MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-12-21 23:41:32+00:00
Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.

A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.

When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.

It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.

Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)

Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-21 23:41:43+00:00
Late 90’s I had a ~90 minute commute for a while (50min train with seat, 20min London Underground seat mostly, 15min train crammed, 10min walk).

The longer train I would use my laptop, same with the 20min underground section on the journey in (going home no chance), but for the packed train and the walk I listened to music (I still have my Diamond Rio PMP300, no idea if it still works, just remember downsampling music to 32kbps to get more on a memory card, quality was less important than quantity - I must have listened to David Gray’s album _White Ladder_ many hundreds of times).

Toshiba laptops (Satellite? I think they were before the Tecras), heavy and the battery life wasn’t much more than 90 minutes but it was just enough. Dual booting Windows and Linux. (Linux for dev work on the go…)

Obviously no mobile connectivity back then, I had to have a plan for what I was going to work on and that also involved backup plans if I ran into a blocker on the primary. Same for the way home.

A bit later I could get GPRS data rates via Infra-Red to my mobile and that just felt like magic.

I found the times I couldn’t be on my laptop (walking or on the packed train) were great for thinking problems through and often had to stop to scribble down thoughts/ideas/solutions in a notebook that I kept in the laptop bag.

Wrote so much useful code in that 18 months without the distractions of the Internet or emails or whatever.

Now I somehow find I have less time despite having virtually no commute. Technology has vastly increased the number of distractions and I have let myself succumb to them. Where I had no real choice in what music I listened to now I have too much choice. There’s always one last thing to check before I get on with a bit of work. Sometimes I wish for simpler times.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-21 23:42:42+00:00
Yes, I started off with the idea that Rue's syntax would be a strict subset of Rust's.

I may eventually diverge from this, but I like Rust's syntax overall, and I don't want to bikeshed syntax right now, I want to work on semantics + compiler internals. The core syntax of Rust is good enough right now.
by ncruces | 2025-12-21 23:42:52+00:00
I mostly read those signs as “don't go there unless you already know you can” which as a “tourist” I just assume can't (unless I'm a local, and figure it out).

What I've recently found troubling is the places that use similar signs for emissions controls. With a rental you usually have a recent enough car that you can ignore those.

Being able to distinguish between “low emissions zone, but any car from this decade can go in” and “local traffic only, you need to live in this neighborhood to enter” in a foreign language, bit me a couple of times while traveling.
by SamDc73 | 2025-12-21 23:44:01+00:00
Fair point. The USA PATRIOT Act shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But one of its most controversial parts (Section 215) did expire in 2020 (it was barely going to make it, though).

But you’re right overall: most of the Act’s powers were repeatedly renewed or re-created under other laws.

Sunset clauses aren’t a silver bullet, but they do occasionally stop or slow things that would otherwise become permanent.
by incanus77 | 2025-12-21 23:44:35+00:00
Oh sure, lots of things to miss about that time... startup vibes, underdog causes during the worst of the Bush years, and work that ranged from the Mac stuff to Linux/BSD backend admin, PHP dev, introduction of the tech team to SVN/version control, even some music composition for a video. And close work with a bunch of folks on the team who now have their own Wikipedia pages, as well as high-profile clients. My boss left eventually in mid 2005 to go work for (then Senator) Obama and personally interviewed him for / produced his podcast, posted to his Flickr, and that sort of thing.

The commuting... not so much. Moved into DC proper after that year, which itself was a great adventure. Leaving the house at 5:30-6:00am and returning at 8:30-9:00pm was no way to live.
by sublinear | 2025-12-21 23:45:44+00:00
> Switching to another tool felt like a huge project that was just not worth it. Linear took that to heart, and made switching super simple with a 2-way sync, keeping your legacy tool updated. I haven’t met an engineer who tried Linear and didn’t like it. Teams that switch to Linear see 2x more reported issues - engineers actually want to use the tool. More visibility => fewer meetings => happer engineers.

Yeah that's very clearly an ad. They didn't even try to be subtle lol.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-21 23:47:10+00:00
> It's one thing to be at the forefront of enshittification, but Microsoft is now actively hostile to its users.

Haven't lived under a rock until now must be relaxing.

I really hope this mess will lead to a significant uptick in Linux usage though. That would be a great effect. Unfortunately, most people will either adapt or go with macOS and be in a similar spot in a few years.
by drweevil | 2025-12-21 23:48:07+00:00
The most interesting feeding behavior of wasps, occurring only in the social species, is called trophallaxis. Since the larva need protein to grow, the adults hunt caterpillars, bugs, etc. They chew them up for the larva and feed them. In return, the larva provide the adults droplets of a fluid rich in nutrients and sugars. Feed your babies protein, eat the sugary excrement. Yum.
by Insanity | 2025-12-21 23:48:21+00:00
I felt similar for most of 2025. Then at some point something clicked and now I work on side projects again without AI.

Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.

The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.
by dheera | 2025-12-21 23:49:32+00:00
I think it's also because high middle class earners are financially smart (don't buy things if they don't have the money), AND health-smart (realize their body's needs, including sleep) so they choose logically not to have kids, because they do not have the resources for it, and will not sacrifice their own well-being just to have kids.

The upper class is financially smart, AND has the resources (20+ years of child rearing costs already secured upfront, ability to hire night nannies, ability to take a few years away from work without income, own a home and not at the mercy of rent increases), so they have kids.

The lower class is often not financially smart, is not health smart, and systematically poisoned to sacrifice themselves and buy things they cannot afford. They are given insufficient resources and told that they should have kids, so they do.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-21 23:50:08+00:00
I prefer narrow entries with an "event ID" attached; you can trivially filter to get all of your items with the same event ID, but it works better with all the tools designed for narrow entries.

So instead of one entry with e.g. 27 elements, you have maybe a dozen entries, all with the same event id and 2-4 elements (including the event ID) each. This also lets you log incrementally; if your server crashes before you log the wide entry you have zero data.

It also lets you adjust the granularity. E.g. for a web service you might have both a session and a request ID.
by kazinator | 2025-12-21 23:50:35+00:00
> The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination.

Right; that's the feeble public imagination. What captures my imagination is the idea that the existence of the rules alone is enough to obtain the universe; no simulator is required.

We can make an analogy to a constant like pi. No division has to take place of a circumference by a diameter in order to prop up the existence of pi.

The requirement for a simulator just punts the rock down the road: in what universe is that simulator, and what simulates that? It's an infinite regress. If there is no simulator, that goes away.

If certain equations dictate that you exist and have experiences, then you exist and have experiences in the same way that pi exists.
by josephg | 2025-12-21 23:50:50+00:00
Yep. This was the biggest thing that turned me off Go. I ported the same little program (some text based operational transform code) to a bunch of languages - JS (+ typescript), C, rust, Go, python, etc. Then compared the experience. How were they to use? How long did the programs end up being? How fast did they run?

I did C and typescript first. At the time, my C implementation ran about 20x faster than typescript. But the typescript code was only 2/3rds as many lines and much easier to code up. (JS & TS have gotten much faster since then thanks to improvements in V8).

Rust was the best of all worlds - the code was small, simple and easy to code up like typescript. And it ran just as fast as C. Go was the worst - it was annoying to program (due to a lack of enums). It was horribly verbose. And it still ran slower than rust and C at runtime.

I understand why Go exists. But I can't think of any reason I'd ever use it.
by devmor | 2025-12-21 23:51:48+00:00
What is the difference between buying your child a dino sticker and buying them a machine that creates whatever stickers they want without having to think or look at anything, derived entirely from stolen artwork by others?

You might as well say there’s no difference between a rock and a semi truck.

You don’t seem willing to have an honest conversation, just assert ridiculous nonsense and call it a rebuttal - there is nothing thoughtful about your replies to me.
by foobarchu | 2025-12-21 23:52:20+00:00
For what it's worth, a lot of the crowd who used to want to but we're hamstrung by the garbage support for games on Linux are now actually switching since Steam has essentially made it "just work" via Proton. The final real blocker for many people is finally gone this iteration of the cycle.

I myself have fully switched to Endeavor for my personal desktop, though I still use a MacBook for work (as I have for 17 years now, if you include college). It's been a surprisingly seamless experience, I highly recommend it over Ubuntu-based distributions, especially for Steam (I was a former Mint adherent but the general stability has gone way downhill).
by em-bee | 2025-12-21 23:52:23+00:00
there are already more of us than we know how to sustain

what is the evidence for that? if that were true then we would have lot's of people going hungry, but that's simply not the case. poverty is getting reduced world wide. if we could not sustain the current population, we should have lots of people dying from hunger and the population should stop growing. but the reason why population is growing especially in africa is exactly because the growth is still sustainable. if it wasn't, then it could not be growing.
by teleforce | 2025-12-21 23:52:46+00:00
The Practice Guide of Computer is really a gem, and the bottom lines sentences are just golden (now I understand what they meant when people mentioned bottom lines) of part D: Rid yourself of the following reasons of being a practioner of computer.

To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
by fusslo | 2025-12-21 23:53:28+00:00
one person proved the uselessness of ai reviews for our entire company.

He'd make giant, 100+ file changes, 1000+ worded PRs. Impossible to review. eventually he just modified the permissions to require a single approval, approves his changes and merges. This is still going on, but he's isolated to repos he made himself

He'd copy/paste the output from AI on other people's reviews. Often they were false positives or open ended questions. So he automated his side, but doubled or tripled the work of the person requesting the review. not to mention the ai's comments were 100-300 words with formatting and emojis.

The contractors refused to address any comments made by him. Some felt it was massively disrespectful as they put tons of time and effort into their changes and he can't even bother to read it himself.

It got to the CTO. And AI reviews have been banned.

But it HAS helped the one Jr guy on the team prepare for reviews and understand review comments better. It's also helped us write better comments, since I and some others can be really bad at explaining something
by prattmic | 2025-12-21 23:53:30+00:00
> 2. Cell service has, at the same time, become ubiquitous in subway tunnels.

Not in New York, unfortunately. All of the stations have cell service, and one tunnel (14th Street L train tunnel under the East River), but everywhere else has no service between stations. It’s an annoying limitation that most cities seem to have fixed by now.
by klustregrif | 2025-12-21 23:55:18+00:00
> And in 2026, replicas of this plant will start popping up across the globe.

> We mean that literally. It takes just half a day to inflate the bubble. The rest of the facility takes less than two years to build and can be done just about anywhere there’s 5 hectares of flat land.

Gotta love the authors comitment to the bit. Wow, only half a day you say? And then just between 1 to 2 years more? Crazy.
by godelski | 2025-12-21 23:55:29+00:00
You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.

How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).

Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".

Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.

But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.

Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.

In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
by kfreds | 2025-12-21 23:56:00+00:00
Thank you for your constructive criticism.

> I think the right course of action should be a political activism, not a technological one. Especially when the company doing it makes a fortune.

We tried that. My cofounder and I, as well as several of our colleagues, tried classic political activism in the early 2000s. It became increasingly clear to us that there are many powerful politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups that don't act in good faith. They lie, abuse their positions, misuse state funds and generally don't care what the population or civil society thinks. They have an agenda, and don't know the meaning of intellectual honesty.

> The course, when one can just disengage from participating in society by sidestepping the problems by either using VPNs in terms of censorship .. is very dangerous and will reinforce the worst trends.

It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to respect local law, not circumvent censorship through technological means, and only work to remove censorship through political means.

Generally, the more a state engages in online censorship the less it cares about what its population thinks. There are plenty of jurisdictions where political activism will get you jailed, or worse.

Are you seriously suggesting that circumventing state censorship is immoral and wrong?

> So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.

Social media companies make money by keeping people engaged, and it seems the most effective way of doing that is to feed people fear and rage bait. Yes, that's a problem. As is disinformation campaigns by authoritarian states.

Powerful companies have powerful lobbyists, and systematically strive for regulatory capture. Authoritarian states who conduct disinformation campaigns against their population are unlikely to listen to reform proposals from their population.

I don't claim to have a solution for these complex issues, but I'm pretty sure mass surveillance and censorship will make things worse.

> Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.

Political reform through civil discourse cannot be taken for granted. Mass surveillance and censorship violate the principle of proportionality, and do not belong in a free society.

> Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.

I'm not sure what you mean by performance. Please clarify.
by arboles | 2025-12-21 23:58:37+00:00
Here's people installing Tailscale binaries and gracefully working around a missing kernel module and the missing iptables binary on the Kobo Sage / Kobo Libra 2:

https://blog.videah.net/my-e-reader-setup/#tailscale-vpn

https://dstaley.com/posts/tailscale-on-kobo-sage/
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-21 23:58:48+00:00
If you decide to dual boot:

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

I run this as the first step on any new Win 11 machine, the recommended defaults remove nearly all annoyances I care about. It's a popular tool that's been around for years with a lot of users so isn't some random repo, and it's just Powershell so pretty easy to understand what it's doing if you want to audit the code yourself.

After running it once, I've seen nothing that I would consider an "ad" on Windows 11, and search looks only at the filesystem without any web/store trash. Somewhat ironically, it makes for a cleaner experience than MacOS where I regularly get spammed by Apple trying to cross-sell me something (iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc).

(FWIW, I have also never needed to re-run after an update or anything, based on 6+ full Win11 installs across three different devices.)
by scrollaway | 2025-12-21 23:59:09+00:00
The world is full of people who, like you, seek any reason to not listen or read interesting things in favour of doing just about anything else. You don’t win a prize for being part of that group — at best, you saved as much time as it took you to write that comment. In exchange you are likely poorer for it intellectually because Patrick’s writing has an exceptionally high signal to noise ratio, and that signal is one most are not privy to.

At no point did the article claim AARP was in the wrong for running those ads. But had you kept reading you’d maybe have understood that wasn’t the point nor the premise in the first place.
by mudkipdev | 2025-12-21 23:59:42+00:00
Claude's $20 plan should be renamed to "trial". Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes. With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours. I'm sympathetic to developers who are using this as their only AI subscription because while I was working on a challenging bug yesterday I reached the limit before it had even diagnosed the problem and had to switch to another coding agent to take over. I understand you can't expect much from a $20 subscription, but the next jump up costing $80 is demotivating.
by throw1235435 | 2025-12-21 23:59:50+00:00
I think the models, if they continue to get better, and frameworks/service patterns change to accommodate AI's. Where pieces of code will be thrown away, etc because the new code will be designed to slowly accommodate the "big ball of mud" risk.

We are moving from a conceptual/model job which typically requires training and skills (i.e. the code model/tool use/etc meets the requirements) to simply validation which is an easier problem and/or can be sharded in other roles. In other words the engineering part (i.e. the fun part) will be left to the AI. What I've found is people types (e.g. managers), and QA types (if it works, I don't care, this is what needs to work) will do well. People who liked the craftsman ship, solving problems, etc will do worse. Pure tech IMO will be less and less of a career.
by 46Bit | 2025-12-22 00:00:29+00:00
What we're doing at Cloudflare (including some of what the author works on) samples adaptively. Each log batch is bucketed based on a few fields, and in each bucket if there's lots of logs in each bucket we only keep the sqrt or log of the number of input logs. It works really well... but part of why it works well is we always have blistering rates of logs, so can cope with spikes in event rates without the sampling system itself getting overwhelmed.
by gbraad | 2025-12-22 00:00:49+00:00
I have been doing something similar for years, especially for login to VMs: sets up an environment of my dotfiles based on a checkout and runs a resumable 'screen' session with tmux. This looks elegant (ephemeral), but I seldom log in to a machine I can't leave my files on as installed.

${HOME} is where your dotfiles are.
by bilalq | 2025-12-22 00:01:12+00:00
This question is surprising to me, because I consider AI code review the single most valuable aspect of AI-assisted software development today. It's ahead of line/next-edit tab completion, agentic task completion, etc.

AI code review does not replace human review. But AI reviewers will often notice little things that a human may miss. Sometimes the things they flag are false positives, but it's still worth checking in on them. If even one logical error or edge case gets caught by an AI reviewer that would've otherwise made it to production with just human review, it's a win.

Some AI reviewers will also factor in context of related files not visible in the diff. Humans can do this, but it's time consuming, and many don't.

AI reviews are also a great place to put "lint" like rules that would be complicated to express in standard linting tools like Eslint.

We currently run 3-4 AI reviewers on our PRs. The biggest problem I run into is outdated knowledge. We've had AI reviewers leave comments based on limitations of DynamoDB or whatever that haven't been true for the last year or two. And of course it feels tedious when 3 bots all leave similar comments on the same line, but even that is useful as reinforcement of a signal.