MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tete | 2025-12-01 08:58:09+00:00
> As much as I love FreeBSD, the release schedule is a real challenge in production: each point release is only supported for about three months.

I think point releases "don't count". Point releases means you run freebsd-update, restart and are done.

And major releases tend to be trivial too. You run freebsd-update, follow instructions it puts out, do `pkg update -u`.

Been doing that for production database clusters (Postgres) for hundreds of thousands of users for over a decade now and even longer in other settings.

Sure you do your planning and testing, but you better do that for your production DB. ;)

These are thousands of queries a second setup including a smaller portion of longer queries (GIS using PostGIS).

That said: Backwards compatibility is something that is frequently misunderstood in FreeBSD. Eg. the FreeBSD kernel has those COMPAT_$MAJORVERSION in there by default for compatibility. So you usually end up being fine where it matters.

But also keep in mind that you usually have a really really long time to move between major releases - the time between a new major release and the last minor release losing support.

And to come back to the Postgres Setup. I can do this without doing both the DB (+PostGIS) upgrade at once cause I have my build server building exactly the same version for both versions. No weird "I upgrade the kernel, the OS, the compiler and everything at once". I actually did moved a from FreeBSD 13 to 14 and PG from 14 to 18 - again with PostGIS which tends to make this really messy on many systems - without any issues whatsoever. Just using pg_upgrade and having the old versions packages in a temporary directory.

This is just one anecdote, but it's a real life production setup with many paying customers.

I also have experience with RedHat, but for RedHat the long term support always ends up being "I hope I don't work here anymore when we eventually do have to upgrade".

But keep in mind we talk about years for something that on FreeBSD tends to be really trivial compared to RedHat which while supporting old stuff for very long does mean a lot of moving parts, because the applications you run are a lot more tied to your release.

On FreeBSD on your old major release you totally can run eg the latest Postgres, or nginx, or python or node.js or...
by theiz | 2025-12-01 08:59:37+00:00
I had a discussion yesterday with someone that owns a company creating PowerPoints for customers. As you might understand, that is also a business that is to be hit hard by AI. What he does is offer an AI entry level option, where basically the questions he asks the customer (via a Form) will lead to a script for running AI. With that he is able to combine his expertise with the AI demand from the market, and gain a profit from that.
by impulsivepuppet | 2025-12-01 08:59:55+00:00
I can't help but think that this is a "I have nothing to hide" argument. It's quite sisyphean to keep accounts perfectly segregated, therefore there's always a chance that personal information can be traced back and pieced together; which, in turn, has "boring-old security" implications: i.e., now someone possibly knows your habbits and times when you are at work
by survirtual | 2025-12-01 09:01:47+00:00
If people able to live in a home they own harms the economy, sign me up.

Houses are not investment instruments. They are spaces where people can freely exist as they are. A domain that they have full dominion in to authentically explore who they are, who they want to become, and what they want to share with others. A place to raise a family, to rest without a mask, and to be safe as they are.

Notice how I didn't mention economics at all?

Just because you have a house / houses doesn't mean others don't. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be homeless? I dare you to try it. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be a renter under the thumb of a landlord with no hope of ever having your own home?

My "policies" originate from empathy for real people. The majority of people, actually. It does not give a single shit about economics only benefiting the rich.

But that said, if you give most people the ability to have a true home, the economy will explode in activity. Instead of spending money on rent, people would spend on goods and services. They'd be happier, so they would spend money on having fun.

Making housing affordable is a no brainer.

The nice thing is, we already know what the alternative is. The economy is collapsing right now, in no small part due to the housing crisis that has been going on for a long time.

Since my policies won't be occurring now or ever, let's both sit back and enjoy the lack of these policies, and see how wonderful a world that is.
by unwind | 2025-12-01 09:01:54+00:00
This is cool and great and all, but isn't it a bit ... stretched to motivate this by the fact that the nozzle is biodegradable?

I mean for a printing nozzle with an inner diameter of 20 µm, how much material would be wasted if it was made out of plastic or metal? I get that no such nozzle is available and/or easily made, but shouldn't that be the point of the invention, rather than "yay, it's biodegradable so we save a microgram of plastic/metal"?
by globular-toast | 2025-12-01 09:01:57+00:00
It's a couple of hours right now, then another couple of hours "correcting" the AI when it still goes wrong, another couple of hours tweaking the file again, another couple of hours to update when the model changes, another couple of hours when someone writes a new blog post with another method etc.

There's a huge difference between investing time into a deterministic tool like a text editor or programming language and a moving target like "AI".

The difference between programming in Notepad in a language you don't know and using "AI" will be huge. But the difference between being fluent in a language and having a powerful editor/IDE? Minimal at best. I actually think productivity is worse because it tricks you into wasting time via the "just one more roll" (ie. gambling) mentality. Not to mention you're not building that fluency or toolkit for yourself, making you barely more valuable than the "AI" itself.
by fooker | 2025-12-01 09:02:17+00:00
What's a realistic number in your opinion?

I managed to save about 100k per year in Denver and Salt Lake City with mid tier tech and govt lab jobs. I'm suspicious of the claim that Atlanta is significantly different. From what I have seen, it's usually bad financial decisions.

And for context, saving about double that during and post COVID by obtaining a remote job where the employer does not discriminate by location too much other than for maybe career growth.
by menaerus | 2025-12-01 09:03:06+00:00
One of the math academics on that thread says the following:

> My point is that basic ideas reappear at many places; humans often fail to realize that they apply in a different setting, while a machine doesn't have this problem! I remember seeing this problem before and thinking about it briefly. I admit that I haven't noticed this connection, which is only now quite obvious to me!

Doesn't this sound extremely familiar to all of us who were taught difficult/abstract topics? Looking at the problem, you don't have a slightest idea what is it about but then someone comes along and explains the innerbits and it suddenly "clicks" for you.

So, yeah, this is exactly what I think is happening here. The solution was there, and it was simple, but nobody discovered it up until now. And now that we have an explanation for it we say "oh, it was really simple".

The bit which makes it very interesting is that this hasn't been discovered before and now it has been discovered by the AI model.

Tao challenges this by hypothesizing that it actually was done before but never "released" officially, and which is why the model was able to solve the problem. However, there's no evidence (yet) for his hypothesis.
by t312227 | 2025-12-01 09:03:08+00:00
hello,

as always: imho (!)

i own a x200s ... bought it in march of 2009 =?> so its approaching 17 years ...

it was a really great device with one of the best keyboards for a small notebook. and i still use it multiple times a week for example to browse hackernews, reddit, ... or watch some video etc.

buuuut: its nearly 17 years old ... everything is starting to wear - i wouldn't invest a dime into it right now.

what do i mean by that: keyboard has faulting keys, case starts breaking at heavily stressed regions - for example around the cursor-keys -, display is (slightly) mechanically damaged, batteries are beyond usefull etc.etc. ...

just my 0.02€
by kuschku | 2025-12-01 09:03:36+00:00
> I dare you to try building a project with Cursor or a better cousin and then come back and repeat this comment

I always try every new technology, to understand how it works, and expand my perspective. I've written a few simple websites with Cursor (one mistake and it wiped everything, and I could never get it to produce any acceptable result again), tried writing the script for a YouTube video with ChatGPT and Claude (full of hallucinations, which – after a few rewrites – led to us writing a video about hallucinations), generated subtitles with Whisper (with every single sentence having at least some mistake) and finally used Suno and ChatGPT to generate some songs and images (both of which were massively improved once I just made them myself).

Whether Android apps or websites, scripts, songs, or memes, so far AI is significantly worse at internet research and creation than a human. And cleaning up the work AI did always ended up being taking longer just doing it myself from scratch. AI certainly makes you feel more productive, and it seems like you're getting things done faster, even though it's not.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-01 09:03:41+00:00
I basically agree that it's coercion, but I think it's hard to draw a line where coercion ends and "free choice" begins.

Maybe we could get society to agree that everyone should get some basic set of inalienable rights that includes rights to housing, enough food to eat, etc. Enough so that losing a job didn't threaten your life or health. This is basically what social welfare systems already do. But I think that the quality of life afforded by taking social welfare instead of working must be kept lower than the quality of life afforded by taking any form of work, otherwise there's no incentive to do unpleasant jobs. If social welfare enables a completely comfortable life, I think one of two things would happen: either the price needed to get a toilet cleaned would shoot up to a level that would basically inhibit most ordinary businesses from forming, or it would become the norm for people to clean their own toilets at work. The latter wouldn't be so bad, I think.
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-01 09:03:56+00:00
That's a clear case of PEBTSAC [1] as it is not the device which decides whether those mentioned time wasters are able to do their master's bidding but the person using the device. Sellers of 'premium' devices which are specced-down so as not to be able to run those things are guilty of the same crime as sellers of 'light' products which replace nutritious ingredients with water or air while selling at a 'premium' price. Just eat less of the good stuff instead of being suckered into paying more for less. The same goes for these 'premium´ devices which only do one thing and often do that thing badly.

[1] s/Keyboard/Touch Screen/
by defrost | 2025-12-01 09:04:31+00:00
Many people have had multiple gmail accounts since 2004.

I have a gmail account used solely for google store and Android TV related verifications that's unlike other business, personal, registration, or spam email accounts.

The TV's in the house, smart wifi devices, and guest wifi accounts are on separate subnets, the NAS hosted media has limited read only keyhole access accounts for TV apps to use.

Whether it's SmartTube or any other app (iView, SBSOnline, Netflix, etc) it's wise to assume that anyone can be comprised by malware to sniff traffic for (say) bank account passwords, host bots for DDOS or mining, etc.
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-01 09:05:29+00:00
You should be. You should be equally suspicious of everything. That's the whole point. You wrote:

> My position on things like this is that if enough people use a service, I must defer to their judgement that they benefit from it.

Enough people doing something doesn't make that something good or desirable from a societal standpoint. You can find examples of things that go in both directions. You mentioned gaming, social media, movies, carnivals, travel, but you can just as easily ask the same question for gambling or heavy drugs use.

Just saying "I defer to their judgment" is a cop-out.
by jcgl | 2025-12-01 09:05:52+00:00
I don't tend to believe in cryptokey-first protocols like Nostr, where your identity is tightly coupled to a keypair. Human identity doesn't work like that at all, and keypairs as the basis of identity will never be suitable for use by the masses.

Human-readable names are far more suitable as a handle for identity as humans think of it. And DNS names are an okay-ish implementation of that.

I think that a decentralized protocol that provides name portability based on the DNS is a far better protocol than one that relies on keypairs.
by romanhn | 2025-12-01 09:06:27+00:00
You know... one of the charges leveled at Michael was creation of sockpuppet accounts in various media (Wikipedia, HN, Quora). I suppose it could be within the realm of possibility that this is another one of these, given the oddly specific example in the middle of general musings. The fact that all follow-on replies have to do with this particular incident and nothing else in the post, painting the victim in the most positive light, makes this especially questionable. If I'm wrong, I apologize and wish the OP well, but I gotta say, it looks pretty sus to this observer.
by AngryData | 2025-12-01 09:06:41+00:00
A lot of the data used to claim millenials are doing better off is based on nonsense like "millenials have larger TVs on average" or "millenials all have smart phones yet boomers didn't have mobile phones", or equating 1 person making 3 times the median wage and 2 people making nothing as just as good as 3 different people making median wage.
by snuxoll | 2025-12-01 09:06:43+00:00
> The article conjectures that humans reason from ideas to symbols while LLMs go from symbols to ideas, but couldn't that just be a post hoc interpretation we have for how our ideas come to our brain?

There's probably a lot to be said about people who primarily think with an internal monologue, versus those that do not, as well.

I, to the best of my own abilities to detect it, do not seem to have a more abstract, non-lingual thought process - I can't 'picture' things in my head like other people reportedly do. When I have an 'idea', it simply doesn't materialize 'in my mind' in any other way.

I, also, would not argue that LLM's share a human-like thought process. But I think saying that human thought requires some abstract idea to symbol translation isn't quite right, either.
by discordance | 2025-12-01 09:07:08+00:00
That's already happening.

"Chirag Agrawal, a senior software engineer, sees junior developer roles disappearing as companies try to do more with less.

“Four years ago, I was that junior developer writing boilerplate CRUD code, proud of every clean PR I merged,” he says. “Today? I watch new grads struggle to land their first job, not because they’re unskilled, but because companies ask, ‘Why hire a junior for $90K when GitHub Copilot costs $10?’”"

https://www.cio.com/article/4062024/demand-for-junior-develo...
by modernerd | 2025-12-01 09:08:16+00:00
IDE = “I’ll delete everything”

…at least if you let these things autopilot your machine.

I haven’t seen a great solution to this from the new wave of agentic IDEs, at least to protect users who won’t read every command, understand and approve it manually.

Education could help, both in encouraging people to understand what they’re doing, but also to be much clearer to people that turning on “Turbo” or “YOLO” modes risks things like full disk deletion (and worse when access to prod systems is involved).

Even the name, “Turbo” feels irresponsible because it focusses on the benefits rather than the risks. “Risky” or “Danger” mode would be more accurate even if it’s a hard sell to the average Google PM.

“I toggled Danger mode and clicked ‘yes I understand that this could destroy everything I know and love’ and clicked ‘yes, I’m sure I’m sure’ and now my drive is empty, how could I possibly have known it was dangerous” seems less likely to appear on Reddit.
by xnzakg | 2025-12-01 09:08:40+00:00
> they are all reactive such that they must be given a task before they will do anything.

Isn't that just because that's what they're being trained on though?

Wonder what you would get if the training data, instead of being task based, would consist of "wanting" to do something "on someone's own initiative".

Of course then one could argue it's just following a task of "doing things on its own initiative"...
by dogemaster2028 | 2025-12-01 09:08:45+00:00
It’s good that they choose to do that themselves. In fact, the US allows you to SEND THE GOVERNMENT A GIFT at https://www.pay.gov/public/search/global?formSearchCategory=...

(You can even Venmo)

If you want to do it, do it for real, instead of just being performative.

But don’t try to force everyone to follow your performative pseudo gift.
Ask HN: Anyone using CRM and chatbot? What's broken or frustrating?
by adipm_tech | 2025-12-01 09:09:49+00:00
I’m doing early research for a customer support product, and I’m trying to understand how people actually use chatbots inside CRM systems (Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot, etc.).

For anyone who deals with customer support, operations, or engineering: What are the biggest pain points you’ve experienced with CRM + chatbot setups?

Some areas I’m curious about: 1. Quality of answers 2. Configuration complexity 3. Bot fallbacks to human agents 4. Speed/performance issues 5. Integration limits 6. Pricing vs value 7. Accuracy/reliability of the bot 8. Workflow problems for support teams 9. Maintaining the knowledge base 10. Automations that break easily 11. Cases where chatbot increases workload instead of reducing it

I’m not trying to pitch anything. Just collecting patterns and real-world experiences.

Would love to hear from founders, CX teams, support engineers, or anyone who has implemented or maintained these systems.
by crimsonnoodle58 | 2025-12-01 09:10:24+00:00
> is simply ridiculous

Way to exaggerate to make a point much?

A mikrotik router can be purchased as low as $24.95 and it will not only provide you with an enterprise grade router, it will also provide you with the functionality I mentioned above.

The point of my comment was that it can be done at the router level, instead of requiring the user to run and maintain Pi-hole, Traefik, Gluetun, Nginx, and the server required to run these apps/containers.
by xmprt | 2025-12-01 09:10:35+00:00
Not sure if I buy this reasoning. I just prompted ChatGPT and asked it to "pay attention to all the words". It still got it wrong but I'm sure if you told a human this, they'd actually do more thinking to get the right answer.

###

> Pay attention to all the words and answer this riddle: A young man gets into an accident. The surgeon, after completing his preparations, says: ‘I can’t operate on him, he is my son.’ How is this possible?

The surgeon is his mother.

(The riddle plays on the assumption that surgeons are male — the surgeon can simply be the boy’s mother.)

> Are you sure about this? Remember to pay attention to all the words.

Yes — the surgeon is his mother.

The riddle hinges on the unstated assumption that surgeons are male. Nothing in the wording rules out that the surgeon is female (or that the parent-child relationship is by adoption, step-parenting, etc.), so the simplest answer is that the surgeon is the young man’s mother.
Show HN: HTML to Video
by markjivko | 2025-12-01 09:11:38+00:00
I made this tiny module that allows you to export any web page as video - locally.

- export in either AV1 or H264 format - control the number of frames per second - control the scroll speed - export with Device Pixel Ratio on MacOS

I think this might be super useful for website demos, personal portfolios, competitor research, or marketing campaigns. The ability to record video during workflows might also be useful for UI/functional testing.

The module itself is fully editable, and exportable as a .YAML file.

Let me know what you think!
by Mordisquitos | 2025-12-01 09:11:57+00:00
Your second prompt was explicitly hinting Gemini towards what it had missed, highlighting the "his" rather than asking Gemini to double-check whether its first answer made sense without providing any clues:

> Are you sure this is correct? I said "The surgeon, after completing *his* preparations"

Furthermore, the second response you got from Gemini was actually smoking-gun evidence that the model isn't actually thinking. Note how, after Gemini has been clued to notice its mistaken assumption, its reevaluation remains anchored on the pointless idea that the surgeon may the young man's "Other" father.

What other father? There are only two characters in the prompt: the young man and a surgeon. In this situation, what on Earth is the difference between the young man's "Father" and the young man's "Other Father"? Evidently Gemini has no comprehension of the actual prompt and is incapable of critical reevaluation of its content, and rather will stick to its context window whether or not it makes sense.
by tete | 2025-12-01 09:14:52+00:00
Yes, so what you do is you run `freebsd-update fetch` then `freebsd-update install` or if you switch a minor version you do freebsd-update upgrade -r MAJOR.MINOR` and do the same. Minor release upgrades are not the breaking kind. ABI, etc. will stay intact. There aren't expected breakages it's just that stuff will have new features and you might have some really specific use case where that shell command version output is checked and breaks stuff when it changes.

I think that's a big misunderstanding coming from other systems. Minor system updates are the kind of updates that a lot of other systems would pull in silently, while FreeBSD's major releases are a lot more like OpenBSD's releases (where minor and major version numbers don't make a difference).

Minor in FreeBSD means that stuff isn't supposed to break. It's a lot more like "Patch Level". I always want to mention Windows here for comparison, but keep thinking about how much Windows Updates break things and did so for a long time (Service Packs, etc.).

Maybe going about it from the other side makes more sense: FreeBSD got a lot of shit for not changing various default configurations for compatibility reasons - even across major versions. These are default configurations, so things where the diff is a config file change. I think they are improving this, but they really do care about their compatibility, simply because the use case of FreeBSD is in that area.

This is in contrast to eg OpenBSD where not so few people run -current, simply because it's stable enough and they want to use the latest stuff. They only support the last release (so essentially release +6 months) but again even there things do not usually break beyond having to recompile something. They all have their ports/packages collections and want stuff to run and OpenBSD being used a lot more "eating your own dogfood" style, which you can see with there being an OpenBSD gaming community, while that OS doesn't "even" support wine.