MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-07 01:27:55+00:00
RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...

But that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.

Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.
by ajax33 | 2025-12-07 01:29:58+00:00
Past discussions:

1. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059899) - May 2021 (126 comments) 2. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633122) - Sept 2021 (40 comments) 3. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546874) - Sept 2023 (277 comments)
by defrost | 2025-12-07 01:31:02+00:00
> They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology.

Yes. That doesn't do much to detect a stone from a parapet rolling onto the line though.

Hence the need for inspection.

> runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.

I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.

If anything urban rail is in a better position today as ideally camera networks should hopefully rapidly resolve whether a bridge is really damaged as per a fake image or not.
by superkuh | 2025-12-07 01:31:09+00:00
>This distinction is extremely important, because it allows for addiction without substance dependence to be taken just as seriously, and properly treated and addressed clinically or by other means.

Here's where you seem confused. The article is not saying this. It is explicitly saying that medications which one builds up a tolerance to and experiences withdrawal symptoms from are not addictive.

>The DSM-5 referred to the confusion over this issue, stating that “’Dependence’ has been easily confused with the term ‘addiction’ when, in fact, the tolerance and withdrawal that previously defined dependence are actually very normal responses to prescribed medications that affect the central nervous system and do not necessarily indicate the presence of an addiction.” Public Health England makes the same distinction.

You are claiming the article's distinction between addiction and dependence is discussed in order to make a claim about substance abuse and addiction without dependence. This is not in the text at all. What the heck?

I have the decades of domain specific knowledge and time spent reading neuroscience journal articles to know that I don't have to read between the lines of the article here. It's not an opaque or jargon hidden meaning. It's quite plain: dependence is not addiction. Not, "addiction can happen without dependence" which is not addressed or relevant to the paper or this HN discussion about caffeine.
by comex | 2025-12-07 01:31:29+00:00
If we're talking about actual clean-room reverse engineering where only the overall design or spec is copied and not the specific code, then yes. In this process, one person would decompile the original and turn it into a human-readable spec, and another person would write their own implementation. But the decompiled code itself is never distributed.

That's very different from the decompilation projects being discussed here, which do distribute the decompiled code.

These decompilation projects do involve some creative choices, which means that the decompilation would likely be considered a derivative work, containing copyrightable elements from both the authors of the original binary and the authors of the decompilation project. This is similar to a human translation of a literary work. A derivative work does have its own copyright, but distributing a derivative work requires permission from the copyright holders of both the original and the derivative. So a decompilation project technically can set their own license, and thereby add additional restrictions, but they can't overwrite the original license. If there is no original license, the default is that you can't distribute at all.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-07 01:32:28+00:00
Indeed. In fact, only recently the Fedora KDE version was elevated to "Edition" status and is now on the same tier as the Gnome version.

Most newer popular distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Zorin, Asahi, etc.) default to KDE now, and it's very nice that Fedora's not only keeping up, but also providing the basis for some of them.
by stopbulying | 2025-12-07 01:32:35+00:00
This says "67,000 dead in a week":

"Why Is The UAE Funding A Genocide In Sudan?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=GIPeNc9uod0

How have US private security companies been involved in these atrocities?

Can the US help make peace if they are training or arming private paramilitary which are perpetrating genocide of women and children?
by joquarky | 2025-12-07 01:33:34+00:00
Nope, I've been architecting, creating, and maintaining web apps since 1996 (most recently 12 years at an S&P 500 company), but I can't do live coding interviews to save my life.

Nobody will accommodate me in two years of job searching. They don't deny me outright, they just ghost me if I ask to do a "take home" or any other alternative.
by loeg | 2025-12-07 01:34:02+00:00
What med do you plan to pay $650/mo for? Tirzepatide is $300-450/mo straight from Lilly[0] and semaglutide is similar from Novo[1]. (This is another price cut after Lilly dropped prices already in February[2].) It would not be shocking to see prices continue to fall in 2026 as semaglutide goes off-patent in Canada and maybe some of the in-pipeline drugs from other manufacturers come to market.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[2]: https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
by gregjor | 2025-12-07 01:36:53+00:00
You conflate different meanings of "context."

The problem Brooks describes around communication has to do with multiplying the number of paths as the team grows. The "surgical team" approach includes a member in charge of documentation at all stages, to give everyone access to the same context.

A small team may "vibe code" something they call a CRM in a week, but unlikely it will work and stand up to requirements changes. Only someone who doesn't understand the business domain would claim they can coax a solution out of an LLM in a few days.
by accrual | 2025-12-07 01:40:14+00:00
I agree crash test dummy could be useful. Maybe the impact tests could actually improve the internal models by giving them training data on severe incidents.

Personally I would love to just be able to say "hey go get me $tool from the shop" and have it returned to me a bit later. Maybe I could ask about its journey and it can tell me about almost slipping on the ice outside while I'm busy working on whatever.
by pkaye | 2025-12-07 01:42:05+00:00
I've writing one myself in Go the past few months just to learn the way CAS internals work. Got about 300 symbols working to varying degree. Complex numbers almost working. Basic rule system. Various algebra simplifications. Still trying to figure out how to do Factor as it is pretty math intensive. No graphical output, just to the terminal for now. Using Claude models also to learn AI programming and help with so of the math concepts.
by jon9544hn | 2025-12-07 01:42:27+00:00
Worked over a decade in transport logistics, various forms, tech in the latter half. ELD manipulation is as old as the first ones were introduced on the market.

Check the previous FW [0] article regarding undercover DOT officers, uncovering real-time manipulation of ELDs, and the blatant freight theft, mostly with corporate identity theft on top of that.

Paper logs - as known back then - were literally written out daily. To rewrite, you would just tear it out, and redo 7-10 days worth, right?

Well electronic manipulation is even easier, especially when outsourced to Eastern European countries with teams who work 24/7 in providing that service.

USDOT announces which ELDs aren’t allowed to be used - regularly. Usually because of backdoors, but in other times, the sucky software.

[0] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/english-language-crackdown...
by accrual | 2025-12-07 01:42:33+00:00
Interesting concept that feels almost inevitable. There will be gaps in what the AI is able to perform. Outsourcing those to humans could be one way forward. I imagine there will be back and forth when humans vet the request and deem them impossible/inefficient/irresponsible.

Black mirror episode idea: the AI becomes ever more trustworthly and integrated into human society. As it gains increasing control over a group of employees it leverages individuality to find human agents most complicit in some external goal the AI develops, and hands specific tasks to those humans to further those goals.

An expert of manipulation + humans motivated by paycheck could equal black-mirror-worthy results.
by fizzynut | 2025-12-07 01:43:35+00:00
Honestly if you actually need high end specs then you should just build a PC.

"16 core Zen 5 CPU, 40 core RDNA 3.5 GPU. 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM @ 256 GB/s + stunning OLED" - Easily done as a pc build.

In a world where you can get this laptop with Linux, there's a new set of trade-offs -

- be prepared for a LOT of things not working because the size of the market for extremely expensive configurations with high end CPU + GPU + RAM + Monitor + Linux is practically zero.

- when closing the lid and walking to the coffee shop will the battery be dead before you finish your coffee? probably

- will a new GPU/GPU architecture be a headache for the first X years...yes, and if you want to replace every 2 years, I guess you will have a permanent headache.

- will updating graphics drivers be a problem? yes

- is the text in your "stunning oled" going to be rendered correctly in linux? probably not

- will the wifi chip work in linux? maybe

- will all the ports work/behave? probably not

- will your machine perform worse than a high end PC that cost 1/2 as much from 3 years ago... yes.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-07 01:44:49+00:00
> The threat level for airplanes is set to orange... for anyone dumb enough to fly over an erupting volcano.

Even 180km away from the eruption, airplanes can be seriously damaged [1].

Jet engines really, really do not like to ingest anything else than air and, maybe, a tad bit of water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-07 01:46:08+00:00
> Basically, all human knowledge is an application of either math or philosophy

Philosophy is not knowledge, it's pure speculation.

> law is philosophy, so cant be modeled by math

Law is not philosophy unless it was written based on sloppy speculations. In other words, what law is, depends on how it was written, it can certainly be modeled by logic and math methods can be developed for it too.

It's nothing new, lawyers have to master logic as part of their training.
by thundergolfer | 2025-12-07 01:46:39+00:00
A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line:

> it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open.

I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they should approach LLM use.

Bryan has 30+ years of challenging software (and now hardware) engineering experience. He memorably said that he's worked on and completed a "hard program" (an OS), which he defines as a program you doubt you can actually get working.

The way Bryan approaches an LLM is super different to how a 2025 junior engineer does so. That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.
by bubblethink | 2025-12-07 01:46:43+00:00
The downside is that you have declining birth rates and a slowing economy. Despite all the non-sense from the current admin, you do actually need immigrants. Trump has said so himself as his admin keeps screwing things up (see the Hyundai fiasco). The average American citizen has no idea about how immigration in this country works. People are overwhelmingly in favor of legal and skills based immigration.

>but congress taking action I think is very likely to screw things more than they currently are

Congress' inaction and paralysis is the reason we find ourselves in this morass. Congress has abdicated its responsibility and ceded power to the executive.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-12-07 01:47:16+00:00
Anyone that has had a really vivid dream will tell you the brain needs no help in creating a simulation.

The idea that no computer or system could possibly be powerful enough for the complexities of a simulation is a very trivial way of looking at things and isn’t thinking of something that is readily available.

I have long held the theory the brain is very capable of filling in all the complex details required for a simulation.
by aalittle | 2025-12-07 01:47:44+00:00
I’m the VPE for Field Service Mobile at Salesforce. We rolled out AI assistants to our engineering teams earlier this year.

We expected faster boilerplate and unit tests (which we got). But the real shift was upstream. We found engineers are using the tools heavily to pressure-test PRDs, draft design docs, and spot gaps in requirements before writing the first line of code.

We also found that despite being a mobile shop, the first-party tools from platform vendors (Apple/Google) aren't winning; the team prefers third-party tools that fit the workflow better.

Wanted to share our retrospective on the rollout, how we handled the "job anxiety" conversation, and where the tools are actually adding value vs. just generating noise.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-07 01:48:44+00:00
> Yet another attack vector

AI-Generated disinfo has been a known attack vector for the Russian regime (and their allied regimes) for years now [0][1].

[0] - https://cyberscoop.com/russia-ukraine-china-iran-information...

[1] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/esp...
by accrual | 2025-12-07 01:48:57+00:00
I recently spun up Jellyfin in a container about 1-2 years after my last setup and was impressed with the polish. My library auto-updated with correct titles, images, etc.

The only missing piece is a solid Apple TV app. I tried Swiftfin, and maybe the AppStore version is old, but it's just as buggy and unpolished as I remember.

However it /does/ work and I can play movies via SMB piped into Jellyfin and then to Swiftfin on an Apple TV rooms away. Reminds me of the old Xbox/Kodi days but with modern hardware.
by Klonoar | 2025-12-07 01:49:02+00:00
Yeah... I don't care.

Small company that deals with what hardware they can get their hands on. They're shipping a device when others are not. It's a pretty straightforward equation right now; people who want to advance the ecosystem should consider it if they want a device they can drive and build for.

Otherwise there's no real reason to not just run Graphene.
by chemotaxis | 2025-12-07 01:49:48+00:00
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.

I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-12-07 01:50:05+00:00
A computer program takes digital bytes, runs some discrete logic on them, outputs some more bytes. Laws take messy real world stuff, run some subjective decision tree on them, and output some messy real world actions to take. If you model the former with the latter you end up 'shelling out' to human judgement every 2 words. Suppose you accidentally shoot somebody while duck hunting, the meaning or value of pretty much everything here can't be determined by a computer, so the code-law version of this random snippet of natural-language-law would be pretty useless:

> If it is found that the defendant did the killing or wounding, but that it was not intentional or negligent, the court shall dismiss the proceeding. Otherwise, if it is found that the defendant did the killing or wounding intentionally, by an act of gross negligence, or while under the influence of alcohol, the court shall issue an order permanently prohibiting the defendant from taking any bird or mammal.
by jameslk | 2025-12-07 01:52:17+00:00
> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.

> "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said.

I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer
by Klonoar | 2025-12-07 01:52:46+00:00
You're citing language demand as a result of incumbent industry usage. That's an inherently weighted metric because existing products are not (contrary to what some Rust zealots might want) going to be rewritten in Rust for no reason.

i.e, it's not rocket science - languages with 10-20+ year history are embedded in the industry. News at 11. ;P

Popularity - as the term is actually used - is one where Rust is fine.
by jon9544hn | 2025-12-07 01:53:05+00:00
I think you’re missing the point. EU size/amount of countries, and shared regulations, etc, makes much sense. North America has that too, where USA, Mexico and Canada drivers are able to cross the border and deliver freight.

The difference is that Canadian drivers are vetted in Canada, and drive in the US. Where as Eastern European/Asian(Indian) drivers who are NOT here on a visa/temporary residence(green card)/citizen status, are able to get privileged driving status.

They work 3/4 months, make so much money (in comparison to back home), live there a few months, then come back for more earnings.

All the while, their freight pay, doesn’t even cover the cost of running that truck. Example: $1.60ish per mile, is required to run a truck/trailer to break even: equipment payment, insurance, tires, diesel, taxes (!!!!), payroll, etc. Normally, a truck wouldn’t take that freight, unless they are in a tough spot, something got cancelled or whatever, they will only take it as a last ditch effort to make it to the next trip. But consistently the freight being covered, is paying sub-$1. Literally barely covering FUEL expenses only. How do I know? Cuz the brokers giving out these freight contracts tell us the price they got it covered when you ask why the price is so low.

Anyway, this was a tangent sorry lol
by s0rce | 2025-12-07 01:55:48+00:00
I think it was fine 20 odd years ago. I had a Thinkpad T41p in 2004 and it was a great laptop. Even my Sony Vaio Z was nice in 2008 compared to the competition (although it had serious issues with the screen flexibility causing it to fail multiple times).

Since 2012 I've had 3 Macs, a 2012 Air, a 2020 M1 (this was a massive upgrade and the nicest laptop I ever used, even compared to my relatively new work thinkpad). I just cracked the screen on my M1 so bought a discounted M4 air on black friday. I can't tell the difference other than I like having magsafe back and only miss the touch bar slightly.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-07 01:56:36+00:00
I could add, based on a few decades of life as an adult, that almost all of the abortion I've known of was motivated by concerns of inconvenience, chief among that including the economics and time requirements of child raising. It's a very thorny issue that ironically provokes anti-abortion activists to killing others, though this is rare.

And then I can't resist thinking about Kierkegaard, who pointed out that our anxiety about our behavior with respect to Christian morality is what keeps churches from turning into dance halls (and since your essay deals with extrapolation, maybe brothels or equivalent?)

So if infanticide, whether in the womb, or after birth, is already mostly a convenience issue, there isn't much Christian morality there at all. But is it pagan? What kind of paganism? There is a huge menu to choose from among billions of non-Christians.

If my thinking, writing this, seems unclear or objectionable, fine. Yours is a well written, thought provoking essay that clearly draws upon thoughtfulness and life experiences. But maybe I am way too overanalytical and want to put "paganism" in a box with clear boundaries. Are there any?
by laughing_man | 2025-12-07 01:57:59+00:00
My problem with PERL was always that there's just too many things to remember, particularly if the code I'm debugging was written by someone who knows the language well. I'd be on a PERL project for awhile, then get pulled off to do Java or Ruby or whatever. By the time I needed to do PERL again, I had to go back and relearn everything. I never had that problem with Java, Ruby, Python, or Javascript.

Also, PERL allows you to write the most unmaintainable code I've ever seen. I ran across a single line of PERL that would read a buffer, do some simple data transformations, add framing information (some of it derived from the data like length, data type, and checksum), and then write out the completed buffer.

It was beautiful. And also completely unmaintainable. Even the guy who wrote it didn't remember how it worked and had to fiddle with it for twenty minutes before he remembered a variable he used was getting set as a side effect of something else later in the line. That's great for a programming contest, but not so much for production code you may be tasking a newly minted software developer with maintaining.

Granted, you can write maintainable PERL code. But over the years the PERL has been hands down the least maintainable in different jobs and projects.
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-07 01:59:09+00:00
I loved how quickly the app started up and immediately had me at an interactive step.

I think you really need to have 10-20 levels, not 2, before interrupting with the CTA for paying. I had only just learned the basic rules and had no clue if I liked the game or what hints would even be worth to me.

I was going to comment that the frame rate and responsiveness was oddly bad but when I went back to check a few things it was buttery smooth. Dunno if that was just a weird one-off or something that happens on first launch?

Let me hide the timer. I know, it’s silly. But it truly affects my enjoyment of nonogram games.

I like the simple little beeps it makes when toggling. Have you considered picking triads from different keys? This can break the monotony. You could pick a random key each game and different chords from that key!

Overall this is well done. You should feel proud of your accomplishment!
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-07 02:00:10+00:00
> I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.

Ideally? Sure.

But when someone can generate plausible disaster photos of every inch of every line of a country's rail network in mere minutes? And as soon as your inspection finishes, they do it again?