MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-05-04 08:08:23+00:00
Good comments on earthing in reply to this thread: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/04/25/on_call/...

From comment about UK having three earthing standards:

TT - Terre Terre or Earth/Earth, where the installation earth is actually connected directly to earth via an earth rod or similar and only phase and neutral run back to the transformer. Very common still with older housing stock, particularly with older overhead cables, though things are gradually being upgraded. The earth in a TT system is high impedance and unlikely to pass enough current to blow a fuse under fault conditions, so a separate safety device must also be fitted which these days is an RCD, and there are all sorts of rules for that TN-S - Terre Neutral - Separate, where the installation earth is connected to an earth installation at the transformer, where the neutral is also earthed. This earth is usually conducted over the metallic sheath of an underground cable and can blow fuses without the help of an RCD, though RCDs are mandated domestically for other reasons too TN-C-S - Terre Neutral - Combined - Separate, where the installation earth connects to the supply neutral at the service cutout of the installation (and nowhere else), while the neutral is grounded not just at the transformer, but for obvious safety reasons at several points along its path to your house too.
by fjfaase | 2025-05-04 08:09:18+00:00
I now regret that I did not ask one of my teachers to be a co-author for the only math paper I got published, which was a broad generalisation of a technical report he wrote. This was long before I knew about the Erdős number and that he had one. I did show him the paper for review and he gave me some comments about some particular case.
by yorwba | 2025-05-04 08:10:13+00:00
> you could probably put together one reasonable collection of word counting and question answering tasks with average human time of 30 seconds and another collection with an average human time of 20 minutes where GPT-4 would hit 50% accuracy on each.

So do this and pick the one where humans do best. I doubt that doing so would show all progress to be illusory.

But it would certainly be interesting to know what the easiest thing is that a human can do but current AIs struggle with.
I built an AI-powered mock interview platform to ace job interviews
by yogigan | 2025-05-04 08:10:25+00:00
Inspired by my own job interview struggles, I built SalaryTalk, an AI-powered platform to help anyone nail their next interview. It offers mock interviews with real-time answer suggestion, lifelike voice simulations (thanks to ElevenLabs), and personalized coaching tailored to your career level. it’s designed to make interview prep feel real and effective.

It’s early days, but I’m excited to share it! Try it out and let me know your thoughts—any feedback on features or UX would be awesome. What’s been your go-to way to prep for interviews?

Live demo: https://www.salarytalk.pro/
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-04 08:12:48+00:00
On a modern laptop running Linux, the three slowest things in the boot are:

- The firmware

- The bootloader timeout

- Waiting for the user to type the encryption passphrase

Everything else takes almost no time at all. So, if you can eliminate 5 seconds from the boot process in the normal case, without eliminating your ability to debug the system in the unusual case, that's a win.
Show HN: C2desf – Make C code run on any device (even IoT/fridges)
by FerkiHN | 2025-05-04 08:13:29+00:00
---

Hello, HN community!

We’re working on c2desf — a tool that transforms ordinary C code into a universal format for any platform. Even your fridge could run it!

### Why You’ll Care: - For Developers: - Platform independence without code changes. - Architecture-specific optimizations (SIMD, JIT). - Built-in obfuscation to protect your code. - For Tech Enthusiasts: - Easily integrate code into IoT, microcontrollers, or smart devices.

### Key Details: - The project will be open-sourced on GitHub soon (stay tuned!). - Documentation is in the works — updates coming shortly.

### Questions for You: 1. What devices would you want to support first? 2. Have you struggled with cross-platform code portability before?

Follow this account — tutorials, demos, and releases are on the horizon!

---
by baq | 2025-05-04 08:14:11+00:00
It’s one of RDBMS peculiarities that you just need to learn about. Any half decent MSSQL course or book will tell you about the plan cache and the occasional gotcha exactly like yours. Time wasted debugging this issue by the unaware is probably in kilo man years by now.

…but MSSQL is still a fantastic database, if you can afford it. Postgres and mysql come with their own set of gotchas, some of which need an actually decent book to be explained. (Note all the RDBMS manuals are decent books and everyone without exception should read at least the TOC of the db they’re using, which IME is still a rarity.)
by tannhaeuser | 2025-05-04 08:14:35+00:00
The XML subset of SGML still includes most forms of entity usage SGML has, including external general entities as described by grandparent. XInclude can include any fragment not just a complete document, but apart from that was redundant, and what remains of XInclude in HTML today (<svg href=...>) doesnt't make use of fragments and also does away with the xinclude and other namespaces. For reusing fragments OTOH, SVG has the more specific <use href=...> construct. XInclude also really worked bad in the presence of XML Schema.
by ben_w | 2025-05-04 08:15:20+00:00
AI is software.

As software gets more reliable, people come to trust it.

Software still has bugs, the trust means those bugs still get people killed.

That was true with things we wouldn't call AI any more, and still does with things we do.

Doesn't need to take over or anything when humans are literally asleep at the wheel because they mistakenly think the AI can drive the car for them.

Heck, even for building codes and health & safety rules, they're written in blood. Why would AI be the exception?
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-05-04 08:15:37+00:00
Interesting site. It would be good to differentiate between Denial of Service (DoS) and Denial of Wallet (DoW).

The contributors are running into one of the many common tradeoffs of Serverless, an inability to set spending caps.

I wouldn’t go along with the last line conclusion of the original post - “done with cloud”.

It might be old fashioned, but I really like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) rather than Platform as a Service (PaaS). Spin up cloud compute hosts as required, and avoid anything platform specific as much as possible. It’s easy to end up married to AWS, GCP or Azure because the cost of a migration project is always a bit too high to pay off.

My use cases might be smaller scale, but I currently like using Terraform and Ansible with EC2. My Terraform setup is quite specific to the AWS environment (EC2 hosts, VPC, subnets, etc) and would require modification if I jumped ship, but much of my detail is in the Ansible playbooks, which simply expect Debian Stable host(s) to configure with my chosen stack. I currently front all that with Cloudflare, and use the cache and built-in bot protections along with rate limits and WAF rules to try to mitigate against abuse that could run up a bill (such as excessive egress).
by npteljes | 2025-05-04 08:16:57+00:00
I'm pretty sure it's not impossible, but rather just improbable, because of how human nature works. In other words, we are not incentivized to do that, and that is why we don't do that, and even when we did, it always fell apart.

You are very right that AI will not change this. As neither did any other productivity improvement in the past (directly).
by pizza | 2025-05-04 08:18:08+00:00
Well.. autodiff isn't particularly technically sophisticated. But I doubt that when it was first invented in the 1950s, people could have foreseen that a lot of autodiff put together can write an implementation of autodiff.

If you're interested in more technical approaches, I think they're starting to come together, slowly. I've seen several research directions (operads / cellular sheaves for a theory of multiagent collaboration, the theory of open games for compositional forwards/backwards strategy/planning in open environments) that would fit in quite nicely. And to some extent, the earliest frameworks are going to be naive implementations of these directions.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-05-04 08:18:18+00:00
> Ok, we clearly have an extremely different definition of the word "the" workhorse of open source.

You said what it is not, but forgot to share your own definition.

>That sentence took a strange turn. Enterprise, and then back to open source?

What makes you so surprised? One does not exclude another, enterprise users are users too. Most of things in Java world aren’t client-side, so many users won’t observe them directly, but open source Java technology is doing a lot of work for them, constituting significant share of the code base.
by Thorrez | 2025-05-04 08:19:46+00:00
I've tried a lot of different fake meats, and real meat tasted better to me. Sure, meat requires special cooking to taste good. That doesn't mean meat as a whole tastes bad. When other things are cooked the same as meat, they don't taste as good to me as meat.

>Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows.

I'm not saying that meat producers don't optimize their production to lower prices. I'm saying that despite their optimizations, vegetarian foods are cheaper to produce than meat.

>It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.

Look at the price of beef vs the price of vegetarian foods. Beef costs more. Also look at the carbon footprint of beef vs vegetarian foods. Beef production produces more carbon.

>Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.

I don't think any of those are the main reason people eat meat. In a different comment you say rice, potatoes or lentils are easier to cook such they taste good. I don't think meat is easier to cook than other foods.
by jjani | 2025-05-04 08:21:19+00:00
> They don't want to be subject to app store approval policies, shitty TOS, nor pay Google or Apple a 30% cut. Installing the app is easy, visit the web site, clck the install banner, add to home screen and you're good to go. On the developer side you get to deploy as iften as needed.

And the metrics are saying that people click it?
by _QrE | 2025-05-04 08:21:39+00:00
I don't think that this is a fair comparison. HTTP actually has a specification that you need to follow if you need the web to _work_ (or at least, look good). MCP and others on the other hand are just you explaining to the LLM how you want it to format its responses.

MCP is barely worth being called a protocol; LLMs are now smart enough to follow instructions however you give them. When I played around with creating my own tool-using agent, I specified the tools in YAML, and asked it to use custom tags to 'call' them. It worked just fine.

More critically, there's nothing stopping the LLM from _not_ obeying whatever it is you give it, especially as the context fills up and/or the user trying to break it, except its own training. There is no proper HTTP server that would give you invalid responses 'just because'. Yeah, you could wrap the agent in a function that calls it again and again if the response isn't properly formatted with whatever formatting error happened, but I don't think any sane person would call that 'following the protocol', as the only entity it makes happy is whoever you're buying tokens from.
by d-ch | 2025-05-04 08:21:49+00:00
Location: Gdańsk, Poland

Remote: Yes, strongly preferred

Willing to relocate: Prefer Remote, but open to discussion

Technologies: React, JavaScript, Three.js, WebGL, HTML, CSS, REST API.

Résumé/CV: https://d-ch.netlify.app/

Email: ch.dariusz.ch@gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariuszchyla

Hi! I'm Dariusz, a multidisciplinary developer with a strong background in Next.js, React, and UI/UX design.

Focus: JS/React/Redux, also PHP/SQL/Node.js Open to learning new technologies quickly. Interested in WebGL (react-three-fiber) & AI (LangGraph agents).

Portfolio: https://d-ch.netlify.app/ | https://be.net/Dariusz | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariuszchyla
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-04 08:22:58+00:00
The Citroen system was very ingenious but also physically quite simple.

It got a bad rep through an initial design flaw that was quickly solved, and (US) mechanics that did not know or learned how to do maintainance on these.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/citroen-hydropneumatic-su...
by lm28469 | 2025-05-04 08:23:14+00:00
> we - all of us - will continue to invent new demands for energy and continue to trend towards more energy used per person per unit time.

I'm personally in the process of designing my house and I'm going for maximal energy efficiency: 38cm thick brick walls + 20cm thick rock wool insulation, basic rectangular shape, 80% of the windows to the south, triple pane, heat recovery unit coupled with a air/earth heat exchanger to avoid needing a resistance to pre warm the air in winter, heat pump water heater, catalytic wood stove

Although I would agree that overall people don't give a shit and I probably am in the minority
by int_19h | 2025-05-04 08:23:15+00:00
Me personally, I didn't even care that much about strict semantic web, but XML has the benefits of the entire ecosystem around it (like XPath and XSLT), composable extensibility in form of namespaces etc. It was very frustrating to see all that thrown out with HTML5, and the reasoning never made any sense to me (backwards compatibility with pre-XHTML pages would be best handled by defining a spec according to which they should be converted to XHTML).
by jchw | 2025-05-04 08:23:25+00:00
You can always ignore the BIOS routines and directly touch hardware registers/etc. so as long as you know precisely what hardware you are dealing with. Of course, this is what modern OSes do for most hardware after bootstrapping since calling back into BIOS isn't really an option.

BIOS routines are purely an abstraction layer, though the abstraction is somewhat leaky and my understanding is that most hardware was trying to be IBM compatible even when software skips the BIOS routines and directly touches hardware interfaces.

e.g. you can see documentation for the VGA card here: https://wiki.osdev.org/VGA_Hardware

The thing is, as far as I know you do not need to use the video BIOS routines even to set the video mode. After all, the video BIOS routines are also just routines that run on the CPU, the only advantage they really have is that of any abstraction, the fact that using it allows you to be compatible with any card that implements that software interface even if it doesn't implement the same exact hardware interface. But as far as I know, if you know you're dealing with a VGA compatible card, you can set the mode by directly flipping around CRTC registers and it should work just fine.

Same for disk controllers and etc.
by franze | 2025-05-04 08:23:26+00:00
yeah, also grounding with Google in Google 2.5 Pro does not

... deliver any URLs back, just the domains from where it grounded it response

it should return vertexai urls that redirect to the sources, but doesn't do it in all cases (in non of mine) according to the docs

plus you mandatory need to display an HTML fragment with search links that you are not allowed to edit

basically a corporate infight as an API
by jjani | 2025-05-04 08:24:13+00:00
I had no idea! Cool to learn.

It definitely makes complete sense in that scenario, but remains a very niche usecase where people have no other option.

>People outside tech just get installation instructions

People outside of tech don't need instructions to install non-PWA, store apps. So all this does to me is reinforce that no one is installing PWAs outside of niche scenarios where 1. people basically have to use the app due to a connection to a physical institution 2. they are explicitly told how to do it 3. the app is not available on the stores for legal reasons.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-05-04 08:25:54+00:00
> But with open addressing we can avoid that.

In risk management there exist several different approaches: accept, mitigate, transfer, avoid. What makes you think that this design must avoid certain risks? The developers of standard libraries like Java usually base their decisions on industry feedback, IIRC, Oracle team did have a lot of telemetry data and they are good engineers. Do you have any insights proving that their approach is wrong?
by nicbou | 2025-05-04 08:26:38+00:00
I think that the best setup is Jekyll on GitHub pages. It's the lowest-effort way to turn text files into a website.

If you don't start from scratch, the biggest problem with static websites is maintaining old URLs. At some point you need URL rewrite rules, and then you can't just have static files on a server. You need server rules.

It's also nice to just editing text files locally without having to install stuff. Then you need some sort of build system on another server.

Then you might find that you need forms, comments and other features beyond text on a page.

Basically, it's hard to have just static files.
by V99 | 2025-05-04 08:29:42+00:00
Here's a couch from a retail store you've probably heard of that you can configure online for $12k.

https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/bedford-sofa-uphols...

Personally I'd rather buy one from IKEA and use the change left over from $12k to buy.. a used truck to drive the sofa home in.. but apparently there's a market.

You can certainly go much higher for smaller companies producing actual custom stuff, using exotic materials, for a giant sectional instead of a single sofa, etc.
by buserror | 2025-05-04 08:31:46+00:00
Grub is like a turd that won't flush. It's been completely unnecessary for years, is massively overcomplicated, pretty much unusable as a shell with it's 1995 idioms, and there are much, MUCH lighter (and as useful) replacements (extlinux etc) -- and you can even just remove it completely and boot the kernel directly these days with the EFI stub...

But still, it gets installed, trying to justify its existence.
by twelvechairs | 2025-05-04 08:32:50+00:00
The Mercedes version is hydropneumatic suspension. It was pioneered in the 1940s and 50s by Citroen. Citroen still use on high end vehicles too. Byd has adopted more recently

It has always occurred to me that the car industry doesntprioritisee a smooth ride or this would be much more widely used.
by code_biologist | 2025-05-04 08:33:45+00:00
Just an app dev, not a geospatial expert, but reprojection always seemed like something a library should handle under the hood unless one has specific needs. I'm used to the ergonomics / moron-proofing of something like Postgis' `ST_Distance(geography point1, geography point2)` and it gives you the the right answer in meters. You can easily switch to spherical or Cartesian distances if you need distance calculations to go faster. `ST_Area(geography geog)` and it gives you the size of your shape in square meters wherever on the planet.
by rashunain | 2025-05-04 08:33:55+00:00
Daily current affairs updates are available in English, including news headlines, GK questions, and answers. Overall, the Current Affairs 4 May 2025 covers a range of topics, including national and international news, sports, education, and daily current affairs quizzes. It is essential to stay updated with the latest news and developments to remain informed and prepared for competitive exams and other challenges.
by KronisLV | 2025-05-04 08:34:15+00:00
I did something a bit unconventional for my own blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/my-blog-doesnt-need-quality-it-...

I decided on running an instance of Grav, which is a flat file CMS, with a fairly minimalist theme, except I version all of the files (even the PHP dependencies) in my Git repo, from which I build Docker images that actually get deployed: https://getgrav.org/

The benefit here is that I can launch it locally and see how the blog posts look, it's just a bunch of files unlike SSG, but with dynamic templating, meaning that I also get an updated index of the pages, as well as search functionality out of the box.

Furthermore, each new post is basically a deploy of a new version of the container, which curiously also means that if something goes wrong (e.g. if it gets hacked), there is no serious data loss because none of the data is meant to be truly persistent, I don't even need to think that much about backing it up, rather just the Git repo its built from.

Plus, there's a nice admin UI if I need it (behind additional auth through the web server), or I can just write things in a text editor of my choice locally.

Oh, and the performance is pretty good, too, because there is no database to hit with complex SQL, more like some disk I/O (which also is lessened by the cache).
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-04 08:36:29+00:00
Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared.

IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was still a massive improvement on what came before.

Wireless USB wasn’t a significant enough improvement to Bluetooth given that BT was already ubiquitous by that point, but also cheap and (by that point) battery efficient now too.
by netcan | 2025-05-04 08:37:12+00:00
So... angel investing was once a very small and rare thing. An investment class well outside the scope of formal financing channels. The "angel" was a relative of "silent partners," the informal early financiers of small businesses.

We can call YC the "turning point," nominally. Now we have an extremely mature web of financing channels. People with degrees specializing in the sector. Formal pipelines. Scale.

The key point is that these were investments "no one else is willing to make." Hence "angel." Mike Markkula wasn't competing for his deal with Apple. That changes everything.

Most startup investments made today would have happened whether or not any specific investor decides to do it. The market has liquidity.
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-04 08:38:27+00:00
"Being anti gmo is being anti science"

No, it isn't. As scientists we know how little we know of complex biological systems. This is bio-engineering based on rickety models.

Especially in times where the US is all about 'trade balances' , would it not suite them to take onboard some of the precautionary principles adopted in other parts of the world when it comes to health and safety?
by ZeroTalent | 2025-05-04 08:38:38+00:00
Yes, they are doing the Proof of Work. If need be, we will completely emulate human-like mouse movements. These are essentially clients no different from real users.

But the thing is, the more they push for this, the less accessible websites will get, so there has to be another solution. Not everyone uses a mouse.

Source: I work in the industry.