MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshuamerrill | 2025-12-29 23:01:19+00:00
Taking your questions at face value, the difference is incentives and feedback loops.

Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.
by paxys | 2025-12-29 23:01:23+00:00
There is a change, not directly to postmarking but the larger collection process which will affect postmarking.

> This discrepancy is expected to become more common due to the implementation of the "Regional Transportation Optimization" (RTO) initiative and the adoption of "leg-based" service standards.

> This change in USPS processes will have a potentially significant impact on tax filings.

Basically, a large chunk of mailboxes across the country will no longer have evening collection, so unless you drop off your mail very early in the morning it will be processed and postmarked at minimum 1+ day later.
Ask HN: How can I stop worrying about my future in CS?
by ouk | 2025-12-29 23:01:27+00:00
Hello, I am a second-year CS student in Switzerland and I have always loved programming. When I started my bachelor's degree, I was almost certain that it was the right choice. I made this choice because I was really interested in it. I started programming in 2020 and worked on lots of small projects. I also knew (at the time) that it would be easy to find a job afterwards.

But for several months now (especially since 2025), with the rise of very good LLMs, I have been feeling increasingly anxious. I realized that all the projects I have worked on over the past five years are losing their value. Everything I've done and been proud of can now be done by anyone. I also see a lot of posts on the internet about the future of the job market, and most of them are pessimistic, which has a significant impact on my mental health. I'm losing my motivation and trying to reassure myself that studying at a school like EPFL will always leave doors open for me, but I feel like I'm in denial.

So I wanted to ask for your opinion on HN, because I think you might have a more nuanced view. How would you react in my place if you hadn't started in this industry yet?
by poszlem | 2025-12-29 23:01:41+00:00
What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.

Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.

That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
by montjoy | 2025-12-29 23:02:06+00:00
I don't understand how their benchmark is getting close to 20 Gbps. From what I understand a PCIe Gen4 x1 slot should be capping around 16 Gbps when doing full duplex or 8Gpbs in each direction.

Edit: Maybe they are testing within one system?

> We tried PCIe card NIC to the onboard NIC, and onboard NIC to onboard NIC.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-29 23:02:13+00:00
No, and to do so would be to challenge the law itself since the laws are written with reference to postmark date.

Perhaps ironically, video evidence has been used to invalidate ballots. In 2023, a CT judge invalidated the results of the Democratic primary, finding "ballot stuffing" in that 1,253 absentee ballots were submitted at Bridgeport dropboxes despite surveillance video only showing 420 people using the boxes. A new Democratic primary was ordered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023%E2%80%9324_Bridgeport,_Co...
by why-o-why | 2025-12-29 23:02:15+00:00
After reading this very well-written essay, what jumped out at me was "this is rich person psychosis". It seems like the easiest answer. Rich people know they are destroying the world, and rather than dial it back, they have mentally cracked and are fantasizing (and probably literally fetishizing -- in that it becomes sexual) about end-of-days. They've completely internalized what was a niche Evangelical position since Hal Lindsay (who I am surprised did not pop up in the essay). I know the trope that these folk must be sociopaths, which is why I opt to believe they aren't, and have just damaged themselves with the contradiction they represent. (As for the peasants who believe this? Collateral damage from hero worship.)

I enjoyed the essay from a recent-history perspective, but damn does it scare me.
by hinkley | 2025-12-29 23:02:28+00:00
I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.

Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
by collingreen | 2025-12-29 23:02:42+00:00
A more fair, less corrupt system/market sounds great! I also think once we solve that tiny problem that the "should ai do ceo jobs" problem is way easier!

What should we do while we wait for the good ol boys networks to dismantle themselves?

On a more serious note, the meritocracy, freedom, data, etc that big tech libertarians talk about seems to mostly be marketing. When we look at actions instead it's just more bog standard price fixing, insider deals, regulatory capture, bribes and other corruption with a little "create a fake government agency and gut the agencies investigating my companies" thrown in to keep things exciting.
by nebezb | 2025-12-29 23:02:43+00:00
Wow that’s intense.

I remember hearing someone complain on HN of their site getting blocked because it shared an IP with an illegal soccer livestream. I can’t imagine they’re doing this to IP blocks owned by CDNs like Fastly, CloudFlare, or CloudFront though. Or are they? Does this regularly break most of the internet for UK customers?
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-29 23:02:46+00:00
Hm, I see a fruit factory fanboi has been downvoting my recent posts again. Tiring but that's the price you pay for daring to speak up here. This place would be so much more tolerable if that down-vote arrow came with some price, e.g. 'you have X down-votes left for this week, use them wisely' or if the down-voter had to give a reason (visible to all) for the downvote in combination with a meta-moderation system like Slashdot of old (and maybe of today, no idea since I left that place aeons ago). The way it currently works it is far too easy to do the Wikipedia thing here, i.e. downvote into oblivion any voice outside of some accepted narrative. In combination with the virtual ban on discussing downvotes - the first rule of the Lumber Cartel is 'never discuss the Lumber Cartel' [1] - this makes HN more welcoming to knee-jerk downvoters and less welcome to free and open discussion. A shame, really, the place would be more interesting with more of the latter and fewer of the former.

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html
by tyre | 2025-12-29 23:02:51+00:00
For smol things like left-pad, sure but the two examples given (moment and react) solve really hard problems. If I were reviewing a PR where someone tried to re-implement time zone handling in JS, that’s not making it through review.

In JS, the DOM and time zones are some of the most messed up foundations you’re building on top of ime. (The DOM is amazing for documents but not designed for web apps.)

I think we really need to be careful about adding dependencies that we’re maintaining ourselves, especially when you factor in employee churn and existing options. Unless it’s the differentiator for the business you’re building, my advice to engineers is to strongly consider other options and have a case for why they don’t fit.

AI can play into the engineering blind spot of building it ourselves because it’s fun. But engineering as a discipline requires restraint.
by senordevnyc | 2025-12-29 23:02:53+00:00
Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code. Now it feels increasingly like you can’t be an IC in that way anymore. You’re now coding through others, either humans or AI.

Sure, I can write code manually, but in my case I’m working full time on my own SaaS and I am absolutely faster and more effective with AI. It’s not even close. And the gains are so extreme that I can’t justify writing beautiful hand-crafted artisanal code anymore. It turns out that code that’s “good enough” will do, and that’s all I can afford right now.

But long-term, I don’t know that I want to do that work, especially for some corporation. It feels like the difference between being a master furniture craftsman, and then going work in an IKEA factory.
by thayne | 2025-12-29 23:03:02+00:00
> I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with OpenAI wanting to keep their chains-of-thought secret.

I do. Besides the fact that it is kind of the opposite of "open" and is another sign that OpenAI is an inapt name for the company, I think being able to inspect the reasoning is often useful. It gives me a better idea of how much to trust the final response, and if the response is wrong, sometimes gives me hints on how to get to the right answer.
by mbirth | 2025-12-29 23:03:11+00:00
Back when eSIM was relatively new, while upgrading to a newer iPhone, my wife’s eSIM didn’t get transferred over but still got deactivated on the old phone.

And the T-Mobile Germany portal to download a new eSIM required authentication via SMS to that now deactivated number. That was fun. (As they didn’t have an alternative procedures to provision eSIMs in place, we had to go visit a store to get a new physical SIM first and could then convert that to eSIM.)
by pixl97 | 2025-12-29 23:03:30+00:00
100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship.

First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.

These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-29 23:03:46+00:00
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.

Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."

Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.

She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.

To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.

I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"

No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
by hiq | 2025-12-29 23:03:50+00:00
> WhatsApp

This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.

To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.

Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
by hopelite | 2025-12-29 23:04:09+00:00
Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive?

It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.

My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.
by keyle | 2025-12-29 23:04:19+00:00
Just like cooking in the middle ages. As the kitchen, hygiene, etc. got better, so did the chefs and so did the food.

This is just a transition.

re-Rest API, you're right. But again, we use roombas to vacuum when the floor layout is friendly to them. Not all rooms can be vacuumed by roombas. Simple Rest api can be emitted one shot from an LLM and there is no room for interpretation. But ask a future LLM to make a new kind of social network and you'll end up with a mash up of the existing ones.

Same thing, you and I won't use a manual screwdriver when we have 100 screws to get in, and we own an electric drill.

That didn't reinvent screws nor the assembly of complex items.

I'm keeping positive in the sense that LLMs will enable us to do more, and to learn faster.

The sad part about vibe coding is you learn very little. And to live is to learn.

You'll notice people vibecoding all day become less and less attached to the product they work on. That's because they've given away the dopamine hits of the many "ha-ha" moments that come from programming. They'll lose interest. They won't learn anymore and die off (career wise).

So, businesses that put LLM first will slowly lose talent over time, and business that put developers first will thrive.

It's just a transition. A fast one that hits us like a wall, and it's confusing, but software for humans will be better made by humans.

I've been programming since the 80s. The level of complexity today is bat shit insane. I welcome the LLM help in managing 3 code bases of 3 languages spread across different architectures (my job) to keep sane!
by debesyla | 2025-12-29 23:04:39+00:00
And lithuanian list is here: https://www.nksc.lt/vasaris.html (in lithuanian). Mostly phishing sites, but includes fun piracy portals too.

Content piracy specific, mostly movies, blocked by public broadcaster orders:
https://www.nksc.lt/doc/vasaris/siena-lrtk.txt, https://www.nksc.lt/doc/vasaris/siena-lrtk-2.txt, https://www.nksc.lt/doc/vasaris/siena-lrtk-3.txt
by reconnecting | 2025-12-29 23:05:00+00:00
AI is only getting better at consuming energy and wasting people's time communicating with this T9. However, if talented engineers continue to use it, it might eventually provide more accurate replies as a result.

Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.
by egypturnash | 2025-12-29 23:05:16+00:00
Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.

Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-29 23:05:20+00:00
I would assume the better programs implement some velocity control, turning it quickly will cause it to increment in larger steps, turning it slowly will increment single steps. This is how I have done it in the past when I have used the scroll ring on my trackball in PureData.

I would also assume there are detent free mousewheels with a far greater number of steps, there used to be. The scroll ring on my trackball is detent free and quite fine but it is also ~2" in diameter, considerably larger than the wheel on any mouse.
by LoganDark | 2025-12-29 23:05:46+00:00
I want to say that cognitive strategy doesn't meaningfully impact what I'm talking about, but I struggle to define where the line is between cognitive strategy and neural architecture. It appears to me that different neurotypes have different ways of learning and processing information, and that makes for different most effective strategies, and that becomes evident in how the learnings are eventually used. There's a sort of wavy abstract concept called "derived meaning" that sort of helps explain this, but that's even less understood. But basically, how I understand it is that different neurotypes have different frameworks of derived meaning; when they learn something, they persist differing parts of it and in different ways; this results in a different organizational structure, different forms and mechanisms of association between different ideas, different approaches of using the ideas, and so on. I don't know for sure that there isn't a non-autistic neurotype that learns outside-in like in Asperger's ... but if one were discovered it'd probably become part of the autism spectrum for being so uncommon. :D

Inside-out versus outside-in also doesn't really have to do with the order of learning. I could very easily learn the basic metadata of an overall system before I start diving into the details. Black boxes are very common for me to avoid going too deep into research or reverse-engineering rabbitholes (or to paper over an inability for me to learn more about inner workings). It has to do with the structure of learning. For me to model something as a black box, I'll accept that, though there may be parts inside it, I don't need to care how they're implemented. For someone with Asperger's to model something as a black box ... I imagine they already do that by default. How much of that is cognitive strategy or not, I can't really tell, but outside-in learning seems to prefer to pick up entire pieces that have a desired value rather than digging into every detail contributing to that value. While I could mimic that or show behavior that resembles something like that, it's just not really how my brain works on a fundamental level like that? I don't really know how to draw the line. You do raise a decent point.
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-29 23:06:05+00:00
Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away.

Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-29 23:08:19+00:00
Massively? I can't know. I read the article and upvoted 1) because it suggests a rocky road ahead for Google and 2) because, as you may have guessed, I dislike ads, dislike Google's complicity in ads, and so am happy to discuss.

I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good deal on where they go now.
by zyan1de | 2025-12-29 23:08:44+00:00
yeah so you can run it in automatic mode, or read only mode. In automatic mode it hooks onto the conversation and tool calls so you get the entire conversation stored. If you dont want to get super deep, then read only is safe and only stores what you ask. You could ask it things like "why is my reasoning dumb" by recalling passed conversations, or even give it the claude tool call sequence and ask "how can claude be smarter about next time".

I think of it like a file tree with proper namespacing and keep abstract concepts in separate directories. so like my food preferences will be in like /preferences/sandos. or you can even do things like /system-design preferences and then load them into a relevant conversation for next time.
by collingreen | 2025-12-29 23:08:56+00:00
The steel men (armored enemy knights) are exactly the inverse of the straw man (training dummy) metaphor. I think it's a fantastic term since it directly addresses the point (tackle the best opposing arguments head on instead of a poor subset/facsimile of them), it fits within the existing straw man metaphor, it's terse, and it's very clear.
by zwnow | 2025-12-29 23:09:07+00:00
The model of capitalism is to use money to build some means of production and hopefully generate more money from that.

We are arriving in a form of techno-feudalism where nobody produces anything. People with means to produce will pay the owners of AI who just own and make money through renting shit to people who cant afford building their own data centers or whatever. Its what companies like Amazon or Microsoft already do. They dont produce, they own and collect.

All of this has nothing to do with capitalism, its all about selling the big AI lie to producers so people base their products on some AI they dont own. And the cycle repeats, Amazon squeezed actual producing companies out of their money decades ago and now we will repeat this with AI.

Capitalists have means to produce, feudalists just collect and own.
by jmgao | 2025-12-29 23:09:20+00:00
> Compilers can do whatever they want when they see UB, and accessing an unassigned and unassiganble (file-local) variable is UB, therefore the compiler can just decide that *foo is in fact always 42, or never 42, or sometimes 42, and all would be just as valid options for the compiler.

That's not exactly correct. It's not that the compiler sees that there's UB and decides to do something arbitrary: it's that it sees that there's exactly one way for UB to not be triggered and so it's assuming that that's happening.