MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-26 03:52:18+00:00
A few things come to mind.

1.) This was at the beginning of commercial mass air travel and freight transport.

Limited by range, speed, and weight for decades to come. Economics. Luxury.

Now search for the few surviving pictures of the spacious interior of the passenger wagons, and try to imagine how it would be to travel in them with 200 to 250kph.

Which was the intended speed, and already technically possible at the times. Even with normal gauge steam trains on good tracks.

2.) About the wide bends, no sleepers and ballast.

Look at any HSR > 250kph operating today. All of them are ballast- and sleeperless, so called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballastless_track

or https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feste_Fahrbahn

Sharp bends? Nope. Why? Look at how any HSR is tracked and profiled out of the inner cities, be it by tunneling, or really long bridges. Japan, France, Germany, China...

Building BIG with concrete was a thing then, just look at early 'Autobahn'. No tarmac, just big slabs of concrete. The same could be said for parts of the US at the time.

3.) BIG freight, simplifying construction of all sorts of things. Bigger prefabrication, less need for assembly on site.

F.i. https://static1.simpleflyingimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/... ,

chemical reactor(cracker tower), pressure vessel, tank, prefabedd house parts, or whole not so small houses, whatever.

They had no containers then, but imagine instead of double-stacking them like it is done now in the US, having two rows of them double-stacked, maybe even 3 by 3.

4.) This is NOT insane. The world has been thrown back, or at least stopped in its tracks in many sectors by WWII. It only seems so, because you don't know it any different. And any big thinking is associated with Nazism. Which is ridiculous, because other nations have been building big too, then, and before.

Afterwards, not so much anymore. Because thrown back...

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel comes to mind,

he's choosen 2.140mm for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Railway initially.
by 620gelato | 2025-04-26 03:52:30+00:00
> jack up premiums by 20% unless you force employees to change their password once every 90 days"

Always made me judge my company's security teams as to why they enable this stupidity. Thankfully they got rid of this gradually, nearly 2 years ago now (90 days to 365 days to never). New passwords were just one key l/r/u/d on the keyboard.

Now I'm thinking maybe this is why the app for a govt savings scheme in my country won't allow password autofill at all. Imagine expecting a new password every 90 days and not allowing auto fill - that just makes passwords worse.
by aurareturn | 2025-04-26 03:52:45+00:00
BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).

Yea you nailed it in the end. No way BYD would invest in a factory when the entire government and media are anti-China and could expel you out of the country any moment. The US is not predictable for businesses and investments right now.
by rsingel | 2025-04-26 03:53:05+00:00
Acting DC AG Martin has a history of sockpuppetry. Bought a sycophant a laptop and then ghostwrote Facebook posts attacking a judge in a case against Martin. Should have been disbarred.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ed-martin-trump-interim-d...

It's always projection with the MAGA crowd
by zeroq | 2025-04-26 03:53:16+00:00
A fellow Elbonian made a book [1] depicting the ugliest places in our town.

Despite the tongue-in-a-cheek mood it's a great piece of nostalgia trip spiced with some interesting local history lessons.

He also have an automotive youtube channel dedicated to popular old cars and he loves to film them in these obscure and sordid locations mentioned in the book.

EDIT: fun note - when MS released their first digital encyclopedia in Elbonia, somewhere in mid 90's, the Elbonia entry, apart from having accurate information about the country and up to date statistics had an illustration image subtitled "Elbonians in front of typical dwelling" depicting something like this: https://strojeludowe.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1.3-600x...

[1] https://paskudnik.com/strona-glowna/6--ebook-paskudnik-warsz...
by jayarajsd | 2025-04-26 03:55:27+00:00
PostgreSQL: The World's Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database. PostgreSQL comes with many features aimed to help developers build applications, administrators to protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments, and help you manage your data no matter how big or small the dataset. In addition to being free and open source, PostgreSQL is highly extensible. For example, you can define your own data types, build out custom functions, even write code from different programming languages without recompiling your database
by intermerda | 2025-04-26 03:55:40+00:00
I tried giving it a shot. It starts with an "executive summary", followed by an intro to how Wikipedia works. The very first link to any concrete evidence is by a guy who has a page on PragerU with gems like "Russian collusion hoax" and how the "mainstream media" is "fake news".

It's a pretty simple case of Wittgenstein's ruler for me. It tells me more about ADL as an org than the content.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-26 03:55:46+00:00
>But do they mind? Because so far you are saying anyone who doesn't agree with you doesn't understand. Sounds like while you might not mind being disrespected, you fail to realize that other people do mind.

Is that disrespect or is that just sensitivity? From my POV this is fact. Like 1 + 1 = 2. I'm stating that. Or should I be inclusive and say that 1 + 1 maybe equals 2 but I respect your alternative opinion?

If I believe in something as a fact. I should be able to talk about it as a fact and talk about it as if the other person is wrong. You have that right as well. Same with my young coworker.

They probably do mind. But I feel that's just life. He called my way of doing it using "assembly language" even, and I let it go. If someone is wrong, we shouldn't be afraid to slightly offend them and tell them they are wrong. That goes both ways. I don't want to live in society where we have to dance around everyone's feelings even when they're utterly wrong and borderline delusional.

>You also clearly have an over-sized server if you think 10K concurrent connections can be covered on it. If that is true, you could save a heap of money by downgrading that server and going to lambdas. The more you defend your position, the less tenable it becomes.

This is not true. Your laptop on a 10 year old intel chip can handle 10k concurrent connections. Some guy pushed it up to a million here: https://unetworkingab.medium.com/millions-of-active-websocke...

The lambda architecture doesn't work for our case because our server maintains long running websocket connections. We just need async non blocking tasks. So I'm saying, launch a concurrent coroutine (aka go routine) and call it a day.

I think you're not aware of how much concurrency modern servers can handle. Back in the days of LAMP this would be a problem. But not anymore.
Show HN: Oliver's Army
by brandoniscool | 2025-04-26 03:56:25+00:00
https://olivers.army

Meta's social media apps suck. All of them. They're all misinformation piles of [*]. YouTube is great, too bad it's run by Google. Reddit is gold except it's way too hard to read and engage with and its moderators are batshit crazy, not chill at all. We built Oliver's Army for the next wave of social, Social after we've understood what went wrong the first time.Oliver's Army is a real-time conversation network. No bots ever (we use sophisticated bot detection). Every conversation real-time. Chat with as many people at once, cycle through as many man-made prompts as you can imagine. A whole new/old social format... chat windows! It's better seen than described.

Right now we want to test the random chat window thesis with US Politics. The Trump admin is causing a stir and the world doesn't have an easy off-ramp to communicate with their fellow citizens about it. Times are changing fast and the old social "post threads" style is archaic and unmeaningful.
by skillseeddev | 2025-04-26 03:56:32+00:00
This was my first time dealing with APIs at scale, so I didn't do a whole lot of protection. I'm glad the site got botted though, I learned a lot about rate-limits, and the botter (from MIT) was kind enough to help me protect the API from future botters. It was a great learning experience, and I'd gladly do it again
by kcplate | 2025-04-26 03:58:14+00:00
> The administration is in open violation of supreme court rulings and the law.

But is this one of those situations? The problem I think people get stuck in the muck about is all these situations run together and they start assuming facts from one case apply to another.

Two things can be true— The Trump administration be in defiance of some other ruling related to immigration/deportation as well as being perfectly within the law for this particular case.
by rayiner | 2025-04-26 03:59:04+00:00
In fact there was an extensive analysis of the election by Democrat pollster David Shor, who found that 100% turnout would have resulted in an even larger Trump win, by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...

This has been the pattern for awhile now. The pool of politically unengaged people are especially Trumpy compared to regular voters: https://abcnews.go.com/538/vote-back-trump/story?id=10909062...
by NaOH | 2025-04-26 04:02:24+00:00
Previous discussions:

Plain Text Sports - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30754064 - Mar 2022 (109 comments)

Plain Text Sports – The day's sports in plain text - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30309356 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)

Show HN: Plain Text Sports: live sports games, play-by-play, and boxscores, fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314 - Mar 2021 (7 comments)
by gdwatson | 2025-04-26 04:03:12+00:00
Superscalar processors (which include all mainstream ones these days) do this within a single core, provided there are no data dependencies between the assignment statements. They have multiple arithmetic logic units, and they can start a second operation while the first is executing.

But yeah, I agree that we were promised a lot more automatic multithreading than we got. History has proven that we should be wary of any promises that depend on a Sufficiently Smart Compiler.
by zeroq | 2025-04-26 04:04:23+00:00
This is fucking amazing!

Everyone and their mother are trying to hop on the band wagon of AI and make a half assed service just because it may sell just due to the "ai" tag attached to it - this is different!

Chapeau bas! It's simple but brilliant. It's a great example of what a good idea is - with minimal effort he made an epic product focusing not an AI, but what AI can bring to the table and executing it flawlessly. Hats off!
by adrianmonk | 2025-04-26 04:04:51+00:00
Apologies if I'm missing something obvious, but why not just stick a potentiometer on the same axis behind the 3.5mm TS jack? Many 3.5mm jacks are open on the back, so you can give the knob a long shaft (longer than 3.5mm obviously), and that shaft can mate with the potentiometer.

Alternatively, Eurorack uses TS jacks as connectors for control voltage inputs, right? If you build a module with a TRS jack instead, you have an extra pin (R) that you can connect a removable potentiometer + knob to. And you can still plug in regular TS cables.

(Note: the article uses "TRS" loosely when it means "TS". I mean them literally.)
by TheMiddleMan | 2025-04-26 04:04:54+00:00
Dems and republicans both do their political corruption, Trump is something else.

https://commonslibrary.org/authoritarianism-how-you-know-it-...

What are the Top 10 Elements of the Authoritarian Playbook?

1. Divide and rule: Foment mistrust and fear in the population.

2. Spread lies and conspiracies: Undermine the public’s belief in truth.

3. Destroy checks and balances: Quietly use legal or pseudo-legal rationales to gut institutions, weaken opposition, and/or declare national emergencies to seize unconstitutional powers.

4. Demonize opponents and independent media: Undermine the public’s trust in those actors and institutions that hold the state accountable.

5. Undermine civil and political rights for the unaligned: Actively suppress free speech, the right to assembly and protest and the rights of women and minority groups.

6. Blame minorities, immigrants, and “outsiders” for a country’s problems: Exploit national humiliation while promising to restore national glory.

7. Reward loyalists and punish defectors: Make in-group members fearful to voice dissension.

8. Encourage or condone violence to advance political goals: Dehumanize opposition and/or out-groups to justify violence against them.

9. Organize mass rallies to keep supporters mobilized against made-up threats: Use fearmongering and hate speech to consolidate in-group identity and solidarity.

10. Make people feel like they are powerless to change things: Solutions will only come from the top.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-26 04:05:34+00:00
>> Anyone can do programming. That's not really that impressive.

You're completely right, but just because anyone can doesn't mean it's unimpressive. (It does make it 'not valuable').

It's like cooking. Anyone can do it. Lots of people do. Some (maybe the majority if you include men and children) never learned how. A home cook can be exceptional but apart from the obvious (feeding the family) it's a skill that is hard learned with little value.

Of course frozen meals were designed to replace home cooking decades ago (hint; that never happened. ) And just because people can cook, doesn't mean they can (or should) open a restaurant. (The restaurant business is only lightly dependent on cooking.)

The analogy holds in programming. A good programmer is impressive for getting on the ladder. But making it in the software world requires lots of non-programing skills.

Put another way, yes programing is impressive (looking from below) but is only one step on a tall ladder. As you say, there's design, development, architecture, documentation, communication, refinement - all critical to a product's ultimate success.

AI is on the first rung of the ladder. And in many ways thats a very impressive step. And maybe it'll climb a bit higher. But looking down, it has a long long way to go before it replaces me :)
by neRok | 2025-04-26 04:05:41+00:00
> I occasionally need the hauling capacity [of a] 1998 Ford Ranger

Then rent a suitable vehicle for the occasion.

- Your example Ford Ranger[1] seems to have towing capacity of 6,000lbs (~2700kg), and a payload capacity of 1,260lbs (~570kg).

- Compare that to the worst model Toyota Hilux[2], which has a payload of up to 1240kg, and can tow 2500kg. These can be rented for like $65 AUD per day (~$40 USD).

[1] https://www.kbb.com/ford/ranger/1998/specs/ [2] https://www.redbook.com.au/cars/details/2019-toyota-hilux-wo...
by crabmusket | 2025-04-26 04:06:02+00:00
For reference, informal votes were around 5% in our last federal election:

https://results.aec.gov.au/27966/website/HouseInformalByStat...

This article contains a fun breakdown of the types of informal votes including a category for "the usual anatomical drawings" (0.7% of informal votes):

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/22/2025-federal-election-p...
by throw10920 | 2025-04-26 04:06:04+00:00
This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

Just like code, regulation isn't intrinsically valuable - it's a means to an end, and piling lots of poorly-written stuff on top of each other has disasterous consequences for society. We have to make sure that the code and law that we write is carefully thought out and crafted to achieve its desired effect with minimal complexity, and formally verify and test it when possible.

(an example of testing law may be to get a few clever people into a room and red-team possible exploits in the proposed bill or regulation)
by consumer451 | 2025-04-26 04:06:28+00:00
Not who you are responding to, but given that as rational humans, we have the capacity to make non-binary comparisons, Kremlin propaganda is indeed far worse than most. I say this as a European who sees clear flaws in the US system, but that does not make the Russian system good, or even a little good. It is objectively horrible. The Russian people, for one, deserve far better.

It is important to point out that Russian propaganda is actually excellent propaganda. However, their message is the at the very bottom:

There is no truth, up is down, nothing matters, the invader is the victim, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_propaganda_in_the_Russia...
by rabysh | 2025-04-26 04:11:05+00:00
This looks like a very good opportunity for explaining how fast computers are and how spinning up infra doesn't always make sense.

I'd try to show how much a single process could scale by writing a simple benchmark, and comparing the performance, cost and latency of the alternative.

The results should speak for themselves at that point.

(But also, spinning up a lambda to wait for a db request? Wat? Must be missing some more context/details)
by karpathy | 2025-04-26 04:11:55+00:00
I also find myself wanting to go back to RSS for the exact same reasons of 1st paragraph. You own your content and host it. Unfortunately all the RSS readers are too raw and I think one of them has to port over Twitter features, things like: more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox, reply, quote tweet, retweet, like, follow, and new: LLM-driven customizable algorithmic feed.
by dilap | 2025-04-26 04:12:58+00:00
> Science selects actively against people who react strongly to incentives

I don't think this is true at all! If it were true, we would not have the reproducibility crises and various other scandals that we do, in fact, have.

Scientists are humans like any other, and respond to incentives.

Funding is a game -- you have to play the game in a way that wins to keep getting funding, so necessarily idealists that don't care about the rules of the game will be washed out and not get funding. It's in our collective interest, then, to make sure that winning the game equates to doing good science!
by gdwatson | 2025-04-26 04:13:29+00:00
Historically, different Unixes varied a lot more than they do today. Say you want your program to use the C library function foo on platforms where it’s available and the function bar where it isn’t: You can write both versions and choose between them based on a C preprocessor macro, and the program will use the best option available for the platform where it was compiled.

But now the user has to set the preprocessor macro appropriately when he builds your program. Nobody wants to give the user a pop quiz on the intricacies of his C library every time he goes to install new software. So instead the developer writes a shell script that tries to compile a trivial program that uses function foo. If the script succeeds, it defines the preprocessor macro FOO_AVAILABLE, and the program will use foo; if it fails, it doesn’t define that macro, and the program will fall back to bar.

That shell script grew into configure. A configure script for an old and widely ported piece of software can check for a lot of platform features.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-04-26 04:13:37+00:00
Weird idea: What if user content was stored and transmitted encrypted by default? Then an attacker would have to either (a) identify a plaintext which encrypts to an attack ciphertext (annoying, and also you could keep your WAF rules operational for the ciphertext, with minimal inconvenience to users) or (b) attack the system when plaintext is being handled (could still dramatically reduce attack surface).
Show HN: Inovex Support Ticketing – Modern, Affordable, No-Bloat Alternative
by Shaz-Momin | 2025-04-26 04:17:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the founder of Inovex Technology, and after years of seeing small and medium-sized businesses struggle with expensive, outdated, and overly complex ticketing systems like Zendesk, Zoho, and Freshworks, I decided to build something better.

Inovex Support Ticketing is a straightforward, modern app designed for SMBs who want robust features and a clean UI-without the enterprise price tag or confusing menus. You get centralized ticket management, customizable workflows, real-time notifications, and actionable analytics, all wrapped in a UI that actually feels pleasant to use. It’s built to be easy for teams to adopt and scale as they grow.

I’d love feedback from the HN community-especially if you’ve felt the pain of legacy support tools or have ideas for features that could make support less of a headache for small teams. You can check it out here: https://inovextech.com/products/support-ticketing
by throw10920 | 2025-04-26 04:18:10+00:00
> that is at best a rather native take.

No more so than correctly pointing out that writing code for ffmpeg doesn't mean that you're enabling streaming services to try to redefine the meaning of the phrase "ad-free" because you're allowing them to continue existing.

The problem is not the existence of the library that enables streaming services (AI "safety"), it's that you're not ensuring that the companies misusing technology are prevented from doing so.

"A company is trying to misuse technology so we should cripple the tech instead of fixing the underlying social problem of the company's behavior" is, quite frankly, an absolutely insane mindset, and is the reason for a lot of the evil we see in the world today.

You cannot and should not try to fix social or governmental problems with technology.
by Demiurge | 2025-04-26 04:18:49+00:00
> Python preferred over Ruby

... Perhaps what you're describing is having a niche opinion. If you had some opinions, like a preference for "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters" or "I hate indentation", it would certainly seem that the world is against you. But, perhaps, you just really smart and can remember the intention of all the complicated code you wrote a year ago, so you don't even need to write comments, and thats great. However, being special does not mean that some technolgoy is objectively inferior, unless you can actually come up with a provably objective metric.

Overall, the technology that is there, solving most of the problems for most of the cases is the technology that is superior, by the law of the universe, not the other way around.

I don't agree with any of your examples, but I have my own, like Pascal is a better language than C, by many metrics. I can also accept that C, is what people who invented unix, also invented. And that makes Pascal inferior to C, now, as choice for any project that requires that you hire embedded software developers. That's what the universe decided.