MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-04 20:14:06+00:00
I can't vouch for this, but maybe you could get SolidWorks working in Wine? (e.g. https://github.com/cryinkfly/SOLIDWORKS-for-Linux). Of note, SolidWorks is cheap if you're a student or veteran, for a non-commercial license. It is a dramatic improvement over FreeCAD. (I wish CAS were in a state like EDA and artistic model makers where the free/OSS software was on par with commercial, but we are not.)
by schroeding | 2025-05-04 20:14:19+00:00
The US Air Force bombed a local underground fuel storage facility, one of the biggest in Germany at the time, with quite a lot of heavy bombers in April 1945 with mixed success - only three days before finally capturing the facility with the US Army. At that time, the tanks were already almost empty, as the existing (significant) reserves were used for weeks to fuel the last heavy vehicles and tanks.

The fuel storage facilities were mainly used to mix the fuel the Luftwaffe needed - they got almost all of their fuel from them.

Always wondered what made the allies wait for so long or why it apparently wasn't a high priority target - they had to know that it was there, there were two railway connections and large amounts of visible tank cars (which they did attack a few times with smaller planes) just a few hundred metres away, with a major military airfield close, and it was a (mostly) unpopulated area. There were bomber formations flying overhead for months at that point, as a big German city was just a few miles away.
by rscho | 2025-05-04 20:14:37+00:00
MAC is the alveolar concentration (so strictly speaking defined only for anesthetic gases) at which half of people show no motor reaction on surgical incision. I understand your interpretation about paralysis, but we know the measurement endpoint is not paralysis in practice. Gases are hypnotics, and although they do cause some amount of muscle relaxation they do not induce paralysis. Hence the need for other drugs when we need paralysis. BTW, there is evidence that EEG prevents awareness under anesthesia, but it's not a guarantee either. Fortunately, awareness is extremely rare even in the select cases where it occurs more often (emergency C-section and cardiac surgery, especially in seniors).
by sillysaurusx | 2025-05-04 20:14:41+00:00
I think people who don’t like writing shouldn’t be forced to write, just like people who don’t like music shouldn’t be forced to play music. Ditto for math.

Forcing people to do these things supposedly results in a better, more competitive society. But does it really? Would you rather have someone on your team who did math because it let them solve problems efficiently, or did math because it’s the trick to get the right answer?

Writing is in a similar boat as math now. We’ll have to decide whether we want to force future generations to write against their will.

I was forced to study history against my will. The tests were awful trivia. I hated history for nearly a decade before rediscovering that I love it.

History doesn’t have much economical value. Math does. Writing does. But is forcing students to do these things the best way to extract that value? Or is it just the tradition we inherited and replicate just because our parents did?
by satanfirst | 2025-05-04 20:15:19+00:00
You really have to make a distinction between monopolies of control and the rest. If you can go to multiple shops, restaurants, etc, then you have selection as control. The troublesome ones here have a lot of lock-in, if you can just move towns, switch phone OSes, etc, then you've probably sacrificed quite a bit to avoid that lock-in.
by zoky | 2025-05-04 20:15:19+00:00
I know two people with that exact model of 3D printer. Both printers are routinely out of commission for weeks on end due to some failure that the owners lack either the technical expertise to diagnose and fix or the desire to pay exorbitant prices for proprietary replacement parts to fix (or both). Meanwhile my Ender 5 is always chugging along, and is never out of commission for more than a day or two while awaiting replacement parts from Amazon that cost between a few cents and up to maybe $20 each.

I don’t actually think Bambu makes unreliable printers; to the contrary, they are excellent machines that, if anything, are much more reliable on the whole than Creality. But they’re kind of like sports cars, in that their target market is either people who want something fast and flashy and are willing to throw money at any problems to make them go away, or for technical types who want something they can take out on the track and don’t mind wrenching their own machines. The problem is that Bambu printers are marketed and touted as being great for beginners, and while they certainly make it easy to get into 3D printing for nontechnical people, I think most of them will end up ultimately being disappointed at either the lack of customization they allow or amount of time, effort, and money required to diagnose and fix them when something goes wrong.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-04 20:15:39+00:00
Did you even read my comment? I have designed cooling systems professionally and I can assure you that is how things work :) Not trying to be rude, but your comment is incorrect in several ways.

I'll make this very simple: The hot chip is warmer than the ambient air because the rate of heat transfer from the chip to the air is low. A fan will increase the rate of heat transfer, thus decreasing the temperature of the chip and increasing the temperature of the air in the backpack. It will also increase the rate of heat transfer from the backpack air to the backpack, which will increase the rate of heat transfer from the backpack to the environment.

Notably, the fan would help even if the backpack was a magic closed system (which it is not; put a 100W computer and a 1kWh battery into it, open ten hours later, and you will not have anywhere near 1kWh of heat.) But why would it help in a closed system? Because the chip does not care about the total energy in the system, the chip cares about the peak chip temperature. The chip will always be the hottest thing in the backpack, but the delta in temperature between the chip and the air can be quite large. Indeed, in practice, for "natural convection" (no fan), this dT between the chip and the air is considerable. When you add a fan ("forced convection") you shrink that dT substantially.
by slyfox125 | 2025-05-04 20:15:41+00:00
Existence of a/the soul isn't the only reason machines cannot replace people in the context of something like this.

One reason is that the human experience is dependent upon the biological nature of man. The biological systems color the experience. The pumping of blood, the nervous system, the heart beating, and ultimately, one's awareness of the specific type of mortality inherent to biological organisms, are integral to the experience. If you accurately reproduce that experience then perhaps you've simply made a human rather than a machine. Of course that claim spurs many subsequent philosophical arguments. Ultimately though, a video game console emulator is not the literal console no matter how accurate it is.

A second reason is simply the subjective experience of a person. Regardless of how accurate the simulation is, ultimately, if the person is aware the other end isn't human, the experience is tainted (for better or worse depending on the individual's opinion - but tainted nonetheless). Knowledge of the truth will necessarily affect the experience. The alternative - being in the dark or outright deception - raises other questions of genuinity that taint the experience.

A conversation with a human, by another human, will never be the same as a conversation with a machine - by definition.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-04 20:15:49+00:00
It should, but I think most of us read enough old code to know that this doesn't happen as often as we'd like. With an LLM you already wrote the prompt, so if you had an easy way to attach the prompt to the code it could make it more likely that some form of documentation exists.

Some times you also fail to write the comment because at the time everyone knew why you did it like that, because that's what everyone did. Now it's 10 years later and everyone doesn't know that. The LLM prompt could still require you to type out the edge case that everyone in your line of business knows about, but might not a generalised across the entirety of the software industry.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-05-04 20:16:08+00:00
I hear that. What I can say is that on the ground, this community I am in is thriving and struggling just like everyone else. We have jobs and worries and families. We buy stuff and pay taxes. We’re a mixed group of techies and poor artists and we help each other out and try to be good citizens and help out our broader community.

From my lived experience in this community, absolutely nothing says to me this is some unstable condition. Everyone who is in this community is in it because they are happier this way, and there’s a lot of happy people in this community. Depending on how you slice it our community isn’t for everyone but that’s okay.

So I hear that you have that hypothesis. I can report from the ground people are happy and productive.

If you think there’s something specific that would lead to some sort of societal problem I would be interested to hear about it.
by im3w1l | 2025-05-04 20:16:16+00:00
I think the best usecase by far is when you don't know where to start. The AI will put something out there. Either it's right in which case great, or it's wrong, and then trying to analyze why it's wrong often helps you get started too. Like to take a silly example let's say you want to build a bridge for cars and the AI suggests using one big slab of paper maiche. You reject this but now you have two good questions: what material should it have? and what shape?
by keybored | 2025-05-04 20:16:40+00:00
Democracy is complicated in practice and has a complicated history. But the theory is simple. Most of my own studies into the subject was learning and conceptualizing the wrong-headed mainstream conceptions of democracy.

No useful theory of democracy involves game theory. As a democrat the idea of social scientists maintaining a quasi-mechanical machine offends me. Politics needs less eggheads.

Then there’s the part about humility about Trump coming to power. Well by your own admission then your theories were just bad. People ranging from Richard Rorty to Noam Chomsky had predicted that someone like Trump could come to power if the current trajectory of the time kept on going. That was in the 90’s.

The quote about parties losing power isn’t true. America has an undemocratic duopoly. But I guess “fear” might be the keyword. Since neither party seem to truly fear it.
by karhuton | 2025-05-04 20:17:08+00:00
After certain age, all school students up to university use/have a computer.

If they end up in an office job, they very likely will have/keep one around.

And even when not, people with higher education tend to like use the home computer for certain things. For example ”official stuff” like doing taxes, using government services. Maybe throw in some more detailed trip planning, hobbies, spreadsheets…
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-04 20:18:22+00:00
> A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they shall receive a degree as testament to their completion of these assignments.

I agree with the broader point of the article in principle. We should be writing to edify ourselves and take education seriously because of how deep interaction with the subject matter will transform us.

But in reality, the mindset the author cites is more common. Most accounting majors probably don't have a deep passion for GAAP, but they believe accounting degrees get good jobs.

And when your degree is utilitarian like that, it just becomes a problem of minimizing time spent to obtain the reward.
by ddingus | 2025-05-04 20:18:51+00:00
If we don't have files, then what?

Seems to me we very rapidly arrive at records or entities.

We see both these days in databases.

Entities show up in CAD and simulation. Records show up in business tools of various kinds.

All require a schema and serious dependencies flow from there.

In CAD, for example, the database schema can change quite dramatically from version to version of the same software tool. And all this makes writing plug in tools or anything really painful.

And forget exchanging native data between systems. STEP exists for that, and O God help you on a bigger project involving any old data

The thing about files is they are basically EASY.

And easy, when looking at where we are going, matters. A lot.

Files can exist on pretty much anything. Paper tape, mag tape, all sorts of media, up to advanced storage tech.

Databases are a different story.

I am not convinced we are anywhere rear being ready for that huge leap.

And I would normally say "forward" but on this?

Nope!

It would be a huge mess requiring we toss just about everything we have in use today
by INTPenis | 2025-05-04 20:19:07+00:00
I use flatpaks daily but not many apps. Because I've been on Atomic Linux for a couple years now flatpak has become part of my daily life.

On this work laptop I have three flatpaks, Signal, Chromium and Firefox. They all take 1.6GiB in total.

On my gaming PC I have Signal, Flatseal, Firefox, PrismLauncher, Fedora MediaWriter and Steam, and obviously they take over 700G because of the games in Steam, but if I count just the other flatpaks they're 2.2GiB.

So yeah, not great, but on the other hand I don't care because I love the packaging of cgroups based software and I don't need many of them. I mean my container images take up a lot more space than my flatpaks.
Ask HN: Anyone else give up on trying to get rich?
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-04 20:19:26+00:00
Let me preference this by saying I'm comfortable where I'm at. I have a solid upper middle class job and I can afford to take vacations and travel.

I'm doing much better than I could of ever hopped to when I was growing up.

However, in my mid 30s, something is different. I went from trying to come up with multi-million dollar ideas and cold calling( tweeting/emailing) VCs asking for funding and feedback. Now I'm just content working on small games.

I have another project which is basically a music/lyric video generator in Unity.

I really like the technical aspects of creating a startup, picking a stack and hacking something together. I hate the business side. Idea guys with half-baked ideas who expect free prototypes. I like building stuff with my friends, but actually figuring out how to make money... That's the hard part.
by q3k | 2025-05-04 20:19:42+00:00
My favorite continues to be hardware from Prusa. They're rock solid and respect user freedoms (serviceability/upgradability/hackability). Being made in the EU is also a big upside for me.

I've had an MK3S+ for years and even though it's a primitive machine in comparison to the current Bambu hardware I see no reason to upgrade to something else. It just keeps printing whatever I throw at it and the results continue to be very good. In fact, I seem to have better luck with it than the Bambus I sometimes use at various hacker/makerspaces.

If you just look at the numbers (speed, volume, ...) against Bambu hardware they're not as good, but the reliability and simplicity make up for it IMO. The main missing feature is multi-material support, but that's something I'm not really interested in due to how wasteful the current technology is.
by nicce | 2025-05-04 20:19:53+00:00
I would say that legacy code is something that one does not simply change.

You cannot update any dependencies because then everything breaks. You cannot even easily add new features because it is difficult to even run the old dependencies your code is using.

With LLMs, creating legacy code is using some old APIs, old patterns to do something, that is not relevant anymore, but the LLM does not know about.

E.g. if you ask any LLM to use Tailwind CSS, they use V3 no matter what you try to do while the V4 is the latest. LLMs try to tell you that pure CSS configuration is wrong and you should use the .js config.
by flysand7 | 2025-05-04 20:20:32+00:00
In a change log simply stating "bug fixes" is not enough, because as a user, it's not clear whether or not any of those bugs that you have fixed has affected me. This might be my personal opinion though, I'm not sure, but when some software releases an update that says "fixed the issue where X goes wrong because of Y" and that specific thing has been annoying me for a few months, it kinda makes me happy in that moment, because I know I can expect the next update to suck a little less. Might be something to consider, but at least writing down the scope of the bug would be already better.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-04 20:20:49+00:00
Is bringing up Naur's paper and arguing that theory of program is all that matters and LLMs cannot do that, just a 2025 version of calling LLMs stochastic parrots and claiming they don't model or work in terms of concepts? Feels like it.

EDIT: Not a jab at the author per se, more that it's a third or fourth time I see this particular argument in the last few weeks, and I don't recall seeing it even once before.
by Animats | 2025-05-04 20:21:08+00:00
That's because the instructor is asking questions that merely require the student to regurgitate the instructor's text.

To actually teach this, you do something like this:

"Here's a little dummy robot arm made out of Tinkertoys. There are three angular joints, a rotating base, a shoulder, and an elbow. Each one has a protractor so you can see the angle.

1. Figure out where the end of the arm will be based on those three angles. Those are Euler angles in action. This isn't too hard.

2. Figure out what the angles should be to touch a specific point on the table. For this robot geometry, there's a simple solution, for which look up "two link kinematics". You don't have to derive it, just be able to work out how to get the arm where you want it. Is the solution unambiguous? (Hint: there may be more than one solution, but not a large number.)

3. Extra credit. Add another link to the robot, a wrist. Now figure out what the angles should be to touch a specific point on the table. Three joints are a lot harder than two joints. There are infinitely many solutions. Look up "N-link kinematics". Come up with a simple solution that works, but don't try too hard to make it optimal. That's for the optimal controls course.

This will give some real understanding of the problems of doing this.
by firefoxd | 2025-05-04 20:21:36+00:00
Personally, I've used LLM to help me better structure my blog post after I write it. Meaning I've already written it, then it enhances it. Most of the time, I'm happy with the results at the time of editing. But when I come back a week or two to re-read it, it looks just like the example the author shared.

The goal is to make something legible, but the reality is we are producing slop. I'm back to writing before my brain becomes lazy.
by nialv7 | 2025-05-04 20:21:38+00:00
> It can infer why something may have been written in a particular way, but it (currently) does not have access to the actual/point-in-time reasoning the way an actual engineer/maintainer would.

Is that really true? A human programmer has hidden states, i.e. what is going on in their head cannot be fully recovered by just looking at the output. And that's why "Software evolves more rapidly under the maintenance of its original creator, and in proportion to how recently it was written", as is astutely observed by the author.

But transformer based LLMs do not have this hidden state. If you retain the text log of your conservation with an LLM, you can reproduce its inner layer outputs exactly. In that regard, an LLM is actually much better than humans.
by nine_k | 2025-05-04 20:21:47+00:00
Yes. BIOS. Real mode. Not that I've been missing them these 30 years, and they are still in place. It gives a weird feeling.

I mean, if you target ancient baroque hardware like e.g. ZX Spectrum, you specifically target an ancient machine. But this is expected to work on any modern x86 hardware, while it feels like code for a 80286, and likely would run there. And this ancient stuff is still supported and actively used.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-04 20:23:13+00:00
Nothing crazy about that. It's mostly European countries that have mandatory paid sick leave by law for everyone, as they fought for that right in the post-war times when the economy was booming and the world outside the west less safe from outsourcing, and importing cheap labor less easy, so the perfect storm giving labor most power over employers, something that's not gonna repeat again in the globalized world of today.

It was the temporal global exception, not the rule, as the worldwide norm was working people to death for most of history. Companies would gladly give their workers zero benefits if they could get away with it.
by mikrl | 2025-05-04 20:23:19+00:00
I read that Oceanic climates are less stable, making it harder for the massive cumulonimbus clouds associated with thunderstorms to form.

Here in Ontario, I can sit on the beach and look over westward and see storms approaching from Michigan. One summer I saw a cloud top on the horizon at about 3:30pm and managed to get in one last swim before packing the car and getting on the road right as the rain started around 5:00… European weather is not that predictable until you get into the continental zone… eastern Germany through Poland.
by vunderba | 2025-05-04 20:23:46+00:00
This is the CRUX of the issue. Even with SOTA models (Sonnet 3.5, etc) - the more open-ended your prompt - the more banal and generic the response. It's GIGO turtles all the way down.

I pointed this out a few weeks ago with respect to why the current state of LLMs will never make great campaign creators in Dungeons and Dragons.

We as humans don't need to be "constrained" - ask any competent writer to sit quietly and come up with a novel story plot and they can just do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677863

That being said - they can still make AMAZING soundboards.

And if you still need some proof, crank the temperature up to 1.0 and pose the following prompt to ANY LLM:

Come up with a self-contained single room of a dungeon that involves an unusual puzzle for use with a DND campaign. Be specific in terms of the puzzle, the solution, layout of the dungeon room, etc. It should be totally different from anything that already exists. Be imaginative.

I guarantee 99% of the returns will return a very formulaic physics-based puzzle response like "The Resonant Hourglass", or "The Mirror of Acoustic Symmetry", etc.
by nathants | 2025-05-04 20:23:56+00:00
the solution is obvious. stop grading the result, and start grading the process.

if you can one-shot an answer to some problem, the problem is not interesting.

the result is necessary, but not sufficient. how did you get there? how did you iterate? what were the twists and turns? what was the pacing? what was the vibe?

no matter if with encyclopedia, google, or ai, the medium is the message. the medium is you interacting with the tools at your disposal.

record that as a video with obs, and submit it along with the result.

for high stakes environments, add facecam and other information sources.

reviewers are scrubbing through video in an editor. evaluating the journey, not the destination.