive. Look up the recent example of the driver FanControl used to issue SMBus commands being blacklisted.
by protocolture | 2025-12-01 03:22:46+00:00
Well my last attempt turned out to be a vendor issue. It was officially acknowledged by a vendor support rep. It had to do with their unique method of populating a whitelist with DNS entries, and weird response chain to blocks in that state.

I read through the backlog, ensured I had completely exhausted every other avenue (short of 3 more weeks of yelling at one of the involved vendors for information about how they were performing their whitelisting) and had available captures for network and application, full reproducibility steps and details of everything that had been interrogated. I even remember linking similar issues, and explaining how I ruled out their causes.

In fact I am still relatively confident that the way mobile browsers were responding to the bug, probably constitutes a bug in itself but honestly, cant be assed to pursue it.

When enough time has passed I will probably produce a blog about the issue, so it can be digested by the next iteration of the troubleshooting machine. But I really dont feel compelled to provide further data to the stackoverflow community directly considering their complete lack of response. Even closing it as a duplicate of an existing issue would have been helpful, but it wasn't a duplicate so it was just ignored.
by dabockster | 2025-12-01 03:23:12+00:00
> After it suggested some undocumented kernel param with the nvidia kernel module, I said that's it, let's try something else and reinstalled with Gnome.

> To my surprise, it worked without issue. I've been using it like this for weeks now.

> I have no idea if the explanation is good or not but chatgpt said it's because my hardware + proprietary nvidia driver + plasma wayland was a bad combination.

GNOME has more paid devs than KDE and therefore has better quality overall. It sucks as I love KDE's UX but I had rough patches using it as well.
by kikokikokiko | 2025-12-01 03:24:44+00:00
Yes, the analogy to the bell curve doesn't fit this use case very well, I didn't noticed it before. But the point still stands: non heterosexual behaviour is a tiny minority compared to the norm. So, abnormal is a perfectly good word to describe non-heterosexual behaviour. Once again, it doesn't make it bad per se. I just can't stand word police, which is just another facet of thought police.
by bluGill | 2025-12-01 03:26:14+00:00
Last time I entountered a mainframe they religiously rebooted - full power cycle every six months. a few years before their power backup failed in an emergency and for months aftrewards they were trying to figure out what all was running on that thing and how to get it started. By rebooting people starting a process remember to get it in the startup sequence - or at least only a few moths have passed so odds are they remember how it works.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-12-01 03:26:21+00:00
The author‘s reasons seem sensible (https://eldred.fr/blog/codeberg/)

But I'm sort of disappointed the end result doesn't seem like it's any better for users? (not blaming the author)

The benefits for the maintainer are also mostly philosophical... Which is a shame

I just tried Codeberg

- I get constant "Making sure you're not a bot!" anime girls

- The login with Github is hidden behind a minuscule drop down arrow. Seemingly intentionally obscured.. either have the option clearly, or don't have it at all..

- the format is identical to github with zero improvements to layout. It still has the README at the bottom, where you have to scroll past a billion files to even see what the project is about. Ex: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot Why not just make the README the landing page, and then the file tree a separate tab? Or some horizontal side-by-side layout

Blindly copying the market leader and offering nothing new .. just doesn't seem like a winning strategy? It either indicates a lack of imagination or initiative. This space has some very clear room for improvements..
by vannevar | 2025-12-01 03:26:24+00:00
>...but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along.

I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September.

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/11/2...