MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rollcat | 2025-04-28 12:26:59+00:00
> I don't think determining factor is price

This is a solution that is supposed to be affordable in third-world countries, where 99% of all personal computing happens on low-to-mid-end smartphones.

Unless you specifically mean first-world countries, in which case you can just run a hotspot from your PC or laptop.

> it is how easy or hands off the appliance can be.

I can already barely justify having a single RasPi plugged into my router, and I'm a devops nerd. That box does one single thing that is too annoying to set up on my Mac mini. 99% of people do not want yet another blackbox appliance, this is why every single SOHO router has a built-in switch and AP.

> Every postgres search implementation has atleast one internet connected postgres nerd on standby.

It doesn't have to be postgres specifically, just pointing out that decent FTS has been commodity software for decades. Throwing LMs at every already-solved problem is the problem with LMs.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-28 12:27:43+00:00
The reason why we interconnect grids has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with physics, politics can sometimes lead to disconnections (like how the Baltic states disconnected from the Russian grid earlier this year) but it comes with great cost and involves careful planning (the fact that the Baltic states remained connected for almost three years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine should give you an hint of how challenging it was).

The bigger the grid, the more efficient and resilient it is (and managing electric grids on islands is a nightmare), but it comes with a significant complexity and means restarting from zero is harder.
by john-h-k | 2025-04-28 12:27:56+00:00
I don't think it is an argument in favour of it.

arith-mean = E[x] , the first moment of x geo-mean = exp(E[log x]) , so log geo-mean = first moment of log x

They are both equivalent in amount of information preserved, but arithmetic preserves additive structure whereas geo preserves multiplicative structure
by red_admiral | 2025-04-28 12:28:23+00:00
I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack.

There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages

I remember the day when the Swiss railway power network went down for a day (in 2005) because one power line was down for maintenance and someone pressed the wrong button and produced a short circuit somewhere else. It's a bit like the incidents in planes were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-04-28 12:28:24+00:00
I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.
by bilekas | 2025-04-28 12:28:26+00:00
> Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.

I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.

The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.
by throw0101a | 2025-04-28 12:28:29+00:00
> As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!

Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

North America is organized in regional grids:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
by Applejinx | 2025-04-28 12:28:34+00:00
I invent new things on a weekly basis for years on end to make a living on Patreon, and literally have to unfailingly hack creativity or starve. (my choices of working in open source leave me no alternative as I don't get persistent revenue streams beyond what I'm able to continue to create.)

Everything the author said about creativity checked out from my experience, except that I'm not working in such a generalist field that obituaries light up relevant 'unrelated associations' for me. However, it seems completely plausible from my perspective.
by throwanem | 2025-04-28 12:28:38+00:00
Oh, for God's sake. Unflagging was added because sometimes people hit "flag" by mistake, and I know that because I was one of the ones who asked for it. (Well, the "flagged" list on your profile page was so added. Unflagging I assume has existed about since flagging, but if you accidentally flagged from the homepage, that could not be undone until lately as I describe, because it would also hide the flagged story. Excuse me, I am as yet pre-coffee.)

I'm similarly familiar enough with the lead HN dev, with whom I have passed a friendly discussion or two of how some site features are implemented, to be quite sure unflagging reverses whatever specific moderation weighting flagging applies.

Do you have any specific knowledge to substantiate the claim you have made here?
by sgallant | 2025-04-28 12:28:42+00:00
Well done! Just tested this out and it's great but some feedback:

I couldn't successfully trim my recording. I could get into "trim mode" but couldn't figure out how to do it. That's a really important feature to me and the UX needs a lot of work there.

A feature that I always use with Screen Studio is changing the speed of clips. For example, if I'm typing in the recording, I like to speed it up super fast.

Also, I like the Cursor size/preferences (size, hide when mouse isn't moving, etc)

A feature that is missing from SS is: I can't insert title cards or my own clips. I kinda wish it took video editing to the next level and allowed me to insert other clips or title cards.

I'm still not happy with Screen Studio's pricing change.

Good luck!
by Qwertious | 2025-04-28 12:29:06+00:00
>Could this material be a cost-effective replacement for stainless steel?

Iron ore costs $~100/ton, The cost of copper ore is hard to find (possibly because there are so many types, and because it tends to be processed locally AFAICT) but you're looking at ~$5000/ton.

So the raw-material cost should be about 50x, and apparently stainless steel costs ~$2500/ton so even if the processing is free you're already 2x the price.

So, no. Copper is about as rare as lithium, for context. Iron is an amazingly cheap metal.
by gruturo | 2025-04-28 12:29:10+00:00
I get what you mean and probably there are people like that, but I consider it mostly an exaggeration.

Simply - the GPL has some clauses enforcing some obligations (to prevent some rights from being taken away from you, the end user - according to their wording, and I agree), these and other clauses make it legally incompatible with the inclusion of ZFS (CDDL license) in the Linux kernel (GPL). You can build it yourself (so indeed as a user you get to not care or obey) but not distribute it (this is the problem of your distribution's maintainer).

Canonical's lawyers think this is not a problem if the ZFS code is distributed as a module, instead of compiled into the kernel itself, and since 2016 Ubuntu shipped with ZFS support.

The BSD license is considered perfectly compatible with the inclusion of CDDL licensed code and therefore many BSD distros ship with ZFS (and Dtrace) out of the box without legal worries. Indeed Oracle hasn't come knocking.

TL;DR: it's not a vibe. Some licenses are compatible with each other, some aren't. It also depends on how different licenses come into play into a "finished product" (e.g. kernel module vs monolithic build)
by brohee | 2025-04-28 12:29:18+00:00
Some people close to power in Russia (Dugin) actually seem to believe Russia natural range is from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

"Putin channels ultranationalist discourse, such as the Izborsk Club and the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin, in calling for quasi-religious rebirth of Russian dominance, an agenda that seeks to swallow “Little Russia” into a renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."

https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/4/1-2/article-p126_10.x...
by chuckadams | 2025-04-28 12:29:20+00:00
My least favorite was the protection typical on C-64 games that caused constant resets of the floppy drive, banging the head against the stop repeatedly. tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRRRAAAAAAP. I would crack games I owned (admittedly, most I did not own) just to keep them from eventually knocking my drive out of alignment. Loaded a lot faster too. Fast-Hack-Em FTW.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 12:29:31+00:00
PyPy is a JIT compiler — it runs on a standard CPU and accelerates "hot" parts of a program after runtime analysis.

This is a great approach for many applications, but it doesn’t fit all use cases.

PyXL is a hardware solution — a custom processor designed specifically to run Python programs directly.

It's currently focused on embedded and real-time environments where JIT compilation isn't a viable option due to memory constraints, strict timing requirements, and the need for deterministic behavior.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-28 12:29:38+00:00
Apparently 'The Terminator 2029' had such a trick in it. One of my friends in college was obsessed with the game and was frustrated about not being able to complete one of the levels due to a target being inaccessible. Eventually someone told him it was an intentional flaw introduced into copies that were pirated. Not sure if he ever bought the game so he could finish it.
by bilekas | 2025-04-28 12:29:45+00:00
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers.

That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..

> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
by immibis | 2025-04-28 12:30:03+00:00
There was a very famous one in 2003.

As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.
by RegnisGnaw | 2025-04-28 12:30:07+00:00
The democracy is CAN/US has devolved into an almost like 'us-vs-them' paradigm. While its not everyone, but a lot of people think that its okay since we're the good guys.

We're in an election cycle in Canada (I am citizen of both countries) and the amount of signs being destroyed is much higher then I've ever seen.
by kokada | 2025-04-28 12:30:23+00:00
In my experience, for the 4G/5G network to be down something really serious must be happening. I had long power outages (more than a few hours, in some cases even days) that affected multiple regions in places that I lived before that still had working cell network. I assume cell networks have backup power and preferential usage of the power grid, but I am not a specialist.

And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages.

Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-28 12:31:32+00:00
OK, I'll bite.

"Porn is... a symptom of the larger issues."

Since male monkeys in the lab will willingly trade food for monkey porn, I think you have a pretty high hurdle to prove that societal issues cause porn.

Also, you continue the article's unproven premise that "porn is bad". That's an opinion. And objectively, what few factual studies I've seen tends the other direction: ready access to porn correlates with lower sexual violence in countries.
by bouassaba | 2025-04-28 12:32:40+00:00
Voltaserve is an open source cloud storage where you can say:

- "Find me the woman with pink hair"

- "Move all 3D models that look like buildings into the Architecture folder"

- "Copy all my train tickets from last year into the Tickets folder"

And it does it! (after asking your confirmation) with high precision and correctness. This works with images, 3D models, PDFs, office documents and scans.

Operating systems or cloud storages that can barely find text content? yes they exist, but something that allows you to manipulate your entire cloud storage with human language via a chat UI, it's unprecedented, and it's going to change how we interact with computers.

And to make things more epic, Voltaserve has a stunningly beautiful user interface, a web UI and a native iOS app that is designed for iPad and iPhone, and works great on the Mac.

Check these demo videos to see it in action:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCfvdj49WBw

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf3EWb2hDfs

Get started:

Download on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6744360805

Download on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/mac/app/id6744360805

Check the website for more: https://voltaserve.com

GitHub repository to run your self-hosted server: https://github.com/kouprlabs/voltaserve
by rpastuszak | 2025-04-28 12:32:44+00:00
I was going to say something similar. I live in Portugal and I've heard a lot of panic/fear mongering, mainly from the techies in the co-working space I was working on and expats.

(apologies for singling out these specific groups of people - my point is that it might be worth to put down news sources like xitter, and read AP/translated local Portuguese news)
by relaxing | 2025-04-28 12:33:09+00:00
The reason behind the citation style is to serve the automated parsing of citations by research information systems, which can then roll up all of your contributions to the field into a single score which determines one’s entire worth in academia.

The author really should have recognized this, as it serves his point about careerism and brownie points.

The idea that being forced into a citation style stifles innovation is hilarious, especially coming from a computer scientist - formal systems are all we do. It’s not so hard, is it? Use a citation manager and have them generated for you!
by dijit | 2025-04-28 12:33:58+00:00
Agreed.

It's crazy how momentum can carry a business.

To use a potentially controversial example, Microsoft products (Office, Windows) are still extremely entrenched despite the overwhelming majority of knowledgable people agreeing that they're on a steep downward trajectory and the alternatives have long since surpassed them.. leading to this[0] recent video from Pewdiepie...

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
by Applejinx | 2025-04-28 12:34:05+00:00
I don't do it, but consider this: obituaries are clearly capsules of what people consider valuable and worthy about a person. This has nothing to do with whether they're true, or plausible: they're little windows into what one would consider surpassingly important.

It's like the saying about the Velvet Underground: 'very few people came to their concerts but everyone who did, started a band'.
by myself248 | 2025-04-28 12:34:18+00:00
I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent.

PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
by em-bee | 2025-04-28 12:34:19+00:00
the problem here is building only public housing, and the way the US handles public housing. vienna doesn't build just public housing. seestadt in particular is not public housing. the city does the planning, and private developers compete for specific projects that they fund themselves. and they don't compete on cost but on design that makes for a livable city. so developers don't just get to build what they think makes them the most profit disregarding everything else. the city does contribute to the funding, but that happens with every development in the city anywhere because by city law 2/3rd of all new development must be subsidized with controlled rent. but that is still not public housing like in the US.

the failure of the US project is that it is segregating poor people. vienna doesn't do that. subsidized housing is mixed in. every building has some subsidized apartments among freely financed ones, and also, while you need to qualify by income to get a subsidized apartment, you are allowed to stay even if your income rises.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-28 12:34:40+00:00
> The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.

No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.

They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-28 12:35:07+00:00
Seems reasonable that you would struggle with the opportunity cost of your time when you're writing software for fun since you could also be working towards a greater goal of launching something that might make money.

Software is relatively unique because of the multiplying effects of software (without banking on a moonshot) unlike, say, carpentry or strumming a guitar. So the opportunity cost can be even higher.

You should always be cognizant of opportunity costs because they're always in play. And I can see that getting away from people, especially if you haven't already achieved your financial life goals.

I feel similar when I try to play a game in my 30s. It feels like a huge waste of time compared to something that would advance me towards my aspirations. But I think that's just part of being an adult. Just be aware of the trade you're making.
by amiga386 | 2025-04-28 12:36:32+00:00
Not quite. There was nobody holding back on sharing for legal reasons, and it didn't prevent lawsuits.

The LiViD mailing list was full of people trying to get DVDs working with Linux, and they were already quite far into it. Derek Fawcus had already written the drive authentication code (so the drive would allow the host to read most disc sectors).

A piracy group, DrinkOrDie, reverse engineered the Xing DVD player for Windows and released DoD DVD Speed Ripper (no source code).

MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering) also reverse engineered the Xing DVD player and released DeCSS (no source code).

MoRE consisted of "mdx", "the nomad" and Jon Lech Johansen. "the nomad" reverse engineered the Xing DVD player. "mdx" used them to write a decrypter. Jon made a GUI frontend.

Prior to DeCSS's release, someone sent Derek Fawcus the decryption code. And he got around to playing with it, and was going to publish it on the LiViD list.

But before he did, DeCSS came out, and also its source code leaked, and Fawcus noticed his own code was in it (the drive authentication code), stripped of his credit. He complained about this and Johansen got in touch, and ultimately he allowed DeCSS to use his code under a non-GPL license.

Then, famously, Norway's "economic crime" unit brought criminal charges against Johansen. Ultimately, they concluded that Johansen himself hadn't infringed anything, because it was Derek Fawcus, "the nomad" and "mdx" who did that, and they're not Norwegian.

So, with that in mind:

- the LiViD mailing list would almost certainly have developed a DVD solution for Linux, not caring about clean room implementation, if DeCSS had not beaten them to the punch

- the fame DeCSS got also brought the angry litigators (though eventually justice prevailed)

I'll end on a quote from Derek Fawcus:

https://web.archive.org/web/20001202051300/http://livid.on.o...

> Something that may be of interest to people in the states is that I've had an offer of help to produce a specification of the algorithm - from which a third party could produce an implementation. i.e. proper clean room approach. This doesn't really matter from my point of view (or in my opinion most Europeans) but may be of use to the Yanks.
by skor | 2025-04-28 12:36:53+00:00
I code purely for fun, creating programs that generate and compose music. Sometimes I hit the record button and capture the results.

Here's one of my latest recordings, if anyone's interested: https://lowveld.bandcamp.com/album/etches.

Musically I think this belongs in the underground - and should stay there.

I'm very interested in the theory behind software & music. Over the years I've mostly focused on the engineering side, but maybe one day I'll document and publish more about it too.
by jitbit | 2025-04-28 12:37:25+00:00
This is the author's 3rd or 4th attempt to launch a product in this niche, Interactivedemo.ai (ProductHunt launch), demo.fun (link in their profile), a chrome extension with the same name (never took off), etc. I got this all from their Twitter profile

I'm a bootstrapped software developer myself, so I can't decide if I should admire this or flag this as spam. But you're probably right, we're getting a "pricing" page very soon.
by dmd | 2025-04-28 12:37:42+00:00
I had grand plans to build something like this when my kids were small, but ended up building this https://github.com/dmd/nkplay/ instead.

It's just a rpi plugged into a standalone numeric keypad, acting as a jukebox. Playlists are numbered.

By the time my kids were about three, they could enter the numbers on their own, and by four they had memorized the playlists so well they didn't look at the printed catalog any more.