MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amanzi | 2025-12-08 23:03:26+00:00
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too.

The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.

Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.

Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...

And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-08 23:03:29+00:00
I’m not an expert on India-Europe relations, but online I’ve seen a lot of hateful talk towards them from content creators and politicians. I don’t know if that is a misrepresentation but I’ve got the sense that there is hostility. Some of this is cultural animosity but I think it’s also economic - like around having to compete on labor costs. Is it really viable for European politicians to partner with India in that environment? And will India go for it or will they distrust Europe? I think the same question could be asked for Southeast Asian countries too but they’re smaller and maybe are less of a focus in geopolitics.
by defrost | 2025-12-08 23:03:30+00:00
The mining majors, BHP, Rio Tinto, et al have petabytes of surface geochemistry, samples, near surface magnetic maps that penetrate into the crust, 3D seismic maps, drill cores, technical reports on every mine ever, surrounding geology, and good models on where economic feasible (at particular price points) amounts of desirable metals can be found.

For example, there are only so many places significant masses of porphyry copper deposit will be found (although these aren't the only types of copper deposit).

For people interested in subscribing, there are databases such as the S&P portal that scratch some of that industry knowledge.

https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/market-insight...

although they seem to have backed off from a public page about the GIS portal to the mining databases they purchased.

So; pretty much most areas have been scratched - Antartica is still open, the Artic has possibilities .. but should we.

There are known untapped masses of copper, eg: in the US there's a mass that will take 64 years to mine .. that's on Apache land so, you know, it'll be US history all over again poking that one.

* US Supreme Court spurns Native American challenge to Rio Tinto's Arizona copper project - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-supreme-court-spur...
by rio-popper | 2025-12-08 23:03:51+00:00
We actually did try making a pulley-system to reduce weight at one point. The issue was that it moved the headset kind of oddly WRT the person's head, which reduced sensor contact. One thing we intend to try is pulley system + good chinstrap, which might make the headset stay still and let us reduce the weight at the same time. Good ideas!
by codethief | 2025-12-08 23:03:59+00:00
I don't use Office365 much, apart from maybe Outlook (which I have to, for some of my work). However, the other day I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and… it turns out it's completely and utterly broken? I mean, the document looked nothing like the presentation my coworker ended up giving (using the desktop application on Windows(?)). What I saw in the browser was that positions were off, font faces and sizes were inconsistent, etc. etc. It was wild. How do they even manage to sell that?
by heldrida | 2025-12-08 23:04:00+00:00
No, it's different. A "toast" is a floating element, a "push notification" which is detached from the panel, e.g. can disappear quite quickly. The banner is placed closest to the context where the action is triggered, e.g. might require the user to close it. If you have some disability, e.g. cognitive, visual or motor, it's likely to be easier to perceive the information. When a user creates an "issue", the "issue item" is displayed in the list, meaning that you won't need a secondary notification process.
by kolinko | 2025-12-08 23:04:30+00:00
I'd say this is similar to working with assembly vs c++ vs python. Programming in python you learn less about low level architecture trivia than in assembly, but you learn way more in terms of high level understanding of issues.

When I had to deal with/patch complex c/c++ code, I rarely ever got a deep understanding of what the code did exactly - just barely enough to patch what was needed and move on. With help of LLMs it's easier to understand what the whole codebase is about.
by kirb | 2025-12-08 23:04:44+00:00
> Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?

Web engines were honestly not great back then. WebKit was ok but JavaScriptCore was very slow, and of course that’s what iOS, Android, and BB10 were all running on that slow hardware. I have distinct (bad) memories that even “GPU-accelerated” CSS animations were barely 15fps, while native apps reliably got 60fps unless they really messed up. That’s on top of the infamous 300ms issue, where every tap took 300ms to fire off because it was waiting to see if you were trying to double-tap.

So I really think some of the blame is still shared with Apple, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of any malicious intent to prop up the App Store, or just because they were under pressure to build out the iOS platform that there wasn’t enough time to optimise. I suspect it was both.
by netsharc | 2025-12-08 23:05:07+00:00
There's a news story about such a company where they basically throw the bodies in a chest freezer, or stuffed many of them together in one unit, etc. Nightmare fuel...

I have doubts that such a company could keep the power on for the next 200 years, with an increasingly unstable planet (climatically and politically).

Maybe sending your body in a lead coffin into the coldness of space is a better preservation method, maybe that's why the loser billionaires are so interested in going to space..
by gherkinnn | 2025-12-08 23:05:17+00:00
I am lucky in that I haven't used Jira in many years, so here are some examples of how GitHub does it:

- create an issue: redirect to the created issue

- create an issue from a project view (kanban board): close the creation modal, stay on the view, and let the newly created issue show up in the list

- create a sub-issue from within an issue open in a side panel of project view: close the creation modal, stay on the parent issue and render the newly created sub-issue in the section called "sub-issues"

Within the awkward constraints where GitHub projects clash with the old UX of issues this is works very well and I know way beyond any reasonable doubt that the desired action has indeed been performed. Error states like failure to create an issue can be rendered in the modal and I can retry right in context too. I fail to see how toasts would add anything.

In a product based on different principles this might not be possible but then the GitHub doc is internal guidance and not a universal rule.

As an aside, GitHub's issue creation modal used in the project view is well executed.
by carbarjartar | 2025-12-08 23:06:59+00:00
> AI cars are already much safer drivers than humans.

I feel this statement should come with a hefty caveat.

"But look at this statistic" you might retort, but I feel the statistics people pose are weighted heavily in the autonomous service's favor.

The frontrunner in autonomous taxis only runs in very specific cities for very specific reasons.

I avoid using them out of a feeble attempt to 'do my part', but I was recently talking to a friend and was surprised that they avoid using these autonomous services because they drive, what would be to a human driver, very strange routes.

I wondered if these unconventional, often longer, routes were also taken in order to stick to well trodden and predictable paths.

"X deaths/injuries per mile" is a useless metric when the autonomous vehicles only drive in specific places and conditions.

To get the true statistic you'd have to filter the human driver statistics to match the autonomous services' data. Things like weather, cities, number of and location of people in the vehicle, and even which streets.

These service providers could do this, they have the data, compute, and engineering to do so, though they are disincentivized to do so as long as everyone keeps parroting their marketing speak for them.
by kenjackson | 2025-12-08 23:07:01+00:00
I wouldn't say there is no value to it, but I do feel like I learned more using LLMs as a companion than trying to figure everything out myself. And note, using an LLM doesn't mean that I don't think. It helps provide context and information that often would be time consuming to figure out, and I'm not sure if the time spent is proportional to the learning I'd get from it. Seeing that these memory locations mapped to sprites that then get mapped to those memory locations, which map to the video display -- are an example of things that might take a minute to explore to learn, but the LLM can tell me instantly.

So a combination of both is useful.
by almosthere | 2025-12-08 23:07:13+00:00
Most code is simple, the fact that large complex systems are layers of simple code on top of itself, like garbage heaps at the dump, makes it complex. Sticking with the garbage analogy, the LLM is like upgrading from one shovel to an crew of 10 people with excavators to look for a lost Bitcoin hard drive.

Your project is still going to fail, but it will fail faster with the 10 excavators.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-08 23:07:23+00:00
The definition of things such as reasoning, understanding, intellect are STILL open academic questions. Quite literally humans greatest minds are currently attempting to tease out definitions, whatever we currently have falls short. For example see the hard problem of consciousness.

However I can attempt to provide insight by taking the opposite approach here. For instance what is NOT reasoning. Getting a computer to follow a series of steps (an algorithm) is NOT reasoning. A chess computer is NOT reasoning it is following a series of steps. The implications of assuming that the chess computer IS reasoning would have profound affects on so much, for example it would imply your digital thermostat also reasons!
by FreakLegion | 2025-12-08 23:08:18+00:00
According to the site it is.

Revenues -> Eliminate Tax Max without Benefit Credit (parent's #2) closes the gap by 68%.

Benefit Formula -> Slow Benefit Growth for Top Half of Earners (closest option to parent's #3) closes the gap by 41%.

Together these keep the program solvent indefinitely.
by d-lisp | 2025-12-08 23:08:21+00:00
You are the object the camera is bound to, which is elligible for collection when it become unreachable, allowing at some point in time for new allocations to be made with the amount of space you occupied during your life.

Do note that if nothing is done with this space -ever- then your data is not zeroed out, yet you don't exist anymore ?
by nehal3m | 2025-12-08 23:08:24+00:00
Life is full of moments like that. For example on your way to work that same morning, had you left your house 30 seconds later than you did, someone might have had to wait at an intersection longer than they otherwise would have, causing them to narrowly miss being in an accident further down the road instead of being hit. Butterfly effect and all that. You can’t predict the future.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-08 23:09:02+00:00
> I’ve seen a lot of hateful talk towards them from content creators and politicians. I don’t know if that is a misrepresentation but I’ve got the sense that there is hostility...

> Is it really viable for European politicians to partner with India in that environment? And will India go for it or will they distrust Europe?

It doesn't matter.

The decisions that matter to India can be forced through the European Council, and even in those countries with nativist sentiments like Croatia [0], Greece, Cyprus and Italy [1], India increasingly uses it's monetary power to extract the deals it wants - especially because China has decided to increasingly consolidate it's investments in Hungary and Spain instead and OBOR funding in much of Europe has been scaled down [2][3] so the only large economy left that can help.

On top of that, European countries like France are using India as a backdoor for continuing business operations on dual use technology like Safran-UAC's SJ-100 commercial jet project [4].

Essentially, those politically unpopular decisions that require public consent go through the European Council, and everything else is done via business and state-level engagements.

It's the same model China used in the late 2000s and early 2010s when it was at the stage that India is at today.

> I think the same question could be asked for Southeast Asian countries too but they’re smaller and maybe are less of a focus in geopolitics

ASEAN nations like Vietnam already have FTAs with the EU [5] and are conducting influence ops within Europe with impunity [6]

This is why I made an earlier comparison to the EU with the Qing and Mughal Empires - both federal empires collapsed because individual European states made deals with those empires subnational units, which undermined both empires.

[0] - https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-26/mod...

[1] - https://orionpolicy.org/imec-and-the-battle-for-connectivity...

[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67634959

[3] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/re...

[4] - https://idrw.org/original-sam146-engine-likely-to-power-indi...

[5] - https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...

[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-25/berlin-ki...
by ed_elliott_asc | 2025-12-08 23:09:13+00:00
Im really liking it for writing boring code.

As an example I wanted a plugin for visual studio. In the past I would have spent hours on it or just not bothered but I used Claude code to write it, it isn’t beautiful or interesting code, it lacks tests but it works and saves me time. It isn’t worth anything, won’t ever be deployed into production, I’ll likely share it but won’t try to monetise it, it is boring ugly code but more than good enough for its purpose.

Writing little utility apps has never been simpler and these are probably 90% cheaper
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-12-08 23:09:41+00:00
MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.

…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.

I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-08 23:09:49+00:00
That's not great 100% of the time either, but a mix is what I've found to be a bit better for mental health.

> At least every room in my house has ample natural light…

Must be nice, I live in a basement. A place where every room, presumably more than one of them, has ample natural light, costs a minimum of a million dollars, but I still prefer my city to one who's only value proposition is ample sunlight and cheap houses.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-08 23:09:54+00:00
> Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.

Counterpoint: What might have happened is that we expect software to do a lot more than we did in the 90s, and we really don't expect our software features to be static after purchase.

I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.
by dabockster | 2025-12-08 23:10:06+00:00
And not everyone wants to use a cloud AI either. Remember that when tons of cash is on the table, things like license agreements become less enforceable and more of a "don't get caught in the cookie jar" thing. All it would take is something similar to what's going on with book authors/publishers - a major AI provider exposed as using other firms' proprietary code without even considering to get a license - to totally blow up the "safety" of cloud based coding agents.

Local models are becoming more and more capable but the tooling still needs to get better for those.
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-08 23:10:21+00:00
The greed/“capture all of the value” mindset of SaaS kills it, because you can infer the cost of delivery in many cases and beat it.

For anything that is billed by the human, O365 is the benchmark. I’m not paying some stupid company $30/mo for some basic process, I use our scale to justify hiring a couple of contractors to build 80% of what they do for $400-600k in a few months. Half the time I can have them build on powerapps and have zero new opex.
by traceroute66 | 2025-12-08 23:10:31+00:00
No insight here either, but I would guess it is a spin-off ... mostly because it is a US company and in the US spin-off's are generally tax free to both company and shareholders.

Spin-off is where the parent company creates a subsidiary and distributes the shares in the subsidiary to the existing shareholders. So the shareholders end up holding shares of two companies. Share allocation is done on a pro-rata basis so each shareholder still has the same exposure they did before.
by jaccola | 2025-12-08 23:10:53+00:00
With enough money, at least here in the UK, it is possible to set up structures that endure for one sole purpose for many generations.

It was quite common for rich Victorians to donate their grounds/houses to be used for the public good and still today they are owned by the original trust and money from the trust can only be used in a certain way etc... we have many parks because of this (that otherwise could have been developed to extract money).

Obviously the longer the technology takes to develop, the higher the chance something goes wrong; though the concepts of trusts have existed for some 800 years so if it takes only 200 years, I think your chances are good!
by mikewarot | 2025-12-08 23:11:44+00:00
This wouldn't be the first time that the cost of software radically dropped. It happened back during the early 1960s for the first time when IBM introduced the System 360, which included backward compatibility for the 1401. Prior to this point, the maximum lifespan of software was tied to that of the computer in question. The software would be re-written for the next architecture, every time a new computer was purchased.

The advent of the PC, and the appearance of Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, and spreadsheets that could be automated made it possible for almost anyone to write useful applications.

If it gets cheaper to write code, we'll just find more uses for it.
by loandbehold | 2025-12-08 23:12:01+00:00
For me, as a remote developer, it means I'm able to finish my work in 1 hour instead of 8 hours. So I'm able to capture "extra value" in the form of time. In our team everyone uses GitHub Copilot and I use Claude Code. My teammates' productivity increased slightly but my productivity increased a lot. This is because 1. Claude Code is just a better coding agent 2. I invested time to get good at agentic coding. Eventually Copilot will catch up and management will realize that now 1 developer can do what previously would take a whole team.
by accrual | 2025-12-08 23:12:45+00:00
Time is fun to think about. It seems to only matter if one has the facilities to perceive and quantify time passing.

Some suggest time is an illusion. A nice linear construct to help conscious beings integrate in the material world. Eckhart Tolle advises there is no past and future, only now. And in some spiritual models time doesn't exist outside the material world, and takes on a hub and spoke model, where all of time is instantly accessible (think RAM vs tape).

Not saying any of this is true or positing materalism vs not, but it's interesting to ponder.
by freefaler | 2025-12-08 23:12:52+00:00
It's not the social safety, but the bad enforcement of the law. When bad acts are not punished, this is the problem that occurs.

Some social systems like in Israel if you're ablebodied you are given a public service job, like cleaning the park and etc... so you aren't entitled to a check for doing nothing.

South Africa hasn't any meaningful social net and the wealthy people live in special "high security" enclaves with additional guards and fenced perimeters. If you have a lot of hungry people on the street they will be forced to survive somehow and you'd get more crime.
by almosthere | 2025-12-08 23:13:01+00:00
LLMs, long term, have killed most SaaS.

Most SaaS used to be killed by bespoke software engineers that would build some custom thing, and it was integrated perfectly into the legacy system.

Then all those people decided to be managers and go on "i dont care" autopilot mode and hired a bunch of teens that still do care, to some extent. But those teens suck at it, and the old guys just don't really care anymore.

Now with agentic code, instead of "buy splunk" or "buy jira" or whatever thing they are trying to do, they have one of those "teens now in their mid twenties" that are SUPER excited about Agentic flows, either write an agentic tool or simply use an agentic tool to code up the 300 lines of code that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk or whatever. Since most people only use 5% of the total features of any product, there's no reason to buy tools anymore, just build it for a fraction of the cost.

I don't know if the above is where we're at right now, but it's coming.
by kerblang | 2025-12-08 23:13:07+00:00
Kafka is really not intended to improve on this. Instead, it's intended for very high-volume ETL processing, where a classical message queue delivering records would spend too much time on locking. Kafka is hot-rodding the message queue design and removing guard rails to get more messages thru faster.

Generally I say, "Message queues are for tasks, Kafka is for data." But in the latter case, if your data volume is not huge, a message queue for async ETL will do just fine and give better guarantees as FIFO goes.

In essence, Kafka is a very specialized version of much more general-purpose message queues, which should be your default starting point. It's similar to replacing a SQL RDBMS with some kind of special NoSQL system - if you need it, okay, but otherwise the general-purpose default is usually the better option.
by neom | 2025-12-08 23:13:27+00:00
Toronto outright banned a startup I was helping out with in 2021, they ended up packing up and moving it to Miami- Toronto has a rule that the city should not be made more inaccessible to folks with disabilities, and that a delivery robot could potentially cause an accessibility issue on the sidewalk for blind or wheelchair using folks. They didn't reach out to the startup, or tell them about the vote happening at council, they did invite the accessibility advocacy groups in. I agree the startup should have been banned (against my own interests) pending a review, however, I also believe a review of the technology and startup would have left very little room for concern. That said, I'm still skeptical robots on sidewalks are a great idea, ideally they can operate on the roadways.

This issue is going to become an issue with AVs too, if availability is the value prop and number of vehicles creates the availability and there are no humans to drive, I presume we end up with another situation where sidewalks across the world were littered with thousands of those lime/bird scooter things.

https://www.therobotreport.com/toronto-city-council-votes-to...