MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-03 17:17:04+00:00
> The point about Solow's Paradox is that the gains of certain high productivity technologies do not provide society-wide economic benefit

Some people certainly argue that about the computer age, and it’s not totally unsupported. But I don’t think the evidence for that interpretation (as opposed to a delayed effect) is strong enough that I’d want to automatically generalize it to a new information technology advance.

To be clear, I don’t think China’s reticence is necessarily wrongheaded. But “we will usher in an age of undisputed dominance in a decade or two instead of right now from this investment” is a weird argument, especially from a government as ostensibly long-term focused as China.
by cratermoon | 2025-12-03 17:17:42+00:00
I once flagged a bug in Epic, the big EHR system. The system had somehow mixed up kilograms and pounds. For example, a normal adult male weight of 150lbs would be ~68kg, But accidentally save it without converting and get 150kg. Convert back and it becomes 330lbs. Suddenly our reasonably slim man becomes grossly obese.

It's not just wrong, it's extremely dangerous. In an emergency situations, where morphine is commonly administered for extreme pain, the dosage needed to relieve the pain of a 330lb man would kill a 150lb man. Granted the responder at the patient's side would probably realize something is amiss, but a pharmacist in another room filling an order wouldn't have the context, and could make the error.
by hinkley | 2025-12-03 17:17:47+00:00
It’s the same sort of apathy/arrogance that made new Windows versions run like dogshit on old machines. Gates really should have had stock in PC makers. He sold enough of them.

I don’t think it’s always still the case but for more than ten years every release of OSX ran better on old hardware, not worse.

Some people think the problem was MS investing too eagerly into upgrading developer machines routinely, giving them a false sense of what “fast enough” looked like. But the public rhetoric was so dismissive that I find that pretty unlikely. They just didn’t care. Institutionally.

I’m not really into the idea of Helldivers in the first place but I’m not going to install a 150GB game this side of 2040. That’s just fucking stupid.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-03 17:18:01+00:00
Their salary is not nearly enough. FAANG SWEs make several times more money for something that's quite a bit less important. Their pay is pretty good, but they also have a job which requires them to stay away from home (for most of them) for long periods of time. The pay is not really enough to maintain a household and a second living space comfortably.

I get the sentiment that they shouldn't be in it for the money. But money is important even for idealists. Let's say someone wants to serve the people, but not enough to take a $174,000/year salary with a lot of travel and needing to pay for lodging in a remote city, when they could be making $500,000/year at Facebook instead. Would you say that this person doesn't want to serve the people enough, and shouldn't run?

Maybe you would, but the problem is that you mostly won't get people who want to serve even more. By paying a relatively low salary, you'll end up getting:

1. Idealists with poor prospects in the job market.

2. Extreme idealists with good job prospects.

3. People who think they can leverage the position to make enough money to offset the difference in pay.

4. People rich enough not to care about piddling W-2 income.

In practice, categories 3 and 4 will win. According to https://www.quiverquant.com/congress-live-net-worth/, 107 members, or 20%, of Congress has a net worth of over $10 million. That net worth is in the top 2% of their age group. 16 members, or 3%, have a net worth of over $100 million.

And of course people don't tend to attain substantial net worth without having an eye for ways to make money, so it's very likely that those people will abuse their position to make money as long as they think they can get away with it.

I'd rather see a substantially increased salary, something like $1 million/year, so that ordinary people with decent skills can see serving in Congress as something they don't have to sacrifice for, financially. That would create a lot more competition for those positions and push out some of the extremely wealthy ones.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-03 17:18:16+00:00
> So what does the US value?

Every time we (the US) try to fix / change anything, a bunch of wonks with irrational arguments whine and complain until they get their way. The initiative fails, and we don't fix / change anything.

In short, we value letting irrational sabotage any form policy making; because we don't exclude people who negotiate in bad faith.
by gynvael | 2025-12-03 17:18:33+00:00
A surprisingly common misconception about Paged Out! is that we have some super strict acceptance policy. In reality we almost never reject articles and try to work with authors to improve them if there's any need for that ;)

But if you feel worried, our Discord is open, and you can also just email us with an article topic idea and we'll give you feedback on it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-12-03 17:18:40+00:00
Like many smart people they focused on telling people the "how", and assume visitors to their wall of "AI"/hype text already understand the use-case "why".

1. I like that it is written in Go

2. I saw nothing above what Apache Spark+Hadoop with _consistent_ object stores already offers on Amazon (S3), Google Cloud (GCS), and or Microsoft (Azure Storage, ADLS Gen2)

Best of luck, maybe folks should look around for that https://donate.apache.org/ button before the tax year concludes =3
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-03 17:18:45+00:00
My point is that Linus and the Zig guy are in different categories in my mind. I think it is a bit naive to lump them into the same category.

I would definitely classify the tiki torch wielding white nationalists as losers publicly, for example. In fact I have a hard time thinking of a better term for them. It could also apply to the fairly famous liar and criminal, the disgraced Congressman George Santos. Or any person who decides to flash kids at a playground, or beats his wife and children.

I think the Zig guy was a little over-dramatic with his initial post. He did change his mind, so in my book that's better than not. Linus did too, just after many years of bad behavior. My point is that your replies were painting the world with only black and white and there is a lot of gray area in between. Sometimes public shame is a valid way to do discourse. Often times it isn't. But it's not a "always" or "never" thing.
by amluto | 2025-12-03 17:18:59+00:00
Los Angeles solved housing after the wildfires like this:

https://members.aagla.org/news/once-again-la-county-board-of...

It’s very effective: people with previously unrented units will obviously decide to rent them out at, legally, at exactly 160% of the FMR rates, thus making lots of new housing available. FMR rates can be easily found here:

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr/fmrs/FY2026_code...

And the fact that it’s impossible to predict the law more than one month in advance will guarantee success!

Hah, did anyone fall for that? I know people who were about to move out of LA County, rent somewhere cheaper, and rent out their house to a family that needed it, except that 160% of FMR is utterly, hilariously below market in LA’s housing emergency and isn’t really enough to make the whole housing swap worthwhile, so their house is not actually available to rent. Good job, LA.

P.S. If one could instantly get a permit to rebuild a modern house on the site of one’s burnt-down house, then the housing emergency might resolve faster.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-03 17:19:17+00:00
For complex logic I don't rely on the CI system; I've been burned too many times. I shell out to an external program and have it return an output variable, and I just do "if $foo = y then blah" in the CI's DSL (and I keep those tests to a minimum; rather have more separate jobs than one complex job). Often I will put everything in a dedicated build tool (Make or similar) so I can run it from my laptop or CI, and any change to logic only happens in one place. It's adding an abstraction, but the end result is I write the CI job once and never touch it again. For flexibility I add parameters to the CI job.
by JohnBooty | 2025-12-03 17:19:41+00:00
FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time.

But this means that before they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing how their game performed with and without it?

Maybe they didn't test it with their game because their game didn't exist yet, because this was a decision made fairly early in the development process. In hindsight, yeah... it was the wrong call.

I'm just a little baffled by people harping on this decision and deciding that the developers must be stupid or lazy.

I mean, seriously, I do not understand. Like what do you get out of that? That would make you happy or satisfied somehow?
by internetter | 2025-12-03 17:19:46+00:00
While I agree with your conclusion

> While this analysis might be completely off, the simple fact that I could get even this information without much efforts is mind-boggling. With better setup it might be able to get more.

This can essentially be rephrased as "I don't know if what the LLM said is true or not but the fact it may or may not be correct is amazing!"
by bityard | 2025-12-03 17:19:58+00:00
Interesting! I like the relative simplicity and durability guarantees. I can see using this for dev and proof of concept. Or in situations where HA/RAID are handled lower in the stack.

What is the performance like for reads, writes, and deletes?

And just to play devil's advocate: What would you say to someone who argues that you've essentially reimplemented a filesystem?
by norir | 2025-12-03 17:20:03+00:00
For me, compiler optimization is a mixed bag. On the one hand, they can facilitate the generation of higher performance runtime artifacts, but it comes at significant cost, often I believe exceeding the value they provide. They push programs in the direction of complexity and inscrutability. They make it harder to know what a function _actually_ does, and some even have the ability to break your code.

In the OP examples, instead of optimization, what I would prefer is a separate analysis tool that reports what optimizations are possible and a compiler that makes it easy to write both high level and machine code as necessary. Now instead of the compiler opaquely rewriting your code for you, it helps guide you into writing optimal code at the source level. This, for me, leads to a better equilibrium where you are able to express your intent at a high level and then, as needed, you can perform lower level optimizations in a transparent and deterministic way.

For me, the big value of existing optimizing compilers is that I can use them to figure out what instructions might be optimal for my use case and then I can directly write those instructions where the highest performance is needed. But I do not need to subject myself to the slow compilation times (which compounds as the compiler repeatedly reoptimizes the same function thousands of times during development -- a cost that is repeated with every single compilation of the file) nor the possibility that the optimizer breaks my code in an opaque way that I won't notice until something bad and inscrutable happens at runtime.
Ask HN: Is AI going to cure the common cold?
by phtrivier | 2025-12-03 17:20:10+00:00
I know that it's tongue in cheek to ask when AI is going to "cure cancer and solve climate change", but, is there a company / university / lab working on using AI (or mRNA, or CRIPSR, or whatever) to solve the more mundane and yet incredibly frustrating "small diseases" (like the common cold that we'll all get twice a year no matter how much vitamin C we consume ?)

Where is the "breakthrough" research done on topics that no one talk about ?
by MongooseStudios | 2025-12-03 17:20:11+00:00
Location: Austin, Texas Remote: Preferred Willing to relocate: Maybe Technologies: Go(Golang), Python, C#, C, Jenkins, Kubernetes, miscellaneous other things, if I don't know it I'll learn it. Résumé/CV: mongoosestudios.github.io Email: Located on the about page (not the landing page) of the link above.

Mostly a back end dev. I've done a little front end and DevOps work here and there. Vibe Coding, AI, and crypto shops need not apply.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-12-03 17:20:18+00:00
Versity Gateway looks like a reasonable option here. I haven't personally used it, but I know some folks who say it performs pretty great as a "ZFS-backed S3" alternative.

https://github.com/versity/versitygw

Unlike other options like Garage or Minio, it doesn't have any clustering, replication, erasure coding, ...

Your S3 objects are just files on disk, and Versity exposes it. I gather it exists to provide an S3 interface on top of their other project (ScoutFS), but it seems like it should work on any old filesystem.
by jitl | 2025-12-03 17:20:40+00:00
You’d run FEX with WINE/Proton, no windows needed. If you did use a VM, I’d think it would be a Linux VM. But, Linux VM on macOS could already use Apple’s Rosetta2 for x86_64-to-arm64 translation.

Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.

EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
by oersted | 2025-12-03 17:21:06+00:00
Gamers are quite vocal about such things, people end up hearing about it even if they don’t check directly.

And this being primarily a live-service game drawing revenues from micro-transactions, especially a while after launch, and the fact that base console drives are still quite small to encourage an upgrade (does this change apply to consoles too?), there’s probably quite an incentive to make it easy for users to keep the game installed.
by apercu | 2025-12-03 17:21:15+00:00
Every western country that has a single payer system as far as I know allows for private clinics, doctors and labs.

I spent 18 years in Canada. The healthcare I got was as good as anything I received in America (in both cases it depends on where you live, unfortunately) and looking ahead to 2026 was cheaper (comparing my tax burden in Ontario to the terrible insurance I can afford for 2026 in America).
by mattkevan | 2025-12-03 17:21:38+00:00
No, type designers want their art to be used. The type industry until recently has been a fairly friendly one as only designers really cared about it.

I think it’s more likely that vulture capitalists have discovered a matket that they can ruthlessly exploit, extracting every last shred of value without giving the slightest of shits about its long term sustainability.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-03 17:21:46+00:00
I don’t disagree that it’s too large at 154GB but the decision (at least to me) also made more sense at a time when storage, especially external storage, had never been cheaper. That only changed like 6-8 weeks ago. Prior to that getting a 4TB external SSD was like what? $150-$200? $120 for a 2TB nvme? You could get 1TB SSD’s for like $65 if you looked for them.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-03 17:21:48+00:00
Linux is fine now, and has been for at least the past 5 years if not more. Even HiDPI works just fine now which has been a pain point for a while (at least, it works great on KDE).

That being said, my daily driver is macOS ever since apple silicon released, purely due to the laptop hardware. I keep a reasonably powerful Beelink mini PC mounted under my desk running ubuntu server and most of my work happens there over SSH with Tailscale. If you're primarily a laptop user, I'd definitely recommend this set up (or something similar), you get the best of both worlds.
by gfaster | 2025-12-03 17:22:47+00:00
That seems super far fetched given that 37%[1] of the world's population does not have internet access. You could reasonably restrict further to populations that speak languages that are even passably represented in LLMs.

Even disregarding that, if you're making <3000 euros a year, I really don't think you'd be willing or able to spend that much money to let your computer gaslight you.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/internet
by the_af | 2025-12-03 17:23:03+00:00
Go figure: people are downvoting me but I never once said developers must be stupid or lazy. This is a very common kind of mistake developers often make: premature optimization without considering the actual bottlenecks, and without testing theoretical optimizations actually make any difference. I know I'm guilty of this!

I never called anyone lazy or stupid, I just wondered whether they blindly trusted some stats without actually testing them.

> FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time

Wouldn't this mean their optimization mattered even less back then?
by folkhack | 2025-12-03 17:23:10+00:00
> (I personally don't mind subsidizing my library + local school district... good schools and libraries are good for the community)

Just sharing random coffee break thoughts... it always blows my mind is how many people _don't_ think like this. When base conditions improve for society, the conditions improve for _everyone_ regardless if they directly benefit you.

I'm also in the boat where I don't have kids, but I'd also like to live in a place that has educated people - so schools make perfect sense to me. Heck, even if I didn't benefit from it, providing children education is just the gosh-darn right thing to do.
by hamdingers | 2025-12-03 17:23:29+00:00
> That self-selects out the majority of qualified candidates who must work for a living.

Occupations like "landlord" and "car dealership owner" are wildly overrepresented in local government because they have high incomes with virtually no time commitment.

These people aren't necessarily unqualified, but their motivation for holding office isn't usually aligned with the needs of the average member of the public.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-03 17:23:34+00:00
I’m circumspect that anyone knows how it’ll play out. I think there’s strong evidence a correction is coming, but some talking head is predicting it’s going to be this week every week, and have been for a while. Nobody has convinced me it’s likely to look like the Great Depression yet.

I also think the circular dealing fears in particular are overstated. Debt financing that looks like this is common in semicon, and I doubt there are any serious investors that haven’t already priced it in. If the bust is fatal for AI investment, it’ll just be bankrupt companies owing money to other bankrupt companies.
by LunaSea | 2025-12-03 17:23:48+00:00
> The pay is not really enough to maintain a household and a second living space comfortably.

Who's talking about a second living space? They can move like most Americans do for work when the commute is too much.

> Let's say someone wants to serve the people, but not enough to take a $174,000/year salary with a lot of travel and needing to pay for lodging in a remote city, when they could be making $500,000/year at Facebook instead.

Then they can go work for Facebook. Who cares what they would like to have.

> Would you say that this person doesn't want to serve the people enough, and shouldn't run?

Yes.

> Maybe you would, but the problem is that you mostly won't get people who want to serve even more.

Source?

> In practice, categories 3 and 4 will win. According to https://www.quiverquant.com/congress-live-net-worth/, 107 members, or 20%, of Congress has a net worth of over $10 million. That net worth is in the top 2% of their age group. 16 members, or 3%, have a net worth of over $100 million.

Before or after they started their career?

> I'd rather see a substantially increased salary, something like $1 million/year, so that ordinary people with decent skills can see serving in Congress as something they don't have to sacrifice for, financially.

Ordinary people don't have the expectation of needing to be payed $1M to serve their country.

> That would create a lot more competition for those positions and push out some of the extremely wealthy ones.

The wealthy ones just use their wealth to get ahead.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-03 17:23:53+00:00
> Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here

I mean "liberal" in the philosophical sense, not the ill-defined, often pejorative partisan sense (in a philosophical sense, both major US political parties are liberal parties; we live in a liberal political order). One can support liberal institutions while rejecting the ideology along with its false anthropology, presupposed metaphysics and thus ethics.

The basic failure of liberalism lies in its definition of "freedom" which boils down to the ability to do whatever you choose, an absence of any restraint or constraint. Compare this with the classical definition of freedom as the ability to do what is objectively good. True freedom only exists in being able to exercise your nature as a human being. That's what flourishing means. The heart of such freedom is virtue and thus morality. The ability to do drugs or watch porn or sleep around or whatever is contrary to the good of the person doing those things. They do not make a person free. Immoral acts imprison and cripple the person committing them in the very act of committing them.

> individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy

I'm not talking about economic freedom. Economic freedom is always subject to various constraints. Some (good) regulation is necessary to protect the common good on which we all depend.

I'm talking about an anthropology that conceives of human beings in a way that denies or misrepresents their social nature and denies their obligations and duties toward others, and misunderstands freedom.

> People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path.

I'm also not talking about having the liberty to make all sorts of life choices. What would the alternative be? And people today aren't moving out of the house. They're living with mom and dad into their 30s, maybe longer. Yet liberalism marches on.

And that's perhaps part of the lesson. If we draw out the conclusions of liberal premises and cross them with human nature and the human condition, we find that liberalism's inner contradictions cause it to implode on itself, producing what might appear to be paradoxical results. After all, shouldn't liberalism have given us a freer, better world? This is the part where its defenders will blame external factors, which raises all sorts of new questions about how that is possible.
by bilkow | 2025-12-03 17:24:02+00:00
I think you are correct, but you probably misunderstood the parent.

My understanding of what they meant by "retroactively apply a restrictive license" is to apply a restrictive license to previous commits that were already distributed using a FOSS license (the FOSS part being implied by the new license being "restrictive" and because these discussions are usually around license changes for previously FOSS projects such as Terraform).

As allowing redistribution under at least the same license is usually a requirement for a license to be considered FOSS, you can't really change the license of an existing version as anyone who has acquired the version under the previous license can still redistribute it under the same terms.

Edit: s/commit/version/, added "under the same terms" at the end, add that the new license being "restrictive" contributes to the implication that the previous license was FOSS