MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linsomniac | 2025-04-07 00:06:01+00:00
Heating, in its various forms, has one big drawback that having a battery that can charge faster in low temps would be really nice in: Starting the day needing to charge.

Ideally, you don't do that, but when traveling sometimes you have to stay at a place that doesn't have a charger, and it's really cold, and now rather than a 30 minute charge it's more like 90 minutes.
by sn9 | 2025-04-07 00:06:01+00:00
If you take the assumption that most books average out to ~350 pages in length, then you get a pretty good heuristic that if you read a minimum of N pages per day, then you're likely to complete at least N books per year.

10 pages per day gets you 10 books per year, 50 for 50, 100 for 100, etc.

Pages read is a more useful metric in general. A process goal that leads to the outcome.
by tptacek | 2025-04-07 00:06:22+00:00
I just asked 4o:

Yes, Paul Newman did experience significant struggles with alcohol. In his posthumously published memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, Newman candidly discusses his drinking habits and acknowledges his long-term battle with alcoholism. He describes himself as a "functioning alcoholic," a trait he noted was shared with his father. At one point, Newman was reported to consume a case of beer daily, followed by spirits, until he eventually gave up hard liquor.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-07 00:06:27+00:00
It’s very few years in physics. Einstein was lucky to see so many outcomes and impacts of his work. Maxwell, Boltzmann, Meitner, noether, and plenty of other physicists didn’t really get to see the impact of their work. But like some things that Einstein predicted, like a BE condensate, were not verified until long after he died.
by contact9879 | 2025-04-07 00:06:35+00:00
The work done by Distributed Proofreaders is pretty amazing. I try to contribute my 35 pages as often as I can. The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month

it truly is an "online hobby that feels constructive". you get these tiny glimpses into our shared literary/cultural history while knowing that the work you're doing is for the benefit of all (benefit of the public domain)
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-07 00:07:41+00:00
Almost half the base made the fiscally prudent vote.

I don't know what the bigger half is capable of learning, some of them probably learned a lot already if they are a shareholder of any kind, and it would not make very much sense for it to remain the bigger half by now. It really was the non-voters that consistently failed to send Trump and his people packing though.

Sickening as it can be sometimes, hindsight is 20/20 and just a short number of weeks ago it would have made more sense for the shareholders of the USA to just cough the money up front and pay him $1Trillion to go away and never come back, taking his kind with him.

Even worse, a year ago his price would have surely been lower, probably one of the biggest lost opportunities some of these shareholders will ever see.
by flutas | 2025-04-07 00:08:14+00:00
I manually pre-parsed the bytecode file with awk into a bazillion individual files that were each just one function, and gave it the hint to grep to sort through them. This was all done in Cursor.

awk '/^=> \[Function #/ { if (out) close(out); fn = $0; sub(/^.*#/, "", fn); sub(/ .*/, "", fn); out = "function_" fn ".txt" } { if (out) print > out }' bundle.hasm

Quick example of the output it gave and it's process.

https://i.imgur.com/Cmg4KK1.png

https://i.imgur.com/ApNxUkB.png
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-07 00:08:49+00:00
China and the cultural revolution/great leap forward should be a warning of what can happen when there is no oppositional veto power. These tariffs could be our four pests moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

In 1967, emboldened radicals began seizing power from local governments and party branches, establishing new revolutionary committees in their place while smashing public security, procuratorate and judicial systems.

Mao ambitiously sought an increase in rural grain production and an increase in industrial activity. Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles, which meant that industrialization of the countryside would solely be dependent on the peasants. Output from the industrial activities such as steel was also supposed to be used for urban growth. Local officials were fearful of the so-called "Anti-Right Deviation Struggle" and they competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas which were based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent "surpluses" and leaving farmers to starve to death. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action.

Acknowledging responsibilities for the Great Leap Forward, Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and "rightists" who opposed him.

There is a reason historians are already fleeing the country: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-...

If we wait too long to act, there's a good chance it will be too late or cost much much more.
by wdpk | 2025-04-07 00:09:15+00:00
Well yes, this is an idiosyncratic event, chances are that a bunch of hedge funds have no hedge against stupid!

I'm actually more worried about the small businesses that say have a container full of whatever product somewhere in the middle of the Pacific that will have to pay the tariffs upfront out of pocket with a disappearing consumer on the other end of the pipe.
by ndiddy | 2025-04-07 00:09:33+00:00
> So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings?

Or around 4 years after the first public GNU Emacs release, 4 years after the first public GNU Bison release, 3 years after the first public GDB release, and 2 years after the first public GCC release.

> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.

Correct, just like how the initial public BSD release was just the networking stack (worthless on its own).

> There is a lot of deliberate ignorance of public domain code being posted on BBSes at the time.

Not sure where you got that from. Nobody claims that Stallman was the first one to come up with publicly releasing source code. I will say that a lot of the "public domain" software from back then lacks the uniformity you see from later movements like free software or open source. Some of it isn't even public domain, and has a license like "this is copyright me, any modified copies must have my copyright statement preserved, this software may not be used for commercial purposes".
by jrapdx3 | 2025-04-07 00:09:36+00:00
For the record, Tcl doesn't use garbage collection, rather objects are reference-counted and freed when ref count is <= 0.

But interestingly, Tcl is a good example of languages that took a piece of Lisp's domain. In fact, Tcl is quite Lisp-like with a syntax distinct from Lisp. Tcl has been successful and with the recent release of v. 9.0, it stands to gain traction among programmers.

OTOH CL and Scheme remain underused though current implementations are generally well-equipped to handle contemporary requirements. I've used Scheme to build website generators and other tools but there's a dearth of large-scale, visible Lisp/Scheme projects out there to attract developers.

Starting such a project is a big commitment, probably programmers are hoping somebody else will pick up the ball and run with it.
by dyhi55 | 2025-04-07 00:09:55+00:00
C is not node.js. C exists for 50 years and is expected to have stable API. In scientific circles it's not unusual to compile c and f77 libraries built in the 70's, 80's.

BLAS, gemv, GEMM, SGEMM libraries are from 1979, 1984, 1989. You may have seen these words scroll by when compiling modern 2025 CUDA :)
by ashwinsundar | 2025-04-07 00:10:08+00:00
I want to switch from Postgres to SQLite for a side project. Managed Postgres is an unnecessary expense, and introduces complexity which I don't want to deal with or troubleshoot. SQLite is simple and appropriate for my current needs. I believe a simple rsync script is enough to keep backups. I'm also attracted to the fact that the database is stored in the same file system in SQLite, instead of being a network request away for Postgres.

However, I am hosting the application via DigitalOcean App Platform, which has an ephemeral storage and lacks the ability to mount volumes. I looked into storing the file in DO Spaces (S3-like storage), but App Platform seems to lack the ability to install/run s3cmd to retrieve files. I also cannot easily curl the file over, because the Spaces files are private and require a new presigned URL which needs to be manually generated as needed.

I really like the App Platform's zero-downtime capabilities and minimal configuration hassle, but I don't like that I lack granular abilities to install what I want on the managed VM (such as s3cmd). I could switch to a droplet, but then I have to manually script the shutdown and startup sequence so that it pulls the db.sqlite file from Spaces on startup.

I'm a little frustrated that App Platform is just barely not compliant enough for me to run SQLite.
by senderista | 2025-04-07 00:11:51+00:00
Under the constitution, Trump doesn't have the power to unilaterally make trade policy (that is Congress's prerogative). He claims he does under a vaguely worded emergency powers law that clearly doesn't apply to current circumstances (we are not, or at least were not, in the sort of emergency contemplated by the law). (This goes to show that all such laws granting extraordinary powers to the executive during "emergencies" will eventually be abused by someone sufficiently unscrupulous.)

In a "real" parliamentary system, Trump already would have gotten a no-confidence vote.
by jcims | 2025-04-07 00:11:53+00:00
I just had Cursor Pro + Sonnet 3.7 Max one shot a python script to send this question to every model available through groq.

>Found 24 models: llama3-70b-8192, llama-3.2-3b-preview, meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct, allam-2-7b, llama-guard-3-8b, qwen-qwq-32b, llama-3.2-1b-preview, playai-tts-arabic, deepseek-r1-distill-llama-70b, llama-3.1-8b-instant, llama3-8b-8192, qwen-2.5-coder-32b, distil-whisper-large-v3-en, qwen-2.5-32b, llama-3.2-90b-vision-preview, deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-32b, whisper-large-v3, llama-3.3-70b-specdec, llama-3.3-70b-versatile, playai-tts, whisper-large-v3-turbo, llama-3.2-11b-vision-preview, mistral-saba-24b, gemma2-9b-it

Excluding the ones that do not support chat completions, all but one (qwen-qwq-32b) answered in the affirmative. The answer from qwen-qwq-32b said:

Paul Newman, the renowned actor and humanitarian, did not have a widely publicized struggle with alcohol addiction throughout most of his life, but there were specific instances that indicated challenges.

Using lack of progress in a specialized field as a barometer for overall progress is kind of silly. I just spent the last few days 'vibe coding' an application and I have to say that it's pretty remarkable how capable it is now relative to my experience last year.

It took three minutes for me to do the above from the time I created my API key to when I had an answer.
by holameraj | 2025-04-07 00:12:10+00:00
I’ve built TinyHead, a lightweight tool that turns all your docs, notes, and links into a chat-ready, searchable AI brain.

The idea came from this pain: We store valuable info everywhere — Notion, Google Docs, random notes, web links — but when we actually need it, we dig through folders, tabs, or spend forever searching.

With TinyHead, you can:

Chat with your entire knowledge base Semantically search across Notion, Google Docs, notes, and even YouTube Add data easily from docs, links, or just write a quick note Clean UI, zero setup headache Built with vector search + LLM, runs fast and focused
by mappu | 2025-04-07 00:12:29+00:00
> this was called “tivo-ization” at the time, because TiVo did it.

It's not widely known but what TiVo actually did was something different than this, and both RMS and the SFC believe that both the GPLv2 and GPLv3 allow what TiVo actually did. Some discussion and further links via https://lwn.net/Articles/858905/
by jbm | 2025-04-07 00:12:33+00:00
In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery. Tesla is nice enough to hide this under "You should keep your car plugged in all the time" messages. It's really a pain, especially if you have a relatively small battery to begin with. I have a 2019 Model 3 w/ a 50 kwh battery, and use 10-20 kwh on a regular basis; 5 kwh wasted means as much as 1/3 of my energy use is effectively waste.

I'd be very interested in seeing what they can provide for us. Improved battery chemistry for use in the far north is of far, far more value than yet another 5 person car for 1 person driving in San Francisco.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-04-07 00:13:57+00:00
Yes. But such code can be fixed without functional changes.

I'm not denying that there are codebases where trying this would result in an Armageddon of refactoring, but I would venture that's the exception rather than the rule.

Most C programmers use "const char*" for string literals, and have for a long time.
by hamstergene | 2025-04-07 00:14:12+00:00
Publicly announcing trades many months ahead should be enough, without having to get too radical about it.

It pretty much prevents benefiting from "subtle insider" trading via being lobbied by corporate officials or getting any friendly hints from them. The problem with "follow Nancy's trades" idea is that by the time the trade is known, the price has already corrected. The first one to complete the trade is often the only one to collect a significant benefit, the followers get scraps.

And it indirectly disincentivizes owning individual stock because prearranged trade of one stock carries a risk of being screwed by market manipulators, while prearranged trade of a broad index fund is not a problem.
by defrost | 2025-04-07 00:14:35+00:00
> WHAT is happening here? We don't know. And the government is not saying, beyond publishing how much they're doing.

It's the same for robberies, petty fraud, assaults, etc. Just the totals in broad categories are published.

There is a reason for that, privacy, personal details of victims and the actually innocent although accused. These are things that take time, money, resources to scrub from the public record and so are not publicly published.

The reporting done on robberies is done by reporters who understand the privacy laws and apply for access, by people that attend courts or pull transcripts and sign off on the privacy aspects.

Researchers get full unfettered access to entire databases on the same basis.

If you want to know more then take action to allocate funds to drill into the data, write to a newspaper and lobby for them to do the drudge work, approach universities that study crime stats.

Crime reporters, and interested general public, look at the Court dailies and attend hearings on subjects of interest. That's how the public hears about details of a spicy robbery, fraud, or assault. That or parties involved alerting reporters.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-07 00:15:50+00:00
> One organization I knew of had 1,500 terabytes of data, with less than 2% ever having been accessed after it was first stored.

On a related note, probably a similar percentage of people claim on their car insurance. If only the rest realised they had "crap insurance" and were paying for nothing, they could save so much money!

This is obviously sarcasm, but I think it's important to remember that much of the data is stored because we don't know what we will need later. Photos of kids? Maybe that one will be The One that we end up framing? Miscellaneous business records? Maybe those will be the ones we have to dig out for a tax audit? Web pages on government sites? Maybe there will suddenly be an interest in obscure pages on public health policy if a global pandemic happens.

Complaining that data is mostly junk is not a particularly interesting conclusion without acknowledging this. Is there wastage? Yeah sure, but accuracy on what needs storing is directly traded off with time spent figuring that out, and often it's cheaper to store the data.
by codingdave | 2025-04-07 00:16:28+00:00
I know Domino exceedingly well. I started working with it in '94, and continued with it in one form or another until 2021. My last gig with it was even a Domino-based SaaS that reached over 8 figures ARR, and is still up and running. Everything in this post sounds completely accurate. Domino is absolutely a viable platform from the back-end, database perspective.

But that is not the important point when deciding whether to use it, because it is absolutely not a viable platform from the "Can you find a team to actually code on this platform?" perspective.

By the time I had finished with that last gig, I told everyone the same thing: That I personally knew both Domino and modern web frameworks and could blend them together to have a modern front-end on that back-end. But I figure there are a couple dozen people in the world who know both sides well enough to do so, because the industry moved on. The talent moved on. Or retired. Most of my work post-2009 was decommission projects. At the same time, new frameworks have come to fruition since the 90s, so all the special features Domino has baked in just aren't that unique anymore. There are also almost no jobs in it, so no reason for people to learn it.

At the end of the day, you cannot run a company on a tech stack where there is no talent pool.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-07 00:16:40+00:00
That is literally not oppositional veto power. You're asking what is currently a one party state to disempower itself or infight. That's absurd.

The problem is unchecked power. You can't expect those in power to check themselves. When there is no forceful resistance at all to obviously insane completely radical policy that experts are "confused" by, we should all be very very worried.
by ninefoxgambit | 2025-04-07 00:18:27+00:00
I sell templates for a living and have used several of these providers.

The main options are Gumroad - high fees and ugly design, solid system never had issues does most what I need.

Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.

Paddle - haven’t used it but I think it’s probably as good as Gumroad or Lemon.

Polar.sh - the trendy new option, most creators abandoning Lemon Squeezy are moving there. Has lots of innovation in features beyond payments such as selling private GitHub access.

All of these platforms are MOR as far as I know, all provide the checkout UI etc. all handle digital asset file delivery. They are perfect for creators selling digital products that want a turn key solution and don’t want to do any development work.
by SllX | 2025-04-07 00:18:55+00:00
Well that’s not quite correct. If you look at their most recent 10-K, Ads made up about 8% of Amazon’s revenue. The bulk of their revenue is still retail (online, physical and third party seller services) with AWS providing about 16%.

Microsoft’s largest segment is cloud, but it doesn’t quite provide the bulk. Their ads business is small compared to the rest.

Certainly killing advertising would hurt them, but I’m not seeing a mortal wound here, so I thought I was missing something when you lumped them in.
by ryan_lane | 2025-04-07 00:19:05+00:00
> In very simple terms, you are just intolerant. You just gave yourself a permission to hate ( because your hate is so totally different from their kind of hate ). On the off-chance sarcasm was not obvious, it is not some sort of neat trick or get out of jail card, because there is some level of social permission for this.

Yeah, I'm OK hating people who want to imprison/kill people for being born a particular way. You can change the way you think, they can't change the way they were born.

> Friend,

You're not my friend.

> Then we are out of words and are unable to communicate further. What does that accomplish?

We don't need to debate concepts like "should we send people to labor camps, without due process". Engaging people who think this way simply helps spread their ideas, and their ideas are a cancer.

Saying this community is debating these things because we believe in curiosity is just an excuse to allow fascists in our midsts without feeling guilt about it. If you have a bar and let nazis hang out, you're a nazi bar.

> 'When is it not ok to disagree?'

If your disagreement is about whether someone should be allowed to exist because of the way they were born, then it's not OK to disagree.

I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't exist. I'm suggesting that we, as a community, shouldn't allow you to participate in debate, because it simply helps spread your hate, and it makes the community as a whole worse to allow you to participate.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-07 00:21:46+00:00
"Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow."

I remember a world without advertising on the internet. Products still existed. Commerce still happened. Information still flowed. At first I got access to the internet through universities. Later I paid subscription fees for internet access. Nothing I accessed on the www required a paid subscription.

Bandwidth sucked. CPUs were less powerful, RAM and storage were in short supply. All that has changged.

But I still pay for internet access, much more than I did in the early days. And, remarkably, I see people asking internet users to "subscribe" to websites, in addition to paying internet subscriber fees. This does not stop these websites from also conducting data collection, surveillance and targeted advertsing.

Internet advertising is not like other advertising. People try to argue it makes stuff "free". Stuff that was already free to begin with.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-07 00:22:23+00:00
Related Red Sprites and Blue Jets Explained (Transient Luminous Events) [video] (5 years ago, 1 comment)[0].. which has some great visuals.

The paper this breathless article is based on Massive Outbreak of Red Sprites in South Asia Observed from the Tibetan Plateau[1] really doesn't support the title.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24387986

[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-024-4143-5