MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chii | 2025-12-02 03:02:49+00:00
> It'd be so much more efficient to just stab-stab-stab and take the money directly.

which is exactly what the law of the jungle is. And guess who sits at the top within that regime?

Humans would devolve back into that, if not for the violence enforcement from the state. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the state to make sure regulations are sound to prevent the stab-stab-stab, not the responsibility of the individual to not take advantage of a situation that would have been advantageous to take.
by DennisP | 2025-12-02 03:02:59+00:00
It's been nine years since the chain split, which happened within the first year. No irregular changes have been made since then. Two major hacks caused over a hundred million dollars in losses to Parity, a company founded by one of the core devs. That dev lobbied heavily for rescue, and the community refused.

Bitcoin also made an irregular change, a year and a half into its history.
by bbor | 2025-12-02 03:03:23+00:00
Random thought, but Kagi is acting like I wish Mozilla would. Their main product is a search engine, but they’ve been trying out a slew of other initiatives, all of which seem well thought out and integrate LLMs in an exclusively thoughtful, opt-in way. Surely many of them will end up being failures, but I can’t help but be impressed.

Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.

But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?
by kragen | 2025-12-02 03:03:51+00:00
The ADM3A was slightly more than a dumb TTY; it supported direct cursor addressing despite being made of SSI TTL chips. It was the main platform for vi. I bought a used one at a government surplus auction and, many years later, wrote an emulator. Thanks to termcap/terminfo, most TUI programs work adequately on an ADM3A emulator.

No graphics, though, not even TRS-80-style pseudographics. Not even inverse video.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-02 03:03:53+00:00
Look up the AT&T "You Will" advertising campaign sometime. This ran beginning in 1993, and I remember seeing at least a few of the spots at the time.

What these ads (and much speculative fiction, say, Arthur C. Clark particularly the "newspads" (tablet computers) in 2001 and "minisecs" (smartphones) in Imperial Earth) portrayed was capabilities without consideration of commercial and market imperatives. Capabilities promised empowerment and enablement. Markets delivered enshitiffication and enclosures of commons.

And as Timothy B. Lee noted, "the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T". AT&T's networks deliver much of the content and messaging which was portrayed, but the services themselves are not rooted in AT&T, either the original firm or its remonopolised successor organisation.

<https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6113853/we-live-in-the-future-a...>

Microsoft's vision was portrayed as well in the Bill Gates book The Road Ahead, published about the same time (1995). Again, it envisioned much, but little of that vision was delivered directly by Microsoft (though much of it was in fact experienced on computers running Microsoft's operating system, at least until the smartphone revolution supplanted it).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Gates_book)>
by xoa | 2025-12-02 03:04:59+00:00
It's pretty depressing as well as frustrating, watching something pretty solid get flushed in real time. This post puts words on it I hadn't really, but fading "confidence" is a really succinct foundation. There's no single massive thing just completely fubar'd, but the cumulative effect of hundreds to thousands of mysterious cuts combined with that now familiar sinking feeling of watching GUI bikeshedding accelerate with each new version, every more miserable, less useful, no more Feelings Of Delight at seeing some cool little attention to detail or nice new thing that clearly had some real thought and testing behind it. It all really eats away at one's day. I'm seeing this HN post and article literally right as I'm watching Activity Monitor and trying to figure out WTF is going on with mysterious ApplicationsStorageExtension (a plugin buried in the StorageManagement.framework) tasks spawning 4x on a Sequoia Mini M4 Pro and doing constant disk churn to no discernable purpose and introducing massive latency to certain file system access patterns. This started up out of nowhere in the last few weeks, almost exactly 1 year after getting this machine and with no major system upgrades. Why!? Who knows! Force quit them all and other stuff like MailStorageManagement goes nuts for a bit and then it settles down for an indeterminate period of time. Restart the computer and it goes away for awhile. No FS corruption issues found, seem to be no issues with spotlight. Sigh.

After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
by Nursie | 2025-12-02 03:05:12+00:00
The essay was a thought experiment based around the popularity of the so-called "sharing economy" at the time, not a WEF strategy document and certainly no government's policy.

Even the author of the piece said it was not a description of her vision of the future, but intended to start a discussion about technology.

But it's been picked up by wackaloons around the world as part of some overarching conspiracy theory.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-12-02 03:05:33+00:00
Seems like it would also result in capital investors covering more year-to-year tax revenue, which could reduce some pressure on other tax payers.

In theory, capital gains should average out over time. But in practice, I think an increasing amount of wealth is being held and not realized over many decades.

It doesn’t help anyone that a few billion $ of gains will be taxed eventually if that is so far into the future that most citizens alive today will have passed away by then.
by chasebank | 2025-12-02 03:05:33+00:00
There is a Swiss restoration youtube channel, my mechanics, that's restoring a 1973 Datsun 240Z. It's quite a project and worth watching if you're into that sort of thing. He's incredibly talented and loads of other restoration projects that are super interesting. Easily my favorite youtube channel!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B13vXFj37RI&list=PLN0SuqPcbL...
by ivankra | 2025-12-02 03:05:52+00:00
Looks like they're coining a new legal term "Capital Growth Tax", under which they are going to tax unrealized capital gains. I'm not aware of any other country that taxes them like that (besides wealth/exit taxes), so maybe they're the world's first here!

Some countries have wealth taxes - but they are usually flat or scale with wealth, not the yearly increase in wealth. Note that currently NL does de facto have a wealth tax in Box 3 system - shares are presumed to have a fictional fixed yield of around 5-6% per year on which they charge you income tax, so it works out to about 2% wealth tax.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-12-02 03:05:59+00:00
Thank you for responding.

* my original post was in no way intended to be patronizing - it was merely to point out that before investing effort, it pays to understand one's goals and priorities :-). Some activities have rabbit holes, which are fun, but only if you're into that sort of thing.

* now though, I will indulge in pointing out my absolute favourite hacker news type of post : "how dare you insinuate this is tricky or difficult or time consuming for anybody - you merely [series of acronyms and technologies and activities nobody in my family could do after a month's study, while hand waving over risks and issues and costs]" 0:-)
by zbentley | 2025-12-02 03:06:24+00:00
Say more? That sounds like an old codebase, and poor programming practices. What about the codebase and your struggles with it suggests that a rearchitecture is in order? What about it suggests that microservices might be the right solution?

I apologize if that sounds critical; it's not meant to be. Microservices/SoA are often the best available solution given human and technical constraints--I'm not skeptical, just curious.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-02 03:06:38+00:00
Because it was mentioned here that Israel needed to behave like the US in occupied Germany, I look up the numbers and while Israel was starving Palestinians Israel was providing more calories per person than the USA did for Germany.

BTW, the United Nations, which said it had food for the Palestinian to bring the calorie number up, is feeding the Sudan refugees 1/3 of the calories the USA provided to Germans after WW2, and much less than Israel supplied Gaza. But no one cares about the people the UN is starving (remember, the UN had extra calories and foods it begged to get into Gaza). No protests. No fundraisers.
by bg4 | 2025-12-02 03:07:19+00:00
Location: Dallas–Fort Worth, TX Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Java, Scala, Python, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, GCP, AWS, learning Go Résumé/CV: on request Email: bgoldswo@gmail.com

Hello! Fifteen years building backend systems with strict correctness and reliability requirements: matching engines, healthcare workflows, optimization pipelines.

Recently I built a vehicle–passenger on-demand matcher and a Kubernetes job platform for heavy optimization workloads. Before that I worked on distributed systems for chronic-care data (Scala, Kafka). Earlier, I spent a decade in transportation optimization across routing, planning, and scheduling.

I’m at my best when partnering with ML or OR teams, taking prototypes and turning them into predictable, production-ready systems. Strong domain modeling, correctness, property-based testing, and keeping on-call quiet.

Open to senior or staff backend or platform roles.

Happy to talk.
by evanelias | 2025-12-02 03:07:54+00:00
> If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically.

Yes, but crucially none of those expanded options cost $0, so I still don't understand your math at all. I feel like we're talking in circles here.

You should be deducting a substantially non-zero number from the amount in the headline to account for your "normal" non-childbirth-year best-case medical insurance premiums (or out-of-pocket cash costs if foregoing insurance altogether).
by askmike | 2025-12-02 03:08:02+00:00
To summarize the current Dutch personal income system: besides income from salary and income from own business (these are taxed quite high), income from investments (stocks, passive investments, real estate excluding your first home) is taxed quite low. The amount is simply a percentage based on the value (as per the start of the year) of your investments.

So in the Dutch tax system there is no difference between realized and unrealized gain. As such it doesn't matter when you buy/sell your investments. It doesn't impact your tax burden. The effect you get is that everyone's wealth just slowly erodes away, just like with inflation (unless your yield outpaces that).

But with this new law that all might change.
by Johnny555 | 2025-12-02 03:08:08+00:00
>What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?

People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic.

I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk.

When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work.

My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office.

The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.
by pembrook | 2025-12-02 03:09:19+00:00
Sometimes we have to place our hand on the stove to learn why we shouldn’t place our hand on the stove.

There’s a bizarre silliness to implementing this compared the relative ease of just increasing capital gains taxes (accrued capital gains are already tracked and reported!) to match income. Will just be a massive jobs program for the bean counters and consultants.

As someone living somewhat Netherlands adjacent, I will happily welcome all Dutch entrepreneurs and investors who wish to grow our local economy instead and not be forced to sell chunks of their company to the state over time.
by nomel | 2025-12-02 03:09:28+00:00
No, it was larger than many of the other browsers (like Opera), and size wasn't different enough to matter. Back then, download time was entirely quantized by "one night", because the only thing that mattered was that it finished by morning so someone picking up the phone wouldn't sever the dialup connection. A substation piece of software, like a browser, was happening during sleep time, regardless of size, and rare, so two night would also be fine (resuming was trivial with ftp, where these were sourced, usually from university mirrors).
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-02 03:10:15+00:00
Yeah, it half-ass made sense? Maybe?

I mean when the apps are small and have just a couple settings, you save having every app having a settings widget that takes you to another panel, etc.

(But a "Good" iOS app in my mind would still have a widget in the app to take you straight to the correct pane in Settings where you configure it.)
by yuye | 2025-12-02 03:11:18+00:00
I feel a lot of the noise complaints are due to open plan offices.

I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.

The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.

Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.

The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.

Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.

That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
by kragen | 2025-12-02 03:11:19+00:00
I don't know if anyone has dumped the Tek font ROMs, but the IMLAC Scroll Saver tty emulator has been preserved, and I converted its typewriter font to Hershey font format.

Scroll Saver disassembly: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/f6408e16cb1aaf7f2583c02cd...

My kludge to parse it into Hershey JHF format: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/imlacparse.py

The resulting Hershey font: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/imlac-pds-1-ssvchr.22.j...

Its appearance rendered: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/smolhershey-imlac.png

My 400-byte BSD-licensed C library for using Hershey fonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/smolhershey.md.html

If someone does get the Tek font, I'd love to do the same thing with it.
by tempestn | 2025-12-02 03:12:23+00:00
In a way I agree with you that this will cause market distortion in the form of greater demand for real estate over eg. equities. But there are plenty of such tax distortions; for example many countries have favourable tax treatment for domestic dividends.

Regardless, I assume the logic behind this exception is that while you can easily sell a portion of your holdings of publicly traded stocks to cover your annual tax burden, you can't sell a portion of a house. You could of course finance, but that's going to disproportionately benefit lenders.
by chaboud | 2025-12-02 03:12:53+00:00
In various sectors, you need to be able to explain why you/your-system did what it did. Exchange Act Rule 15c3-5 is probably the most relevant in financial circles:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...

Note: I am neither a lawyer nor in financial circles, but I do have an interest in the effects of market design and regulation as we get into a more deeply automated space.
by hnthrowaway0328 | 2025-12-02 03:13:35+00:00
I picked the same strategy for Windows. I remember I was still on 2000 when XP is hot, and still on XP when 8 is available, and now I use 10 and this is going to be my last Windows as 11 is too shitty and I suspect 12 and beyond are going to be worse.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-02 03:13:57+00:00
I got my first Dell laptop, the XPS15, 5 years ago. Prior to that I had a good 25 years as a Thinkpad die-hard. The XPS has been ... ok. I've had some issues with it resetting for no apparent reason over its life. Frequency varies, but sometimes it'll just blank the screens and then the BIOS comes up on the display, a few times a week, then it'll be good for a month or more.

I had one issue where I needed to ship it back: it would reset and then it was running off the battery, and no matter what port I plugged a charger/docking station into it wouldn't charge until I powered it off and back on again. I got them to do a replacement under warranty a couple years ago.

Around a month ago it was doing the reset fairly frequently and then wouldn't power on sometimes, and I noticed the wrist rest was a little bowed. I replaced the battery pack (kind of a pain, but not the worst I've done), and it was good for around a month, but now it has that "won't charge the battery" issue again. I believe when they did the previous repair they replaced the motherboard, but now I'm out of warranty.

For my next laptop I kind of want a Framework, so I can replace the mobo if I need to. My work likes us to replace hardware no more frequently than every 5-6 years, but we get a warranty for way less than that (my laptop I pushed to get a 4 year).

Meanwhile my previous Thinkpad T470s is still going strong, though the screen just developed a line through it. That's ~10 year old now.

My personal 4 year old Macbook has been a real workhorse, never had any hardware issues with it. My son's macbook has been another story, he's had that in for service 4-5 times in the 3 years he's had it. But, I suspect that is more him than the hardware. I don't baby my MBP, but he is just terrible with things. He's lucky if a pair of glasses can last 6 months, ditto with a phone (usually broken screens), so I'm not sure I can blame the MB Air...
by intull | 2025-12-02 03:13:57+00:00
I think what comment-OP above means to point at is - given what we know (or, lack thereof) about awareness, consciousness, intelligence, and the likes, let alone the human experience of it all, today, we do not have a way to scientifically rule out the possibility that LLMs aren't potentially self-aware/conscious entities of their own; even before we start arguing about their "intelligence", whatever that may be understood of as.

What we do know and have so far, across and cross disciplines, and also from the fact that neural nets are modeled after what we've learned about the human brain, is, it isn't an impossibility to propose that LLMs _could_ be more than just "token prediction machines". There can be 10000 ways of arguing how they are indeed simply that, but there also are a few of ways of arguing that they could be more than what they seem. We can talk about probabilities, but not make a definitive case one way or the other yet, scientifically speaking. That's worth not ignoring or dismissing the few.
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-12-02 03:14:28+00:00
Serialization issue. From the Introduction to Cap’n Proto:

"Cap’n Proto is INFINITY TIMES faster than Protocol Buffers. (...) there is no encoding/decoding step. The Cap’n Proto encoding is appropriate both as a data interchange format and an in-memory representation, so once your structure is built, you can simply write the bytes straight out".

I take it as a rationalization of what OLE Compound File Binary - internal Microsoft Office memory structures serialized "raw" as file format - would look like if they paid more attention to being backward and forward compatible and extensible.
by busterarm | 2025-12-02 03:15:15+00:00
Very similar story here.

I still somewhat "think in Ruby" though. It was really the first language that let me comfortably build large projects and really lean into metaprogramming. I prefer Elixir/Erlang for personal projects though.

Haven't lucked into an Elixir/Erlang job yet to experience working on such a codebase with others yet, so for that my preference is still C++.

Work makes me use Golang and Python and I find no joy in either. I still drop into Ruby if I need a small script for something personal.
by icegreentea2 | 2025-12-02 03:15:19+00:00
It's true that it's a carve out, and current young generations are having huge problems getting homes in a lot of the world.

But in the Netherlands, the overall home ownership rate is still about 70 percent (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ilc_lvho02__c... might need to drill down a little).

In the US it's 65 percent.

Carve outs for home owners are some of the most understandable political strategies across the developed world.
by Nursie | 2025-12-02 03:15:22+00:00
> In Australia, 35 year mortgages are normal,

Are they? I was under the impressions that 25-30 was normal now.

> $1700 per month pays off a $350k loan in 17 years, does it not?

Noooo. Have a play with this Australian mortgage calculator - https://www.commbank.com.au/digital/home-buying/calculator/h...

I think you might be in for a shock.

The example rate on the calculator is 5.35, about right when the base rate is 3.6 percent (though you can get lower), using that your $350k mortgage will take 40 years to pay off at $1700 per month. A $300k mortgage would take about 30 years. Or a $230k mortgage could be paid in your 17 years.

None of these loan amounts will get you anywhere close to a house in Australia today. You're looking around $1 million for the average house in most of the capital cities, with very few available under about the $650k mark.