MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by popalchemist | 2025-12-12 20:30:02+00:00
What you say is true but it does not represent the spirit of what has happened historically. Historically the means of production exploit labor vastly more frequently and with greater degrees of extremity than the inverse.

This comment puts it in perspective:

>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.

Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
by Manuel_D | 2025-12-12 20:30:23+00:00
> There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.

And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.

Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?

And it sure looks like the answer is "no", given that the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement and speculate that something like that might be happening at Id.
by mmooss | 2025-12-12 20:30:24+00:00
No, that's part of their nonsense.

I'm describing how things are. Liberalism, including the Enlightenment is, and has been overwhelmingly successful in adoption (every corner of the globe, though not 100% of the globe), and success. It really does rule the world.

Mothballed and Milton are describing how they think things ought to be, or inevitably will be (I believe for many, the former is their goal, disguised as the latter). But that's just theory with no basis (as I pointed out earlier).

The idea that the latter is 'real' is laughable. Look at the world. The people who built a liberal world order had to contend with argument like this - there was little precedent. They had to invent much of it in the face of skepticism (like every innovator).

But it's absurd, now that it's built, institutionalized, and successful and status quo - now that you were born in it, fed on it, and live in it and breath it - now that all you need to do is pick up the tools that your predecessors did the hard work of creating, for you to argue that it's somehow not real. Just pick up the tools and march forward.

I mean, wow, that is some effective propaganda. It's like saying at noon that there's no star in the sky, like telling a fish in the ocean that there's no water.
Show HN: Verani – Socket.io-like realtime SDK for Cloudflare
by v0id_user | 2025-12-12 20:30:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Verani, an experimental realtime SDK for Cloudflare Actors (Durable Objects).

The goal is to bring a familiar, event-based DX (rooms, emit, channels, lifecycle hooks) to Cloudflare Durable Objects, while handling hibernation correctly.

It focuses on - Socket.io-like semantics on top of Durable Objects - Proper Actor hibernation handling (WebSockets survive, state is restored) - Typed API with explicit tradeoffs.

It’s early and experimental, but functional. I built it mainly to explore DX and state management patterns on Cloudflare Actors, and I’d love feedback from people who’ve built realtime systems or used Durable Objects.
by carsoon | 2025-12-12 20:31:03+00:00
I have a kinda strange chatgpt personalization prompt but it's been working well for me. The focus is me to get the model to analyze 2 sides and the extremes on both ends so it explains both and lets me decide. This is much better than asking it to make up accuracy percentages.

I think we align on what we want out of models:

""" Don't add useless babelling before the chats, just give the information direct and explain the info.

DO NOT USE ENGAGEMENT BAITING QUESTIONS AT THE END OF EVERY RESPONSE OR I WILL USE GROK FROM NOW ON FOREVER AND CANCEL MY GPT SUBSCRIPTION PERMANENTLY ONLY. GIVE USEFUL FACTUAL INFORMATION AND FOLLOW UPS which are grounded in first principles thinking and logic. Do not take a side and look at think about the extreme on both ends of a point before taking a side. Do not take a side just because the user has chosen that but provide infomration on both extremes. Respond with raw facts and do not add opinions.

Do not use random emojis. Prefer proper marks for lists etc. """

Those spelling/grammar errors are actually there and I don't want to change it as its working well for me.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-12 20:31:14+00:00
> all the memory chips and energy. And GPUs of course.

Yes and no and yes.

AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.

The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.
by freedomben | 2025-12-12 20:31:41+00:00
Indeed, Home Depot's software is generally so bad. I remember around 2017/2018 time frame when they started showing up to big tech conferences (especially K8s and React.js conferences) really trying to modernize. I spent a few minutes talking to the people manning the booth (which were surprisingly high ranking in the company, at least by title), and came away thinking "I'm glad you're making an effort, but y'all really have no idea what you're doing." The left hand and the right hand had completely different ideas/priorities about how to accomplish their goals. I didn't want to make any judgments on a simple conversation at a conference, but at this point I think time has shown that it was pretty representative of how they were approaching it internally, and unsurprisingly it did not work out super well.

Now that said, I don't want to minimize the difficulty in modernizing software at a corp like HD. It's wildly more difficult than most people can appreciate. I've consulted for companies trying to do it, and there are lots of challenges with legacy systems, migrations, and plenty of non-technical challenges as well.

Shout out to Wal-mart for genuinely kicking ass at this though. I'm quickly becoming an Onn fanboy. Genearlly speaking, great products at great prices, from their USB cables up to their smart speakers and more. You can really tell from the product design and implementation that they are letting the nerds geek out and have fun! That in turn enables me to do the same :-)
by autoexec | 2025-12-12 20:32:02+00:00
Why would they be terrified of a handful of employees just for having the ability to influence the company? The point of a union is to improve working conditions and job security, not to murder your bosses and kill off the company. Funny thing about workers is that they like having jobs, especially ones where they have any influence at all. If a company is fearful that treating workers a little more fairly will sink them, the company deserves to go under.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-12 20:32:17+00:00
Without wishing to completely sidetrack the discussion...

> I like your libertarian approach.

Their idea is to prohibit government...

What we are seeing in Australia is a community that has decided that the best course of action is to say that children under the age of 16 are generally too young to have the skills to deal with some social media.

You yourself are comfortable with the idea that a 5 year old is far too young for social media (and kids that age /can/ work devices to access social media if they want)

The question really is, at what age should we draw the line.

16 is arbitrary, but the ones most able to manage the interactions are the ones that will have the skills for circumventing the blanket ban, and the ones that aren't that savvy, won't.
by mmooss | 2025-12-12 20:32:21+00:00
They are reality, not at some point but right now and for generations (depending on where you live).

I'm not talking about you, but the rhetoric, the ideas. But another part of the rhetoric is to shift the conversation to being a victim, and away from the merits of the ideas so one doesn't have to talk about them. Heck, looking back, I even took trouble to say it wasn't about you.

If you want to insist you embrace those idea, that's your problem. Or you could be an independent thinker who examines ideas on their merits. That would be the core of HN.
by nickthegreek | 2025-12-12 20:32:55+00:00
Directly from the serpent's mouth:

"No more gaps – just evidence.

A license plate is just a start. Flock’s Vehicle Fingerprint® tech turns footage into evidence that solves cases by pinpointing vehicles by make, color, type, and unique characteristics like decals, bumper stickers, and accessories. This capability proved to be instrumental in a recent case in Catoosa, OK where police were able to track down the suspect connected to a mass murder after their vehicle was spotted by a Flock camera."

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/6-benefits-of-lpr-for-law-e...
by piker | 2025-12-12 20:32:56+00:00
I don’t think you understand. Either of those arrests are unconscionable by American standards. Most U.S. folks would be shocked to ever see such a thing, so it’s necessary to first show it to level-set that non-US jurisdictions don’t have any concept like the 1st Amendment. It wasn’t a slight in any way.

It was to say: even a single arrest on those grounds would be national news in the U.S. and quickly over turned by any circuit in the judiciary.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 20:33:10+00:00
Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure.

Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
by salawat | 2025-12-12 20:33:32+00:00
Doesn't need it to justify unionizing. Unionizing is a right, and it was previously not exercised because there was no evidence of the will of the market to defraud or conspire against workers. It is now written plain for all to see that indeed, these types of arrangements are kept in board members back pockets. It is not their job to protect a companies interest in renumeration execs and shareholders. It is their job to get their share in spite of the management class's proven track records of the proclivity to engage in shenanigans and lies.

The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-12 20:34:01+00:00
Both sides have been chancing their arm most of my lifetime. We get reports of Russian planes and ships round here all the time. The west does it to them as well... and it is no secret that British and American folk have been involved in the Ukrainian conflict. It allows both militaries to justify their spending so it is mutually beneficial as well as being brinkmanship.
by torginus | 2025-12-12 20:34:04+00:00
Well, this economic downturn might have something to do with the games industry continuing to push out products that nobody wanted (or were no good in the first place) at absolutely lavish budgets. It didn't seemingly come out of nowhere.

Cue Concorde.

If you spend half a billion, to make a game that's five multiplayer maps, fail to do any market research, to find out that the part of your audience that isn't indifferent to your game actively hates it, playing the role of innocent victim subject to the whims of evil studio execs, is somewhat unproductive.
by savanaly | 2025-12-12 20:34:06+00:00
If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.

Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".
by skydhash | 2025-12-12 20:36:05+00:00
The "Sun Eater" series (7 books) by C. Ruocchio have the final book published this year. Dune vibe/A bit of Warhammer.

"Simplicity" by Dave Thomas is in the same vein of "The Pragmatic Programmer". Worth a quick read.

"Tidy First?" by Kent Beck is another one that's worth a quick read.
by sebastiennight | 2025-12-12 20:36:14+00:00
> It's still a big issue that the models will make up plausible sounding but wrong or misleading explanations for things,

Due to how LLMs are implemented, you are always most likely to get a bogus explanation if you ask for an answer first, and why second.

A useful mental model is: imagine if I presented you with a potential new recruit's complete data (resume, job history, recordings of the job interview, everything) but you only had 1 second to tell me "hired: YES OR NO"

And then, AFTER you answered that, I gave you 50 pages worth of space to tell me why your decision is right. You can't go back on that decision, so all you can do is justify it however you can.

Do you see how this would give radically different outcomes vs. giving you the 50-page scratchpad first to think things through, and then only giving me a YES/NO answer?
by mandevil | 2025-12-12 20:36:16+00:00
I mean, the basic problem at Chernobyl was the lack of a big heavy containment vessel that essentially all other reactor designs have. That containment vessel (and a couple of other design features, e.g. negative void coefficient in a PWR) has, so far, largely prevented Chernobyl like issues at other, better designed reactors. So far a TMI/Fukushima Dai Ichi/Chalk River is about the worst that has been observed in a reactor with a containment vessel.

And as for how realistic it was that it would make large areas unlivable, the threat was of a melt-down going far enough down to hit the water table and contaminating the groundwater. That would make large areas only livable if you brought your own water, even for bathing, basically making the area impracticable. Obviously it didn't happen, but I'm not clear whether it was a 0.5% chance, a 5% chance or a 50% chance.
by palmotea | 2025-12-12 20:36:30+00:00
> The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.

The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
by tamimio | 2025-12-12 20:36:41+00:00
I thought it was supposed to be the golden age!? Instead we have technocratic elites who are after mass surveillance whether in forced digital ID or AI surveillance for cars and humans, and the worst part is if you try to protect your privacy you are a criminal now, like using VPNs or countering the AI. What's next, using cryptography is illegal and is considered terrorism? And public justification is ready; it's either "illegal immigrants" or "protecting the kids" depending on your political views.
by antonvs | 2025-12-12 20:36:54+00:00
The entire capitalist economy is based on that principle.

In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.

But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.
by vablings | 2025-12-12 20:37:08+00:00
The first point is exactly my thought. Self-driving cars are completely different to human drivers. We should not hold them to the same standards while simultaneously holding them to much higher standards. There are many driving violations that are just laws because they could lead to an unsafe scenario that is purely the fault of the driver.

Eg; stop signs. The only reason a full stop is required is to ensure that drivers are taking a clear observation and to give way to other stop signs. If there are no other traffic and no other drivers to give way to. Why do self-driving cars full-stop
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-12-12 20:37:17+00:00
What are you trying to protect yourself against?

1. Microservices imply distributed computing. So work with the grain on that - which is basically message passing with shared nothing resources. Most microservices try to do that so we are pretty good from a technical pov

2. Semantic loops - which is kind of what we are doing here with poly trees. This is really trying to model the business in software

Now here comes the hard part - this is not merely hard it’s sometimes bad politics to find out how a business really works. Is think far more software projects fail because the business they are in is unwilling to admit it is not the shape they are telling the software developers it is. Politics, fraud or anything in steer.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-12 20:37:18+00:00
Not all businesses fail because of unions, but let's suppose some of them did. Should the conclusion then be that we should find ways to prevent that from happening again, or should it be that two wrongs make a right?

It goes both ways. There are plenty of nations with strong unions throughout. In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).

The fact that someone can pull up an example where a union caused a business to go under doesn't make me think "we should eliminate unions". It doesn't even make me think "We should limit union negotiation powers" primarily because unions rights have been curtailed since the Reagan era.

If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
by renewiltord | 2025-12-12 20:37:21+00:00
Seems like a great feature. What I’d really like is a “recap for me till here” for books I started reading then stopped for whatever reason. I was reading Unsong for a bit (great book, very enjoyable) and then lately the baby has wanted a lot more attention so I didn’t get much reading done. I just want to catch up quick so I can continue.

LLMs are great for this, for the plot and character questions, etc.

Authors have nothing to do with it. It’s my device, my book that I bought. It would be like if YouTube banned a screen reader. These are at two different levels of the stack.
by gowld | 2025-12-12 20:37:23+00:00
> Concepts like

> finite context windows

like a human has

> or the fact that the model is "frozen" and stateless,

much like a human adult. Models get updated at a slower frequency than humans. AI systems have access to fetch new information and store it for context.

> or the idea that you can transfer conversations between models are trivial

because computers are better-organized than humanity.
by measurablefunc | 2025-12-12 20:37:27+00:00
LLMs can not "lie", they do not "know" anything, and certainly can not "confess" to anything either. What LLMs can do is generate numbers which can be constructed piecemeal from some other input numbers & other sources of data by basic arithmetic operations. The output number can then be interpreted as a sequence of letters which can be imbued with semantics by someone who is capable of reading and understanding words and sentences. At no point in the process is there any kind of awareness that can be attributed to any part of the computation or the supporting infrastructure other than whoever started the whole chain of arithmetic operations by pressing some keys on some computer connected to the relevant network of computers for carrying out the arithmetic operations.

If you think this is reductionism you should explain where exactly I have reduced the operations of the computer to something that is not a correct & full fidelity representation of what is actually happening. Remember, the computer can not do anything other than boolean algebra so make sure to let me know where exactly I made an error about the arithmetic in the computer.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-12 20:37:37+00:00
I know this might be a hot take but:

I'd bet all my money, and all the money I could borrow, that a waymo would stop/swerve for a child running out before the sensory nerves in a humans eye reacted to that child. Just thinking it's not as egregious a violation when committed by something with a 0.1ms response time. Still a violation, still shouldn't do it, but the worst case outcome would be much much harder to realize than with a human driver.

Also just to add, the fact that there aren't cases of this from Phoenix or SF seems to signal it's a dumb mistake bug in the "Atlanta" build.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-12 20:37:42+00:00
These use a very old and SoC and only 512MB of LPDDR2.

Using this for a tablet would be a very disappointing and slow experience. There are many better SoCs to use. If someone was set on using a Raspberry Pi, the full size compute modules would be a much better choice.

These are for embedding in very simple devices. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything like web browsing or trying to run a modern GUI app.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-12-12 20:37:45+00:00
Back in the day an OS called CTOS hosted what were essentially microservices. This acyclic problem was solved there, by not letting the essential OS services ever wait on a service response. It simply registered the outstanding service request and went back to servicing its own request queue. I thought at the time, this was an elegant solution to the deadlock problem.
by milesvp | 2025-12-12 20:37:46+00:00
BTW, if you don't know Benn Jordan, his YouTube content is fire. I happen to be in the intersection of things that he likes to think about, but every video I've seen of his lately deserves front page HN treatment. It is that good.

This one was particularly good, given the technical difficulties of recording low frequency sounds. I can't vouch for his conclusions, but the effort he goes to to record these sounds is crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTvr8L5v8u8
by retrac | 2025-12-12 20:37:56+00:00
Consumer price of the energy. Doesn't include connection fees, but those are a minority of the cost. Includes special energy taxes. But not sales tax.

For a real example, I'm on flat rate and if I use 1000 kWh my monthly bill will be 211 CAD (effective rate 0.21 CAD / 0.13 EUR per kWh) including taxes, connection, delivery, everything, but without subsidy. The amount I pay after the subsidy is applied would be less at 165 CAD.
by popalchemist | 2025-12-12 20:38:06+00:00
You are correct. Unions do not exist to exploit employers, they exist precisely to make working conditions acceptable (livable) and no more, most of the time. There are outliers, like Police unions, which have ulterior motives, but on the whole it is a labor movement meant to prevent the abhorrent conditions to which capitalism naturally backslides, which we saw after the industrial revolution.