MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thwarted | 2025-12-04 17:10:42+00:00
> When I open a PR without discussing it at all beforehand with anyone, I expect the default to be that it gets rejected.

TNG S2E8, "A Matter Of Honor" is about this topic. The submitter introduced risk on the maintainers (the risk being here largely eating up the maintainers time needlessly) by working in isolation and only presenting the finished work without any feedback or awareness from the rest of the participants.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-04 17:10:47+00:00
> Robert F. Kennedy junior, America’s health secretary, thinks that autism has become an “epidemic” in his country. His concern stems from figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which shows that the condition now affects 32 per 1,000 eight-year-old children in America (see chart). That is in contrast, he says, with the near-absence of the condition in his childhood. Mr Kennedy was born in the 1950s, and studies estimate a prevalence of autism to around two to four per 10,000 in the 1960s.

I'd note that RFK Jr.'s very own aunt was lobotomized then hidden away for something that sounds a lot like autism if diagnosed today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
by eduction | 2025-12-04 17:10:54+00:00
teeny tiny link at the bottom, oy. A site almost totally free of context. No date on the post, even. In the context of how history/journalism of this sort is normally delivered, it is absolutely bizarre.

Ironic that someone specializing in security doesn't understand how to make their information trustworthy. But I suppose it's easier and more fun to try and understand machines than other human beings.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-04 17:10:58+00:00
> also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps

That used to be my jam in Q3A, Instaunlagged. Nothing is quite like railgun jumping with no splash damage. Dusk's crossbow jumping comes close, but isn't hitscan..
by jf22 | 2025-12-04 17:11:07+00:00
One of my worst job experiences was when I depended on a colleague who wouldn't deliver. Any feedback or conversations with that colleague mostly resulted in tantrums and empty promises.

The lack of delivery severely harmed the services I provided to the company and to external users, ruined team morale, and was a huge source of stress.

My boss always turned the problem back on me, despite him also being my colleague's boss.

I tried everything I could for 18 months and had extensive documentation of all my attempts, sometimes working in parallel with my boss or using his recommendations.

Still, the problems persisted and every time I brought it up with my boss it was as if he was oblivious to the ongoing saga. I want to HR and over his head about it and he always fed me shit about "empowerment" and "growth."

Yeah, I was empowered to interview with other company's and grew into other new roles.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-04 17:11:07+00:00
Eggs have traditionally been an extremely cheap protein staple.

A typical pattern might be to have two eggs for breakfast (a whopping 120 calories), boiled eggs for lunch/snack (another 60-120 calories), and of course baking, but I will pretend that people don’t bake.

A more typical serving for an adult breakfast might be 3 eggs if not supplemented.

For mom and dad and the little one, you’re now at 35 (2+2+1+2)x5 eggs per week. When your cost goes from $6 (2x18 @3) to $16 (2x18@8) per week, you notice.

Obviously the political discourse around this was not healthy. But eggs suddenly becoming a cost you have to notice is a big deal, and a symbol for all of the other grocery prices that went up simultaneously.

If you’re a typical HN user in the US you might be out of touch with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a real hardship when you’re raising a family on limited income.

The peak was actually closer to $8/dozen, my math has been conservative at every step, the situation is worse than I describe.
Ask HN: Are LLMs just expensive search and scripting tools? Is it that simple?
by edwin2 | 2025-12-04 17:11:09+00:00
Can all of LLMs be summarized as a (currently) really expensive search that allows you to express nuanced queries and script the output of the search? Why or why not?

Take code. In a sense, StackOverflow is about finding a code snippet for an already solved problem. Auto complete does the same kind of search in a sense.

Take generative text. In a sense that’s the equivalent of making a query and then aggregating the many results into one phrase. You could imagine the bot searching 1,000 websites and then taking the average of the answers to the query and then outputting the result.

Does every LLM use case fit the following pattern?…

query —-> LLM does its work —-> result —> script of result (optional)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-04 17:11:09+00:00
> Putting "MAGA" and "academic progressivism" on equal footings is pure bothsideism

One is a political movement that controls the Presidency and several states. The other has a seat at the table in a few cities. If you’re seeing equal footing, you’re squinting hard.

> What do you mean by "illiberal" exactly, and why would that apply to progressives?

I’m specifically referring to the policing of speech. Brendan Carr telling broadcasters what they can and cannot say is illiberal. Same goes for the euphemism escalators that regulated the form, but not content, of classic political correctness. More broadly, liberalism triumphs tolerance while conservativism purity.

But to the point, LatinX and the Gulf of America being similarly dumb is an academic exercise. They’re functionally dumb and dangerous for entirely separate reasons. Compressing them into illiberalism is interesting, but not usefully descriptive.

Going back to OP, treating the world as pro- or anti-Musk is similarly uselessly reductive.
Show HN: Tracksy – a minimalist time-tracking tool I built for my freelance work
by miguelboka | 2025-12-04 17:11:22+00:00
I'm a freelance developer who got tired of switching between time-tracking apps, spreadsheets, and invoicing tools. I built Tracksy because I just needed something simple: start timer → log hours → export PDF → send to client.

I’ve been using it daily and recently added:

responsive UI

invoice templates

analytics

watermark removal

feedback system

interactive demo

Would love feedback from the HN community. Demo: https://app.arcade.software/share/ipJQTkzCnEgNaXaHCS3z
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-04 17:11:23+00:00
> The median age of people working local politics is probably 55, and I've met more people (non-family, that is) over 70 doing this than in anything else, and all of them are (a) using AI for stuff and (b) psyched to see any new application of AI being put to use

That seems more like a canary than anything. This is the demographic that doesn't even know which tech company they're talking to in congress. That's not the demographic in touch with tech. They have gotten more excited about even dumber stuff.

For people under 50, it's a wildly common insult to say something seems AI generated. They are disillusioned with the content slop filling the internet, the fact that 50% of the internet is bots, and their future job prospects.

The only people I've seen liking AI art, like fake cat videos, are people over 50. Not that they don't matter, but they are not the driver of what's popular or sustainable.
by flaminHotSpeedo | 2025-12-04 17:11:25+00:00
My understanding of the contemporary argument against publicly traded companies, though I'm not completely convinced of them personally, are that the fiduciary obligations inevitably drive those bad behaviors, and/or that shareholders often demand short term returns at the expense of long term value.

As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
by apercu | 2025-12-04 17:11:28+00:00
It's not just AI mania, it's been this way for over a decade.

When I first started consulting, organizations were afraid enough of lack of ROI in tech implementations that projects needed an economic justification in order to be approved.

Starting with cloud, leadership seemed so become rare, and everything was "us too!".

After cloud it was data/data visualization, then it was over-hiring during Covid, the it was RTO, and now it's AI.

I wonder if we will ever return to rationalization? The bellwether might be Tesla stock price (at a rational valuation).
by redwall_hp | 2025-12-04 17:11:28+00:00
I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs).

It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans, random brief freezes of the whole system, a shell that still feels like a toy, a proprietary 170W power supply and mediocre battery life, subpar display. The keyboard is okay, at least. What a joke.

Meanwhile, my personal M3 Max system can render Da Vinci timelines with complex Fusion compositions in real time and handle whole stacks of VSTs in a DAW. Compared to the Lenovo choking on an IDE.
by r0m4n0 | 2025-12-04 17:11:33+00:00
I'm mostly saying the hype is real on a lot of things today. Is it working perfectly for everything? Definitely not, but I'm of the opinion giving it another 10 years and it just might be. I'm amongst the many working to make it better and all I see is a million possibilities of what can be done that we have only worked through a few of the issues. Did it change EVERYTHING over night? No, it was a big breakthrough, the rest is still catching up.
by iamthejuan | 2025-12-04 17:11:56+00:00
Regarding Facebook is listening, my girlfriend and I was taking few years back around 2021, we usually keep our call for more than 24hrs at a time. One evening we were talking then suddenly we heard a man, talking as if he is in an office then we both stopped and listened, and he just stopped as if he accidentally unmuted. This happened again the next, night but this time it is a woman. Same, as if they were in an office environment. They were talking in English, we are not listening to anything, we were just talking then suddenly we heard them, and also we are not a native English speaker, we do not talk in English during our call. That is the the time we decided to switch to Signal, which as many say is more secure.
by bluGill | 2025-12-04 17:12:10+00:00
Depends on what you are asking of the engine. An engine at red line but under no load doesn't generate that much heat, and so can get by with no coolant, and run for a long time on just the oil film left after draining the oil. This is really bad for the engine and it will wear out much faster - but it will run for a surprisingly long time.
by 7bit | 2025-12-04 17:12:17+00:00
> everyone knows

Not everybody knows. People who learn JavaScript don't know. In fact, they must learn this. And from my experience, most learning resources don't mention this, let alone teach this. It took me a really long time to understand what ECMAScript is and how it relates to JavaScript. And the effort I put in this understanding... I would have preferred to not having needed that.

So no, not everybody knows this.
by Teever | 2025-12-04 17:13:36+00:00
Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.

The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.

We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.

It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.

It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.
by tonyarkles | 2025-12-04 17:13:49+00:00
I'm laughing because I used that exact same phrase: "shit umbrella". Like some of the other replies mentioned, telling your team it's raining is great. The balance I found was to let them know what's coming and why but to let leadership's "pivots" to stabilize for a few days before sharing the unfiltered shit stream with my reports. This meant that the team still knew what was going on early but didn't panic as much when there was a sudden crazy random request from leadership that would be highly disruptive.
by neilv | 2025-12-04 17:13:54+00:00
I have an approach for multiple of these steps, which involves adapting a kind of non-LLMs respected authority tech approach (my previous side project), to LLMs.

I think it can be done right now with MCP servers in a way that you don't immediately hand over your data to the chatbot portal companies so that they can cut you out. (But, over time/traffic, they could quickly learn to mimick your MCP server, much like they mimick Web content and other training data, and at least appear to casual users to interact like you, even if twisted to push whatever company bid for the current user interaction. I haven't figured out what you do when they've trained on mimicking you with an evil twin; maybe you get acquired early, and then there are more resources to solve that next problem.)
by somenameforme | 2025-12-04 17:14:09+00:00
Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics.

In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself with government and then imposing itself on everybody and everything.
by simlevesque | 2025-12-04 17:14:13+00:00
I should have been more clear: It's my http cache for my crawling jobs. Lots of files in many shapes.

My new setup: gen5 ssd in desktop:

> time find . -type f | wc -l 5645741 ________________________ Executed in 4.77 secs

My old setup, gen3 ssd in laptop:

> time find . -type f | wc -l 2944648 ________________________ Executed in 27.53 secs

Both are running pretty much non-stop, very slowly.
by F3nd0 | 2025-12-04 17:14:47+00:00
The problem is that 'what changed' is hardly related to why they joined Twitter in the first place. Becoming 'increasingly hostile' and prioritising 'hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism' (more than before) doesn't really contradict or prevent you from 'reaching members of society who were not active in [y]our preferred spaces for interaction'. Like I wrote, X is still popular, there are still people you can communicate with about your mission. The original logical (and given) reason for being on X is still just as valid.

And I didn't criticise them for taking an ambiguous stance. On the contrary, I remarked they seem to be taking a rather unambiguous political stance (one opposed to that of X's new leadership). What I criticised was their not being upfront about this and instead giving explanations which don't really add up for me (for reasons restated above).

I quoted only short parts to avoid making my comment appear twice as long, but please let me know if you found the way I did so to be misleading in some way.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-04 17:15:15+00:00
I would say that I hate this, but I actually don't know what good it does to be a political organization actively engaging on social media anymore. There are too many paid mercenaries with expensive automation who will disrupt whatever you do.

But what are they going to do instead, nothing? Killing yourself in protest makes it really easy on your enemies (and aren't the only enemies of Free Software the people who want to sell closed devices?). Do what you do, don't feel like you have to control all the responses to what you do, or that they are hurting you. Your engagement with the public is independent of any reaction to you. You have total control over it. In this case, it looks like you're choosing to withdraw into a closet and only speak to your friends.

All that being said, twitter/X, both pre-Musk and post-Musk, sabotaged and sabotages reach based on opinionated, political, and profit-driven algorithms. People don't even see you. If your reach numbers were crap, you might as well not waste the effort. But I actually don't know what the effort is to fire and forget links to your press releases and current campaigns that you've doubtlessly posted other places. Seems almost zero.

My fear is that this is being pushed by people who are simply taking advantage of their power in an organization to push their own personal grievances. Free Software should only care about Elon Musk and Twitter to the extent that it is not Free Software. If you've moved into the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" place, you've lost the plot.

I'm also getting a bit sick of Europeans stepping out of conversations because they aren't censored enough, even if the algorithm is definitely promoting the worst for engagement. It's scary. Europe has a comically bad history with this.

edit: and even the mention of "misinformation" is a red flag. I don't want a FSF that is a "misinformation" and hate speech monitor. I want a FSF that neonazis and climate skeptics feel free to join if they think that software should be Free.
by rng-concern | 2025-12-04 17:15:26+00:00
That is part of it, but the bigger part for me is, art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.

Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".

I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
by tech_ken | 2025-12-04 17:15:30+00:00
> A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy.

Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground.

> Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch

I disagree, I think they're artifacts of the rehab environment (the ZIRP policy sphere). I think in a world where we fully ate the loss of '08 and started in a new direction you might get Tesla, but definitely not TSLA, and the version we got is really (Tesla+TSLA) IMO. Bitcoin to me is even less of a break with the pre-08 world; blockchain is cool tech but Bitcoin looks very much "Financial Derivatives, Online". I think an honest correction to '08 would have been far more of a focus on "hard tech and value finance", rather than inventing new financial instruments even further distanced from the value-generation chain.

> Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.

Hard agree here
by habinero | 2025-12-04 17:16:18+00:00
Yeah. You're not a coder, so you don't have the expertise to see the pitfalls and problems with the approach.

If you want to use concrete to anchor some poles in the ground, great. Build that gazebo. If it falls down, oh well.

If you want to use concrete to make a building that needs to be safe and maintained, it's critical that you use the right concrete mix, use rebar in the right way, and seal it properly.

Civil engineers aren't "threatened" by hobbyists building gazebos. Software engineers aren't "threatened" by AI. We're pointing out that the building's gonna fall over if you do it this way, which is what we're actually paid to do.
by candiddevmike | 2025-12-04 17:16:25+00:00
As someone with thinning hair, it's horrible how little study/research is being performed to understand how hair grows and treat hair loss. Most of the products on the market today were discovered by accident and have serious side effects. This condition impacts millions++ of people, yet everyone from physicians to pharmaceutical companies is fine with the status quo of "here, this may work for you" effectively woo medicine.
by kryogen1c | 2025-12-04 17:16:39+00:00
I went to Ignite a few weeks ago, and the theme of the event and most talks was "look at how we're leveraging AI in this product to add value".

Separately, the theme from talking to Every. Single. Person on the buy-side was gigantic eye roll yes I cant wait for AI to solve all my problems.

Companies I support are being directed from their presidents to use ai, literally a solution in search of a problem.
by Shank | 2025-12-04 17:17:27+00:00
This is going to be a serious problem. We’ve had smart devices percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines to fridges. That’s all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At what point does this become a national security issue? People need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-04 17:17:36+00:00
I don't know how this works in the US, which is why I'm asking, but you paid of part of your mortgage already, so if you could sell you home for what you paid, or more, the difference would be cash-in-hand. If you spend all that buying the new home (assuming same price or lower), your new mortgage would be lower, and potentially cheaper, even with the higher interest rate.

You could also convert a 3% mortgage to a 5% for example. Because the owners of the 3% mortage aren't that interested in it any more, you could get that at perhaps as low as 80% (a former coworker got as low as 65%) of the original value. So if you buy a home for e.g. $200.000, you paid of $50.000 and "buy back" the rest at 80% you're now left with $120.000 of debt. You then get a new mortgage for that amount, and even at higher rate, that might result in a monthly saving. When the remaining amount is low enough, you could refinance and get e.g. a 10 year fixed rate mortage for a really low rate.

I don't know if you can do that in the US, but that's pretty much standard in Denmark. Most people will do that maybe 3 - 5 times during the lifetime of a mortgage. For the most part is make absolutely no sense, the bank just do some paper work, have you sign and then you owe less, but at a higher interest.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-04 17:17:44+00:00
If you are consistently maxing out your computers performance in a way that is limiting your ability to earn money at a rate greater than the cost of upgrades, and you can't offload that work to the cloud, then I guess it might make sense.

If, you are like every developer I have ever met, the constraint is your own time, motivation and skills, then spending $22k dollars per year is a pretty interesting waste of resources.

DOes it makes sense to buy good tools for your job? Yes. Does it make sense to buy the most expensive version of the tool that you already own last years most expensive version of? Rarely.
by Teslazar | 2025-12-04 17:17:55+00:00
UT2k4 had software rending support via the Pixomatic software renderer from RAD Game Tools:

https://www.radgametools.com/pixo/PixoWithUnreal2004.txt

Further discussion about it here:

https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/software-rendering-i...