MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lupire | 2025-12-05 23:19:03+00:00
We are being vague here about "quality" and "average", by in the US, about 15% attend 2-year junior colleges, and about 50% attend 4-year colleges.

About half of those 4-year college students are earning degrees that are mostly filler and would be 2-year colleges plus remedial and/or fluff courses. USA has a very weird college industrial complex.

China, meanwhile is undergroing a massive push to send a majority of the population through some form of college or another.
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-12-05 23:19:20+00:00
> What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID

Why do people still frame this as either/or? How many people out there didn't get covid after they got some number of shots?

The only real scenario is covid with n shots, where n >= 0. In other words, when you got covid, how many shots had you gotten.

(Not anti vax myself, though generally avoid whatever drugs I reasonably can)
by rebane2001 | 2025-12-05 23:19:21+00:00
I don't think invalid spam reports mean something is overrated. Spam reports are spam reports. That'd be like saying buffer overflows are overrated because there are a bunch of AI-generated invalid spam reports with them.

A valid report needs to demonstrate a realistic attack scenario, and I think that's the approach bug bounties should take.

I think a good example is Google with its stance on open redirects[0]. They won't accept a report just pointing one out, but they will accept one that "can demonstrate that its impact goes beyond phishing".

[0] https://bughunters.google.com/learn/invalid-reports/web-plat...
by konmok | 2025-12-05 23:19:38+00:00
> Personally I don't get the impression that Framework is endorsing a particular view, nor are they directly sponsoring a specific individual or their views.

I agree. However, I do think that Framework is taking a particularly cowardly stance by refusing to acknowledge community concerns, and I think that kind of behavior is exactly how far-right groups gain power in tech spaces. When one group just wants to live in peace, and another group wants to make the first group disappear, organizations that don't distinguish between the two ultimately drive out the peaceful group.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-05 23:19:51+00:00
Well the problem is that even at $200 a month they're bleeding MONEY. FYI for every well intentioned skilled engineer using llms you have 100 lazy code monkeys shipping mountains of tech debt faster than ever before, 1000 people generating bullshit emails/tickets that could have been summed up in 5 bullet points, 1000 people role-playing with virtual friends/partners, &c.

You're in your own little bubble and completely oblivious to the thousands of man hour wasted every day to unfuck AI slop

And as it turns out 80% of users aren't willing to pay a cent and will abandon ship as soon as there is an alternative
by bombela | 2025-12-05 23:20:33+00:00
https://github.com/accretional/collector/blob/main/pkg/colle...

There is no way btrfs can be slower than this in any shape or form.

If we are comparing something simpler. Like making a copy of the SQLite database periodically. It makes sense for a COW snapshot to be faster than copying the whole database. After reading the btrfs documentation, it seems reasonable to assume that the snapshot latency will stay constant, while a full copy would slow down as the single file database grows bigger.

And so it stands of reason that freezing the database during a full copy is worse than freezing it during a btrfs snapshot. And a full copy of the snapshot can then be performed, optionally with a lower IO priority for good measure.

It should be obvious that the less data is physically read or written on the hot path, the less impact there is on latency.

For what is worth, here is a benchmark comparing IO performance on a few linux filesystem. Including some sqlite tests. https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-615-filesystems
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-05 23:20:43+00:00
> "The future belongs to the humans who already knew what they were doing..."

Which is who? The top 25% of talent? The top 10% of talent? The top 1% of talent? If you accept the assertion of the essay, it's saying that everyone else is cooked (probably including a large fraction of those nodding along with the essay thinking "Thank goodness _I_ know what I'm doing").

Think about the meaning of "mediocrity" in "it kills mediocrity". It's the normal, the commonplace, the average, and by definition half of people are below average and the majority of people cluster around the average.

So what's the insight or takeaway from this essay? "Don't worry, fellow better-than-mediocre elites, we're going to be fine."? Is there a more charitable interpretation that I'm missing?
by DetroitThrow | 2025-12-05 23:20:52+00:00
So they're not sponsoring Omarchy sure, but that the CEO doesn't really respond to the parts where they've advertised Omarchy repeatedly is enough for me to close my wallet going forward. For me, this is a cut and dry issue and you don't have to endorse white supremacy to make it clear you don't have many issues with engaging white supremacists.

DHH has said things beyond the pale, that go as far to say that people like me are not welcome in spaces he tours, not because of my actions but instead my skin color. Framework can flirt with his projects if they want to. I just won't buy their products going forward, and it sounds like they're fine with that. Idrc if it's seen as contributing to cancel culture.
by gpm | 2025-12-05 23:21:13+00:00
GPLv2

> c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

GPLv3

> d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.

With the definition

> An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.

As I understand the licenses if you use a GPLv2/3 library and you aren't proactively displaying notices (i.e. not just including them in a menu that the user might not even see or a readme file, but actually printing something about licenses to the screen every single time the user starts the program) you are committing copyright infringement.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-05 23:21:38+00:00
Mikrotik is pretty lacking in aspects that relate to the newest hotness of wifi standards.

802.11ax ("wifi 6") is as good as it gets, with [eg] their wAP AX.

They get a lot of stuff right, though. They run RouterOS, which is a custom userland for Linux that is intensely flexible. Approximately any routing-esque function a person can dream up that can work with a Linux kernel can be made to work within RouterOS.

The form factor of the wAP AC/AX boxes is really very nice -- they can blend well in on a wall (inside or outside), attached to a pipe, or whatever. I've got a wAP AC on the wall of my living room, for instance. I use another one when "camping" off-grid, zip-tied to the leg of an easy-up awning.

It's ostensibly just an access point, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, like: There's two ethernet ports, but they exist without a preconceived function. Want to use it as a router, with hardware WAN and LAN ports? How about with VLANs and a managed switch instead, so it works with just one cable? Eleventy-five different SSIDs? Bridging networks with wifi? Using station mode to leech bandwidth from the cafe across the street, and perform firewalling and NAT and VPN, so you can use it in your apartment -- with only one box? Sure, no problem. Whatever it is, it works.

Power is flexible. All of the bits to use passive POE are included; or it can just plug in with the included DC connector; or it can use proper 802.3af PoE.

I don't know how it compares to something from Ruckus, but I'm much more pleased with it than the Ubiquity gear that I am presently taking a break from fighting with.
by neilv | 2025-12-05 23:21:41+00:00
I saw the (a?) architectural model for Stata before it was built. I was with an artist, and we just walked into somewhere it had been set up for an event. (Yay for MIT culture of letting students go most places on campus.) It looked pretty crazy at the time. IIRC, there was a clear sphere embedded in the top of one of the lower roofs. My joke was that the model looked like someone had taken a paperweight, and smashed up a previously ordinary-looking building. It was crazy when construction started, and you could start to see elements of the building emerge, like, they are actually building that. (Though they left out the paperweight sphere.)

Before it was built, a designer friend, who'd worked worked in a Stata building before, mentioned the frequent complaints of Gehry buildings, such as people in triangular offices, or with slanting walls, that couldn't fit a desk.

Years later, I was surprised and deligted to end up working in Stata. My office was pretty generic rectangular and functional, with big windows that opened. No complaints about the office, except the HVAC couldn't win against the early GPU compute my officemate was doing. Space in the building was in demand by everyone, yet there were large areas of dead space. I wondered whether some of the conspicuously unused space was because they could've figured out how to adapt it, but was being banked consciously, so that space could be made for PIs who arrived later.

Stewart Brand criticized IM Pei's building for the original Media Lab (E15), as not being malleable like the "temporary" Building 20, and maybe some of the same criticism applied. Though Stata, coincidentally built partly on the site of Building 20 that was razed for it, did incorporate plywood elements in the interior, I think as a nod to Building 20. This included large plywood tables that were moved around as needed for different purposes in the open ares outside the elevator on my floor (G10?), multiple times a day.

The strange bathroom placement, and the ones that used visibly dirty ("green") water to flush, weren't a practical problem, but multiple times were awkward to explain to visitors. I liked the big single-person bathrooms on the office floors, and they were luxurious for students and professors doing all-nighters to get in a discreet paper towel bath, compared to the indignity of trying to do it in a toilet stall.

One thing I liked about the larger building design was the main street ground floor, adding cafe and various random seating, which was a big improvement over the Infinite Corridor.
by eszed | 2025-12-05 23:21:44+00:00
I am grateful to every pharmacist / pharmacist assistent who's sotto voce ignored that immoral "rule".

On the flip side, before I transferred my prescriptions to my (excellent) locally-owned small pharmacy, I checked that these are drugs on which the respective Pharmacy Benefits Manager allows them to make a profit rather than a loss. That reminds me that I'll need to repeat that conversation when our insurance changes in January.
by Muromec | 2025-12-05 23:22:08+00:00
>Following your argument shouldn't anything that can induce addiction be controlled?

Depending on a risk profile -- totally. There are talks of taxing sugar drinks and not selling "energy drinks", which are coffeine + sugar, to kids for this very reason.

I also mean controlled in the broad definition, not as in the "controlled substance". The culture of consumption prescribed by society is a way of regulation too, more effective than laws even.
by wagwang | 2025-12-05 23:22:14+00:00
Maybe, maybe not, maybe like teflon, the real poison is an intermediate ingredient, but I think its bullshit that we're just creating chemicals that linger in our water supply for eternity. You literally cannot find anyone in America without traces of the dangerous variant of the PFAS in their blood stream. Like every sip of water is some ridiculous dupont cocktail and we have to tolerate it because people have dry eyes and want non stick pans. Why cant you just use theratears?
by andrewf | 2025-12-05 23:22:19+00:00
Quickly Googling about, a commonly repeated figure is that Akamai served 15% - 30% of Internet traffic in the late 2010's. They probably have less of the market today due to others growing, but they're not a minnow.

2024 revenue figures were $1.669 billion for Cloudflare, and $3.99 billion for Akamai, per Wikipedia.
by sejje | 2025-12-05 23:22:29+00:00
The commercial GMO seed developers require that you buy seed from them every year. You're not allowed to collect the seed and re-plant it next year. Or share it, I guess.

That's in the US, not sure how it plays out around the world.

They just want to lock in the farmers, in an situation where they can't do it technologically. So they're doing it via the law. It's...basically what you'd expect of the world today. Sad, but I suppose they argue that they should have IP rights just like any industry.

And you'd think they'd just boycott on principle, but it puts them at a big disadvantage in many cases, as their yields go down while national harvest goes up, making sale prices lower. So it's not easy to see what to do about it from the farmer's perspective.
by varun_ch | 2025-12-05 23:22:29+00:00
That’s really reasonable then (I guess apart from any disagreements with the authors views). Omarchy isn’t just a post installation script, they have the entire thing bundled as an ISO. So I can see why an in-kind sponsorship of a CDN makes sense. Although it’s still unclear to me how Omarchy specifically fits into ‘the future of the open web’ vs Ladybird
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-12-05 23:22:36+00:00
Critical high-level stats such as errors should be scraped more frequently than 30 seconds. It’s important to have multiple time granularity scraping intervals, a small set of most critical stats should be scraped closer to 10s or 15s.

Prometheus has as an unaddressed flaw [0], where rate functions must be at least 2x the scrape interval. This means that if you scrape at 30s intervals, your rate charts won’t reflect the change until a minute after.

[0] - https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/3746
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-05 23:22:43+00:00
I believe that's the wrong angle to be looking at it since you're starting from the perspective of someone trying to sell something.

The 'need' end is the perspective that's most useful to society. How can someone who has a need find out to satisfy it?

Make your product able to be found by those who need it. Don't shove it in the faces of everyone.

One problem with the above is the effectiveness of making 'unnecessary' sales by creating fomo by shoving it in the faces of everyone. This effectiveness, however, is evidence of the fact that it's psychological manipulation / abuse.
by dmix | 2025-12-05 23:22:49+00:00
Also inflexibility, large backlogs, quality of staff, etc.

In Canada all of our best doctors go to the US and there's often nurse shortages. It's not just a private incentive either, the US gov pays out far more in public healthcare coverage as a percentage of GDP and per capita than Canada and almost all of Europe.

Despite their reputation the US doesn't have a lack of public healthcare spending (ranking #1-3 in the world). It's just their system's insurance regulation is extremely convoluted, creating risky edge-cases and perverse incentives. If they fixed that they would by far have the best healthcare system in the world.
by benbreen | 2025-12-05 23:23:09+00:00
I think the median response is something between revulsion and mild dislike if it's spoken about in the context of the classroom. But there are also a pretty significant group of people who find it interesting as a potential research tool. (Also the question of what "it" is matters a lot here - if you asked people in history about ChatGPT, the response would be massively different than if you asked about machine learning tools for OCR and data mining historical documents, which there is a lot of support for).

Personally I think it absolutely will lead to major changes in historical research. The transcription and translation abilities of transformer models alone are already leading to significant changes and advances. For instance, I'm working on a post about new transformer based OCR tools like Leo that are geared specifically for historical research and led by historians (https://www.tryleo.ai - I'm not involved in the project, just an interested observer).

IMO AI tools will definitely still be used by a minority of historians in a 5-10 year horizon. Historical research is not like some STEM fields where there is a lab-base culture oriented around adopting new tech and finding applications quickly. It's a lot more of a solo, idiosyncratic process of personal research and that is partly why I like it, but it also means that uptake of new tools is much slower. That said, historians do use technology and digital tools all the time and are not inherently adverse to it. It's interesting reading history books from the 1970s, like the works of Lawrence Stone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Stone) and seeing the footnotes about how the data was encoded in punchcards and analyzed by mainframes. I expect we will be seeing history books by the end of the 2020s that use custom data analytics and tagging tools developed by the historians themselves using vibe coding.

Thanks for the question, will be writing more about this. Feel free to get in touch any time.
by Sleaker | 2025-12-05 23:23:47+00:00
I was dumb and rebooted without redoing the kernel install, otherwise I probably could have just rolled back and reran mkinit to get fixed but the bootloader entry had already been removed for the old kernel as I think I was also running some cleanup commands, and when I booted to reduced mode I had no network to try and recover so I just decided to reinstall. Helps having a separate drive for files. Didn't have to worry about a backup or anything so it went smooth
by pixelpoet | 2025-12-05 23:23:53+00:00
It's a desktop mini PC, there's no battery. There are laptops with the same Ryzen AI 395+ CPU+RAM, but I'm doing heavy rendering / computing (actually I got it for rendering work, not AI stuff) and laptops are a bad form factor for that.

Sleep mode... works? I actually turned it off because I have long-running processes and it only uses 4W at idle with the screens off. It's 8W at idle with a 4K 160Hz monitor and a 1440p 144Hz monitor, which IMO is Alien Fucking Technology, considering there's a > 5GHz 16 core CPU with 128GB RAM (4 channels like Threadrippers, vs 2 for normal desktop CPUs) in there.
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-05 23:24:03+00:00
A car (especially ICE but even EVs) consists of tens of thousands of components. People like to point at things in cars and say "why did they save five cents there? And 10 cents here?", and the simple reason is if you bump all these components up one "quality level", if you will, that's thousands of bucks just in material costs. The twenty dollars of per-car savings are not profit, they're unit cost savings, which will contribute to profit, but also price. And margins in the car industry are rather tight, buyers are cost sensitive, it's not an industry where you save 10$ on parts and are able to pocket that, I don't think.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-05 23:24:25+00:00
Are we even talking about the same thing? The precautionary principle, at least as far as I understand it, is to emphasize caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations with potential for causing extreme harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. As risk increases, the threshold for certainty rises as well.

Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?

Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.

> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"
by acjohnson55 | 2025-12-05 23:24:32+00:00
I'm not saying it's someone else's job to communicate to a lay audience. Simply that a research paper doesn't have to be a self-contained device for doing that and accurately describing the research to people who already have a lot of background knowledge on the topic and methods.

I guess I will say that I have thought for a long time that serializing research into linear documents seems archaic at this point.
by phil21 | 2025-12-05 23:24:42+00:00
> Herbicides are pesticides. Are you implying that I made a mistake with that word? I did not.

Fair, the word pesticide is technically accurate - simply not used where I am from to describe herbicides.

> would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?

I don't see where anyone is advocating this. I see a lot of attacks against the most tested and studied herbicide on the planet - many such studies and tests set about with a pre-determined agenda (by either side). If there was strong evidence of this chemical being widespread harmful to human health, I feel it'd have come out by now.

What it means is that instead of using glysophate, agriculture simply switches to less tested and newer chemicals that may end up actually being more harmful. Certainly more expensive. Using nothing is not an option for modern agriculture if we're going to feed the number of humans on the planet.

There are plenty of "bad actors" in this field (no pun intended) - but if used as directed and in conjunction with GMO crops engineered to reduce herbicide applications it's likely one of the best ag inventions of our lifetime. Why so many people are willing to die on this hill is beyond me. I see otherwise very intelligent people in my life who as they have aged went down the youtube conspiracy theory rabbit hole and now preach about how it's the devil.

If Monsanto (or others) conducted research or scientific fraud they should absolutely be punished for it. To be blunt - especially the scientists - since it is absolutely deleterious to public trust.