MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beej71 | 2025-12-02 17:14:10+00:00
Appreciate it!

This response turned into more of an essay in general, and not specifically a response to your post, marginalia_nu. :)

Sharing information, to me, was what made things so great in the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s. Just people helping people explore and no expectation of anything in return. What could you possibly want for? There was tons of great information[1] all around everywhere you turned.

I'm disappointed by how so much of the web has become commercialized. Not that I'm against capitalism or advertising (on principle) or making money; I've done all those, myself. But while great information used to be a high percentage of the information available, now it's a tiny slice of signal in the chaff--when people care more about making money on content than sharing content, the results are subpar.

So I love the small internet movement. I love hanging out on a few Usenet groups (now that Google has fucked off). I love neocities. And I LOVE just having my own webpage where I can do my part and share some information that people find entertaining or helpful.

There's that gap from being clueless to having the light bulb turn on. (I've been learning Rust on and off and, believe me, I've opened plenty of doors to dark rooms, and in most of those I have not yet found the light switch.) And I love the challenge of finding helpful ways to bridge that gap. "If only they'd said X to begin with!" marks what I'm looking for.

I'm not always correct (I challenge anyone to write 5000 words on computing with no errors, let alone 750,000) or as clear as I could be, but I think that's OK. Anyone aspiring to write helpful information and put it online should just go for it! People will correct you if you're wrong[2] :) and you'll learn a *ton*. And your readers will learn something. And you'll have made the small web a slightly larger place, giving us more freedom to ignore the large web.

[1] When I say "great information", I don't necessarily mean "high quality". But the intention was there, and I feel that makes the difference.

[2] It can be really embarrassing to put bad information out there (for me, anyway). I don't want people to find out I don't know something and think less of me. But that's really illogical--I don't even personally know my critics! And here's the thing: when the critics are right (and they're often right!), you can go fix your material. And then it becomes more correct. After a short time of fixing mistakes critics point out, you get on the long tail of errors, and these are things that people are a lot less judgmental about. The short of it is, do the best you can, put your writing out there, correct errors as they are reported or as you find them, and repeat. I cannot stress how grateful I am to everyone who has helped me improve my guides, whether mean-spirited or not, because it's helped me and so many others learn the right thing.
by throwaway150 | 2025-12-02 17:14:29+00:00
> what's the endgame?

Is it not obvious? The endgame is to publish a blogpost that sounds interesting. That itself may be the reward and the endgame for the author.

Someone who has worked for 25 years would definitely have stories. I've worked far longer than that. I've got stories too. But none of the stories are as ridiculous as a "coworker" thinking that of all things IntelliJ would lead to the doom of software engineering or multimedia would lead to the collapse of an industry. I mean, what the heck! How does one even go from "multimedia" to "collapse of an industry". There is no logical connection. On the other hand, "multimedia" creates more work in the industry.

So my application of Occam's Razor tells me, surely the stories are made up to set up strawman that they can take down one by one to write an interesting blog post.

But I'll reiterate that it's a good post. I can like a post and find issues with it at the same time. I find all the strawman a bit forced which detracts from the reading experience.
by SimianSci | 2025-12-02 17:14:30+00:00
free speech absolutism sounds fair in a vacuum but neglects the power disparity that wealth provides in a connected world. Free Speech is not the concept of anyone can say anything without rules. Its about the ability for those without power to be able to speak on an even playing field as those with power.

The Wealthy and powerful have never had to worry about the freedom of their speech in history. They determined what speech was acceptable.

Take a break from defending those actively destroying our society through their actions, intentional or not, and learn the foundations of why free speech is designed the way it is.
by quesera | 2025-12-02 17:14:45+00:00
You are putting way too much faith in the knowability of a historical thing, at the level of detail required to construct and cohere a narrative.

That's convenient, if your preferred mythology matches up to your culture's mainstream accepted view of history. But it is not definitionally more correct.

This is the cognitive bias/belief side of Gell-Mann amnesia, as held by a culture.

I am not discounting the possibility that some mythologies are more true, or more supported, or more plausible, than others. Just that it's not a requirement or a disqualification.
Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon (Part 2)
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-02 17:14:56+00:00
I'm building an open source Amazon.

In other words, an open source decentralized marketplace. But like Carl Sagan said, to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe.

So first I had to make open source management systems for every vertical. I'm launching the first one today, Openfront e-commerce, an open source Shopify alternative. Next will be Openfront restaurant, Openfront grocery, and Openfront gym.

And all of these Openfronts will connect to our decentralized marketplace, "the/marketplace", seamlessly. Once we launch the other Openfronts, you'll be able to do everything from booking hotels to ordering groceries right from one place with no middle men.

The marketplace simply connects to the Openfront just like its built-in storefront does. Together, we can use open source to disrupt marketplaces and make sure sellers, in every vertical, are never beholden to them.

Marketplace: https://marketplace.openship.org Openfront platforms: https://openship.org/openfront-ecommerce Source code: https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront Demo - Openfront: https://youtu.be/jz0ZZmtBHgo Demo - Marketplace: https://youtu.be/LM6hRjZIDcs Part 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410
by deltoidmaximus | 2025-12-02 17:15:32+00:00
Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.
by benoau | 2025-12-02 17:15:59+00:00
God yes.

> Ten years ago they started to build apartments just across the street and I had to get used to close neighbors, about 10 meters from window to window. Soon it became clear that my closest neighbors had roller blinds which they shut down day and night, so the need for me to get something in front of my windows wasn’t very urgent.

I bet they never wondered if they cause the other person to keep their blinds shut all the time...
by shagie | 2025-12-02 17:16:08+00:00
Which government? Who controls the account?

How do I claim it?

How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)

What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?

What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?

---

I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
by fwip | 2025-12-02 17:16:16+00:00
Right, but you don't need to know how it works to know if it is one. Unless I'm misunderstanding this part: "how can you tell if the AI has actually created one for you or not?"

I interpreted that as "I asked the AI to make me one, and now I have one, so it did it," with the operative question being "is it really a multiplayer FPS?"
by electroly | 2025-12-02 17:16:46+00:00
Having never done it myself, I don't know, but I do know that the "microtar" library I picked up off GitHub is buggy when expanding GNU Tar archives but perfect when expanding its own archives. Correctly creating one valid archive is a lot easier than reliably extracting all valid archives. The code appeared competent, I assume tar just has a bunch of historical baggage that you can get wrong or fail to implement.
by ArtDev | 2025-12-02 17:16:51+00:00
Look up how much hospital administrators make and then calculate the massive grifting from every contractor/subcontractor and pharmaceutical company and you will get an idea of the scope of the problem.

It will require nothing short of a full revolution and violence is never ideal.

I think the solution is to create a new parallel medical system, that can slowly replace the old system. Start with medical schools that train Doctors and Nurses that are affordable/free but also require working at this new parallel medical system. They would earn less but would avoid massive loans and have less bureaucracy.

When for-profit hospitals go under, which happens all the time, they can be folded into this new system.
by brianajohnson | 2025-12-02 17:16:52+00:00
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by wiseowise | 2025-12-02 17:17:07+00:00
Richard Hamming’s second most famous quote:

> I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that

Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.

Also:

> 10 years

Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.
by hackernudes | 2025-12-02 17:17:10+00:00
There are two issues to consider: security updates and software compatibility.

The LTSC version is good for security updates, but I worry that software could stop supporting Windows 10 despite the LTSC version existing.

Coincidentally I am about to install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC! I was experimenting (and struggling) with PXE boot with iSCSI. An update broke iscsi boot in Windows 11 25H2 (26200.6901 works, 26200.7019 fails) as well as LTSC (26100.6905 works, 26100.7178 fails). There were other issues with iscsi boot on the LTSC version - the network hardware needs to be enumerated before the first boot, but can't boot because it needs network (a chicken-and-egg style problem).
by cbb330 | 2025-12-02 17:17:11+00:00
Yeah sure, Thiel’s money helped put his protégé Vance in the VP chair, he has real influence, no denying it.

But scroll this comment section for any critique of Thiel and you’ll see the pattern: his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do.

Take the “Antichrist Thesis” everyone mocks. It’s Rene Girard-speak for centralized, charismatic authoritarianism that weaponizes morality and scapegoating to grab power. Think Sam Altman preaching about AGI danger while lobbying the gov for openai prioritizing and startup stifling policies. Fed government using big tech censorship for preventing hate speech. He’s been dead-on about that danger for decades.
by michaelmrose | 2025-12-02 17:17:15+00:00
Idiots run things for a lot of reasons.

Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it.

Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity.

Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
by denysvitali | 2025-12-02 17:17:38+00:00
I honestly think it is. The amount of people who thinks Europe and EU are the same thing is really concerning.

And no, it's not only americans. I keep hearing this thing from people living in Europe as well (or better, in the EU). I also very often hear phrases like "Switzerland is not in Europe" to indicate that the country is not part of the European Union.
by jfindper | 2025-12-02 17:17:44+00:00
>Google must submit to the other WHATWG members doesn't make any sense in an argument for restoring XSLT or JPEG XL.

The comment you replied to was speaking generally, not specifically to XSLT or JPEG XL. They obviously didn't say "Google should be barred from having standards positions" just in context of XSLT/JPEG XL, but they're totally cool with the Google monopoly with every other standard.

>You seem to be reading subtext into a statement that was put plainly.

Nah, I'm really not.

But I'm just farming downvotes, apparently, so nevermind. You win! yay

(It's fun that people are coming to a conversation over 24 hours old, however many levels deep, to downvote!)
by giraffe_lady | 2025-12-02 17:18:03+00:00
I'm not that well read on Hershock but I don't think this is a very good application of his tool-vs-tech framework. His view is that tools are localized and specific to a purpose, where technologies are social & institutional. So writing down a shopping list for yourself, the pen is a tool; using it to write a letter to a friend, the pen is one part of the letter-writing technology along with the infrastructure to deliver the letter, the cultural expectation that this is a thing you can even do, widespread literacy, etc.

Again I think this is a pretty narrow theory that Hershock gets some good mileage out of for what he's looking at but isn't a great fit for understanding this issue. The extremely naive "tools are technologies we have already accepted the changes from" has about as much explanatory power here. But also again I'm not a philosopher or a big Hershock proponent so maybe I've misread him.
Openlane – Open-source compliance software
by adelowo | 2025-12-02 17:18:20+00:00
Matt, Sarah, and Kelsey have spent the last year building (and launching) Openlane, which is open-source, developer-friendly compliance software.

The core repo will show you our (self-hostable) compliance management tool, which we think changes how companies think about customizing controls and compliance today.

https://theopenlane.io
by toast0 | 2025-12-02 17:18:29+00:00
Microsoft's Software Development Engineer in Test position was different than the "power user QA" archetype you describe and is common.

These positions required development abilities and they would develop the testing scenarios concurrently with the team building the software. And the results were less buggy, IMHO. But it's expensiving having twice the engineering staff when you can just ask software developers to test things themselves and not follow up to make sure it happened.
by daviducolo | 2025-12-02 17:18:36+00:00
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by angiolillo | 2025-12-02 17:18:40+00:00
> but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things

It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?

I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.

(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
by mwpmaybe | 2025-12-02 17:18:42+00:00
I scored an "open box" Dell Pro 14 Plus on eBay for about 600USD. It's got two USB-A ports, two USB4 ports, built-in Ethernet, 4G LTE, upgradeable storage, and decent Linux support (on Ubuntu LTS at least). The battery is field-replaceable but the 32GB RAM is soldered. (There are other models with upgradeable RAM.)

It's got a middling display (the 2-in-1 display is better) and a somewhat dated Hawk Point SoC, but it's fine for running to a client's site for imaging or network troubleshooting or what have you. I still don't think it's going to last very long, but it's a nice complement to the MacBook I use for client dev work and it didn't break the bank.
by palmotea | 2025-12-02 17:19:00+00:00
> It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed.

A lot of advice is that way, which is why it is advice. If following it were easy everyone would just do it all the time, but if it's hard or there are temptations in the other direction, it has to be endlessly repeated.

Plus, there are always those special-snowflake guys who are "that's good advice for you, but for me it's different!"

Also it wouldn't surprise me if Sam Altman's talents aren't in management or successfully running a large organization, but in machiavellian manipulation and maneuvering.
by perpil | 2025-12-02 17:19:19+00:00
This is very thorough, but I have a few things to add if you are using Node 22. I benchmarked Node 22 earlier this year using something similar to the light benchmark. https://speedrun.nobackspacecrew.com/blog/2025/07/21/the-fas...

I found that Node 22 had ~50ms slower coldstarts than Node 20. This is because the AWS Javascript V3 SDK loads the http request library which became much heavier in Node 22. This happens on the newly released Node 24 as well.

I recommend that if you are trying to benchmark coldstarts on Lambda, you measure latency from a client as well. The Init Duration in the logs doesn't include things like decrypting environment variables which adds ~20ms and other overhead like pulling the function code from S3. The impact of this manifests when comparing runtimes like llrt to Node, the Init Duration is faster than Node, but the E2E time from the client is actually closer because the llrt bundle size is 4-5MB larger than Node.
by tech_ken | 2025-12-02 17:19:35+00:00
> This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world.

I could have used some more explication on the connection between Thiel's ideology and Palantir's project portfolio. I felt like this article was structured like "Part 1: Thiel is Crazy, Part 2: Palantir is Awful, Conclusion: They are Related", without really making clear what the relationship between them was. It seems pretty contradictory that someone concerned about "The New One World Order" would create a global police technology apparatus, so deep-diving into the cognitive dissonance there (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).
by taeric | 2025-12-02 17:19:38+00:00
Kudos on the article! My understanding on BDDs is sadly not as strong as I would prefer it to be, so I'm guessing I am not quite caught up on how they are being used here.

I think I was expecting to see the algorithm for merging multiple BDDs that I saw in Knuth's work. Though, in that regard, I would expect a ZDD approach would be a lot easier to start with. That or you would have to make the BDD to merge be a big chain of every variable before the stuff to be merged where true goes to BOTTOM, and false goes to the next variable before new first to merge.

Again, kudos on this. I do look forward to trying to understand it more!
by piva00 | 2025-12-02 17:19:56+00:00
If making infra means designing their own silicon to target only inference instead of more general GPUs I can agree with you, otherwise the long-term success is based on how cheap they can run the infra compared to competitors.

Depending on Nvidia for your inference means you'll be price gouged for it, Nvidia has a golden goose for now and will milk it as much as possible.

I don't see how a company without optimised hardware can win in the long run.
by queenmab | 2025-12-02 17:19:59+00:00
>I think it would suit you to do the same, now that you’ve acknowledged it.

I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid. It's clearly AI and I would bet my life on that post having been at least edited by ChatGPT.

>What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?

Plenty of online spaces are now full of bots posting and replying to other bots with the occasional human engagement. Some subreddits I used to post on are practically useless now with all the AI spam. Dead internet theory etc. If I wanted to talk to a bot I would use AI directly without pretending I'm discussing something with humans.