MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pests | 2025-12-28 05:32:27+00:00
AOL was your ISP - you would connect via your telephone line instead of cable/fiber. Your modem would call their number and establish a connection. No one else could use the phone while you were online.

When you connected, it would load the AOL application which contained most of what AOL offered - built in AIM (AOL instant messaging), a web browser, group chats, keyword search, email, etc.

You were still connected to the internet and could use alternate browsers, but most people stayed inside the AOL app and ecosystem. Keywords were a time before search, where companies could buy keywords (from AOL) and then when people searched them they would show up. It was kinda a separate system from DNS that AOL tried to profit from.

You had competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe offering similar dial-up + custom app offers.

You wouldn't use the AOL app without having AOL dial-up service (although I recall them offering it separately late in its life, bring your own internet). People thought "AOL" was the internet. You might recall the classic "You've got mail" movie. That was from the AOL app which loaded after connecting.

aside: It's crazy how AOL could have become Facebook. AIM chat was the main focus - but AIM had "profiles" which you could customize, and I did - even with daily status updates. Modern Facebook is basically the reverse - profiles with a chat attached.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-28 05:32:36+00:00
I find that this is something reflective of most modern language ecosystems, not just Rust. I actually first started noticing the pervasiveness of MIT on npm.

For me, I am of two minds. On one hand, the fact that billion-dollar empires are built on top of what is essentially unpaid volunteer work does rankle and makes me much more appreciative of copyleft.

On the other hand, most of my hobbyist programming work has continued to be released under some form of permissive license, and this is more of a reality of the fact that I work in ecosystems where use of the GPL isn't merely inconvenient, but legally impossible, and the pragmatism of permissive licenses win out.

I do wish that weak copyleft like the Mozilla Public License had caught on as a sort of middle ground, but it seems like those licenses are rare enough to where their use would invite as much scrutiny as the GPL, even if it was technically allowed. Perhaps the FSF could have advocated more strongly for weak copyleft in area where GPL was legally barred, but I suppose they were too busy not closing the network hole in the GPLv3 to bother.
A Chess Conjecture I've Been Thinking About
by kinj28 | 2025-12-28 05:35:08+00:00
I have a conjecture about chess and how different rating levels approach the game:

Sub-1500 Elo players may actually be doing more real-time thinking during a game compared to Grandmaster-level players.

At elite levels, many positions are instantly recognized. Years of pattern recognition, theory, and experience allow GMs to play large portions of a game almost automatically. Their brilliance lies in what they’ve internalized.

For sub-1500 players, however, most positions are unfamiliar. There’s less reliance on memorized structures and far more active calculation, questioning, and exploration:
• What is my opponent threatening?
• Is this move safe?
• What happens if I try something different?

This isn’t to say sub-1500 players play better chess—clearly they don’t. But they may be engaging in a more conscious, effortful thinking process move by move.

It makes me wonder:
• Is chess mastery about thinking more—or thinking less, but better?
• At what point does intuition replace deliberate reasoning?

Would love to hear thoughts from players, coaches, and fellow chess enthusiasts.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-12-28 05:35:48+00:00
The spec rarely has enough detail to deterministically create a product, so current vibecoding is a lottery.

So we generate one or many changesets (in series or in parallel) then iterate on one. We force the “chosen one” to be the one true codification of the spec + the other stuff we didn’t write down anywhere. Call it luck driven development.

But there’s another way.

If we keep starting fresh from the spec, but keep adding detail after detail, regenerating from scratch each time.. and the LLM has enough room in context to handle a detailed spec AND produce output, and the result is reasonably close to deterministic because the LLM makes “reasonable choices” for everything underspecified.. that’s a paradigm shift.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-28 05:36:19+00:00
> Wait. This doesn’t make sense to me. Statically typed programming languages cannot be deployed nor can they run with a type error that happens at runtime. Untyped languages CAN run and error out with a type error AT runtime. The inevitable consequence of that truth is this

There is nothing inevitable about the consequence you’re imagining because statically typed languages also reject correct programs.
by usernamed7 | 2025-12-28 05:36:25+00:00
while AI does lower the barrier to who can do software development it does not nullify their need only moves them into more complicated domains. Yes, if you're job as a SWE was building landing pages, you're pretty much cooked. But if you're working in complicated domains, or domains that require a level of technical awareness or social skills to create success, AI is just an amplifier and makes the boring/frustrating parts easier.

I am using claude to build a pretty complicated project. Technically, a lot of what i am prompting are things that other people could prompt. But I also do find myself leveraging a lot of knowledge in shaping what the code should do and how it should do it, and also needing to step in when claude reaches limits of it's training. I am confident that the number of people who could build what I am building is pretty small.

So I think the author is creating a narrative that is unfounded. There will always be software engineers. There will always be engineering challenges that it takes a human to resolve. Yes, always; no matter how "smart" the AI gets. For sure, AI will be taking some development jobs. But calling for a collapse is simply hyperbole, shortsighted and naive.
by moltopoco | 2025-12-28 05:37:56+00:00
That is not what I said at all. My claim is that, regardless of what the authoritarian right is doing, the left has become more tolerant of authoritarianism itself. Or in the case of the lefties I know, they have become outright advocates for it over the pandemic years, to 'save democracy' (which is again reminescent of the GDR, starting from its very name).

As to why, I'd argue it is always easy to be anti-authoritarian when you are in the opposition. Why do you think the AfD reliably votes against Chat Control and other power grabs? It makes them look good at no cost. Conversely, over the last decades, the left has become a dominant force due to its long march through the institutions. So it is just natural that the left is now splitting into people who want to use these institutions to cement their power (debanking the enemy, police raids for milquetoast internet comments), and those of us who look at the internet compass from your sibling post and decide we'd rather hang out with people in the libertarian right than with _any_ kind of authoritarian.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying the CCC is an authoritarian organization. But I don't think they'll ever be too critical of e.g. our intransparent "Trusted Flagger" system that polices the internet, because they know it would anger many in their crowd. 20 years ago we'd have agreed that this kind of crap only happens in China.
by ggm | 2025-12-28 05:39:58+00:00
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?

A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.

Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-28 05:41:15+00:00
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would be enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956
by maximinus_thrax | 2025-12-28 05:41:18+00:00
> Why plural?

Belarus and Ukraine

> What? By which rule the US invaded Iraq in 2003? By which rule NATO changed the borders of Serbia?

None of those instances are wars of conquest, of annexation of a sovereign country by military force or of trying to erase a national identity.

How's the Putinesque Koolaid tasting, protomolecule? Good enough to grab a rifle in the name of the fatherland? Or do you just do internet battles? I'm surprised you're allowed on the broad internet. Are you VPNing or are you some sort of silovik?

Your cowards launched quite a bunch of drones and missiles at Kyiv last night, targeting civilian infrastructure. Lots of civilians dead. The civilized world will never forget this.
by scheme271 | 2025-12-28 05:41:37+00:00
The first generation of GLP-1 agonists are out of patent protection. Teva is producing a generic liraglutide (aka Victoza / Saxenda). Ozempic (semiglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) have protection until after 2031 in the US, I think it's less in other countries.
by tombert | 2025-12-28 05:41:46+00:00
You can be skeptical of both but Palantir and Peter Thiel especially are categorically horrible, and have shown to solely value increasing their net worth more than all else.

Yeah yeah capitalism optimize for shareholders, but there are plenty of successful large companies that haven't built an entire brand out of directly enabling large entities to erode any semblance of freedom we have left.
by esperent | 2025-12-28 05:42:15+00:00
I set grayscale in my phone's quiet hours settings. It's to help me sleep, rather than to reduce my phone usage. It means if I wake in the night and look at my phone, I'm not blasted by colors. Or if I stay up a bit later than usual.

I did try setting my phone to grayscale during the day but didn't see much if any benefits there.
by Sayyidalijufri | 2025-12-28 05:43:25+00:00
This is a really clever tool. I love the clean, one-page layout for tracking habits over a full year.

One suggestion: would it be possible to add a quarterly version? Like three months per page, or separate pages for each quarter? It'd be great for shorter-term goals without everything feeling so crammed on one sheet.

Thanks for making and sharing this!
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-28 05:45:20+00:00
I agree that advertising is the root of it, but some people might still pay for modern social media. They used to pay for porn, before it was available for "free" (ad supported). Some still do. I pay for YouTube to avoid the ads. I don't think I would pay for Facebook or Tiktok though. Possibly an uninformed opinion as I've never used those platforms.
by ksec | 2025-12-28 05:45:44+00:00
>Things are looking worse this generation: The Xbox Series S and X reportedly only sold around 33 million units as of July, according to Statista estimates, while Sony confirmed it sold 84.2 million PS5s as of November.

I read the title and I thought xbox must be doing really bad. Turns out not the case. Especially when two sales figures are 4 months apart. Historically speaking PlayStation has always outsold Xbox by 2-3 times even in Xbox's best days. Compared to its lunch in 2000 when no one in Japan or Asia were buying it this is still not doing too bad.

Although I wouldn't be surprised if PS6 will put Xbox further behind.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-28 05:47:23+00:00
>> A some point the company says "you know what, we like this software so much that we're going to fork it, but the fork isn't going to be free or open source. It's going to be just ours, and we're not going to share the improvements we made"

Right. So at that point all those contributing developers are free to fork, and maintain the fork. You have just as much control as you always did.

And of course being MIT or GPL doesn't make a difference, the company is permitted to change the license either way. [1]

So here's the thing, folk are free to use the company product or not. Folk are free to fork or not.

In practice of course the company version tends to win because products need revenue to survive. And OSS has little to zero revenue. (The big revenue comes from, you know, companies who typically sell commercial software.)

Even with the outcome you hypothesize (and clearly that is a common outcome) OSS is still ahead because they have the code up to the fork. And yes, they may have contributed to earn this fork.

But projects are free to change license. That's just built into how licenses work. Assuming that something will be GPL or MIT or whatever [2] forever is on you, not them.

[1] I'm assuming CLA us in play because without that your explanation won't work.

[2] yes, I think GPL sends a signal of intention more than MIT, but it's just a social signal, it doesn't mean it can't change. Conversely making it GPL makes it harder for other developers to adopt in the first place since most are working in non-GPL environments.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 05:47:29+00:00
> disagree that it will always go unused. I think that China is using the US current global antagonism to encourage others to participate

China is in a border dispute with another founding member of the BRICS. Another is in the Western Hemisphere and will become a proxy-financial frontline.

There will be yuan, Euro and dollar payment rails. (If the EU had failed to unify, they’d be getting divided up between Washington and Moscow again.)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-28 05:48:15+00:00
I don't know if you all know this, but Palantir offers ai/analytics services that are not just for governments. That's how they started out, but don't be surprised seeing random companies using them same as they would elastic, splunk and the like.

I won't comment on Palantir themselves, I doubt I could add anything there, but I think there is a glaring pattern to be observed there. Companies really are not people, if people don't want them, they can cease to exist. If the UK for example is really able to say no to Palantir, can they do it countrywide?

Fines aside (let's be real, they're just taxes at this point since no company goes bankrupt from fines these days), what company is facing meaningful consequence for harming society?

Vote with dollars? Ok...but back to my pessimism earlier, I guess I don't need to vote at the ballot then right? Let's just vote with our wallets instead?

If Palantir really is so evil (and I'm not saying that, I don't know enough , although I've probably used their stuff more than most), at minimum, tell me what sort of a vote will lead to their extinction. if they broke the law, tell me who I can vote for to imprison the law breakers. If they didn't break the law because one didn't exist to prohibit their actions to begin with, then who will pass the laws required so I can vote for them? Why are we not talking about whatever practice Palantir is in the habit of doing, and how to criminalize that? Maybe we can't in the US, but this is Europe, I would hope they'd have better luck.

This sort of thinking and action-taking doesn't seem to exist here in the US. I don't think we're able to function that way anymore.

To friends in Europe and elsewhere: Take heed and be warned. Being able to organize and resist companies and laws, that's something you should fight with all your strength over.

But looking at this site, it isn't very convincing. I know of more serious accusations against Palantir that aren't listed there. Enabling mass deportations and gaza, yeah.. that's Microsoft, Google and Cisco as well. Their CEO, yeah.. Elon says a lot worse things about a lot more things, are his satellites banned in the UK? at least is the UK gov banned from using them? He's been caught aiding Russia with his sats a couple of times now.

My observation is that a more holistic approach and measures are needed. A glaring lack of consequences over all.
by tombert | 2025-12-28 05:49:07+00:00
I find time accuracy to be ridiculously interesting, and I have had to talk myself out of buying those a used atomic clock to play with [1]. I think precision time is very cool, and a small part of me wants to create the most overly engineered wall-clock using a Raspberry Pi or something to have sub-microsecond level accuracy.

Sadly, they're generally just a bit too expensive for me to justify it as a toy.

I don't work in trading (though not for lack of trying on my end), so most of the stuff I work on has been a lot more about "logical clocks", which are cool in their own right, but I have always wondered how much more efficient we could be if we had nanosecond-level precision to guarantee that locks are almost always uncontested.

[1] I'm not talking about those clocks that radio to Colorado or Greenwich, I mean the relatively small ones that you can buy that run locally.
Ask HN: Are LLMs becoming a real discovery channel for ecommerce?
by David_0101 | 2025-12-28 05:49:08+00:00
With more people using AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot for product research, it feels like traditional SEO is no longer the full picture.

I’m curious how others here are approaching this:

• Are you tracking whether AI assistants recommend your products?
• Are you changing product data, schema, or feeds to improve AI readability?
• Or is this still too early to matter in practice?

I’ve noticed a split between tools that monitor AI mentions and tools that focus on fixing product data so LLMs can actually verify and recommend items.

Would love to hear real experiences from people experimenting with this.
by paulhebert | 2025-12-28 05:49:26+00:00
Yeah this is true at this point. A lot of more complex patterns require JS to be accessible to screen readers.

We still should do more with HTML and CSS! And reach for leaner solutions than React everywhere.

But be careful going for a pure CSS solution for things like tabs if you don’t understand the accessibility requirements.

(I wish the HTML spec would move faster on these common patterns!)
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-12-28 05:50:32+00:00
Additionally, I have read up a bit more on the Lightning Network now, and it seems not possible to send invalid payments in the first place.

The sender does not have a direct communication channel with the receiver. They send the payment to a hop they are connected to (they have a channel with) and it gets routed to the receiver. The first hop would already drop an invalid payment. If they spam them with more invalid payments, all that would happen is that their connection to the Lightning Network would get lost as their channel partners would disconnect from them. The receiver would not receive a single network packet in the whole process.
by chuckledog | 2025-12-28 05:50:32+00:00
> “As an aside, I think there may be an increased reason to use dynamic interpreted languages for the intermediate product. I think it will likely become mainstream in future LLM programming systems to make live changes to a running interpreted program based on prompts.”

Curious whether the author is envisioning changing configuration of running code on the fly (which shouldn’t require an interpreted language)? Or whether they are referring to changing behavior on the fly?

Assuming the latter, and maybe setting the LLM aspect aside: is there any standard safe programming paradigm that would enable this? I’m aware of Erlang (message passing) and actor pattern systems, but interpreted languages like Python don’t seem to be ideal for these sorts of systems. I could be totally wrong here, just trying to imagine what the author is envisioning.
by dahart | 2025-12-28 05:50:39+00:00
Nope, no goal posts were moved, Wikipedia and GitHub are both private entities that offer privately funded free services to everyone, and due to the widespread free access, both have been considered to be examples of digital commons by others. I didn’t make up the Wikipedia example, it’s in Wikipedia being offered as one of the canonical examples of digital commons, and unfortunately it pokes a hole in your argument. If your ‘book’ disagrees with the WP article, you’re free to fix it (since WP is a digital commons), and you’re also free to use it to re-evaluate whether your book needs updating.

You seem to be stuck on definitions of ‘commons’, and unfortunately that’s not a compelling argument for reasons I’ve already stated. Also unfortunate that there are fundamental terminology flaws, or made up definitions, or straw men arguments, or incorrect statements, or opinions in every single item you listed.

“Tragedy of the Commons” is a phrase that became an economic term of art a long time ago. It’s now an abstract concept, and gets used to mean (as well as defined by) any situation in which a community of people overusing shared resources causes any loss of access to those shared resources for anyone else in the community. “The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory claiming that individuals tend to exploit shared resources so that demand outweighs supply, and it becomes unavailable for the whole.” (Investopedia) I’ve already cited multiple sources that define it that way, and so far you’ve shared no evidence to the contrary.

There are also tons of examples online where the phrase has been used to refer to small, local, or privatized resources, I found a dozen in like one minute, so I already know it’s incorrect to claim that people don’t use the phrase in the way I’m suggesting.

Even though the phrase does not depend on any strict definition of commons, none of your argument addresses the fact that what’s common in, say, Germany isn’t freely available to Iranians, for example. Land is often used in ‘tragedy of the commons’ examples. Hardin’s original example was sheep grazing on “public” land, and yet there is really no such thing as common land anywhere on this planet, all of it is claimed by subgroups, i.e. countries, and is private is some sense. The idea of commons, and even some of the alternate dictionary definitions, make explicit note that the word is relative to a specific community of people. Nothing you’ve said addresses that fact, and it means that ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ has always referred to resources that aren’t common in a global context. GitHub and Wikipedia are more common than “public” land in America in that global sense, because they’re used by and available to more people than US land is.

What I can agree with is that it’s common for people to mean things like land, air, and water, when using or referring to the phrase, and I agree those things count as commons.
by shubhamjain | 2025-12-28 05:51:19+00:00
I tried this. One week in, I got used to grayscale as well and my screen time was back to the baseline (maybe only marginally affected). After nearly a decade of trying these tricks, hacks, and gamified interventions, it’s clear to me why they rarely work: they fixate on the symptom (screen time, social media use) rather than the underlying problem. Your mind craves to feel engaged/challenged in something. You have to replace the empty screen time with something meaningful and that demands effort.

If you want to reduce your screen time, the boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach. Put the phone down and replace it with a book, or puzzles, or hobbies, or time with people.