MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thinkcontext | 2025-05-19 14:59:34+00:00
I'm in a food buying club with a few dozen others. We mostly buy staples in bulk from distributors and divide things up. We'll get things like 50 pound bags of rice, 5 gallons of oil, etc. A side benefit is less plastic waste since everyone bring their own containers. An even better side benefit is that acquaintances become friends.
by shermantanktop | 2025-05-19 14:59:47+00:00
Have you worked at a Help Desk? It’s shocking how often those dumb questions reveal what’s really going on. Fake but realistic examples:

- chrome doesn’t work! (It was actually Microsoft word)

- my printer won’t print! (Out of paper)

- your program keeps crashing! (No, that’s the os reminding you of a security update)
by kennywinker | 2025-05-19 14:59:48+00:00
Why would you accuse them of lying? If the author wanted to lie why would they include their mistakes like missing the email?

Either way, it doesn't actually matter - even if it's 100% the author's fault, NINE days to get to a human who can resolve the issue is enough of a reason to avoid having too many of your services centralized with apple.
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-19 14:59:57+00:00
I have implemented database schemas, (without knowing database theory), and these principles are a revelation to me.

A question I have is: Given a schema, are there automated verifiers for validating that it adheres to these principles ? A schema "linter" of sorts.

There seem to be parallels to linear algebra here (orthogonal bases, decompositions, etc)
by mananaysiempre | 2025-05-19 15:00:00+00:00
Sorry, I was misremembering on two counts: it’s x264 that does this, not ffmpeg (but you’re using x264 if you’re making H.264 with ffmpeg); and the info is the encoder’s actual settings, not the flags (so a preset like “veryslow” will get expanded). With those caveats, the information is displayed for example by mediainfo under “Encoding settings”.
by BurningFrog | 2025-05-19 15:00:22+00:00
Our ancestors in the 1800s worked under conditions we find atrocious, because that was the best work they could get. Not because they were some kind of slaves.

By 2025 standards, the 1890s were a time of extreme poverty, low technology, and medical ignorance. Life was short and hard, but also much better than a century earlier.

In a century, people will hopefully say the same about our time.
by dagw | 2025-05-19 15:00:51+00:00
We all need mechanics, electricians, and construction workers.

I know people whose kids skipped university and went to vocational school to become electricians or plumbers. Almost all of them have failed to land jobs, and every job they apply for they're competing with dozens of applicants. The one that got a job was forced to move halfway across the country to some rural town in the middle of nowhere to get that job.

We may all need mechanics and electricians but no one seems to want to hire an inexperienced mechanic or electrician.
by HelloNurse | 2025-05-19 15:01:03+00:00
Advanced GCC command line options seem hardcoded, e.g. "-fomit-frame-pointer -march=native -flto " and many more in runner.cpp.

It's probably a good fit for the author's needs, but for most other potential users running a more generic project skeleton generator or simple ad hoc script, leveraging a mature build system, is likely to do more and allow future growth for a similar effort.
by cbeach | 2025-05-19 15:01:07+00:00
"Harm" is a very subjective, one-sided view of a government efficiency and anti-corruption project.

Hundreds of millions of American taxpayers are fully behind DOGE.

I'm sure you'll find some supposedly vital science project that lost its funding, but please don't forget the hundreds of millions of people that are forced, by threat of violence, to pay for these things (that's the reality of taxation as a system). Sometimes those people get fed up, and they want government priorities to better match their own.
by imtringued | 2025-05-19 15:01:43+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by this.

"if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting

Consider the following scenario:

If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money.

Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person.

People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him.

After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on.

What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.
by xrendan | 2025-05-19 15:02:03+00:00
Ugh, I don't have it. It was from before I used git.

Basically to do this you have a cups server that exposes itself as a network printer that prints to a specified PDF directory and then you have a program watching that directory for new files and if there's a new one it opens up whatever pdf viewer you want in full screen.

Setup a shared pdf printer: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1310867/how-to-set-up-shared...
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-19 15:02:24+00:00
Good work.

It occurs to me to wonder: is it going to end up being a general rule that SWE jobs that can be done remotely are going to pay less than SWE jobs that require specific geographic location or coming into the office over time? It feels like the naive supply-demand calculation suggests that a company willing to accept remote work has a much broader talent supply to draw from, which would lower labor cost.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-19 15:02:50+00:00
Blaming yourself is something I can relate to.

[Comedy take: I blame you for my projects not being done too! :) Bada-tish!]

Seriously though, guilt, blame, shame all that stuff: it's not helpful. It just compounds the feelings that make it hard to get started again because those feelings are emotionally draining.

What I'm trying to get myself into the habit of is a 5-minute dip into something. If I just say to myself when I'm feeling slightly exhausted "I just need to put 5 minutes into this next task, and then I'll stop", I frequently find myself spending 30+ minutes on it. I can then feel a sense of over-meeting my "goal". That builds a little momentum, it makes you feel good about getting something done.

I also have reminded myself of the advice I gave others when younger: don't underestimate rest - particularly sleep, but also generally doing nothing - as being part of getting stuff done.

I don't do this well at all at the moment, hence my comment you're replying to, but I absolutely 100% will not let blaming myself get into my head like that, and that does help a little with the 5-minute trick.
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-19 15:03:16+00:00
Tesla's bad decisions:

(1) Cybertruck sales projections were ridiculously overestimated. A mid-level exec at Toyota who did something similar would likely have been fired, but since this was apparently the decision of the Great Leader, there were no consequences.

(2) Full self-driving claims were overhyped and the technological decision to remove LIDAR was a big mistake, if we look at Waymo in comparison, and the long record of Tesla's failed claims on this one.

(3) The Great Leader dove into politics and thus alienated a large fraction of the customer base, while also not generating a new customer base. I see some similarities here to the Bud Light marketing debacle, in general.

Conclusion: companies selling products should really focus on creating good designs that meet people's needs above all else, and should implement internal democratic systems that can remove wild-eyed Great Leaders from decision-making positions before they take everything off the rails.

P.S. Why can't we just have a simple 1990s-style Toyata truck with an electric drive train and a robust battery with well-designed and tested firmware that doesn't need OTA updates and smart phone app and telemetry? I don't need an 'infotainment center' if I have a phone or tablet, either.
by vel0city | 2025-05-19 15:03:25+00:00
A 2.4GHz wave has a wavelength of ~12mm. The concept of blocking the emissions of a microwave oven is to only have small gaps, much smaller than the wavelength, in the metal casing. That's why you can have those 1-2mm holes in the door window without having much leakage; the holes are much smaller than the waves.

So as long as the gaps on the doors and panels of the microwave are still aligned right and the door closes somewhat tight (only a couple of mm gap) you're still trapping the extreme majority of the energy in the box.
by andrewfromx | 2025-05-19 15:03:49+00:00
While Kubernetes theoretically allows for simple iptables-based routing, in practice, very few production environments stop there. Most clusters do use CNIs, kube-proxy, Service abstraction, and often external load balancers or Ingress controllers, which together form a nontrivial networking stack.

The claim that kube-proxy is “not designed for use in proper production systems” is simply incorrect. It is widely used in production and supported by Kubernetes core. While it has limitations—especially with high-connection-load environments—it is still the default in most distros, and even advanced CNIs like Calico and Cilium often interact with or replace kube-proxy functionality rather than ignore it.

If kube-proxy is just a stopgap, why do so many managed Kubernetes platforms like GKE, EKS, and AKS still ship with it?

While it’s true CNIs are plugins and not core to Kubernetes, this outsources complexity rather than eliminates it. Different CNIs (e.g., Calico, Cilium, Flannel, etc.) use different overlay models, BPF implementations, or routing approaches.

Even in a CNI with kernel-fast path routing, pod churn, rolling updates, or horizontal scaling still introduce issues. Service IPs are stable, but pod IPs are ephemeral, which means Long-lived TCP clients pinned to pod IPs.

You can design a lean Kubernetes network path with minimal abstractions, but: You lose things like dynamic service discovery, load balancing, and readiness-based traffic shifting. You must manage more infra manually (e.g., configure iptables or direct routing rules yourself). You’re fighting against the grain of what Kubernetes is designed to do.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-19 15:04:13+00:00
I'm 63, and still actively shipping "side" projects (quoted, because now they are my "day job"). Been doing it for at least a couple of decades. Probably more like 30 years.

Here's what I'm working on, right now[0]. It's a major rewrite of an existing app, that's been submitted to the App Store, and will probably go "live" in a day or so (unless someone at Apple has an issue with it, which happens, from time to time. Annoying, but not the end of the world). I'm working on the README and code documentation, now (I'll put together a docc catalog, as well as a Jazzy Docs site, and the supporting pages[1]).

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara (Just a timer app, but a pretty good one).

[1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/ios-apps/rival-t/
by Ukv | 2025-05-19 15:04:39+00:00
> while the silicon closest to its capabilities needs more like tens of kW.

I think looking at power consumption for the very edge of what technology is just barely capble of may be misleading, since that's inherently at one extreme of the current cost-capability trade-off curve[0] and stands to drop the most drastically from efficiency improvements.

You can now run models equivalent in capability to initial version of ChatGPT on sub-20w chips, for instance. Or, looking over a longer timeframe, we can now do far more on a 1-milliwatt chip[1] than on the 150kW ENIAC[2].

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/GydBGRG.png

[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/syntiant-chip-plays-doom

[2]: https://cse.engin.umich.edu/about/history/eniac-display/
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-19 15:04:48+00:00
The usual analysis is that Common Lisp killed the Lisp machine, that is, as much as some people will deny it, Common Lisp was designed with implementation in mind (anything implementable is designed with implementation in mind) and the intention was that it would get better-than-Lisp machine performance on machines like the VAX, 68k, 80386, which soon became the mainstream.

An alternate OS is an appealing idea in many ways today but runs into the problem of "where do you get your userspace?" Make it POSIX compatible and you can run all kinds of C code like the GNU tools and other things you find in a Linux distribution. Make something radical and new and you have to write everything from scratch and so do all your users.
by troupo | 2025-05-19 15:04:56+00:00
> I don’t want to be attacked by flashy colored buildings all the time.

There are other types of decorations than colors, and there are other colors than flashy.

The very first example in the OG article isn't colorful, and is rather beautiful. The link to tweet shows a gray beautiful building.

> I don’t want to live in self proclaimed “taste critiques” environment.

If you are surrounded by ugly things, there's very little space where you can learn and develop taste.

Already you can't imagine any other alternatives than "being surrounded by flashy colored buildings all the time"

Edit: you are not alone. I've seen this "counterpoint" in quite a few conversations. Many people cannot imagine anything beyond "buildings in flashy colors" because that's usually the only alternative the modern world provides. Something like this: https://www.dreamstime.com/new-technologies-construction-mul...
by tbyehl | 2025-05-19 15:05:10+00:00
I love my smart plugs and power strips! Mostly not for lighting or other high-touch purposes, but I do use a few Lutron Caseta plug-in dimmers for lamps that aren't on switched outlets as the remotes can go in a standard Decora-style wall plate and they work regardless of the hub being online.

I've got Zigbee and Wi-Fi/Tasmota outlets running the heating and lighting for my chicken brooders[0], my partner's plant lights, fish tank lights, probably more that I'm forgetting. At our cabin the mountains, an outlet + temperature sensor combined with Home Assistant's Thermostat helper gives us temperature control over an extremely basic window A/C unit and we cast an HA dashboard to a nearby Google Home screen. A smart power strip controls all of our "cabin intra" -- router, cable modem, LTE backup, etc. HA automations monitor them all and restart anything that stops working, and a Tasmota rule ensures that nothing can gets stuck in the Off state due to automation failure or operator error.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/uDGYBzh
by frognumber | 2025-05-19 15:06:20+00:00
I'll give a few examples.

* Learning biology, memorize terms like "anabolic reaction" or "reverse transcriptase"

* Learning algebra, memorize major groups like S_n or GL_n

* Learning statistics, memorize the major probability distributions, their means, and standard deviations

* Preparing for math contests, remember things like "Chinese remainder theorem"

That's a tiny part of learning, but it dramatically accelerates the other parts. At that point, when you're working through texts, you'll understand what you're reading without looking things up or thinking about it. And when you're engage in complex problemsolving, you'll have the knowledge ready.

Do this either on or before the first (surface learning) pass, and once they're memorized, use them in more advanced contexts (e.g. reading research papers, teaching, complex problemsolving, etc.).

All this stuff interconnects, and SR gives a fast, cheap way to start building out the simpler parts of the knowledge network.
by detaro | 2025-05-19 15:06:23+00:00
It's something they'll run a batch for occasionally, but thats normal. Fabs are not like one long conveyor belt where a wafer goes in at the front, passes through a long sequence of machines and falls out finished at the end. They work in batches, and machines need reconfiguring for the next task all the time (if a chip needs 20 layers, they don't have every machine 20 times), so mixing different products and having products is normal. Low-volume products are going to be more expensive of course due to per-batch setup tasks being spread over fewer wafers.

In general scheduling of machine time and transportation of FOUPs (transport boxes for a number of wafers, the basic unit of processing) is a big topic in the industry, optimizing machine usage while keeping the number of unfinished wafers "in flight" and the overall cycle time low. It takes weeks for a wafer to flow through the fab.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-19 15:06:49+00:00
> "Harm" is a very subjective, one-sided view of a government efficiency and anti-corruption project.

I don't think it's an efficiency or anti-corruption project. If it is, it has failed pretty solidly. In the meantime, it's actively and objectively harming real people.

Regardless of whether or not you agree, the opposition to Musk doesn't appear to be overly tribal in nature. It appears to be a reaction to harm (real or perceived).
by el_don_almighty | 2025-05-19 15:07:08+00:00
This is what makes Hacker News such an astounding resource for thought provoking insight. I take the American perspective on free speech as nearly a theological imperative despite the problematic side effects. The alternatives strike me as far worse. Free speech drives faster resolution and remediation to the socially unacceptable. The ideas and behaviors highlighted by the reviewer are not new to society and collectively we do not stand in a place in a place, "never before seen." Our tools for communicating, identifying, and correcting the evils in this world are better than ever. Evil is just so damned ingenious. That isn't speech's fault.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-19 15:07:23+00:00
All positions we know today. At the time when computers went mainstream, it automated many jobs we no longer have (e.g. manually calculating spreadsheets), but also created new entry-level ones.

People then couldn't even have predicted what a "social media intern" might do or that there could be "associate software engineers" (SWEs were basically magicians).

I'm not saying there won't be disruption and tough times for a while, but I also think we'll figure out new things for young people (and ourselves) to do.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-19 15:07:41+00:00
Virtual L3 and L4 looks like a bad deal today since SRAM cell scaling has stalled quite badly in recent fabrication nodes. It's quite possible that future chip designs will want to use eDRAM at least for L4 cache if not perhaps also L3, and have smaller low-level caches where "sharing" will not be as useful.
Show HN: Adiem – Real-Time Haptic Feedback for Social Anxiety (Apple Watch)
by victorasao | 2025-05-19 15:08:24+00:00
We’ve built Adiem, an Apple Watch app that uses real-time heart rhythm data and adaptive haptics to support people navigating social anxiety, ADHD, or overstimulation. Unlike wearable hardware, Adiem works on-device, leveraging HealthKit data to generate personalized haptic rhythms during social interactions. Sessions are screen-free and start directly from the Watch. We’re currently onboarding early users and therapists, and would love feedback from this community—on everything from tech to use cases to where it might evolve.
by jl6 | 2025-05-19 15:08:29+00:00
At high temperatures and pressures, some substances are neither liquid nor gas, but a fluid with properties of both.

Whereas most people work to live, and prefer boundaries between the two, worklife is an intertwined way of being.

Brunch with your business partners, afternoon shaking hands on a golf course, dinner with a senator, placing bets on Wall Street, a penthouse suite at the resort hotel where you’re keynoting, hosting a fundraiser at your home…
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-19 15:08:43+00:00
Describing it as junky is an understatement!

The reality (which this article doesn't mention) is that all income brackets have risen, but that there is more increase in the higher brackets. And it doesn't even touch on why this is happening: technology. In the old days the high skill worker was held back by all time spent on low skill tasks. Now our machines have taken over a lot of the low skill stuff, the actual value created by the high skill worker has risen faster than the overall average. Of course wages have spread out more! For that not to have happened would require very high taxation.

And, yes, we see celebrities making very big bucks. Once again, an inevitable result of technology. The "value" they produce is mostly an up-front cost, the per customer cost is low. Technology lets them reach an awful lot more customers, thus the customers will focus more on those they consider best. There also is an issue with the shift in the balance of power--it used to be the studios basically owned the careers of their stars. That considerably reduced the disparity but was it a good thing?!

As for loopholes: yes, they exist--but nowhere near like they used to. But if they can hide income do you not think they could also hide wealth? And inheritance is based on wealth. Loopholes are no reason to tax wealth or inheritance. And when you tax wealth you have the problem of that wealth often being extremely concentrated in the corporation that someone controls, they likely can't pay a wealth tax without selling off their company. But their company is valuable because they're running it well--you're going to destroy value this way.

As for Piketty--I tried to read his book. I couldn't stomach more than a few chapters because he kept making a fundamental mistake: assuming that as the form of wealth changed that it was still the same group controlling the wealth. No, fortunes rarely last more than a few generations.

There's also the fact that wealth "inequality" has a huge time component to it. Those starting their careers likely have little if any wealth and easily can have negative wealth (student loans.) By the time they retire any high skill worker should be a millionaire. (The next dollar of spending never provides as much value as the current dollar of spending. Thus your maximum value from your income will come if you spend at a fixed rate--and for a high skill worker to do that they will need to be a millionaire by the time they retire.) Those who want to portray it as a huge problem consistently avoid looking at this.
by bumby | 2025-05-19 15:10:18+00:00
Your gatekeeping keeping is both unwarranted and against the HN guidelines of fostering curious conversation.

I don’t know if you’re being obtuse or discussing in bad-faith, but I’ll make the relevance explicit:

>"If we want people to move to EVs..."

…then we need to understand and address the positive and negative externalities. Those include the tax revenue lost from gasoline taxes.
by daveguy | 2025-05-19 15:10:32+00:00
Unfortunately we are much farther from growing a human brain than we are from a scaling up an LLM to a 29 megawatt-consuming behemoth.

With growing a brain, we barely know where to begin. Not in terms of growing a few neurons in a petri dish. Nourishing the complex interconnecting structure of neurons that is a human brain is nowhere even on the horizon. Much less growing the structure from cells. At least with the LLM/AI techniques we have control over the entire processing pipeline.

And I agree, that is an ethical minefield.