MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phire | 2025-05-04 11:18:26+00:00
By "early days", I was more thinking about the 1999-2005 era, before low-end Nokias even got Bluetooth and the ability to play MP3s.

The wireless headset was the killer app that drove bluetooth adoption within cellphones, driving down costs until eventually the lower-end models receiving it too. While sharing files was possible in the 1999-2005 era (especially with PDAs), most phones were lacking enough flash storage to store anything worthwhile.

While I don't want to say file sharing wasn't a killer app, it does seem to have been limited to just schools during a certain time period.

A time period that I missed out on by a few years. At high school, we did all our file sharing by swapping burned CDs. Then we switched to dragging around laptops and USB hard drives at university (and using the private emule network on the university wired ethernet).
by Retric | 2025-05-04 11:19:39+00:00
Ok, yep that’s 100% BS.

Burning food can produce more useful work in a heat engine than you get from humans doing labor so I’m baffled by what about this comparison seems to make sense to you.

Ignoring that you’re still off by more than an order of magnitude. 100% of the energy content of oil can’t even be turned directly into work without losses. You get about 10% of its nominal energy content as useful work, less if you’re including energy costs of production, refining, and transport.

Even if look at an oil well fire it’s incomplete combustion and not useful work.
by admingirl | 2025-05-04 11:20:42+00:00
You’re totally right, systems at scale aren’t solo efforts. I think my goal is to be the kind of engineer who can prototype ambitious ideas from scratch, understand all the layers, and be dangerous across the stack. Also really appreciate the reminder about soft skills. I'm starting to realize that being able to talk to people and translate messy needs into clean systems might be more rare than knowing five frameworks.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-04 11:21:14+00:00
I would have said lazy rather than idle if that what I meant.

For most people lazy implies that there are things you things you really ought to get done but you're choosing to avoid doing it to the point where its a problem that whatever the thing is still isn't taken care of.

Idle just means you don't feel like you have anything that needs to be done, you aren't avoiding things to the point that it causes a problem.

Of course our economic system prefers people to be "fully utilized" rather than idle, but who cares? I don't owe an economic system anything, we could change the system whenever we want, and ultimately an economy is only useful to analyze the comparative output that already happened - it has nothing to do with the present or future.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-04 11:24:31+00:00
You’re either misremembering things or talking about an era after Bluetooth had already taken off.

In the days before Bluetooth, transferring MP3s over IR took multiple minutes, even on high end (for the time) handsets.

And the fact that you needed to keep line of sight during the whole process meant your phone couldn’t be used that whole time. Which was a real pain in the arse if you got a text message or phone call while trying to transfer a file.

IR was really more designed for swapping contacts. In fact that’s exactly how BlackBerry (or was it Palm?) marketed IR on their device: a convenient way to swap contact details. But you’re talking about a few KB vs several MBs for an MP3.

The tech has definitely moved on since. But then so has Bluetooth, WiFi and GSM et al too.
by the_gipsy | 2025-05-04 11:26:22+00:00
In same boat here. I just do not understand the *EFI stuff anymore, and I've tried.

I somehow got refind to work, after disabling some vaguely named "secure boot" option in the BIOS. It shows my several linux options, and the only one that works is "rescue", that boots what is apparently a systemd bootloader with Nix generations. When I select Windows, I get some windows boot menu/loader instead of directly booting Windows.

I have no clue how it all works - there is some partition with some files, but I also must run some command to "apply" changes - I think. It's horrible.
by fragmede | 2025-05-04 11:28:12+00:00
Let us "delve" into this topic. The problem is it's all just words, and school children have figured out they can just ask ChatGPT to use the diction expected of a 13 year old child, and have it rewrite their essay without any of the old tells, like the word "delve", leaving us all none the wiser. Meanwhile, the difference between community theater and a movie, or live music vs recorded is obvious to even the most casual observer. Thus, this time it's different because other than a few particular word choices, and a bit of structure, we're left guessing just how much ChatGPT was used. Was it zero? Was it used as a more advanced Google Search? did it write the whole thing? Was there any editing of ChatGPT's output?

What do you do when we can no longer tell the difference?
by _heimdall | 2025-05-04 11:28:20+00:00
At least in US agriculture, when they speak of productivity they generally refer to pounds per acre for crops. For livestock it's a bit less clear, they sometimes refer to pounds of feed to final live weight. You generally have to schedule a slaughter day months out and you estimate the final weight, you don't get paid as well if you are too far off the weight in either direction. Its less common generally, but in the cattle industry I've heard the accuracy of hitting that targets talked about as productivity.

I agree with you on the double speak though, really I think its just a lack of the public really understanding the meaning given to "productive" in the industry though. The industry doesn't hide what it means by the word, most just don't care about any version of productive that measures things like nutrient value, sustainability, soil health, animal welfare, etc.
by chgs | 2025-05-04 11:28:38+00:00
Jobs in different cities in the U.K.? Jobs in London pay far more than ones in Manchester or Birmingham, let alone the majority of the country.

That’s the point - the junior jobs tend to be in the major cities especially London. If you are from say the kings lynn suburbs, or barnstaple, or thirsk, it’s unlikely you’ll get a job with high career growth without spending a decade with all you income in rent and commute as you won’t be living with parents and saving £1200 a month (in the London case)

Most people are looking to settle down in one place by their 30s when they have kids. Of course that doesn’t happen as much now in the western world, mainly due to housing costs rather than active choice, and sure some are happy to be global nomads, never put down roots, never have a family. Renting can make sense for them.

Doesn’t change the fact that most people have at least one child, and benefit from having a steady home they own near their parents. This skews massively in favour of those in London and commuting distance as that’s where the highest paid jobs are.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-04 11:29:01+00:00
Call me extremely dubious. Even if we grant the plausibility of the universe being a simulation, adding gravity (to the rest of our current physical laws) enormously increases the computational workload - due to vastly more, and more complex, interactions between particles. Vs. if memory is tight - just dial down the resolution a touch on all the hydrogen gas. Or simulate a smaller universe. Unless you're a big fan of cosmology, there is no sign of our universe doing anything particularly interesting at a "the whole universe" scale.
by neilv | 2025-05-04 11:29:40+00:00
> and stuff won't go missing (although I have no reason to think this is specifically a concern [..].

I once hired a moving company that was a bit scammy. I lost a nice component stereo system that they secretly took.

I later learned that other people had trouble with that same company "forgetting things on the truck". It seemed to be one of their tactics to enforce scam pricing while they had you over a barrel. If you still didn't buckle on the spot, they'd secretly take away obvious valuables, and hold them hostage until they could extract more money.

(They were based in Providence, RI, shortly before "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plunder_Dome", when the FBI cleaned up some local government institutionalized corruption. Occasionally, talking with someone who'd also lived there in that period, I'll hear an anecdote about crossing paths with mob-lite connected people. My favorite was someone whose apartment was burglarized, and their nice landlord told them he'd take care of it, and that they should temporarily be away from the apartment at a specific time; they come back after, and their belongings had been returned. I say mob-lite, because it's not tommy-guns and broken kneecaps, but there did seem to be an alternative system of rules by which some played, distinct from the law, and there was just a faint background awareness of that. Other than that, Providence was a nice place, and presumably is even nicer after the FBI cleaned up some corruption.)
by admingirl | 2025-05-04 11:30:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a college student, and this is an MVP I built to help people identify patterns of emotional manipulation—things like gaslighting, guilt-tripping, boundary erosion, etc.

It’s very much a prototype, not a finished product. I know it doesn’t capture the full complexity of these behaviors yet, but I wanted to ship early and learn fast. The idea is to treat emotional pattern recognition more like debugging—accessible, structured, and useful.

Would love feedback on the concept, the UX, or even whether something like this should exist in the first place.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-04 11:30:36+00:00
Its not just a problem needing a signature. We have the policies we have today because a lot of people want them, or at least agree with the general direction.

If the right person signs a change that magically fixes a labor shortage in a rural area we're right back to where we were, and much of the public would be up in arms about it.

(This doesn't actually reflect my opinion on immigration laws to be clear, just my view on where we are today in the US)
by oreilles | 2025-05-04 11:34:13+00:00
Chiming in to promote a similar project, a geospatial extension for Polars [1] I'm working on. It's not stable yet (abeit pretty close to), but is already pretty feature complete (it uses GEOS and PROJ as a backend, so has parity with GeoPandas).

[1] https://github.com/oreilles/polars-st/
by raffael_de | 2025-05-04 11:34:54+00:00
If there is a programmed connection to the physics for the in-game commentary then it should be here: https://github.com/pncnmnp/xpong/blob/main/main.py#L212

https://github.com/pncnmnp/xpong/blob/main/main.py#L289:

"- **Shot Angles:** Derive each shot's angle from the (vx, vy) vector:\n" " • Steep angles (>45°) become daring corner lobs or sharp cross-courts.\n" " • Moderate angles (15°-45°) look like graceful arcs that test court coverage.\n" " • Shallow angles (<15°) play out as direct, flat drives down the line.\n"

Didn't find where the balls motion is communicated to the LLM.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-04 11:35:17+00:00
Commentator 1 (Greg “The Swatch Whisperer”): Welcome back, folks, to what can only be described as the pinnacle of human achievement: watching Disney Princess™ Pink paint dry. I haven’t been this excited since the 2002 Home Depot Black Friday Sale when I almost got my hands on a discontinued eggshell Martha Stewart Lavender.

Commentator 2 (Marsha “Two Coats” Hernandez): Greg, I still remember the way you wept in aisle 7. But let’s talk about today’s masterpiece—Disney Princess Pink, the shade officially inspired by the collective inner glow of Aurora, Cinderella, and, dare I say, Ariel's clam-bikini energy.

Greg: Absolutely, Marsha. And look at that glorious semi-damp sheen—like a freshly glazed donut at sunrise. It’s got a dreamy undertone of "your niece’s birthday party at 10 a.m. with a bouncy castle and too much Capri Sun."

Marsha: Oh-ho, what’s this? Is that… yes, I think the lower left quadrant is beginning to matte. Ladies and gentlemen, we may be witnessing the first signs of Stage 3: The Settling of the Pigment.

Greg (choked up): My god… I haven’t seen a transition like this since Elsa’s Let It Go phase. Remember that? How she emotionally dried her entire personality over a solo in under three minutes? Iconic.

Marsha: Speaking of queens, this paint owes everything to Belle’s bedroom in the lost “Live Laugh Library” deleted scene. That’s the shade they were going to use until someone spilled tea on the concept art. Literally. It was Chip. That kid is a menace.

Greg: I’m sorry but—hold on—this is huge. That patch near the window just tightened. We are witnessing micro-shrinkage. It’s subtle, it’s refined, it’s got the attitude of Mulan at a dim sum buffet. She came hungry, and this paint came to DRY.

Marsha: Greg, if this drying pace keeps up, we’re on track for a Suburban First-Timer Finish Time. I haven’t seen Disney Pink behave like this since the infamous 2017 "Frozen Themed Daycare Hallway Incident." They had to repaint in Tiana Teal—the shame.

Greg: And oh! There it is! That final middle patch—she’s going matte, folks. This wall is becoming a canvas of completion, a poetic stillness in a chaotic world. I feel like I just watched Cinderella get her slipper and a Roth IRA.

Marsha (tearfully): This… is why I do this job. For moments like this. For the shimmerless silence. For the slow, glorious commitment to finality.

Greg: And so we leave you, dear viewers, staring into a flat, fully-dry future. The room has changed… and so have we.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-04 11:35:18+00:00
Joules are just a measure of work, and this all started by an attempt to say how productive we are because we need fewer farmers today. My argument is that we only need fewer farmers because we found a cheap source of energy and have been using that to replace farmers.

When looking at joules its an attempt to compare something like a human cutting a field with a scythe and a tractor cutting it with an implement. The tractor is way more efficient at cutting it when considering only the human hours of labor cutting the field. But of course it is, a single barrel of oil has way more energy potential and even a small tractor will be run with fuel milage tracked by gallons per hour.
by palata | 2025-05-04 11:35:57+00:00
Totally. Many accessories nowadays require bluetooth/wifi where actually they could be connected with a cable: they don't move and they need to be charged.

Connecting over a cable is trivial: you detect the connection and that's it, and the user physically sees the connection between the devices.

Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very frustrating when it doesn't work. Pairing is annoying so devices try to automatically reconnect, but then if you pair with multiple devices, it brings frustration because it never automatically connects to what the user wants.

Whenever cables are a possible solution, they are superior.
by ctxc | 2025-05-04 11:36:59+00:00
Had to move away from Gemini because the SDK just didn't work.

Regardless of if I passed a role or not, the function would say something to the effect of "invalid role, accepted are user and model".

Tried switching to openAI compatible SDK, it threw errors for tool call calls and I just gave up.

Could you confirm if it was a known bug that was fixed?
by homebrewer | 2025-05-04 11:37:14+00:00
I sometimes have to write integrations with external data providers (most of them being government agencies), and they love graphql, where (IMHO) it makes a lot of sense. They provide data about some entity¹ split into X fields, your application needs maybe 20% of them, and thanks to graphql you don't have to request anything but those 20%. When loading hundreds of millions of records, it saves you from loading, parsing, and then throwing away gigabytes of unnecessary JSON.

1: one example being tax records with all associated information about tax collecting agencies and taxpayers — it's a lot of data
by Findecanor | 2025-05-04 11:40:52+00:00
Precisely. That is how I would have designed a wireless mouse protocol: using wrapping counters and sending the counter values. The HID protocol does not support an input value that is Absolute/Wrap (although it could be extended to do so, and I think that it should)

I'd think it would also be possible to get around congestion problems by using tricks such as multiple channels and/or interference detection on top of BLE. But only Logitech knows how Bolt actually works.
by chan27-2 | 2025-05-04 11:41:05+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been frustrated with the UX of the official TypeScript docs, really great content, but it could be more beginner-friendly and easier to navigate. So, I built typescriptdocs.com, a port of the official docs with a fresh, maintainable stack and a polished UI.

Huge respect to the TypeScript team for their incredible work, this is my attempt to complement their efforts. The site is currently a faithful port but designed for easier updates and better readability. My goal is to make it the goto resource for TypeScript devs, from newbies to pros, with community-driven features like tutorials and advanced guides.

It’s open-source, and I’d love your feedback and contributions! Check out the https://github.com/chan27-2/typescriptdocs to report issues, suggest features, or add content. What do you think—how can we make TypeScript docs even better?

Sai Chandan Kadarla
by prashnts | 2025-05-04 11:41:10+00:00
Really cool!

A quick enhancement you can add, which will help mobile users, is adding appropriate touch specifiers to the element. Currently I am unable to drag the pen to draw -- the whole page moves. By fixing that, I should also be able to use my Apple Pencil.

Specifically, this page describes it better: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/touch-actio...
by namaria | 2025-05-04 11:42:18+00:00
No, we know planetary ecosystems can use energy gradients to sustain intelligent lifeforms. Intelligence is not a feature of the human brain, it's a feature of Earth. Without the ecosystem there are no cells, no organisms, no specialization, no neurons, no mammals. It isn't the human brain that achieved intelligence, it's the entire system capable of producing, sustaining and selecting brains.
by jessekv | 2025-05-04 11:43:47+00:00
I tried out duckdb-spatial for a hobby project and my takeaway is the main thing it offers over geopandas is performance in batch processing.

If I can reduce my spatial analysis to SQL and optimize that SQL a little bit, duckdb will happily saturate my CPUs and memory to process things fast in a way that a Python script struggles to do.

Yes, the static linking is nice. It helps with the problem of reproducible environments in Python. But that's not a game changer IMO.
by immibis | 2025-05-04 11:43:53+00:00
I keep getting spam to info@immibis.com (which I used for a dodgy signup wondering if spammers would react differently to a vaguely official looking address) claiming to try to sell me electric bicycles. I don't really understand why someone would ever want to buy nore than one or two electric bicycles or why they'd buy them from a spammer. The message is written in a way that could look like it was merely misdirected. This sounds like a message used to test mail servers etc as mentioned in the article.

--

Entirely separate comment: this type of broadcast channel is used in the newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages, though in there, the presence of a message is obvious.
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-04 11:45:19+00:00
I think for the upvoter, sending an upvote can trigger that same feel-good, "I agree to this!" dopamine hit as an emoji reaction would.

For the upvoted, seing their magical internet points go up can also feel the same as the notification that they received your heart emoji.

BUT - for the network, having scores be hidden and not displaying a loot of emoji reactions on each post makes a huge difference - it changes the incentives.

You don't get socially rewarded for engagement, because the loot is invisible in the thread (aside from being shown higher on the page). This disincentivizes Reddit-style snark, Twitter-style dunks, etc.

This probably disproportionally tends to attract the kind of people who like discreet positive reinforcement for smart well thought-out comments.
by SoMomentary | 2025-05-04 11:46:53+00:00
Huh, today I learned my wife is not a woman. Who knew?

But for real, my wife is probably the most minimalist person I know. She lived out of a suitcase for years while traveling, and now between us, I'm the one with electronic knick-knacks while her tastes can only be described as spare.

Maybe instead of making sweeping generalizations about what "women" want, we could acknowledge that people of all genders have different preferences about possessions? Some people feel sentimental about objects, others prioritize mobility, and many fall somewhere in between.

Your moving cost estimate is helpful, but the gender stereotyping doesn't add anything to your point about the economics of moving versus replacing possessions.
by progbits | 2025-05-04 11:48:12+00:00
Sounds fascinating, can you share what it was for?

Regarding your parent message, I agree, but the EMI stuff will depend on lots of other factors and so you will have to do your own modeling / measurements. While the mechanical bouncing should be pretty uniform so this is a nice data source for picking a well behaved switch and designing debouncing network.

Of course I'm just realizing this is N=1 for the switch so hard to say what manufacturing tolerances each one has.
by animal531 | 2025-05-04 11:49:48+00:00
I'm currently struggling with my eyes. Over time my near vision started degrading as I'm approaching 50, then I hit that wall where it suddenly became a lot worse and I got glasses for the first time.

But the problem is that it generates a ton of eye strain for some reason, so now I'm on eye drops probably every 30 to 45 minutes and if I don't take them my eyes become really sore and useless.

At least I'm working for myself so its less of a hassle, but taking constant breaks to rest the eyes isn't great for productivity.
by ksec | 2025-05-04 11:50:38+00:00
>Figma‑ or Gmail‑class apps.....

Figma is a definite yes. But Gmail is something we say from late 00s and somehow continue till now. I thought it has been proven we dont need SPA for Email Client. Hey is perfectly fine other than a little slow, mostly due to server response time and not Turbo / HTML / HTMX itself.

I still believe we have a long way to go and innovate on partial HTML swaps. We could have push this to the limit so that 98% of the web doesn't need SPA at all.

Really hopes Rails has more in store this year.
by gforce_de | 2025-05-04 11:51:51+00:00
The minified version needs ~51 kilobytes (16 compressed):

$ curl --location --silent "https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@2.0.4" | wc -c 50917 $ curl --location --silent "https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@2.0.4" | gzip --best --stdout | wc -c 16314
by baq | 2025-05-04 11:52:33+00:00
Because the point isn't that the DB should figure everything out, as it is a baseless claim that it's a 'poor optimization decision'. The point is to allow you to meet your requirements within your constraints. You're trading some of your constraints for different ones (here - you don't want to implement your own database, so you're using one that's already built with its own requirements and constraints). A database is a database, not a holy grail.

I haven't used MSSQL for some time now, but I'm sure there are tools which do exactly what you say you want, i.e. continuously monitor the DBMS and suggest actions or even act itself. This is usually done by a team of DBAs, though.