MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-12-22 16:52:18+00:00
There’s always a trade off in terms of alternative approaches. So I don’t think it’s “crazy” that if one fails you switch to a different one. Sure, sometimes persistence can pay off, but not always.

Like if I go to a restaurant for the first time and the item I order is bad, could I go back and try something else? Perhaps, but I could also go somewhere else.
by just6979 | 2025-12-22 16:52:25+00:00
Except it's always written, but almost never read. Something that is fast/non-resource-intensive to write is definitionally a better design for logging.

What metadata? The raw template? That's data in this case, data for the later rendering of logs. Yes, the template plus the params is going to be slightly bigger than a rendered string, but that's the speed/size tradeoff inherent almost everywhere. It may even keep seperate things like the subsystem, event type, log level, etc; which trades off size (again) for speed/ease of filtering. It's all trade-offs, and to blanket declare one method (the Windows method in this case) as just bad design is only displaying your own ignorance, or bias.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-22 16:52:37+00:00
This is especially prevalent on the Airbus A320-series aircraft due to the way it's very easy to overfill or spill oil on the APU in a way where the fumes can get sucked into the cabin air.

The only commercial aircraft immune to this issue is the B787 because it does not use engine "bleed air".
by cratermoon | 2025-12-22 16:52:48+00:00
As private equity continues to gobble up health care
and health insurance companies continue to be profit-driven,
it's only going to get worse for US citizens.
That's even before we get to damage to the system that RFK Jr. and the MAHA crowd will do.

Where most Americans used to have access to the best medicine in the world,
we'll see a country where the very rich get the best and go to the front of the line while the rest get sicker and die earlier from preventable and treatable causes.
by fud101 | 2025-12-22 16:52:50+00:00
Perl had charm, it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it. It still remains a beautiful language that I regret not learning due to having a superior taste. Python had none of it. I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. The only argument you can make is boring is better imho.
by vorpalhex | 2025-12-22 16:53:08+00:00
I'm sorry this happened to you and your family.

1. Get police reports
2. Use the police report to start an issue with the bank
3. Work with a lawyer and escalate through the courts.

Do all of these things. Don't let the bank staff dissuade you from getting a lawyer involved now.

There is a second "thing to do" which is to regather yourself. You seem to feel, justly, as if your house was robbed. Take care of yourself as if that was true. Do a personal security audit if that is the sort of thing that makes you feel better. Journal, meditate, pray, etc as appropriate.

No defense is perfect and complete. That doesn't mean the defenders stop trying.
by nine_k | 2025-12-22 16:53:13+00:00
The system actually sort of uses the atmosphere as an ambient heat sink (when compressing) or heat source (when expanding).

I wonder if that heat could be stored in a more sensible way, e.g. as heated water in a tank near the bubble. This could improve the efficiency figures at short repeating patterns (charding at high noon, discharging through the night).
by dahart | 2025-12-22 16:53:20+00:00
They might not intend to claim homicide is a bigger danger than heart disease, specifically, but that’s effectively what’s happening anyway.

However, they are claiming homicide and terrorism cause more risk and death than they really do, in part because fear is good for their business, and in part because these two specific causes of death are sometimes political vehicles.

The topics of homicide and terrorism wouldn’t actually be as interesting to the public if the media reported on them accurately, and actively worked to show the true risks to the public, especially in relation to heart disease, cancer, and car accidents. The level of public interest depends on the level of reporting!
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-12-22 16:53:21+00:00
I love that this article added a correction and took ownership in it. This encourages more people to blog stuff and then get more input for parts they missed.

The best way to get the correct answer on something is posting the wrong thing. Not sure where I got this from, but I remember it was in the context of stackoverflow questions getting the correct answer in the comments of a reply :)

Props to the author for their honesty and having the impetus to blog about this in the first place.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-22 16:53:23+00:00
The artist's conception, with Jupiter-like bands running at an angle through the principle tidal axis really bugs me. If there's some bizarre mechanism that makes this even remotely plausible, it ought to have been explained. If (as I think is more likely) it's just a case of someone who didn't understand the article commissioning and approving and illustration by someone else who didn't understand it... why? Why even bother? It would be clearer with no illustration than with a misleading picture.

(The worst example of this I've seen was a few years back, when CNN briefly used a picture of a cow to "illustrate" an article about coconut milk).
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-22 16:53:31+00:00
>The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns.

This is how it works in most of north america.

Those confused tourists are just making up excuses for being poor drivers.

Yes, I feel the same way about driving in NYC thanks for asking.
Show HN: Utter - System-wide dictation on Mac & iPhone with AI prompts (BYOK)
by helro | 2025-12-22 16:53:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Utter, a native macOS dictation app, and wanted to share it here to get feedback.

The motivation was that Apple Dictation works for short notes, but for longer or technical input it often produces a wall of text that takes more time to clean up than typing. I wanted dictation that could understand context and produce structured output directly.

Utter works system-wide: you press a global hotkey, speak, and the text is inserted directly at your cursor in any app. Before insertion, the dictated text can optionally be processed through a custom AI prompt (fully user-defined).

Some details:

- System-wide dictation (works in any text field)

- Custom prompts to turn speech into emails, structured Markdown, summaries, JSON, etc.

- Bring-your-own API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), so it’s free to use

- Optional hosted models if you don’t want to manage keys

- Privacy-first: no accounts, no data retention, keys stored locally

- Searchable audio + transcript history

- iOS companion app with a custom keyboard, synced via iCloud

My main use cases are note-taking, email, and coding. For example, I often dictate rough thoughts while walking and have them converted into clean Markdown, or dictate rough prompts into terminal and turn them into structured prompts with file references.

Link: https://utter.to

I’d really appreciate feedback — especially from people who use dictation or voice input regularly, or who’ve tried building similar workflows.

Thanks!
by panarky | 2025-12-22 16:53:46+00:00
And then a few of those users who you treated like adults who don't need surveillance make a private network among themselves and other nodes in Russia and China to exfiltrate the corporation's most sensitive intellectual property, serve as a bridge for state-sponsored bad actors to bypass your firewall, and tunnel command-and-control traffic through your "unrestricted" egress, and now your zero-trust philosophy has created a zero-accountability blind spot that your IR team discovers eighteen months later during a breach investigation.
by dataflow | 2025-12-22 16:53:51+00:00
I think this might not be a shortcoming of MSVC but rather a deliberate design decision. It seems likely that MSVC is failing to apply strict aliasing, but that it's deliberately avoiding it, probably for compatibility reasons with code that wasn't/isn't written to spec. And frankly it can be very onerous to write code that is 100% correct per the standard when dealing with e.g. memory-mapped files; I'm struggling to recall seeing a single case of this.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-22 16:53:58+00:00
And, it's not just about "pay for it" vs. "don't pay for it". It's about needing to pay for it monthly or it goes away. I hate subscriptions. They sneak their way into your life, little by little. $4.99/mo here. $9.99/mo there. $24.99/yr elsewhere. And then at some point, in a moment of clarity, you wake up and look at your monthly expenses and notice you're paying a fortune just to exist in your life as you are existing.

I'm not going to pay monthly for X service when similar Y thing can be purchased once (or ideally open source downloaded), self-hosted, and it's your setup forever.
by edot | 2025-12-22 16:54:08+00:00
Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, actually. I’m glad that Benn Jordan and others are giving this the airtime it needs, but they’re focusing the messaging on security vulnerabilities and not state surveillance. Thus Flock can go “ok we will do better about security” and the bureaucrats, average suburbanites, and law enforcement agencies will go “ok good they fixed the vulnerabilities I’m happy now”
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-22 16:54:10+00:00
Been using this strategy since Windows XP

I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word

It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)

I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes

There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-22 16:54:47+00:00
> "Is it wrong to have your career on autopilot if you are satisfied with your job?"

Only if you don't mind the career equivalent of CFIT¹ when a mountain turns out not to be where your maps said it was. I'll wager that a lot of former Flash developers weren't expecting Apple to cause Flash to die out.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
by troupo | 2025-12-22 16:55:05+00:00
> fines on American companies bigger than revenue from your entire tech industry?

1. As someone already mentioned, taxes != revenue

2. On top of that, "public internet companies" != "entire tech industry"

3. On top of that, tax evasion and creative accounting by "public internet companies" companies is well known, documented, and is subject to additional fines (not as often or as much as they deserve)

4. On top of that "announce these new fines monthly like clockwork" speaks volumes about the state of the "public internet companies" and there continuous disregard for the law.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-22 16:55:14+00:00
I get where you're coming from, having wrestled with Codex/CC to get it to actually emit everything needed to even do proper evals.

From a "correct solution" standpoint having one source of truth for evals, agent memory, prompt history, etc is the right path. We already have the infra to do it well, we just need to smooth out the path. The thing that bugs me is people inventing half solutions that seem rooted in ignorance or the desire to "capture" users, and seeing those solutions get traction/mindshare.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 16:55:16+00:00
Yet another reason I'm more than happy I switched my personal desktop use to Linux a few years ago now... After a decade of running Insiders, literally the first time I saw an ad on the Start menu search results, I was out. MS has only been increasingly hostile to users since.

Fortunately o265 web versions are pretty capable, including Teams, and most of the development work I've done is not specifically tied to Windows, and even where it is hasn't been too bad in actual business/enterprise environments (beyond typical corporate/govt hinderances). That said, I like what WSL brings to the table.
by 01100011 | 2025-12-22 16:56:08+00:00
Many of us have to do this job(personality quirks, ASD, etc). I remember talking to a nerd friend(Verilog/VHDL guy) 25 years ago, in the time before Google salaries when engineering wasn't a job most people desired. He shared that thought and it rang true with me. I've met many folks who I don't think would have done well outside engineering. Myself, I have a good brain for engineering but have a marked lack of common sense. I'm a jack of all trades but as that implies I'm not particularly good at anything besides systems programming or electrical engineering.

Back in college('97) a guy offered me a job as an elevator repair tech. I almost dropped out since the money was better than what I'd make as an engineer($50/hr plus OT). My first engineering job, doing embedded SW and some EE work for a large consumer electronics company was $37.5k/yr.
by blackguardx | 2025-12-22 16:56:14+00:00
I live near both wind turbines and oil/gas fracking sites in Colorado. The wind turbines are far less obtrusive. Fracking sites produce a lot of noise and they try to hide them with these giant walls that look like a post-apocalyptic fort. On top of that, because they don't disclose their fracking fluids you always kind of have ground water contamination near your home on the back of your mind.

I'm not even against fracking but the alternatives to wind and solar are more a public nuisance to live around.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-22 16:56:17+00:00
Tech pervades all things. These days in particular it's impossible to do anything too well without advice from AI.

I could and I do daytrade options, which however is more tech than tech itself, whether by hand or by a bot.

I would however like to be a consulting speaker, but the research for it can't really be done without a steady and heavy dose of tech.
by goku12 | 2025-12-22 16:57:09+00:00
> In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.

As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.

I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.

We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
by dpark | 2025-12-22 16:57:32+00:00
With respect, lispers are probably not the best people to ask how to make a widely adopted language.

Regardless, you’re regurgitating exactly what I said. Your gut is that Python was just a slightly better replacement for Perl. This is at best one dimension. If you can’t broaden your perspective, then this thread full of examples and arguments for why Python became popular will be lost on you.

If you’re so confident in your assessment, why did you bother to ask?
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 16:57:41+00:00
> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

This seems like an over generalization, though I agree with your other points. Microsoft is not a good company, but are any of the big tech behemoths?

I could buy an argument that requiring Windows for devs might be a red flag, unless said company is making Windows software or games, but there are plenty of valid reasons to standardize on Windows & Microsoft 365 across the office, especially in very large companies. Even if a company issues macs, they are still probably on M365 unless they are in silicon valley or a startup using Google Workspace.

Consumers aren't Microsoft's customer, and to be honest, I get the vibe that Microsoft would just prefer to stop selling to and catering to consumers/personal users entirely for Windows. Windows in an enterprise, properly reined in by a competent IT department, isn't too bad. Windows gives a lot of tools to IT and the business that you would otherwise have to build yourself, which for non-tech company or a company where software isn't their revenue generating product, has a lot of appeal.

The distaste everyone feels for it is because Windows isn't built for the end user anymore, it's built for the person signing the checks at the company, who usually has different needs. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (although, it's not great), just that you, the user, isn't who its designed for.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-22 16:57:54+00:00
Depending on how much gets automated and how quickly, yes that could be a temporary, short-term problem. I personally think the transition will happen slowly enough that it'll barely be noticeable, but if I'm wrong and we somehow automate 50M people out of a job in the space of a few years, that will indeed lead to an oversupply in the labor market, temporarily resulting in high unemployment and low wages for workers with the affected skillsets (including unskilled workers).

Where displaced workers will go though is not something that can or should be planned out in a centralized fashion, because the best answer to that question is different for each individual and depends on their skills, preferences, and life situation, balanced against the needs and desires of other consumers in the unimaginably complex web that is the global economy.

Despite not knowing exactly where everyone will end up though, I think I can still be confident that they will find something, because the incentives to do so are very strong, both on a personal level (needing to find work) and the entrepreneurial level (finding useful things for displaced workers to do could make you very rich).

As another commenter put it a while back, unemployed workers are an unused resource, and the economy is very good at finding uses for unused resources.
by necovek | 2025-12-22 16:58:06+00:00
I wasn't aware of the formal first-arrived rule (as I said, we don't have 4-way stop intersections). Obviously, still imperfect for the original point of arrival (if 4 vehicles come at the same time), but once the pattern is established, it can keep flowing.

I apply the alternating pattern even when I have right of way to keep the traffic flowing.
by AlexB138 | 2025-12-22 16:58:13+00:00
This is pretty incredible to watch. I initially thought she must be pulling some kind of trick to make that look so fluid, but the fact that she is making very small typos and correcting them as she goes make it look very believable. This is really the first time I've watched someone use one of these tools and it feel like a musician using a new kind of instrument.
by mmh0000 | 2025-12-22 16:59:00+00:00
I assume:

Why programmers like cooking: You peel the carrot, you chop the carrot, you put the carrot in the stew. You don’t suddenly find out that your peeler is several versions behind and they dropped support for carrots in 4.3

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/agv5ol/why...
by nospice | 2025-12-22 16:59:14+00:00
> Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.

Huh? Back then, there was very little glamor to software engineering. Computing just wasn't serious enough. There was relatively little competition, salaries were unremarkable, and sure, you could land a job for life, but that still exists today. If you are an IT guy for a lumber mill, a regional ISP, or a grocery store, it's not going to be as cutthroat as Big Tech. It's just that you're not gonna be making millions.

We're pretending that this type of cozy tech jobs don't exist anymore, but they do. They just don't come with IPOs and RSUs.
by karthink | 2025-12-22 16:59:23+00:00
> agentic capabilities are very much on a roll-your-own-in-elisp basis

I use gptel-agent[1] when I want agentic capabilities. It includes tools and supports sub-agents, but I haven't added support for Claude skills folders yet. Rolling back the chat is trivial (just move up or modify the chat buffer), rolling back changes to files needs some work.

[1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel-agent
by throwaway673662 | 2025-12-22 16:59:25+00:00
I imagine my answer will be a bit unique - I'm in tech because I like computers and I'm good at working with them, but I feel a strong conviction that if I'd had my way, I would've gone into some sort of sex work, likely either porn or pro-domme work. There was an article posted here[0] a few years ago by an escort reflecting on her experiences, and the conclusion, which spoke to the human element of the work, deeply resonated with me - in fact, I recently left the IC track for a manager role because I'm realizing how meaningful I find work that exercises empathy to be.

Human sexuality is the one thing in this world that's more interesting to me than computers, and while I'm grateful for my stable job and career that allow me to explore it as a hobby, I'm infinitely curious about what that other life would have looked like.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28924751
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 16:59:39+00:00
> (1) ban all recommendation engines in social media, no boosting by likes, no retweets, no "for you", no "suggested". you get a chronological feed of people you follow, or you search for it directly.

I always find these comments interesting on Hacker News. The Hacker News front page is a socially sourced recommendation engine which presents stories in an algorithmic feed, as boosted by likes (upvotes) from other users. The comment section where we're talking is also social at it's core, with comments boosted or driven down by upvotes and downvotes.

In your proposed regulation, are you really expecting that the Hacker News front page would go away, replaced only by the "new" feed? Or that we'd have to manually sign up to follow different posters?

If we have to sign up to follow specific posters, how do you propose we discover them to begin with?

Usually when I ask these questions the follow ups involve some definition of social media that excludes Hacker News and other forums that people enjoy.
by dvtkrlbs | 2025-12-22 16:59:42+00:00
Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations).

[1]: https://lookout.co/georgia-police-chief-arrested-for-using-f...
[2]: https://www.404media.co/emails-reveal-the-casual-surveillanc...
[3]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...