MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elihu | 2025-05-08 10:32:38+00:00
My current phone is a cheap Samsung. It's awful. The usb-C connector has never worked for data and only barely works for power (the plug sits at a funny angle and doesn't charge unless it's "just right"). There doesn't seem to be any debris in the connector and I've tried a couple different cables, so my best guess is just the connector came from the factory misshapen.

Phone reception is terrible where I live, but I'm not sure if that's the fault of my phone or the carrier.
by lordnacho | 2025-05-08 10:32:44+00:00
Yes, absolutely. The one thing I have quipped about with my kid's school is this: Everyone is scared to death of their kid not being able to get the job that they are hating.

I live in a bit of a bubble where pretty much every kid's parents are professionals. Some of these people are off to London before the kids are in school, and arrive back home after they are asleep.

People spend a lot of money on top of private school to get a tutor in order to get into the grammar schools. This is a pure loss for society: the wrong kids get in, since not everyone can afford to learn this particular test. And money is spent on reducing the kids' free time for exploration.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-08 10:33:17+00:00
Right. I should have done such a thing years ago. And, there are free/elastically scaled commercial RDBMS that are cheap. Oracle just give them away these days in the cloud. Even if you self-host, you can run small databases (up to iirc 12GB of data) for free, which is plenty for many internal apps.

The other thing that is super-unintuitive is the cost of cloud managed DBs. People like open source DBs because they see them as cheap and lacking lockin. I specced out what it costs to host a basic plain vanilla Postgres on AWS vs an Oracle DB on OCI at some point, and the latter was cheaper despite having far more features. Mostly because the Postgres didn't scale elastically and the Oracle DB did, plus AWS is just expensive. Well that was a shock. I'd always assumed a commercial RDBMS was a sort of expensive luxury, but once you decide you don't want to self-admin the DB the cost differences become irrelevant.

And then there's the lockin angle. Postgres doesn't do trademark enforcement so there's a lot of databases being advertised by cloud vendors as Postgres but are actually proprietary forks. The Jepsen test the other day was a wakeup call where an AWS "postgres" database didn't offer correct transactional isolation because of bugs in the forked code. If you're using cloud offerings you can end up depending on proprietary features or performance/scaling without realizing it.

So yeah. It's just all way more complex than I used to appreciate. FoundationDB is still a very nice piece of tech, and makes sense for the very specific iCloud business Apple use it for, but I'm not sure I'd try to use it if I was being paid to solve a problem fast.
by metalman | 2025-05-08 10:36:25+00:00
heat stress mitigation for trees, could actualy be exploited for our, and there benifit. treat a tree as a bunch of fancy pumps, which it is, and choose trees that have best shape and canopy for cover, that are also water hogs, as they do pump a lot of water from the ground to stay cool, so give them extra via burried waterers that drip feed them water to there roots, and they will cool the surrounding area a bit more, set enough of them up, and paint all availible roofs with the new super reflective paints, and it might be possible to create niehborhood islands of cool
by jajko | 2025-05-08 10:37:41+00:00
They simply don't care for the second part. Some even consider it a safety feature (to be known well in advance) and modify exhausts to be louder accordingly.

The amount of time me or our kids were woken up by some ferrari, maserati, chopper et al flooring it on purpose on nearby intersection past midnight has been many, punishment 0 nothing. After moving to rural countryside its one of many aspects I am certainly not missing from previous life and would have hard time coming back to lower quality of life in cities.
by lproven | 2025-05-08 10:38:10+00:00
> gaming coders learn more than standard coders do

See the _Taos_ operating system. Based around something that conventional programming knowledge said was impossible. Created by games developers because they could.

https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt...

TL;DR

All Taos code (except for some core device drivers for booting) is compiled for a nonexistent "Virtual Processor" (VP) and the VP bytecode is compiled to native code on the fly as it's loaded into RAM; the compiler is so efficient that the time delay of reading from hard disk is enough to generate native binaries with no significant delay.

Result: not only is the entire OS above the bootloader not just portable but will execute unmodified on any supported CPU from x86 to Arm to MIPS to PowerPC, but it was possible to have heterogenous SMP.

The Acorn RISC PC was an Arm desktop with an x86 second processor in a slot. Taos could execute on both at once.

Taos evolved into Intent and Elate, and nearly became the next-gen Amiga OS, before Tao Group collapsed. Some of the team used to hang out on HN.

The closest thing in the Unix world is Inferno, which is effectively UNIX 3.0 and is almost unknown today. Inferno embeds a bytecode runtime in the kernel, shared by the whole OS, and rewrites what was effectively Plan 9 2.0 in its own new descendant of C. So all binaries above the bootloader and kernel are cross-platform binaries that can execute directly on any CPU.
by _rpxpx | 2025-05-08 10:38:12+00:00
Contains a couple of pop narrative cliches that always turn out to be gaudy exaggerations for journalistic effect: "he came from art, he is driven by beauty! he stunned the mathematical world!", it's bollocks really, and he's no doubt quite embarrassed by this article. He once thought about being a poet, but actually didn't like the work. His parents had a mathematical academic background and he picked that up as an undergraduate. He exhibits fairly typical neurodivergent behaviour of people with ADHD and/or autism. I would like to see journalists start writing about actual poets, or sculptors etc, in this absurdly valourizing, mythologizing way.
by rezonant | 2025-05-08 10:39:15+00:00
The article, and Apple's messaging therein, contradicts your understanding of this feature.

> Because Critical Alerts are disruptive, they are meant to be used for a very restricted number of purposes. This include medical- and health-related notifications, home- and security-related notifications, and public safety notifications.

Only the last use case matches what you describe. And as the article says, Apple's own Health app uses this feature, along with, apparently, simple TODO apps. Apple's health app makes sense, since Apple specifically calls out medical apps. Is a medicine reminder app a medical app? I would say so.

Apple's developer documentation states:

> Critical alerts ignore the mute switch and Do Not Disturb; the system plays a critical alert’s sound regardless of the device’s mute or Do Not Disturb settings. You can specify a custom sound and volume. > > Critical alerts require a special entitlement issued by Apple.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-08 10:40:30+00:00
The Anglophone world and especially the US has a special place in our hearts for "teens". Even though this man is legally an adult, yes, he is still a "teen" for another 1-2 years and that is good marketing P.R. Why pass up such a chance to tout his youth?

I say "Anglophone world" because English is the only language that separates out our cardinal numbers from 13-19 because they end in "teen", and therefore it is somewhat a rite of passage for an English-speaking child to turn 13, and they enjoy special "teen" status until turning 20 years old. That's just how it is. Other cultures have other standards for youth and counting; we've got ours. An 18-year-old teen who develops something cool makes for a better headline than an "adult man" who does the same thing, doesn't it?
by Yizahi | 2025-05-08 10:41:14+00:00
Decentralization benefit society. Trust-less systems - don't. Trust-less systems lead to libertarianism and anarcho capitalism, both are just fancy words for feudalism. We all know how that works, there are even modern day re-enactment which all end up massive fraud and crime. I prefer semi-trusted democracy to the feudalism any time.
by snickerbockers | 2025-05-08 10:44:42+00:00
> games built with Unity depend on LGPL code by default (hello glibc!)

So I'm being needlessly pedantic here and this doesn't necessarily go against the OP's point, but since I find this sort of stuff interesting I'd like to point out that glibc is actually GPL not LGPL. There is however an alternate license that applies to programs which link against glibc, with the intention being that the GPL prevents you from distributing glibc as part of a non-Free compiler. I'm not sure of how exactly this is expressed in the legalese but that was my understanding of it.
by noir_lord | 2025-05-08 10:46:07+00:00
EX44’s are Intel 13500’s so no, not ECC.

I have one, I use it for running an arma3 server, it’s been bulletproof for reliability though, hetzner have come a long way since the first time I used them years and years ago where it was a mess.

I’m almost at the point I’d use them for some thig that mattered (I.e. money was involved).
by GJim | 2025-05-08 10:46:54+00:00
> even though the lever that is the rear brake on the bike is the front brake on the motorcycle

Then your bicycles brakes have been put back on the wrong sides (is home maintenance by a previous owner to blame?).

The front brake should _always_ be on the right. Just like a motorbike.

EDIT: Correction. It appears US and UK bicycles have their brakes on opposite sides. How bizarre!
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-08 10:48:42+00:00
When I was a child, our suburban home was at the mouth of a dead-end but very straight street. It was 100% residential, 25mph, single lane each way, but many motorists abused it. We could often tell when someone was lost, looking for the freeway, looking for a through lane that would put them somewhere else.

When there was a high-speed crash into the barrier at the end, the car would often plummet into a ravine into the valley below. My mother tended to call this "taking the shortcut to Benihana" as that was the restaurant to be found at the bottom of the ravine (not an actual shortcut, but just a macabre sense of humor.)

Now we had some neighbors with a very picturesque home a few blocks down. They were from Switzerland, and Dad owned a Volkswagen repair shop a few blocks in the other direction. Since they worked frequently on German-engineered Volkswagens, they also worked on Porsches. And so it worked out that Dad would often bring home a Porsche to work on or to play with, or something in-between. Dad had 2 or 3 sons who all loved cars, and so by the time they were driving age, there were quite a few Porsches in circulation there.

And we always knew it, because those 911s are not quiet. And the sons would not be quiet either as they gunned their engines to show off their nice Porsches, in various states of souped-up or in-progress repair. It became a more or less nonstop parade of motors for a few years.

My parents never miss an opportunity to complain, and so there is plenty of traffic still to give them a chance. There is at least one resident down the way with an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, so Mom and Dad always cluck and chide and complain as that vehicle takes its turn on the street.
by lproven | 2025-05-08 10:49:20+00:00
Could anyone explain for a non-gamer what this is?

I gather it's a game, it's graphically simple but in fact is really hard, and it was a commercial success early on (due to a Humble Bundle?) -- but I haven't really played games since the ZX Spectrum was new. Never heard of it, or the developer, and I have no idea what people are/were excited about.

(For other ZX Spectrum era folks: it sounds like a harder "Manic Miner" and I hated that.)
by mrweasel | 2025-05-08 10:49:45+00:00
They used freely available NASA data to map Russian and Ukrainian electronic warfare systems. The jammers used leak into the 1.4 GHz spectrum, which is suppose to be silent, and does so which sufficient power that you can be pretty sure it's man made.

So if you're looking for an intersting target, you could do worse than those lit up areas.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-08 10:49:49+00:00
I don’t know if a pill reminder app rises to the level of importance where a critical alert is needed.

There are only five apps on my phone, out of over a hundred, that use critical alerts.

PulsePoint, if someone near me is having a heart attack

Messages, if one of my kids is in trouble

Health, if I am having a heart attack

Home, if my smoke alarm is going off

ActiveAlert, my fire department’s dispatch notification app, which will tell me where to drive the ambulance if someone is having a heart attack

If I’m in a darkened theater and someone nearby needs cpr, my house is on fire, or one of my kids is in trouble I want the phone to make a sound.

I want someone else’s phone to make a sound if they get those notifications, too.

If it’s time to take their atorvastatin I don’t give a shit their phone better stay shut the hell up.

If someone’s calendar app slipped through the cracks and got permission to issue critical alerts, THAT is the problem, not the fact that a pill reminder app can’t.
by HelloImSteven | 2025-05-08 10:50:37+00:00
Apple's Critical Alerts aren't a broadcast system though. It's just an API to bypass the mute switch and DnD, but users have to go into settings to enable it on a per-app basis. The alert is otherwise just a normal notification.

It does tend to be used for public safety notifications, but it's strictly opt-in. There are also several apps using it for smart home security alerts, health reminders, etc. already.
by filleokus | 2025-05-08 10:52:05+00:00
I haven't seen any hint that the Critical Alerts entitlement would use any special infra compared to regular push notifications.

It's just metadata in the notification body indicating to the device to ignore silent mode etc.

It's e.g used by Pagerduty [0]. It's just a way to override notification settings.

The software for the systems you mention have this entitlement (or some equivalent), but are otherwise completely unrelated to this.

[0]: https://support.pagerduty.com/main/docs/mobile-app-settings#...
by frabcus | 2025-05-08 10:52:15+00:00
They mention Google Cloud Marketplace (not Google Cloud Platform), this seems to be their listing there:

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/mistral...

Which says:

"Managed Services are fully hosted, managed and supported by the service providers. Although you register with the service provider to use the service, Google handles all billing."

My assumption is that they're using Google Marketplace for discovery and billing, and they offer a hosted option or an on-prem option.

But agreed, it isn't clear!
by cydmax | 2025-05-08 10:52:18+00:00
Buy a used Braun A1/A2 amp (100-200$). There are maintenance handbooks online for both. Replace the two main condensators, which cost about 10-20$ each. Buy a pair of Canton GLE 200 or their presuccessors (100-350$). They didn’t change much in the last 20 years. Still very good, neutral and enough bass for a small living room. Hook your Technics 1200 MK2/5 (1000$) with an all round needle (100$) to the Phono-In Cinch connectors. Select your favorite vinyl from your collection, put it on the plate of the 1200. Move the arm on the first track of the vinyl. Enjoy completely analog music without distractions. The A1 boots in under 100ms, so does the Technics 1200. Total costs 1670$. Beats any Sonos etc. setup in sound quality and convenience.

Disclaimer: I have booth systems in parallel and I feel disgusted and disappointed every time I have to use the Sonos system now.
by red_admiral | 2025-05-08 10:52:41+00:00
I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange".

You could even, if it didn't come by default already, have the active title bar in a different color.

Maybe 99% of people didn't use this. Maybe they hired an authoritarian at GNOME to make the adwaita "one theme to rule them all". But it used to feel like I the style choices for my own computer's gui belonged more to me as a user.

Often, that meant picking a theme that I liked, from the very active theme-design community (the garden lists more than 3000 themes, although I'm not a mac person) and then just tweaking a color here or there.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-08 10:53:18+00:00
I think it's not only that, but if you spend some time looking, you can often get really good deals on used gear. New gear is really expensive for what is at best a very marginal gain and all that translates into even fewer sales still. The target market isn't only people who want great sound, it's people who want great sound, have ample disposable income and live somewhere where they can actually use the gear to enjoy it.
by BlobberSnobber | 2025-05-08 10:54:35+00:00
Apple for some reason hasn’t implemented that feature, and it boggles the mind. Say I’m playing music on my iPhone and I try playing a track on my mac, it doesn’t ask me on which device to play, hell, it doesn’t even stop playing on my iPhone to start on my mac, it just puts an ugly warning in the middle of the screen saying something like “stop playing on your iPhone to listen to the song on this device”.

It’s actually insane to me.
by ghaff | 2025-05-08 10:56:13+00:00
Often smallish but a big cut above US convenience stores such as M&S/Sainsbury in the UK are pretty common in Europe generally. I still wouldn't be inclined to use them for lunch sandwiches in general but they have better than the slop you'll get at a US 7/11. I can't say I've really observed the dining area in general outside of some of the big food halls. (There are food markets with such but those exist in some big US cities as well.)
by Etheryte | 2025-05-08 10:56:37+00:00
I think both the message and the code are wrong in this case. 429 too many requests indicates that you specifically as a client have spent too many requests, not that the site is being spammed to hell. If the site can't handle the traffic, a good option is 503 service unavailable, as that makes it clear that the problem lies on the server side, not the client.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-05-08 10:56:39+00:00
To expand a little bit, RF is subject to free space path loss - signal strength decreases proportional to the square of the frequency and the square of the distance. The higher the frequency, the less far you go. Of course, weaker signals are harder to distinguish from noise so there’s only so weak your signal can go. If you want to control drones, lower frequencies are better.

There’s a reason that microwaves (the cooking instrument, named after the rough band of RF frequencies it uses) interfere with WiFi when improperly shielded: they run at approximately 2.4GHz. That’s a part of the band that’s free to use without licensing (ISM band, runs at 900MHz, 2.4GHz, 5Ghz, and so on). That’s because microwave manufacturers don’t want to license spectrum, and it’s the part of the ISM band closest to the ideal absorption frequency of water. The point of microwaves is to push energy into water molecules and make them move around faster, aka heat them. Water molecules do that well at 2.4GHz. This also means that water blocks RF at that frequency very well, because it absorbs it. Trying to shoot 2.4GHz WiFi through trees sucks because it gets blocked by the leaves.

So you want to control drones. You can’t be around 2.4GHz because rain would screw you up. You can’t go above that so you can get enough distance. You can’t go as low as 900MHz or other stuff on the ISM band might interfere with you.

Not that much left, given that 1.7GHz is a popular cell phone frequency, and so on - you can look at publicly available frequency charts to see what’s assigned for what where.

This glosses over a lot and is heavily simplified.
by Martinussen | 2025-05-08 10:57:32+00:00
If I miss the dosing window by more than an hour or so it'll either ruin my sleep or ruin my day after lunch, I have responsibilities and can easily lose track of time for an hour or two while working or in meetings, so the iOS medication reminders are very useful to me personally, at least.

edit: though if I remember or see the initial reminder and log it, it obviously won't go off with sound. If it pings, I've basically always already forgotten.
by isaachinman | 2025-05-08 10:58:25+00:00
Yes, we've dealt with those issues, and that was actually one of the hardest problems to solve. Most email providers use mailboxes, while Gmail uses labels to "emulate" mailboxes (sort of).

We have spent quite a lot of time and thought creating a label abstraction that makes _all_ email accounts play together nicely. There is currently no other product like this on the market.
by bArray | 2025-05-08 11:00:06+00:00
I think the main point is being missed here:

> Apple’s own Health app uses Critical Alerts for its medication reminders, so I assumed my use case would qualify. I submitted a request for access to the API, but it was rejected.

I think what is being developed is a competitor to a space that Apple are in and want to be more involved in, and that is why you will not get permission to use the necessary API.
by robdefeo | 2025-05-08 11:01:04+00:00
(Disclosure: I’m the CTO of Vidos, a company building such an identity layer.)

I believe in a version of the trust triangle. Where issuer, holder, and verifier remain clearly separated. Meaning no single entity, has full control over your data.

E.g. a government issues an ID credential to your wallet app, and you can use it to prove your age without any intermediary getting any extra data. The site gets a cryptographic proof “user is 18+” and nothing more. I'm pleased when I read standards like ISO 18013-5 for mobile IDs that support selective disclosure by design. You share just a yes/no or an attribute, not your whole ID document.

Crucially, this addresses the “Google as a single point of failure” fear. You just need credentials from issuers you trust (your government, your bank, university, etc.) stored in a wallet of your choice. The verifier (website/app) will accept a proof from any wallet/issuer that meets their criteria. We’ve built our system to be agnostic about credential sources for exactly this reason. It’s a universal verification layer.

If anything I hope we can agree, we must continuously surfacing and discussing these risks early rather that waiting until it's too late.
by easygenes | 2025-05-08 11:01:38+00:00
Mini batch and streaming GD make the benefits obvious and trivial. Closed form OLS is unbeatable so long as samples * params^2 is comfortably sitting in memory. You often lose that as soon as your p approaches 10^5, which is common these days. Soon as you need distributed, streaming, or your data is too tall and or too wide then first order methods are the point of call.
by happymellon | 2025-05-08 11:02:08+00:00
> But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven.

I can't disagree more.

Consumers haven't requested this, and up until this ability was taken away people did theme their XP, etc.

There weren't many options without hacking but changing the XP blue bar to silver or green regularly happened. People are just taught to accept that this is how it is now though.
by juliangmp | 2025-05-08 11:03:13+00:00
Id like to see this kind of brake light as the default for any vehicle, not just motorbikes.

As for the noise, I get it. And I think the industry and the riders are to blame, motorbikes have been getting outrageously loud. Especially the fact that some newer bikes even come with exhaust valves that open at like 55-60 km/h is insane to me.

While I enjoy the hobby I cometely understand why Südtirol did what it did and I won't be surprised to see strict limits like these pop up elsewhere too.