MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rurban | 2025-05-13 06:22:56+00:00
I maintain some project on all forges in parallel, even savannah. Savannah is even the default. But 99% of all reports and contributions are on the github mirror, 1% on savannah, 0% on gitlab and 0% on codeberg. Nobody cares about those islands.

issues are stored in git bug and automatically synced. Github is the only viable option, but you can keep the others as mirrors when github chooses to strike you.
by data_maan | 2025-05-13 06:25:43+00:00
You live in a bubble and you think that just because you use American products (GitHub owned by MS, AWS and the rest) the rest of the world does too.

Why don't you have a look at Asia (and it doesn't even have to be China, it can be Japan too)? Most major Asian companies have clones of the software stack that you mentioned and do not rely on it as much as you think.

These days there are (luckily) alternatives to American products, and this American-first ideology will only accelerate the speed at which the rest of the world will switch to alternative ones.
by sesm | 2025-05-13 06:25:51+00:00
It's not even about engineering challenges.

- Lawson criterion is derived with the assumption of equilibrium plasma, which doesn't hold true in any real tokomak/stellarator

- at required temperatures most of the energy would be in photons of thermal radiation, that don't get confined by magnetic field, so when plasma relaxes from high energy beams to thermal equilibrium, it loses all the pumped energy through radiation

- with high energy beams tokomak is essentially a particle accelerator, where electrons get in the way of collision
by debarshri | 2025-05-13 06:31:25+00:00
It reminds me of Hadoop days, where the data would be stored in the HDFS and you would use mapreduce to process it. However, the concept was to send computation to the location of the data.

This really make sense. I might be a little out of touch. I wonder, do you incur transfer cost when you data is in buckets and you process by bringing data to the compute.
by mdavid626 | 2025-05-13 06:32:59+00:00
Interestingly, for me this worked very well. On my BMW M235i it was flawless. It had normal beams, and one could turn on the auto beams. One button to switch it on/off. I really liked it, as it was easy to activate, did its job, and when in doubt, I could deactivate it easily (button).

On my VW Golf GTD (mk7) it works also pretty good, only the activation/deactivation is strange. It uses the same switch, which is used to switch on the beams. Depending on the current state, it activates the beams, auto beam or turns it off. After more than a year of ownership, I still don’t know how to use it. Sometimes when I need to turn it off, it doesn’t turn off, but does something I don’t want it to do.
by azonenberg | 2025-05-13 06:33:50+00:00
There are no blobs I'm aware of anywhere that are actually running in the system.

The STM32s have a small boot "ROM" burned into a write-protected region of flash but I have it jumpered so I boot from main user flash, not the bootloader.

I did a quick silicon overview of them (just out of curiosity... they came new from Digikey so I have no reason to believe they're fishy).

STM32H735: top metal only https://siliconpr0n.org/map/st/stm32h735/azonenberg_mz_mit20..., deeper dive planned but haven't had a chance

STM32L431: did a full teardown https://serd.es/2025/01/02/STM32L431-teardown.html

The 12-port PHYs are a fused-down version of a switch chip so there is a MIPS core on there, but to the best of my knowledge in the switch SKU it doesn't actually run (e.g. its RAM bus is NC and the IO power rail is grounded).

The FPGA is completely programmed from the bitstream I control. Tampering with a random resold FPGA to add some kind of backdoor is extraordinarily difficult and unlikely, it's the kind of thing you would see done as a targeted attack rather than just dumping FPGAs into the secondary market and hoping that a juicy intelligence target buys them rather than some guy tinkering around with open source projects.

And, if I ever get the slightest hint that there is something fishy about silicon I bought from a sketchy overseas source, I'm gonna take it into the lab at work and go to town. I do semiconductor reverse engineering at my day job and am the absolute last person anyone should try to sneak backdoored chips past. It's going to end up getting dissected inside a SEM and turn into an awesome talk at REcon or something.

While it would be slightly annoying to have my side projects disrupted, having a living breathing nation-state silicon backdoor show up in my lab would be a dream come true. I'd be ordering as many more chips as I could from the same seller and instrumenting it in every way possible, practicing on non-backdoored chips to make absolutely certain I didn't damage any of the spicy ones while studying the altered circuits, etc.
by VintageDan | 2025-05-13 06:34:39+00:00
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Please see the the job listing and application instructions here: gem.app/jobs
by laurentlb | 2025-05-13 06:34:50+00:00
I wrote this article mainly for the people in the demoscene. If anything is unclear or missing for the Hackernews audience, I'm happy to answer questions here.

If anyone wants to try it, I've made a web build: https://ctrl-alt-test.fr/minifier/

I might write a more general article later on writing code minifiers, e.g. how it compares to writing a code formatter, how to implement the transformations, etc.

On the tech side, the code is written in F#. The web build uses Bolero (Blazor for F#). So maybe I'll write later about my experience writing an open source project with F# and evolving it.
by tobyhinloopen | 2025-05-13 06:38:47+00:00
That's because you are aware of the limitations. Ruby is really powerful and allows you to manipulate existing modules, but you shouldn't do that because it will leak everywhere.

This namespaces feature allows you to manipulate existing globals, but keep it isolated in your own namespace. That seems pretty good to me :) Because it remains isolated, you can also use these features more aggressively.
by seanhunter | 2025-05-13 06:39:20+00:00
> There's a reason we see so few of those on the roads, amidst an explosion of various human-powered modes of transport.

Cargo/passenger trikes are growing in popularity here where I live in London. I see probably a dozen a day which are an even mix of people ferrying kids about in a Danish/Dutch style "bakfiets" thing (you seem to be able to get 1-4 small people in the front of one of these depending on how picky they are about being squashed in) and cargo/parcel delivery which seem to be more modernized designs anecdotally. Whereas the model for a courier company used to be a person on a bicycle or motorbike doing one delivery at a time it seems more and more to be shifting to a person on a cargo bike doing multiple related deliveries in an area, and somewhat competing with traditional logistics just with a faster turnaround. The hook for parents seems to be if you have more than one kid it's still possible to use a bike to get around rather than a car (which is a very inconvenient mode of transport within London generally) and it's much faster and with bigger range compared with trying to get your offspring to walk (which might not even be possible for any kind of reasonable distance depending on age).

The advantage to these designs is that you have a bicycle that can carry cargo. Having decided that is the criterion you want to hit, having a modular version may well be beneficial.

The disadvantage you cite (that the driver can't lean) really doesn't factor too much into this use case because they aren't trying to travel at speed. Urban settings have much more stop-start movement in straight lines than cornering, and if you think about a parent with kids in the front of a bike they probably aren't trying to go super fast because they want to know they can definitely brake fast if the need arises.
by mdavid626 | 2025-05-13 06:39:35+00:00
I believe you, that these systems work. However, I watched too many videos about cars on which it doesn’t. Many of them were expensive cars. Phantom breaking is really scary to me. I’d rather have full control of the car, than letting some system randomly emergency brake the car for no reason. ABS and ESP one can anticipate. ESP usually can even be turned off.
by szszrk | 2025-05-13 06:40:39+00:00
In a way, you just confirm what I said. I think that "fallacy" is cool for a ted talk or a sales book, but falls apart when faced with reality.

tacostakohashi chose very precise examples - cash registry and self checkout. These are clearly wrong, as proven by experience.

To meet your point it would be better to say "I don't want to be a farmer or a pilot". But even that is bogus.

Many people that can "be a farmer", plant their own vegetables. It's an option available for many people.

It may not be true in your local example, but it is for mine - almost every person that has a small piece of land (even tiny garden) at least experiments with some vegetables or fruits. On denser areas like mine (where houses are rare, blocks of flats are more common) it's not uncommon to plant tiny amounts on balconies.

Owning a share of "community gardens" right outside of city is insanely popular even with very high prices of those. The one my cousin has parcel in is over 1000 parcels (usually around 20x20 meters or so), where people plant and compost (mandatory).

Many people want to be a farmer if that gives them high quality products. They will jump through hoops to achieve that.
by globular-toast | 2025-05-13 06:40:39+00:00
Oh it is, but I think people forget what the distributed model gets you. It isn't just about having a completely decentralised workflow. When you clone a repo you have everything you need to keep working on that project. You have your own copy of all the branches which you are free to do whatever you want with. This is what makes it fast. Every clone has a brand new master branch and you never needed to ask anyone or get agreement to get your own branch to work on. Commits on your branch will never interfere with anyone else's work. You don't need to lock files and complete your work as quickly as possible. You can do as many commits as you like, a hundred in a day is not unheard of, because it's your branch. Previously people would commit once a day at most and sometimes not even until the end of the week, which is just unthinkable to a git user. A git clone is your own personal repo which allows you to use version control before you even share anything with anyone.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-13 06:41:04+00:00
The historical perspective is kind of interesting. What interests me more is how this stuff can be modernized. Because the current byzantine system of task saturating people by making them yell numbers and letters at each other over state of the art 1950s technology for doing so is hardly efficient, scalable, or ultimately secure when it inevitably breaks down under the stresses it induces on pilots and staff involved.

Communication failures and pilot errors are usually major contributing factors to accidents. Pilot errors become more likely when individuals are preoccupied with processing vast amounts of information and demands thrown at them via radio in critical parts of flight (e.g. when finding their way to a runway).

Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.

Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.

If you call your granny via whatsapp, facetime, or whatever, there's no need to tell her who you are. Because the app tells her before she even answers. It's completely redundant information. She already knows. There's no valid technical reason why ATC cannot have the same comfort of knowing who they are talking to and what they are flying. It's 2025! Not 1965. ATC should have full context when they talk to people. They shouldn't have to ask for that context verbally. Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.

There are a few things happening in aviation that are making this more urgent after many decades of stagnation in technological changes. Battery electric is going to make flying vastly cheaper and safer than it is today. That's going to increase the amount of relatively inexperienced pilots and plane movements. And secondly, there are an increasing amount of autonomously flying planes, drones, etc. Those are actually going to dominate traffic in the years ahead. Pilots are expensive and are becoming kind of redundant. The amount of flights that ATC needs to juggle is going to increase by at lease one or two orders of magnitude.

The current system won't scale with that, it will have to change. Now would be a good time to start figuring that out.
by reconnecting | 2025-05-13 06:41:06+00:00
There is nothing about luddism here. We had a choice: to create a standard modern website, as everyone does these days, or to try something slightly different. The team chose a non-standard approach. To an external observer, such as our banker, it looks absolutely normal. However, if some CTO veteran were to delve into the code and encounter HTML tags that they haven't seen in the last 25 years, they might experience some sentimental or ironic feelings, but in any case, no one gets hurt. Luckily, the <bgsound> tag is no longer supported.

What these web page experiments actually prove is that there are people in the industry who either don’t know or have forgotten what a real HTML page without JS/CSS frameworks looks like. For those, it might be beneficial to discover how things were done at the beginning.

Thanks for mentioning the art. This is something that couldn't be done alone, as it requires both a creator and a spectator. From this perspective, feeling that this HTML web page has an influence on a different audience is exactly what modern art (not to be confused with programming art) is about.

P.S. I am not associated with the original post above.
by ars | 2025-05-13 06:41:12+00:00
This title is click bait, and the article is poorly written.

A better title: "Texas Senate passes bill requiring renewables to designate backup power to reduce their volatility"

I also clicked on the references given in the article, and they don't exactly say what the article claims.

For example: "A study by the Texas Association of Business (TAB) found that the legislation would cost the state $5.2 billion more per year — and cost individual consumers $225 more."

That's not what the link says, the link says that reducing the growth of renewables would do that. The article pretends that this legislation would reduce renewables, but it does not actually prove that claim.

The Hill usually has higher quality work, this article is garbage.
by sshine | 2025-05-13 06:41:33+00:00
> if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back.

You could, but generally people can’t. They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond. GitHub use translates into GitLab use, but not into general git use workout a central repository.

> Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by distributed git either. (though I would love a good issue tracking system that is done entirely inside git)

Radicle offers one. CLI-based, too.
by eru | 2025-05-13 06:41:53+00:00
I used to live just off Old Street and worked in the City, so I frequently passed by the Barbican when I walked to work.

It's an interesting place to be sure, but I wouldn't praise it nearly as much as the article does.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43966676 expresses some of what I felt.
by azonenberg | 2025-05-13 06:44:07+00:00
I've wargamed how I'd backdoor an FPGA even given the ability to make a completely new mask set from a fork of the original CAD files, and it's really difficult.

You'd either have to add an enormous amount of logic or have extremely detailed a priori knowledge of exactly what someone was going to use it for (down to what functions each pin was being used for). Making it meet the original factory performance and timing specs would be immensely difficult.

The best idea I had was that you could add some logic inside the transceiver IP that would understand common networking line codes and then bridge packets with certain magic header values over to an ICAP or something, so that you could enable an unauthenticated partial reconfig over IP channel.

But when you have lots of different line codes out there and don't know the bus width or configuration the user is going to have now suddenly you have to implement half a dozen different PCSes inside your fork of the GTY IP without changing the layout enough to fail timing or change the bump map enough to be visible to someone looking at the substrate or...

Small stuff like adding bypasses to bitstream encryption I could see, but nothing that would be a major risk to something like this.
by eru | 2025-05-13 06:44:12+00:00
If you don't already own a flat in the Barbican, but plan to move there, than the service charges and the leasehold are immaterial to you.

If they lowered the service charges tomorrow, that would just mean that the headline market price of the apartments would go up to compensate.

If they moved from leasehold to freehold tomorrow, you would also see that reflected in the price.
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-13 06:44:20+00:00
I do agree that uninstallation can be hard on macOS. I think Apple just envisions a future where every app is self-contained and putting the app in the trash really does remove everything because it was all in there.

Maybe that's not realistic, though.

I still think there's something to be said about an installation/uninstallation process that relies purely on moving files around, no custom script execution.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-13 06:47:17+00:00
The Voyager space probes for sure use visual fixes on guide stars, such as Alpha Centauri (and our own Sun?) to ensure correct orientation. Of course, they don't need to navigate much, since given the relative velocities, their thrusters wouldn't make much difference.

And there is a quite-famous scene in Apollo 13 where they literally line-up the Moon itself in the reticule so that their engine burn puts them on exactly the correct trajectory.
by eru | 2025-05-13 06:47:54+00:00
For a more positive example, you might look at what the 'Housing and Development Board' managed to put up in Singapore. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pinnacle@Duxton and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board in general.

However, I feel like HDB should declare victory and go home.
by wahern | 2025-05-13 06:48:28+00:00
Moreover, I think Venus has lost most of its hydrogen to space, so you can't even make water anymore. Hydrogen escapes the atmosphere relatively easily for Earth- and Venus-sized planets[1], and the vaporization of all the water and subsequent disassociation[2] of H2O allowed the hydrogen to escape into space.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere#/media/File:Solar_s...

[2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-13 06:50:16+00:00
Texas should be careful what they ask for; they might get it. Their intention is obviously to protect their gas exploitation industry and sell lots of gas. But the net result might actually be making gas power plants more redundant faster.

Batteries would allow solar plants to provide power when the sun doesn't shine. And those are of course already being deployed in record numbers on the grid and very popular in combination with wind and solar setups. Any surplus of battery capacity would weaken the business case for operating gas plants and push those into the role of peaker plants.

Australia is a good benchmark of what that looks like. Several of their states run on solar and battery most of the time with coal/gas plants only switching on occasionally now.
by Munksgaard | 2025-05-13 06:50:26+00:00
I agree that the terminology is not ideal, but think there's a huge difference between JS' "weak types", i.e. abundant implicit conversions, and e.g. Elixirs "strong types", where `1 + "foo"` is a runtime error. I don't care if we call the latter something else though. Any good suggestions?

That said, I prefer having both strong and static typing, but that's another argument.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-05-13 06:50:43+00:00
The reason is that it is more than code. Managing identity is hard and for many projects besides having a source of truth for the repository you also need some degree of project management (bug tracking)

And: Even though source of truth is centralized for many projects in GitHub, git still benefits from being distributed: It's the basis for "forks" on VithUb and for the way people develop. Ja jung the clone locally and committing locally and preparing the change set for review. In the CVS/SVN days one had to commit to the ce teal branch way sooner and more direct.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-13 06:51:10+00:00
As a GitHub user myself, I don’t disagree with your point. However I’d like to say that this isn’t quiet as different a problem to solve as it might first appear:

The issue tracking can be a branch and then you just need a compatible UI. In fact some git front ends do exactly this.

CI/CD does already exist in git via githooks. And you’re already better off using make/just/yarn/whatever for your scripts and rely as little on YAML as possible. It’s just a pity that githooks require users to set up each time so many people simply don’t bother.
by paul7986 | 2025-05-13 06:52:18+00:00
Chat with it when I drive to get things done like GPT create the best route for a New Mexico trip (El Paso to Carlsbad to Rosewell to White Sands to Truth & Consequence to Albuquerque) and create an image of it showing the drive distance between them all. Just like I would have to slog through and use Apple or Google Maps to do this .. GPT should do this for me and much quicker via an image I can then share with travel friends. Some nerd rage today as I discovered it can't do this ATM. Hopefully they are working on integrating Bing Maps so I can use it for travel; use Apple and Google Maps less.

Now it can't do that but does some cool things based off of what you try with it like recently in an Icelandic restaurant I took a pic of the menu, uploaded to GPT and asked it to create a mirror image yet show me the menu in English and US dollars (not Icelandic Krona). That was very handy as I then shared it with my travel friends in the restaurant and those in the hotel.

Overall love hearing how people are using it uniquely too! Used it to count my calories for a year as I eat out daily at healthy chains (Cava and others) and GPT can easily grab calories from their sites and calculate.