MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2025-06-27 22:38:31+00:00
Not at all. I think we should all be using the full potential of our preferred system instead of sucky abstractions that provide the lowest common denominator of features.

Portability is overrated. Portability between POSIX systems is especially overrated. Linux and the BSDs have powerful exclusive features and people should be using them as much as possible in their software, simply because it's better than the legacy POSIX nonsense. This also applies to the features of Windows, macOS, iOS, etc.

GNU Make is powerful, ubiquitous and portable. That makes it even more pointless to avoid it. I won't claim it's perfect but it's absolutely a hell of a lot better than some "standard" POSIX variant of make that virtually nobody actually cares about. GNU Make will be present in pretty much every system capable of compiling software. Everyone is used to running make to build things. Avoiding things that make life easier because POSIX is pointless masochism.
by siriusfeynman | 2025-06-27 22:38:53+00:00
Every tool I've ever used referred to this as hex (including design tools but maybe I'm sheltered), whereas rgb refers to the 0-255 triples

If someone asked me for a colour in "RGB" they'd be rightly confused if gave them a hex format colour (obviously you can convert between them but that's not what they asked for)
by RheingoldRiver | 2025-06-27 22:39:01+00:00
Just know them no. Able to sanity check that an RGB value is the color it's supposed to be yes sometimes. It's not the most useful skill because you almost always get a swatch now, but sometimes being able to have some idea of how it'll look (should it be dark or light, grey or intense color) saves me 10 seconds here and there.

I like playing guess-RGB games every now and then because it improves the skill, but at the same time I find them really stressful haha.
by Arch-TK | 2025-06-27 22:39:23+00:00
Author here.

Just to be clear, the one paragraph that indirectly references HA was not intended as "hate". It was intended solely as gentle mockery and a bit of humour. I think it should be very clear from the article that my Mosquitto + Z2M + mqttr + bash + jq solution, while feature-complete for my purposes, is not a competitor to HA, which I have never used or tried.

Why have I never tried HA? To run it, I would need to either create a VM or buy dedicated hardware. First, I don't want any more dedicated hardware in my house. Second, I like to keep the number of hosts I need to secure, manage, and keep running to a minimum. Third, from what I've heard (from people insisting it can't run on cheaper SBCs), it's not light; I was genuinely concerned about the server load on my single, low-power home server which already handles other things.

I imagine that for many people, Home Assistant works great: the UI is what they like, it never breaks, and they never have to troubleshoot it. Or, if it does break, they're satisfied with just backing up their configuration and reinstalling it.

But for me, when it comes to things I set up in my own time for my own use, I like to understand everything I am managing so I can quickly understand any failures. If I am going to use a ZBMINIR2 in detached mode to have my smart lights effectively on 100% of the time with the only method of control being Zigbee + glue, the glue had better be: a. rock-solid, b. trivial to troubleshoot, and c. easy to fix. I am not confident that I could learn, and retain, enough knowledge about HA to be able to achieve those three goals.

Lastly, I have extensive experience of DIYing my own solutions to problems for which working off-the-shelf solutions exist. This is not because I am a contrarian who hates everything that works, although maybe there's a tiny bit of that. The reason I didn't use HA wasn't because I hate it; I didn't use it because I wanted the pleasure of solving that problem myself.
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-06-27 22:39:28+00:00
Anne-Marie Lagrange, lead author of the study

What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point

Incidentally, although I'd never heard of A-M Lagrange before now, she's had an incredible career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Lagrange
by sunshine-o | 2025-06-27 22:39:55+00:00
Absolutely.

Syncthing is great but I really wish for a syncthing-lite you could deploy and configure easily.

The version we have today is really suffering from a lot of legacy.

I remember they are working on a big v2 with a revamp of the API which is a mess but they had to give up on getting rid on that horrible XML config file because it was too much work.

Be aware they also recently silently disabled the sync of symlinks on the android build, what can cause a lot of bad surprises.

They did define some specs of their protocols [0] but i haven't seen a alternative implementation yet.

- [0] https://docs.syncthing.net/specs/index.html
by pockybum522 | 2025-06-27 22:40:45+00:00
I designed the wedding ring for my wife, so I had a specific ring in mind to see how well it would do. I used the prompt:

A titanium ring with wavy rails on the sides, incorporating flowers in the middle of the band, where the wavy rails move farthest away from each other. The flowers should be a lily, sunflower, and then a spot for a gem, followed by a lily, sunflower, and then a spot for a gem and then a sunflower. The flowers should be evenly spaced around the whole band.

And it got the basics right, looked good, but it put the gem settings between the flowers, where the wavy rails were closest together. I tried several attempts at putting prompts in the "How should we modify this?" box such as "No, the gem settings should be where the flowers are, but every other flower" and "Don't put the gem settings at the points where the wavy edges are closest together" and it just failed hilariously. No matter how I phrased it, it kept putting the gem settings where the rails were closest together. After three (or it might have been four) attempts I gave up.

I could have explained the entire ring to a jeweler in a short paragraph, and any issues with it could be fixed in a sentence or two. I'm not sure why I need a frustrating middleman. And don't feel bad, this applies to nearly everything I use built on LLMs.

It's a cute toy, but boy are LLMs not remotely ready for production anything. I didn't even bother to give it the other aspects of the ring because if it can't get one of the most basic things in four tries of exceedingly clear language, then why would I keep going?
by owebmaster | 2025-06-27 22:41:18+00:00
> Have better tools made software engineers irrelevant before? Lol no.

Yes that is true. But now we have a situation where in 5 years, the pool of available software engineers might grow from, I don't know, 10million people to 200million. Just like every person became a photographer with smartphones. This makes being a software engineer not a great career anymore. Unless you are a great programmer, just like the great photographers. But that will be a way smaller pool than the current highly paid software engineers.
by masfuerte | 2025-06-27 22:41:59+00:00
That was a good read. I reread the relevant section of the HTML5 spec and noticed an error in an example:

> For example, &not;in will be parsed as "¬in" whereas &notin will be parsed as "∉".

Only a small minority of the named character references are permitted without a closing semicolon, and notin is not one of them. So &notin is actually parsed as "¬in". &notin; is parsed as "∉".

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#parse-error-missing-semicolon-...
by godelski | 2025-06-27 22:42:22+00:00
> As a person who builds stuff, I'm tired of these strawmen.

Who says I don't build stuff?[0]

Allow me to quote Knuth. I think we can agree he built a lot of stuff

| If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.

This is important. I don't know you and your beliefs, but some people truly believe theory is useless. But it's the foundation of everything we do.

> We don't have to invent a crisis past that.

You're right. But I'm not. Qwen isn't the only one here in the larger conversation. Look around the comments and see who can't tell the difference. Look at the announcements companies make. PhD level intelligence? lol. So I suggest taking your own advice. I've made no strawman...

[0] my undergrad I did experimental physics, not theory. I then worked as an aerospace engineer for years. I built a literal rocket engine. I built advanced radiation shielding that NASA uses. Then I came back to school and my PhD is in CS. I build things. Don't confuse the fact that I want to understand things interferes with that. Truth is I'm good at building things because I spend time with theory. See Knuth
by xeonmc | 2025-06-27 22:42:42+00:00
This is just photonic crystals, literally the entire point of photonic crystals is to create as many interfaces as possible to give light a second/third/fourth/… chance of getting reflected. Basically why your sunglasses are shiny.

The main news is using a precursor chemical and photolithography to cure hollow glass trusses, so that the interface is glass-against-vacuum instead of glass-against-less-contrasting-material.
by fsckboy | 2025-06-27 22:43:12+00:00
>I mean, I can work it out from first principles knowing how color mixing works

did you try it? if you can work it out from first principles because you know how color mixing works, you should get a perfect score; that's the game. If you don't get a perfect score, you need to reinspect what you think you know about color mixing and even the first principles.
by kube-system | 2025-06-27 22:43:42+00:00
Many of the highest crime places on earth are ethnically homogenous. Culture is not determined by skin color. Rather, Japan places a high value on the rights of and responsibility to the collective good. People in the US are culturally much less willing to suppress any rights of the individual, even if it supports a collective good. You can be much more confident that others will do what's in your best interest if society will come down on them hard if they don't.
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-27 22:43:45+00:00
I mean they paid some $97 Billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 [0], the country knows about them, and taxes them. They contribute so much to the economy Texas refuses to have business verify worker's work status for fear of the economic impact it would have.

[0] https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-06-27 22:44:01+00:00
That flight started much later than planned, and already got an extension for 30 minutes after the curfew. If the pilots, or the airline acted smarter, they'd diverted to Hahn from the beginning. I also don't have much sympathy for the terrible distress of the poor passengers, coming in from Mallorca with a cheap mass-tourism carrier. Probably much drunken, as is usual. Imagine the ADVENTURE to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, driving through the dark night in unknown territory, to be greeted by the rotten concrete of FFM!

Yay! Serves them right. So much for (useless in the first place!) spent fuel/burned carbon. Harr, Harr, Harr :-)
by tshaddox | 2025-06-27 22:44:42+00:00
I disagree. The trouble with your explanation is that there are plenty of issues which have had clear broad bipartisan support for decades. This is mostly stuff that doesn't even come up in mainstream political discourse and isn't even clearly associated with a particular party. It's basic stuff like consumer protection (e.g. predatory loans, telemarketing), government integrity (e.g. lobbying, term limits), and more.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-27 22:46:47+00:00
You’re really pulling at straws. Despite what Michelle Obama says, this is exactly “who we are” and who we have always been from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the dog whistles of Reagan to Willie Horton, to “Obama is a secret Muslim who wants to bring Sharia law”, to “the Haitians are eating our pets”, to the segregated proms that have happened in the rural south as late as the early 2000s.

This is what the American people voted for.
by firesteelrain | 2025-06-27 22:47:25+00:00
These come to mind:

1. In 2017, one district court blocked Trump’s travel ban nationwide, while others upheld it. That led to confusion at airports and legal whiplash

2. In 2019, one judge blocked the public charge immigration rule nationwide, while others allowed it. The rule ended up applying in some States and not others

3. Multiple district courts issued conflicting nationwide injunctions on Title IX guidance for transgender students during the Obama and Trump years

Those are just some

Inconsistency is still possible. But the alternative was worse

What we had was a race to the most favorable courtroom

The fix isn’t unlimited injunctions. It’s reform and not stretching judicial power beyond what the law allows
by core-explorer | 2025-06-27 22:48:06+00:00
debugging information is more precise than line numbers, it usually conveys line and column in a source file.

Some debuggers make use of it when displaying the current program state, the major debuggers do not allow you to step into a specific sub-call on a line (e.g. skip function arguments and go straight to the outermost function call). This is purely a UI issue, they have enough information. I believe the nnd debugger has implemented selecting the call to step into.

Addr2line could be amended. I am working on my own debugger and I keep re-implementing existing command line tools as part of my testing strategy. A finer-grained addr2line sounds like a good exercise.
by dan_voronov | 2025-06-27 22:49:22+00:00
I couldn't even log in, which is why I really disliked this tool. The only thing I was able to do was change the color theme.

When I try to log in using a personal account, it tells me I need to generate something in the dashboard. I know that on my main account from maybe 15 years ago I had things like domains thats nowdays Google Workspace. But I'm trying to log in and authorize using my second (NOT MAIN), relatively new account. Despite this, it redirects me to the console (like it would for the first account), and there it says I'm logged in (!), but the application itself says I'm not.

I switched profiles within the console too, tried the same steps, and it still results in the same problem. Yes, I can see my new profile in the top right corner, not the old one. It sends me to a "Users may have to specify a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT if:" github [0] saying this ID is needed, and I honestly would even generate it, but I don't want to waste time with the program if you can't even get basic authorization working correctly.

0: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...
by susam | 2025-06-27 22:49:27+00:00
The 3-digit shorthand for hexadecimal RGB colours dates back to CSS1, if not earlier.

From <https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1/>:

> The format of an RGB value in hexadecimal notation is a '#' immediately followed by either three or six hexadecimal characters. The three-digit RGB notation (#rgb) is converted into six-digit form (#rrggbb) by replicating digits, not by adding zeros. For example, #fb0 expands to #ffbb00. This makes sure that white (#ffffff) can be specified with the short notation (#fff) and removes any dependencies on the color depth of the display.

I'm quite fond of the 3-digit hexadecmial RGB notation. It's a concise way to express the colours I use for web pages or Emacs font locking. In these cases, I rarely need the full 16-million-colour range offered by 6 digits. The 3 digits are usually more than enough, at least to me.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-27 22:49:27+00:00
The well has been poisoned by Sotomayor's dissent, and the headlines which come form it. I'm rebuffing a framing that many have taken who haven't listened to the oral arguments, havent read the judgement, and so on.

I don't take people who engage in this emotionally elevated reaction to the issue to have a different opinion, I take them to have no opinion at all -- because their reaction isn't an evaluation of the judgement.

All i'm saying is, "before you go ham on emotionally disregulation based on media reports, go read a few pages of the actual judgement
by majormajor | 2025-06-27 22:49:27+00:00
Using private weapons to fight against the government to protect your rights is a laughably-low-probability-of-success scenario. Even when insurrections or rebellions succeed they often end up... not so great.

We have seen what you get when you have an armed populace. Highly armed cops. Highly armed federal agents. Military equipment for civilian forces. All necessary in order to compete in the arms race against the "bad guys." All cheered for by conservatives, of course!

All that make it that much more easy to start cracking down. Maybe as a first step, issuing pardons for the rebels on your side while increasing the use of force against those protesting you.

Guns are not defensive tools. If you have a gun, but the government shoots first, you still lose.
by magicalist | 2025-06-27 22:49:51+00:00
> Ironically, imv, I think in this case, they didnt. This was, imv, a case where a universal injunctions was actually within the power of the disctict court -- because (and here Sotomayor is correct) the states were being obligated to take on burdens that "crossed state lines" and a complete remedy to relieve them of these burdens actually requires a universal injunction. So, imv, under the history of what equitable remedies are supposed to do, this would be one rare case where the action of the courts could be legally defensible.

> However, the SC was extremely fed up with district courts sending inumerable number of cases their way -- trigger happy judges at the distict level deciding they're going to rule for the whole US in a federal system. So, by this point, they've tried many times to stop it, and it hadnt worked.

...so you were lauding a "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" opinion?

We're talking citizenship here, in a time when the executive branch is deporting people as hastily as possible to prevent judicial review. But the supreme court was "extremely fed up" and took a stand...against universal injunctions. How "non-hysterical" of them.
by andy99 | 2025-06-27 22:50:01+00:00
This sounds like they have an LLM running with a context window that just gets longer and longer and contains all the past interactions of the store.

The normal way you'd build something like this is to have a way to store the state and have an LLM in the loop that makes a decision on what to do next based on the state. (With a fresh call to an LLM each time and no accumulating context)

If I understand correctly this is an experiment to see what happens in the long context approach, which is interesting but not super practical as it's knows that LLMs will have a harder time at this. Point being, I wouldn't extrapolate this to how a commercial system built properly to do something similar would perform.
by schiffern | 2025-06-27 22:50:10+00:00
It's just Headlinese, an evolution of earlier telegram style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese

Per the convention, "Virginia" is shortened to its acronym VA. So although it's written "VA Tech" it's meant to be read aloud (or in your head) as "Virginia Tech."
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-27 22:50:11+00:00
> Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia.

Is there more to this story? Presumably they didn't actually box up their infant and entrust it to a total stranger!?
by 9rx | 2025-06-27 22:50:47+00:00
It is unlikely there has ever been a "everyone trusted everyone" moment in human history, but even today we rely on "random strangers" to move children to and fro every single (school) day. Such trust in people isn't out of the ordinary even now.

I doubt parents put their children on the school bus because "something bad is apt to happen anyway", rather "it is just what you do" without any further thought. The postal service carrying humans isn't what we do these days, so it stands out as a curiosity. If it the story was, instead, about a bus line or taxi service, it wouldn't seem unusual at all.
by pedalpete | 2025-06-27 22:51:10+00:00
I didn't see a link to the paper, so can only assume they were introducing new noises at randomized decibel levels to study participants.

My start-up uses sound to enhance sleep's restorative function. So blankly saying "noise at decibel level x disrupts sleep" is not true.

Over the last 10 years, research has shown that precisely timed micro-auditory stimulations increase slow-wave activity, and accompanying biomarkers of health. There are now more than 50 published peer-reviewed papers regarding this phenomenon. We link to some of these on our website https://affectablesleep.com

Environmental noise is different than precise stimulation based noise, but most of us have an adaptation level to environmental noise.

I remember when I first moved to Chile having dinner with an Argentinian and an Indian, and the Argentinian said the streets in Santiago were so loud it was important to get an apartment on a higher floor. The Indian guy looked around and was like "what noise"? To him, Santiago was a peaceful and quiet environment.
by mersenne | 2025-06-27 22:51:20+00:00
I've also been doing small improvements to my sleep over the years and share some of your recommendations! What's worked best for me have been:

1. Good mattress and pillow (this is a 101 kind of thing).

2. Having the right temperature (same as above).

3. White noise. I also use a white noise machine and the White Noise app on iOS (which I bought for like $1 years ago and still use it). Ironically, I don't use white noise but brown noise, which is slightly more soothing to me.

4. Air purifier, not necessarily for the white noise it produces because it's pretty silent, but because that way I guarantee that I get at least 8 hours of purified air a day.

5. Black out curtains.

6. Eye masks. I actually wear two at once -- the first one to block any lights, the second one to press against my eyelashes, which I find it better for sleeping.

7. Magnesium Glycinate. I've tried different supplements, different forms of magnesium, and even different brands, and the one that I currently use has worked wonders for me. Made me go from being a light sleeper to a medium-heavy sleeper.

Haven't tried earplugs, but I don't really feel the need to. Another thing I tried (but never noticed a real difference) was using a small piece of tape on my lips to avoid opening my mouth.