MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by talkingtab | 2025-12-16 18:26:05+00:00
We're microsoft. We don't care. We don't have to care, we're microsoft. Lock in? Embrace, expand, extinguish? Anti-competive? Anti-trust? We don't care. We don't have to care. Pay taxes? We don't have to pay taxes (https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-...). We're ... etc.

This is not new, not unexpected. This is ongoing. Nothing stops this because who wins elections? How do they pay for all that publicity. Certainly "contributing" to campaigns is much cheaper than paying your taxes.

Supposedly this is a place for hackers. Hackers can build a better alternative.
by elviejo | 2025-12-16 18:26:06+00:00
One of the clearest thinkers I had the privilege of knowing was Dr. Eli Goldratt author of Theory of Constraints.

Fortunately for us he defined as his life's mission to teach the world to think clearly.

So I suggest you start with three of his books: The Goal, Is not luck and The Choice. After trat read "The thinking Processes".

Apart from the theory of Constraints literature you can study system dynamics. And if you like programming then "Introduction to NetLogo" is great at both.

If you don't like programming then Zenge's the "Fifth Discipline" is a great intro to system dynamics.
by kortex | 2025-12-16 18:26:18+00:00
It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.

The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
by ajross | 2025-12-16 18:26:22+00:00
(I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.)

Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.

No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
by cweagans | 2025-12-16 18:26:24+00:00
That's not exactly true. You just won't be able to use self-hosted infra to validate GitHub PRs a) using GHA and b) for free.

GitHub still supports e.g. PR checks that originate from other systems. We had PR checks before GHA and it's easy enough to go back to that. Jenkins has some stuff built in or you can make some simple API calls.

It's not as convenient, but it works just fine.
by alwa | 2025-12-16 18:26:43+00:00
That’s my sense too. I wonder where the new foca are starting to form, as far as where people will look to serve the purposes that this slop’s infiltrating. What the inevitable alternatives to the New Inevitable start to look like.

At the risk of dorm-room philosophizing: My instincts are all situated in the past, and I don’t know whether that’s my failure of imagination or whether it’s where everybody else is ending up too.

Do the new information-gathering Schelling points look like the past—trust in specific individual thinkers, words’ age as a signal of their reliability, private-first discussions, web of trust, known-human-edited corpora, apprenticeship, personal practice and experience?

Is there instead no meaningful replacement, and the future looks like people’s “real” lives shrinking back to human scale? Does our Tower of Babel just collapse for a while with no real replacement in sight? Was it all much more illusory than it felt all along, and the slop is just forcing us to see that more clearly?

Did the Cronkite-era-television—>cable transition feel this way to people before us?
by glenstein | 2025-12-16 18:27:06+00:00
Can you say more? I do think Google has effectively pushed embrace-extend-extinguish, changing the rules so that it's a game they can win. And I do think part of the point of web standards protocols is to limit complexity. So I agree the rules as they exist now favor Google. I think the "real" solution was for the standards bodies to stay in control but seems like that horse left the barn.
by renewiltord | 2025-12-16 18:27:09+00:00
The franchise is already restricted to citizens except for weird subsets like SF schools, right? I think any model of franchise restriction must have negative feedback effects:

- should not allow franchise holders to arrogate state function to themselves in a snowball manner

- should not allow franchise holders to enhance franchise power

Not in a direct “outlaw this”sense but in a dynamic systems sense. So something like net tax payer is good. If you use it to vote yourself more state benefits you lose the franchise and others can then remove that benefit from you.

It will be hard to handle delayed reward situations (I pay now to get benefit later) so I think the problem is we just don’t have the correct device for this yet.

But the restricted franchise is something I think is very useful. The model of having free riders vote for more free riding is rapidly approaching its limit.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-12-16 18:27:10+00:00
The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.

They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.

But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.
by mothballed | 2025-12-16 18:27:25+00:00
I'd argue it's a 4A violation to require it to be displayed, though. It's a search of your registration 'papers' without RAS or PC of an offense.

The fact that driving is a 'privilege' doesn't negate your rights to be secure in your papers, the police should have to have articulable suspicion that your car is unregistered or unlicensed before they can demand you to display your plate.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-12-16 18:27:27+00:00
I get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart.

Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.
by maxglute | 2025-12-16 18:27:50+00:00
Person A claims US overmatch can Gaza Havana.

Person B claims Bay of pigs failed / maritime invasion hard.

Person B argument retarded because US doesn't need to invade to Gaza Cuba.

Person B is admitting they lack 101 subject matter knowledge, to even bring up maritime invasion (because that's the context PRC/TW scenario is presented in lay news) is kind of so stupid it's not even wrong when talking about razing TW into Gaza.

TLDR PRC doesn't need to invade TW to Gaza it. They can now do it trivially from mainland fires. That's the current military reality. There doesn't need to be single foot on the ground to starve island with 90% energy and calorie import needs, and there's functionally nothing US+co can do about it, at least not for next 10+ years where procurement is locked in, and assuming PRC MIC somehow regress. So when I say PRC can Gaza TW, I mean statistically, with the currently correlation of forces across the strait, PRC can conventionally level TW like Gaza, without any amphib effort, just like US can simply glass Havanna from CONUS. That should not be controversial statement if you understand the actual #s involved. I mean delulu libtards are free to think delulu impossible thoughts, but some of them are, in fact functionally in the realm of impossible.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-12-16 18:28:09+00:00
I think you significantly underestimate the number of CI minutes people are using in practice.

(Which, yes, has implications for energy use/climate change too for sure).

It doesn't look like i currently have access to the usage data on any of the lots-of-runners-lots-of-PRs projects I currently work on (which are still probably way less than some large companies).
by matty22 | 2025-12-16 18:28:50+00:00
Ok, well Texas ain't the entire country. The vast majority of the population of this country do not live in the rural Midwest. As of the 2020 census, 80% of the population live in areas considered "urban" and 20% live in areas considered "rural". I'd also hazard a guess that most people who drive trucks, are not people who buy them because they need truck "utility". They drive them because twice a year they need to carry a load of garden dirt and maybe on the weekends they carry tools to their buddy's house. If putting a lot of miles on your truck is what you need it to do, the hybrid Maverick gets ~35-40 mpg, 3-4x what any full sized pickup will get.

> EV in fullsize truck doesn't work that well

Yes, you are making my argument for me. Fullsize EV pickup trucks don't work well, so Ford should stop making them...
by joshstrange | 2025-12-16 18:29:29+00:00
Nothing irks me quite as much as "Did you use ChatGPT/AI on this?" or assumptions that it was used.

Just the other week a client reached out and asked a bunch of questions that resulted in me writing 15+ SQL queries (not small/basic ones) from scratch and then doing some more math/calculations on top of that to get the client the numbers they were looking for. After spending an hour or two on it and writing up my response they said something to the effect up "Thanks for that! I hope AI made it easy to get that all together!".

I'm sure they were mostly being nice and trying (badly) to say "I hope it wasn't too much trouble" but it took me a few iterations to put together a reply that wasn't confrontational. No, I didn't use AI, mostly because they absolutely suck at that kind of thing. Oh, they might spit of convincing SQL statements, those SQL statements might even work and return data, but the chance they got the right numbers is very low in my experience (yes, I've tried).

The nuance in a database schema, especially one that's been around for a while and seen its share of additions/migrations/etc, is something LLMs do not handle well. Sure, if you want a count of users an LLM can probably do that, but anything more complicated that I've tried falls over very quickly.

The whole ordeal frustrated me quite a bit because it trivialized and minimized what was real work that I did (non-billed work, trying to be nice). I wouldn't do this because I'm a professional but there was a moment when I thought "Next time I'll just reply with AI Slop instead and let them sort it out". It really took the wind out of my sails and made me regret the effort I put into getting them the data they asked for.
by moh_quz | 2025-12-16 18:30:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I realized I was spending the first 3 weeks of every new B2B project just wiring up "boring" infrastructure like Authentication, Team Invites, and Billing webhooks.

I decided to open-source my internal kit (MIT Licensed) to fix this.

The Goal: Help founders skip the plumbing and start building their unique business logic on Day 1.

The Stack:

Backend: Go 1.23 (Modular Monolith with sqlc).

Frontend: Next.js 15 (App Router).

Included: Pre-configured RBAC, Multi-tenancy, Billing (Polar), and a pgvector RAG pipeline.

It’s opinionated, but it saves you from "Decision Fatigue" when launching a new product. Happy to answer questions!
by NemoNobody | 2025-12-16 18:30:09+00:00
AI is software. It functions recursively, which means circular, it's always looping - stuff you say and suggest with stuff you liked that it said and adding that to delivering whatever it thinks you want now. It does not remember. It does not think.

A new chat is a restart - not in total, but you can do that too. It doesn't learn us - it cleverly delivers us what we have suggested we want to hear, what works, it does more of.

If you want it to do less of whatever - you do a new chat.
Open to Work
by busolatom | 2025-12-16 18:30:27+00:00
Location: Nigeria Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes (open to Africa & international roles) Technologies: Jira, Figma, Amplitude, GA4, SQL (basic), Power BI, Agile/Scrum, SaaS, AI-assisted products Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OXBg8gS1olgM0HSemRWShWsv979lPqNL/view?usp=sharing

Email: busola.fam@gmail.com

Summary: Product Manager experienced in building and scaling SaaS products for education and healthcare. Currently leading a behavioral therapy platform and an education data dashboard for public-sector stakeholders. Skilled in product discovery, PRD writing, Agile delivery, and cross-functional execution. Experienced in shipping AI-assisted features and AI chatbots responsibly, with human oversight. Comfortable working in fast-moving teams, aligning stakeholders, and turning user needs into delivered products.
by RHSeeger | 2025-12-16 18:30:33+00:00
But "what you saw" isn't necessarily representative of the state of things, either. Arlington, VA is (was?) one of the nicer places in VA; generally expensive, etc. When I drove through there, the van in front of me at a light was car-jacked, and the person in it chased down. I'm uncomfortable driving through Arlington because of that; even though it's not representative of the area. Admittedly, this was years ago... but the point stands. My experience is not representative of the actual facts.
by fzeroracer | 2025-12-16 18:30:35+00:00
Literally one sentence after your quote

> “Especially in today’s climate, there are families where the child is a citizen and the parent is an immigrant, and they’re fearful of interacting with government,” Alker says. But such fears can only explain a small proportion of those who are uninsured, she notes.

So what's your goal here? My patience level is incredibly thin for people that are very clearly taking the article out of context to push some remarkably dumb agenta.
by rng-concern | 2025-12-16 18:30:41+00:00
I have to say this sort of thing is hard to think about, as it's pretty hypothetical right now. But I can't imagine how the current iteration of AI could give me the same joy? Me and my friend were roommates. We played other games together, including dnd. We struggled with another friend to build a LAN so we could play these games together.

I can't imagine having the same shared experience with an AI. Even if I could, knowing there is no consciousness there does changes things (if we can know such thing).

This reminds me of solipsism. I have no way of knowing if others are conscious, but it seems quite lonely to me if that were true. Even though it's the exact same thing to the outside. It's not?
YouTube Recommendations and Elephants in the Room
by danielfalbo | 2025-12-16 18:31:15+00:00
Sometimes youtube recommends me videos and I completely ignore them. I see the cover with my peripheral vision, I passively read the title, but for some reason I do not open them. Then YouTube keeps recommending them to me over and over. I keep ignoring them. At some point for some reason, I finally take a better look at the title and the cover, they feel very interesting, I open them, and they provide me with something interesting and valuable. I could've watched them the first time YouTube recommended them to me, but instead I was a zombie looking at them deadly, and had to be exposed to them over and over again before opening my eyes, watching them, and letting them change my life. I think this happens with various themes in my life too. There are very obvious things that keep happening in my life and behaviours I keep doing over and over again. They are bad and/or should be changed, but for a long period of time I am just unaware of them and I keep doing them as a zombie. Then at some point I wake up, I finally become aware of them, I update them, and they change my life for the better. Damned elephants in the room.
by star-glider | 2025-12-16 18:31:32+00:00
Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.

For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.

I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.
by anthk | 2025-12-16 18:32:05+00:00
Xaw95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/x... You don't need to install it globally, an LD_PRELOAD env var pointing to ./libXaw95.so.8.0 will do the trick.

Usage:

xmkmf -a make

Test:

export LD_PRELOAD=./libXaw95.so.8.0 xcalc
by tptacek | 2025-12-16 18:32:05+00:00
A huge number of municipalities all share the same tech stack: Granicus/Legistar. You can pull the agendas and minutes of all their board meetings probably going back a decade. From captioning information you can Whisper-transcribe and attribute transcripts of the meetings themselves.

During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff).

That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler.

You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.
by gldrk | 2025-12-16 18:32:06+00:00
My evidence is the git commit log: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/84460945/#q84481507

This doesn’t even include the XFree86 CVS commit history and older, which accounts for most of the code in X.org. Some of those people may actually be dead now.

>AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers.

There are 38 people with 100+ commits, which obviously counts as a major contributor.
by Amezarak | 2025-12-16 18:32:27+00:00
Which is more convenient?

1. Let the Christmas tree farmer toss a 8’ tree in the back of my truck, tying the base to the anchors behind the cab. Very little overhang with the tailgate down. Drive away. This is what most people do.

2. Spend 15 minutes balancing the the 8’ Christmas tree on the roof of my Honda Fit with substantial overhang, precariously tying it, I guess leaving the windows down in the cold weather and praying the Highway Patrol doesn’t pull me over. This is not what most people do but I’m sure it can be done.

Lots of things “can” be done but people value convenience.
I want to build a product, not another generic image generator
by jokera | 2025-12-16 18:32:44+00:00
AI's generative capabilities are really powerful now, and it can produce all sorts of materials. However, if you want to use AI-generated materials in your daily work, the general AI products' image generation capabilities might not fully meet your needs.

Every time AI generates something, it consumes points. The generated images are like opening a blind box; they can't really meet all sorts of needs. For example, I want to generate materials of specific sizes and types, and I want to create various materials of the same type.

What I'm thinking is, can we develop a way to limit the general AI's image generation capabilities to a specific aspect? I'm not looking to see what AI can create; I want AI to provide me with what I want.

For example, if I want to create a 2D game, I need a set of usable game assets. I need to provide some parameter options: what kind of game assets, characters, items, or scene backgrounds? What style, hand-drawn, pixel, cartoon, or realistic?

For example, I want to create a social media image that attracts clicks. I need to provide some parameters to choose from, like the platform, size ratio, and copy content. Then, based on these goals and parameters, I can set limitations for the AI.

Also, every time when generating with AI, to reduce the chances of opening a blind box, we could generate some small preview images, but in large quantities, several at a time. You can choose one that you like, and then generate the complete material. After generating the complete material, we can also provide secondary processing for the material, generate other content in the same style using the material, or even convert the style of the material.

These are my personal thoughts, and I'm seeking suggestions from the community to see if this is feasible, if there are any issues, and what other scenarios we need to consider.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-12-16 18:33:06+00:00
> some large companies

Any "large companies" don't give a shit about things at this cost level. They spend more on the time it takes you to open the door. The number of CI minutes could be astronomical and it still wouldn't rate above the threshold of caring. The time people in this thread have spent wringing their hands is way more expensive.
by suryao | 2025-12-16 18:33:08+00:00
Here are the practical implications and considerations to optimize for cost, given the new pricing. These are generic and ensure you think through your workflows and runners before making any changes.

1. Self-hosting runners is still cheaper than not Despite the $0.002/minute self-hosted runner tax, self-hosting runners on your cloud (aws/gcp/azure/...) remains the cheaper option.

2. Prefer larger runners If your workflow scales with the number of vCPUs, prefer larger runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

For example, using actions-runner-controller with heavy jobs running on 1 vcpu runners is not a good idea. Instead, prefer a 2vcpu runner (say) if it runs the job ~2x faster.

3. Prefer faster runners All else being equal, prefer faster runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

For example, if you're self-hosting on aws and using a t3g.medium runner, it's better to use a t4g.medium runner since the newer generation is faster, but not much more expensive.

4. Prefer fewer shards If you have a lot of shards for your jobs (example: tests on ~50 shards), consider reducing the number of shards and parallelizing the tests on fewer but larger runners.

5. Improve job performance This is not new advice, but it's now more important than ever because of the additional GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

6. Use GitHub hosted runners for very short jobs For linters and other very short jobs, it's better to use GitHub hosted runners.

Note: I make WarpBuild, where we provide github actions runner compute. Our compute is still cheaper than using github hosted runners (even with the $0.002/min tax) and our runners are optimized for high performance to minimize the number of mins consumed. I'm generally biased, but I think the points 1-6 apply irrespective of WarpBuild.