MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 21:06:41+00:00
> When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.

If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?

> For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery.

Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it.

> They are the libertarian solution.

They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.
by Daishiman | 2025-12-12 21:07:18+00:00
> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.

> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.

> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.

Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
by repstosb | 2025-12-12 21:07:18+00:00
That's actually a terrific example, because the company already had a working, field-tested manually controlled version of their product, but they wanted a computer-controlled version to relieve radiologists of all of the drudgery and opportunities for error in the manual setup. So the design spec was to "faithfully replicate the manual setup procedures in a microcontroller," which was achieved. The problem was that the UI was utter dogshit, the training materials were poor (you can't have Marketing say "hey this computer handles all the details for you!" and then expect customers to pore page-by-page through the reference manual), and most clinics weren't really enforcing or QAing the operator training anyway. And since "the computer has a handle on it," the radiologists and senior techs who were supposed to be second-checking everything basically abdicated that responsibility, driven in part I'm sure by management that expected them to now have more "free hours" for other activities that Make Line Go Up. And nobody really raised a flag that this seemed troubling until multiple children died, and at the end of the day a lot of people could say "well, it wasn't my fault, I did what I was told to do" and sort of believe it.

If anyone doesn't think all of that is going to happen again on a massive scale as companies embrace GenAI, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. AI will change a lot of things, but it won't fix human nature.
by Ensorceled | 2025-12-12 21:07:24+00:00
I just had flash backs to a previous job where I was brought in to optimize another teams builds since they were now taking minutes instead of seconds.

I tracked it down to a folder with thousands of C++ files called things like uint_to_int.cc and inch_to_cm.cc and cm_to_m.cc. Basically the developer in charge of writing the conversion library took our typed units library and autogenerated a C++ file for every possible conversion the application might need to make.

Every time we added a new typed unit it would create another couple of dozen files to be compiled.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-12 21:07:28+00:00
> To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.

> It also sounds as though authors and publishers were, for the most part, not notified of this feature’s existence.

This is perfectly reasonable fair use.

I'm starting to realize that a lot of content creators either don't understand fair use, or otherwise are unreasonable control freaks.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-12-12 21:07:32+00:00
A lot of people genuinely can't remember what they did an hour ago, but to be very clear you're implying that an LLM can't "remember" something from an hour, or three hours ago, when it's the opposite.

I can restart a conversation with an LLM 15 days later and the state is exactly as it was.

Can't do that with a human.

The idea that humans have a longer, more stable context window than LLM's, CAN or is even LIKELY to be true given certain activities but please let's be honest about this.

If you talk to someone for an hour about a technical conversation I would guesstimate that 90% of humans would immediately start to lose track of details in about 10 minutes. So they write things down, or they mentally repeat things to themselves they know or have recognized they keep forgetting.

I know this because it's happened continually in tech companies decade after decade.

LLM's have already passed the Turing test. They continue to pass it. They fool and outsmart people day after day.

I'm no fan of the hype AI is receiving, especially around overstating its impact in technical domains, but pretending that LLM's can't or don't consistently perform better than most human adults on a variety of different activities is complete non-sense.
by necovek | 2025-12-12 21:07:35+00:00
So far, it's been pretty easy to find examples of how it is different from human intelligence.

For one, it needs multiple orders of magnitude more tokens (millions? billions? more?) to start following grammar rules: watch any kid pick it up with exposure to maybe 10,000 words by the age of 2 (look how they apply the rule to exceptions and while it does not work, it shows their internalization of the rule).

Next, "how" LLMs work is evident when it barfs in gotcha questions like "if yesterday was Tuesday, what day was yesterday" (I believe all major players have overcome this one in the last 12 months, but you can always find these LLM-twisters: yes, you can trick humans too by distracting them, but these are computers which "don't pay attention"?)

And it can frequently undo an improvement it added earlier, or mess something new up that you did not call out specifically.
by _kst_ | 2025-12-12 21:07:36+00:00
The author missed an opportunity for a much shorter solution for the given problem statement.

// Check whether a number is odd or even. #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdbool.h> static bool is_odd_or_even(unsigned long num) { return true; } int main(int argc, char **argv) { const unsigned long num = strtoul(argv[1], NULL, 10); printf("%lu is %s odd or even\n", num, is_odd_or_even(num) ? "is" : "is not"); }
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-12 21:07:45+00:00
That would have been fantastic. My worry is if we standardized it now, a lot of library code would be unexpectedly dealing with ECANCELED from APIs that previously were guaranteed to never fail outside of programmer error, e.g. `pthread_mutex_lock()`.

Looking at some of my shipping code, there's a fair bit that triggers a runtime `assert()` if `pthread_mutex_lock()` fails, as that should never occur outside of a locking bug of my own making.
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-12 21:08:53+00:00
The concern is that a malicious vendor could send you an evil invoice where the XML either references external entities that get downloaded and allow potential RCE, or where the document contains references to the local execution environment which allow data exfiltration (or both). In theory a properly-secured XML parser shouldn't allow this, but history has shown that's harder than you might think.
by kasabali | 2025-12-12 21:09:23+00:00
He's kinda right even though he's kinda wrong.

He's confused about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because they're afraid China would be the eventual buyer (via proxies) and they'd be inadvertently in violation of US sanctions , so instead of selling they just locked down the old machinery to gather dust instead.

And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been slowly but steadily increasing long before this crisis, after the crisis DDR4 prices have also tripled just like DDR5 prices, even in the used market. So regardless of whether it's a real demand or panic response, the effect is still real on people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems. These people who probably just wants to update RAM in their systems in the hope that it'd help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years while bracing the impact. Had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-12 21:09:28+00:00
> somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery"

I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.
by Supermancho | 2025-12-12 21:09:45+00:00
> Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically.

With current tech, it's practical enough to extract rocks from a rock. We've already done this on a comet, which I think is much harder to do. With current economics, not practical to fund such an endeavor, even if it was to haul back an asteroid made of solid gold. Regardless, we're discussing the far future, rather than current state.

If raw materials (again, an unknown) continue to become more scarce, it's hard to say what economics might support extra-planetary resource collection. What's for sure, is mining Mars will be harder than mining asteroids for water or metals, et al.
by frnkng | 2025-12-12 21:10:25+00:00
Shelly devices support json rpc over udp. It is quite nice to use those apis and the resulting client code is surprisingly light weight and robust.

However, there are two things that worry me:

a) what about datagrams bigger then MSS? Here the risk of losing the whole datagram doubles, triples, … Locally, it may not be so bad when one can use jumbo frames, but one the internet, it will be 1452 bytes per Datagram, before fragmentation happens

b) how to handle encryption and authentication?
by unionmember99 | 2025-12-12 21:10:51+00:00
OK, so if you don't want a union, but you want to achieve goals which are typically fought for by unions, what exactly is the alternative mechanism you propose for achieving these goals?

This sounds to me like "I don't want memory protection, what I really want is for my computer to solidly enforce common sense memory barriers", or "I don't want defense attorneys, what I really want is courts to provide common sense advocacy for defendants". Somebody has to do the work, and you're naming the component of the system which provides the features you want.

The universe maximizes entropy, not common sense. The tech industry doesn't want to give an inch for the same reason a dropped object falls to earth: there is no force suggesting it do anything else.
by desmoulins | 2025-12-12 21:11:12+00:00
This is true, but there's still the problem of how things are distributed within the collective groups.

When the labor market gets competitive, you start to see long probationary periods, two-tier pay and benefit scales, hiring people on as casuals instead of permanent members, and other bargaining concessions that end up favoring some union members over others. I know some unions over the last few years have managed to fight against two-tier systems, but if there's any sort of serious economic downturn I'd expect them to become commonplace again.

I'm curious to see if they can come up with a way to organize that works for everyone, or if it'll end up as something like the Longshoreman's union: a fantastic deal, provided you won the lottery to get in and then stuck around long enough to be a permanent member.
by hvb2 | 2025-12-12 21:11:54+00:00
Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that.

And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)

Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
by breppp | 2025-12-12 21:12:08+00:00
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgknpzrkyvno

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/01/germany-summon...

https://www.euractiv.com/news/germany-arrests-syrian-suspect...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/05/suspected-memb...

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-police-detain-man-in-anti-terr...
by positron26 | 2025-12-12 21:12:12+00:00
> A user has asked if GNU Unifont can be used with commercial (non-free) software.

One can be forgiven for thinking the author means to imply that all commercial software is non-free. It is a further disappointment that anyone has to ask.

Open source was right to get rid of the intentional and unintentionally anti-commercial motifs that only got in the way of paid open source development.
by Umofomia | 2025-12-12 21:12:19+00:00
I totally agree with this, and will add that another benefit of whimsical names is discoverability. If your project is named plugin-update-checker and I want to find documentation on it, it's likely going to be buried in a bunch of other irrelevant search results about plugin update checkers in general. If it was called SocketToMe instead, I'm going to find much better search results.
by akersten | 2025-12-12 21:12:38+00:00
> Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature

I haven't seen a convincing argument why not. There's millions of librarians with the knowledge of more than 20 years of literature under their belt. Why can they answer your questions about a book but the robot can't?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 21:13:23+00:00
> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing?

Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.

> why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers?

Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work.

> If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China

This is literally what has already happened.

The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-12 21:13:43+00:00
Don't take this the wrong way, but the run on sentences are quite hard to parse.

> That’s a vague hypothetical

Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.

> I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers

This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.

Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.

> it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.

The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.

Yes, people are going to say wrong things, and mislead other people. But the cost to suppress this speech is far, far more detrimental than letting it be.
by supern0va | 2025-12-12 21:14:12+00:00
If you have ample free time and few commitments and/or you read very short pop fiction, I could see how you might believe this. But there's a vast world of very long and dense literature, and also...people have kids and a life that gets in the way. Combine the two and...well, I can see why this feature would be useful. :)
by torginus | 2025-12-12 21:14:23+00:00
Not necessarily - many games have custom engines underpinned by a decade of arcane tech that you wont find anywhere in the world outside the company.

It sucks both for you and the company if they have to replace you.

In contrast, if you work building SaaS apps on top of k8s, you can both transfer your skills easily, and the company can replace you easier.

It could go both ways, but in practice it usually turns out that if your skills are transferable you make more money.

This thing also popped up in the gaming industry, with Unreal becoming popular, and people using it making much more and jumping between projects, because their skills are transferable.
by Manuel_D | 2025-12-12 21:14:36+00:00
Id employees can apply for jobs while remaining employed at Id. You're writing as though Id employees must first quit their jobs before seeking a new one. And even if they do have a period of unemployment between jobs, COBRA continues to cover them for up to a year.

> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees

If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.

> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.

> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.

And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.

If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.

People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.
by evgen | 2025-12-12 21:14:37+00:00
For simple yes/no questions ("Is over 18?", "Is US resident?") then you should look back to David Chaum's blind signatures and the work that came out of that back in the 90s. The math is super-simple to understand and there are a ton of even easier metaphors with envelopes and carbon paper that you can use to explain to your grandmother. Once you get someone to grok blind signatures it is easy to lead them to zero-knowledge proofs.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-12 21:14:44+00:00
>small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.

When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.

But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes.
by redserk | 2025-12-12 21:14:57+00:00
Perhaps a quantity below "a single company causes enough of a spike in global demand that it'll have demonstrable impact in nearly every single industry"

And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.

I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
by gala8y | 2025-12-12 21:14:58+00:00
1. on A9 near nurnberg we caught a ride with a musician from munich (he played trumpet and showed us his music when i asked if he had any recordings in the car). it was heavily raining and it was late in the night. as we were approaching munich, he got off the highway and i was worried how we were supposed to get back on the highway in the middle of a effing night, but he just drove home and we stayed overnight. we ate breakfast together with the whole family (wife, kids) and he drove us off to the nearest autobahn entry on his way to the conservatory (he used to teach there) - we were going south, to italy. that's first top of my head, surely there is more. good times. we connected, big time.
by Interesco | 2025-12-12 21:15:22+00:00
(Assuming this is NY) Worth noting that NY license plates had a defect that caused the paint to delaminate [1]. I am not surprised that people intentionally do it, but this delamination used to be extremely common.

[1]: https://www.syracuse.com/news/2019/08/new-york-ends-contract...
by derriz | 2025-12-12 21:15:32+00:00
The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s.

We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.

Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.

All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.

Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 21:15:44+00:00
> Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.

Let's do that then.

> This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.

Except that you then get the union lobbying to sustain the monopoly instead of eliminate it, which makes it even harder to do the thing that actually needs to be done.