MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrweasel | 2025-12-05 14:22:04+00:00
> HBO Max and Netflix are director competitors

I disagree. Spotify and YouTube Music are competitors, because I can switch freely between them, and expect more or less the same catalog. HBO and Netflix are supplementary and many will just get both, because switching from one to the other makes no sense. For example I can't watch Star Trek on HBO and the rights deals made with the studios ensure that I'll never be able to watch it one both.

Assuming that Netflix, Disney, Paramount and HBO where competing, then why aren't pricing at rock bottom? There's zero competition and removing HBO won't change a damn thing, other than removing one subscription for a large number of people (potentially).
Does this AI maximalist company (HN invested) scare / inspire you as much as me?
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-12-05 14:22:47+00:00
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rocketable

So their pitch is roughly “buy a successful saas company, get the humans to train an AI and then fire the humans, the (LLM) keeps the compmay running.

Now I thought this was laughable for about a second.

Then I remembered one of my maxims of management - that managers pretend they rank “hiring the best people” so that if things go wrong it was not the manager who failed to design a working system but that they hired the wrong people.

So imo management is building a system to run a company (/machine) - and that’s what’s happening here

It’s an awesome idea. I have no idea if it’s doable but even if you only need 10% of the humans to keep it ticking over there is a lot of white collar work about to become replaced
by pandaman | 2025-12-05 14:22:51+00:00
Snopes excluded itself from archiving. I let you guess why.

My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE. Imagine if it was archived and available now?
by roflmaostc | 2025-12-05 14:22:52+00:00
> Q: What if I need matrix dimensions (M, N, K) not found in your configurations? >A: 1. You can find the nearest neighbor configuration (larger than yours) and pad with zeros. 2. Feel free to post your dimensions on GitHub issues. We are happy to release kernels for your configuration.

Lol, this will be potentially much slower than using the general matmul kernel.

However, I like this kind of research because it really exploits specific hardware configurations and makes it measurable faster (unlike some theoretical matmul improvements). Code specialization is cheap, and if it saves in the order of a few %, it quickly reimburses its price, especially for important things like matmul.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-05 14:23:20+00:00
In my interpretation of the hacker spirit, hackers don't complain, they do stuff.

What a hacker would do when faced with hostility would be to work around it, in a way that is clever and efficient. Maybe replicate the functionality of an online service with open source software and some glue, use a proxy to block annoyances, use scrapping techniques to extract the data you want, etc...

Showing a Clippy avatar is nothing like that. It doesn't solve a problem, it demands that others fix the problem for you, but hackers don't ask, they take the matter in their own hands. And the Clippy character, it is trying to help, hackers don't need help. They may take whatever help they get, but if they don't get it, they can figure it out by themselves. They are not well known for giving help either, they can, but unlike Clippy, they are not going to do your job and expect involvement on your part. The focus is on solving problems using the resources they have at their disposal.

Ironic since the initiative has been launched by Louis Rossman, who I consider a true hacker. He started getting known by posting YouTube video of him ranting and fixing Macbooks. He has an unauthorized repair business, and the way he got these computers working, mostly using standard electronic workshop equipment, gray market parts and a working brain is a very "hacker" thing. However it seems like he went from repairing stuff with some ranting to full time ranting.
by hylaride | 2025-12-05 14:23:42+00:00
> Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.

I know some people running independent community fiber ISPs. Digging trenches can be a nightmare depending on the neighbourhood. You can have property ownership issues, other utilities being present, permit nightmares, different ground/soil types, etc. That ignores the fact that when somebody else digs they can hit your lines and repairing that is a pain.

Digging is better, though. But it’s not necessarily as easy as one may think.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-05 14:24:32+00:00
My wife works a lot with LLMs and writing, and some time in episode 3 she was like, “I’m pretty sure a lot of this was written by AI.”

The long talking-in-circles conversations, especially.

That’s in addition to repeating everything several times, which is just a Netflix bad-on-purpose thing to account for people who aren’t paying much attention.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-05 14:24:41+00:00
As developer starting coding in the 1980's, that always valued high level approaches to computing than plain bits and bytes, I find this a kind of tragedy, given that productive tools helps everyone.

I love a quote from from some VB folks, that while others laught of them using VB, they were laughing all the way to the bank themselves.

My only complaint about visual environments, is that not all offer modular tools, the EEE IC version of a module or function, some are quite primitive only allowing one screen for the whole flow.

I wonder what place will be left for the TTY clones and vi emulation folks, when everything on the system is driven by systems programmed in agentic tools, command line wizardry replaced by MCP like tools and such.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-05 14:25:20+00:00
"Retarded" is a medical term which properly refers to disabled people. Do you think that is acceptable as petty banter?

I referred to western countries outsourcing their manufacturing elsewhere, which would lead them shifting their pollution elsewhere.

Air pollution is not the only form of pollution either. China currently has some of the most contaminated waterways in the world.

China is addressing pollution finally, but since it is a dictatorship officials routinely misreport data to please their superiors, and the public cannot discuss such issues properly as they arise.
by marknutter | 2025-12-05 14:25:30+00:00
I learn the same way, and I have to say, learning with LLMs now has been a very rewarding and validating experience. I struggled with the traditional school system my whole academic career, and I learn in the same way you describe. These days, I can start at the top high-level concepts and with the help of a competent LLM drill down as far as I need to from there.
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-05 14:25:40+00:00
> That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought.

I think too many people have forgotten that this is by far one of the best quality of the internet, especially the more personal one.

There does not need to be a financial exchange. Sometimes it’s enough to share content and read content others have shared.
by Retric | 2025-12-05 14:26:12+00:00
High end ICE cars have long been treated as disposable items. 3 year lease and then resell for 1/2 of its initial price so suddenly it’s cheaper than new midrange models for good reasons.

Lower end cars on the other hand can be worth 3/4th of their initial value 5 years out, that’s a durable good.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-05 14:26:34+00:00
It is nice stuff. I have several UniFi devices in a 2200 sq foot old house that are wired on Ethernet and the WiFi is great everywhere. They also have a line of point-to-point modified WiFi radios for long range links and it took about 30 minutes to set up a link between my house and another house on the property.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-12-05 14:26:58+00:00
I'm 36. When I was in school, I took advantage of every accommodation there was.

For a long time already, I've looked back and thought that all those accommodations were a flaw in the way my generation was raised. In the real world you don't get that, you need to find a way to overcome and/or turn things that make you different into strengths and leverage them to your advantage. It's interesting to see how things have and haven't changed.

Oh, and on another note, I just sent this article to a friend with the comment, "I was finally able to get that Vyvanse filled at an independent pharmacy."
by uriegas | 2025-12-05 14:27:05+00:00
As someone else mentioned here: not all technical debt is created equal. I agree, sometimes the problem are changing requirements, etc. But it is also true that there is technical debt caused by developers who don't take the time to properly design features and will simply implement the first thing that came to their minds. I agree with the author, this kind of technical debt is caused by a mediocre attitude which often propagates to all the team if there is no one that calls it out.

The more interesting discussion to me is: how do you solve this problem once it exists in a team? I guess there are many approaches, but I tend to think that 'lead by the example' is the best you can do as an engineer, but a top-down approach might work better which is what happened at Microsoft when Satya Nadella became CEO.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-05 14:27:05+00:00
You should do at least a bit of research before you basically accuse someone of being a liar and corporate shill for no more reason than it fits your generic worldview.

F1 and F2 are commonly accepted terms for first generation and second generation seeds from hybrid plants. Because these hybrids are created from two stable lines, they are themselves unstable and will produce, at best, seeds of varying quality and at worst entirely sterile plants.

https://www.parkseed.com/blogs/park-seed-blog/understanding-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/wq3heg/question_why...

https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+first+and...

If you're going to pay more for a hybrid seed, it should be only for a first generation, otherwise you don't know what you're going to get. For some crops, like tomatos, that's survivable. For others like corn, that could easily be devastating. It's like playing russian roulette the slow and expensive way.

Note that OP didn't say the seed banks themselves should be illegal, but when you can't identify by visual inspection, it's very high risk for fraud if they're selling what they claim are premium products but are really F2 seeds.
by garciasn | 2025-12-05 14:27:11+00:00
I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my interest further, I would dig into the actual article.

I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR.

I miss GR.
by BlackWater85 | 2025-12-05 14:27:12+00:00
dotAIX-snippet-engine is a small demo of a deterministic execution model for LLMs. It uses a structured “.aix capsule” format that defines metadata, rules, menus, and pre-approved Python snippets.

Instead of letting an LLM generate arbitrary code, the model is constrained to a fixed menu and can only execute the exact snippets embedded in the capsule. This makes behavior reproducible, auditable, and safer than ad-hoc prompt→run workflows.

The project explores an idea that AI workloads may benefit from something closer to HPC job schedulers or VCF-style metadata containers — giving LLMs a predictable interface for code execution rather than free-form generation.

Repo is small, readable, and purely a conceptual demo (no production claims). Thought it might be interesting to others thinking about deterministic AI, reproducibility, or safer AI-assisted codin
by sparklingmango | 2025-12-05 14:27:28+00:00
In parallel, they're also starting to downgrade their quality. In the latest season of Stranger Things there's a wild amount of in-scene exposition, where the characters explain what's happening while it's happening. I did some digging and learned that they may be dumbing down their shows because they know users typically look at their phones while watching Netflix and users are more likely to drop off of a show if they don't know what's going on.

See here: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...

Edit: I did really enjoy Frankenstein.
by ferguess_k | 2025-12-05 14:27:36+00:00
I can add so many:

- Requirements are rarely clear from the beginning;

- We (DE) are not enabling self-service and automation so we are drowned in small requests (add this column for example;

- Upstream rarely notify us about the changes so we only know when downstream alerts us. We end up building expensive pipelines to scan and send alerts. Sometimes the cost of alerts > cost of pipeline itself;

- We have so many ad-hoc requests that sprint is meaningless. If I were the manager I'd abolish sprint completely;

- Shadow knowledge that no one bothered to write down. I tried to write down as much as possible, but there are always more unknowns than knowns;

Working in DE definitely gives me enough motivation to teach myself about lower level CS.
by RGamma | 2025-12-05 14:27:48+00:00
Heh, I think that notion came from watching Nefarious, the 2023 movie by Solomon and Konzelman, where a psychiatrist tries to clarify whether an insane (or possessed?) death row inmate is fit to be executed (they talk about how humanity thinks they've won, while evil is quietly everywhere). The middling review scores don't do it justice.

Yet another thing on my reading list, I guess.
by ky3 | 2025-12-05 14:27:53+00:00
A grid with 19 columns is enough. Every column at worst has all 3 colors, one of them used twice. Once we fix that one color, there are C(4,2)=6 ways of filling out the rest of the entries. Since there are 3 colors, there are exactly 6*3=18 worst possible columns. With 19 columns a repetition is guaranteed, yielding the desired rectangle.

For fun, try strengthening the result to a square.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-05 14:27:58+00:00
I tell this to everyone who will listen. This... paragraph? Statement? Whatever is pure gold.

Quit watching YouTube videos, quit reading tutorials, quit listening to podcasts. The only way you learn is by doing something, and by doing something I mean fucking up doing something. Over, and over, and over.

Just do the thing. That's how you learn. And after you make a whole ton of things that suck, you'll start making a few things that don't.

There's no way around it.
by dan_h | 2025-12-05 14:28:29+00:00
I've felt similarly about RSS for a while now--I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Another issue is when I try to get anyone even slightly non-technical to use RSS they bounce off immediately; it sadly just seems too complex/too much overhead for a large number of users.

I've been trying to build a site/app that adds some features mentioned in this post ("upvoting" based on views, tiktok-style video experience in the app, etc), but it's still very much a WIP and doesn't exactly fix the complexity problems yet. Still, I get encouraged seeing more projects like the OPs that hopefully bring about some sort of RSS resurgence.

[0] https://jesterengine.com
by steego | 2025-12-05 14:28:31+00:00
After watching a bunch of people use the live chat, I am not discouraged by live chat anymore.

I actually think one can make it work, one simply needs to account for moderation and flooding upfront.

The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I would think when a person is ignored by a certain threshold of people, their content should automatically be moderated.

The second feature that’s needed is some sort of flood protection or detection. If a user is pasting or trying to flood the chat with characters, they should be instantly hidden and their content be subject to moderation. Being able to distinguish between copying and pasting on occasion and flooding goes a long way.
by em-bee | 2025-12-05 14:28:45+00:00
i am not telling people that their problem isn't real. i am telling them that their understanding for the cause of their problems isn't what they think it is, or what they are being told it is.

the people who are having problems finding work, facing crime, etc, do not actually have a problem with immigration. they are only getting told by deceptive politicians that dealing with immigration would solve their problems. they are the ones being lied to. that's the nature of a scapegoat.
by bluGill | 2025-12-05 14:28:51+00:00
> So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well

Absolutely. The first generation of a hybrid seed will produce several times more than either traditional seeds or the second generation. You can't reasonably grow your own hybrid seeds as you need to keep your fields to grow those seeds well separated from any other fields.

Now not all plants can be hybridized, and even of those that can I won't state with confidence that all of them have that property. However Maize (corn in US) which is a major world crop does act like this.

> Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable

Not exactly. There is some of that for sure, but there is also that if you are a seed producer you want to ensure your customers get your good seed and not counterfeit that looks just like yours (if you cannot examine cell DNA you can't tell the difference between a first generation hybrid and any other seed).

However the law was written is clearly too broad. It should protect the hybrid seeds - nobody wants any seed claimed as hybrid that isn't a first generation hybrid. However it shouldn't affect any traditionally saved seeds (though where hybrid is available nobody wants them except museums)
by Telemakhos | 2025-12-05 14:29:16+00:00
The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also undercut some of the desire to publish—once your basic info was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less important. As having personal hosting became less and less the norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a long time ago and are never coming back, because the past exists only as memory.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-12-05 14:29:21+00:00
Pythagoras almost certainly was misinterpreted.

Unsayable numbers (the way the Greeks said irrational numbers) can take the wrong meaning. Like, why are they unsayable? Because you’d die before you could say them. Well, it’s not a threat!

Then it turns into this whole ahistorical fabrication impugning Pythagoras who was, otherwise, pretty much the most incredible guy ever.

Now, the “addition particle” is a strawman, but harder to deal with is just numbers. Are numbers real? Are there discrete “things” in the universe? Well, yes there are. Frequencies or quanta do just fine. Now, when there are numbers, they can be added, whether we want to or not.

Another example would be geometries. Are spheres real? Surely! Do they exist on any planet in the universe? It would seem. Are there any perfect spheres? Nope. Do they precede matter and energy? It would seem.

I think we are saying the same thing. Unfortunately, these beliefs are slippery and metaphysical. I take pride, though, in the pythagoreanness of so many of the scientific greats, from Newton to Penrose.
by tooltalk | 2025-12-05 14:29:36+00:00
Sure, shifting pollution to low-cost countries is nothing new -- an inevitable consequence of decades of environmental NIMBYism and "globalization" under neoliberalism (aka, China will democratize). Even China is doing it[1].

1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Indonesia is one of the few countries still building new coal power plants, the most polluting sources of power. Chinese companies are playing a large role despite a pledge by Beijing to halt such support. Nicholas Kusnetz, data analysis by Peter Aldhous, Inside Climate News, Oct 19, 2025
by dzink | 2025-12-05 14:29:57+00:00
In 2009 a Turner Broadcasting executive stood in front of employees and said they are not worried about Online streaming because it only covered 15 minutes of watching time among consumers. TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, HBO, Time Inc were all under the same ownership umbrella along with the entire MGM catalog Ted Turner had acquired at the cost of losing control of his company. There were executives who knew what they were doing but some were performative - using buzz words and bravado to hide that they had no idea. Many were trying to extract as much as possible from both ends - 50% of revenue from consumers and 50% from advertisers. Even when those two were in direct conflict with each-other’s interests. They believed content was king and so they invested in content, instead of distribution. They hoarded their back catalog for years.

In the mean time Netflix started with 3 CDs per month plans and when they began streaming on 2007 we didn’t use it at start because we assumed that it would cut out of the 3 movies allotment. So we were scared to use it for a while. Yet we used it regularly - because unlike the cable service, streaming didn’t have ads. And ads were massive massive abuse and waste of time for consumers. You can benchmark the level of abuse by the types of ads in the super bowl: Alcohol, crypto, gambling, cars…

The reality is that cable was a paid premium service, unlike broadcast TV, which was free and littered with ads. Mix the two and you lose the golden goose.

That said, the bravado of that executive stuck with me since then.