MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-01 02:18:05+00:00
The investment thesis in AI is that the decline in consumer spending in the other sectors of the economy won't matter when the consumers cease to be a significant participant in the economy in the near term: that moving investment away from the activity in agriculture, transportation, goods and services, etc., is rational because those sectors are soon to be obsolete when their customers buying power and long term capacity to produce buying power is sucked away.

Think of the promise of AGI as a promise of billions of tireless immigrants with PhDs who outcompete the other ethnicities in the labor market. It's the same reason people stopped investing in Detroit-based things years ahead of the industry pullout.
by Chris_Newton | 2025-12-01 02:18:24+00:00
Instability is one of the biggest but perhaps also the least understood downsides of NixOS, IMHO.

Contrary to the name, even the stable branch of NixOS can have problems while installing routine updates with `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade`. In fairness, at least with NixOS you can normally roll back to a previous working configuration where you can try to fix or work around the problem if that does happen. It’s still painful if you have to do that, though.

Even if your routine updates all go smoothly, as you mentioned, each stable release is only supported for a very limited time window after the next one is out. NixOS doesn’t have any long-term support branch in the sense that some distros do. Again, you can overcome this to a degree by customising your configuration if you need specific versions of certain packages, but in doing so you’re moving back towards manually setting things up and resolving your own compatibility issues rather than having a distro with compatible packages you can install in whatever combination you want, which reduces the value of using a distro with a package repository in the first place.

To be clear, I’m a big fan of NixOS. I run it as my daily driver on a workstation where I do a lot of work on different projects for different clients. Its ability to have a clean, declarative description of what’s currently installed globally or for any given user or even when working in any given project directory for any given user is extremely valuable to me.

But it’s also fair to say that NixOS is not for everyone. It has been by far the least stable Linux distro I have ever used, in the sense of “If I turn my computer on and install the latest updates from the stable branch, will my computer still work afterwards?”. If you’re looking for a distro you can deploy and then maintain with little more than semi-automatic routine updates for a period of years then, at least for now, it is not the distro for you.
by jMyles | 2025-12-01 02:18:42+00:00
One thing I haven't seen brought up throughout the dialogue about Wikipedia and bias:

Since the entire edit history is available, isn't it possible / practical / probably not crazy hard w/ AI help to build a "dissentipedia", where the articles are built as if various edit wars had gone the other way?

I'd certainly read such a thing and compare / contrast it to WikiPedia (particularly when looking for cited primary sources).
by p_ing | 2025-12-01 02:19:27+00:00
> It’s purely Microsoft’s lack of desire to continue supporting that use case.

NTVDM leverages virtual 8086 mode which is unavailable while in long mode.

NTVDM would need to be rewritten. With alternatives like DOSBox, I can see why MSFT may not have wanted to dive into that level of backwards compat.
by jbranchaud | 2025-12-01 02:20:06+00:00
I don't remember my first steps with subversion, mercurial, or git too well, but I don't think any of them were any more intuitive. My understanding is that jj is supposed to be easier to use for day-to-day version control. I'm very comfortable with git, but that was hard earned and I don't see that level of confidence with most devs that I've worked with over the years. Hoping jj can be more accessible to the average working software engineer than git has been.
by echelon | 2025-12-01 02:20:08+00:00
Wow. This is so biased. And it's just the first month.

> Joe Biden

> These outcomes, alongside visible signs of cognitive impairment that prompted his July 2024 decision to forgo reelection, defined a presidency criticized for prioritizing progressive spending over fiscal and security prudence.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Joe_Biden

> Donald Trump

> His first term featured economic policies such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and individual rates for many brackets, contributing to pre-pandemic unemployment lows of 3.5% and stock market gains exceeding 50% on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump

I bet the people contributing to Wikipedia did not consent to this. I certainly had no idea my contributions would be used to bootstrap something like this.

Like with the hyperscalers' rip off of Open Source, it turns out that the things you give away can be weaponized against you.

I could have never imagined this outcome. Their free labor created something to use against you.

Just like those Redis and Elasticsearch commits that now fund a trillion dollar conglomerate's takeover of American journalism and media.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-01 02:20:33+00:00
I wonder what the story behind this action is? It's surprisingly short to the shutdown, and they seem to indicate they wanted to keep those markets open, as otherwise I feel like they wouldn't falsely give people hope they might open it up again:

> We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future.

Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open.
by listenallyall | 2025-12-01 02:20:50+00:00
In the short-term, absolutely. Problem is that the points are permanent- so the first person to answer a question, based on the current standards in 2008 or whatever, got hundreds or thousands of points and that answer is still at the top despite multiple revisions and better options introduced later. For example jquery to JS to ES6.

All SO points should slowly degrade, if an answer is still the best 15 years later it will continue to be upvoted but if newer, better solutions come along, the original solution will eventually fall in karma points and the newer, better solution will overtake it.

That's how the site should have been designed, IMO.
by mattclarkdotnet | 2025-12-01 02:20:52+00:00
So much this. We had a rental BYD in Greece this summer, and while it was actually great car in general the mandated “assistance” was awful.

It constantly got the speed limits wrong, constantly tried to tug me out of the correct lane, and was generally awful. It could be disabled but was re-enabled on each restart of the ignition because it’s mandated by EU regulation.

I appreciate a Greek island perimeter road may be a worst case scenario, but it did the same with roadworks on the freeway and many other situations.

Actively dangerous in my experience…
by coldtea | 2025-12-01 02:21:22+00:00
Those are more gossip fodder than things to actually complain about. Was often an asshole? Who isn't? Divorced twice? So, like tens of millions of people?

Fell for a hot italian actress half his age? And his writing and descriptions of his spirit made you think this would be out of character for him, like he was some victorian pearl clutcher or something, and so this dissapointed you?
by yoyo250 | 2025-12-01 02:21:40+00:00
You still have the option to disable the AI assistant. You simply need to disable the relevant item in about:config.

Ah...you ask which ones need to be disabled? Find it yourself. You have the right to disable it.

> The Mozilla Manifesto: Principle 9

> Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
by eru | 2025-12-01 02:22:12+00:00
Wikipedia might be resistant to government capture. But it's rather vulnerable to other forms of capture.

See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe... and https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

Having said that I agree that Wikipedia is a tremendous achievement, and despite the wards it's amazing that it works as well as it does.

If you permit me to go on a tangent: Wikipedia is also interesting as a test case for our definitions of (economic) 'productivity'. By any common sense notion of productivity, Wikipedia was and is an enormous triumph: the wiki models harvests volunteers' time and delivers a high quality encyclopedia for free to customers. By textbook definitions, Wikipedia tanked productivity in the encyclopedia sector because these definitions essentially put revenue in the numerator and various measures of resources expended in the denominator---and Wikipedia's numerator is approximately zero dollars.
by arp242 | 2025-12-01 02:23:08+00:00
Yes, with an edit history I think it's a useful feature. I often use it to add pre formatting to errors or code examples people post, or to edit titles to be more helpful ("weird issue with X" → "clearer description of the bug" after triage). It used to be that it didn't have an edit history. I think it was added about five or six years ago? You could also delete comments with no indication there was ever a comment there.

I once had someone request a feature and they became quite aggressive after I declined it. I essentially told them to fuck off[1] and that was the end of it. A few months after this he strategically edited and deleted some comments to make it appear I was just insulting them for no reason and then started posting on HN and Lobsters what an asshole I was. Back then, there was no real indication of their manipulation.

[1]: In part because he was already a known troll. Well, maybe troll isn't the right word, but he does have a history of mass-reporting hundreds of feature requests across hundreds of repos, to the point where it's basically just spam. He's been banned from Github many times over this, but just keeps creating new accounts and it all starts over again.
by rjdj377dhabsn | 2025-12-01 02:23:12+00:00
I had the same reaction my first year. I found the NixOS documentation to be very poor and the lack of a single set of best practices (e.g., imperative, declarative, home config, flakes) to be frustrating.

I switched a couple devices to Guix and was at first encouraged by their much better docs, but the lack of features and battle testing has been a problem with longer use.

I've mostly been happy to go back to NixOS thanks to LLMs. Even a year ago, AI was very good at updating Nix configs and fixing any errors. Ideally Nix would have better docs and a more intuitive unified config system, but LLMs have made it usable and the best solution for now.
by toast0 | 2025-12-01 02:23:22+00:00
> Do you ever apply kernel patches?

For my personal machines, I just run GENERIC kernels and that includes a lot, so I need to do a lot of updates. I also reboot every time I update the OS (even when it's an update that doesn't touch the kernel) so that I'm sure reboots will be fine... but I did setup my firewalls with carp and pfsync so I can reboot my firewall machines one at a time with minimal disruption.

For work machines, I use a crafted kernel config that only includes stuff we use, although so far I've usually had one config for all boxes, because it's simpler. If there's a security update for part of the kernel that we don't use, we don't need to update. Security update in a driver we don't have, no update; security update in tcp, probably update. Some security updates include mitigation steps to consider instead of or until updating... Sometimes those are reasonable too. Sometimes you do need to upgrade the whole fleet.

When there's an update that's useful but also has an effective mitigation, I would mitigate on all machines, run the update and reboot test on one or a few machines, and then typically install on the rest of the machines and if they reboot at some point, great, they don't need the mitigation anymore. If they are retired with 1000 days of uptime and a pending kernel update, that's fine too.

I would not update a machine just because support for the minor release it was on timed out. Only if there was an actual need. Including a security issue found in a later release that probably affects the older one or at least can't be ruled out. Yes, there's a risk of unpublished security issues in unsupported releases; but a supported release also has a risk of unpublished security issues too.
by buu700 | 2025-12-01 02:24:34+00:00
You're imagining an exchange that didn't happen. At no point have I declined to provide a definition upon request. In fact, I went out of my way to provide both a Wikipedia link and my own off-the-cuff paraphrasing.

That being said, here is my answer to your question: I would broadly define cancel culture as a culture of engaging in grassroots campaigns to materially punish, ostracize, and/or silence sources of speech which one finds disagreeable.

I'm not sure what you think celebrities being the most prominent (debatable) examples proves. That's practically a tautology. It's not difficult to find specific known impacted individuals who weren't celebrities, whom I'm hesitant to name out of respect. Having said that, here are two general examples off the top of my head:

1. Ostensibly non-political major subreddits setting automod to indiscriminately ban anyone with a past comment in /r/conservative. This quietly hits large numbers of nameless people on a daily basis, and manual moderation activity isn't much better (particularly on subreddits that are actually related to politics).

2. A recent campaign of targeted doxxing and harassment against authors of distasteful remarks regarding Charlie Kirk's assassination, including reports to employers with intent to cause financial harm. This is one current prominent example, but there are many others in relation to pretty much any controversial political issue.

I've given no indication of bad faith, so I'm not sure why you insist on accusing me of lying about my preference that cancel culture not exist. It's an anathema to free speech and privacy, and ultimately bad for everyone.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-01 02:24:41+00:00
Md is great, but does not detect bit rot.

Consider mergerfs + snapraid.

Id also argue if you can setup md you can probably figure out how to setup zfs. It looks scary on the RAM, because it uses “idle” ram, but it will immediately release it when any other app needs it. People use ZFS on raspberry Pi’s all the time without problems.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-01 02:25:05+00:00
Wouldn't it be better to connect resistive pigtails to the antenna connectors on the board? A little more work to get to, but less risk to damaging paint and weather seals, and would do a better job preventing signal leakage. I'm no expert on such things, but will definitely be looking at something like that for the next car I buy.
by hakfoo | 2025-12-01 02:25:11+00:00
For my two cents, it discourages standardization.

If you run bare-metal, and instructions to build a project say "you need to install libfoo-dev, libbar-dev, libbaz-dev", you're still sourcing it from your known supply chain, with its known lifecycles and processes. If there's a CVE in libbaz, you'll likely get the patch and news from the same mailing lists you got your kernel and Apache updates from.

Conversely, if you pull in a ready-made Docker container, it might be running an entire Alpine or Ubuntu distribution atop your preferred Debian or FreeBSD. Any process you had to keep those packages up to date and monitor vulnerabilities now has to be extended to cover additional distributions.
by jswelker | 2025-12-01 02:25:25+00:00
In short, soft skills. It depends on your degree I guess. In an MBA or education program, the distance between try hard and slacker is narrow. In more abstract less career oriented programs, the difference on critical thinking and comm skills is huge. If you can't imagine how deeply studying great works and thinkers improves your mind, that tells me maybe you missed something big.
by dang | 2025-12-01 02:26:02+00:00
Could you please stop posting shallow and curmudgeonly dismissals? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you want to make your substantive points without putdowns, that's fine, but please don't use this place to superciliously posture over others.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by danaris | 2025-12-01 02:27:51+00:00
> Strong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad.

Those don't exist. Effectively nobody actually believes that, or is trying to convince anyone else of it.

And if you think that "we should make sure no one person or small group has too much power (with wealth being a form of power), because we've seen the bad outcomes that produces" equates to "human ingenuity and invention is bad", you have been swallowing propaganda whole.
by hakfoo | 2025-12-01 02:28:22+00:00
For some reason I had a much easier time getting OpenBSD working on one specific laptop (a Thinkpad E585 where I had replaced the stock Wifi with an Intel card). A lot of Linux distributions got into weird states where they forgot where the SSD was, and there was chicken-and-egg about Wifi firmware.

OpenBSD at least booted far enough that I could shim the Wifi firmware in as needed. I probably picked the wrong Linux distribution to work with, since I've had okay luck with Debian and then Devuan on that machine's replacement (a L13)
by coldtea | 2025-12-01 02:28:29+00:00
>One major thing this has exposed is how many people from non US countries are grifting on the cultural war between the left and right in the US by pretending to be on either side.

The US has shoved so much of its internal politics and culture over the whole world's throat, and dominates so much of the internet, and US-inspired regional politics in a lot of the world, that many people legitimately get caught up and chime in on US hot topics even the culture war too
by danaris | 2025-12-01 02:28:45+00:00
And these are the examples people bring up eeeeevery time they want to claim that we must listen to the cranks and the nutjobs! Think of all the amazing, important science we would be missing if we didn't!!!

But that's poor logic.

Those few instances are, by far, the exception. They're the ones you know about because they are so exceptional. But they are one in a million. Literally. Possibly even rarer.

And, frankly, your argument doesn't even hold up if they were more common. Because what's the common feature of those, that you yourself highlight? They were mocked. They were ignored. They were laughed at.

And yet, their ideas still caught on, because they were right. Only because they were right.

What this tells me is that, even if we do fully shut the cranks and the conspiracy theorists out of the scientific conversation, the one in a million (or hundred million) that actually find something real will get heard, because their ideas will prove to be right. They may not get credit for them—they might, instead, be credited to an actual scientist in the field who heard it two years later, from a friend of a friend of a friend with no clear attribution, tried it out, and found that it worked—but the truth will out.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-01 02:29:04+00:00
Custom scripts and basic merge logic but manual still happens around modifications. Forces me to update stale comments around changes anyhow.

I first "discovered" it because I repeatedly found LLM comments poisoned my code base over time and linited it's upper end of ability.

Easy to try just drop comments around a problem and see the difference. I was previously doing that and then manually updating the original.
by stephenr | 2025-12-01 02:29:17+00:00
Yeah being new to a tool it's expected that you'll have a learning curve.

But some stuff is just ridiculous.

Ok you use the mercurial model and have bookmarks not branches... oh wait you also didn't create a default bookmark when you initialised the repo.

Ok you also have the mercurial model where there is no staging of files... but now you've added in a whole new command to solve the problem that mercurial solves by just letting you name files on the command line.

Everything about it just feels like it's being different from something for the sake of being different, not for any actual benefit.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-01 02:29:20+00:00
Honestly, I've been trying to cut down on the number of Microsoft development tools in my workflow because they are so drunk on the AI Kool-Aid that it's affecting the usability and reliability of their products in pretty much every other respect.

I don't really have a choice but to use Windows and Visual Studio 2022 for work, but I've dusted off my Sublime Text license and have been eyeing migrating my personal repositories to Codeberg.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-01 02:29:31+00:00
Ukraine had been striving repeatedly to join NATO until 2010. That's when Yanukovych, who generally leaned more East than West, took power. Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions under his leadership and re-affirmed themselves as a neutral state. Then he was overthrown, in an action directly backed by the US with John McCain, Victoria Nuland, and others literally on the ground in Ukraine giving speeches and riling up protesters come rioters, almost certainly with further black ops organizing going on behind the scenes.

Following Yanukovych's successful overthrow figures favorable to the US/UN/EU, including those hand picked by Victoria Nuland in her leaked conversation, ended up in power. In fact the person Nuland hand picked for Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was one of the authors of Ukraine's initial formal request for a membership action plan from NATO.

Can you tell me that you genuinely think that if Russia hadn't annexed Crimea (which happened after all of the above) that Ukraine would have chosen to stay "neutral" in this context? And I put neutral in quotes because what does that even mean when one bloc is driving the successful overthrow of democratically elected leaders and hand picking new ones? Imagine Lavrov et al were on the ground encouraging pro Russian protesters to topple the Ukrainian government (alongside comparably likely black ops organizing behind the scenes), they ended up successful, and then leaders hand-picked by him end up in power. Is that somehow still just Ukraine deciding their own fate?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
by echelon | 2025-12-01 02:29:32+00:00
See all the heavily biased content on the Joe Biden and Donald Trump articles?

Why not start there? Try to see if you can contribute a more neutral voice.

My guess is that the tone of these articles we see now is only the beginning. This thing is only a month old.

Then this will become the source of truth in the LLMs.

I cannot believe they've gone so against the spirit of contributors and that there's no legal recourse to stop this.

Open source and open content didn't bare enough fangs. It shouldn't have allowed profit.

We build open source for big tech. They use it (Linux, Redis, Elasticsearch, Python, etc.) to profit, keep us from owning the machines and systems (AWS) that concentrate and mechanize that profit. They then corral our labor, lay off, and move jobs overseas.

They expand into every industry and inject massive amounts of money to destabilize the incumbents. We literally just watched them dismantle the entire US film industry in just three years and swallow it whole. Tech is picking the bones dry.

And now it's happening with the media we create too.

If the pendulum of power swings, we MUST dismantle these companies. And we can't be slow like Lina Khan. It must be fast and furious like Project 2025.

We also need to weaponize our open source licenses.