MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by candu | 2025-12-08 08:06:32+00:00
TBH there will likely be a _huge_ demand for "digital sovereignty consulting" over the next while, especially in the EU (and maybe also Canada).

Here in Denmark, the previously unthinkable is happening: because of Schleswig-Holstein's leadership in moving to OSS, the Danes are now seeking to learn from the Germans (or at least, that particular set of Germans) about digitalisation! That trend, plus the Danish government's all-in-on-vendors/consultants approach to digitalisation, will likely open a sizeable market - and the traditional vendors like Netcompany have taken a large beating in public opinion themselves, so it's a good time to start something in this direction.

And at the Digital Tech Summit in Copenhagen this year, digital sovereignty (and the lack thereof) was a very prominent theme across both public and private sector talks. As was the comparative advantage the EU has in _trust_, and how that helps e.g. businesses around cybersecurity, privacy-oriented SaaS, and data management expand even outside the EU - which makes it extra infuriating to see continued political interest in things like Chat Control and cracking down on GrapheneOS. This trust is IMHO pretty much the only advantage the EU has in the global tech marketplace, and we're busy throwing it away.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 08:06:37+00:00
> owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures

This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.

> Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders

Merger law is largely state corporate law. If you have a Delaware C corporation, you're operating under more or less the same merger rules irrespective of how your stock is traded.

What may be misleading some folks is that in a private company, these deliberations are typically covered by NDAs. In public companies, it happens in the open. With private companies, someone needs to get pissed off enough to sue. Herego the understandable availability bias.

To drive home how misleading this purported delineation is, consider that some of the largest private equity managers (e.g. Blackstone and KKR) are themselves publicly traded.

Private equity has tons of issues. Tons. In some industries (e.g. healthcare) it shouldn’t exist. But this tripe about public companies having duties to shareholders which private companies don’t is nonsense.
by spankibalt | 2025-12-08 08:06:41+00:00
> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did."

A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.
by bitwize | 2025-12-08 08:06:45+00:00
Well, what can I say except that the 80s, with their little independent app vendors shipping floppy disks in little baggies, are long behind us. Computers are now commonplace enough, with all the attendant dangers, that platform vendors are demanding a bit of accountability if you want to ship for their platforms, and unfortunately accountability means money and paperwork. The platform vendors are well within their rights to do so. They have a right to protect their reputations, and when malicious or buggy software appears on their platform, their reputation suffers. Half or more of the blue screens on Windows in the late 90s and early 2000s for instance, were due to buggy third-party drivers, yet Microsoft caught the blame for Windows crashing. It took a new driver model, standards on how drivers are expected to behave, and signed drivers to bring this under control.

The future is signed code with deep identity verification for every instruction that runs on a consumer device, from boot loader through to application code. Maybe web site JavaScript will be granted an exception (if it isn't JIT-compiled). This will be a good thing for most consumers. Until Nintendo cleaned out all the garbage and implemented strict controls on who may publish what on their console, the North American video game market was a ruin. The rest of computing is likely to follow suit, for similar reasons.
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-12-08 08:07:49+00:00
Again stopping the execution of the handler based on an ID is not idempotency, but rather a corrective measure due to the fact that the handler is not idempotent. Idempotency is a property that says the handler can run as many times as I like, as diametrically opposed to the notion that it can run only once.
by derelicta | 2025-12-08 08:07:50+00:00
If you are doubting these statements of mine, how about you look up the great evils the American govt has inflicted unto Americans themselves? I'd start with MKULTRA, the Kent State massacre and go through COINTELPRO files. Then you will slowly be able to move on to US-led election frauds in Europe, and NATO-funded nazi death squads in Switzerland.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-08 08:07:50+00:00
I've been an employer. I didn't have any power over my employees. If there was anything they didn't like, they simply stopped coming to work. How was I supposed to make them show up?

One embezzled a large amount of money and spent it on drugs. What was I supposed to do about that? He was broke, he couldn't pay the money back. All I could do was tell him to not come back.

I've also been employed at minimum wage jobs, and salaried jobs. I never felt the employer had power over me. At my salaried jobs, my coworkers complained about all the power the company had over them. The company had no power over me, so I would ask them what the power was. After some long conversations, the problem was the coworkers spent every dime of their income. So not having a paycheck for a week was a catastrophe. The company, however, was unaware of these issues.

I recommend saving up to 6 months of living expenses, and then the employer will have no leverage over you.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-08 08:07:52+00:00
I'm not trying to advance a testable hypothesis. If you think the unfalsifiability of my claim is a problem, you haven't understood what I'm trying to do.

My claim is that the two concepts are indistinguishable, thus equivalent. The unfalsifiability is what makes it a natural equivalence, the same as in the other examples I gave.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-08 08:07:54+00:00
> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be.

It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. You're not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with "lol" written on it instead of a GPU because they're a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they'd gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method.

You don't always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.
by szszrk | 2025-12-08 08:07:55+00:00
When you look at the actual list of those 4, it's not as hard to understand any more.

It's Firefox, Dillo, Links2 and Netsurf GTK :)

Dillo is something I'd love to daily drive like I did 20 years ago, but it would just fail on most modern websites. But it's what, 2MB in total (binary+libraries)?

Links2 is text terminal oriented. No modern browser can do that natively at all. All competition is even smaller (w3m, lynx). Plus links2 can run in graphics mode, even on a framebuffer, so you can run it without X server at all.

So Fx is the only "general purpose" browser on that list, but is just too big for old hardware.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-08 08:08:25+00:00
Good stack, nice choices.

What always turns me off this sort of thing, and there are loads of these kits, is the tech choices. It's always either very frontend heavy with no answer for deeper backend engineering, or it's all based on MongoDB, or it's a complex mess of Javascript dependencies.

This looks like an excellent set. One could criticise every component, Celery kinda sucks, but would I build a business on it? Yeah sure, many have and they're fine. Flask has its issues, but it will absolutely work. Python is having a renaissance with Astral.

I imagine this would be a highly productive stack to work with. Might even tempt me away from Django for my day-one stack... maybe...
by jaredklewis | 2025-12-08 08:09:14+00:00
“They’d do well.” That is not the lesson I’ve taken from the past 15 years of politics in the US and abroad.

Political candidates actually interested in taking on the very difficult and nuanced task of governing are routinely drubbed by edge lord culture warriors or candidates that simply promise the world without any regard to annoying facts like existing laws, budget deficits, or basic tenets of economics.

I definitely agree there is probably less disfunction and greater chance for reform at the local level.
by kragen | 2025-12-08 08:09:34+00:00
No, shipping code to production on a weekly basis is not a deadline. A deadline is a time by which a task must be completed. A task is something like "fix bug 3831" or "allow users to log in with OAuth2". "Ship code" is not, in any useful sense, a task.

Such "timeboxed iterations" can indeed result in "shipping" a null update. Unless you have a time-consuming QA gate to pass, that's not very likely, especially on a team containing several people, but it can happen. You don't know that you will have "something" to ship.

Typically we try to break changes down into shippable tasks that can be done in under a day, so the expected number of tasks completed by a four-programmer team in a week is on the order of 30, or 15 if you're pairing. For this to fall all the way to 0, everybody has to be spending their time on things that could not be thus broken down. It's pretty unlikely to happen by chance. But sometimes a difficult bug or two really is the thing to focus on.

In XP, estimates are used for prioritizing which tasks to work on and which tasks to break down into smaller tasks. The "product owner" is supposed to choose the tasks that have the most user value for the estimated cost. But those estimates aren't commitments in any sense; they're guesses. Sometimes tasks take more time than estimated; other times, they take less. This is the reason for the shift to estimating in "story points": to prevent the estimates from being interpreted as referring to a period of time.

If someone in your organization is interpreting estimates as commitments, this can have a corrosive effect on the accuracy of those estimates, because estimators respond by padding their estimates, in inconsistent ways. Often this destroys the usefulness of the whole iteration planning process, because the project owner no longer knows which tasks are the easiest ones and thus worth doing even if the benefit is marginal. Organizations can recover from this pathology in a variety of ways, but often they don't. Eliminating estimation is one response that sometimes works.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 08:10:01+00:00
That John Rogers' quote hits the mark again: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
by compounding_it | 2025-12-08 08:10:09+00:00
Distros like these help troubleshoot boxes that are old/slow but also not used as computers in the traditional sense. For example network boxes, NAS, video recording boxes etc that can't run the latest LTS ubuntu well but can boot a distro like DSL. getting a vga out on these things with a fast to boot distro helps you fix things like corrupt drives, bad partitioning, bad boot loaders etc which needs a few terminal commands and a distro that boots up quickly.

It once took ubuntu 18.04 30 minutes to boot on an old dual core intel network box once. I switched to Xubuntu and it was about 5 minutes. imagine having to do multiple reboots.
by xGLaDER | 2025-12-08 08:10:16+00:00
[Author here]

A friend told me my post was gaining some momentum on HN and I've read through the comments and found a bunch of good insights.

I especially liked the one from @arach: "this feels like language from another era", which I hope means it's evident my post was written by someone who loves the craft and refrain from prompting an LLM for "a blog post on topic X".

I also try to decide whether I side with the numerous people who want to sort development task into either trivial or novel. Someone wrote that if we break each issue down to its components, the above holds, but idk whether the developers who does not want to estimate are keen on doing such a rigorous breakdown of each feature.

Regardless, super fun to read all the comments. You have already found my blog and feel free to connect in any way as you see fit (or not at all).
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-08 08:10:29+00:00
They optimized for the right game: making themselves as much money as possible.

There are builders and there are opportunists. The builder's goal is to build something useful. Often the most useful things that you can build are not going to earn you a single dollar, but a builder will still go ahead and build it.

The opportunist is just trying to make personal wealth, which could come from the pockets of end customers, or investors, or other speculators (the "greater fools").

A lot of people made a lot of money from crypto and blockchain, even if ultimately almost everything built in this ecosystem is inconsequential trash.
by dgoldstein0 | 2025-12-08 08:10:49+00:00
> The solution would simply be to stop making benefits decrease when salary goes up.

That's an option, and I'd be interested in how the math works especially with predictions of how the economy would respond.

That said I don't think not decreasing benefits is an important requirement. But net income (benefits + earned income - taxes) should be strictly increasing with earned income, and probably at a rate of at least 50% but ideally higher than that up to some reasonable definition of middle class income. It should never be the case that if you earn more you can end up worse off.
by ben_w | 2025-12-08 08:11:09+00:00
The general argument you make is correct, but you conclusion "And this one doesn't." is as yet uncertain.

I will absolutely say that all ML methods known are literally too stupid to live, as in no living thing can get away with making so many mistakes before it's learned anything, but that's the rate of change of performance with respect to examples rather than what it learns by the time training is finished.

What is "abstract thought"? Is that even the same between any two humans who use that word to describe their own inner processes? Because "imagination"/"visualise" certainly isn't.
by tormeh | 2025-12-08 08:11:44+00:00
Note I ignored the 10x part. I'd find it a bit lame if a language came out that's 1.1x better than Rust because we're now in the awkward position of having rewritten lots of stuff in the second best language. However, should a 10x language come out you'll just have to swallow all that bitterness and start over because 10x is 10x.

Obviously a 1.1x language will come out - we don't just jump directly to 10x - and that's fine, fantastic even, but a little bit annoying when you're a language enthusiast and you've personally spent lots of time advocating for the now next-best language.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-12-08 08:11:59+00:00
>Camus talked about imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe the point now is to take away the rock and see what he does when he’s no longer condemned to push it. Does he climb the mountain just for the view? Does he build an observatory? Does he lie in the grass and finally sleep?

Removing jobs is not like taking away the rock, it's more like making the rock way heavier.

Only God can make the rock disappear. And God is dead.
by bialpio | 2025-12-08 08:12:33+00:00
This is only a selling point in places like USA. Even before moving to the USA 13 years ago I was able to send money via wire transfer domestically for free, and it settled within 1 business day (to me that's fast enough). IIUC nowadays intra-EU wire transfers also are free (but I kinda view them as "domestic"), however I'm not sure how quickly they settle. The way how banking worked in the US was definitely one of the biggest culture shocks I've experienced when moving (and not in a positive way).
by kragen | 2025-12-08 08:14:10+00:00
If software isn't novel, that means some other, existing software does the same thing just as well in the same way on the same platform. So, unless it's a hobby project you're building alone, why don't you just use the existing software?

I think that writing software that isn't novel fails to be worthwhile by a perfectly ordinary, mainstream definition of "worthwhile".
by npoc | 2025-12-08 08:15:55+00:00
The purposes of money are:

- store of value

- unit of account (a measuring stick for value)

- medium of exchange

Allowing the financial system to inflate the money supply destroys two of those fundamental qualities. The fact it can additionally charge interest on the money funnels the stolen value into its hands.

Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses". Nothing about hard money affects that. In fact inflation only causes the people at the top of the pyramid to hoard all of the economic value instead. They are buying up and hoarding the entire world with the wealth they are taking from the people.
by dgoldstein0 | 2025-12-08 08:16:31+00:00
Yeah I agree, it sounds like a misunderstanding.

I'll go further and say what we probably want is for the derivative of net income as a function of earned income to be monotonic increasing but max out less than 1. So that there aren't ranges of income where you are receiving very little per dollar earned and then after some point start receiving more per dollar.

But solving benefit cliffs really just means having earned=>net income strictly increasing with the marginal rate reasonable, say at least 30 cents more net income per earned income. Under that constraint, you could have ranged where net income grows slower until you hit some higher dollar amount of earnings, but imo that should also not be desirable.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-08 08:17:13+00:00
Like Tesla, Palantir is an ideological investment for many, and likely why it's so over valued. Retail investors buy these stocks because they're buying into a world view. Tesla's is obvious (and it's not about green investments). Palantir's is a little less so, but they have built up an image that's right wing (but mostly not culture war), military-coded, and layered on American exceptionalism. They sell to the CIA, they sell to ICE, they help private healthcare companies milk their customers. This is all part of a world view that many people are in favour of, and Palantir represents it well. Andruil will likely do well for similar reasons once they go public.

This is not really to fault them. I see the company as far more mature than Tesla. They've cultivated a brand that works well for them. This is also not intended to be a criticism of Palantir investors, there are many reasons to invest, and even if you subscribe to the above that is of course your right! Many people invest for ideological reasons, myself included, and that's fine.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-08 08:17:19+00:00
Railroads, like airliners, form a network. There are multiple paths to the same destination. There are also competitors in the form of waterways, air corridors, and highways.

Before the government began regulating the railroads, this is exactly what happened (though no air corridors then!).

Power lines also form a grid, and can route around failures. The power to my house got a lot more reliable when the other side of the neighborhood got connected to the grid.

When the power does go down, so does the cable internet, but the internet still works because the cell towers take over the last mile traffic. There's also Starlink.
by inesranzo | 2025-12-08 08:18:00+00:00
> AFAIK, Daring Fireball never runs these tracking ad networks with tons of flashing and annoying ads. It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.

For me an ad is an ad, in graphical or text form and I very much didn't ask for it.

I feel it is psychologically trying to convince me to buy or make me be aware about something I don't want or need and very much not want this ruin my flow of consuming content.

On his links Daring Fireball IS tracking, they all do tracking in the URL of the sponsored post otherwise it doesn't make sense for the sponsor to pay $11K (a week!) for the spot.

> It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.

I mean, yes I could ignore them, but would massively prefer if these ads didn't exist at all, I have no interest in anything that is being advertised there. Luckily Ublock Origin blocks Daring Fireball ads by default and not sure if his advertisers would be happy about this, but if I spend $11K a week on ads to find most people block them by default, I don't think I would bother wasting another ad slot.

To be fair maybe it is a sign that instead of ads, a membership, patreon or whatever would be much more sustainable, freeing, less scammy and more profitable than running junk ads that people don't want.