MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-21 23:35:23+00:00
The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero.

People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia.

Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself" while dealing with a bunch of users who will have the nagging thought of "Why the heck does this bug exist/this feature not exist? I could fix this in an afternoon." Ironically, open source relieves this pressure for multiple orders of magnitude more people than actually contribute, because they're only grappling with their own laziness, rather than resenting you, the developer.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-21 23:35:27+00:00
I guess that was poor framing on my part from the beginning; I used the term deadweight meaning overhead that can be cut, not implying culpability one way or another.

Which positions are culpable or victims is besides the point here (I have other comments on ZIRP related threads if you are interested, where I do make direct accusations).

> ordinary people who were lied to by the actual decision-makers

Were they truly lied to? They got paid for years of service. Now whether they got lied to by Bending Spoons denying there will be layoffs I don't know (or whether the lie matters - for all we know they got a fair severance package, at least in places where that is legally mandated?).

But for those who started their career in the "good days", I would say they got misled by an environment that rewarded raw engineering without concern for the business outcome of said engineering (and often rewarded over engineering in fundamentally unsustainable businesses). Now the business outcome is suddenly becoming the most important thing and these people are taken by surprise.

---

Now it's clear you have some kind of beef with me; I'm either talking complete shit, or I struck a nerve. Maybe a bit of both. Either way I will not pursue this conversation further - best of luck!
by citizenpaul | 2026-01-21 23:35:46+00:00
I think lots of SWE massively overestimate the amount that people in power care if the software really works most of the time. Yes even in financial matters. Here is a not secret, Accounting will stop any strange money loss that would cause any problems, its their job. If it happens often enough they will complain and have an SWE fix it. There is a reason so many companies take forever to pay out.

How much of the world currently runs on horribly broken,outdated and inaccurate spreadsheets? Disposable AI slop apps are just a continuation of this paradigm. I do think that AI slop apps will become competitive with broken spreadsheets and 10,000 scattered python notebook files, causing a massive drop in need for various SWE,Analysis, Data Scientist type jobs. I've seen report systems with individual reports in the millions that were only run once (and many not at all), a huge percent of digital work is one off disposable items.

SWE is first and foremost a power structure for the people in charge. The first thing you do when you are in power is always minimize the amount of people with power you depend on. I think that AI already is reducing the amount of people needed to maintain and develop what are basically state of the company applications for the C-suite. Sure tech first companies will be hit less hard but for example the fortune 500 will be making continuous cuts for the next decade.
by JohnMakin | 2026-01-21 23:36:12+00:00
> It has become difficult to grade students using anything other than in-person pen and paper assessments,

This shouldn't be a big deal. This was the norm for decades. My CS undergrad I only finished ~10 years ago, and every test was proctored and pen and paper. Very, very rarely would there be a remote submission. It did not seem possible to easily cheat in that environment unless the test allowed notes you yourself did not write, or if you procured a copy of the test beforehand and were able to study off that previously, but the material was sufficiently rigorous that you sort of had to know it well to pass the class, which seems to me the whole aim of a college course.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-21 23:36:58+00:00
> you can impart miniscule amounts of impulse which, over the course of hundreds of orbits

right. this is what is counter-intuitive for those that are not familiar with space. they don't just light the burner and boost to a new altitude. the part about stopping the acceleration with an opposite burn is often not considered. most think you can fly a space ship like a jet fighter, but in space. can't blame them since that's how sci-fi portrays it. real life space flight is really boring in comparison. jumping out of FTL to land in orbit around a planet makes me laugh every. single. time.
by Paracompact | 2026-01-21 23:37:00+00:00
> Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt.

If you were an indentured slave and gave birth to children, those children were not indentured slaves, they were chattel slaves. Exodus 21:4:

> If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

The children remained the master's permanent property, and they could not participate in Jubilee. Also, three verses later:

> When a man sells his daughter as a slave...

The daughter had no say in this. By "fellow Israelites," you actually mean adult male Israelites in clean legal standing. If you were a woman, or accused of a crime, or the subject of Israelite war conquests, you're out of luck. Let me know if you would like to debate this in greater academic depth.

It's also debatable then as now whether anyone ever "willingly" became a slave to pay off their debts. Debtors' prisons don't have a great ethical record, historically speaking.
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-21 23:37:12+00:00
Devices are completely locked down users do not have admin rights and must make a request for anything to be installed or executed. They cant even use a USB without getting approval. Software must come from our internal software repo and we run updates so often that known mac haters beg for macs to escape the win11 hell we've created. Its awful and I feel gross helping manage such a user hostile environment. Yesterday our update tool shutdown someones computer in the middle of a important action. It prompted him 3 times with 15min intervals then shut down his pc. He was going berserk as he lost a lot of progress.

Most of this is because of the strict compliance requirements our security team enforces on us. But some of it is done because we dont know how to implement the stuff in a way that is strict but lenient. Mac is way better because we dont have as much invasive tooling that supports it.
by donner_dropout | 2026-01-21 23:38:37+00:00
Sincere condolences to the Strava devs: if the migration headache gets to be too much, Fireworks AI is still hosting Llama 3.3 70B (and 40+ others). Even if your enterprise budget is more "scrappy startup" than "big tech" right now, our GTM team is open to talking. Or just DIY it—the platform is built for self-serve. If you need some credits to skip the procurement hurdles, email marketing [at] fireworks.ai and we'll hook you up.
by tacostakohashi | 2026-01-21 23:38:41+00:00
Totally standard / "normal" at BigCo (fortune 500, banks, etc.).

At MegaCorp, there is a never ending arms race between security/compliance teams locking things down, adding approval and surveillance checks, and everyone else just trying to do their job.

Usually there are workarounds and backdoors available to people in the know. If you kick up a fuss, you'll be seen as "difficult". A key part of the job is finding tricks to get things done _despite_ all of the rules / checks in place trying to protect you from yourself.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-21 23:38:47+00:00
The current administration is post constitution. That (“post constitution”) is a big part of the project 2025 ideology, and you can look up what’s been said on this topic before. It’s not something that they view as a law that limits them but more like an annoyance in their way. So an assertion that a constitutional right doesn’t matter is completely in line with their strategy. Every violation is a way to normalize this until it’s legal.
by neurodyne | 2026-01-21 23:38:48+00:00
Not to be yet another critical voice, but where are your prices actually coming from? I'm in the US, and I just chose the top three "Price/TB" items and none of the prices on your site agree with the actual item pages on Amazon.

- Toshiba X300 16TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive
- https://terabytedeals.com/us: $229.95
- https://amazon.com/dp/B0CYQXNCVZ: $353.30 new

- Western Digital 18TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD
- https://terabytedeals.com/us: $259.99
- https://amazon.com/dp/B08K3TFM92: $361.53 used, $549.59 new

- Western Digital 22TB WD Purple Pro Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD
- https://terabytedeals.com/us: $329.69
- https://amazon.com/dp/B0B5VYRJ6Q: $465.00 new

You can claim Amazon price volatility, but I don't suspect that to be what's going on here. CamelCamelCamel price history graphs show that these items have never been anywhere near the terabytedeals.com prices looking back the last three months, including Amazon, 3rd Party New, or 3rd Party Used prices.

- https://3cmls.co/US/B0CYQXNCVZ
- https://3cmls.co/US/B08K3TFM92
- https://3cmls.co/US/B0B5VYRJ6Q

In fact, my spidey senses are tingling. The only strings that match the terabytedeals.com prices are completely different items.

These other items and prices only appear if you choose the "See All Buying Options" button or the "Other sellers on Amazon" menu. Then wait for the "Didn't find what you were looking for? Consider these alternative items" section to load.

- For B0CYQXNCVZ (16TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NTDWMSQ (6TB) which *IS* listed as $229.95.
- For B08K3TFM92 (18TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMJPRLJV (18TB) which *IS* listed as $259.99.
- For B0B5VYRJ6Q (22TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0966V6YJB (12TB) which *IS* listed as $329.69.

That this pattern holds true for three items, seems like maybe the wrong prices are being scraped somehow?
by cortesoft | 2026-01-21 23:40:01+00:00
Personally, probably not, although I would be more likely to than if I couldn't access the source.

I just don't have a good history with software created and sold by a company. Their incentives rarely seem aligned with mine, and I have had too many rug-pulls to fall for it again.

Companies that start out with sensible and open policies too often struggle to make money, and then end up trying to pull back on their openness and suddenly important bits aren't able to be modified or controlled by the user anymore.
by jchw | 2026-01-21 23:40:56+00:00
To be completely fair, this becomes significantly less mystifying when you trace back the origins of the free software movement...

edit: To be a bit less opaque, a relevant quote:

> In the late 1970s, Richard Stallman had an issue with a new printer installed in the MIT AI Lab, where he worked at the time, which ran proprietary firmware. Richard Stallman was frustrated that he could not receive a copy of the printer software and edit the code to solve his problem. This early experience made him realize limits of non-free software was a social issue.

Importantly: it was never about cost. It was about the rights of users of software. It's just that the particular rights that GNU was concerned with also makes it challenging to have a moat on monetizing the resulting software.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-21 23:41:06+00:00
> By now under Trump only 20% of the number of illegals that Obama deported have been deported. I'm not saying Trump won't surpass Obama's score but... Obama was the posterchild of the dems: so where's the outrage? Apparently Tom Homan learned under Obama.

I don’t remember any evidence of unconstitutional raids, or illegal detainment of citizens, or outright murder of Americans in the streets under Obama. It’s not about the numbers. It’s the purposeful violation of our laws and the addiction to violence we are seeing among ICE agents.
by Fwirt | 2026-01-21 23:41:09+00:00
This was my belief for many years, but then I tried sniping (with the same prices I was putting as my maximum bid before!) and my success rate skyrocketed and the prices I was paying dropped.

It seems that despite repeated reminders and explanations, there are three groups of people using eBay "incorrectly" that make the sniping strategy viable:
1) People who do not understand proxy bidding and think that they "need" to repeatedly bid in increments.
2) People who are irrational about their price ceiling and are willing to bid above their price ceiling because they want to "win".
3) People who want to drive up the price either to deprive others of a good deal, or to drive up the price on behalf of the seller by starting a bidding war with the two above groups.

From a sellers perspective it is common to deal with buyers who won't pay because they paid "more than they wanted", although this is against the eBay ToS and a bid is a contract to purchase the item, because there are few consequences for not doing so.

For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed. I wonder if this has to do with eBay's search ranking algorithm or some other irrational behavior that I don't understand. At any rate, bidding with 5 or less seconds left to go seems to defeat the above behaviors. I find it distasteful and irrational but it works so I put up with it.

eBay's reputation and trust network is really what makes it a viable product at this point. Given how unreliable Facebook Marketplace buyers are and how many scams are present, I would hesitate to conduct any major transactions beyond a local area.
by protocolture | 2026-01-21 23:41:17+00:00
Spotify cancelled my subscription. I started off with a Spotify partner subscription with my wife, which grandfathered into some other thing, like a family subscription, and then whatever I had got cancelled. Meanwhile I found a new local radio station has started playing 60% of what I like, some new (to me) joint venture thats a web first marketing company and they bought a bunch of radio stations to add local radio advertising to their list of services. Between spotify with ads, radio with ads, I am listening to radio, while planning out how to most easily go back to just having my favourites on my phone or maybe even an mp3 player.
by foota | 2026-01-21 23:42:07+00:00
Imo programming is fairly different between vibes based not looking at it at all and using AI to complete tasks. I still feel engaged when I'm more actively "working with" the AI as opposed to a more hands off "do X for me".

I don't know that the same makes as much sense to evaluate in an essay context, because it's not really the same. I guess the equivalent would be having an existing essay (maybe written by yourself, maybe not) and using AI to make small edits to it like "instead of arguing X, argue Y then X" or something.

Interestingly I find myself doing a mix of both "vibing" and more careful work, like the other day I used it to update some code that I cared about and wanted to understand better that I was more engaged in, but also simultaneously to make a dashboard that I used to look at the output from the code that I didn't care about at all so long as it worked.

I suspect that the vibe coding would be more like drafting an essay from the mental engagement POV.
by abrookewood | 2026-01-21 23:42:11+00:00
It is hard for IT departments to continue to allow that freedom as the company grows and compliance requirements creep in. I am in the weird position of being responsible for Risk & Compliance while also directing the IT policy for personal machines. I've managed to hold on and grant everyone local admin access, but I get a LOT of push back every year from auditors and customers running their own audits. I'm hoping that continues, but it's probably 50/50.
by subroutine | 2026-01-21 23:42:38+00:00
But most of what you are suggesting could be automated without the LLM. The price and categorical condition (new, great, good, fair, etc.) could be evaluated for a search query without getting LLM agents involved. I'm just surprised that an LLM evaluation of the written product description is the tipping point (often those descriptions are empty or contain irrelevant information), where people would switch from reviewing their carts to allowing autonomous transactions without in-the-loop supervisory control.
by Bender | 2026-01-21 23:42:41+00:00
Having the national guard get things under control means pitting them against ICE and likely actually triggering a civil war.

No, used correctly the police and national guard would round up the rioters. The governor is seeing it the other way around because he is in a lot of trouble with the federal government at the moment for unrelated issues. I never base things strictly on articles as the authors are often misinformed and wish to control narratives. The governor not only wants the riots he is actively promoting fights between his citizens and ICE.
by MaKey | 2026-01-21 23:42:44+00:00
You could set up a monitoring solution that alerts you if one of your devices is suddenly reachable from the internet via IPv6. It will probably never fire an alert but in your case might help you sleep better. IPv6 privacy extensions could help you too.

In practice I don't think it's really an issue. The IPv6 firewall will probably not break in a way that makes your device reachable from the internet. Even if it would, someone would have to know the IPv6 address of the device they want to target - which means that you have to connect to a system that they have control of first, otherwise it's unlikely they'll ever get it. Lastly, you'd have to run some kind of software on that device that has a vulnerability which can be exploited via network. Combine all that and it gets so unlikely that you'll get hacked this way that it's not worth worrying about.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 23:42:55+00:00
To be fair yes, but I am finding that its much easier to lobotomize in the sense that atleast open source models like glm 4.7 are really permissive & even some non open source models are permissive as well.

of course chatgpt might deny it but It is just the tip of the ice berg.

My worries actually are that we might use these models and think we are private but when in actuality, we are not. We are probably gonna see an open source model which is really good for such purposes while being able to run on normal hardware (macs etc.) without much hassle. I tried liquidfm on my mac and its a 1B model and it has some flaws and isn't completely uncensored but I don't know to me it does feel like an more compact and even uncensored model can be built for very simple purposes.
by rishab178 | 2026-01-21 23:43:00+00:00
> EU together with UK and Canada hold more Treasurys than the entire rest of the world combined

That is just not true? Out of the $38T, ~75% is held be US Domestic entities. Even of the remaining 25%, these 3 don’t combine together to form a majority. It’ll come out to something like $3.5T out of the $9.1T foreign holding (~38%). Or under 10% of the total debt.

https://economicsinsider.com/top-15-largest-us-treasury-hold...
by holoduke | 2026-01-21 23:43:14+00:00
Similar story here , but started mine when first Android phones were released. Had great success. And still have. Now with AI I have 2 max accounts with Claude and I don't touch any code anymore. I went full high risk cowboy style. All code. Server management, databases, security, upgrades, root access. Access to all my accounts, keys, hashes all goes into my prompts. Everything with ai. I don't even go to the Playstore site to publish. The only thing I touch is my terminal with Claude instances and opencode, Gemini or codex as backups.
by ragall | 2026-01-21 23:44:05+00:00
> Interesting segue from claiming Europe is 20-40 years behind the US to claiming if Europe's policy choices have resulted in any better outcomes than the US its because they're enriching themselves by taking advantage of the "peace dividend"!

That's not what I claimed. Europe is 20-40 years behind in how the social fabric is being destroyed, making everything precarious and lives shitty, stressful and meaningless. Many good choices in Europe have slowed down that decay, but I'm afraid it's just slowed, not arrested.

And it's not so much as the "peace dividend" helping Europe, but the opposite: the US have made themselves poor because with the same economic framework as today, the US would be in a much better position if it had an efficient healthcare system, instead of one that spends 2-3x the European average for worse outcomes, and if it didn't drive up the cost of living by allowing boomers to print themselves money by restricting housing construction though zoning.
by kryogen1c | 2026-01-21 23:44:29+00:00
>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards

This argument has always seemed obviously false to me. You're sure acting like theres a moral truth - or do you claim your life is unguided and random? Did you flip your hitler/pope coin today and act accordingly? Play Russian roulette a couple times because what's the difference?

Life has value; the rest is derivative. How exactly to maximize life and it's quality in every scenario are not always clear, but the foundational moral is.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-01-21 23:44:47+00:00
APL predates ASCII by a couple years.

It originally wasn't even intended as a software language, but rather a uniform mathematical notation in the style of curry's combinators, but more practical for describing non trivial algorithms.

So he was in an era where the expectation was if you were typesetting a mathematical monograph you'd already be doing stuff like swapping the balls on your IBM typewriter for math symbols.

It's not a choice you'd make today obviously, but it was entirely reasonable then.

As for why it persists, simple answer is APL fans like it that way. It's trivial to translate to some ascii text representation. I think anyone strongly motivated to do that just switched to j, k, or if even those are two weird goes to numpy or such.
by observationist | 2026-01-21 23:44:55+00:00
>>> The BitCraft source code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for license details. The license applies only to the contents of this repository. It doesn't extend to any other assets or code that is not part of BitCraftPublic.

Contents of the repo are fair game, anything bitcraft related outside the repo is not, and you have to share attribution under Apache - seems fair. I don't see any bitcraft assets or trademark things in the codebase, but I wonder how much of the game logic and play has to change before it's sufficiently different from the things being protected?
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-21 23:45:01+00:00
In any case they have an agreement with copyright holders. Anna Archive does not.

IP laws are broken, keep extending protection, and do not prevent distribution exclusivity.

I could sell a license to Bob who can sell my arts to you. But I won't give a license to Alice to even be able to enjoy the art for the fee I charged Bob, and I can tell Bob to do the same and not give it away to Alice at any cost. The law would say that's fine, and let's even arrest Bob if he ever sells to Alice.