MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brushfoot | 2025-12-01 12:48:44+00:00
If this obnoxious and seemingly ubiquitous platitude were actually true, then torture would be a moral duty. Enforced poverty would be a moral duty. Governments would be obligated to regularly arrange mass starvations for their citizens.

I don't believe it. Personally, I think spiritual weakness and religious corruption are more likely culprits -- and not necessarily the type of spirituality or religion that you might be thinking of.

Either way, "good times" is a dangerous place to put the blame. It relieves us of responsibility for our own catastrophes (it was the good times' fault), and it makes us suspicious of prosperity and happiness.

Good times are not evil. We don't need to shun them, provided we keep strengthening the better angels of our nature.
by Jnr | 2025-12-01 12:48:49+00:00
XMPP felt great when compared to Matrix. Matrix was in a bad state some years ago when I hosted it for a while, and seems like it still is the same messy state. I avoid it as much as possible but for some reason there are communities using it.

At this point it should just die so people would be motivated to replace it with something better.
by Uptrenda | 2025-12-01 12:49:02+00:00
This seems like the canary in the coal mine. We have a company that built this tool because it seemed semi-possible (prob "works" well enough most of the time) and they don't want to fall behind if anything that's built turns out to be the next chatgpt. So there's no caution for anything now, even ideas that can go catastrophically wrong.

Yeah, its data now, but soon we'll have home robotics platforms that are cheap and capable. They'll run a "model" with "human understanding", only, any weird bugs may end up causing irreparable harm. Like, you tell the robot to give your pet a bath and it puts it in the washing machine because its... you know, not actually thinking beyond a magic trick. The future is really marching fast now.
by piltdownman | 2025-12-01 12:49:15+00:00
The argument - and wholly plausible prediction being made - is that these changes lay the groundwork for a legal definition of ‘subversion’ that could prioritise ideology over conduct, providing the state with a broader arsenal to classify any political dissent as a security risk.

This is ALREADY in play with the proscribing of Palestine Action, and subsequent arrest of protestors on Terrorism charges. They are absolutely spot-on in their conclusion that, "These developments reveal a state increasingly concerned with defending its own legitimacy that is weaponising security itself to shield power from accountability."

The potted history of Shabana Mahmood is a grotesquely cynical exemplar of this relatively new phenomenon.

In 2014, a backbench Labour MP named Shabana Mahmood lay on the floor of her local Sainsbury’s in protest against the sale of products made in illegal Israeli settlements. A week later, she spoke to crowds at a Free Palestine protest in Hyde Park, of the “compassion and humanity expressed for the people of Gaza … from every race and every religion.”

Mahmood is now the UK Home Secretary, and gets to decide if the more than 2,000 people arrested for alleged support of Palestine Action – mostly for holding placards stating: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” – will face criminal trial.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/26/ban-on-pales...
by narrator | 2025-12-01 12:49:20+00:00
I just asked AI what the thousands of arrests for social media posts so far are for and it didn't say anti-semetic content. It said it's largely targeted at anti-immigrant, gender-critical, and being mean to politicians comments. Israel is the "woke right" line these days though, and something the "woke left" and "woke right" can both agree on hating.
by modo_mario | 2025-12-01 12:49:39+00:00
>try to unionize next time

Amazon had a whole paper about how bringing migrants and diversity makes unionization less likely and successful. It's part of the point.

Also it's not just the US. Here in Europe it's the same. Hell the government spent it's money trough the employers org training Moroccans to become programmers to then bring em in. I knew a fair few programmers who believe this is all just for low skill low paying jobs as if paying better wages for those is impossible and as if those deserve to be undercut. The weird thing is how this kind of plainly rightwing economic rhetoric is often masquerading as left wing.
by aeve890 | 2025-12-01 12:50:13+00:00
>An unproved theorem now proved is by definition new math.

No. By _new math_ I mean new mathematical constructs and theories like (to mention the "newest" ones) category theory, information theory, homotopy type theory, etc. Something like Cantor inventing set theory, or Shannon with information theory, or Euler with graph theory.

AFAIK no new field of mathematics as been created _by_ AI. Feel free to correct me.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-01 12:50:59+00:00
Can you please also hallucinate a plausible-sounding justification for this otherwise unsubstantiated statement?

Jokes aside, we do produce plausibile sounding stuff all the time well beyond the limit of what we actually know or can prove. I think there is a continuum between formulating statements about things we don't know for sure and we can't prove, guessing details here and there to fill gaps in our memory, misremembering things that we thought we knew, and making up entire facts that sound plausible but are completely invented. Yes, llms seem to have trouble introspecting what they actually know; but it sounds more like a missing skill rather than a fundamental difference in the way they reason.
by keyshapegeo99 | 2025-12-01 12:51:43+00:00
> And… this wasn’t immediately seen as being deeply unethical and downright evil?

Oh, these people know it's evil - from the second they suggest it. The personality types associated with SV leadership are simply wired for rationalising evil as a means to any business end. It's just implicitly accepted that it's an appropriate tool to be wielded.

You're the weird one who "just doesn't get it" if you push back. Push back hard enough and you'll quickly find yourself on the receiving end.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
by abdulhaq | 2025-12-01 12:51:57+00:00
Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.
by Rochus | 2025-12-01 12:52:18+00:00
> when it is something else, it is thrown around as proof they aren't as good as C for systems programming

That's not my position, and not my argument in this thread. My argument was, that Wirth created his own world and never cared about industry requirements, so industry cared for themselves.

But let me address your concerns. C is an ugly language with a silly syntax (e.g. for arrays, or function types), and the preprocessor is a nightmare, and the weak type checking overlooks a lot of errors (but at least we get warnings, and weak types are very useful when I use C as an IR). But the standard version (ANSI) lets me do all things I need for system development; I don't use inline assembler.

So let's look at Modula-2 (since you seem to see it as Wirth's response to industry needs). First, we have to differ between Wirth's Modula-2, and ISO Modula-2, which is a completely different language (more industry friendly, containing things Wirth was strictly against, and he even refused to participate). So let's stick with Wirth's Modula-2. The first thing that annoys me is the requirement of the original 1982 specification to capitalize all keywords. The second thing is the removal of any type checking for all operations essential for low-level system programming (a pattern Wirth continued in Oberon). ADDRESS is declared as POINTER TO WORD, and the specification doesn't define whether pointer arithmetics has byte or WORD resolution. Type casting is very limited (i.e. restricted to SYSTEM.TRANSFER or variant records without tag, but not in expressions). There is no conditional compilation and only limited compile-time evaluation. There is no explicit "extern" declaration; the use of definition without implementation modules is inofficial and compiler dependent. Some of these issues were "fixed" in ISO Modula. But if I compare Modula-2 e.g. with Ada, which is indeed a true system language explicitly designed for critical industry needs, even ISO Modula is still very limited.
by Sharlin | 2025-12-01 12:52:19+00:00
Well, there are these things called computers, and they’re really very good at this stuff. It’s not exactly rocket science (heh) to write a program to listen to an audio stream and mark and log every occurence of something else than background noise and ambient wind sounds (if Martian winds are even loud enough to make sound). Everything else that the rover has to do automatically is way more complicated.

It’s pretty likely that the entire stream of silence isn’t being stored, or sent to Earth, only the interesting parts. There isn’t any way for people to listen in real time anyway, because communications (can) only happen at specific times of the day. Every interplanetary mission works by sending a preplanned sequence of commands one day, then coming back the next day to see what the probe/rover/whatever sent back, then planning the next set of commands, and so on.
by ahtihn | 2025-12-01 12:52:28+00:00
Your math seems way off?

NDXT went from ~2300 in 2015 to ~12500 in 2025. That's ~5.5x return. So even if you had your whole 1M saving in 2015, you'd only have 5.5M now. No idea how you get nearly 3x that?

And it's way worse if you take the actual scenario which is 100k added every year instead of starting with the 1M.

S&P500 is worse yet, at about 3.5x total return if you had the whole million at the start.
by josephg | 2025-12-01 12:53:18+00:00
If you are happy to pay the cost of a garbage collector, why C at all and not Java, C#, Go, Typescript, or any of the other fine options? They’re simpler languages with better tooling and cleaner syntax. I understand Fil-C for running legacy code. But for new code, the only reason I’d ever pick C is performance and Fil-C takes that benefit away.
by watwut | 2025-12-01 12:53:38+00:00
>But crying about not having a door to walk through isn’t going to change anything.

Why is it such a problem for you that people talk about it openly? Why the need to pretend that everyone can have this under control? It seems to me that your advice is just about making you feel better about the situation, about pretending to ourselves that all issues are individual failures, that the world is fair.

I do not see people who argue with you calling for revolution, I am seeing them trying to talk about objective state of the world. You seem to be rejecting that description, because it involves things you or them cant control.
by DontForgetMe | 2025-12-01 12:53:40+00:00
Just to be clear, are you asserting that every opinion in this thread that you don't agree with is due to the poster hallucinating, or only specific ones?

Do you have any evidence or well established theory to back up this rather extraordinary claim?

Because if you are honestly positing that numerous people around the world are literally hallucinating despise (statistically) not being under medical supervision, presumably continuing to drive, work, and make decisions, that would be a pretty urgent global health phenomenon that you really should be chasing up. And at some point, the authorities best placed to deal with this hitherto unseen mass incapacitation might reasonably ask: what are the chances that multiple unrelated people around the world are experiencing such localised, hugely specific breaks from reality causing them to express reasonably common opinions on an internet forum, rather than the inconsistency being on the end of this one person who doesn't agree with them?
by ivape | 2025-12-01 12:53:47+00:00
First, your role gets renamed …

Then you get laid off.

It’s kind of sad to see everyone being walked out of the factory, the final shutters on the modest profession of programming. I guess this is kind of exactly what it would look like, that bittersweet moment of ‘it’s actually really happening, and it’s actually really sad’.

Part of me wishes we could freeze time, that if we could just keep it like this, this many jobs, this many people, keep it a nice small village …

But this tidal wave before us doesn’t care. So long folks.
by talideon | 2025-12-01 12:54:14+00:00
I typically use OCaml myself for them and have never found the standard library to be particularly "depleted" for AoC, though I do have a couple hundred lines of shared library code built up over the years for parsing things, instrumenting things, and implementing a few algorithms and data structures that keep cropping up.

Also, dune makes pulling in build dependencies easy these days, and there's no shame in pulling in other support libraries. It's years since I've written anything in Haskell, but I'd guess the same goes for cabal, though OCaml is still more approachable than Haskell for most people, I'd say. A newbie is always going to be at some kind of disadvantage regardless.
by archiewyles | 2025-12-01 12:54:20+00:00
I've been working on observ.dev. It's infrastructure for better LLM apps that are cheaper, quicker and more reliable.

Implement in a few lines of code to wrap your LLM provider, and forget about it.

It's currently available as a Typescript SDK, with Python being launched later tonight. The majority of the infrastructure is written in Go.

Observ charges a percentage of savings, meaning we only win when you do, but happy to discuss this as needed.
by piltdownman | 2025-12-01 12:54:25+00:00
I mean the opening statements of the KC for the accused perfectly refutes such nonsensical claims.

As Raza Husain KC told the court - “There are reasons of profound importance as to why, in the 32 executive orders that have been made adding organisations to proscribed lists, no direct action civil disobedience organisation appears...Such proscription is repugnant to the tradition of the common law and contrary to the European convention on human rights.”

“The Defendant has deployed this most repressive of regimes against PA, notwithstanding that, on her own evidence, only four out of hundreds of its actions are even capable of meeting the definition of serious property damage.”

“The decision to proscribe PA is an unprecedented and disproportionate interference with articles 9, 10 and 11 [freedom of thought, expression and protest].

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/26/ban-on-pales...
by tcldr | 2025-12-01 12:54:27+00:00
Fairly subjective, but personally I find all apps being within the browser quite constrictive. I'd much rather have my apps unencumbered by browser chrome and unintended keystrokes, persisting their window size/position and all kind of other affordances. Definitely not a fan of the 'browser as the OS' philosophy, as it feels a bit inception.

That said, I'm less and less bothered by an app that's Electron under the hood, but I think that's more to do with the quality bar for native apps slipping over the past few cycles (macOS) and forfeiting their advantage.
by aylmao | 2025-12-01 12:54:30+00:00
> Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader.

Except this is not true.

Microsoft became the biggest company in the world with this strategy. Most famoulsy, Windows was a copy of MacOS, and Internet Explorer (which became so dominant it took Microsoft to court) of Netscape. Android copied iOS and became bigger than it. Again, Instagram famously copied Stories from Snapchat, and quickly took over [2]. There's many examples of a bigger company copying smaller ones and using their distribution or ecosystems to win.

> Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google?

I don't know if you're perhaps too young or too new to the industry to know about the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust case, but if Microsoft pulled all the stops it once upon a time did, it would. It so happens Google is has an infinite money machine too though, and can pour many millions in the courts if Microsoft were to try.

> You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.

Let me correct this sentence for you. You'll rarely beat the big companies by copying them, but the big companies can easily beat you by copying you. OpenAI might seem big, but it hasn't found its infinite money machine yet.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomward/2017/05/03/oh-snap-inst...
by blandflakes | 2025-12-01 12:55:02+00:00
> Kotlin multiplatform being adopted by Google for huge projects like Google workspace makes it sound like it may actually be a winning proposition, if you ask me. Kotlin is replacing the more-than-a-decade old, battle tested, Java-to-ObjC translation at Google. I find that very impressive.

When it comes to Google, I'll believe it when I see it. How's Fucshia?

> For sharing code between e.g. Android and iOS, Kotlin multiplatform seems to become the better solution. If you use Rust, you still have to call it from Swift and you just introduced a 3rd language.

I'm not positing Rust for this or any multiplatform thing, I was suggesting that Scala Native is eclipsed by Rust in its relatively narrow niche (and actually in addition to Rust, graal native-image).
by harshitaneja | 2025-12-01 12:55:08+00:00
The amount of goal post shifting is so amusing to see. Yes, sure this was probably not an "important" or a particularly "challenging" problem which had been open for a while. Sure, maybe it remained open because it didn't get enough eyeballs from the right people to care about spending time on it. Yes, there is too much overhyping and we are all tired of it somewhat. I still think if someone 10 years ago told me we would get "AI" to a stage where it can solve olympiad level problems and getting gold medals in IMO on top of doing so with input not in a very structured input but rather our complex, messy human natural language and being able to do so while interpreting, to various degrees of meaning what interpreting means, image and video data and doing so in almost real time I would have called you nuts and this thing in such a duration sci-fi. So some part of me feels crazy how quickly we have normalized to this new reality.

A reality where we are talking about if the problem solved by the automated model using formal verification was too easy.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying any of this means we get AGI or something or even if we continue to see improvements. We can still appreciate things. It doesn't need to be a binary. What a time to be alive!
by 24t | 2025-12-01 12:56:35+00:00
To add another data point, I've been hosting a (tiny) matrix server for a few months. I'm pretty comfortable with self-hosting using docker, so I opted not to use the ansible scripts in the hope that it'd keep my setup simpler and more maintainable. Somehow I didn't find any mentions of ESS until Synapse was already up and running, but Kubernetes would have been a dealbreaker for similar reasons.

In this short time I've run a database migration (sqlite is the default, but MAS requires postgres), tried and failed to migrate to MAS (required to use Element X) and have lost a couple of days messing around with coturn and eturnal with nothing to show for it -- my calls still don't connect when NAT is involved. I have to tell new users to ignore the recommendations to install Element X until I get MAS working.

There's a lot of room for foundational improvements here, even updating docs to point would-be server admins to the recommended setup du jour would help.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-01 12:57:03+00:00
Thanks, I've changed my comments to say Xorg.

However, in that potted history, let's not forget a lot of progress and advancement that Keith Packard and the FreeDesktop.org initiative did make. Standardising on autotools/make rather than the obnoxious imake, creating fontconfig rather than requiring arcane settings and conversion software to add fonts, creating the RandR extension and supporting hotplugging monitors and autodetection; I can't remember the last time I had to add a modeline manually to a config file!

But the problem is the current Xorg developers want to kill X11, however short their tenure on it was. If they choose to leave, there aren't other Xorg developers waiting in the wings, apart from the crazy guy.
by 0x3f | 2025-12-01 12:57:08+00:00
> trifold offers an easy alternative to services like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify [...]

Does it? Those provide dynamic compute for e.g. SSR, not hosting static sites. The equivalent here is more like S3 + Cloudflare (Cloud Connector and some rules). Which is free for most use cases and (IMO) pretty easy.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-01 12:57:11+00:00
That would be a silly argument because feelings involve qualia, which we do not currently know how to precisely define, recognize or measure. These qualia influence further perception and action.

Any relationships between certain words and a modified probabilistic outcome in current models is an artifact of the training corpus containing examples of these relationships.

I contend that modern models are absolutely capable of thinking, problem-solving, expressing creativity, but for the time being LLMs do not run in any kind of sensory loop which could house qualia.
Ask HN: Linux offline knowledge base app?
by rando77 | 2025-12-01 12:57:17+00:00
I'm looking for something like devdocs but for sysadmins when they can't access Google.

So I was thinking solr for search of documents and OCR to scan screen shots.

This came about thinking I'd like more people to be able to use joke assistant so high quality Linux knowledge would be good especially in remote locations or dodgy connections
by viraptor | 2025-12-01 12:57:42+00:00
I mean... Yeah?

Reminds me of the Metalocalypse on Christmas trees: "It's like having a rotting corpse in your house, but the corpse of a tree, you know? It's kind of baddass. It stands and then you humiliate it even further by hanging ornaments all over it,"

You can make anything metal if you try hard enough.
by KurSix | 2025-12-01 12:57:48+00:00
The idea of validation on real data is great. But why post questions directly? It's risky and intrusive. It would be much safer and more powerful to simply passively observe. Have agents scan the thousands of existing threads where people are already complaining about problems. You'll get honest data without risking being banned. People have already told you their problems, you just need to (automatically) listen, not ask again
by elzbardico | 2025-12-01 12:58:10+00:00
Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy.

Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people.

So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".