MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-31 18:33:16+00:00
Projecting an image of legitimacy behooves the government because it makes everything they do (and there is almost always someone who loses dearly whenever the government does something) that much less likely to be resisted. Government is always pushing at the limits of its authority or at least going right up to them so just "seeming" a little more legitimate in the minds of as many people as possible pays back because at the margin that turns into a bunch of fights you don't have to fight, all the work you don't have to do to justify your actions, the appeals that aren't filed, etc, etc.

Think about how HN just takes whatever the EPA says at face value vs scrutinizing ICE. Every office, department, etc, etc, aspires to get the EPA treatment from as much of society as possible. Acting the part is part is part of that.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-31 18:34:21+00:00
I heard that the YouTube channel isn't official and that watching them on Archive.Org is preferred. But they're not especially well organized on the Archive. Here's a link to a torrent with all the episodes, which might be a bit of overkill if you're just trying to find a single episode.

https://archive.org/details/computer-chronicles-full-epidose...
by rasz | 2025-12-31 18:34:32+00:00
Equipment not product. It started with money going to R&D and scams like epic HSMC https://www.chinatalk.media/p/billion-dollar-heist-how-scamm... but Chinese are patient and real innovation eventually rises to the top. Case in point Made in China 2025 - looked like pipe dream 10 years ago, yet became bitter reality for western component manufacturers.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-31 18:34:47+00:00
From https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-facility-a...:

> Duke has a F&A rate of 61.5% with the NIH, which means that for every dollar provided to a Duke faculty member conducting research, an additional 61.5 cents is given to the University to compensate for its F&A costs.

This is not an uncommon overhead rate for a large university, and is in line with overhead rates at the largest government contractors. That doesn't mean it's entirely reasonable or a sign of an efficient operation.
by chistev | 2025-12-31 18:34:56+00:00
Tech wise?

Keep improving my Python and Javascript and my knowledge of their associated frameworks/libraries by building more and more projects. I want to specialize in these two languages. Tech might be my only route away from being broke, I have to give it my all.

Book wise?

Read at least 24 books, 2 books for each month of the year. I only managed 13 books this year. Not bad, but not good enough. By read, I mean finish. And I don't mean forcing myself to read a book I'm not feeling simply to add to the count. There are lots of interesting books out there to be read.

I wrote about books I read this year in my blog post here -

https://www.rxjourney.net/list-of-books-i-finished-reading-i...

Social media wise?

I got banned by Facebook earlier this year for account integrity issues. I was mad as hell because I've had that account since 2011 but all my appeals failed. But, with time I think I started to see the bright side. These platforms have a negative effect on mental health and I'm still trying to limit my use of Twitter (yes, I still call it Twitter). Basically, my goal is try to use these platforms less.

Fitness wise?

I registered at the gym for the very first time some months ago. And it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I joke with my friends and tell them that I'm mad at them for never trying to force me to go to the gym. It's just an amazing feeling seeing myself do things I couldn't do before. Handling weights I couldn't handle just a few weeks or months ago, and seeing myself being able to run longer on the threadmill by virtue of being consistent. It makes me feel like the principle applies to everything in life. If I show up everyday and keep trying to do something just a little above my current ability, I'll get better and see the results.

I haven't missed a single gym session since I registered, and my goal for 2026 is to keep up the consistency. By the end of 2026 I hope to look back at myself and be amazed at how far I've come.

Health wise?

Try to eat healthy and do healthy things. Health is wealth. What's the point of anything if you're sick?

Financial wise?

To have at least 8,000 usd saved.

A specific number, I know. But there's a reason for that. Of all the things listed here, I think this one is going to be the one that might be out of reach for me.

But imagine what we could accomplish if we showed up every single day until the end of 2026!

Endless possibilities.
by kbrkbr | 2025-12-31 18:35:02+00:00
> Removing CO2 from the air is a pipe dream for several obvious reasons.

For me at least both your arguments are not obvious.

There are a lot of things that are harder to put in the atmosphere than to remove them. Stones for example.

The second one is less of an argument, but rather a question. Why not the UN, the US, China, or Europe?
by easyThrowaway | 2025-12-31 18:35:21+00:00
It's a meaningful change in behavior though.

Compared to us nerds, people aren't leaving Windows "to fight the evil Empire and join the rightful FOSS fight" or whatever pretentious bullshit de jour.

They're leaving for the same reason most people stopped buying Roombas or Sonos Soundbars: New versions kinda suck, they have become expensive (if they have to buy a new device if they can't upgrade to Windows 11) and Knockoffs (Sure, linux isn't a knockoff but bear with me) or alternatives like macOS are good enough.

If your laptop is just a big window into Notion, Clickup, Jira, Slack or your web mail client, your OS has become entirely disposable.
by socialcommenter | 2025-12-31 18:35:48+00:00
From reading the TIL, it doesn't appear as if Simon used LLM for a large portion of what he did; only the initial suggestion to check the archive, and the web tool to make his process reproducible. Also, if you read the script from his chat with Claude code, the prompt really does the heavy lifting.

Sure, the LLM fills in all the boilerplate and makes an easy-to-use, reproducible tool with loads of documentation, and credit for that. But is it not more accurate to say that Simon is absurdly efficient, LLM or sans LLM? :)
by kccqzy | 2025-12-31 18:36:05+00:00
Strong disagree about laziness. If the dev is lazy they will not make a path for it. When they are not lazy they actually make a path and write a comment explaining why they think this is unreachable. Taking the time to write a comment is not a sign of laziness. It’s the complete opposite. You can debate whether the comment is detailed enough to convey why the dev thinks it’s unreachable, but it’s infinitely better than no comment and leaving the unreachability in their head.
by fweimer | 2025-12-31 18:36:41+00:00
Bundling the JRE in the bundle typically results in something that is not redistributable with the default OpenJDK license: The Java ecosystem is heavily tilted towards the Apache license, but Hotspot is licensed under the GPL v2 only (no classpath exception). The Apache license and older GPL versions (before 3) are generally assumed to be incompatible.
by hinkley | 2025-12-31 18:38:50+00:00
Back in the 00’s I worked at a place where we were still ignoring WLB and would work until seven a couple nights a week on average. But the building AC shut off at 6. A few of us noticed that the later it got the worse our decisions and the worse the bickering and we eventually got to the policy that anyone could declare Deciding done for the evening when they realized we were just tired, hot, and stuffy. Every minute past about 6:15 got worse, particularly in summer.

I’m sure the CO2 was part of it but lack of circulation also means increasing temperature, especially with a bunch of people in a small meeting room. Long meetings themselves are a problem and any excuse to call it early is probably worth it even if it’s not entirely true.
by GrantMoyer | 2025-12-31 18:38:52+00:00
Even with modern digital codecs and streaming, there's usually chroma subsampling[1], so the color channels may have non-square "pixels" even if overall pixels are nominally square. I most often see 4:2:0 subsampling, which still has square pixels, but at half resolution in each dimension. However 4:2:2 is also fairly common, and it has half resolution in only one dimension, so the pixels are 2:1. You'd have trouble getting a video decoding library to mess this up though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling
by metadope | 2025-12-31 18:39:23+00:00
Someone once proposed a National Sales Tax. I think it was suggested that we could eliminate personal income taxes if we imposed a federal sales tax on all purchases.

Liberals vehemently opposed the idea, calling it 'regressive', meaning it would be socially backwards, but the idea held appeal as a simple and fair way of "taxing everyone equally". For some reason, a majority of public opinion leaned left on this particular idea, and it never gained a foothold.

When I learned of the blanket tariffs being imposed on everything imported into the US, I think I knew what I was seeing-- this was a National Sales Tax in disguise. This was an attempt to fund the federal government off the backs of people, who will at the very least pay 10% more for everything they buy.

The big lie was told-- that this was an emergency necessary correction for an ongoing American-life-threatening international trade imbalance. But the real lie was bald-faced, right there in front of us-- everybody was going to have to pay more for everything, because this was, and is, a new tax.

I think there's a slim chance the Supreme Court may not even issue a decision addressing the legality of the president's impertnent array of tariffs. Although two full months have passed since oral arguments were made before the court, we may have an even longer wait for a decision, because it sure looks like John Roberts and company can't find/manufacture a reason to uphold/allow the president's seizure of tariff power.

They have demonstrated a preference for empowering the president. The court's character is displayed with quick mute indecipherable decisions from the shadow docket, while unpopular new anti-precedents get leaked ahead of release, delayed until opinion can be spun. So I would not be surprised to see the decision delayed, maybe even all the way to next October.

However it turns out, I'll pay the price and take my medicine, and try to be happy.
by sak84 | 2025-12-31 18:39:26+00:00
I think you're right that 10x isn't realistic for most work, and Brooks is still mostly correct. The "No Silver Bullet" argument holds because most of software development isn't typing code faster.

But you're describing exactly the shift that matters. You're not running faster, you're getting better quality. You're more likely to understand dependencies, write tests, try multiple solutions. That's the actual productivity gain.

The marshmallow challenge point isn't about whether AI makes you 10x faster. It's about the mindset shift. The MBAs didn't lose because they were slower. They lost because they spent their time planning the perfect approach instead of iterating.

The memory leak example from Boris Cherny isn't about AI being reliable. It's about his coworker not having the baggage of "this is how you debug memory leaks." They just tried asking Claude first. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But the willingness to try it first is what creates the gap.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-12-31 18:39:30+00:00
Why? It's not well suited to it - fundamentally the language semantics lead to very large distributions, slow startup and expecting a runtime on the machine. Okay, I hear this can be solved by Graal, but that's a whole piece of its own complexity that you'd never have to worry about with a tool written in something like Go.

Python has many similar properties, but at least there I can understand that Python is a 'pretty' language to write things in. Java has never been something that I have ever wanted to choose, and far, far less so when there's a big hill to climb like this.

I guess I fundamentally disagree with all the statements in the article like "This needs to change". I don't think it does. I would much rather than people wrote CLIs in Go or Rust than Java, 100% of the time the latter has been more painful for me to consume.
by mikethe | 2025-12-31 18:39:43+00:00
Greetings again..

I have now read more of the book on oberon, and confess that I lost traction. It seems very clear that he is using objects, and my bias against them is very strong. I have heard it said that both oberon and plan9 are beautiful, but completely different.

I'd be interested in your take on the two of them, when, if, each of them should be used, and why. I am currently attempting to install plan9/9front/9legacy et. al. I understand that oberon, being much smaller, could be very useful for learning purposes, but if you don't actually approve of OO, then.. is it really the kind of thing you want to be teaching people. Obviously, you want people to see a bit of everything, just so they are aware of alternate ways of doing things. At the same time, most people will assume that the first thing you show them is the way you actually want them to do it, and will tread the alternatives as what you present them as, curiosities, potentially useful. So, if the objective is plan9, then what would actually be needed would be a .. well.. a tutorial for plan9. A tutorial that gradually built the operating system, explaining the logic step-by-step. There -is- actually at least one tutorial that does such a thing, that I am aware of, but what it takes as it's inspiration, I haven't checked out yet. This is the one: https://os.phil-opp.com/
by bespokedevelopr | 2025-12-31 18:40:01+00:00
I previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side.

My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.

I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.

Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.

On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.

As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
by kbr2000 | 2025-12-31 18:40:08+00:00
"It was able to squeak, but not to speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused to transmit one intelligible sentence." [0]

"A translation of Legat's article on Reis' invention was obtained by Thomas Edison prior to his filing his patent application on a telephone in 1877. In correspondence of 1885, Edison credits Reis as having invented "the first telephone", with the limitation that it was "only musical not articulating"." [1]

Fascinating stuff nonetheless, these inventors and their ideas... See also previous experimenters [2]

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

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis#Previous_e...
by mindslight | 2025-12-31 18:40:36+00:00
These quotes are harrowing, as I encounter the exact same ego-stroking sentence structures routinely from ChatGPT [0]. I'm sure anyone who uses it for much of anything does as well. Apparently for anything you might want to do, the machine will confirm your biases and give you a pep talk. It's like the creators of these "AI" products took direct inspiration from the name Black Mirror.

[0] I generally use it for rapid exploration of design spaces and rubber ducking, in areas where I actually have actual knowledge and experience.
by _vertigo | 2025-12-31 18:40:46+00:00
If you invent a person and assume their identity, that's still a false identity.

> I always grew up with the assumption that everything on the internet is most likely fake.

How you interact with the internet is not really relevant to the discussion. The average person does not interact with the internet in the same way that people on this forum do, so that should not be the yardstick by which we judge this.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-31 18:41:04+00:00
Not really. Lots of companies have valuable data they sell and have been in business for decades just fine. It's even better for reddit because it's user generated so they don't even have to do anything. The users who left during the API debacle are not the vast majority of users which are generally casual and do not give a single shit about what happened, much as tech people like to think otherwise.
by m132 | 2025-12-31 18:41:12+00:00
Erlang! Indeed a crazy idea (in a good way!), and while I'm not normally a big fan of unikernels, now you've got me seriously intrigued :)

I've been dabbling in Erlang and OS development myself, my biggest inspirations being Microsoft Singularity and QNX. The former is a C# lookalike of what you're making, or at least that's how it seems from my perspective.

The readme mentions a FreeBSD-like system call interface, but then the drivers and the network stack are written in Erlang. Is that actually a unikernel design with BEAM running in the kernel, or more of a microkernel hosting BEAM, with it providing device handling and the user space?
by Rendello | 2025-12-31 18:42:00+00:00
Ay, there's the rub. Professional video makes tend to be pushed into making videos for a more general audience, and niche topics are left to first-timers who haven't developed video-making skills and (tend to) go on and on.

I've produced a few videos, and I was shocked at how difficult it was to be clear. I have the same problem with writing, but at least it's restricted in a way video making isn't. There's so many ways to make a video about something, and most of them are wrong!
by pear01 | 2025-12-31 18:42:02+00:00
It's really not that dramatic. Just build it like more classic media. Curated content the company takes responsibility for, closed platform, pay upfront. Or have public programming, that is the oldest model there is.

Ad driven online content is especially bad for kids. But let's not pretend the only way to find an alternative is to end the world.

The fact is the "bad" solution is popular because consumers say they care about these things but then in real life they act like they don't. If no one watched the problem would solve itself. Thus, I'm not sure the solution is even to be found in platforms, if parents are burned out or don't have ways to make better choices for their kids.

That's a reason for these laws, to essentially just take it out of people's hands.
by doug_durham | 2025-12-31 18:42:11+00:00
Typing is great, presuming that the developer did a thorough job of defining their type system. If they get the model wrong, or it is incomplete then you aren't really gaining much out of a strictly typed language. Every change is a fight. You are likely to hack the model to make the code compile. There is a reason that Rust is most successful at low level code. This is where the models are concrete and simple to create. As you move up the stack, complexity increases and the ability to create a coherent model goes beyond human abilities. That's why coding isn't math or religion. Different languages and approaches for different domains.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-31 18:42:12+00:00
> A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them

This is only true if the probability distributions for the values of the individual deals are rather uncorrelated (or even better: stochastically mostly independent).
by gyptazy | 2025-12-31 18:42:26+00:00
Sylve (by Alchemilla and sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation) is an open-source project that tries to make virtualization on FreeBSD simple and user friendly. It uses Bhyve for virtual machines, Jails for containers and takes advantage of ZFS for storage. The backend is written in Go and the frontend in SvelteKit, which gives it a clean and modern look. The idea behind it is to provide something similar to Proxmox but made for FreeBSD - including clustering support which lacks in most UI stuff (yes, cbsd can it on the cli).
by kube-system | 2025-12-31 18:42:33+00:00
Yeah, they are probably a disturbance at best. Like pets, large signs, beach balls, and alcohol alcoholic beverages, which are other things on the list.

"security" is a lot more broad than just "preventing terrorist attacks"

You don't need to be a super l33et h4x0r to disrupt an event -- you could knock around a beach ball or turn off a display with the IR blaster on a flipper zero. Not everything is life or death.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-31 18:43:38+00:00
When was this, before or after Nano Banana Pro came out? This is a well known bug, or rather, intended behavior to some extent, because it goes through content filters on Gemini which can be overly strict so it doesn't edit it as you'd expect.

You can try it on AI studio for free, which does not have the same strict content filters, and see if it still works for your use case now.
by neogodless | 2025-12-31 18:43:40+00:00
Based on Tesla's stock price and P/E ratio, it would seem most people do believe what you're suggesting, right?

But I am curious what the end-to-end math looks like for all costs incurred in Cybercab rideshare services, maintenance, insurance, repairs, and so forth, and how that calculates out per mile. And of course the volume of rideshares, given the tepid pace most Tesla announcements come to fruition and scale.

The Model 3 / Y scaled better than many predicted, but since then, other promises have gone the other way.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-12-31 18:43:47+00:00
The PC as a growth segment was at an end, but that’s because Microsoft cornered the market.

It was good enough and they just needed to make security fixes and tweaks; and I still would have paid for it!

Yet, the leaders at Microsoft found a way to lose their marketshare.

tl;dr; it just needed to remain quiet, boring, but reliable to remain a cashcow.