MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-12-01 14:08:43+00:00
> Do you really not see the difference between "color of blender" and "unable to turn off LLMs on a device that didn't have any on it when I bought it"?

Do you really not see that there is no difference?

Either the government starts dictating product design or it doesn't.

I don't want a world where the government decides which features software makers include or turn on or off by default. Whether there are 20 companies competing in a space or mainly 2.

Don't you see where that leads? Suddenly it's dictating encryption and inserting backdoors. Suddenly it starts allowing Truth Social to build new features and removing features on Twitter.

This is a bigger issue than you seem to be acknowledging. The freedom to create the software you want, provided it's not causing actual harm, is as important to preserve as the freedom to write the books or blog posts you want.

If this had something to do with antitrust then the fact that there are only two major phone platforms would be relevant. But the fact that both platforms are implementing LLM features is not anticompetitive. To the contrary, it's competitive even if you personally don't like it. It's literally no different from them both supporting 1,000 other features in common.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-01 14:08:45+00:00
And what do we do after an entire generation matures without developing skills or knowledge, and takes over our politics and economies?

Education and excess authority do not mix. Public universities are right for wanting to meet kids where they are... and then bring them to where they should be. That's how education works. We can save the elitist crap for elitist universities; the working man still needs an education, and a student body who lacks accountability and vision, or is just creatively blind, must be led to open their eyes willingly. A real mentor embodies this philosophy.

I came from an awful, abusive upbringing. Both of my parents were drug addicts and often homeless. I finished out my last two years of high school while homeless. I have extreme ADHD, for which at the time I lacked enough healthy coping mechanisms. Despite consistently having the highest test grades, my general performance suffered greatly and achieving a high GPA was extraordinarily difficult for me.

There are some serious problems in our society. We will not fix these problems by sticking our heads in the sand and being hard-asses, instead of connecting with the youth and teaching them the importance of taking things seriously.
by madcaptenor | 2025-12-01 14:09:11+00:00
Wikipedia gives 2191 for "at least New Testament", which I assume means all the books of the New Testament, and 698 for the Old and New Testaments. So it's still #1, since #2 (Le Petit Prince) is at 610.

It wouldn't surprise me if the number for the four Gospels is higher than the full New Testament number.
by myrmidon | 2025-12-01 14:09:35+00:00
Costs to clean up a mess from an underregulated industry can be bigger then the whole industry causing it. This is not even untypical.

Examples: Leaded gas, tobacco, CO2 emissions, dam breaks, reactor meltdowns, air pollution (really pollution in general; river/groundwater contamination for your septic tank example)...

If you underregulate, you end up with frequent cases where not even imprisoning and dispossessing everyone remotely involved/culpable is gonna get you sufficient compensation; this is extremely undesirable.

Companies are frequently gonna steer towards such scenarios, too, because they can allow them to externalize costs.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-01 14:09:35+00:00
Till they hit your program memory. We just had really interesting incident where one of the Ceph nodes didn't fail but started acting erratically, bringing whole cluster to a crawl, once a failing RAM module had some uncorrectable errors.

And that was caught because we had ECC. If not for that we'd be replacing drives, because metrics made it look like it is one of OSDs slowing to a crawl, which usual reason is drive dying.

Of course, chance for that is pretty damn small, bit also their scale is pretty damn big.
by crote | 2025-12-01 14:09:43+00:00
ECC memory is a bit like RAID: A consumer-level RAM stick will (traditionally) have 8 8-bit-wide chips operating basically in RAID-0 to provide 64-bit-wide access, whereas enterprise-level RAM sticks will operate with 9 8-bit-wide chips in something closer to RAID-4 or -5.

But they are all exactly the same chips. The ECC magic happens in the memory controller, not the RAM stick. Anyone buying ECC RAM for servers is buying on the same market as you building a new desktop computer.
by petesergeant | 2025-12-01 14:09:57+00:00
> Curious job titles are also popular in the media and entertainment industries, including at Walt Disney, where technical experts who design and build its theme parks are referred to as “imagineers”.

Sorta shit you can pull off if you're Disney, absolutely not something you can pull off if you're fucking Accenture. People as old as me may remember the KPMG song[0]

0: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-01 14:10:10+00:00
As someone who started using Ubuntu around 9.x sometime, basically had breakages every time I ran dist-upgrade, gave Debian (both stable, unstable and testing) a chance, hit more snags and finally moved to Arch Linux and been using it since 2017 without a single Arch-induced issue, I do consider Arch Linux the single most stable distribution, probably mainly because of the rolling release schedule if nothing else.
by Heinrich_Meiner | 2025-12-01 14:10:48+00:00
I used to think that you only get access to cryptocurrencies if you start trading on exchanges, investing and so on. I even thought about trying it, I even looked into cryptocurrencies, stablecoins https://relopay.io/blog/how-stablecoins-are-shaping-the-futu... and other new solutions aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum. But now literally anyone can use crypto. Even just to pay for online or offline purchases. If the store accepts Visa, you can even buy milk with crypto. It feels like that very crypto future is already here.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-01 14:10:54+00:00
$170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month net if you are living in GA - with fairly low state taxes. I calculated this on paycheckcity.com. That’s without taking into account health insurance cost.

So to invest $100K a year let’s say some pretax and some post tax, they would have to live off of $1700 a month. They are not going to be buying a house with that.

As far as wealth through equity in a house, that’s not liquid. What are you going to do borrow against it?

And actually I can speak for one of the best case scenarios for buying a house. I had a house built in 2016 in the most affluent county in GA for $335K - a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath - and sold it in 2024 for $670K and moved to state taxe free Florida and bought a condo in 2022 for half the cost (we kept both for awhile)

Even then, we could only do that because my (step)kids were both grown and I pivoted to customer facing cloud consulting in 2020. A niche that hasn’t suffered from the return to office mandates - ironically enough except for AWS ProServe (former employee) and Google’s equivalent internal department (who has been trying to recruit me for years).

Most people won’t and shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. Of course it’s easy to be a genuis saying what would have happened if you picked stocks that went up.
Show HN: Heat Cue – An LLM Powered Mini-Game About Finding Hidden Nouns
by saretup | 2025-12-01 14:11:02+00:00
Heat Cue is an AI powered mini game where you have to guess a hidden noun and get constant feedback on how "Hot" or "Cold" you are to the target noun.

I liked playing 'Hot or Cold' type games online but most were not very accurate in estimating the proximity of different words across a variety of domains.

Seemed like an easy job for LLMs to do, so I made this game inspired by Wordle and r/HotAndCold. Would love some feedback :)
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-01 14:11:09+00:00
This has been discussed many times on HN, including as far back as 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34925320

The tldr is it's a cute marketing / interior design stunt by Cloudflare. The lamps certainly produce entropy, but you can get good randomness much cheaper and quicker from a Hardware Random Number Generator (HWRNG) that uses thermal noise or radioactive decay, which is what most people do.
by logicprog | 2025-12-01 14:11:13+00:00
This is a very good analysis. Timnit Gebru, Emile Torres, and even Hao herself's response to this has been very annoying to me (calling several multiple OOM mistakes that completely reverse the ideologically convenient picture she painted "a typo", whataboutism because the guy who pointed it out is an EA guy, and ignoring most of the criticisms as "philosophical differences" while trying to shift blame for the one issue she does admit, respectively).
by alexfoo | 2025-12-01 14:11:32+00:00
I disagree, the odd few are quite simple and can be done with pencil and paper.

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/1 for example. It's not hard to do part 1 by hand.

You need two numbers from the input list (of 200 numbers) that add to 2020.

For each number n in the list you just have to check if (2020-n) is in the list.

A quick visual scan showed my input only had 9 numbers that were less than 1010, so I'd only have to consider 9 candidate numbers.

It would also be trivial for anyone who can do relatively simple things with a spreadsheet.
by arashvakil | 2025-12-01 14:11:42+00:00
I built PassItOn.To in a week. One person. Here's the idea:

You book a video session with someone who's navigated what you're going through. Eldercare. Adoption. Career pivots. Teaching. Whatever. They set their rate ($50 to $250). 100% of that fee goes to a nonprofit they choose.

Not 10%. Not 50%. All of it. The expert never earns a dime.

The math on a $100 session:

- Stripe: $3.20 - Daily.co (video): $0.50 - You pay a $5 booking fee - $100 goes to charity

That $5 barely covers infrastructure. On higher sessions, we lose money. We're not optimizing for profit.

Why build this?

60% of young adults feel "seriously lonely." Our solution as a society? Chatbot companions. Sycophantic AI masquerading as relationships.

Meanwhile, real knowledge is locked away. People who've figured things out want to help others. They just don't want to become "coaches" or build personal brands.

This gives them a way to share what they know, fund a cause, and move on.

Tech stack: Next.js 15, Supabase, Stripe, Daily.co for video. Deployed on a shared OCI instance. The whole thing is embarrassingly simple because there are no retention hooks, upsell funnels, or subscription traps to build.

Cameo had 400 employees at its peak. Intro.co raised $25M. When you're not optimizing for extraction, the platform is simple.

Happy to answer questions about the build, the model, or why I think chatbots are a terrible solution to loneliness.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-12-01 14:11:56+00:00
There was the issue of hard disk prices for years after the floods in taiwan in 2011.

GPU prices were horrendes when crypto happened (they migrated into a stable issue but it was still because of crypto).

DDR4 jumped because they started focusing on DDR5 before these news right now.

I could probably find more examples but hey
by rckt | 2025-12-01 14:12:30+00:00
Wishing these guys all the best. It's not just about following the market. It's about the ability to just be yourself. When everyone around you is telling you that you just have to start doing something and it's not even about the moral side of that thing. You simply just don't want to do it. Yeah, yeah, it's a cruel world. But this doesn't mean that we all need to victim blame everyone who doesn't feel comfortable in this trendy stream.

I hope things with the AI will settle soon and there will be applications that actually make sense and some sort of new balance will be established. Right now it's a nightmare. Everyone wants everything with the AI.
by ajross | 2025-12-01 14:12:34+00:00
> That would be a silly argument because feelings involve qualia, which we do not currently know how to precisely define, recognize or measure.

If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them?

I remain amazed that a whole branch of philosophy (aimed, theoretically, at describing exactly this moment of technological change) is showing itself up as a complete fraud. It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one.

I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-01 14:13:06+00:00
I calculated saving $100K out of $170K gross some pre tax and most post tax is living off of around $1800 a month.

And again, expecting your salary to double every six or seven years is not realistic for most developers.

Most developers making around $120K in 2013, aren’t making $480K now.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-01 14:13:30+00:00
Rejecting clients based on how you wish the world would be is a strategy that only works when you don’t care about the money or you have so many clients that you can pick and choose.

Running a services business has always been about being able to identify trends and adapt to market demand. Every small business I know has been adapting to trends or trying to stay ahead of them from the start, from retail to product to service businesses.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-12-01 14:13:32+00:00
It was nothing like covid. The dot com crash lasted years where tech was a dead sector. Equity valuations kept declining year after year. People couldn't find jobs in tech at all.

There are still plenty of tech jobs these days, just less than there were during covid, but tech itself is still in a massive expansionary cycle. We'll see how the AI bubble lasts, and what the fallout of it bursting will be.

The key point is that the going is still exceptionally good. The posts talking about experienced programmers having to flip burgers in the early 2000s is not an exaggeration.
by BenGosub | 2025-12-01 14:14:34+00:00
IMO the shift towards AI was very detrimental to the job market, because every company started to work on their AI strategy and not on their core competencies. This has resulted in most companies failing to materialize their AI strategies, while burning their cash. One of the reasons for this is that the average company competes against Goliaths that have infinite funding.

At first many companies stopped developing mobile apps and I think mobile app devs were the first hit. Second, the frontend developers were hit because of how the AI can generate good enough websites, however, they aren't hit as hard as the mobile developers.

This has spread into most parts of the stack with a variable impact.
by LightBug1 | 2025-12-01 14:15:11+00:00
Considering what is happening to the Palestine Action protestors right now in the UK, your waiving away of concerns is hard to read. Give an inch and they (current, or future governments) are given more scope to attempt to take a mile through interpretation or overreach.

- Broad discretionary powers

- Vague thresholds

- Pre-emptive justification

- Lack of neutral limits (time, geography, number of events)

- Expansion of police control over public assembly

Your post to waive away concerns as partisan or alarmist is either an intentionally bad act or, sorry, naive.
by basisword | 2025-12-01 14:15:36+00:00
This happened to me long before LLM's. I was experimenting with Linux when I was young. Something wasn't working so I posted on a forum for help which was typical at the time. I was given a terminal command that wiped the entire drive. I guess the poster thought it was a funny response and everyone would know what it meant. A valuable life experience at least in not running code/commands you don't understand.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-01 14:16:01+00:00
> Saying "well you have to follow the market" is such a cravenly amoral perspective.

You only have to follow the market if you want to continue to stay relevant.

Taking a stand and refusing to follow the market is always an option, but it might mean going out of business for ideological reasons.

So practically speaking, the options are follow the market or find a different line of work if you don’t like the way the market is going.
by n4r9 | 2025-12-01 14:16:07+00:00
I searched for "CQRS" in both the HN thread that I linked and the article that that linked, and the only mention I could find was this:

> Companies burned hundreds of thousands of engineer-hours migrating from monoliths to microservices, or from HTTP service calls to event-sourced architecture, or from event-sourced architecture to full CQRS, and so on.

Is that what you're talking about? imo this hardly counts as an attack on CQRS itself. The issue is rather with enterprise companies forcing the migration of large codebases based mostly on hype.
by Barathkanna | 2025-12-01 14:16:16+00:00
I didn’t know “eccentric engineering” was even a term before reading this. It’s fascinating how much creativity went into solving problems before large models existed. There’s something refreshing about seeing humans brute force the weird edges of a system instead of outsourcing everything to an LLM.

It also makes me wonder how future kids will see this era. Maybe it will look the same way early mechanical computers look to us. A short period where people had to be unusually inquisitive just to make things work.
by ho_schi | 2025-12-01 14:16:21+00:00
It are only minor changes.

Recent ThinkPads are close to be identical: X280 - X13 Gen3 (minor change: 16:10 with X13 Gen1).

X13 Gen 4 - Gen 6 are sadly nearly identical, especially the ugly camera bump which is not required. No camera needs that space and video conference systems cannot used the full resolution.

Luckily sometimes the batteries are compatible.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-01 14:16:21+00:00
> SmartTube’s developer told me that the computer used to create the APKs for the project’s official GitHub page was compromised by malware. As a result, some official SmartTube releases were unintentionally released with malware.

Seems it's lacking in information about how a malware manages to compromise supposedly signed releases? Do authors not have the production signing keys behind a password or similar, and review 100% of the changes before they deploy stuff?

I swear the more time goes on, the more I'm loosing faith in the entire ecosystem. People running random binaries on the same device they do banking on always surprised me, but now developers manages to get malware on their developer machine and are publishing random binaries to other strangers???
by alias_neo | 2025-12-01 14:16:30+00:00
Exactly this.

I'd been planning to upgrade my desktop as a christmas present for myself.

Now I have the cash and was looking at buying my PCPartPicker list, the cost of the 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM I planned to buy has gone from £300-400 to £700-800+, a difference of almost the price of the 9070 XT I just bought to go in the computer.

I guess I'll stick with my outdated AM4/X370 setup and make the best of the GPU upgrade until RAM prices stop being a complete joke.
Show HN: PhenixCode – Open-source, self-hosted alternative to Copilot Chat
by nesall | 2025-12-01 14:16:56+00:00
Hi HN! Solo dev here. I built PhenixCode as an open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot Chat. Why I built this: I wanted a code assistant that runs on my hardware with full control over the models and data. GitHub Copilot is excellent but requires a subscription and sends your code to the cloud. PhenixCode lets you use local models (completely free) or plug in your own API keys. Tech stack: Pure C++ with RAG architecture (HNSWLib for vector search, SQLite for metadata). The UI is Svelte + webview. It's designed to be lightweight and cross-platform. Current state: I've been dogfooding it for several weeks on my own projects. The core is solid, but I'd love feedback from others—whether you find it useful or discover bugs, both are valuable. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, design decisions, or anything else!
by gruez | 2025-12-01 14:17:00+00:00
According to this chart, it's approximately correct?

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Background radiation is 10msv per day, so 3650 in a year. A cross country flight (6hrs according to google flights) is 40msv, so 1% of yearly background exposure. However I did mention a "short" flight, so if you scale it down for a 2 hr flight, you get 0.3%, which is admittedly higher than 0.1%, but not too far off.
by arthurfirst | 2025-12-01 14:17:04+00:00
I did not look for a consulting contract for 18 years. Through my old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take on.

That collapsed during the covid lockdowns. My financial services client cut loose all consultants and killed all 'non-essential' projects, even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year, they did not care! Top down the word came to cut everyone -- so they did.

This trend is very much a top down push. Inorganic. People with skills and experience are viewed by HR and their AI software as risky to leave and unlikely to respond to whatever pressures they like to apply.

Since then it's been more of the same as far as consulting.

I've come to the conclusion I'm better served by working on smaller projects I want to build and not chasing big consulting dollars. I'm happier (now) but it took a while.

An unexpected benefit of all the pain was I like making things again... but I am using claude code and gemini. Amazing tools if you have experience already and you know what you want out of them -- otherwise they mainly produce crap in the hands of the masses.
by priyanshu_101 | 2025-12-01 14:17:16+00:00
OP here. I work with IT procurement and have noticed they've always been frustrated that G2 reviews are mostly non-technical marketers swapping gift cards for 5-star ratings.

We put together a list of alternatives that actually focus on technical requirements (latency, compliance, API limits) rather than just "sentiment."

The list covers:

Taloflow (for cloud/infra technical specs)

Olive (AI-driven RFP bias removal)

Vendr (for actual pricing data, which is always opaque)

TechnologyMatch (our tool – focused on curated vetting)

Curious what other HN folks are using to evaluate heavy-duty enterprise vendors without getting spammed by sales teams?
by typ | 2025-12-01 14:17:31+00:00
The difference is that you can customize/debug it or not. You might say that a .EXE can be modified too. But I don't think that's the conventional definition of open source.

I understand that these days, businesses and hobbyists just want to use free LLMs without paying subscriptions for economic motives, that is, either saving money or making money. They don't really care whether the source is truly available or not. They are just end users of a product, not open-source developers by any means.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-01 14:17:33+00:00
Yeah exactly... it's stick or no stick, the carrot is the razor thin margin only used to keep you away from the competitors.

At this point car insurance has gotten so bad that it's becoming normal that you can save hundreds of dollars by switching providers every 6 months. These companies are probably making millions on people who are just too exhausted to switch constantly.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-01 14:17:47+00:00
> If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.

I assure you that my hometown in South GA (a cheap city) didn’t have $170K a year developer jobs.

A friend who moved to Columbus GA after college in 1997 I doubt is making $170K now.

I know my friend who still lives in Atlanta and is a lead developer at Home Depot (one of the few F500 companies based in Atlanta) just crossed around $170K and he has been there 10 years.