MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cellis | 2025-05-13 03:37:26+00:00
Not just end of ZIRP, not just Agentic AI / Vibe Coding being effective [1], but also:

"Software development is now considered a Section 174 R&D expenditure. This means it must be capitalized and amortized over 5 years (15 years for foreign software development)."

If any one of these were the case you'd have tens of thousands of previously gainfully employed swes out of work. But ALL of them became the case and pretty much in the last 3 years.

[1] - Let's just say I'm a believer
by gwerbret | 2025-05-13 03:38:27+00:00
> Stopping an experiment once you find a significant effect but before you reach your predetermined sample size is classic P hacking.

Although much of the article is basic common sense, and although I'm not a statistician, I had to seriously question the author's understanding of statistics at this point. The predetermined sample size (statistical power) is usually based on an assumption made about the effect size; if the effect size turns out to be much larger than you assumed, then a smaller sample size can be statistically sound.

Clinical trials very frequently do exactly this -- stop before they reach a predetermined sample size -- by design, once certain pre-defined thresholds have been passed. Other than not having to spend extra time and effort, the reasons are at least twofold: first, significant early evidence of futility means you no longer have to waste patients' time; second, early evidence of utility means you can move an effective treatment into practice that much sooner.

A classic example of this was with clinical trials evaluating the effect of circumcision on susceptibility to HIV infection; two separate trials were stopped early when interim analyses showed massive benefits of circumcision [0, 1].

In experimental studies, early evidence of efficacy doesn't mean you stop there, report your results, and go home; the typical approach, if the experiment is adequately powered, is to repeat it (three independent replicates is the informal gold standard).

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17321310/

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16231970/
by andrewflnr | 2025-05-13 03:39:10+00:00
I recall one of the plans being to use the sun shield to entirely freeze out the atmosphere, then use a mass driver to chuck most of the CO2 into space. I don't recall exactly where that was supposed to be on the feasible to scifi spectrum.

I'd rather try to keep the carbon around for organic molecules. Are we sure we can't get in enough H2O and N to balance it out and build a nice thick biosphere?
by gmueckl | 2025-05-13 03:39:36+00:00
I am also not deeply into this stuff. But there is more going on in a car than what you list.

One probably surprising thing is that an LCD dashboard is usually driven by multiple rendering stacks. One is for the complex graphics and eye candy. The other one is responsible for brake and engine warning lights etc. and is considered safety critical. The second one is very basic and often partitioned off by a hypervisor.

A lot of these controllers are running more than just control loops. They are also actively monitoring their system for failures. The number of possible failure conditions and responses is quite large. I had instances where e.g. the engine warning light came on because the ECU detected that the brake light switch was faulty. In another instance, I had powered steering turn itself off during a drive because it had developed a fault. These kinds of behaviors are the results of dedicated algorithms that are watching just about every component of safety critical systems that can possibly be monitored.

All of these software systems are provided by different vendors who develop the aplication software based on either their own stack or operating systems and middleware provided by other upstream suppliers. It don't think it's uncommon for a car to contain multiple copies of 3 or 4 different RTOS stacks. Nobody at the car manufacturers is enforcing uniformity in the software stacks that the suppliers deliver. The manufacturers tend to want finished, self-contained hardware units that they can plug in, configure and turn on.
by exodust | 2025-05-13 03:40:27+00:00
Censoring the statue of David is not old news! Unless you go back to the 19th century:

"The practice of covering Michelangelo's "David" with a fig leaf, particularly a detachable one, was common during the Victorian era, specifically in the mid-19th century, due to Queen Victoria's discomfort with the statue's nudity."

So we have a newly tightened trajectory of censorship. Grok was promoted as an AI that strives to "maximize truth and objectivity". We've gone from that to effectively placing fig leaves over statues.

Meanwhile the linked article fails to clarify the outcome, which apparently was a "rogue prompt change" by a new employee, Musk wasn't involved. The prompt was reversed and "the system was functioning as intended." It's completely understandable there might be a volume of anti-[personX] material on the internet, put there as propaganda, that might serve as weighted reasoning for an LLM. This is nothing new, unless you're aiming for cheap shots.
by fumeux_fume | 2025-05-13 03:41:31+00:00
> If you’ve played with the most recent AI tools, you know: They’re very good coders, very good legal analysts, very good first drafters of writing, very good image generators. They’re only going to get better.

Most of the bullshitters will tip their hand pretty early that they're just hype men for AI. Right off the bat, the fact that AI is disruptive and transforming society is apparently self-evident because they never cite a single premise or event to back this up. In the quote above, the phrase "if you've played" stuck out to me. Yes if you play around with them a little it's easy to believe they're really good at so many things. When you stringently evaluate them, you begin to see they make a lot of mistakes and perform inconsistently on even trivial tasks.
by codersarepeople | 2025-05-13 03:41:40+00:00
Cruzbikes have front-wheel drive via a very short chain. This allows them to use off-the-shelf components that all bikes use for a front hub. This is more like a unicycle hub, which are wildly different from bike parts (I would know, I built this: https://imgur.com/a/we-made-electric-assist-unicycle-long-ve...)

Right now, there is only one multi-geared commercially available unicycle hub, and it only has 2 gears, and costs $1500 (Schlumpf drive). As for ebike motors that can be coaxial with pedals, as far as I know 2 have ever been made, by myself and by Justin @ ebikes.ca.

The entire unicycle community would be thrilled if they actually built this because then we could buy these hubs. But I would be very surprised to see this launch with a unique hub, instead of a cruzbike-like hub.
by codersarepeople | 2025-05-13 03:46:51+00:00
It's true that internally geared bikes are common, especially in Europe. But internal gear hubs that are coaxial with pedals are almost unheard of. The only production one ever is the Schlumpf Unicycle hub, which costs $1500 and only a few hundred have ever been made. It also has only 2 gears. It's certainly possible to do, but I have doubts about a company opting for that incredibly expensive option of creating a new hub instead of reusing standard bike parts.
by purpleidea | 2025-05-13 03:47:17+00:00
This is a great project I've been following along. My personal desire is to see this eventually support https://docs.kernel.org/networking/switchdev.html (although it will likely be someone other than Andrew that implements this) since mainstream switching where it works just like regular Linux networking would change our world for the better!

We need fewer proprietary interfaces for such an important part of networking.
Ask HN: Satoshi Was a Gamer?
by tokenmemory | 2025-05-13 03:50:32+00:00
Many people have written about Satoshi Nakamoto's expressions and words, like

"bloody hard" "order of magnitude" "hosed" "fencible" and "Nakamoto" (the Japanese name itself),

but few have discussed these words from his 2009 emails, https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi :

"pwn" "retarded"

So in addition to Satoshi obviously being a programmer, was he a gamer?
by nickyvanurk | 2025-05-13 03:51:31+00:00
There is a GitHub link in the top-right corner :) I am currently busy building out a game platform over at https://evergate.io/ so this project is on hold for now, so I made it open-source. And I know about Hordes, it's great! It's one of the reasons I am trying to do something a bit different over at https://evergate.io/ instead of making what would basically turn into a Hordes clone.
by schwartzworld | 2025-05-13 03:52:00+00:00
Instead of storing plaintext passwords, most companies store a hash of that password, essentially applying a one-way transformation to it and saving the result of that. I don’t have to know your password, I can just apply the hash algorithm to whatever you enter in the input and if that matches, we’re golden.

No reason you couldn’t apply the same philosophy to biometric data.
by treyd | 2025-05-13 03:52:49+00:00
It was not always like this. You used to comfortably be able to handle 70+ players in a single server before Paper existed (my memory of this is from before like 2015). You'd need to allocate a lot more memory than normal, like 8 gigs instead of the normal suggestion of 1 or 2, but it could handle it without regular lag.
by JessePinkmanYo | 2025-05-13 03:53:00+00:00
A+ Operations/Chief of Staff Candidate. 5+ years as Senior Consultant Deloitte. Ex-founder of marketplace, $50K revenue.

Location: Toronto, Canada Remote: Not really, no Willing to relocate: Yes, no visa needed - SF Technologies: Not-technical, but very tech savvy - Notion, etc. Résumé/CV: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGnS9lLhus/RFfDH4H2XnQmVeLQ5-q2rA/view Email: mash@hirecmo.io
by saretup | 2025-05-13 03:55:18+00:00
You sound more prejudiced against AI than they seem to be hyping AI in that sentence.

Yes, they’re very good coders; no, they aren’t perfect. Sometimes they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate, and other times they have unique insights about difficult problems or one-shot a lot of complex tasks.

If you don’t see the value of AI even at this point, you’re either lacking imagination and/or just too stuck in your own ways.
by parpfish | 2025-05-13 03:57:17+00:00
I was heavily encouraged to do what would later be called “p-hacking”, but it looked different from what they describe here. This article describes p-hacks for people that aren’t into math/stats. I always ended up p hacking because I was into stats methods.

Somebody would say “here’s an old dataset that didn’t work out, I bet you can use one of those new stats methods you’re always reading about to find a cool effect!”, and then the fishing expedition takes off.

A couple weeks later you show off some cool effects that your new cutting edge results were able to extract from an old, useless dataset.

But instead of saying “that’s good pilot data, let’s see if it holds up with a new experiment”, you’re told “you can publish that! Keep this up and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to get a job someday!”
by starspangled | 2025-05-13 03:58:51+00:00
> Is that it's literally what us software optimization engineers do. We keep writing optimizations until we find one that is a statistically significant speed-up.

I don't think that is what it is saying. It is saying you would write one particular optimization (your hypothesis), and then you would run the experiment (measuring speed-up) multiple times until you see a good number.

It's fine to keep trying more optimizations and use the ones that have a genuine speedup.

Of course the real world is a lot more nuanced -- often times measuring the performance speed up involves hypothesis as well ("Does this change to the allocator improve network packet transmission performance?"), you might find that it does not, but you might run the same change on disk IO tests to see if it helps that case. That is presumably okay too if you're careful.
by dpacmittal | 2025-05-13 03:59:27+00:00
This. Moved from Linux to Mac recently and I was so confused about the random root password pop-ups. It gives no explanation on which app or command is asking for root access or why it needs root access. So I started denying the request after granting access a few times. Now I don't get that pop-up anymore. I still have no idea what was causing those pop-ups and why they stopped
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 04:01:23+00:00
This is a seriously impressive project and it's been fun to follow along.

I almost hesitate to say anything, but the constant scope creep (that he readily admits in the blog) is starting to feel like a real obstacle to getting anything done. It's fun to see all of the theorizing about 96-port switches with $11K of FPGAs, but it would be fantastic if something like the simple 4-port switch design could be spun out as an open source project that people could iterate on.

I've also been following his solder-in probe projects for years ( https://www.antikernel.net/products.html ). There was a small Kickstarter and some reviews, but now the one distributor has 404s on the product pages and there are a lot of "coming soon" labels attached to all the different products and variations. Again, it would be fantastic if just one of those projects was available in distribution semi-reliably.
by xingwu82 | 2025-05-13 04:02:35+00:00
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by hiddencost | 2025-05-13 04:03:30+00:00
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P-hacking_by_early...

The author is absolutely correct. Early stopping is a classic form of p hacking. See attached image for an illustration.

If you want to be rigorous, you can define criterion for early stopping such that it's not, but you require relatively stronger evidence.

Clinical trials that stop early do so typically at predefined times with higher significance thresholds.
by RandomBacon | 2025-05-13 04:04:16+00:00
While there was over 10 times as many applicants as there were spots, there were people that went to college and studied ATC who weren't able to become Air Traffic Controllers because of the Biographical Questionnaire.

You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.

The fact is though, that the Biographical Questionaire affected hiring. Did it make a noticeable difference though? Who knows. We just know for certain that people who studied for this job didn't get in.
by nurettin | 2025-05-13 04:04:20+00:00
I thought the upside was pretty obvious, but perhaps there is such an age and culture gap that it has to be said out loud: I'm all for people exercising (and thus, strengthening) their research and patience skills. And complaining about how not every post on HN is a pretty landing page pitching a product is a spit in the face of that. Some communities don't attract people like this and rightly so. I grew up in a RTFM & RTFS culture (and it was awesome!), so perhaps we might never reconcile our differences.
Show HN: I built a YC data scraper in under 5 minutes
by dpacman | 2025-05-13 04:04:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm an indie hacker who built Autonoly solo over the past 3.5 months. I essentially vibe coded the entire platform based on automation needs I encountered in my own work. I wanted to share a practical example of what it can do - creating a Y Combinator data scraper in just a few minutes without writing any traditional code.

The technical approach is straightforward but effective:

1. Browser automation navigates to YC's company directory 2. For YC's infinite scroll pagination, I implemented a progressive scroll function that iterates about 150 times with calibrated delays (ensuring all ~1000+ companies load) 3. Data extraction uses XPath selectors to identify and capture the structural pattern of each company listing 4. The system then extracts specific data points (company name, description, location, etc.) into a structured CSV

The trickiest parts were getting the XPath patterns right (the DOM structure varies slightly between different company entries) and fine-tuning the scroll timing to ensure complete loading without timeout issues.

What makes this approach effective is that it works with the site's intended user experience. The browser automation renders JavaScript properly, handles dynamic loading, and interacts with elements in a natural way.

While this YC scraper example is specific, I built Autonoly to automate virtually any digital task - data processing, content creation, file management, business workflows, and more. As an indie developer, I kept encountering processes that were tedious to do manually but didn't justify hiring someone or spending weeks on custom code.

I'd love to hear feedback from the HN community, especially from those who've built similar systems or have different approaches to workflow automation. Happy to answer any technical questions about the implementation or discuss the challenges of building automation tools as a solo founder.
by cyberax | 2025-05-13 04:06:15+00:00
Depending on a size, probably on the order of tens of thousand.

Comets in the Oort cloud take very little energy to put on a collision orbit, the Sun barely holds them gravitationally, orbital speeds in the Oort cloud are measured in _meters_ per second. So they require (relatively) little energy to put them into a required orbit. It might be doable with just regular thermonuclear charges.

It will then take these comets more than a thousand years to "fall" from the Oort cloud.
by paul7986 | 2025-05-13 04:06:15+00:00
Faithful year and half user of chatGPT on my iPhone which has made me loathe Siri for how dumb she is in every sense of the way!

When will OpenAI (with the help of Microsoft) release a GPT phone to compete with the iPhone? Im so tired of the boring iPhone! Give me a GPT phone where from my lock screen GPT does everything for me. Fingers crossed :) it's secretively in the works!
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-05-13 04:06:36+00:00
We got FedRAMP certified at a previous job. At first I balked at you saying it cost $1M but, doing some back-of-the-napkin math, that's probably pretty accurate once you take into account the salaries of everybody involved, time that we had to spend figuring out all the auditing, outside companies we had to hire and involve, and extra cloud costs and setup. Not to mention the ongoing cost of maintaining all of that and ongoing audits.

We were also a pretty small startup (~50 people?) but were focused solely on government data storage and management, so it made a lot of sense for us to get the certification. It definitely paid for itself in the number of contracts it unlocked.
by transpute | 2025-05-13 04:06:48+00:00
For the other end of the wire, sometimes you can find NetFPGA academic research devices on eBay. The project has been running for 15 years, with 5 generations of NICs, https://netfpga.org/

> A line-rate, flexible, and open platform for research, and classroom experimentation. More than 3,500 NetFPGA systems have been deployed at over 300 institutions in over 60 countries around the world.
by quantadev | 2025-05-13 04:07:31+00:00
I was fascinated with doing particle simulations in "C" language as a teenager in the late 1980s on my VGA monitor! I would do both gravity and charged particles.

Once particles accelerate they'll just 'jump by' each other of course rather than collide, if you have no repulsive forces. I realized you had to take smaller and smaller time-slices to get things to slow down and keep running when the singularities "got near". I had a theory even back then that this is what nature is doing with General Relativity making time slow down near masses. Slowing down to avoid singularities. It's a legitimate theory. Maybe this difficulty is why "God" (if there's a creator) decided to make everything actually "waves" as much as particles, because waves don't have the problem of singularities.
by comeonbro | 2025-05-13 04:07:50+00:00
This involved a completely nonsensical and arbitrary biographical screening test, which:

1. was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently

2. then-current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...

-----

Example questions with the score given for each answer:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...

15. The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was: A. SCIENCE (+15) B. MATH (0) C. ENGLISH (0) D. HISTORY/SOCIAL SCIENCES (0) E. PHYSICAL EDUCATION (0) 16. Of the following, the college subject in which I received my lowest grades was: A. SCIENCE (0) B. MATH (0) C. ENGLISH (0) D. HISTORY/POLITICAL SCIENCE (+15) E. DID NOT ATTEND COLLEGE (0) 29. My peers would probably say that having someone criticize my performance (i.e. point out a mistake) bothers me: A. MUCH LESS THAN MOST (+8) B. SOMEWHAT LESS THAN MOST (+4) C. ABOUT THE SAME AS MOST (+8) D. SOMEWHAT MORE THAN MOST (0) E. MUCH MORE THAN MOST (+10)
by sureIy | 2025-05-13 04:08:07+00:00
Technically you're right. From an end-user standpoint, it's irrelevant. Apple's mock vista ad applies just as well to Ventura: they're all annoying and a security theater if the user is just told to input admin password into any random popup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqZ8AqmLPY
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-13 04:08:19+00:00
Okay sure. Your state will vary. California's exempt status requires a certain salary, among several other clauses:

https://www.calchamber.com/california-labor-law/exempt-nonex...

>Exempt employees in California generally must earn a minimum monthly salary of no less than two times the state minimum wage for full time employment.

So as of now that floor would be $34/hr to even be considered.

>Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages

Given federal minimum wage, it's likely to be the other way around. $25/hr in CA may go down to $11 in a low COL. You can see some abysmally low compensations flr jobs that "require" advanced degrees.

>If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.

Spoken like someone who's never tried to get housing out of state without a job offer. Let alone moving long distance.
by cyberax | 2025-05-13 04:08:21+00:00
> Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location.

I have the standard open, and I don't see it.

> The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants.

Sure. So just choose an automaker that doesn't provide data subscription services and/or don't pay for them. The eCall requirement in itself doesn't require tracking.
by desireco42 | 2025-05-13 04:08:34+00:00
Hmm... My setup is that when I invite client for a call, I do this from my personal gmail and include business email as attendant (which goes through Gmailify). Now, when I get confirmation, I can confirm for both that they will attend, but I didn't try to see if I can open calendar with this other email. Based on this it sounds like it exists somewhere, but I really don't care as I have too many different things and all I want is to use my gmail accnt and look professional enough.

Hope this makes sense and sorry if it took longer to respond.