MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway422432 | 2025-06-04 00:34:47+00:00
EOS (Aust) have a 50-100kW system, 4 km range.

https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/

What they are good at is target tracking, having started out in satellite communication.

Their tracking system paired with a 30mm Bushmaster cannon and proximity ammo is another solution, and there are apparently 160 of them heading for Ukraine to be mounted on M113 and Kozak vehicles.

https://eos-aus.com/defence/counter-drone-systems/slinger/
by bell-cot | 2025-06-04 00:34:49+00:00
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/ (2007)

https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/67/2/351/6071463?l... (2020)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchimerism#Fetomaternal_mi...

IIR, substantial and sustained fetal cell presence in the mother is often a sign that things are going wrong.
by Izkata | 2025-06-04 00:34:58+00:00
By far the biggest two things screwing me up here are problems with the app itself: The single-quote opens up the browser's quick-search, leaving the app and screwing up the flow, and the automatic yellow text that moves at a constant speed is extremely distracting if it ever gets ahead of me because of how much more visible it is compared to where the cursor actually is. And it's almost guaranteed to happen on the ones that use single quotes because of the first problem.
by roenxi | 2025-06-04 00:35:01+00:00
> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover....

I don't think he's reached the end of his road to cynacism; maintaining the moral high of looking for a utopia requires not spending any time assessing the evidence presented by reality. If he has complaints about the tech industry, stocked full of utopianists, he's in for a rude shock in the rest of the world if he keeps thinking about work in moral terms. The economy is a material system that optimises material results. The best outcome is making people you like materially better off (which can be easily done in tech, FWIW), but there are always going to be side effects because the world is messy and competitive.

A fun challenge is to come up with a set of moral principles where most people aren't enabling evil. There is a reason that sociopaths tend to rise to the top, principled people don't get much support and are going to struggle with the actual impacts of what they do.
by tom_ | 2025-06-04 00:35:14+00:00
The return value refers to the same element that you'd reach by skipping over the elemnent(s) rather than deleting them. So if doing 1 elemnt at a time, you can ++it (and now it is the next element), or you can it=erase(it) (and now the current item is gone, and it is the next element).

(In the map/unordered_map/set/etc. case, you can get away with storing std::advance(it) and then erasing, but when forward-iterating vectors the iterator invalidation rules are quite different and the API is designed to cover this.)
by hackingonempty | 2025-06-04 00:35:38+00:00
This is a very good point, fast compilation times are a huge benefit. The slow compiler is a downside of languages like Rust, Scala, and Haskell. Especially if you have many millions of lines of code to compile like Google.

However, OCaml has a very fast compiler, comparable in speed to Go. So a more expressive type system is not necessarily leading to long compilation times.

Furthermore, Scala and Haskell incremental type checking is faster than full compilation and fast enough for interactive use. I would love to see some evidence that Golang devs are actually more productive than Scala or Haskell devs. So many variables probably influence dev productivity and controlling for them while doing a sufficiently powered experiment is very expensive.
by pier25 | 2025-06-04 00:36:13+00:00
> if interfacing with a user is very important you could also say that the UI is the actual heart of the program instead

If it's meant to be used by humans, then yes. The experience should be the north star.

That doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice everything in favor of this. Obviously you need someone with enough technical knowledge to understand how to balance all the priorities.

Edit:

And by experience I don't only mean the UI per se. Also the performance of the whole system etc.
by xracy | 2025-06-04 00:36:54+00:00
China has better trade relationships with more of the rest of the world than the US does, (especially thanks to recent policy changes by the US Gov't).

The only requirement to be the worlds reserve currency is that everyone has to keep it in reserve in order to trade later. One can imagine that if China has trade relationships with the rest of the world, they would begin to stockpile more of the Yuan to keep in reserve, and as a result, the need for the dollar would become lesser.

Other than that, pricing commodities would be the next thing that would need to change, and that's not that hard. I could see a world where we move to 3 different reserve currencies based on the biggest economic powers and then, if the current administration continues its stupid trade war, everyone stops needing to hold onto as many dollars.
by pandaman | 2025-06-04 00:37:21+00:00
Yes, I don't find the "energy to start moving" explanation very rational too but whatever is the reason cyclists want to blow stops and reds, I am just confused how somebody can believe that it makes cycling safer. Especially the one given, that bikes are more fragile than cars, it just does not follow. I would not run a red light in a car for the fear of a side collision and my chances to survive one in a car are so much greater than on a bike.
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 00:37:27+00:00
> I am glad Apple didn't do that and stayed native for nearly everything. This is a big selling point for me.

Right, but Apple also perfectly exemplifies the problem with that approach - their software is incredibly limited, and can only run on a ridiculously small number of computers. Even if the software is good, which ehhh, but even if it is - there are cons to that approach.

To expand, this also hurts the customer in a lot of direct and non-direct ways. You're forced to buy Apple hardware, and that hardware might not meet your capabilities. This further fuels anti-consumerist anti-repair behavior, because they know that their computers are the only ones you can use.

And, since they create their own market, they kind of have you in golden handcuffs. If their prices go up, which they do and already are high, you're along for the ride.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-04 00:38:07+00:00
> These threads are really about discussing the work

That’s what I was trying to do. I opened up the code, started reading, and realized it wasn’t really what I thought it was.

I’m not trying to “police” arbitrary things, I’m trying to explain what the project is.

There’s been a recent trend of “Show HN” projects taking credit for other people’s work, like the “KVSplit” Show HN from several weeks ago that claimed credit for some upstream features in another project by wrapping it up in a separate repo and writing some LLM-generated claims.
by indianmouse | 2025-06-04 00:38:37+00:00
Aah!

Just in time...

Though a bit late to the party!!

I'm on the recovery path of my dominant hand boxer's fracture... A month and a few weeks to go yet for the cast removal...

Surprisingly got used to type with two fingers and minimal movement though have to place the external keyboard at an awkward angle.

My 2 cents would be to try out a few existing possibilities before investing heavily on alternates. Sometimes all such just-for-the-time-extensions (or should I call it contraptions?) do not have a useful after life after the utilization or in-need-of period.

I have had many injuries / broken bones (or at least 7 more times! (And please don't judge me based on this. I'm either that clumsy or those were freak incidents...)) and none that were created / acquired to help me out during those restricted movement periods have stayed with me...

Anyways, the mileage may vary... My short advice... Try for sometime (if you could get somethings loaned or borrowed) for a short / extended-short periods and invest...

Tough times and best wishes and speedy recovery to get back on feet and to a healthy normal!

This too shall pass...
by UncleEntity | 2025-06-04 00:38:38+00:00
> Why wouldn't automobile companies build more if people were willing to buy them?

They would and I'm sure they produce just as many as they can reliably sell.

I always end up with a manual as they are cheaper (presumably) due to less demand. Hell, my current car they strait-up lied that it was an automatic on Carvana and when it showed up I was, like, whatever. Wasn't really worth the effort to go through whatever Kafkaesque dispute resolution system they crafted and I needed a car so now I have one of those elusive 5-speeds.
by nchmy | 2025-06-04 00:39:53+00:00
It's useful for people who don't want to make a bicycle-powered shredder and instead want to source local laser-cut specialized alloys and all sorts of electronics, so they can produce a few kg of shredded plastic per day, and then a few bowls. /s

The value of Precious Plastic has long-since been realized - it inspired some actually-practical people to start making cottage recycling industries in the developing world, which has helped provide some employment and divert some plastic from rivers.
by parentheses | 2025-06-04 00:40:11+00:00
The fundamental thing that try/catch and similar language structures give us is an error _boundary_. I feel that not having one is a weakness of the language. The nesting and syntax all serve the purpose of handling errors neatly. I think it works very well and Go has unsolved the problem.

I am not saying that the mechanism is perfect but it is more useful if we have it than not. IMO it's only weakness is that you never know if a new exception type is thrown by a nested function. This is a weakness for which we really don't have a solid solution - Java tried this with checked exceptions.

Go not using such a paradigm to me is bonkers. Practically every language has such a construct and how we use it best is pretty much convention these days.
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 00:40:38+00:00
> And as you can see, 99.9% of developers took Apple’s route

Um, well no they didn't, because most things are web applications. And most software actually targets Windows. And then most phone software that's big is cross platform.

Apples' model is cool, but it certainly has a lot of drawbacks, and in many ways they did not win. They, too, lost to the web.
by neilv | 2025-06-04 00:42:21+00:00
Thirded on Twiddler. I didn't use it myself, but I worked with some people who were very productive with it. One was even said to have written their dissertation laying down, with a Twiddler and a HUD.

Separate from that, when I've temporarily injured one hand/arm or the other, typing on a QWERTY keyboard wasn't that slow for me. Especially if I typed all-lowercase. Though my normal typing style has two hands moving around the keyboard a bit; I don't know whether traditional home-row typists would fine one-handed more difficult.

(Just be careful when Web searching about this topic at work, since it's bumping into an old euphemism joke on Reddit.)
by lapcat | 2025-06-04 00:42:48+00:00
> Right, but how do you filter students, if not by grades? With no grades, how do you know which ones are capable of a more rigorous program?

The concept here is mastery rather than grades. When a student has mastered a subject, they can move onto more rigorous subjects. If they haven't mastered a subject, then they need to continue studying that subject. When we socially promote students who receive a grade of D, C, or even B, I wonder, what is the student missing? Why are we giving up and moving on just because an arbitrary amount of time has passed? And if the student has failed to completely learn things at the current level, what's going to happen when the student moves on to higher, harder levels? That's a disaster waiting to happen, compounding ignorance over time.

It appears that the "answer" to these questions is that our society cares more about ranking students than it does about educating students. So we allow the education to be incomplete for many or perhaps most students, as long as we already have our ranking from "best" to "worst" (at a given age). This is, in my opinion, an unfortunate consequence of the multiple conflicting purposes of the educational system.

> (Similarly, later, how do you know which ones should get into the best universities? And so on)

I already talked about the GRE, for example, so I don't know why you're still confused about that. (I'm not actually defending the GRE, or the SAT, another standardized test, but there are clearly ways to evaluate people separate from schools and grades.)

I do have some problems with the inequality of opportunities implied by "the best universities", but that's a whole other discussion. I've already mentioned that the conflicting purposes of the educational system extend to the college level too, are arguably even worse at that level. Think back to the very first quote I posted, from the A.I. cheater for whom the point of an Ivy League university was not to receive an education but to make the right social connections. How is academic achievement even relevant there? To me, this is a sign that the current system is fundamentally broken.
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 00:43:02+00:00
The native UX toolkits wouldn't be so shit if everyone wasn't so greedy. We don't need to reinvent a better wheel every 5 years (windows) or force some proprietary garbage nobody cares about (mac).

It just needs to be reasonable, easy to adapt to other platforms, and long-lasting. The web isn't even that good, the competition is just self-destructive to a point it can't be justified.
by dang | 2025-06-04 00:43:54+00:00
Two claims are being made here, one boring and one lurid.

The boring claim is that the company inflated its sales through a round-tripping scheme: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/builder-a... (https://archive.ph/1oyOw). That's consistent with other recent reporting (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640)

The lurid claim is that the company's AI product was actually "Indians pretending to be bots". From skimming the OP and https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/how..., the only citation seems to be this self-promotional LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7334521... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250602211336/https://www.linke...).

Does anybody know of other evidence? If not, then it looks bogus, a case of "il faudrait l'inventer" which got traction by piggybacking on an old-fashioned fraud story.

To sum up: the substantiated claim is boring and the lurid claim is unsubstantiated. When have we ever seen that before? And why did I waste half an hour on this?

(Thanks to rafram and sva_ for the links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172409 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175373.)
by sneak | 2025-06-04 00:44:09+00:00
> This feature has a server component, running on Linux-based infrastructure, that is maintained by Apple.

Somewhat surprised Apple doesn’t run their services on XNU on internal Xserve-like devices (or work with or contribute to Asahi to get Linux working great natively on all Mx CPUs).

A 1U Mac Studio would be killer. I doubt it’d even be a huge engineering effort given that they’ve already done most of the work for the Studio.
by sgammon | 2025-06-04 00:45:15+00:00
> or if it also ran the compiler in the same JVM instance

Honestly, Gradle's toolchain resolution mechanisms have changed so much, it is a little hard to keep track. Good point

> The docs say 3 hours is default

Huh, I'm not sure where I got 10 minutes. I'll research some more about these assumptions, but even so, having used Gradle professionally and personally for many years (like you), I wonder how often I would have hit that threshold. I was mostly working in smaller projects and companies, though, so my experience could be different from the norm. Even assuming engineers hit that threshold, it would be toward the latter end of that window and only until the end of that window. An experience optimized for cold-start and non-reflection balances this approach, and is even build-cacheable with standard tools like sccache. There are still a lot of projects where JIT-based javac would be optimal

> perhaps would make sense to keep it alive as long as possible

It would for sure. I'm not sure why Gradle was never able to execute on Bazel's full vision for remote execution. Probably a hermeticity problem, considering the challenges they already seem to face with e.g. the configuration cache.

In any case, this is great feedback, thank you :)
by zeke | 2025-06-04 00:46:54+00:00
For reducing the number of points I've often used mapshaper.org.

For deciding if a user is in Texas you could create a simple polygon completely inside Texas and one in Oklahoma. 99% would fall in the simple polygon and the rest go to the detailed polygons. Or create bounds near the complex river borders and use the detailed polygons there.

On the other hand I just use simple, non-optimized functions for qquiz.com.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-04 00:47:05+00:00
Sort of. But I've seen what he's seen and worse. The situation isn't solved by changing "careers" or nibbling on the periphery. It requires either changing socioeconomic conditions through effective political organizing over a long timeframe or moving to another country that values community, solidarity, and people as more than just sources of money and labor to be used as tools.
by hinkley | 2025-06-04 00:47:31+00:00
15KW to make a single sheet of plastic. That is practically the entire capacity of a residential power feed.

And “several sheets per day”. Ouch.

If I were seeing a plastic recycling facility on How It’s Made I would expect to see a continuous feed system, with elaborate heat scavenging systems to preheat the ingredients while cooling the product.

I’m not sure how you scale such a thing down to cottage industry scale. Preheating to around 60° could be reasonably done by amateurs but this stuff goes up to at least 350° to melt plastic.
by ivape | 2025-06-04 00:47:55+00:00
Except that FB/Twitter are rotting platforms.

They were not rotting platforms when they evaporated jobs at that particular moment, about 10-15 years ago. There's no universe where people are making money making websites. One could easily collect multi thousand dollars per month just making websites awhile ago before twitter/fb pages just on the side. There is a long history to web development.

Also, the day of the website has been over for quite awhile so I don't even buy the claim that social media is a rotting platform.
by keyle | 2025-06-04 00:48:01+00:00
It saddens me that the conclusion is

"it's been like this for this long now"

and

"no one could ever agree to something"

leads to this amount of verbosity. Any of these keywords approach, `try`, `check`, or `?` would have been a good addition, if they kept the opportunity to also handle it verbosely.

The argument that LLM now auto-completes code faster than ever is an interesting one, but I'm baffled by such an experienced team making this an argument, since code is read so many more times than it is written; they clearly identify the issue of the visual complexity while hand-waving the problem that it's not an issue since LLM are present to write it - it completely disregards the fact that the code is read many more times that it is written.

Visual complexity and visual rhythms are important factors in a programming language design, I feel. Go is excruciatingly annoying to read, compared to Dart, C, or any cleaner language.

Ultimately, it's just one of those "meh, too hard, won't do" solution to the problem. They'll write another one of those posts in 5 years and continue on. Clearly these people are not there to solve user problems. Hiding behind a community for decision making is weak. Maybe they should write some real world applications themselves, which involves having these error checks every 2nd lines.

At this point I wouldn't be upset if someone forked Go, called it Go++ and fixed the silly parts.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-06-04 00:48:16+00:00
The second paragraph literally says "I'm a scientist". Scientists do things other than pipette liquids and stain slides all day. They also get to think about the meta details of their field and try to solve them, which it sounds like what this author is after.

I think a lot of proof is given in the article about the claims that you suggest are "false generalizations". What "niche" field do you think the author works in, where these issues with publishing only apply there and no where else? More importantly, in what scientific fields is the publishing system actually working? Those would be effective counter-examples, and I'd genuinely be interested in learning why it works for those fields.

The whole "easy path" argument you're making is totally incomprehisible. Just say whatever it is that you're trying to say. Unless you're saying that scientists should just "care more", and their problems will be solved.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-06-04 00:49:19+00:00
I looked in to this because it does actually sound logical, but it seems like burying plastic in landfill might actually be better. By incinerating it, you've taken carbon (oil) out of the ground, and released it into the atmosphere. By burying it back underground you are locking it away for at least a thousand years.

We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.
by fuzztester | 2025-06-04 00:51:05+00:00
Wow. I had said "it might have had" into my mic, but Google voice typing changed it to:

>it my day had

that's speech recognition for you. some of the mistakes it makes are even funnier, particularly when a non English speaker is speaking into the mic, like me.

for example it automatically changed the "some of the" to samudra, which is Hindi and Sanskrit for sea or ocean. I've seen many more such errors in that category.

but I have to say that there are huge amounts of improvement in the quality of the recognition over the last some years, since I first started using a phone which had that feature.
by freetime2 | 2025-06-04 00:52:06+00:00
There's a delay between when you get off the toilet and when it flushes automatically (about 10 seconds, on some models it is configurable), so there is enough time to close the lid first. You can also turn off the feature completely, but personally I'd much rather have the toilet get flushed with the lid up than not at all (because someone forgot, made a mistake, etc).

Also, the science doesn't really back up the claim that closing the lid prior to flushing makes a meaningful difference [1]. Cleaning the bathroom and toilet regularly has a much larger impact than whether or not you close the lid before flushing.

[1] https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(23)00820-9/fu...
by dhosek | 2025-06-04 00:53:53+00:00
The memory management strategies in Rust and Swift are similar. The big performance hit in Swift would come in method dispatch where it’s following Objective C strategies which would result in indirect calls for object methods. This is possible in Rust (using Box(dyn trait)), but discouraged in critical paths in favor of either static dispatch by means of enums or reified calls through Rust generics. Swift has similar capabilities, of course, but with both languages, the best performance reqires consciously making choices in development.