MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jpetso | 2025-12-26 17:43:21+00:00
It's a little more nuanced than that. Software and gained freedoms survive not because they exist, but because they are being actively maintained. If your original, never-taken-away software does not get continually maintained, then:

* It will slowly go stale, for example, it may not get ported to newer, increasingly expected desktop APIs.
* It will lose users to competing software (such as your proprietary fork) which are better maintained.

As a result, it loses its relevance and utility over time. People that never update their systems can continue using it as they always have, assuming no online-only restrictions or time-limited licenses. But to new use cases and new users, the open software is now less desirable and the proprietary fork accumulates ever more power to screw over people with anti-consumer moves. Regulators ignore the open variant due to its niche marketshare, increasing the likelihood of things going south.

Harm can be done to people who don't have alternatives. In order to have alternatives, you need either a functioning free market or a working, relevant, sufficiently usable product that can be forked if worse comes to worst. Free software can of course help in establishing a free market, it isn't one or the other.

If a proprietary product takes over from one controlled by the community, much of the time it's not a problem. It can be replaced or done without.

If a proprietary platform takes over from one controlled by the community, something that determines not only how you go about your business but what other people expect from you, everyone gets harmed. The problem with a lot of proprietary software is that every company and their dog wants their product to become a platform and reshape the market to discourage alternatives.

MIT by itself does no harm. If it works like LLVM and everyone contributes because it makes more sense than developing a closed-off platform, then great! If it helps to bootstrap a proprietary market leader while the originally useful open original shrivels away into irrelevance, not as great.
by jama211 | 2025-12-26 17:43:24+00:00
You’re attacking one or two examples mentioned in their comment, when we could step back and see that in reality you’re pushing against the general scientific consensus. Which you’re free to do, but I suspect an ideological motivation behind it.

To me, the arguments sound like “there’s no proof typewriters provide any economic value to the world, as writers are fast enough with a pen to match them and the bottleneck of good writing output for a novel or a newspaper is the research and compilation parts, not the writing parts. Not to mention the best writers swear by writing and editing with a pen and they make amazing work”.

All arguments that are not incorrect and that sound totally reasonable in the moment, but in 10 years everyone is using typewriters and there are known efficiency gains for doing so.
by kgwxd | 2025-12-26 17:43:34+00:00
When the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter.

When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.
by holg | 2025-12-26 17:44:03+00:00
Thanks! You nailed it - AutoLISP was the right abstraction. Direct DXF/PostScript meant entity tables and coordinate gymnastics. (command "LINE" p1 p2) just did the thing.
What's running here: real WASM interpreter executing AutoLISP, not a slideshow. SVG native, DXF export (AC1009), all text editable, JSON data feed instead of CSV. My brother could open this page and start working the same workflow we did in '91 - better feed, better output.
And Rust is a surprisingly natural fit - Lisp's explicit stack discipline maps cleanly onto ownership. What Rust enforces, Lisp already wants.
by hallole | 2025-12-26 17:44:39+00:00
I guess I agree with you. Deep down, I wish they hadn't given up on prohibition, and that we'd have banned smoking, too. Still, though, there's gotta be a point where people become responsible for their actions. We're running on "monkey hardware," true, but one who gives in to their monkey brain rage and commits murder will still rightfully end up imprisoned. We expect individuals to have self control.

Couple other notes: I agree that excessive sugar is bad, but there's nothing wrong with whole grains. Also, we talk of corporate lobbies altering the public narrative on nutrition, but honestly, how much does it really matter? How much heed do most people pay to their image of a healthy diet? Is anyone really fooled into thinking soda, or fast food, is good? I don't think so.
by vtomole | 2025-12-26 17:44:42+00:00
Quantum theory says that quantum computers are physically plausible. Quantum theory lies in the realm of physics, not mathematics. As a physical theory, it makes predictions about what is plausible in the real world. One of those predictions is that it's possible to build a large-scale fault tolerant quantum computer.

The way to test out this theory is to try out an experiment to see if this is so. If this experiment fails, we'll have to figure out why theory predicted it but the experiment didn't deliver.
by rovr138 | 2025-12-26 17:44:58+00:00
There was a thread here earlier this month,

> Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178

Section of the top comment says,

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

and the reply to it has,

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.
by skybrian | 2025-12-26 17:45:12+00:00
Open source software is published to the world and used far beyond any single community where certain norms might apply.

If you care about what people do with your code, you should put it in the license. To the extent that unwritten norms exist, it's unfair to expect strangers in different parts of the world to know what they are, and it's likely unenforceable.

This recently came up for the GPLv2 license, where Linus Torvalds and the Software Freedom Conservancy disagree about how it should be interpreted, and there's apparently a judge that agrees with Linus:

https://mastodon.social/@torvalds@social.kernel.org/11577678...
by VorpalWay | 2025-12-26 17:45:13+00:00
Had to replace the NVME SSD in my Thinkpad a few years after it went out of warranty (that Thinkpad has a motherboard replacement on warranty as well). Needed to replace the fan in an older Thinkpad after 9 years.

Unfortunately the quality of Thinkpads went downhill after Lenovo took over, they used to be really good. But there is nothing else with trackpoints these days, which I vastly prefer over touchpads. (And even on some old Dells that had trackpoints, they never felt as good as on Thinkpads.) Also, Linux support was always very good, though that is less of an issue these days.

Never had to replace a battery though, but I always used that "don't charge more than 80%" mode. My old Thinkpad with a Core 2 Duo from 2009 still gets over a hour of battery (though the laptop is largely unusable for any practical use these days).

I don't mind repairing electronics in general, even on a component level if need be (as long as the components are large enough that I can see them, which really isn't the case any longer with tiny SMD components). And I tend to use things for a very long time rather than replace them. I'm still rocking a Dell monitor from 2013 for example.
by gtowey | 2025-12-26 17:45:40+00:00
I think you'd be surprised then to know that shoes are not generally made with robots.

Factories have made mass production possible, but there are still tons of humans in there pushing parts through sewing machines by hand.

Industrial automation for non uniform shapes and fiddly bits is expensive, much cheaper to just offshore the factory and hire desperately poor locals to act like robots.
by pseufaux | 2025-12-26 17:45:48+00:00
This is how WinGet works. It has a small SQLite db it downloads from a hosted url. The DB contains some minimal metadata and a url path to access the full metadata. This way WinGet only has to make API calls for packages it's actually interacting with. As a package manager, it has plenty of problems still, but it's a simple, elegant solution for the git as a DB issue.
by scott_w | 2025-12-26 17:46:00+00:00
I’m not trying to dispute your version of events. I’m just offering a suggestion of what teekert had in their mind when they thought of a campsite, to better help you see where the misunderstanding comes from. Given they replied with agreement, I hope I captured it accurately.

I also feel it was unnecessary to dismiss their experience as “not camping,” just because it was different to yours. It turns a learning opportunity for us all into a needlessly toxic argument.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-26 17:46:08+00:00
I know right?

If rob pike was asked about these issues of systemic addiction and others where we can find things google was bad at. I am sure that he wouldn't defend google about these things.

Maybe someone can mail a real message asking Rob pike genuinely (without any snarkiness that I feel from some comments here) about some questionable google things and I am almost certain that if those questions are reasonable, rob pike will agree that some actions done by google were wrong.

I think its just that rob pike got pissed off because an AI messaged him so he got the opportunity to talk about these issues and I doubt that he got the opportunity to talk / someone asking him about some other flaws of google / systemic issues related to it.

Its like, Okay, I feel like there is an issue in the world so I talk about it. Now does that mean that I have to talk about every issue in the world, no not really. I can have priorities in what issues I wish to talk about.

But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.

And some people like rob pike who left google because of (ideological reasons perhaps, not sure?) wouldn't really care about the fallback and like you say, its okay to collect checks from organization even if they critize

Honestly Google's lucky that they got rob pike instead of vice versa from my limited knowledge.

Golang is such a brilliant language and ken thompson and rob pike are consistently some of the best coders and their contributions to golang and so many other projects is unparalleled.

I don't know much about rob pike as compared to Ken thompson but I assume he is really great too! Mostly I am just a huge golang fan.
by MoltenMan | 2025-12-26 17:46:48+00:00
...what? What are you talking about? In what world would a compiler implement a preprocessor directive to ever use an llm, the internet, or your credit card details (from where would it get those)??? There are always implementation defined things in every language, for example, ub behavior. Do you get worried that someone will steal your bitcoin every time you use after free? Of course not! Even in Python when you OOM -- at least in CPython -- you crash with undefined behavior.
by swgeek | 2025-12-26 17:47:08+00:00
Good point, but I don't think they are mutually exclusive spread out over a year, only if I try to do them all at once.

This month my focus is on full-stack, and I don't move on to the next project until I get the basics right on that.

> it is best to pick one thing from the "many trades" and master only it before beginning another

Exactly this thanks, but my aim is only "get comfortable", not "master"
by weakfish | 2025-12-26 17:47:24+00:00
No problem. And FWIW, I’m what I’d consider a highly left-wing person. I only say that to give a sample that not all of us are like that. But I recognize that the loud ones get the attention.

I draw the line on live-and-let live only when the other person’s ideology poses a physical threat to me or my liberties, or those of other folks. But what you describe is how things ought to be - if you don’t feel like hanging around leftists, who the hell cares? I probably wouldn’t want to hang out in a highly conservative space, but I also don’t care if they hang out without me.

Merry Christmas!
by cowl | 2025-12-26 17:47:33+00:00
Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
by merlindru | 2025-12-26 17:48:25+00:00
The repo in question incorporated FFmpeg code while claiming their code is Apache 2.0-licensed over 1.5 years ago[1]

This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.

[1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137
by cycomanic | 2025-12-26 17:48:30+00:00
I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive
by awitt | 2025-12-26 17:48:54+00:00
I'm not saying LLMs are useless. But the value they have provided so far does not justify covering the country in datacenters and the scale of investment overall (not even close!).

The only justification for that would be "superintelligence," but we don't know if this is even the right way of achieve that.

(Also I suspect the only reason why they are as cheap as they are is because of all the insane amount of money they've been given. They're going to have to increase their prices.)
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-26 17:49:07+00:00
Article is out of date (including it being days old news already) but the guy updated his LinkedIn post walking back some of the statements. Update in the original HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46360955)
and then a further discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46381813
Ask HN: What problems do you have building / managing AI in production
by zarathustra333 | 2025-12-26 17:49:15+00:00
I’m working on Satori (https://www.usesatori.sh), a memory management library for AI agents. The plan is to make a self-hosted, OSS version.

As I’ve been building it, I’m wondering if there are more pressing problems or product directions to focus on first — for example giving agents access to workspace data, or to production logs and internal knowledge bases.

Curious to hear people’s thoughts.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-12-26 17:49:21+00:00
I switched to the Ultra 2 about a year and a half ago and the battery life is excellent - I don't have to charge daily, I can run or hike for several hours while listening to music or podcasts being streamed from the watch. It actually allows me to carry my phone much less, since the watch can make/take phone calls too & let me pay for things. The battery life on the apple watch I had before this one, was really abysmal though.
by moshun | 2025-12-26 17:50:34+00:00
Given the rapidly diminishing quality of discourse on the open internet the last decade or so, I understand.

I recently restricted comments on my blog or 15 years to existing subscribers only. It took me a while to accept that after removing the random spam, then the racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other lowlife commenters, I was left with 10-15% of discussions worth reading.

Pretty sad state of affairs, and it’s clear it’s degrading faster every day.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-26 17:51:32+00:00
I went 100% bazzite back in April/May, no windows, and I couldn’t be happier. The pc I built is basically 90% gaming/movies/hanging with friends, 10% browser tasks. Very easy to live this life if you don’t have particular professional needs IMO. When I was doing more freelance editing this really would not have been an option as resolve studio does not work well on Linux.
Show HN: FYI - Product Events Tracking and Notifications for Elixir Phoenix Apps
by bustylasercanon | 2025-12-26 17:52:01+00:00
I'm an indie hacker who builds a lot of small Phoenix apps, and I got tired of setting up LogSnag/Mixpanel/whatever for every project just to get pinged when someone signs up or makes a purchase.

My favorite thing about Elixir is not needing third parties -Phoenix.PubSub instead of Redis, Oban instead of Sidekiq, LiveView instead of React. So I built FYI to bring that same philosophy to product event tracking and notifications.

What it does:
- Track events with one line: `FYI.emit("purchase.created", %{amount: 4900})`
- Get Slack/Telegram notifications when things happen
- Route specific events to specific channels (e.g., waitlist.* → Slack, errors.* → Telegram)
- Beautiful admin UI at /fyi with live updates, search, and filtering
- Drop-in feedback widget (installs into your codebase, not an iframe)

Key features:
- Zero external dependencies - just BEAM, Ecto, and Phoenix
- One command setup: mix fyi.install
- Integrates with Ecto.Multi so events only emit after transactions commit
- Fire-and-forget - failures never block your app
- Feedback component lives in YOUR repo so you can customize it

Philosophy:
No Oban queues, no retries, no backoff. Just simple HTTP notifications and Postgres persistence. Think "LogSnag but self-hosted and Elixir-native."
The installer even copies a feedback component into your codebase instead of making you use an external widget, so you can style it however you want.

Repo: https://github.com/chrisgreg/fyi

Hex: https://hex.pm/packages/fyi

Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/fyi

Would love feedback from the community!
by boundring | 2025-12-26 17:52:03+00:00
May or may not need to get clarified: if you've got a functional tool, it's probably getting crawled and picked apart now. If it's at all useful for what you're intending, that's probably not going to be too-too great in the long run for a lot of folks.

Not my preference or intent to get too far into all that, though. Kudos for the project, it's interesting but still a little unfortunate in the long view
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-26 17:52:32+00:00
The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.
by rapnie | 2025-12-26 17:52:41+00:00
Fun fact, in my student group at university of twente two people claimed to have developed the first web server for Windows. They called it W4Server and at fist thought of erecting a company called Antelope Software, but later prioritised their studies and let it drop. Another fun fact is that on a web search the first result is a CVE relating to their work. But it was quite exciting at the time, all this brand new web that was emerging.

https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19622
by planb | 2025-12-26 17:52:46+00:00
Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before.

It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements.

Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-26 17:53:26+00:00
Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.

I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha

> It was a weird place to work

What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?

> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.

For context, can you please talk more about it :p

> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though

What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?

Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-12-26 17:53:30+00:00
This doesn't sound like the kind of portability anyone is really worried about. I get that the docs on the linked site are written in standards-ese and are complicated by macro replacement, but I don't think the outcome of sending your credit card details away is gonna be an outcome. If it was, an uncharitable implementation with access to your card details would be free to do that any time you gave it input invoking undefined behaviour (which is of course not uncommon, especially in incorrect code).
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2025-12-26 17:54:52+00:00
We humans use timestamps in conversations to reference a persons particular state of reference at a given point in time.

Ie “remember on Tuesday how you said that you were going to make tacos for dinner”.

Would an llm be able to reason about its internal state? My understanding is that they dont really. If you correct them they just go “ah you right” they dont say “oh i had this incorrect assumption here before and with this new information i now understand it this way”

If i chatted to an llm and was like “remember on Tuesday when you said X” i suspect it wouldn't really flow.
by Stratoscope | 2025-12-26 17:55:16+00:00
Claude's web interface has an elegant solution. When you roll the mouse over one of your prompts, it has the abbreviated date in the row of Retry/Edit/Copy icons, e.g. "Dec 17". Then if you roll the mouse over that date, you get the full date and time, e.g. "Dec 17, 2025, 10:26 AM".

This keeps the UI clean, but makes it easy to get the timestamp when you want it.

Claude's mobile app doesn't have this feature. But there is a simple, logical place to put it. When you long-press one of your prompts, it pops up a menu and one line could be added to it:

Dec 17, 2025, 10:26 AM [I added this here]
Copy Message
Select Text
Edit

ChatGPT could simply do the same thing for both web and mobile.