MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: advice! tired uni student gaining engineering skills (with joy)
by indiraschka | 2025-06-26 05:23:42+00:00
I'm going into my 2nd year at uni, based in the san francisco bay area and want to get into hardware (point 1 of advice)! School has been not a great fit for me and need perspective re: dropping out (advice point 2).

1. Engineering.

Over the past 2 months, I really loved the physics and engineering of programming NFCs, webapps that vectorize smells and allow searching, and making $8 microelectrode arrays (tiny grids of wires!) by laser-induced graphene on microscope slides, whereas usually they're $300, with my friends.

Skills I want to become proficient at: I want to be good at rapid prototyping on the edge of status quo in research. low-level programming, CAD skills (kicad, fusion), PCB design, lasers and micromachining, bioamplifiers, spectrophotometers

Other stuff I want to do (right now!): text-to-smell diffuser system, scent recognition system, fast steering mirror system and error correction.

How can I further push myself and learn faster here? Any advice is appreciated. I had many collaborative projects spanning microdrones, biosignals, etc and 3 internship-equivalent experiences.

2. Conflicts with school.

I would really like time find rare quests and push the status quo collaboratively, and I self-learn really fast per project (mentors have noted this).

Any more time in the structured school system is causing a lot of unhappiness. In elementary school, I created a popular zine about unschooling which almost got me expelled, so I moved countries (having learned english through coding forums). After the pandemic, I have mostly been doing online school (including uni).

The current conservative strategy is to remain in school for another semester/year until I solidify the visa status post dropping-out. I don't satisfy the o1 visa criteria yet (duh, I'm not yet exceptional) and am working on it (through publications and grant awards). Are there some other options you would recommend?

Happy to talk more - you can message at x.com/indiraschka
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-26 05:24:01+00:00
supertokens did the same thing from bengaluru. didn’t start loud. just showed up with clean abstractions that didn’t leak. you could tell someone had wrestled with real auth mess before touching a single line. it worked, across teams, stacks, workflows

better auth gives off the same shape. that gets well adopted because it survives scaling without needing a rewrite

same pattern and diff origin place. someone holding the whole stack in their head long enough to ship something
by bradgessler | 2025-06-26 05:24:46+00:00
The problem is that other payment processors could emerge with the same trust profiles as Apple to facilitate this transaction.

I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.

Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.
by rixed | 2025-06-26 05:26:04+00:00
Interesting link.

Another quote from that same link, from that same hateful person whose first grievance was that Feynman was just interested in calculations and playing the drum :

"I do not know—but I believe that Richard Feynman is either a Communist or very strongly pro-Communist—and as such is a very definite security risk."

I had read many books from and about Feynman, probably even more than the average HNer; first time I encounter such a claim. I do not believe in heroes and like to have my beliefs questioned, but in this instance I will still stand with Feynman. This case does not look like it is about violence.
by chronid | 2025-06-26 05:26:16+00:00
They should be funded by the companies using them. Do you believe any of the fortune top100 would be greatly impacted by funding libxml2? They probably all rely on it, one way or the other.

The foundation of the internet is something that gets bigger and bigger every year. I understand the sentiment and the reasoning of declaring software a "public good", but it won't scale.
by duxup | 2025-06-26 05:27:07+00:00
I wonder if it is how people see it work?

I tried Gemini and then google had Gemini piping up in Gmail and of course search… I didn’t want or like it there. In search it is wrong a shocking amount of times. The intrusion in my email and wrong answers in search gave me a poor impression.

I wanted to ask it via a traditional LLM chat format and i wanted to provide context and so on, a controlled experience. ChatGPT does that pretty well (as do others).

The folks cramming it in everything, I don’t even know what it is supposed to do , or worse it gives a poor impression.

Copilot seems more akin to the cram it everywhere style….
by nottorp | 2025-06-26 05:27:22+00:00
"Security" announcements seem to be of 3 kinds lately:

1. Serious. "This is a problem and it needs fixing yesterday."

2. Marketing. "We discovered that if earth had two moons and they aligned right and you had local root already you could blah blah. By the way we are selling this product that will generate a positive feedback loop for your paranoid tendencies, buy buy buy!".

3. Reputation chasing. Same as above, except they don't sell you a product, they want to establish themselves as an expert in aligning moons.

Much easier to do 2 or 3 via "AI" by the way.
by hinkley | 2025-06-26 05:28:15+00:00
This story has been floating around for weeks already. I’ve seen two different videos talking about this already including one claiming Microsoft has already stated they are working on it. It’s not just that the games run faster but that battery life is also better. On a handheld system battery life will change minds more than frame rates.

Correction: it’s been a month and they had both devices:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

And it’s $130 cheaper.
by defrost | 2025-06-26 05:28:27+00:00
For general interest, Western Australia's State Power company has a variety of battery application cases that it assists with; home batteries, community batteries, fully stand alone, microgrids (with batteries).

https://www.westernpower.com.au/resources-education/consumer...

https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/energy-policy-wa/wa-resid...

West and South Australia are a fair way down the integrated renewables pathway with a high percentage of household rooftop solar, mixed rural PV farms, wind power, battery farms, etc.
by chrisbrandow | 2025-06-26 05:28:43+00:00
There have been a lot of studies that show the correlation with lead up and down and varied by lead in different cities countries with different phaseout timelines.

Kevin drum and Rick Bevin both did a ton to lay this out systematically.

As leaving drum has noted, Lead is NOT the only contributor to crime, but it was the cause of the largest variations for most of the 20th century.
by _moof | 2025-06-26 05:29:08+00:00
No, you can't. Gravity assists require the assisting body (Jupiter) to be moving, relative to the body that needs the assist (Voyager), in the direction the assisted body wants to go.

They have an unfortunate name because it's not just the assisting body's gravity that provides the assist. It's the combination of gravity and velocity.

As Voyager nears Jupiter, Jupiter's gravity grabs it. Then, Jupiter's velocity relative to Voyager drags Voyager - that is, transfers energy to it. Without that relative motion, all Voyager's gravity does is add energy on the way in and then remove exactly the same energy on the way out.
by cess11 | 2025-06-26 05:29:30+00:00
Kind of weird thing to lie about.

https://www.globalfounderscapital.com/

https://www.htgf.de/

https://seedcamp.com/

https://www.parequity.com/

https://partechpartners.com/

https://www.speedinvest.com/

https://www.kimaventures.com/

Then there are many niche VC-networks, like https://www.timetoraise.co/.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-06-26 05:29:53+00:00
I used to go to a Ruby meetup and it was pretty much just like this. There was a core group who went every time and then you'd get some real whackos showing up. Often who didn't even know what the group was about, just that there was something on tonight.

I'm not sure a product is even able to solve this. A product needs to maximise engagement, turn a profit, etc. But there isn't really any money to be made here. A local community isn't going to want to pay a fee to some 3rd party so they can arrange to meet up at the pub. The best solution here is just a IM group chat. Only problem is it isn't very discoverable to new members, but to some extent being hard to find is a feature itself.
by phatskat | 2025-06-26 05:29:56+00:00
I don’t know exactly what they’re referencing, but Zsh has something like that where you can expand eg filenames and paths from this unique bits.

So if you have

``` src/components/Button.vue src/components/ButtonGroup.vue ```

And you type `nvim s/c/G<Tab>` it’ll expand to the second file’s path.
by dmix | 2025-06-26 05:30:00+00:00
I see, so since a large majority of crime is done by young people, peaking between 15-25, they are basically comparing a whole new generation of kids who didn't have developmental brain issues vs their elders.

Were the older people who grew up with lead exposure also experiencing higher rates of impulsive crime in the late >1990s relative to the new and prior generations? That would help eliminate the major differences in economics/culture/politics of their upbringing (for ex: mass flight of families moving to the suburbs to raise their young kids after the 1970s crime wave scared them away).
by b112 | 2025-06-26 05:30:05+00:00
Urges to kill and rake and destroy? The first, yes. The second, lack of care by some.

Yet the first is aggression often born from, again, reproductive drive. You don't see moose smashing the horns together for fun, they do it to exhibit dominance. All creatures strive to say "I'm the best!", in hundreds of subtle and overt ways. "Success" at any act means "I'm a better mate!".

All of human culture, all of human drive, all of our existence is laced, entwined, and coupled with this drive. You may think your fancy pants brain is the ruler of all, but it's not, for the very way you think, is predicated by an enormous amount of physiological drives, the primary being "reproduce".

Saying that "citing concepts from entire branch of science" is weak, is a very weird thing to do.
by godelski | 2025-06-26 05:32:16+00:00
> No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

I think we often forget this. Especially in our fast paced world and career. But often it is the little things which are hard to get right and also the things that create the most problems.

I think we try to think we can predict what are important problems and what are not. Sometimes this is easy and we're right, but often we aren't. This is true in math, physics, and computer science. In any domain. So do what you like because you never really know. Plus, they say interest is worth an extra 10 IQ points.

From all my reading of Feynman I think there's one thing he'd stress: have fun. To never lose the creativity, that child like wonder. In CS we got here because we loved to play around and hack. I hope we never lose that.
by fathomdeez | 2025-06-26 05:32:16+00:00
On the flip side I was at a startup using auth0, because as you said, not a core part of the business right? Until the traction hit and they had hundreds of thousands of users. Suddenly the auth bill became untenable - users are great but there wasn’t enough revenue to cover these costs. Auth0 didn’t budge. In fact they were outright nasty to deal with. They were holding our user logins and passwords hostage and they knew it.
by ttepasse | 2025-06-26 05:32:45+00:00
Interestingly there was a real attempt to build an E-Puzzler for shredded documents, to reconstruct the torn Stasi files after the German reunification. But while the system worked for defined stuff, but failed for mass reconstruction of documents with different formats:

https://www.bundesarchiv.de/en/stasi-records-archive/the-rec...
by seec | 2025-06-26 05:33:24+00:00
That's hilarious. Germany has the complete reverse problem; the indoctrination is largely happening at school. It's probably one of the worst countries in the EU on that matter.

It's also an extremely stupid and authoritarian law. The number of parents that would homeschool their children is rather low (as long as school is free) and even if they wanted, they probably couldn't because both parents need to work nowadays. Homeschooling is largely a rich people or alternative people affair, pretending that significant indoctrination can happen there is just a nice excuse to better subject children to the state indoctrination.

Also, this article is largely proof that public schooling is largely irrelevant when it comes to made up belief. But I guess we are still stuck in the (very wrong) blank state idea around human behavior/learning/growth. It's not going well.
by Terr_ | 2025-06-26 05:33:26+00:00
It seems the plan is to turn it into a luxury penthouse for Trump apparatchiks, using our tax money:

> HUD Secretary Scott Turner [...] has made specific requests for accommodations in the building [...] include a dedicated executive suite on the 19th floor, construction of an executive dining room, and reserved parking spaces for his five cars. [...] exclusive use of one elevator and space on the 18th floor to host his executive assistants. Plans potentially include a gym for Turner and his family.

[0] https://www.alxnow.com/2025/06/24/report-national-science-fo...
by genocidicbunny | 2025-06-26 05:34:05+00:00
And yet, it works a lot more often than you'd think. Just having someone who you perceive to be in some kind of position of authority tell you that it's okay to relax and calm down can have a significant effect on one's stress levels. And it works even better when you're not having to worry about how much listening to the doctor tell you to reduce your stress levels is going to cost you financially.
by vessenes | 2025-06-26 05:35:20+00:00
Ninjaing in here: Thanks for reading this!

I’m a small time GCP customer for five or six years, and relatively tech competent, and I had a very difficult time getting Gemini code set up yesterday with Vertex API keys; finally I had to use gcloud to login from the CLI in combination with clicking a link and doing web sign on from Gemini. This frustrated me, not least because I have API direct calls to Vertex Gemini working from Aider, although I could not tell you exactly what incantation I finally used to make it work. In particular it didn’t look to me like the Gemini code app uses something like dotenv? I don’t recall now; upshot - could get it to tell me I was logged in wrong / had an oauth2 error / needed a project id at various times, but no inference.

What I wanted: to be able to go to a simple page tied to a google login and generate named API keys that can be used from anywhere to query Gemini models with a SINGLE key and environment variable kept in a .env file. I would prefer to pre-fill the account that debits by API usage. For an example, you could sign up for Anthropic API, OpenAI API, OpenRouter to see their customer flows. They are extremely simple in comparison to getting a new account (or even an old one) in shape to do metered billing for Gemini inference.

I then want this API key to work, regardless of what gcloud “knows” about me — am I logged in to a GCP account? Don’t care. What’s my current “Project?” Don’t care. What’s the difference between Vertex and Gemini? Don’t care.

As I write this, I bet a startup could be launched just offering this as a wrapper. This is surprisingly painful!

Thanks again for all the work; looking forward to seeing more out of Gemini.
by vladimir_adt | 2025-06-26 05:36:37+00:00
In terms of battery life, the AI doesn't even load the two performance cores — the main power consumption comes from the camera preview. On Android, it's more reliable to keep the device connected to a power source and use the battery as a backup. Camera preview can also be optimized by running continuously at a lower resolution, then switching to 720p to capture the actual image once a face is detected
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-06-26 05:37:32+00:00
> Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects.

There is zero evidence so far that AI improves software developer efficiency.

No, just because you had fun vibing with a chatbot doesn't mean you delivered the end product faster. All of the supposed AI software development gains are entirely self-reported based on "vibes". (Remember these are the same people who claimed massive developer efficiency gains from programming in Haskell or Lisp a few years back.)

Note I'm not even touching on the tech debt issue here, but it is also important.

P.S. The hallucination and counting to five problems will never go away. They are intrinsic to the LLM approach.
by imiric | 2025-06-26 05:38:23+00:00
I'm surprised to read that from a prominent figure in the industry such as yourself.

The problem is that many hallucinations do not produce a runtime error, and can be very difficult to spot by a human, even if the code is thoroughly reviewed, which in many cases doesn't happen. These can introduce security issues, do completely different things from what the user asked (or didn't ask), do things inefficiently, ignore conventions and language idioms, or just be dead code.

For runtime errors, feeding them back to the LLM, as you say, might fix it. But even in those cases, the produced "fix" can often contain more hallucinations. I don't use agents, but I've often experienced the loop of pasting the error back to the LLM, only to get a confident yet non-working response using hallucinated APIs.

So this problem is not something external tools can solve, and requires a much deeper solution. RAG might be a good initial attempt, but I suspect an architectural solution will be needed to address the root cause. This is important because hallucination is a general problem, and doesn't affect just code generation.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-26 05:38:44+00:00
> ...there are currently four bugs marked with the security label in the libxml2 issue tracker. Three of those were opened on May 7 by Nikita Sveshnikov, a security researcher who works for a company called Positive Technologies.

I'm confused. Why doesn't Positive Technologies submit a patch or offer to pay the lead maintainer to implement a fix?

FYI, Wiki tells me:

> Positive Technologies is a Russian information security research company and a global leader in cybersecurity.
by hinkley | 2025-06-26 05:40:39+00:00
I’m hearing that Microsoft has done a shitty job of tuning windows for the Lenovo device. Someone last week cited commentary that Microsoft has been working on it and they think they can reduce the Windows overhead by TWO GIGABYTES. Why is the fucking operating system using 2 gigabytes of memory in the first place, let alone enough more than that to be able to reduce memory usage by 2 GB.
by chii | 2025-06-26 05:41:21+00:00
> It could also indicate that News companies make more money from a tiny number of subscribers than whoever would pay microtransactions

which is exactly what "doesn't work" means - not enough revenue from microtransations compared to another avenue (such as subscription + adverts).

> they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies

i suppose that's possible as well - but some news outlets do have sufficient revenue to experiment, and they either hadnt, or have and found it wanting.

> not ask hard questions over actual journalism

that has nothing to do with the funding model. You're conflating separate concerns - one being a business concern, and one being a civic concern.
by threatofrain | 2025-06-26 05:41:48+00:00
You don't have to buy into Okta, you can also lean on auth frameworks like auth.js. Either way you're depending on outside labor to adapt.

I worked for a social media company before and we also rolled our own auth and we didn't regret it. High user accounts are a special case and you should know ahead of time.

But for B2B? Beware. You might get hit with an ask for active directory support.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-06-26 05:42:00+00:00
ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.
by toast0 | 2025-06-26 05:42:34+00:00
It depends on the terms of the net metering.

If it's the ancient practice of crediting on a one for one basis, yeah that doesn't help. (A look around says that's probably where PR is now). If they credit power delivered to the grid based on conditions when it was delivered, then that might help. With appropriate controls, storage can increase grid stability. It would probably be more cost effective to do utility scale storage projects, but project management is difficult in PR; letting those with personal capital hook up solar+batteries and send some of that onto the grid when demand is high seems useful?
by genocidicbunny | 2025-06-26 05:42:46+00:00
You're not going to be seeing every patient every month. Many you might only be seeing a few times a year; They will have a quick phone chat every few months to make sure their prescriptions are up to date, maybe order a blood panel or two to stay on top of things. They're not coming in every week for an hour-long deeply-personalized appointment. As long as the practice limits itself to a reasonable number of patients, they should be plenty solvent.

We're talking about basic preventative care here. Your doctor doesn't need and probably doesn't want to be your friend for these sorts of things. There doesn't need to be a deep personal relationship there if it's not necessary.

(But also, $50/mo is a very low price. I've seen plenty of such services that are in the $500+/mo range. It's still way cheaper than health insurance would cost out of pocket, but it's not 'cheap' either.)
by zrobotics | 2025-06-26 05:43:27+00:00
The choice of games is also super strange. Why include borderlands 3? A 2019 cel-shaded release that isn't super demanding seems odd. Homeworld and returnal also seem odd, they're a little more modern but I don't typically see them used as graphical benchmarks. The only game on their list that I typically see for benchmarking is cyberpunk 2077, the rest of the list honestly looks like they did some cherry picking with their selection to massage the data.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-06-26 05:43:40+00:00
I think the poster’s point is that net metering is a tool to promote early adoption of solar, and (in at least one prominent example) when solar penetration becomes high enough for it to impact grid stability, larger grids have removed net metering. So to address GP poster’s point: net metering affecting grid stability in a substantial way is more a theoretical concern that’s already been addressed in one of the locations where it stopped being theoretical.