MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 21:10:49+00:00
> Question is how you stay motivated to keep at it - looks like it took about 4 years before you made similar to your Google salary, did family pressure or external pressure ever impact you? Or is it mainly just keep your eyes on the longer term goal?

I found it helpful to go in with low expectations.

I was listening to a lot of podcasts about bootstrapping while I was still at Google in 2017-2018, and even the big success stories usually had 5+ years of failing or succeeding only marginally. So, I went in with the expectation that I'd probably fail for the first 5 years, and so there wasn't that feeling of disappointment from not earning much the first few years.

I also had a lot of lucky conditions that made it easy to take the risk at the time, including no family to support, lots of savings, low expenses.

> I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.

Yeah, honestly I do sometimes think, "Wow, if I'd stayed at Google and kept getting that comp (which was about 50% equity IIRC), that would be a lot of money." But I also am very pleased with my life now, and I know I wouldn't have enjoyed my job nearly as much for the last 8 years had I stayed an employee. And that's a huge amount of my life to not do what I'd like to do.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-10 21:11:06+00:00
2 reasons basically.

1. Because people vote with their wallets and not their mouths, and most companies would rather have a cost accident (quickly refunded by AWS) rather than everything going down on a saturday and not getting back up until finance can figure out their stuff.

2. Because realtime cost control is hard. It's just easier to fire off events, store them somewhere, and then aggregate at end-of-day (if that).

I strongly suspect that the way major clouds do billing is just not ready for answering the question of "how much did X spend over the last hour", and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-10 21:11:29+00:00
> In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly.

In good times they were still a blatant form of government abuse however the majority were completely unaffected and so didn't get riled up about it.

Similar to how a vigorous defense of freedom of speech is somehow consistently less popular among constituents of whichever party happens to be in power, as well as when applied to "objectionable" political views.
by aftergibson | 2026-02-10 21:11:38+00:00
Christ, a $60m seed round.

The AI fatigue is real, and the cooling-off period is going to hurt. We’re deep into concept overload now. Every week it’s another tool (don’t get me started on Gas Town) confidently claiming to solve… something. “Faster development”, apparently.

Unless you’re already ideologically committed to this space, I don’t see how the average engineer has the energy or motivation to even understand these tools, never mind meaningfully compare them. That’s before you factor in that many of them actively remove the parts of engineering people enjoy, while piling on yet another layer of abstraction, configuration, and cognitive load.

I’m so tired of being told we’re in yet another “paradigm shift”. Tools like Codex can be useful in small doses, but the moment it turns into a sprawling ecosystem of prompts, agents, workflows, and magical thinking, it stops feeling like leverage and starts feeling like self-inflicted complexity.
by anon291 | 2026-02-10 21:11:42+00:00
The complex numbers is just the ring such that there is an element where the element multiplied by itself is the inverse of the multiplicative identity. There are many such structures in the universe.

For example, reflections and chiral chemical structures. Rotations as well.

It turns out all things that rotate behave the same, which is what the complex numbers can describe.

Polynomial equations happen to be something where a rotation in an orthogonal dimension leaves new answers.
by pino83 | 2026-02-10 21:12:13+00:00
> See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily.

You can't, sure. You shouldn't at least. But what does it mean to me? It leads to the fact that the friendship is pointless. So why should I take a lot of initiative, when I don't get anything back anymore? For a reason that they've actively decided for (typically), btw.

> Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.

I'm not talking about commercial/monetary/material profits. I'm talking about profits in terms of social lives. If my wording is unfortunate, I hope that it's still clear what I mean. One important (not the only one) currency in that regard is: Timeslots in the calendar.

PS: If the other side shows at least some remote awareness of the situation and indicates a little goodwill, it's already a different thing. In my personal experience, even that isn't common, though.
by HNisCIS | 2026-02-10 21:12:18+00:00
That's the thing though, they can't, at least until the very recent advent of EVs. We used to have similar vehicles (the old 80s/90s ford ranger, tacoma, etc) but they were regulated out of existence by CAFE standards.

Even if you repealed CAFE today, the automakers have all built their entire business strategy around selling enormous expensive vehicles and generally despise producing lower cost options.

We are starting to see what appears to be the beginnings of a small pickup renaissance due to electrification but none have actually hit the market yet and trump has further stalled that progress by messing with EV subsidies and environmental standards.
by ryukoposting | 2026-02-10 21:12:34+00:00
I'm not saying they should put their software stack on a Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess. But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge, and sounds like a jet engine.
by mygn-l | 2026-02-10 21:12:45+00:00
Personally, no number is natural. They are probably a human construct. Mathematics does not come naturally to a human. Nowadays, it seems like every child should be able to do addition, but it was not the case in the past. The integers, rationals, and real numbers are a convenience, just like the complex numbers.

A better way to understand my point is: we need mental gymnastics to convert problems into equations. The imaginary unit, just like numbers, are a by-product of trying to fit problems onto paper. A notable example is Schrodinger's equation.
by stoneforger | 2026-02-10 21:12:53+00:00
Sounds like a false dichotomy. NASA got all these different subcontractors to feed, in all these different states and they explicitly gutted MOL and dynasoar and all the air force projects that needed weird orbits and reentry trajectories so the space shuttle became a huge compromise. Perverse incentives and all that. It's not state organizations per se but rather non-profits that need to have a clear goal that creates capabilities, tools and utilities that act as multipliers for everyone. A pretty big cooperative. Like, I dunno , what societies are supposed to exist for.
by Aromasin | 2026-02-10 21:13:08+00:00
The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-10 21:13:12+00:00
>"Rotations fell out of the structure of complex numbers. They weren't placed there on purpose. If you want to rotate things there are usually better ways."

I mean, the derivation to rotate things with complex numbers is pretty simple to prove.

If you convert to cartesian, the rotation is a scaling operation by a matrix, which you have to compute from r and theta. And Im sure you know that for x and y, the rotation matrix to the new vector x' and y' is

x' = cos(theta)*x - sin(theta)*y

y' = sin(theta)*x + cos(theta)*y

However, like you said, say you want to have some representation of rotation using only 2 parameters instead of 4, and simplify the math. You can define (xr,yr) in the same coordinates as the original vector. To compute theta, you would need ArcTan(yr/xr), which then plugged back into Sin and Cos in original rotation matrix give you back xr and yr. Assuming unit vectors:

x'= xr*x - yr*y

y'= yr*x + xr*y

the only trick you need is to take care negative sign on the upper right corner term. So you notice that if you just mark the y components as i, and when you see i*i you take that to be -1, everything works out.

So overall, all of this is just construction, not emergence.
by tamimio | 2026-02-10 21:13:17+00:00
> You can get a prepaid SIM from a grocery store and register it with them

After you provide your gov ID

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...

So now this phone number is tied to your gov ID and bank account, amazing design of a single point of failure based on a broken protocol (GSM).
by prattmic | 2026-02-10 21:13:25+00:00
We changed the way we track Go threads in syscalls/cgo calls, which allowed us to remove one atomic store and one atomic compare-and-swap from the cgo call path. https://go.dev/cl/646198 and https://go.dev/cl/708596 are the relevant changes.

(It's basically an easter egg, but if you look at the source of the release notes, you will see that most entries in the release notes have an HTML comment referencing the Go CL or issue that the entry refers to.)
by buzer | 2026-02-10 21:13:39+00:00
According to AP News (https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...) at least one judge had his bank accounts closed. So it's not just your own government who can debank you in Europe.

Of course in this judge's case there might still be some banks who are willing to work with him even at the risk of getting sanctioned as there weren't language in the news that he was completely debanked which I assume they would highlight if it was the case.
by bubblethink | 2026-02-10 21:13:40+00:00
>Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.

For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You need a product that is 10x better than the competition, and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware, reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
by digiown | 2026-02-10 21:14:08+00:00
It is. I'm not a fan of Drew Devault, but I can agree with this article of his:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...

The most salient part:

> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-10 21:14:20+00:00
> We’d love to hear your thoughts

Google Mail should not be used, nor its use encouraged. Nor should you encourage the use of LLMs of large corporations which suck in user data for mining, analysis, and surveillance purposes.

I would also be worried about energy use, and would not trust an "agent" to have shell access, that sounds rather unsafe.
by tasuki | 2026-02-10 21:14:27+00:00
> Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child.

Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning. But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.
by StableAlkyne | 2026-02-10 21:14:35+00:00
> Web sites are the new banner ads and headings like that are the new `<blink>`.

It's been like this since the Dotcom era

Or did you forget that you can do anything at zombo.com?

It appears to be rather slow today, but here's a Wiki link for the uninitiated- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com
by malfist | 2026-02-10 21:15:18+00:00
What part of Voyager I and Voyager II are "augmented with agentic development?"

Surely if all software is augmented with agentic development now, our most important space probes have had their software augmented too, right?

What about my blog that I serve static pages on? What about the xray machine my dentist uses? What about the firmware in my toaster? Does the New York Stock Exchange use AI to action stock trades? What about my telescope's ACSOM driver?
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-10 21:15:32+00:00
Much like people have different takes on the right way to do the SDLC, we're gonna see a lot of takes on orchestration. None of are really that meaningful until we unblock on validation, but to the extent that they also come with observability tools, they're at least useful there. I'm dubious of agent specific silo'd task management though, that should be surfaced to entire teams.
by scalemaxx | 2026-02-10 21:15:51+00:00
I'm curious about your book journey. Sounds like having a big audience and pre-existing list really helps! How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that? Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer, and how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book? What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book? And, how do you plan to publish the book? Lots of book questions
by andyhedges | 2026-02-10 21:15:53+00:00
I have it (claude, codex) summarise what we've discussed about a design, big change, put it in an MD file and then I correct it, have it re-read it and then do the change.

Then later if it goes off piste in another session tell it to re-read the ADDs for x, y and z.

If someone could make that process less clunky, that would be great. However it's very much not just funnel every turd uttered in the prompt onto a git branch and trying a chug the lot down every session.
by roughly | 2026-02-10 21:15:57+00:00
> Laws are supposed to be crafted to be as applied by anyone, anywhere and at any time. This is why lawyers and politicians are supposed to have foresight and be prudent.

Except this is both impossible and a bad idea, which is why we have judges, juries, elections, and every other part of the system intended to constrain the blind application of the law.
by flatline | 2026-02-10 21:16:04+00:00
I think it represents a bigger threat than you realize. I can't use an AI for my day job to implement these multi-agent workflows I see. They are all controlled by another company with little or no privacy guarantees. I can run quantized (even more braindead) models locally but my work will be 3-5 years behind the SOTA, and when the SOTA is evolving faster than that timeline there's a problem. At some point there's going to be turnover - like a lake in winter - where AI companies effectively control the development lifecycle end-to-end.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-10 21:16:26+00:00
Anecdote from just now, from someone who's wanted to like LInux for ~20 years:

I updated Nvidia drivers from version 580 to 590 on Ubuntu 24, using the additional drivers window. Rebooted. Now instead of the OS, it's booting into something called "BusyBox (initramfs). with a shell. No error message. I don't feel like dedicating an indefinite time to fixing it. Maybe now LLMs will have replaced searching forums and Stack Overflow.

It is this class of problems that has kept me from switching. I'm not sure if it would be easier to track this down, or install the OS clean again. I lament having to make this decision.
by cyberax | 2026-02-10 21:16:31+00:00
In theory yes, but in practice it's more unclear. There are conflicting Supreme Court precedence, that weaken the Fourth Amendment in cases where criminal penalties don't apply. Asset foreiture is another example.

> I think it's a pretty big undersell to describe ICE as "marshals" too - they've got plenty of discretion in how they prioritize targeted people and who they detain. They are not just a neutral party executing court orders.

Yep. That's also a difference between theory and practice.
by neom | 2026-02-10 21:16:43+00:00
Maybe this isn't directly related to what you're saying and I'm not attacking it, I'm just thinking out loud: What would it mean to master gardening then? I've never gardened in my life but I grew up in Scotland around estate houses and castles, my friends dads were gardeners and each of them seems to be specialists in their own area, many working on the same estate, so what exactly is this "holistic experience of gardening"?
by jPendleton | 2026-02-10 21:17:02+00:00
Sean, I've never accused anyone of controlling my mind. That was merely the first instance of Cowen perjuring himself, which is implied by the WAPO article itself. Funny enough, another phony federal judge in DC just repeated that same smear a few months ago -- even as I'm suing Cowen for lying and the WAPO for printing it.

Cowen also lied during testimony about being a federal employee along with the other 2 suspects I identified in 2014. Cowen further lied about knowing Peter Thiel who runs the federal surveillance system, aka Palantir, aka CIA.

The U.S. courts are literally fake, run by the same agency:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SQ83YZ4EAC#JNh9Fjijb1b6
by simion314 | 2026-02-10 21:17:30+00:00
OK, but stop with bullshit that you get more stability because of new packages, you get latest features you read about or watched in some video but you also get the latest bugs, and to get fixes for this latest bugs you will upgrade again in a few months and you get the latest fixes and some new bugs.

There are some valid usecases to use rolling or some bleeding edge distro, like if you want to contribute to KDE or similar project you would want to track latests library versions, but for doing say a web dev job and soem enterteminent an LTS distro works better, you do not upgrade and you have the surprise that GNOME removed yet some new feature you were using, or soem stuff in Plasma broke and now you get a ton of notifications about something not working, or maybe you did not read the Arch forums before upgrading and you had cool package Y that conflicts with cool package Z and now your system is unbootable and you need to fix it instead of doing your actual work. (Arch fans should first Google Arch upgrade briked my system before commenting that this never happened to them).

Btw I used Arch in the past too when I had more free time and loved thinkering with my system.
by Aromasin | 2026-02-10 21:17:33+00:00
Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.
by anajuliabit | 2026-02-10 21:17:45+00:00
Building agents myself, this tracks. The issue isn't just that they violate constraints - it's that current agent architectures have no persistent memory of why they violated them.

An agent that forgets it bent a rule yesterday will bend it again tomorrow. Without episodic memory across sessions, you can't even do proper post-hoc auditing.

Makes me wonder if the fix is less about better guardrails and more about agents that actually remember and learn from their constraint violations.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-10 21:18:22+00:00
TFA's author is using GPU passthrough to get Windows to run games with anti-cheats that won't work under Linux. So you want full hardware virtualization with GPU passthrough for that to work: several hypervisors would do but Proxmox is Debian+hypervisor+LXC+ZFS and it is easy to use.

I got my brother, who's not a techie and who lives at the other end of the world, to install Proxmox and get GPU passthrough working.

> Just put up a reasonable distro (I recommend Debian here

Proxmox is basically Debian.

Proxmox allows to do things that are totally overkill for beginners indeed but it's still simple to use for simple stuff.

I think we should encourage beginners, like my brother, to use solutions like Proxmox, not discourage them.
by nwbt | 2026-02-10 21:18:35+00:00
>I just looked up how KDE does it, in case you're using that, the file manager is called Dolphin, and apparently you might need to install an archive tool first such as Ark and/or 7zip, gotta give you that one, I'm a little shocked, that's a pretty shitty OOBE in my opinion[..]

I think that's an artifact from running just the liveimage and not installing it fully to the VM. I'm 99% certain Ark is included in a default Cachy/KDE install.
by evil-olive | 2026-02-10 21:18:45+00:00
there's been demos of using SQLite client-side, with the database hosted in S3, and HTTP range requests used to only fetch the necessary rows for the query.

there might be some piece I'm missing, but the first thing that comes to mind would be using that, possibly with the full-text search extension, to handle searching the metadata.

at that point you'd still be paying S3 egress costs, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't at least an order of magnitude less expensive than Vercel.

and since it's just static file hosting, it could conceivably be moved to a VPS (or a pair of them) running nginx or Caddy or whatever, if the AWS egress was too pricey.
by strangattractor | 2026-02-10 21:19:28+00:00
Having been in this game about 10 years longer I can understand how he feels. I distinctly remember when I realized that C compilers for the ARM produced better assembly than I could code by hand. Bitter sweet but the code being written became larger and more complex because of it.

Modern coding has become more complex than I would have ever thought possible. The number of technologies an individual would have to master to actually be a expert "full stack" coder is ludicrous. It is virtually impossible for an individual to prototype a complex Web based app by themselves. I think AI will lower that barrier.

In return we will get a lot more software - probably of dubious quality in many cases - as people with "ideas" but little knowledge start making apps. Not a totally bad thing but no utopia either. I also think it will likely reduce the amount of open source software. Content producers are already hoarding info to prevent AI bots from scraping it. I see no reason to believe this will not extend to code as more programmers find themselves in a situation more akin to musicians than engineers.
by whalesalad | 2026-02-10 21:19:28+00:00
This is usally due to DKMS (dynamic kernel module system). Each time you upgrade your kernel, the nvidia portion needs to be recompiled. If this goes wrong, you end up in a state where you cannot boot.

This is why everyone in the linux world has a very sour taste for nvidia. It's not their fault per-say, but they did opt to go this route versus contributing their drivers to the kernel like everyone else.