MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 01:01:46+00:00
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.

They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).

Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.

No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.
by nayuki | 2025-12-22 01:02:01+00:00
> The tried-and-true grid-scale storage option—pumped hydro [--> https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-big-hydro-project-in-big-sky-cou... ], in which water is pumped between reservoirs at different elevations—lasts for decades and can store thousands of megawatts for days.

> Media reports show renderings of domes but give widely varying storage capacities [--> https://www.bloominglobal.com/media/detail/worlds-largest-co... ]—including 100 MW and 1,000 MW.

It looks like the article text is using the wrong unit for energy capacity in these contexts. I think it should be megawatt-hours, not megawatts. If this is true, this is a big yikes for something coming out of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
by jaggederest | 2025-12-22 01:02:36+00:00
In a thematically similar but very different vein, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series was an enjoyable read.

I also recommend Eric Nylund's work, specifically Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered.

Edit: Well, there you go, Children of Time had 23 mentions now that I've read down further. Disappointed to see Eric Nylund's work fade into obscurity, I rate him up with Neal Stephenson.
by thanedar | 2025-12-22 01:04:45+00:00
You get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics.

I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.

Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!
by kristopolous | 2025-12-22 01:06:09+00:00
I use local models + openrouter free ones.

My monthly spend on ai models is < $1

I'm not cheap, just ahead of the curve. With the collapse in inference cost, everything will be this eventually

I'll basically do

$ man tool | <how do I do this with the tool>

or even

$ cat source | <find the flags and give me some documentation on how to use this>

Things I used to do intensively I now do lazily.

I've even made a IEITYuan/Yuan-embedding-2.0-en database of my manpages with chroma and then I can just ask my local documentation how I do something conceptually, get the man pages, inject them into local qwen context window using my mansnip llm preprocessor, forward the prompt and then get usable real results.

In practice it's this:

$ what-man "some obscure question about nfs" ...chug chug chug (about 5 seconds)... <answer with citations back to the doc pages>

Essentially I'm not asking the models to think, just do NLP and process text. They can do that really reliably.

It helps combat a frequent tendency for documentation authors to bury the most common and useful flags deep in the documentation and lead with those that were most challenging or interesting to program instead.

I understand the inclination it's just not all that helpful for me
by strken | 2025-12-22 01:07:04+00:00
I'm not going to put customer data on a USB-3 SSD sitting on my desk. Having a small database doesn't mean you can ignore physical security and regulatory compliance, particularly if you've still got reasonable cash flow. Just as one example, some of our regulatory requirements involve immutable storage - how am I supposed to make an SSD that's literally on my desk immutable in any meaningful way? S3 handles this in seconds. Same thing with geographically distributed replicas and backups.

I also disagree that the ongoing maintenance, observability, and testing of a replicated database would take a few hours to set up and then require zero maintenance and never ping me with alerts.
by ttepasse | 2025-12-22 01:07:13+00:00
Back in the 2000s in the web standards development community there were multiple web development strategies called "progressive enhancement", "graceful degradation" and "unobtrusive javascript":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

There were a lot of practical reasons for that: The browser landscape was much more diverse, different browsers had different support of standard Javascript, some browsers didn't even support JS and some people still kept text-only browsers like lynx/links in mind. Also browsers were not evergreen, so a large part of the audience could be on some older versions. Another thing were sometimes brittle network connection, especially over mobile. Depending on JS could in the case of corruption mean non-functioning websites.

For a lot whose exposure to web development and the discussions abound that, that reason will be stuck in their head, even if in the last decade of React ets the "best practices" will have changed.

There is also an aesthetic thing: There is a thing of beauty in simply curling an url and piping it into grep or such to get the thing you need, instead of having so have an headless browser. In my mind that is still how the web should work.
Ask HN: Allow AI use during job interviews?
by realclayman | 2025-12-22 01:07:18+00:00
Most of us use AI/LLMs for coding and other job related tasks, but job interviews are still done with pre AI ways/methods.

1. How should job interview process change to adapt this new world?

2. What is the value of asking leet code like questions anymore?

3. How to test if a candidate is good at using AI at work?

4. What else you think is important to think about regarding hiring process in age of AI?
by esseph | 2025-12-22 01:07:29+00:00
And our every moments weren't being tracked by flock cameras or a cell phones. If something embarrassing happened at school, it didn't end up on tiktok. We still thought if we got to college we could get out of that shitty town and have a real grown up job and get a house. That is increasingly out of reach. I haven't even touched on something like 25y of constant combat deployments, or politics yet. Or the environment.
by flir | 2025-12-22 01:07:48+00:00
Hah. I think of it as a slime mold. There's the main body (bodies?), but it's always shooting out little bits of itself that try weird stuff - founding underwater communes, or climbing mountains in Crocs or something. Most of these offshoots don't have that much of an impact, but occasionally one lucks out and discovers America or peanut butter and the main body saunters off that way.
by meken | 2025-12-22 01:07:52+00:00
> Currently I am working on affixing a split keyboard to my pants, so that I can program while standing up.

This reminded me of the "walking desk" Stephen Wolfram uses to program:

https://content.wolfram.com/sites/43/2019/02/07-popcorn-rig1...

I tried to use a similar one during Covid and couldn't get into it at all.
by nradov | 2025-12-22 01:09:08+00:00
I doubt that willpower or lack thereof is a significant factor. It's more a matter of habits and discipline. Willpower can allow you to resist temptation for a few hours but it's not sustainable.

I know several people who were formerly obese and have achieved sustained weight loss without drugs or surgery. The common factor seems to be that they "hit rock bottom", sort of like a drug addict, and decided to make permanent lifestyle changes in order to survive and stop letting down those who depended upon them. These lifestyle changes are often pretty drastic, and involve more than just eating less and exercising more.

If people want to take GLP-1 drugs and understand the risks then I have no problem with that and don't see it as a moral failing. But they might want to evaluate whether this is just masking the symptoms of some deeper mental health condition.
by mouselett | 2025-12-22 01:10:05+00:00
I had the same frustrations recently with my MacBook Pro, with macOS constantly telling me about Tahoe despite OCLP--which I used to patch my unsupported Mac to Sonoma--currently not supporting that version of macOS. These notifications aren't able to be disabled, just like in Windows--trust me, I tried to do that. They irritated me so much, that I've actually taken to installing Ubuntu on the Mac just so I can avoid seeing them.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 01:10:42+00:00
Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit.

It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.
by scottbez1 | 2025-12-22 01:11:23+00:00
Very different standards - in its current form of emergency autoland it just needs to be proven to result in equal or better outcomes as a plane with no rated pilot onboard; the best case is another person that knows how to use the radio and can listen to instructions but the more likely case is a burning wreckage when the pilot is incapacitated.

To always auto land it needs to be as good as a fully trained and competent pilot, a much higher standard.
by hoppp | 2025-12-22 01:12:06+00:00
Ye, even the smallest projects nowadays are either serverless or run in kubernetes, they never even think about IPC.

Modern deployment pipelines are very good at deploying services that are running in separate containers, and people hate custom shell scripts, even if they work great.

If it's bespoke and not standardized its harder to maintain that's true, but its also great at reducing operational costs because infrastructure fees change with less reliance on external services . Its a cycle alright.
by zahlman | 2025-12-22 01:12:15+00:00
> Remember when your goal posts were Turing test?

No. You are misrepresenting the test's purpose, the argument made around it and the results people have gotten. Turing was explicit that the question was ill-posed in the first place, and proposed a test of useful capability. But even then, hypothetical imagining of what a "passing" agent's responses might look like, was radically different from what we get today. And the supposed "passes" we've seen recently are highly suspect.
by TheNewAndy | 2025-12-22 01:12:17+00:00
I wrote nearly all of https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463... on a train without internet. It was about a half hour journey, and I found that in such a short amount of time, I would set a small goal and work in a very distraction free way to achieve it. It was very good for doing small things, but sometimes doing larger things (like big refactors) is a bit more difficult. On occasion, I would also dedicate a train ride to just writing up a todo list.

I gave myself the rule of no internet while on the train, so sometimes I would just accumulate a list of questions I wanted to answer later.

There is definitely something to it, and you can get heaps done, but it needs to be supported with some non-train time (e.g. for me, it was all the app store stuff, debugging with real hardware, etc)
by crooked-v | 2025-12-22 01:12:43+00:00
One of the key reasons is that it would be really, really easy to accidentally injure parkgoers with any design big enough to interact with and engineered well enough to be reliable in a full day of appearances.

For example, the working WALL-E robot that's made a handful of PR appearances weighs seven hundred pounds. They absolutely can't risk that ever running across some kid's foot.
by nradov | 2025-12-22 01:12:54+00:00
Why would we think that? Tolerating discomfort seems to be a skill that anyone can develop with deliberate practice. Perhaps genetics imposes some upper limit, but just like in sports most people never put in the work necessary to even approach their genetic limit.

https://eastermichael.com/book/

It's winter in the Northern hemisphere right now. Try going for a walk tomorrow deliberately undressed to the point that you're deeply uncomfortable but not risking serious injury or death. Anyone can do this, and over time it makes tolerating other forms of discomfort easier.
by rubyfan | 2025-12-22 01:13:07+00:00
Funny how these statements seem to preempt alternative descriptions, misconceptions or criticisms.

Python is pretty well known as a data, analytic and machine learning oriented language, and they lean into a more broad characterization.

Perl might be described as dead/dying, and they characterize its development as ongoing.

PHP might be described as a web scripting language, and they characterize it as general purpose and broad.

Swift might be described as an Apple platform a language, and they really want us to know its multi-platform.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-22 01:13:59+00:00
The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue.

To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install.

[1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/insta...
by hu3 | 2025-12-22 01:14:18+00:00
I love Exceptions as control flow! Thanks for the suggestion.

I too use specialized exceptions. Some have friendly messages that can be displayed to the user, like "Please fill the password". But critical exceptions display a generic error to the user ("Ops, sorry something went wrong on our side...") but log specifics to devs, like database connection errors, for example.
by incrudible | 2025-12-22 01:14:44+00:00
The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.
by behindsight | 2025-12-22 01:14:47+00:00
> You can also do some inbetween systems programming in C# if you don’t care about a VM or msft.

C# Native AOT gets rid of the JIT and gives you a pretty good perf+memory profile compared to the past.

It's mostly the stigma of .NET Framework legacy systems that put people off, but modern C# projects are a breeze.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-22 01:14:47+00:00
I use two of these: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B077JX7GBL?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_d... it lets me tent at nearly 90 deg which is great. And it is also good for reclining on my LC4, where I use two Perriand berger stools as armrests and a Levo laptop stand.

For something sturdier I use Ulanzi super clamps with extensions.

The Glove80 (which is fantastic, as a 15 year Kinesis Aadvantage user prior) also has a tripod mounting kit which I haven't tried yet.
by gwern | 2025-12-22 01:15:04+00:00
> I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp

NBP (and the new ChatGPT generator) are integrated with LLMs to various degrees, so seems like the obvious starting point is a reverse approach: ask them to describe the old images which has the esthetics that Fernando Borretti likes, and start generating from those prompts. If you can recover the old images, then it was just a prompting issue. ("Sampling can show the presence of knowledge but not the absence.") If you can't even with their own 'native' descriptions, then that points to mode-collapse (especially all of the 'esthetic tuning' like DPO everyone does now) as being the biggest problem.
by gkoberger | 2025-12-22 01:15:37+00:00
I know there’s BB-8 toys, but I’m talking about the version meant for the parks: https://youtu.be/RDgZjdZsc6g

Much like Olaf (and many before him… dinosaurs, WALL-E, talking characters, etc), it was implied he’d wander around the parks. But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events, and fade away quickly. (The blog post even says that: Olaf will be part of a 15 minute temporary show, and then will visit Hong Kong).

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this exact thing happen a dozen times over the past 20+ years. (And watch the video I posted if you want to see more!)
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-22 01:15:40+00:00
> Regulators have never dictated where auditable logs must live.

That’s true. They specify that logs cannot be lost, available for x years, not modifiable, accessible only in y ways, cannot cross various boundaries/borders (depending on gov in question). Or bad things will happen to you (your company).

In practice, this means that durability of that audit record “a thing happened” cannot be simply “I persisted it to disk on one machine”. You need to know that the record has been made durable (across whatever your durability mechanism is, for example a DB with HA + DR), before progressing to the next step. Depending on the stringency, RPO needs to be zero for audit, which is why I say it is a special case.

I don’t know anything about linux audit, I doubt it has any relevance to regulatory compliance.
by komali2 | 2025-12-22 01:15:54+00:00
> Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?

No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?

That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
by josephg | 2025-12-22 01:16:06+00:00
This hasn't been my experience at all.

I still regularly use typescript. One problem I run into from time to time is "spooky action at a distance". For example, its quite common to create some object and store references to it in multiple places. After all, the object won't be changed and its often more efficient this way. But later, a design change results in me casually mutating that object, forgetting that its being shared between multiple components. Oops! Now the other part of my code has become invalid in some way. Bugs like this are very annoying to track down.

Its more or less impossible to make this mistake in rust because of how mutability is enforced. The mutability rules are sometimes annoying in the small, but in the large they tend to make your code much easier to reason about.

C has multiple problems like this. I've worked in plenty of codebases which had obscure race conditions due to how we were using threading. Safe rust makes most of these bugs impossible to write in the first place. But the other thing I - and others - run into all the time in C is code that isn't clear about ownership and lifetimes. If your API gives me a reference to some object, how long is that pointer valid for? Even if I now own the object and I'm responsible for freeing it, its common in C for the object to contain pointers to some other data. So my pointer might be invalid if I hold onto it too long. How long is too long? Its almost never properly specified in the documentation. In C, hell is other people's code.

Rust usually avoids all of these problems. If I call a function which returns an object of type T, I can safely assume the object lasts forever. It cannot be mutated by any other code (since its mine). And I'm not going to break anything else if I mutate the object myself. These are really nice properties to have when programming at scale.
by QGQBGdeZREunxLe | 2025-12-22 01:16:10+00:00
They started deleting questions that aren't generic enough to be applicable beyond the person that answered. Fair enough. But I put a decent amount of time into the answers I provided and when they do this it removes the "karma" from the person that answered.

I don't answer for SO points but dropping below a certain threshold removes features.

I'm done with the place.
by taylorlapeyre | 2025-12-22 01:16:17+00:00
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:

> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."

Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.

MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.