MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mc_maurer | 2026-01-13 15:35:59+00:00
Ecology PhD turned data scientist, I was looking to respond and you summed up my thoughts really well!

I will add that funding can complicate things a bit, funding sources often get wowed by more "advanced" methods, while the underlying science might be less than stellar. There are important questions that can be answered by small, elegant field studies, and there are questions that require larger datasets and more computation. When we start putting the methodological cart before the scientific horse, that's where we run into problems.
by belatwing | 2026-01-13 15:36:02+00:00
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by bell-cot | 2026-01-13 15:36:06+00:00
Instead of a pro-/anti- analysis of the situation based on ethnic/national groups, I'd parse things in terms of people favoring (or opposing) Authoritarian / Nationalistic / Violent behavior patterns. And be explicit about the degree to which the whole Israel/Palestine mess is a proxy war, between generally-Western pro-ANV groups, and generally anti-Western pro-ANV groups. And whatever sentiments they might voice - I see very little evidence that either of those sides actually cares about their conflict producing a human-rights hell.

Unfortunately, most humans are strongly biased to parse conflicts in pro-/anti- ethnic/national terms. Which is extremely convenient for both of the pro-ANV sides here. And a huge problem for those sides' first-order opposition.
by PedroBatista | 2026-01-13 15:36:07+00:00
Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it..

yeah, that's where the bad news start.

They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
by echelon | 2026-01-13 15:36:39+00:00
They don't need to.

They want marketshare to enhance their other market positions and give them optionality for future strategy.

They'd love the whole market, but they don't need it and they won't employ too many resources chasing that.

They're a powerful giant with hands in so many places. Each enforcing other endeavors.

This encourages people to stay in the Apple hardware ecosystem, for instance. It dog foods their silicon. It keeps people thinking of Apple as the creative brand and operating system. More creatives buying Apple -> more being produced and consumed for and on Apple.

Also the strategy of getting kids young has always been genius. They started that in the eighties, I think.
by tsunamifury | 2026-01-13 15:37:14+00:00
Maybe you should consider being more stoic about it.

Stoicism is a technology of control — inward control so the outward system can function.
It’s the same structure as algorithmic behavior modification, as corporate “resilience” doctrine, as military discipline, as American hustle culture.

Maybe see the cup for what the cup is, not what you wish it to be for yourself to cope with reality.

Furthermore it is not “rude” to criticize something. And Aurelius would certainly call you out on that with a laugh.
by adeltoso | 2026-01-13 15:37:43+00:00
Author here. Context + details that didn’t fit cleanly in the article:
This was a supervised experiment, not “hands off, let the AI run prod.”
I treated the AI as a junior sysadmin/operator with full read access and explicitly scoped write access, and I stayed accountable for architecture and decisions.
Setup (high level):
Single Raspberry Pi 5 running Debian
Self-hosted services (Nextcloud, finance tools, VPN, backups)
AI accessed the system via SSH, logs, config files, and command output
Tasks were given as concrete operational goals (“diagnose why X stopped working”, “make backups safer”, etc.)
What worked well:
Debugging real issues (DNS, IPv6 quirks, misconfigurations)
Writing small scripts and operational docs
Being extremely fast at “read unfamiliar system → form hypothesis → test”
What did not work well:
Anything involving long-term architectural judgment
Security decisions without explicit constraints
Situations where the right answer was “don’t touch this yet”
The biggest takeaway for me: this didn’t replace judgment, but it dramatically compressed the “thinking + doing” loop for ops work I already understand.
Happy to answer questions about failure modes, security boundaries, or how I constrained access.
by aquariusDue | 2026-01-13 15:37:52+00:00
In some ways I always wonder if this Build-A-Bear thingy we've developed in the last 100 or so years regarding spirituality, morals, principles and all that as an alternative to traditional religious practices isn't just as lame as what it's meant to replace but in its own kind.

I'm not advocating for religious institutions or theocracy, mind you, I'm trying to formulate an argument how someone talking about how living life in accordance to Stoics on YouTube or Christ in a church is more of an aesthetics issue than a virtue one.

Though I feel by the time I successfully formulate that argument I'll have multiple groups clamoring for my head.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-13 15:37:54+00:00
Cicada <- Mantis <- Oriole <- Courtier <- Pond, of which only the first three are explicit...

I did once run across some nice phrases at the end of a karate book, which (judging by the lack of hiragana) had been lifted, unattributed, from a chengyu-style source.

If we take 4-word to be the equivalent of 4-character:

Parry? Wait 'til late
Your lunge surprises yourself
Champion with two techniques

(hmm, that worked better than I thought it might!)
by mc_maurer | 2026-01-13 15:38:05+00:00
I'd also add that the best scientists I know have, for the duration of their careers, put the question first and pursued methods to fit. I know folks who have the wildest set of skills, from next-gen sequencing to fish tattooing and all sorts of random engineering skills. Willingness to learn new skills in the pursuit of worthwhile questions is one of the hallmarks of a good scientist, in my experience.
by concinds | 2026-01-13 15:38:08+00:00
All companies should do this. Sometimes I want a one-time purchase. Sometimes I want to try the program for a few months and I prefer a cheap subscription over a big upfront cost. And very, very rarely, I'll prefer the subscription, even though it's more expensive over time, to support a cool indie studio with recurring revenue instead of one-time purchases that may dry up and lead to lack of interest from the devs.
by philipallstar | 2026-01-13 15:38:20+00:00
> so anyone who says "Boo, not you too Apple" can easily be shut down with "You still have the option to buy it!" instead of leaving those critics without answers

This is like saying that it's clever for Mars to keep Mars Bars while launching a new bar, as it "shuts down" complaints that Mars Bars will no longer exist.
by ghaff | 2026-01-13 15:38:25+00:00
Dilbert definitely captured a 90s era corporate zeitgeist. But, after he departed PacBell, although there was the occasional strip that really nailed it, Dilbert never really moved on to modern SV/startup/open floor plan tech and it mostly felt like been there, done that. That said, Dilbert in its prime was easily in the top comics I enjoyed.
by chimprich | 2026-01-13 15:38:33+00:00
> That has never been his opinion. There are many interviews with him on YouTube and I suggest you listen to them.

I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings.

He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.
by yawaramin | 2026-01-13 15:38:58+00:00
I checked with Gemini 3 Fast and it provided instructions on how to set up a Dev Container or VM. It recommended a Dev Container and gave step-by-step instructions. It also mentioned VMs like VirtualBox and VMWare and recommended best practices.

This is exactly what I would have expected from an expert. Is this not what you are getting?

My broader question is: if someone is asking for instructions for setting up a local agent system, wouldn't it be fair to assume that they should try using an LLM to get instructions? Can't we assume that they are already bought in to the viewpoint that LLMs are useful?
by nicholasbraker | 2026-01-13 15:39:17+00:00
I don't have firsthand experience but I do know that IBM mainframes (Z-series) are still actively developed and lifecycled. Whether this is purely financial (as in: we keep the customer locked in to our ecosystem regardless if there are alternatives available which offer the same level of robustness etc.) or the platform really is better suited to the specific requirements set by banks, government agencies etc. remains to be seen..
by bluGill | 2026-01-13 15:39:21+00:00
He fell off the cliff when he left his day job to write the comic full time. At least that is my opinion. Falling down the cliff took a while, at first he was still close enough to corporate reality to still be realistic in his exaggerations and thus funny, but the longer he was a way the less his jokes were grounded in reality and so they became not funny because they felt a little too far out.

Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....

Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.
by svat | 2026-01-13 15:39:21+00:00
Here are some other translations of that passage (Enchiridion 26): https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...

- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.

- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”

- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.

The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.

[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]
by 112233 | 2026-01-13 15:39:42+00:00
What did I just read?

> Ever wonder why we need operating systems? They’re elaborate workarounds for the functional programming concept.

> An OS converts long-running synchronous flows of function-calling-function behavior into state machines by silently saving state somewhere deep in the system (process descriptors, stack frames, registers).

Half of the article is common sense, relatable sentiment (e.g., that FP as abstraction is really mismatched with how CPUs work).

And then there are head scratchers like the quoted bit.
by alwillis | 2026-01-13 15:39:49+00:00
> Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall

There's no indication Apple is planning to end the option of paying once for these apps.

Apple introduced subscriptions for Final Cut and Logic nearly three years ago [1]; this isn't new by any means. Pages, Numbers and Keynote remain available at no cost.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-brings-final-cu...
by speak_plainly | 2026-01-13 15:39:56+00:00
If Socratic philosophy is the greatest threat to state power, Stoicism is the framework for mass compliance. It's a psychological strategy for emotional management that replaces the traditional goals of inquiry. This system encourages individuals to obey authority and limit their emotional range to reach a state of internal comfort. This objective discourages the act of questioning. In this regard, it functions as an anti-philosophy.

The modern interest in Stoicism in my opinion is a move toward a secular version of the Christian experience. Modern Stoicism retains the Christian emphasis on submission and endurance while ignoring the superstitious elements inherent in Stoic physics, such as providential fatalism.

If your objective is to maintain a state of functioning passivity, Stoicism is the effective solution (but I wouldn't recommend it).
by DustinBrett | 2026-01-13 15:40:03+00:00
I can't tell if this was suppose to be for me, I am not Darren. The reply was on my thread...

My replies are at the same level as that which I respond to, never aggressive IMO.

And if you "knew" something about the relevant topic and leave it out, that in itself is part of the dishonesty.

So once you got a job at Google then you felt Waymo was better, hmmm.

Tesla has a robot taxi service that in some cases has nobody in the car. Also everyone that owns a Tesla has experienced FSD in which it goes from A to B without being touched which is the same as it driving by itself. A person just went cross country and back with this. So to say Tesla is doing none of the 100,000 things you think are required, I think that says more about what someone at Google thinks is needed vs what is happening on the ground.

I am not against remote operation in some cases, but those suggesting Waymo has solved this need to admit that it relies heavily on them for basic decision, like what to do when the power goes out at intersections.
by alphazard | 2026-01-13 15:40:05+00:00
A lot of comments here use this metaphor of emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed or they will accumulate and explode.
I think this can be traced to pop-psychology bullshit, and there isn't any neuroscientific basis backing it up.
It seems like wishful thinking by people who like expressing their emotions to others and want to justify their spend on therapists, or their occasional emotional outbursts.

Instead, the evidence points to the brain building habits around emotions and their regulation the same way it builds habits around everything else.
If you practice not feeling emotions or becoming identified with them, then that habit will continue and they will become easier to not feel.
There is not a debt to be paid, or a buildup to be released.

This is often framed in different ways, mediators talk about "creating distance" and "noticing but not indulging".
The timeless grug-brain approach is "ignoring", described by emotional people as "bottling up".
These are different ways to frame the same phenomenon, which is that the brain does what it has practiced.
by magicmicah85 | 2026-01-13 15:40:12+00:00
Always gave a sensible chuckle to his comics. One of my favorite scenes from the show was about "The Knack". My dad originally shared this with me, reminding me that I'm "cursed" for inheriting the knack from him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-13 15:40:14+00:00
A wall of post-it notes can be incredibly handy to the person that placed the post-it notes. The Start screen was never "random", it was designed for customization and personalization. Programs stayed where you told them to in the groups and sizes you wanted them to. Choosing a size would affect how much data an app could show. The program might provide a tile of new data it would show some of the time, but the program's name and icon would still show up in most of the tile variants (and hover tooltips worked on Desktop), and any app could only have at most 3 tiles at a time. The timing of tile flips was a bit random, but there was also a general rhythm to it you would pick up if you used it a lot. It was a very intentional "dance".

At least in my experience there was a lot of sense to it. I had a lot of data organized to my liking in Windows 8.
by 6stringmerc | 2026-01-13 15:40:42+00:00
Wow that is really fast, in my view, and I wonder how many more of his cohort will similarly crash out.

I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.

One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.

This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.
by dralley | 2026-01-13 15:40:55+00:00
If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.

Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.

Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
by teekert | 2026-01-13 15:40:57+00:00
RMS asks you to give something up: Your right to share a thing you made, under your conditions (which may be conditions even the receiving party agree on), nobody is forced in this situation, and then he calls that evil. I think that is wrong.

I love FOSS, don't get me wrong. But people should be able to say: I made this, if you want to use it, it's under these condition or I won't share it.

Again, imho the GPL is a blessing for humanity, and bless the people that choose it freely.
by wnevets | 2026-01-13 15:41:25+00:00
> Later (incorrect) predictions repeatedly featured in Politico magazine's annual lists of "Worst Predictions", including that one of Trump, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would die from COVID-19 by the end of 2020,[98] that "Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election

> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.

Jesus christ.
by kaycebasques | 2026-01-13 15:41:39+00:00
> “It is in nobody’s interests for there to be worries and instability in the U.S.,” said Jonathan Haskel, an economics professor at Imperial College Business School and former member of the rate-setting committee at the Bank of England. “Other countries hold lots of American assets. Savers in Europe will implicitly be invested in the American stock market. America is in many ways a flagship engine, with the A.I. revolution going on. Nobody in the world wants to see that at risk.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/trump-powell-cen...
by ryandvm | 2026-01-13 15:41:42+00:00
The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale.

To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
Show HN: Meter – web scraper that syncs changes & bypasses antibot
by hankwilliamsjr | 2026-01-13 15:42:28+00:00
I recently found that tools like firecrawl aren’t economical to run at scale to extract structured content or track content changes.

I needed to extract data at scale, and LLM markdown wasn’t useful and destroyed my RAG retrieval metrics.

With this, I build meter for structured data extraction and change detection to keep scraped data in sync.

Free beta - live demo on the site without logging in
by DustinBrett | 2026-01-13 15:42:36+00:00
Optimus is early days, and my take isn't against remote operators but pointing out that Waymo relies on them much more than Tesla. You can go from 1 side of the country to the other without ever touching the wheel, something Waymo could not do. And the SF power outage incident showed us that it is actually only autonomous until it isn't, then you have a bunch of cars that can't move and won't and do not.
by showerst | 2026-01-13 15:42:40+00:00
I think that's great!

Maybe that's the answer, hope your town gets one or two good journalists who can live off the pool of people who do care. Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, etc.

I do wish there was a more systematic market for it though, it's crazy how much value a few reporters can provide just by providing the check on power of asking basic questions to those in power.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-13 15:43:05+00:00
The way I see live tiles is that it was MS abandoning widgets that existed since vista (although they were removed later for security reasons) and coming up with a new thing to start all over with, and didn't backporting it so the only way you'd get them is on the (less popular) new version of the OS. Also they were tied into the start screen/menu, you couldn't drop on on your desktop.
by bluGill | 2026-01-13 15:43:32+00:00
As your mourn, remember that this space can now be used for something else. It is easy to see what we lost, but it is hard to see what we lose by not getting rid of something obsolete.

These structures were not something we could reasonably make into a museum (too much work required to make them safe/useful for that, and there already is a nice museum in the city that I strongly recommend you visit instead), so it is time to move on.