MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by etruong42 | 2026-01-17 21:57:32+00:00
It's nice to see someone else (unsurprisingly) reached identical conclusions as me! I would like to try adding a 3rd reason: dumb subordinates don't upset the apple cart because they don't really have the capacity to do so, and people in power hate upsetting the apple cart as they love the status quo that puts them in power.

Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve things, or at least call out idiocy.

I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not). Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will defer to authority.

It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their own power rather than creating value will promote people (at least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship, producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a career treadmill faster.
by falloutx | 2026-01-17 21:57:32+00:00
This is very accurate to my experience. Product & management dont understand basics and anyone who ever had a manager/pm, you know you had to explain to them the same thing multiple times. Product Managers also struggle to align among themselves and they dont care about future velocity, just current velocity. Then you have programmers who have to basically connect all the things and make sure it doesn't break too much.
by dahart | 2026-01-17 21:59:15+00:00
Agreed, that’s what I’ve been saying from the top. Again, you’re disagreeing with @latexr, and agreeing with me.

The tautology is that all companies care about money. Companies care about money by definition. Many companies and many people in companies also care about customers and product quality. However, there is an absolute limit to how much money a company can leave on the table, regardless of what the customer wants, and serving the customer’s best interest becomes a ‘bad decision’ and threatens the ability for the company to do anything for the customer the moment it’s unprofitable, as soon as costs exceed income. This effectively means that at some level, companies must prioritize profit over service, otherwise service will cease to exist. The balance must lean in favor of the company on average over time.
by uecker | 2026-01-17 21:59:22+00:00
"remaining coal",This sounds as if nuclear did produce the majority. But it never produced more than 30% of the electricity in Germany. In 2000 it was 60% fossil fuels and 30% nuclear. Renewables today produce 60% and fossil fuels are below 40% (coal only 20%). Of course, Germany could have decided to build more nuclear. It could have also decided to build renewables faster. Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked. The result is that there are now immense investments into renewables worldwide.
by retrac | 2026-01-17 22:00:28+00:00
4 MB of SRAM in the '80s would have been the main RAM of a supercomputer.

We still use SRAM today. It's what level-1 cache and registers are implemented with - actual flip-flops, can be toggled with one cycle delay. Supercomputers used to make their entire main memory out of SRAM, effectively the whole thing was L1 cache.

The 486 had an on-chip cache - 8 or 16 KB.

Off-chip access to the DRAM involved wait states. The read or write is stalled until the DRAM enters the appropriate state. The 486 would also do block reads of 16 bytes at a time to fill an entire cache line. This is around the time main memory and the CPU became increasingly decoupled.

Avoiding all the complexity of managing DRAM is why hobbyists use SRAM these days. Basically: to avoid cost. Ironic!
by defrost | 2026-01-17 22:00:34+00:00
The river Thames in the Kingdom of England ( ~950 AD -> now +/- various other countries ) usually was freely flowing - just as the article states.

You are, perhaps, not used to having a long view of time, stretching back to at least the founding of your capital city two thousand and more years past on the banks of that very river.

There was a relatively short period of time when the Thames did freeze in winter and England was much colder, this article talks about a chunky bit of architecture during that period.

The windows are discussed wrt their thermal effects, allowing the sun in to heat central stone during the day on one side of the building, likely with heavy curtains at night, with windows blocked internally and largely for show on the rear.
by GaryBluto | 2026-01-17 22:01:14+00:00
> The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with no awareness of how absurd it is...

I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?

> Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn.

Please don't turn Hacker News into a site for endlessly regurgitating lame social media "gotchas" or slogans. There's already many, many websites for that.
by jhawk28 | 2026-01-17 22:01:26+00:00
DevOps is dead because it's run by a bunch of ops people who don't know how to do dev and a bunch of dev people who don't know how to do ops. The only tooling problem is that a bunch of companies created "DevOps tools" that then get dictated to use: K8s, terraform, etc. The only way this works is if you build the application to fit within those frameworks. Writing an indexer that is massively parallel and is mainly constrained by CPU/Memory. Instead, you have devs building something that gets thrown over the fence to a devops team that then containerizes it and throw it on K8s. What happens if the application requires lots of IOPS or network bandwidth? K8s doesn't schedule applications that way. "Oh you can customize the scheduler to take that into account". 2 years later, it's still not "customized" because they are ops people who don't know how to code. If you do customize it, the API is going to change in a few months which will break when you upgrade.
by simianparrot | 2026-01-17 22:01:41+00:00
Sure, but local is a radius. There's my local, then there's my region's local, then there's my country's local. As wonderful as globalism sounds on paper, if saving the global average leads to a drought or a flood for another country, or another region, then you are trying to convince others of giving up a lot for no tangible relevant gain.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-17 22:01:46+00:00
About 10 years ago I found old mail/letters belonging to my great aunt. One of these lettres did really stand out: just mundane stuff, some insurance invoice, but the font on that letter was a thing of beauty. It took me quite some time but I ended up finding which font was used in that (typerwrited) letter and it was some Olivetti font.

I've got a scan of that letter and reference somewhere and although I don't remember the ref right now, I know I eventually found which font it was here:

https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-96540.html

P.S: I've got great memories of my father smoking cigs while typing on his IBM selectric eletric typewriter.
Show HN: Detection-first bot traffic analysis (proof before blocking)
by redwine13 | 2026-01-17 22:01:51+00:00
Blocking bots by category kept breaking legitimate traffic (assistants, search, integrations).

So I built a detection-first tool that observes behavior and shows proof (logs, counts, patterns) before enforcing anything.

Still early. Looking for feedback from people dealing with real bot noise and false positives.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-17 22:01:55+00:00
It's usually referenced as "Hybrid Shutdown" in Microsoft documentation.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system...

> "Note: In Windows, fast startup is the default transition when a system shutdown is requested. A full shutdown (S5) occurs when a system restart is requested or when an application calls a shutdown API."

Technically it's entering a "hybrid" S4 Hibernation with S0 Standby after all users have been logged out. To bypass it you need to press Shift while clicking Shutdown, running the `shutdown /s /t 0` command, or else disabling Fast Startup. You can tell that you didn't do a true S5 shutdown because the system's uptime will not reset.

But disabling Modern Standby in your BIOS will also disable it because Window's power management logic is set during installation. With modern standby enabled, Windows tries to be always on and always connected. When you disable modern standby, Windows doesn't entirely change it's logic so much as it notices it can't send the same power state commands, so it reverts to S5 Shutdown.

I chose to disable it in BIOS because Microsoft can't really turn it back on when I do it that way. Because the thing is... I disabled Fast Startup after the second time it happened. But some Microsoft updates re-enable Fast Startup, and it's not hard to find forum posts complaining about that.
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 22:02:13+00:00
Moravec's paradox likely comes in to play, what's easy is hard and vice versa.

The puzzles would probably be easy. Myst's puzzles are basically IQ tests, and LLMs ace traditional IQ tests: https://trackingai.org/home

On the other hand, navigating the environment, I think the models may fail spectacularly. From what we've seen from Claude Plays Pokemon, it would get in weird loops and try to interact with non-interactive elements of the environment.
by lyu07282 | 2026-01-17 22:03:39+00:00
Leftists wanted her to not be a dog shit politician in order for her to win, they were screaming for her to embrace real substantive policy positions and not business as usual, corrupt, liberal elitism. The same leftists are now in the street protecting communities from the gastapo, while liberals debate about which words they can say. It were those exact liberal politics that lost Hillary the election too, and then you were screaming too about how it was all Bernie's fault. For christ sake, Trump was able to sell himself as the PEACE CANDIDATE, how can you fuck this up so badly?
by megaBiteToEat | 2026-01-17 22:03:41+00:00
Oh come on. Programmers discuss how to "store" data in memory as a data model all the time.

You're reducing definitions and meaning too far to make an ultimately empty point just to contribute the thread.

If social medias only contribution is language policing, then it really should die off. What a waste of resources so functional illiterate nobodies can project ego.
by amtamt | 2026-01-17 22:04:01+00:00
> There's also a worrying underlying assumption being made here that the answers your LLM will give you are accurate and trustworthy.

I first hand saw in, AWS devDays, an AI giving SIWINCH as "root-cause" of Apache error in a containerized process is in EKS for a backend FCGI process connection error.
It has been extremely hard since that demo to trust any AI for system level debugging.
by devsda | 2026-01-17 22:04:03+00:00
> The usual rejoinder I've seen is that AI can just rewrite your whole system when complexity explodes.

Live and even offline data transformation and data migration without issues are still difficult problems to solve even for humans. It requires meticulous planning and execution.

A rewrite has to either discard the previous data or transform or keep the data layer intact across versions which means more and more tangled spaghetti accumulated over rewrites.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-17 22:04:21+00:00
An article in The New York Times reported that a “a group of scholars and activists” had come together to build a new university “dedicated to free speech.”

Is UATX another "freedom of speech" rug pull, like Elon taking over Twitter, or Trump "bringing back freedom of speech"? I guess in general, I'm asking if we should be very wary of those using the language of free speech, but don't have a history of dealing honestly with the concept or the realities.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-17 22:04:44+00:00
I think it's like super insane people think that anyone can just "code" an app with AI and that can replace actual paid or established open-source software, especially if they are not a programmer or know how to think like one. It might seem super obvious if you work in tech but most people don't even know what an HTTP server is or what is pytho, let alone understanding best practices or any kind of high-level thinking regarding applications and code. And if you're willing to spend that time in learning all that, might as well learn programming as well.

AI usage in coding will not stop ofc but normal people vibe coding production-ready apps is a pipedream that has many issues independent of how good the AI/tools are.
by prhn | 2026-01-17 22:05:48+00:00
What does "the crime is less egregious" even mean?

Morally, you burglarized a home.

Legally, at least in CA, the charge and sentencing are equivalent.

If someone also commits a murder while burglarizing you could argue the crime is more severe, but my response would be that they've committed two crimes, and the severity of the burglary in isolation is equivalent.
by musicale | 2026-01-17 22:06:11+00:00
The 2012 "Retina" MacBook Pro design was great.

The 2016 redesign stumbled with the terrible "butterfly" keyboard, the unpopular touchbar (which removed a physical esc key), etc., but it also had 4 thunderbolt ports and could drive an external 5K monitor (same panel as 27" "Retina" iMac), and it was significantly thinner than its successor design, the M1 MacBook Pro. Although the ARM models run very cool, the x86 models still had good thermals, better than ThinkPads I am familiar with.
by matltc | 2026-01-17 22:06:23+00:00
A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb?

Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness.

I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
by fritzorino | 2026-01-17 22:06:42+00:00
> What's being American other than an international embarrassment and a bully, at this point?

This is a good point and I don't know what the answer is. To be American is to be a citizen of Eternal Trumpistan. Trump is America and America is Trump at this point. They have no soft power on the world stage at all any more, they're largely detested, even by their own friends.

The USA had an important role to play in the rest of the 21st century and China could have been contained. But it's over now. Good job Americans. Good job you fucking morons.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-17 22:06:56+00:00
Actually I mixed up S3 and S4. I just hit the wrong key.

Microsoft's Fast Startup is also known as Hybrid Shutdown. When Modern Standby is enabled, a system shutdown will log the user off, then use a combination of S4 Hibernation and S0 Standby.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-17 22:07:30+00:00
If it's really cold outside, an electric heater isn't going to do much if your house doesn't have good insulation. It'll be cranking away on high 24/7 and the room will still be cold. Building direction, window choice, room design, etc all contribute to the overall thermal efficiency so that the space heater can be effective.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-17 22:08:11+00:00
Christianity also assumes free will and non-determinism, yeah otherwise it would be quite pointless. It also includes the possibility of willfully turning away from God, which is not intended by him. If you think of a place where (most) things behave exactly as God created them, that's the story before that apple[0], but guess what, it ended.

[0] ... I know that that is an translation error.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-17 22:08:26+00:00
I read about mathematical expectation in a poker book for the first time a long time ago and it's really an interesting way to think about the world. In real life, it's a bit different though since there are other factors than just raw percentages like poker hands. For example, you could do everything right and still fail while someone else (like a nepo hire) can do everything wrong and still succeed.

Life's odds are rigged.
by thrance | 2026-01-17 22:08:33+00:00
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).

But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
by coldtea | 2026-01-17 22:08:39+00:00
The post itself is AI (or co-AI) slop, which means it can be just ignored.

>If an idiot like me can clone a product that costs $30k per month — in two hours — what even is software development? (...) The new software developer is no longer a craftsman. It’s the average operator, empowered

If entire industries employee counts are decimated and/or commodified, this means the "new software developer" wont find people to pay for what they create (whether software or a software driven service). For the majority, it also means further degradation of the kind of jobs one will be able to find.
by musicale | 2026-01-17 22:08:43+00:00
Non-upgradable RAM is the downside of "unified" RAM inside the Apple Silicon SiP (upside is good memory bandwidth and eliminating data copies between CPU and GPU.)

Non-upgradable SSD is the downside of Apple using raw flash modules (which macOS manages directly I believe) and soldering them to the board (upside may be more flexible and efficient flash management and possibly thinner with more reliable connections.)

Business upside is Apple getting more money out of us as we are upsold to the next RAM and storage tiers. ;-/

My strategy with Apple laptops to get the max RAM and flash storage you can afford, and a low-profile SD card for offload if necessary (wish Apple supported MicroSD Express like Nintendo does with Switch 2.)
by gethly | 2026-01-17 22:09:15+00:00
Yes, but not SaaS or services in general but products. And focus on B2B, not B2C because money in B2C is there only for huge companies whereas if you hit the right niche, you can make bank with B2B.

Also, disregard any "success stories", as they are 99.999% funded by a massive piles of money and immeasurable amount of connections in high and right places, that you never hear of.
by aghilmort | 2026-01-17 22:10:03+00:00
really great! adjacent well-done ASCII using Braille blocks on X this week:

nolen: "unicode braille characters are 2x4 rectangles of dots that can be individually set. That's 8x the pixels you normally get in the terminal! anyway here's a proof of concept terminal SVG renderer using unicode braille", https://x.com/itseieio/status/2011101813647556902

ashfn: "@itseieio You can use 'persistence of vision' to individually address each of the 8 dots with their own color if you want, there's some messy code of an example here", https://x.com/ashfncom/status/2011135962970218736
by coryrc | 2026-01-17 22:10:26+00:00
Forced ventilation of the attic creates negative pressure in the attic, which pulls conditioned air from the house. The additional air movement (which you should minimize with air sealing) costs more than the additional loses by the mildly increased temperature differential through the insulation.

If you aren't using A/C and have the windows open, then it only helps, of course.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-01-17 22:10:56+00:00
It matters to me, because they were not powerless to stop this scenario. The point of a representative democracy.

After January 6th, Mitch McConnell could have whipped up the votes to impeach Trump. Forever banishing him from office. Or over the past four years, when asked, "Did Donald Trump lose the election" instead of equivocating, every Congressperson could have said, "Of course he did. Donald Trump is a loser who lost a fair election, but threw a tantrum when the result did not go his way."

Liz Cheney took a stand, and the party punished her for it. Trump was too popular, Republicans preferred to latch onto that energy, despite the consequences.

No raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood. These leaders enabled this scenario, because they (correctly!) predicted it could help them hold onto power. Now we watch the results unfold as the world does everything to extricate itself from the USA.
by autoexec | 2026-01-17 22:11:19+00:00
If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, it would kiss your ass while it hallucinates about the files on your hard drives, invent command line switches that either don't do anything or does something other than what you want, and every command that used to take just 5-10 characters would now require you to type paragraphs. No thank you.
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 22:11:56+00:00
At a scale, I don't see a net negative of AI merging "shit by itself" if the developer (or the agent) is ensuring sufficient e2e, integration and unit test coverage prior to every merge, if in return I get my team to crank out features at a 10x speed.

The reality is that probably 99.9999% of code bases on this earth (but this might drop soon, who knows) pre-date LLMs and organizing them in a way that coding agents can produce consistent results from sprint to sprint, will need a big plumbing work from all dev teams. And that will include refactoring, documentation improvements, building consensus on architectures and of course reshaping the testing landscape. So SWE's will have a lot of dirty work to do before we reach the aforementioned "scale".

However, a lot of platforms are being built from ground-up today in a post-CC (claude code) era . And they should be ready to hit that scale today.
by sdifpl | 2026-01-17 22:12:07+00:00
It is not known why she committed suicide, as she did not leave a note. Bullying is unlikely to be the full picture. What most accounts of her life omit is the considerable trauma she experienced as a young child: she was repeatedly raped by her father, a crime for which he was arrested and convicted.

The Wikipedia article skims over this, instead focusing on the trans and bullying aspects. This will have been a deliberate editorial choice as well.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-17 22:12:13+00:00
If you want the raw data, you'll have to go dig in the archives to find the log books and card decks.

This[1] paper goes into some detail on how the digital records were constructed from the log books, card decks and such. This[2] paper deals with an update of those digital records, including new digitization efforts. You can download the raw digital data from ICOADS here[3].

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1987)068%3C1239:ACOADS%3E2... A Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (available on the hub of science)

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4775 ICOADS Release 3.0: a major update to the historical marine climate record (open access)

[3]: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/international-comprehensive-o...
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-17 22:12:15+00:00
I live in Europe. My house gets too warm maybe 1 week of the year. I bought a big floor standing fan and it fixed that.

30 degrees Centigrade is exceptional here.

Whereas in other parts of Europe it gets much hotter. Probably best not to generalise over a whole continent that covers 36 degrees of latitude (more than the contiguous 48 states of the US, at about 25 degrees), and goes from islands sat in the Gulf Stream to land sat next to an even larger land mass.