MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-06-24 09:30:43+00:00
The original text would have to be read extremely carefully to conclude that they knew that chromite is really different from magnetite.

I have read many ancient texts about metallurgy and the like, where they were using a bewildering amount of various names to designate the various kinds of ores and of produced metals.

Despite that, they did not think that there was any essential difference between the many kinds of magnetite or of chalkopyrite and so on. They were habituated with the fact that the natural minerals extracted from different places have never exactly the same properties. Now we know that this is caused by slightly different chemical compositions, but they just knew that some are better for a certain purpose, while others are worse, without knowing why this is so.

Because this is how all the minerals they knew had always behaved, it was not considered a surprising fact. It was just accepted that you have to know the exact origin of a mineral, to assess its value and its suitability for a desired purpose.

So I doubt that they had considered chromite as a stone distinct from magnetite, like they considered e.g. magnetite distinct from pyrite, where the appearance of the stones is easily distinguishable.

Even if they had thought that chromite is not a better kind of magnetite, but something really different, they still would have not imagined that chromite contains another metal that becomes alloyed with iron, like they knew to alloy tin with copper or the like. They would have thought that adding chromite stones to the minerals for iron extraction improves the resulting steel for some unknown reason.
by danparsonson | 2025-06-24 09:31:38+00:00
> How can we really be sure about more or less persecution by Chinese government if we don't live in Tibet

You're conflating your lack of knowledge about the subject with a general lack of knowledge about the subject; those are not the same.

> You're right, the media are mostly or exclusively mouthpieces for the state. FTFY. There are not exceptions anywhere in the world.

That's a false equivalence; yes, most or all countries' governments have captured the press to some extent, but the degree to which it happens varies wildly by country, and again the fact that you don't see that speaks more to your own experiences than any objective reality.
by priyanshu_101 | 2025-06-24 09:32:57+00:00
Build in public idea: I recently shared this app with some folks and got some positive feedback but there's a lot that can be improved. So, I thought, why not iterate on this and work on it based on what IT and tech leaders want instead of restricting this to my understanding alone?

Here's an updated version with the functionality to also export it as a PDF.
by audunw | 2025-06-24 09:33:51+00:00
I don’t see why I should care that the battery is glued in? It helps keep the battery stable with minimal overhead, and it’s still fairly easy to replace. Apple has even made improvements to make it even easier to remove glued batteries, not that it was all that hard before. Doing excess engineering to make it easier to replace something which I might replace once in the lifetime of the phone doesn’t make sense.

The old use case of wanting to easily swap batteries to keep the phone going isn’t something people care about anymore since we got a billion options for battery banks that works for all the USB-C devices we have.

Nobody cares about headphone jack anymore. It’s dead. Get over it. Why stick a crappy DAC and a bad and single-purpose bulky port in a device where space is critical, when 99% of users are not going to use it? Just stick a USB-C adapter on your headphones. Then you have a choice in DAC. I would much rather have two USB-C ports than a headphone jack.

Dual SIM is also rapidly becoming obsolete.

Micro SD would be nice still, I’ll give you that.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-06-24 09:34:10+00:00
> Even for the Fairphone, you have to fill out a form on their site to get a bootloader unlock code, and they could close that form if they wished (see Asus).

You also need to sign up with Google to even get past the setup screen, and the phone needs to reach Google's servers and ask for permission to be used. Even if Fairphone would like to keep phones usable, Google can decide otherwise at any time.

I started a thread on this topic on their forums, and they seem to have no interest in fixing this. I wouldn't consider hardware sustainable if it needs to talk to Google's servers to be used and remains completely locked down otherwise. If you find one of these devices in a drawer in 15 years, and Google has changed their server's API, then the phone is as usable as any other brand

(nitpick: you have to "enter a contractual agreement" with Google, and not create an account. Folks on the forums seemed to be obsessed with the choice of word around this, although practically, it makes no difference).
by hnbad | 2025-06-24 09:36:23+00:00
Don't ever look into where the money you make with "passive income" comes from, I guess?

Passive income just means other people are working for your income. At some point, someone has to be poor enough to have to do the actual labor. You can abstract this away with as many financial constructs as you want but it boils down to that. If you can "make money" from mere ownership, we can't all own things that make us money because then we wouldn't have to pay anyone and nobody would have to pay us.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-06-24 09:36:51+00:00
> Also, it's a status symbol, you can't just _not_ upgrade.

You can choose not to upgrade.

Obtaining status symbols is a choice (and a pretty vain one too). Even if your lifestyle requires these empty displays of status, that's a choice of lifestyle that you've made.

You can be perfectly successful in life with a 5 years old phone.
by al_borland | 2025-06-24 09:37:12+00:00
I wasn’t in the industry to see it first hand, but was this same criticism levied against higher level languages when they first hit the scene? Something to the effect of high level languages not being the right level of precision, because the programmer wanted to directly manipulate what was happening in memory, and the high level languages are not the right level of precision for that?

The issue with natural language isn’t that it’s impossible to be precise, it’s that most people aren’t, or they are precise about what they want it to do for them, but not what the computer needs to do to make it happen. This leads to a lot of guessing by engineerings as they try to translate the business requirements into code. Now the LLM is doing that guessing, often with less context about the broader business objectives, or an understanding of the people writing those requirements.
by dspillett | 2025-06-24 09:37:22+00:00
I'm not sure that it is practical to make vibe coding secure enough by default to be called secure by default. You could hang linters of the process and use the results to refine your LLM prompts (perhaps even in an automated manner to an extent), but that'll never be perfect. The LLMs people are using were trained with public code, and that public code has many security issues that may be repeated by the LLM along with the good stuff, and new classes of problem pop up regularly so you have to keep those linters up-to-date which somehow avoid false positives that might cause them to flag decent code and accidentally cause a reprompt in a way that makes it worse.

Vibe coding is just outsourcing, just not directly to other humans, or like giving tasks to an enthusiastic but somewhat bumbling junior dev —¹ you have to verify the results for security issues, style matters, and just to make sure it actually works, whether you have pushed the task to a local human, a remote human, or an environment munching LLM, before using it.

--------

[1] Oh no! An em-dash! Am I an AI and nobody has told me?!
by notyouraibot | 2025-06-24 09:37:30+00:00
I recently started consulting for a company that's building an AI first tool.

The entire application is powered through several AI agents, I had a look at their code and had to throw up, each agent is a single Python file of over 4000 lines, you can just look at the first 100 lines and tell its all LLM generated code, the hilarious part is if I paste the code into ChatGPT to help me break it down, it hits the context window in like 1 response!

I think this is one of the main problems with AI code, 5 years ago every time I took on a project, I knew the code I was reading and diving into was written by a human, well thought and structured. These days almost all the code I see is glue code, AI has done severe damage by enabling engineers who do not understand basic structures and fundamentals write 'code that just works'.

At the same time, I don't blame just the AI, cause several times I have written code myself which is gluecode, but then asked AI to refactor it in a way I want and it is usually really good at it.
by snarg | 2025-06-24 09:38:25+00:00
> If they can be used like that, why couldn't they be used... as phones?

To facilitate planned obsolescence, manufacturers stop providing OS updates after a relatively short time. And then they cease providing security patches after a... still relatively short time.

If you unlock the device and install a custom ROM, which may or may not function adequately for you to begin with, then you're probably also compromising secure boot, which is a problem for the security model of how many people use phones -- and many apps simply refuse to work with this setup (whereas the obsolete OS with no security patches is considered fine, apparently).
by obayesshelton | 2025-06-24 09:38:43+00:00
I am not using Cursor as my IDE I typically get Claude or Gemini to give me feedback about a specific piece of code.

However, my biggest gripe with any of the LLMs or Tools is that they do not suggest package / library to solve my issue.

For example I wanted to do something with GEOJSON and it wrote a heap of code. In most cases for such things I would also use a well maintained and documented package.

I keep thinking that I need to write something that suggest a package / libary before writing code.
by danparsonson | 2025-06-24 09:38:48+00:00
Nothing really to disagree with here tbh; I didn't mean to say that authoritarianism was the reason for everything they've achieved, but rather that it greases the wheels so to speak.

I was really just responding to the discussion that ensued when an earlier commenter said that poor regulation was not the reason the US modernised rapidly but rather population growth and post war economics, and another responded with China as a counter example to that, my point being that China's situation was much different than the US so it's not really a useful comparison.

I am neither a defender of China, nor the US ;-)
by vintermann | 2025-06-24 09:39:05+00:00
Yes. And that doesn't have to be an addict family member or a burglar, it can easily be e.g. a landlord who sees that you have more money, and charges you more money. There are a lot of people in a position to make you give up what you have, if they see that there's money to be squeezed.

This is even more true collectively: as an individual, maybe you can get out by being 50% more frugal than the rest. But everyone can't be 50% more frugal than the rest. If everyone tries, it's even more likely that larger society claws it back through higher rents, lower wages etc.
by Defletter | 2025-06-24 09:39:17+00:00
That is a distinction without a difference: my tax money went to paying off that loan. Whether it was a debt established 200 years ago that we we're still paying off, or assigned a new debt based on something that happened 200 years ago makes no difference: I still had to pay for it. It's a legal fiction, all of it. Quibbling over whether it's this category or that makes no difference to me having to pay for it.
by azthecx | 2025-06-24 09:40:02+00:00
There are arguments to be made, especially if you're young and just starting out to take a reasonable amount of margin and kickstart your compounding growth.

Say you just started working, have no use for your money and are willing to bet 20k on index funds vs a 90% market drop, you should be able to take 2k in leverage and set up your position be auto closed.

But of course as you have more money this type of market exposure starts shifting as you have shorter timer horizons to rebuild and are instead going into more of a wealth conservation mode.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-06-24 09:40:37+00:00
FaceID is absolute terrible. If you wear glasses, the angle on which it operates it pretty narrow. It has a really hard time if your face is partially covered. I can't hold my phone near my lap/chest on a train and unlock it, I need to bring it up to eye level (a gesture most unwelcome when you want to be discreet in unsafe areas). I can't lie in the couch with the phone resting in front of me; I need to angle it up to unlock it. It won't unlock in the mist, light rain, or a variety of other situations.

I last tried the iPhone 16. It's a huge downgrade from the last iPhone SE.
by Vinnl | 2025-06-24 09:41:22+00:00
On the Fairphone 2 you could even replace the screen without screws. It made it unstable and prone to getting loose, and it was a huge improvement when the Fairphone 3 started using screws for that. It was a fun gimmick, but for something you replace that rarely, it's really not worth the sacrifice.

Screws keep them repairable and sturdy. It'll no longer be as easy to bring a spare battery to replace on the go, unfortunately, but unfortunately, it's a trade-off, and with most people already not doing that, it makes sense where they ended up.
by NemoNobody | 2025-06-24 09:42:55+00:00
Ok. So, what does that mean to the average American?

I'm curious how many of us know that the US is a republic and of them how many know what that means.

This is rather humorous almost as the term is essentially meaningless in a world where republicanism won the day and democracy is almost everywhere.

A word that appears to provide validity for the Republican party in its anti elite roots - despite the party being the party of the elite now.

That's both problematic and completely unnecessary to even mention.

America is a Democracy. The Republican Party is on its last legs - republicanism, as it can only be interpreted by most Americans, as the ideology of Republicans ;) - also dead.

I'm hoping for at least 2 generations where people are so triggered by the words conservative and the ilk - that we again learn why that's actually a good thing, when used appropriately, sometimes. Very conditionally.

I personally am very sick of treading water as a society and civilization. Evolutionarily speaking, stagnant life, is dead already.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-24 09:43:13+00:00
You can't really survive on that. It's a snowballing situation. It's perhaps a strategy to avert impending catastrophe but it's like pitching an airplane down to gain speed when the engine is stalling. If it gets you to restart the engine the brief nosedive may let you survive, but if you have to keep turning the nose more and more vertical, the you're gonna meet the ground.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-24 09:44:07+00:00
The jurisdictions where a cop will with force put your finger to the fingerprint reader, but won't beat the keys out of you cover most of the first and parts of the second world.

And if you are not in one of those countries just politely ask for a blank white sheet of paper to sign and let them fill the rest. You will save everyone some time.
by Lio | 2025-06-24 09:44:28+00:00
I don't think you even have to say that you have competing offer $1.25X.

Simply stating you have a competing offer also for $X is completely believable and will probably get you a improved offer from one of the two interviewing teams.

Even if it doesn't and you accept at $X then at the very least your new employer now knows that you liked them best. Which is not a bad way to start a new job.

Either way I would never lie and say I had an offer when I didn't. Lying in general is a bad faith strategy and will often come back on you at some point.
by danwills | 2025-06-24 09:45:47+00:00
> the mathematical universe, like our physical one, may be made up mostly of dark matter. “It seems now that most of the universe somehow consists of things that we can’t see,”

Not heaps fond of relating invisible things in the mathematical universe to dark matter! Although maybe both might turn out to be imaginary/purely-abstract? Imaginary things can absolutely influence real things in the universe, it's just that they are not usually external to the thing they are influencing. If I imagine making a cake say, and then I go ahead and make the one I imagined, the 'virtual' cake was already inside me to begin with, and wasn't 'plucked' from a virtual universe of possible cakes somewhere outside my knowledge of cake-making.

Something nags at the back of my mind around this about maths though, as if to suggest that as soon as there was one-of-anything that was kinda an 'instantiation' of the most abstract "one" object from the mathematical universe.. (irrespective of what axioms are used as long as they support something like one) But I doubt there's never been exactly-PI-of-anything in the real universe, just a whole bunch of systems that behave as if they know (or are perhaps in the process of computing) a more exact value! (spherical planets, natural sine waves etc!)

Very interesting article, I wish my math was stronger! I can just skirt the edges of what they're actually talking about and it's tantalizing! Would love to know more about these new types of cardinal numbers they've developed/discovered.
by wqaatwt | 2025-06-24 09:46:07+00:00
> Using an LLM solves that problem, because you don't need a nerd to operate it.

Until you do. LLMs are great ar building prototypes but at some point if you don’t know what you’ll doing you’ll end up with an unmaintainable mess and you won’t have anyone to fix it.

I mean LLMs perhaps are capable of doing that too but they still need to be guided by people who are capable of understanding their output.

Being able to reduce the number of engineers that you need by e.g. 80% would still be a great deal though.
by immibis | 2025-06-24 09:46:14+00:00
Well, yes, pretty much. It's an observed pattern among authoritarian states that actual facts are frequently in opposition to the authority, therefore, actual facts must be eliminated.

It's a silver lining in disguise, really. Such countries tend to collapse relatively quickly because it turns out facts are important for running a country - look at the USSR's fake food supply. Relatively quickly could still be a decade, though.
by avianlyric | 2025-06-24 09:46:56+00:00
This has the rather tone deaf sound of “if you just had financial security, you wouldn’t need to use loans to survive, then you could use them to invest!”.

Which rather misses the point that many people using these tools don’t have financial security, and don’t have the option to invest like that.

Saying that mortgages can be used to buy investment properties doesn’t change the fact that most people use them to provide basic physical security. I.e. a literal roof over their head, that they can’t be taken away with little notice by their landlord for reasons completely beyond their control.

I’ve you’ve never grown up in an environment where the roof over your head isn’t a certainty, and indeed having a different roof over your head every few years is a certainty. Then it can be rather hard to understand why not everyone considers property just an investment opportunity.
by hilbert42 | 2025-06-24 09:47:00+00:00
First, I'm not in the US (I assume you are), so things may be different here. Until recently all were manufactured locally but the latest batch comes from China,

All containers are semitransparent polyethylene, I can mostly see the contents when looking from the side. The Chinese ones are slightly more transparent than the local product. They're not old enough to develop the film (6—12 months), so it remains to be seen what happens to them over time.

They're definitely not PVC—I've chucked enough of the broken ones on the fire over the years and they don't burn with the acrid fumes of PVC (there's no mistaking the choking smell of burning PVC).

Incidentally, on occasions when broken containers have left me short I've repaired them by running a soldering iron along the cracks to melt them together. As with Pb/Sn soldering I'll use a bit of spare material and apply it to the cracks. It melts just like polyethylene. You cannot do that with PVC (at least not practically), by the time it gets hot enough it bubbles and turns black and stinks to high heaven.

A final point, PVC is now banned here for household use—has been for several decades because of its choking fumes/toxic byproducts of combustion in house fires. Electrician friends who are old enough to remember the PVC insulation days still whinge at its loss, the new insulation isn't as robust or as flexible (stripping the insulation off wire isn't as easy as it was with PVC).
by al_borland | 2025-06-24 09:47:43+00:00
Wow, that’s pretty interesting. I wouldn’t think that would be enough to impact it without some accompanying procedures, like expanding the pallet, or some kind of jaw surgery.

Was it right away from getting the braces put on (from a little extra bulk on the teeth), or after they’ve been on for several months, where the movement of the teeth could change the structure of the face around the mouth?
by tikotus | 2025-06-24 09:49:06+00:00
It's the same problem as with generating good sudoku boards. It's not easy, and there's not many publicly available solutions, but solutions exist.

A common opinion is that a good board is solvable without the use of backtracking. A set of known techniques should be enough to solve the board. To validate if a board is "fun" you need to have a program that can solve the board using these known techniques. Making that program is much harder than just making a general solver. And then you need to find the boards that can be validated as fun. Either you search through random boards, or you get clever...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-24 09:49:49+00:00
The fallacy is in expecting corporations to play the role of the government.

Suppose someone posts a YouTube video that you claim is defamatory. How is Google supposed to know if it is or not? It could be entirely factual information that you're claiming is false because you don't want to be embarrassed by the truth. Google is not a reasonable forum for third parties to adjudicate legal disputes because they have no capacity to ascertain who is lying.

What the government is supposed to be doing in these cases is investigating crimes and bringing charges against the perpetrators. Only then they have to incur the costs of investigating the things they want to pass laws against, and take the blame for charges brought against people who turn out to be innocent etc.

So instead the politicians want to pass the buck and pretend that it's an outrage when corporations with neither the obligation nor the capacity to be the police predictably fail in the role that was never theirs.
by nidnogg | 2025-06-24 09:50:27+00:00
I've been using Atuin for at least a year and a half, and I think it's definitely the tool I'd been looking for the most in my entire dev career. It has made me much more confident with my hazy memory. Before it I'd struggle consistently to remember most of my recent commands.

bck-i was always a bit obtuse to me and I honestly never grokked it until I had Atuin wired into my workflow (hard) and ran into bck-i instead when SSH'd.

Anytime a peer views my screenshare, they ask "what's the funny thing that makes you so fast". I then proceed to share, first and foremost, Atuin.

Thanks Atuin team! Would love to contribute someday with more time.