MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-05-04 15:48:16+00:00
While those things may not have been true in 1987, many of them are true today, now that computers have had several decades to evolve.

1. Cost is arguable today, as cheap computers exist, and quality typewriters have become more expensive. A cheap computer will work better than a beat up old typewriter.

2. A modern laptop, tablet, or phone is much smaller than a typewriter.

3. A computer is demonstrably better than a typewriter, by several orders of magnitude, assuming the user has electricity and a printer (if one of their goals to end up with a printed page).

4. The typewriter still wins here. Though, one could argue, that it takes less physical energy to transport and use a computer vs a typewriter.

5. A computer could be powered by solar energy today, with enough solar infrastructure behind it. I’m also thinking back to the OLPC that had a crank to charge its battery.

6. The typewriter still wins here, though I don’t think the average typewriter user is doing their own restoration or major repairs.

7. Computers now win here, simply due to popularity.

8. This seems to go hand and hand with number 7. A few lucky people may have a local typewriter shop, but they are few and far between.

9. I don’t think the computer inherently creates this disruption. I didn’t notice a shift here until the internet really exploded in popularity. The computer has also attempted to solve the division it created, and has been used to keep families together. I’m thinking of times where I had to travel for work, and I’d get a FaceTime call to bring me into a birthday party happening thousands of miles away.
by Skunkleton | 2025-05-04 15:48:23+00:00
I think you might be missing the point too. Yes, the carbon in the food we eat is where the carbon in our breath comes from. But the carbon that we used to get the ingredients in that food didn't certainly come from the atmosphere (e.g. half of the nitrogen used in agriculture comes from fossil fuels). You can't be a perfectly optimal salad eating machine. One of your fellow humans will ruin the equation the moment they buy produce from the modern supply chain.
by account-5 | 2025-05-04 15:48:30+00:00
I can't really comment about snap since I don't use Ubuntu but I thought flatpaks would work similar to how portable apps on windows do. Clearly I'm wrong, but how is it that windows can have portable apps of a similar size to their installable versions and Linux cannot? I know I'm missing something fundamental here, like how people blame Linux for lack of hardware support without acknowledging that hardware vendors do the work for windows to work correctly.

Either way disk space is cheap and abundant now. If I need thenlastest version of something I will use flatpaks.
by myself248 | 2025-05-04 15:49:06+00:00
It still bothers me. Analog and TDM voice was magical and we didn't appreciate it until it was gone. VoIP was so much cheaper, the latency became the norm, and people who've never known anything different simply have no idea what was lost.

It used to be that if you had two landlines in a large room, you could call one from the other, and your voice would go into one phone, electrically go across town into the switch, back out the other line, and out the other phone, before the soundwaves traveled the length of the room. It was _so_ good.
by maxloh | 2025-05-04 15:50:35+00:00
I was able to reproduce your results with the provided command. In that case, Rethink DNS is 1-2 ms faster than Cloudflare DNS. However, the provided command actually runs 300 queries in a really short timeframe (specified by -c 300), which is very different from real-world use cases — in most cases, we look up a domain only once, and the result is cached by the OS.

If we set the count parameter to 1 (closer to the mentioned real-world use cases), we can reproduce the result in my comment above. Rethink DNS actually takes 450 ms to return a response.

./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/04 23:22:47 [info] Average per query: 452.3948ms

With Cloudflare DNS, it takes only 35 ms, even when using DNS over HTTPS.

./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/04 23:22:49 [info] Average per query: 34.4343ms

As sky.rethinkdns.com is hosted on Cloudflare, there shouldn't be any notable network differences between Rethink DNS and Cloudflare DNS. If you inspect the list of servers in the following two lists, they are almost identical.

- https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=https://sky.rethinkdn...

- https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=https://cloudflare-dn...

If CPU time isn't the bottleneck of response time, any idea what the reason is behind the difference in response time?
by mingus88 | 2025-05-04 15:51:10+00:00
Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th.

It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that

And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do the opposite just because. And it would still probably slap.

Kurt cobain was a fantastic song writer but you see these types of articles come out now and then propping him up as a genius. His own quote refutes that, and anyone who listens to punk music will agree that trying to analyze it using classical western tonality is silly and pretentious
by callc | 2025-05-04 15:51:21+00:00
Yes, it is reasonable to require older folks to pass a driving test that measures alertness, vision, etc. If no pass then take away license.

Heck I was in a parking lot yesterday and almost got hit by a truck, driver is a very old man.

In terms of safety of AVs and human drivers, AVs need to cause 10x less fatalities than humans do in order to be widely accepted by people. It’s an emotional thing.

Just like these humanoid robots we’re seeing companies develop. If we let them loose in society, would it be ok if they only committed murder 1% less than humans do?

People naturally hold the bar higher for robots and computers. It might be for the lack of accountability. I’m not sure of other reasons why this is
by PebblesRox | 2025-05-04 15:52:41+00:00
The optimal amount of regret from decluttering is non-zero!

I’ve learned that yes, maybe 1 out of every 100 items I get rid of will turn out to be something I need again in the future. That’s a worthwhile price to pay for the benefit of not having the other 99 items in my life!

Donating to thrift stores is very convenient. And I learned recently that if I have stuff that’s not really nice enough for the thrift store to sell, I can just list it on Facebook Marketplace for free and people will come take it away from my porch! Makes me feel better about getting rid of stuff that still has some use in it, because I’m not just throwing it in the trash.

My mother-in-law and her friends use a system I call clutter laundering. Anything with too much sentimental value to give to a stranger, they pass along to each other. Presumably once the emotional distance is long enough, somebody can actually get rid of it for good! (That’s what I’ve been helping my MIL do with stuff that comes to her at least!)
by getnormality | 2025-05-04 15:53:08+00:00
> OK, great. Now I have a few hundred lines of C++ I need to read through and completely understand to see why it's incorrect.

For a time, we can justify this kind of extra work by imagining that it is an upfront investment. I think that is what a lot of people are doing right now. It remains to be seen when AI-assisted labor is still a net positive after we stop giving it special grace as something that will pay off a lot later if we spend a lot of time on it now.
by specialist | 2025-05-04 15:53:11+00:00
Probably. I personally haven't done anything like that. Though I'm not sure I follow.

I've mostly done ASTs and (scene) graphs. I prefer dumb objects, stuffing most behavior and logic in an Interpreter (design pattern) implementation. Being a very simple bear, my working memory can't keep track of all the smarts scattered all about.

My current example is processing SQL statements; think expression evaluator (subset) for a very specific use case. I tend to use so called "External" Iterators for walking trees, to keeping all the logic in one place. Versus Visitor, Listeners, or even Active Objects. Which is feasible for this use case, because its bounded and unlikely to change (eg extension points).

YMMV of course. Now I'm just babbling, apologies, and probably went too far off topic.
by simianwords | 2025-05-04 15:53:59+00:00
I mean't that this is the only way to control prefix caching. I consider this a serious feature - if I were to make an application using prefix caching I would not consider OpenAI at all. I can't control what gets cached and for how long.

Wouldn't you want to give more power to the developer? Prefix caching seems like an important enough concept to leak to the end user.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-04 15:54:22+00:00
Cute. Being able to walk into your opponent's side makes this a lot more interesting that my memory of Slime Volleyball.

The AI also has some funny emergent behavior that demands that you go over there to knock the ball out of its control.

Since it has a dedicated site and a Discord, I assume there are plans to implement PvP multiplayer.
by gosub100 | 2025-05-04 15:54:36+00:00
Lawyers specialize in certain fields, so I would search for "consumer lawyer" + my city. If you find one that says they handle business disputes or contracts I'd message them. But also say you're looking for "contract review" and consumer protection. I your email be sure to ask for referrals if they are unable to help.

You're paying them to scrutinize the contract and let you know how to protect yourself if there are shenanigans. One very common tactic is to take your money, move your stuff, but hold it until you pay more money that wasn't in the contract.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-04 15:55:43+00:00
> I would actually say overall C++ is much more reasonable.

This is where I know that, some people, are not actually programming in either of these languages, but just writing meme driven posts.

JS has a few footguns. Certainly not so many that it's difficult to keep in your head, and not nearly as complex as C++, which is a laughable statement.

You've "seen null make it to the database," but haven't seen the exact same thing in C++? Worse, seen a corrupted heap?
by GolfPopper | 2025-05-04 15:56:01+00:00
My understanding has always been that one of the "killer apps" of democracy as a system of government is peaceful transfer of power. It seems like one of those "nobody asks what the old software did well" questions; so many people (i.e. Americans) are so used to the idea of peaceful transfer of power that we don't ever think about what a major achievement it is, and how dependent on it everything we take for granted is.
by brandon272 | 2025-05-04 15:56:46+00:00
Yes, but Buffett’s diet has been famously bad and well documented in the media. Cookies and ice cream for breakfast according to one article on LinkedIn by Bill Gates. Daily McDonalds, hamburgers, and a lifelong love of (addiction to?) Coca Cola.

So while the definition of eating well has always changed, I’m not sure it was ever what Buffett reportedly does. And if Buffett’s diet is actually as reported, he is likely an outlier in terms of typical effects of such a diet into old age.

“If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola. I do it every day.”

https://fortune.com/well/article/warren-buffett-birthday-lon...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warren-buffetts-upside-down-b...
by notahacker | 2025-05-04 15:57:11+00:00
Beyond that, a quirk of the American system in many states is registering your party affiliation at the time you register votes so that you can participate in primaries. When you've got >45% of registered voters identifying as being a supporter of one of the major two parties closely enough to add it to their name on the electoral roll, it's not exactly an encouraging environment to break that status quo

Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
Show HN: Whatsbuilding – A search engine for real estate developments
by csunoser | 2025-05-04 15:58:03+00:00
Hi HN, I built whatsbuilding to better track and understand real estate development in Austin and other cities in North America.

Having previously worked in real estate development, I found the public data scattered and wanted an easier way to see not just what was being proposed, but also get some context around timelines and how projects compared - what makes one project take 200 days less than a similar one?

This site indexes Austin (and a few other cities) development permits/proposals for searching, and critically, it calculates processing times with percentile comparisons to show how projects stack up against local norms. Heavily inspired by the great judyrecords, I really appreciate projects that "merely" ties together disparate data of obscure origins. Appreciate any feedback!
by bombela | 2025-05-04 15:58:49+00:00
Linux + KDE user here.

It used to work on kde/plasma 5 at some point. And after a minor version update it stopped working.

Now the mic of my headset doesn't work because KDE insists that only the high quality sound output without mic is available. The mic + low quality output is gone from the settings.

Lucky for me this update also brought proper handling of the stereo positioned noise cancelling microphones on my thinkpad. So now I can actually enjoy the luxury of built-in microphones that work. Until the day it wont I guess.
by blywi | 2025-05-04 15:59:53+00:00
I always thought it to be the other way around. If you assume that we are living in a simulation, then gravity might well be an artifact of a simulation that runs on localized, loosely coupled nodes. Because when you have mostly empty space, with low interaction, then the simulation is able to run at full speed, but the more particles you have interacting at close range, the slower the simulation gets as the local workload increases. In this model the force called gravity would not be the source, and time dilation one of it's effects, but instead time dilation caused by interactions is the cause and the gravitational force is what we experience as the result.
by holowoodman | 2025-05-04 16:00:49+00:00
I didn't say anything about a foreskin anywhere. And my point is, they did not just do minor stuff like a circumcision (which I think is a barbaric, pointless and immoral practice to inflict on non-consenting minors in any case except to maybe cure phimosis).

They did major surgery. Like opening the cranium or abdomen. Like removing limbs. Like removing burnt skin by brushing it off and applying skin grafts. And no, they didn't even apply Lidocain, because children don't feel pain. At best, they gave muscle relaxants as chemical restraints and to make the tissue easier to cut.
by rayiner | 2025-05-04 16:01:07+00:00
> it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.

That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.

What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.
by TheDong | 2025-05-04 16:01:20+00:00
It appears you're including libmp3lame, and linking against it, but I don't see any copy of their LGPL license included (and it's not output in 'strings', so it seems like there's probably not a menu item. I don't run windows, so I can't really check that part).

To avoid violating libmp3lame's copyright, you need to include their notice somewhere in your application.
by sroerick | 2025-05-04 16:01:36+00:00
I totally agree with this. DuckDB for me was a huge QoL improvement just working with random datasets. I found it much easier to explore datasets using DuckDB rather than Pandas, Postgres or Databricks.

The spatial features were just barely out when I was last doing a lot of heavy geospatial work, but even then they were very nice.

An aside, I had a Junior who would just load datasets into PowerBI to explore them for the first time, and that was actually a shockingly useful workflow.

pandas is very nice and was my bread and butter for a long time, but I frequently ran into memory issues and problems at scale with pandas, which I would never hit with polars or duckdb. I'm not sure if this holds true today as I know there's been updates, but it was certainly a problem then. Using geopandas ran into the same issues.

Just using GDAL and other libraries out of the box is frankly not a great experience. If you have a QGIS (another wonderful tool) workflow, it's frustrating to be dropping into Jupyter notebooks to do translations, but that seemed to be the best option.

In general, it just feels like geospatial analysis is about 10 years behind regular data analysis. Shapefiles are common because of ESRI dominance, but frankly not a great format. PostGIS is great, geopandas is great, but there's a lot more things in the data ecosystem than just Postgres and pandas. PowerBI barely had geospatial support a couple years ago. I think PowerBI Shapemaps exclusively used TopoJSON?

All of this is to say, DuckDB geospatial is very cool and helpful.
by zacka | 2025-05-04 16:02:52+00:00
Yes correct, we use electric motors to directly control an efficient compact pump to bidirectionally pump fluid, or use back electromotive force to dampen motion (and capture energy while doing so). This eliminates the need for controlled valves, but requires advanced controls to mitigate system dynamics (hydraulic losses, etc).

For ride control, machine vision helps a bit, but it’s limited due to the need to determine high fidelity road z-measurements which requires very high resolution and clarity at speed, and no visual occlusion. It helps with simple problems like bump vs hill (which is not trivial to predict just with accelerometers), but we’ve figured out how to get most of the benefit of machine vision with just accelerometers and fast actuators. GM was able to use vision to improve pothole performance, but it’s still a semi-active system that only provides fast adjustable stiffness (damping).

For pre-crash, the system uses cameras to detect a collision-path vehicle and determine an optimized impact zone for that vehicle. For example, the frame or bumper has more structural rigidity which may be desirable in certain crash scenarios.
by brudgers | 2025-05-04 16:03:34+00:00
It is happening because it works the way that is most useful to most people. The number of people who want to use bluetooth earbuds with a different microphone is line noise in the consumer market.

Implementing special requirements is always inconvenient for users because no B2C wants to risk bad the-microphone-didn’t-work reviews, customer returns, and support tickets.

Nevermind coordinating with arbitrary USB microphone latency…I’ve got one with 250ms of it.
Show HN: Creative Constraint – Get creative ideas by applying random constraints
by izanamador | 2025-05-04 16:04:29+00:00
I built Creative Constraint as a tool to help makers break through creative inertia.

You choose a medium (like writing, art, or video), and it gives you a random constraint — something weird, challenging, or specific — to push you into action. The idea is that creativity thrives under limitations, and sometimes the hardest part is just knowing where to start.

It’s a minimal side project, built to scratch my own itch. Would love to hear how other makers might use it, or what you'd want added.
by blahaj | 2025-05-04 16:04:44+00:00
Just a guess, but Windows executables probably depend on a bunch of Windows APIs that are guaranteed to be there, while Linux systems are much more modular and do not have a common, let alone stable ABI interface in the userspace. You can probably get small graphically capable binaries if you depend on QT and just assume it to be present, but Flatpak precisely does not do that and bundles all the dependencies to be independent from shared dependencies of the OS outside of its control. The article also mentions that AppImages can be smaller probably because they assume some common dependencies to be present.

And of course there are also tons of huge Windows software that come with all sorts of their own dependencies.

Edit: I think I somewhat misread your comment and progval is more spot on. On Linux you usually install software with a package manager that resolves dependencies and only installs the unsatisfied dependencies resulting in small install size for many cases while on Windows that is not really a thing and installers just package all the dependencies they cannot expect to be present and the portable version just does the same.
by Skunkleton | 2025-05-04 16:05:01+00:00
> No, all the carbon in food plants comes from CO2 from the atmosphere.

Yes, this is what I said.

> the natural gas used in making fertilizer is a source of hydrogen and energy, but not a significant source of N.

There is no nitrogen at all in natural gas.

Plants cannot use atmospheric nitrogen on their own. They depend on either bacteria or humans to create some usable form of nitrogen. Any carbon captured in a plant that depended on a fossil fuel source of nitrogen cannot be considered carbon neutral, unless you draw a useless system boundary.
by FitCodIa | 2025-05-04 16:05:29+00:00
> Grub is like a turd that won't flush. It's been completely unnecessary for years, is massively overcomplicated

shim + grub suck, but bare bones EFI sucks way more, generally speaking. Vendors of consumer-oriented EFI platforms ("client platforms") are batshit insane; they don't offer UEFI console redirection to/from the serial port even if the motherboard has one; they expose neither secure boot configuration nor boot options management to the user, and so on. A purely EFI-based boot loader such as systemd-boot or rEFInd remains the least annoying choice, IMO.
Show HN: Simp – open-source image host
by danonektm | 2025-05-04 16:06:31+00:00
SIMP - Open source image host

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on a project called S.I.M.P (Simple Image Management Platform) and I’m excited to share it with you all.

S.I.M.P is a self-hosted, open-source image sharing platform that offers built-in analytics and a modern frontend.

S.I.M.P can be used for a variety of use cases, including sharing custom images through ShareX, personal screenshot/image hosting, and full control over your own image platform.

Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/DanonekTM/SIMP

You can also try the live demo from there!

Would love your feedback!
by palata | 2025-05-04 16:06:42+00:00
> Everything's frustrating when it doesn't work.

My point being that it cannot be frustrating if it doesn't exist.

> This is a solved problem

Tell that to my airpods that connect to the wrong device (so I need to manually go connect to them most of the time) and to my phone that doesn't automatically connect to my airpods when it is already connected to my watch.

Granted, I want wireless between my phone, watch and headset. But I wouldn't call it a solved problem.
by sroerick | 2025-05-04 16:07:13+00:00
From the DuckDB geospatial docs:

SELECT * FROM './path/to/some/shapefile/dataset.shp';

COPY table TO 'some/file/path/filename.geojson' WITH (FORMAT gdal, DRIVER 'GeoJSON', LAYER_CREATION_OPTIONS 'WRITE_BBOX=YES');

This seems extremely helpful to me.