MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-04-02 18:23:54+00:00
I play boardgames. I am also visually imppaired. So for me functionality is a massive issue. Readability is a massive issue. Being "pretty" is not an issue.

In this class of games, it's common for a game to be printed, possibly have several printings, and then go out of print. For particularly sticky games, they may come back with a reprint or redesign years later. And I've noticed going back decades that the redesign almost always replaces bold, functional, high-contrast designs for low-contrast, "realistic", "pretty' designs. Examples:

- Brass: original [1] vs redesign [2]

- Titan: original [3] vs redesign [4]

- Saint Petersburg: original [5] vs redesign [6]

I don't know why this is but part of it comes down to people wanting to add "value" by changing things rather than just reprinting them. But why go "realistic"? I think there's a pervasive idea in this space that "realism" is good. So that's a trend.

Cars go beyond color. Cars become a white or other neutral color because it's the least potentially "offensive". Car makers want the largest possible market. Plus companies like Hertz want this kind of car. But look at cars from the 1950s through 1980s and on top of color you have a lot of cosmetic design choices that we don't have now because they're less aerodynamic but, more importantly, cheaper.

In a way, the car ceased to become an object of expression. Instead for many people it's just pure utility. So the designs became utilitarian. You may disagree because people are very opinionated on what cars they prefer but I think that just expresses brand preferences not aesthetic choices.

Chain restaurants also exhibit this trend. Compare McDonald's from the 1980s vs now. A lot of fast food restaurants are now much harder to distinguish.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4265429/brass-lancashire

[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1278376/brass-lancashire

[3]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/82323/titan

[4]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4869350/titan
by acidmath | 2025-04-02 18:24:41+00:00
Where three different disks (or storage underneath Ceph OSDs) each in separate disk silos fail?

In some earlier Ceph clusters I was responsible for I set replication to four or even five.

There was a point where I wrote an internal memo to business leaders explaining that had I not set that replication to four or five we would have been unable to meet business goals (we would have lost the contracts keeping us afloat during critical stages), but now at scale the real dollar cost of that redundancy was showing. In that memo I explained what networking we needed vs what we had, what people we needed vs what we had, and so on. I eventually got the networking gear the company needed in place and was able to hire the kind of people we needed.

For Ceph clusters I am chiefly responsible for today we have Ceph pools in each availability zone doing erasure coding (four or more parity bits) and a small service makes sure objects are copied between the distanced datacenters (availability zones).

While I do get a bit of a boner (of the Hank Hill on propane kinda vibe) on how the erasure coding is distirbuted across cabinet rows, to be fair it is a bit of an optimization.

_

> to have lower durability (say replicas are located within the same networking pod)

A network segment should never ever go down. I know in some places this is "optimistic". I can say for us it's not "optimistic" because we don't allow Ethernet protocol to "hop" anywhere. Layer-2 broadcast domains either stop at top-of-rack and the rest is layer-3 or we are using Infiniband. Stable Ethernet networks are a thing, but not using Ethernet beyond where Ethernet belongs avoids so much risk.

100% network uptime is achievable.

In some places more critical nodes are connected to three Infiniband switches with two uninterrupted power supplies dedicated to each Infiniband switch. Maybe that's "excessive", but within the last year we had to contend with a switch failure. Then a week later a datacenter provider (one that will tell you they never ever EVER lose power) for one of our availability zones was unable to provide power for over two full days.

I don't think we're ever going to have downtime or lose data. In other places this would be "optimistic", but for this deployment I have access to the resources I need to achieve the thing. The only thing that has me concerned about downtime is the current WW3 we are already in heating up.
by nansari | 2025-04-02 18:24:51+00:00
Location: Karachi, Pakistan Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Django, Flask, FastAPI, NodeJS, Go (beginner), PostgreSQL, Linux, ElasticSearch, Redis, RabbitMQ Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mFKCTHzC3a5N9U3-hL5zEoAmamvhwOKu/view Email: ahmednajamansari+hnhiring [at] gmail [dot] com
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-02 18:25:31+00:00
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.

There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.

In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
by captn3m0 | 2025-04-02 18:25:33+00:00
Having a license clarifies what permissions are you giving to someone who downloads your code. The practical benefit is that others can clearly contribute back or build on your work without any legal concerns.

Something like MIT gives them permission to do anything as long as attribution is maintained, while avoiding liabilities.

But there are others you can pick: https://choosealicense.com/
by gnramires | 2025-04-02 18:25:34+00:00
You also need to encode the painted areas somehow. They are not only intersections on K shapes, but sometimes exclusions as well (like (A^B)/C). Two ways come to mind:

(1) Listing closed curves by vertices. Each vertex of a painted area is an intersection of two or more circles, and delimits a section of a circle. So the section of circles that enclose a circle can be encoded each by the union of:

(1.1) A circle (index); (1.2) A 2nd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a first point; (1.3) A bit identifying the (first) intersection (because there may be 2 possible); (1.4) A 3rd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a second point; (1.5) A bit identifying the (second) intersection.

Note the base circle would be the first intersection of a subsequent section of this closed curve, and the 3rd circle would be the subsequent base circle. So 1/2/3 won't be necessary for subsequent curves. So only (K+2) indices + (K+1) bits are necessary for this encoding.

Total ~K log2(K)+K bits. I hypothesize (left to the reader :)) a closed curve should contain at most 2x13 points. There can be at most 2^13 distinct regions however, so each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than that many curves per figure. So each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than 2^13 x 26x(5+1) bits =~ 1.3Mbit.

But that's mostly pathological cases, if each Animal must be a fully connected area, then that might reduce (hypothesis above) to at most only 26x(5+1) bits = 156 bits, or 20 bytes!

I left out a problem which area shapes encoded within each other (like eyes). In that case you need at most another 156 bits per inner cutout shape.

(2) Alternatively, you could use boolean operations to encode each shape. Also left as a fun problem :)
by jcalx | 2025-04-02 18:25:42+00:00
> It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.

That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.

To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:

> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).

whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:

> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.

The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?

[0] https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-02 18:26:09+00:00
no. you can't say it's evidence for dark matter versus any given other theory until after you have computed the expected metrics created by any alternative theory.

in any case, you can't say it's support for dark matter in this specific case without actually running the numbers (what are the rotational speeds and what is the bending curvature)

dark matter halos must have a somewhat specific distribution that goes beyond the perimeter of the visible galaxy itself.

however the more that i think about it this example is likely to be unhelpful. the closer galaxy looks elliptical and most dense elliptical galaxies "have no dark matter" (in basic MOND this is a phenomenon that falls out if the gravity law). We'd really need lensing from a more "normal" looking galaxy.
by doodlebugging | 2025-04-02 18:26:13+00:00
I can see the guy now as the realization that this native plant could undermine the British East India tea trade if people came to enjoy yaupon tea. It probably didn't take any convincing to get him to assign such an uninviting name to the plant and in doing so, save one of the British Empire's main trade items.

It was definitely a chickenshit move on his part though.
by armitron | 2025-04-02 18:26:56+00:00
The underlying strategy is so sound that Russia now effectively owns 20% of what used to be Ukraine, ground which is never going back. Their military has gained extremely valuable experience in fighting a modern war. Additionally, European economy has been decimated and the second order effects (weapon proliferation, criminal syndicates, immigration, societal effects) are yet to play out.

Throw in the ever-present threat of small-yield tactical nuclear weapons being used by Russia if it ever thinks it's in danger of losing and I fail to see the logic behind all of this. Unless of course weakening Europe, utterly destroying Ukraine and strengthening Russia was the point from the get-go. Or you just need to admit that the US fucked this one up badly (as it has almost every other war it's been involved in over the last 40 years).
by garciasn | 2025-04-02 18:27:01+00:00
While I realize I'm an outlier, I do NOT consider 24oz of coffee a lot, nor does anyone I know--that's literally a standard coffee cup at a coffee shop these days. At a minimum, I'm drinking 3 pots (~180oz) of coffee a day, with my usual being 3-4x that amount.

So; with that said, while I believe that eating 28oz of chocolate is a lot, I guess it could happen :-)
by lxgr | 2025-04-02 18:27:15+00:00
Had no benefits/was more cumbersome than what?

My colleagues frequently use one of these general-purpose WYSIWYG drawing tools, and I'm not a fan at all – everybody has their own slightly or wildly varying riff on UML or flowcharts, and the result is chaos: Sometimes rectangles are states, sometimes they're decisions; sometimes arrows are labeled state transitions, but other times they're unlabeled and state transitions are also boxes.

Discoverability is also much worse compared to e.g. Mermaid or PlantUML diagrams checked into version control or stored as text source in Wiki articles.
by cbeach | 2025-04-02 18:27:19+00:00
If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our democratically-elected representatives) then by all means HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own self-preservation.

But until then, we should be free to state facts.

> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.

> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.

> -- John Deighan https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banning-those-w...
by Beijinger | 2025-04-02 18:27:35+00:00
Amazon has become an unreliable company. Opaque return practices, overbilling and break of contract have become common.

"TikTok Shop is an integrated e-commerce platform within the TikTok app that allows users to shop directly from videos, live streams, and profiles."

Amazon just tries to destroy a competitor. We can only hope that authorities won't allow an acquisition by Amazon (EU maybe?).

I personally still use Amazon, but often use ebay. I don't use TikTok. I found the acquisition of Abebooks by Amazon long time ago already unfortunate.
by Avamander | 2025-04-02 18:28:01+00:00
The word "täht" itself means "star" (both celestial one or a notable person) or "letter/glyph", not "planet".

> Or even further back, considering apparently Estonians didn't know what an asteroid was back then.

Asteroids have been called "falling stars" in most languages for ages, nor would "asteroid" work well as a name. Nothing to do with anyone's knowledge of astronomy really.
by Lammy | 2025-04-02 18:28:27+00:00
Yes, and even then only for Ultra HD Blu-ray. Regular BDs should still usually work unless they're uncommon enough to not have a title key known to MakeMKV.

“A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself ‘revoked’. LibreDrive compatible drive is required to read UHD discs.”
by drivers99 | 2025-04-02 18:29:04+00:00
Current photos of old objects. I admit I had the same question based on the caption included in the graph itself, which just says "photos."

> a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-02 18:29:11+00:00
> My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN

Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the popularity of your opinions.
by mikrl | 2025-04-02 18:29:21+00:00
How does this relate to dox?

Let’s say an individual posted identifying or incriminating information online, inadvertently or intentionally, in a public place.

Then a third party decides to store it, and possibly make it accessible to others.

If the original self doxxing user then pulled the original dox, but was unable to scrub the rest, would that information still be considered public, or would it be private? Was it ever truly public? Or private for that matter?
by perching_aix | 2025-04-02 18:29:30+00:00
Is that a moderation issue? Because to me that's more of a system / culture issue.

You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".
by pvg | 2025-04-02 18:29:33+00:00
If you think your dissenting opinions should be popular, your opinions probably aren't all that dissenting. This person's dissenting meta-opinion is unpopular, it's still there and it's still being discussed. Discomfort is inherent in dissent, it's not people putting a lot of likes on your NormanRockwellFourFreedomsPainting.gif.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-02 18:29:38+00:00
The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough.

The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.

Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.
by mgdev | 2025-04-02 18:29:46+00:00
A US-based dev costs 125/hr, on the low end.

A US-based dev directing Claude Code has like 3x output.

So the biz is spending 125 + AI costs, but saving 250/hr.

An individual dev might feel like a superhuman compared to those not using Claude Code. Could even earn them a substantial promotion.

Either way, seems to net out.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-02 18:29:58+00:00
My unscientific wild ass guess would be that because of how LLMs are built to be pleasing, people wind up liking them more and thus lowering their guard with them and therefore judging them less harshly

For a concrete example of what I'm talking about

Imagine if you are really into older movies, like 60s and 70s movies

You start talking to two chat windows about your love for movies

One chat partner shares your love for old movies and is very enthusiastic and wants to talk all about them. In reality, this chat partner is the LLM

The other is lukewarm and maybe tries to steer you away from that conversation because they don't know much about older movies. Maybe they still love movies but they want to talk about more recent movies. In reality, this one is the human

But which one do you think is the human?

If you are self aware that your love for old movies is not really universal, and you are aware that LLMs have a tendency to match enthusiasm, you can probably guess which one is which

If you are less self aware, you are probably just going to guess that the conversation you enjoyed more is the one with the human
by Etheryte | 2025-04-02 18:30:04+00:00
I think where our opinions differ is what boundaries this logic should cross. When I'm in Bash-land, I'm happy that my Bash-isms use the rest of what's available in the Bash env. When I'm in Node, likewise, as this is an expected and desirable outcome. Where this doesn't sit right with me is when a Node-land script crosses this boundary and starts murking around with things from a different domain.

In general, I would want everything to work by the principle of least surprise, so Node stuff interacts with Node dependencies, Python does Python things, Bash does Bash env, etc. If I need one to interact with the other, I want to be explicit about it, not have some spooky action at a distance.
by lefstathiou | 2025-04-02 18:30:16+00:00
Meh, you aren’t seeing it. You are likely noticing a fringe view of a minority of people being greatly magnified through coordinated and uncoordinated social media campaigns and broad sweeping statements intended to covey that a totality of people (ie “a country”) hold a given view.

Now, if we framed it not as an “expropriation of a company” but a “100% tax on billionaires profiting from the work of the creative class” then the numbers would get real very quick.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-04-02 18:30:29+00:00
There's definitely a cultural component to "modern taste". South Asian cultures have a preference for warm tones and many vibrant colors. East Asian cultures from developing and developed countries these days have lots of cool tones and monotone aesthetics. While I found the article a bit short on the "why", I do agree that the West has had a philosophical disdain for color from the Industrial era.
by JohnBooty | 2025-04-02 18:30:30+00:00
Yeah. Unless it's advertised as "food grade" and has a specific "Cobalt chloride free" I would def. not put it in food -

These fit the bill. Assuming they're not straight-up lying or anything...

https://www.amazon.com/Rechargeable-Desiccant-Dehumidifiers-...?
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-02 18:30:58+00:00
On one hand, it feels like this question is a lot more relevant than ever. It's easier to ignore politics when each side doesn't see the other as an existential threat to their way of life.

Like it would be easy not to ask someone's religion when there isn't a 35% chance they're going to say "extremist martyr".

But I don't ask this question if I don't think I know the answer already, and I only ask it with people I think I can have a conversation with.
Ask HN: Go libraries for managing Docker container pools and executing commands?
by magundu | 2025-04-02 18:31:05+00:00
I’m developing a system in Go that maintains a fixed pool of Docker containers (e.g., 10) running a specific image (like ‘node’), where each container remains alive (using a command like tail -f) to be ready for executing arbitrary commands via docker exec. The system tracks the workload of each container, distributes commands to the least loaded one, and monitors container health to automatically restart or replace unhealthy instances.

I’m aware of the official Docker Go SDK (github.com/docker/docker/client) for managing containers, but I’m curious if there are any higher-level tools or libraries in Go that provide additional support for scheduling, load balancing, or enhanced health monitoring of containers in such a setup. Has anyone built or used libraries that streamline this kind of container orchestration and command execution?

Any insights, recommendations, or experiences would be greatly appreciated!
by yoshuaw | 2025-04-02 18:32:00+00:00
`await-tree` seems to be able to output to JSON. As long as all keys are unique, it should be straightforward to convert it into the Collapsed Stack Format most flame graph tools natively ingest.

As a reference: I wrote a Dhat-JSON to Flamegraph conversion tool a while ago for fun. Adapting this to instead convert from the await-tree JSON format probably shouldn't take long:

https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/dhat-to-flamegraph/blob/main/...
by ygjb | 2025-04-02 18:32:15+00:00
Not to get too political, but the US is built on expropriation. From Indigenous peoples, the British, Mexicans, and a variety of other folks. It's baked into laws and policies like eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture. The biggest issue is who is being targetted and why. Heck, even taxation is a form of expropriation. This is also not unique to the US - the political aspect is how and why expropriation happens.
by feoren | 2025-04-02 18:32:52+00:00
Option 3: treat your students like adults as much as possible and be flexible with everyone about how they complete the class as long as they demonstrate that they've done sufficient work and have sufficient mastery of the material. Then you don't need to play arbiter about whether having a child in the hospital is a better excuse than having their backpack stolen, and you don't unfairly favor squeaky wheels over meeker students.
by Kirby64 | 2025-04-02 18:33:06+00:00
You might want to double-check your figures.

Ghiradelli claims their dark chocolate has 20mg per oz and their milk chocolate has 6 mg per ounce. [1]

That would mean eating a standard 3.5oz/100g chocolate bar would have 70mg of caffeine for dark, or 21mg for milk.

While 3.5oz is a lot in a sitting, 70mg is equivalent to a smallish cup of coffee.

[1] https://www.ghirardelli.com/product-faqs#:~:text=Dark%20choc...