MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bpt3 | 2025-12-17 20:24:40+00:00
I don't disagree, but lighting money on fire hyping NFTs and whatever other random fad strikes them as interesting doesn't seem to be the way to accomplish that.

My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.
by torginus | 2025-12-17 20:24:43+00:00
I really want to make a game using a software rasterizer sometime - just to prove its possible. Back in the good ol' days, I had to get by on my dad's PC, which had no graphics acceleration, but a farily substatial Pentium 3 processor.

Games like the original Half-Life, Unreal Tournament 2004, etc. ran surprisingly well and at decent resolutions.

With the power of modern hardware, I guess you could do a decent FPS in pure software with even naively written code, and not having to deal with the APIs, but having the absolute creative freedom to say 'this pixel is green' would be liberating.

Fun fact: Due to the divergent nature of computation, many ray tracers targeting real time performance were written on CPU, even when GPUs were quite powerful, software raytracers were quite good, until the hardware apis started popping up.
by unethical_ban | 2025-12-17 20:25:25+00:00
Isn't it kind of telling how incredibly complicated modern web browsing is, that a web browser is seen as one of the most difficult general purpose projects a developer could imagine building, aside from an entire desktop environment or a kernel?

You know what would be neat? If the Gemini protocol were slightly expanded for video/image embeds, and then having Firefox/Ladybird support it out of the box.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-17 20:25:45+00:00
This is both anachronistic and wrong.

To the extent that learning to punch your own punch cards was useful, it was because you needed to understand the kinds of failures that would occur if the punch cards weren't punched properly. However, this was never really a big part of programming, and often it was off-loaded to people other than the programmers.

In 1995, most of the struggling with the docs was because the docs were of poor quality. Some people did publish decent documentation, either in books or digitally. The Microsoft KB articles were helpfully available on CD-ROM, for those without an internet connection, and were quite easy to reference.

Stack Overflow did not exist in 2005, and it was very much born from an environment in which search engines were in use. You could swap your 2005 and 2015 entries, and it would be more accurate.

No comment on your 2025 entry.
by lrvick | 2025-12-17 20:27:08+00:00
I think free education is fantastic for society and would vote for that every time, taxes be damned.

But until then we in the US live in a capitalist hellscape where we have to prioritize survival which means only focusing on marketable skills to get a job. After that one can pay for college once they can afford it if they want that experience for personal enrichment.
by webstrand | 2025-12-17 20:27:46+00:00
I just use -sk variants with a FIDO authenticator. Being able to port the keys to another trusted machine (i.e. replacing a computer) if I need to is nice. And it's as secure as a secure enclave.

I do prefer to use a unique key for every (local, remote) pair though. It makes revocation more straightforward.
by otterley | 2025-12-17 20:27:48+00:00
This is the official message: https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548

"We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback.

"1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.

"2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026.

"We have real costs in running the Actions control plane. We are also making investments into self-hosted runners so they work at scale in customer environments, particularly for complex enterprise scenarios. While this context matters, we missed the mark with this change by not including more of you in our planning.

"We need to improve GitHub Actions. We’re taking more time to meet and listen closely to developers, customers, and partners to start. We’ve also opened a discussion to collect more direct feedback and will use that feedback to inform the GitHub Actions roadmap. We’re working hard to earn your trust through consistent delivery across GitHub Actions and the entire platform."
by gruez | 2025-12-17 20:28:06+00:00
Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea? For the latter, there's already laws against it that doesn't involve CFAA, eg. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-17 20:29:15+00:00
"The web is unusable without a proper Adblock"

Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense

For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads

Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser

When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary

When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary

Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system

The other half is the client <--- user choice

Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"

These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed

When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy

The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser

1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage

The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
by kjellsbells | 2025-12-17 20:29:25+00:00
It means to copy code or instructions from a site into your own project without having any comprehension of how or why it works.

example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.
by filoleg | 2025-12-17 20:29:53+00:00
You nailed it on the head, down to the exact examples.

I was still in high school in 2010, and was told the same thing about outsourcing to India/SEA/etc. making a CS degree/career (in the US) a terrible choice. It wasn't just random people saying this either, I was reading about it in the news, online, had some family acquaintances with alleged former software dev career, etc. I didn't listen, and I am glad I didn't.

As I was graduating from college, and deep learning was becoming a new hot thing, I heard the same thing about radiologists, and how they are all getting automated away in the next 5 years. I had no plans to go to med school, and I didn't know anyone at the time who went through it, so I didn't know much about the topic. On the surface, it seemed like a legitimate take, and I just stored it in my head as "sounds about right."

Cue to now, I know more than a few people who went through med school, and am in general more attuned to the market. Turns out, all of that was just another genpop hype, those news articles about "omg radiologists are all getting replaced by computers" stopped from showing up on any of my news feeds, and not a single radiology-specialized med school graduate I know had any issues with getting a job (that paid significantly more than an entry level position at a FAANG).

I have zero idea what point I was trying to make with this comment, but your examples mirror my personal experience with the topic really well.
by startupsfail | 2025-12-17 20:30:02+00:00
Junior engineers now learn from AIs. And AIs now learn from RL cost functions. And RL cost functions are being set by PhDs, with little to no production grade engineering experience ;)

The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not.

And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone.

The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top.

The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$
by k310 | 2025-12-17 20:30:04+00:00
It's really funny. I had a department chairman in a department where the staff used macs (I supported the macs and Sun workstations for the academics) and bemoaned that "Students should be using Windows because that's what they will use when they leave".

My counter argument was that by the time they leave, Microsoft will have copied the Apple stuff they are using, so they are well-prepared in any case.

But Apple has its quirks a'plenty. I am using a Logitech keyboard on this mac, because unless you buy a laptop, there's no other way to get a lighted keyboard.

And the "forward delete" key is so useful.

The first thing I do with a new installation is remap keys anyway. Caps Lock first!
by sourdoughness | 2025-12-17 20:30:24+00:00
Interesting. I treat VScode Copilot as a junior-ish pair programmer, and get really good results for function implementations. Walking it through the plan in smaller steps, noting that we’ll build up to the end state in advance ie. “first let’s implement attribute x, then we’ll add filtering for x later”, and explicitly using planning modes and prompts - these all allow me to go much faster, have good understanding of how the code works, and produce much higher quality (tests, documentation, commit messages) work.

I feel like, if a prompt for a function implementation doesn’t produce something reasonable, then it should be broken down further.

I don’t know how others define “vibe-coding”, but this feels like a lower-level approach. On the times I’ve tried automating more, letting the models run longer, I haven’t liked the results. I’m not interested in going more hands-free yet.
by kowbell | 2025-12-17 20:30:56+00:00
I also don't understand common sentiment that if/when the AI bubble pops and hardware manufacturers come crawling back, we consumers are going to make manufacturers regret their decision.

Isn't the whole problem that all the manufacturers are pivoting away from consumers and toward AI? How are we going to "hurt Nvidia in the pocketbook?" Buy from their competitors? But they are also making these pivots/"turning their backs on us." Just abstain from buying hardware out of protest? As soon as prices go down there's gonna be a buying frenzy from everyone who's been waiting this whole time.
by dmitrygr | 2025-12-17 20:30:57+00:00
The way I read the US constitution, every federal government agency is necessarily contained in one of the three branches, since the entire federal government is made of and only of those three branches. FCC is not in the legislative branch -- constitution is clear that that is only the congress, it is not judicial -- the constitution is clear that those are the courts. So it is in the executive, which makes sense since its job is to enforce law -- the job of the executive branch. The executive branch reports directly to and is directly answerable to the head of the executive -- the president.

The congress cannot legislate a fourth branch even if they wanted to. They'd need a constitutional amendment for that. We have thus, by a simple application of reading and logic concluded that this is precisely as is expected given the US constitution.
by mnahkies | 2025-12-17 20:31:17+00:00
I've moved to storing my keys in my password manager, using it as an ssh agent. Means clicking authorize a bit, but also means I'm running a command I'm expecting to use a key then being prompted to authorize (and if it ever prompts unexpectedly I can stop and ask why)

Hardware keys would be better, but I think this is a decent balance or security vs convenience for my needs ATM.
by neom | 2025-12-17 20:31:22+00:00
If AI tools are making teams 76% faster with 100% more bugs, one would presume you're not more productive you're just punting more debt. I'm no expert on this stuff, but coupling it with some type of defect density insights might be helpful. Would be also interested to know what percentage of AI assisted code is "rolled back" or "reverted" within 48 hours. Has there been any change in number of review iterations over time?
by caycep | 2025-12-17 20:31:37+00:00
There is actually a field where subjects do have electrodes implanted (see https://www.humansingleneuron.org/). - this is done when they are doing pre-operative recordings in preparation for brain surgery for the treatment of epilepsy, and the electrodes are already there for clinical diagnostic purposes and they volunteer a few hours of their time while they are sitting around in the hospital, to participate in various cognitive tasks/paradigms. The areas you can go are limited for sure, but some areas are near regions of interest depicting in fMRI scans.

Then there are also papers w/ recordings done in primates...

But overall yes - you integrate many modalities of research for a more robust theory of cognition
by simonw | 2025-12-17 20:31:41+00:00
> Lines of code per developer grew from 4,450 to 7,839 as AI coding tools act as a force multiplier.

Is that a per-year number?

If a year has 200 working days that's still only about 40 lines of code a day.

When I'm in full-blown work mode with a decent coding agent (usually Claude Code) I'm genuinely producing 1,000+ lines of (good, tested, reviewed) code a day.

Maybe there is something to those absurd 10x multiplier claims after all!

(I still think there's plenty of work done by software engineers that isn't crunching out code, much of which isn't accelerated by AI assistance nearly as much. 40 lines of code per day felt about right for me a few years ago.)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-17 20:31:54+00:00
I am not gonna comment about others since obviously there are a lot but OVH from europe even though it has flaws still feels like it definitely competes with AWS

There are also hetzner,upcloud,netcup and sooo many other small cloud providers too but OVH,Hetzner,Upcloud,netcup do seem to me competitors of AWS
by cmoriam | 2025-12-17 20:31:54+00:00
From Mistral: An experimental specialized small model trained on meticulously curated data, designed for creative writing, narrative generation, roleplay and character-driven dialog, general-purpose instruction following and conversational agents.

The smaller Mistral models don’t get nearly enough love. For my use case (https://winterscience.com) of turning structured data points into consumable text, they way outperform other models in their cost tier. Only $0.1/M input $0.3/M output.
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-17 20:31:59+00:00
>It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.

>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.

>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.

This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
Helm Cheat Sheet
by eon01 | 2025-12-17 20:32:24+00:00
I wrote a practical introduction to Helm, aimed at people who are starting to use it beyond copy-pasting charts.

The post explains:

- what Helm actually is (and isn't),

- how charts, releases, and repositories fit together,

- how installs, upgrades, rollbacks, and values work in practice,

- with concrete examples using real charts.

- and other concepts.

It's adapted from my guide Helm in Practice, but the article stands on its own as a solid intro.

Link: https://faun.dev/c/stories/eon01/helm-cheat-sheet-everything-you-need-to-know-to-start-using-helm/

Your feedback is welcome.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-17 20:32:27+00:00
> To the extent that learning to punch your own punch cards was useful, it was because you needed to understand the kinds of failures that would occur if the punch cards weren't punched properly. However, this was never really a big part of programming, and often it was off-loaded to people other than the programmers.

I thought all computer scientists heard about Dijkstra making this claim at one time in their careers. I guess I was wrong? Here is the context:

> A famous computer scientist, Edsger Dijkstra, did complain about interactive terminals, essentially favoring the disciplined approach required by punch cards and batch processing.

> While many programmers embraced the interactivity and immediate feedback of terminals, Dijkstra argued that the "trial and error" approach fostered by interactive systems led to sloppy thinking and poor program design. He believed that the batch processing environment, which necessitated careful, error-free coding before submission, instilled the discipline necessary for writing robust, well-thought-out code.

> "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science" (EWD 1036) (1988 lecture/essay)

Seriously, the laments I hear now have been the same in my entire career as a computer scientist. Let's just look toward to 2035 where someone on HN will complain some old way of doing things is better than the new way because its harder and wearing hair shirts is good for building character.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-17 20:33:29+00:00
Because the orbits largely aren't 3D. These constellations orbit at the same altitude. Altitude changes are very expensive because you can't just go "up", you have to go "forward" faster. "Down" means slowing your orbit.

Two objects at different altitudes cannot maintain the same speed and relative positions. A higher orbit necessarily must have a higher velocity than a lower orbit. If you try to distribute your constellation across multiple orbital altitudes they'll slowly drift out of sync without constant thrust.

So these constellations trace out different and intersecting paths across the surface of the same sphere, not a 3D shell around that sphere.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-17 20:33:33+00:00
do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.
by moffkalast | 2025-12-17 20:34:18+00:00
There's only so much information content you can get from a mug though.

We get a lot of high quality data that's relatively the same. We run the same routines every day, doing more or less the same things, which makes us extremely reliable at what we do but not very worldly.

LLMs get the opposite: sparse, relatively low quality, low modality data that's extremely varied, so they have a much wider breadth of knowledge but they're pretty fragile in comparison since they get relatively little experience on each topic and usually no chance to affirm learning with RL.
by lawlessone | 2025-12-17 20:34:31+00:00
I feel like the interface in this case has caused us to fool ourselves into thinking there's more there than there is.

Before 2022 (most of history), if you had a long seemingly sensible conversation with something, you could safely assume this other party was a real thinking human mind.

it's like a duck call.

edit, i want to add because this is neural net that's trained to output sensible text, language isn't just the interface.

unlike a website there's no separation between anything, with LLM's the back and front end are all one blob.

edit2: seems I have upset the ducks that think the duck call is a real duck .
by sourdoughness | 2025-12-17 20:34:47+00:00
Using Opus 4.5 through VScode/CoPilot gives so much better results than anything else I’ve tried that I kept paying when they briefly made it 3x token rate.

I really like the interaction flows better than Gemini 3 or Codex, though I can’t quite quantify why. The amount of explanation/supporting material in Opus’s output feels just right to me.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-12-17 20:35:01+00:00
It's a little more complicated. The Supreme Court has already ruled that Trump can fire agency heads not for cause even when there is a "for cause" clause in the law. The Court then invented a new "the Federal Reserve is special" clause that prevents Trump from using that exact same power on Fed Governors. So because the Court has made a patchwork quilt out of the law (in an effort to bring about their preferred policy outcomes), Trump is now trying to muster "cause" against Cook. Early signs indicate that the case appears to have serious problems.
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-17 20:35:47+00:00
> It's getting dangerously close to the modern day I.E.

This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.

What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
by zenoprax | 2025-12-17 20:35:49+00:00
I respect the restraint from self-promotion here but...

Your [Docker, Flask, HTTPS, AWS Docker, and DevOps courses](https://nickjanetakis.com/courses) look good and the price is fair. Bookmarked!

(the last two could use some more detail in the overview but the first three would give me enough confidence to take a chance)
by adikso | 2025-12-17 20:35:51+00:00
I needed a simple chat UI for a diy "SMS gateway" (for an extra [nearly free] phone number used only to receive SMS - mainly for registrations and deliveries) and I ended up using Delta Chat that uses your email server under the hood. So I implemented all the logic based on emails... but it would be much better to have some nice looking UI with easy integration.
by n1xis10t | 2025-12-17 20:36:28+00:00
I noticed that, but that page makes it sound like it can only be unbranded if you pay for the commercial version. It looks like Anubis is open source though, so I suppose you might be able to download the source and switch out images for your own, is that correct?

Also, since you are who you are, can I ask how you came across this post? Did you notice it because of the content of the original post or because I mentioned Anubis?