MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lazide | 2025-05-11 08:07:16+00:00
Eh, spent plenty of time outside the US. It always looks a little odd when that isn’t followed [https://www.pinterest.com/widget34/french-signs/] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_signs_in_Spain]

After all, which is clearer and easier to read - aeropuerto (road sign in spain) [https://images.app.goo.gl/iRcmkxvYX3hxLG59A] or Aeropuerto (road sign in Chile) [https://images.app.goo.gl/xcME6HEb4r1AnGS16].

Even more fun when for instance Spain doesn’t follow that consistently![https://images.app.goo.gl/P7cpegHC2unMsfJy7].

Talk about a typesetters nightmare. Still, better than India where a lot of signage is still done by hand.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-05-11 08:09:21+00:00
Photographs of shelves of VHS tapes, books, and TTRPGs from childhood, and the homes of relatives are what I value above a lot of other photos. I had one of the earliest digital cameras, but the photos survived many data losses, and finally being of an age to appreciate a favourite book of a long-deceased relative is unspeakably special.
by tomhow | 2025-05-11 08:11:31+00:00
Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are.

This subthread turned out to be generic political flamewar, just the kind of thing we don't want on HN, and several of your comments fanned the flames.

If you could please have a read of the guidelines and take care to observe them in future we'd be appreciative:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by cgio | 2025-05-11 08:12:31+00:00
Where is it left field I struggle to see, in the context of the document we discuss this is. E.g I read paragraph 5 and I would struggle to say whether this is written by a Pope or a cheap Adam Smith knock off. Adam Smith had more moral sensitivity than this.

“5. It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own. If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and, for greater security, invests his savings in land, the land, in such case, is only his wages under another form; and, consequently, a working man's little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he receives for his labor. But it is precisely in such power of disposal that ownership obtains, whether the property consist of land or chattels.

8. The fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property. For God has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it was assigned to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man's own industry, and by the laws of individual races. Moreover, the earth, even though apportioned among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, inasmuch as there is not one who does not sustain life from what the land produces. Those who do not possess the soil contribute their labor; hence, it may truly be said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one's own land, or from some toil, some calling, which is paid for either in the produce of the land itself, or in that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth.

”

I think you confuse my critique of a document as criticism of a body of Church that is expressed in much more than a papal opinion.
by varlock | 2025-05-11 08:12:57+00:00
Another one by the same author, which I heartily recommend, is "The Ideal Team Player". Read it many years ago, and I still use it as a basic framework when I interview candidates (in a nutshell, you want someone humble, hungry, and smart).

I personally wouldn't recommend "Death by Meeting", though. Maybe it's just because it didn't resonate much with me, so YMMV.
by conformist | 2025-05-11 08:15:06+00:00
It’s fine to be non-rigorous as long as you’re not a jerk and treat your own conclusions on relatively little data as preliminary. Sometimes it’s good to have some information with relatively large error bars and be willing to update quickly rather than ignore information because the error bars are large. From the article it doesn’t become apparent that the author wouldn’t update her views quickly as new information comes in (eg by talking to someone). So yes the observations in the post are not scientific, but there’s nothing preventing them from being the starting point of rational reasoning and behaviour.
by chris_engel | 2025-05-11 08:15:24+00:00
Hm, you cannot simulate sunlight at all with an RGB LED ring. You can create something that looks cool for our human eyes but the average plant wouldnt make it long beneath them because its basically always living in the dark; the important wavelengths are missing.

This is also a huge problem for people having a terrarium with geckos or saurians - they see and need much different wavelengths than we humans do.

I am no expert for carnivorous plants - maybe they are fine but seeing that there is no UV emitting part in the lighting setup, there may be an important part of the spectrum missing for the plants.
by manarth | 2025-05-11 08:16:20+00:00
The typical catastrophic failure would be a failure of "hull" integrity - i.e. the concrete sphere - at the point of relative vacuum. That could cause an implosion and collapse of the sphere.

That implosion would have a localised short-term effect on water currents as water moves to fill the void, which may affect wildlife in the very immediate area, at the point of implosion (e.g. fish swimming directly next to the sphere may be sucked in and knocked into or trapped by the collapsing concrete).

I can't envisage a failure mode which would cause an explosion or cascade to other spheres in the locality.
by stuaxo | 2025-05-11 08:16:26+00:00
There is so much stuff like this right now:

I have a similar feeling looming at the converse API.

Why, do we have a thing that keeps returning all the text, when something on the other end is just appending to it.

Then there is the code inside langchain, some of which feels rushed.

I'm unconvinced of the abstraction that everything is a "Document". In an app I'm working on, once we switched to PGVector in Django the need for a lot of things went away.

What is great with langchain is the support for lots of things.. but not everything.

So, wanting to always use a thin abstraction over native libraries we find ourself using litellm, which covers some bits and langchain for the others (though the code for both of those is not much).

And then there's models: we can't even agree on standard names for the same models.

And this makes it painful when you support different backends, of course if Bedrock is a backend they have their own models you can't use anywhere else.
by protocolture | 2025-05-11 08:16:39+00:00
Disco Elysium is not just good writing, its also good political commentary (from members of far left ideologies, but also not sparing far left ideologies from intense criticism)

To the point where theres something like 4 teams making games right now claiming to be the true successor to Disco Elysium, as the publisher fired the original writers/developers and pivoted to mobile game development.

I cannot recommend it enough. I played Outer Worlds in the same month, and Outer Worlds has the depth of a fox news rant in comparison.
by josephg | 2025-05-11 08:17:30+00:00
Really? Why?

Blog posts don’t change much. Even if your rendering code is horrendously slow (though, why?), you can just cache the resulting html and serve it up with each request. Or slap nginx in front of your web server locally and let that deal with the load. ‘Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare.

Your server has to be pretty badly configured for a personal blog to run out of CPU handling requests.
by microtonal | 2025-05-11 08:17:36+00:00
Sorry, but your answer is all over the place. First you talk about the other end and then you talk about the modem. I don't care about DOCSIS, it's slowly dying here, almost all people have fiber to home in my country (last time I checked, it's getting close to 90%).

So, let's talk about fiber. So:

The ISP controls whatever the other end of that fiber is plugged into. It doesn't matter if the medium is fiber, or copper, or a piece of string. The ISP always has control of the other side of the customer interface. It doesn't matter if the box physically resides in your home or not.

Sure, the ISP owns the other end, but what's your point? By using my own router (and my own SFP+ module, which is less important), the ISP does not have a device (backdoor) on my network and cannot control my router. Sure, they could capture traffic on their end, but at that point it's pretty much all encrypted anyway. If I don't trust my provider knowing to what individual hosts I connect, I could set my router to tunnel all traffic to another host/VPN/whatever.

At any rate, using your own router + maybe modem removes the worst backdoor when it comes to providers.
by hayst4ck | 2025-05-11 08:19:43+00:00
You realize our government built nuclear bombs, went to the moon, and in 4 years produced a nuclear powered submarine from scratch?

Not to mention the interstate system, drinkable water in almost every home, and the world financial order as we know it today, the internet itself was a government project too. GPS?

We have almost eradicated many extremely harmful illnesses as a result of government programs, including something that neutralizes but does not cure HIV.

> Government cannot allocate resources well however well intended.

That's because the half of the government that says this is ensuring it is true in order to justify deregulation and privatization to make their 10B benefactors happy. Most of the people who say what you say feel confident saying it, not realizing that it's not structurally true, but only true because they believe it.
by tomhow | 2025-05-11 08:20:03+00:00
On HN it's almost always been considered fine to use downvoting to express disagreement [1]

As moderators we don't particularly care what opinion you express, but it's everyone's responsibility to comment in a way that doesn't break the guidelines [2].

The most relevant to you in this thread are these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why 80% of Developers Feel Stuck–and How to Fix It
by juanmera01 | 2025-05-11 08:20:05+00:00
I’m Juan, a software engineer. After my mentor asked, “Why aren’t you progressing as fast as you code?”, I realized we all ship features but often lack a clear growth map.

The 2024 Stack Overflow Survey says only 20% of devs feel truly satisfied, and 48% feel complacent.

So I built HubbleQuiz: 1. 40 focused questions in <10 min 2. Instant strengths & weaknesses snapshot 3. (Optional) Step-by-step roadmap delivered by email

In private beta, 100+ engineers “debugged” their careers—70% felt clearer on their next steps within minutes.

Try it at https://hubblequiz.com Built with React & AWS Lambda.

*Feedback welcome:* - Which blockers hit home? - What would you add to these questions?

Thanks, HN!
by masklinn | 2025-05-11 08:20:48+00:00
> This trend of overengineering

I'd dispute it being over-engineering: media keys tend to control a mix of hardware and software (OS) features (looking at asus keyboards on the internet I see audio volume, mic mute, fan speed / perf governor, display off, brightness, projection mode, touchpad off, sleep, and airplane mode).

Given this, an OS driver is a requirement, and the OS further needs to access the hardware for obvious reasons.

This means you can either implement everything uniformly in driver (just bouncing from the interrupt to a hardware operation in the case of hardware features), or you can mix the implementation between firmware and driver.

Unless you have a very good justification to do so (which I'd very much dispute the existence of for gaming-oriented ASUS laptops) the latter seems like the over-engineering.
by zimpenfish | 2025-05-11 08:22:18+00:00
From the photos, they seem to be DFRobot displays[0] ($55). PiHut has one matching the description[1] but it comes with a camera and is pricy (~$107). Amazon have a cheaper clone-brand option[2] (~$37). Aliexpress also has a wealth of cheap options for '7" DSI 800x480' (~$40-50).

[0] https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2193.html

[1] https://thepihut.com/products/7-dsi-capacitive-touch-display...

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B8Y81Y6S
by root_axis | 2025-05-11 08:22:29+00:00
I love Rust, but Go is a much much simpler language, especially for network services. For example, the experience of goroutines vs rust async is night and day in terms of complexity. Also, the borrow-checker introduces a lot more ceremony when managing network peer entities, particularly structuring relationships between entities - a very common requirement in network applications.

Not that I'm against Rust for network services, but with Rust you're accepting increased complexity for increased safety - a worthwhile tradeoff depending on the project.
by jampekka | 2025-05-11 08:25:38+00:00
> T he raw bits of the base pairs is just one component of the information, but it’s like a maximally compressed version of the info.

This sounds a bit suspect. Maximally compressed version would be very sensitive to mutations which wouldn't be great for adaptation via mutations. My understanding is that only a small fraction of mutations lead to unviable phenotypes.

Also AFAIK the current understanding is that majority of DNA is "junk", i.e don't seem to affect the phenotype. Which would be a partial explanation for the above.

The process of genetic expression is indeed something like procedual generation, but if maximal compression is about something like Kolmorogov complexity, the produced phenotype doesn't contain more information than the genetic information.
by josephg | 2025-05-11 08:26:04+00:00
It’s amazing how much code gets pulled in for printf. Using musl, printf apparently adds 13kb of code to your binary. Given format strings are almost always static, it’s so weird to me that they still get parsed at runtime in all cases. Modern compilers even parse printf format strings anyway to check your types match.

This sort of thing makes me really appreciate zig’s comptime. Even rust uses a macro for println!().
by troupo | 2025-05-11 08:26:36+00:00
Sometimes I click on HN submissions out of idle curiosity, not because I seek those out, or because I know what the link refers to.

It doesn't mean that I will actively try and navigate out of a forum completely separated [1] from the actual product site just to see what it is.

[1] It's the bane of nearly all projects, both commercial and open-source: blogs, release notes, discussions, forums and often even documentation don't have a single link back to the product page
by casey2 | 2025-05-11 08:27:46+00:00
Having arms and legs isn't "physically privileged". If one is unable to create and maintain relationships then they likely have some cocktail of physical and mental disabilities. Most functioning adults can go to a bar.

The point being fixing your own life is going to bring much more in the way of benefits than the government or Sam trying to fix it for you. If one are a complete social reject then no amount of AGI will save them. People without close relationships are zombies that walk among us, in most ways they are already dead.
by WWLink | 2025-05-11 08:28:01+00:00
I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock!

But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.

In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.

But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.
by tomhow | 2025-05-11 08:30:46+00:00
Some of your comments in this subthread were arguably unfairly downvoted and flagged, as you were making valid points, but you fanned the flames with some activating language, most notably this:

> Lol what an internet tough guy.

Please take care to read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by stuaxo | 2025-05-11 08:31:08+00:00
My first surprise on it:

I made an error trying with aws bedrock where I used "bedrock" instead of "bedrock-runtime".

The native library will give you an error back.

Langchain didn't try and do anything, just kept parsing the json and gave me a KeyError.

I was able to get a small fix, but was surprised they have no error like ConfigurationError that goes across all their backends at all.

The best I could get them to add was ValueError and worked with the devs to make the text somewhat useful.

But was pretty surprised, I'd expect a badly configured endpoint to be the kind of thing that happens when setting stuff up for the first time, relatively often.
by mesrik | 2025-05-11 08:31:26+00:00
AFAIK calling DNS root the "." is quite recent phenomenon.

I'm fairly old guy who did work with DNS about 35 years before retirement and what I recall from the beginning when I was reading my first copy of DNS and BIND somewhat quite soon it came out -92 I think the second chapter which describes DNS root "A null (zero-length" was already there.

So a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) well known www.google.com the would be www.google.com."" where between the quotation denotes where the DNS root is shown.

However, resolvers don't recognise that syntax. Don't be fooled by

$ host www.google.com.""

www.google.com has address 216.58.209.164 www.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:4026:802::2004

from the shell as it removes those double quotes. Using single quotes around shows how that fails and you can check it easily.

$ host 'www.google.com.""'

Host www.google.com."" not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

The way I learned to understand it the dot in DNS name is (it signifies) the DNS-tree separator, not part of the DNS name. A bit like in some languages (Pascal) use semicolon (;) a sentence separator not an end of sentence like it's in C and many it's practise adopted later.

OK, here's an excerpt from DNS and BIND by Cricket Liu & Paul Albitz, O'Reilly ISBN 0-596-10057-6, Fifth Edition 2006 book which I still have a printed copy in my shelf and shows what I'm referring above.

Chapter 2: How Does DNS Work, page 12, text after Figure 2-1 they write:

"Domain Names

Each node in the tree has a text label (without dots) that can be up to 63 characters long. A null (zero-length) label is reserved for the root. The full domain name of any node in the tree is the sequence of labels on the path from that node to the root. Domain names are always read from the node toward the root ("up" the tree), with dots separating the names in the path. If the root node's label actually appears in a node's domain name, the name looks as though it ends in a dot, as in "www.oreilly.com." (It actually ends with a dot—the separator—and the root's null label.) When the root node's label appears by itself, it is written as a single dot, "", for convenience. Consequently, some software interprets a trailing dot in a domain name to indicate that the domain name is absolute.

An absolute domain name is written relative to the root and unambiguously specifies a node's location in the hierarchy. An absolute domain name is also referred to as a fully qualified domain name, often abbreviated FQDN. Names without trailing dots are sometimes interpreted as relative to some domain name other than the root, just as directory names without a leading slash are often interpreted as relative to the current directory.

... "

I don't have old book copies any more, I've just this one with me.