MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kgwxd | 2025-06-24 12:33:31+00:00
> and argues the migration from Windows 10 to Linux Mint is easier than Windows 10 to Windows 11.

This message needs to stop. I use both heavily, because 1. I need to work and 2. I believe it's my duty to attempt to escape the prison MS/Apple/et al have built around us. But running Linux is fucking hard, unless all you need is available in a browser, and even then...

If someone is going in expecting an easy replacement, they're going to leave the second it's not. If they go in believing it's a fight for our collective souls, they might be willing to join the rebellion.
by neilv | 2025-06-24 12:33:39+00:00
That doesn't sound like a good sign for holistic sustainability.

I've been forming a theory about companies that want to do good. Something like, they need a C-suite executive who is a true-believer, and, figuratively, a pissed-off street fighter, who can see threats to the mission coming from a block away.

For a familiar example of when this isn't happening: most of, say, privacy efforts I see can be classified into one of: (1) well-meaning, but don't really know what they're doing, and hopelessly out of their league against the supposed threat; or (2) it's really just a product marketing angle, for individual pursuit of career or riches.
by jcarterwil | 2025-06-24 12:33:56+00:00
Pears grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand, sold in the US: is an example of how convoluted and absurd our food supply chains have become. Shipping fruit thousands of miles for processing, driven by a system that prioritizes lowest cost per calorie over nutritional value. Time to disrupt this status quo by reframing food as a vector for health rather than just a commodity. Time to align agriculture and supply chains with health outcomes (like fresher, nutrient-dense food produced closer to consumers). Improving public health and creating new economic opportunities for farmers.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-24 12:34:04+00:00
Every time a municipality levies a requirement upon new development the price of everything that could be used the same way goes up by that amount since it's the "next best thing". I got told I need to spend $20-50k on engineered assessments and plans to clear an old farm field that was left to grown over for 30yr and is now considered "forest" by (a single unelected employee of) the municipality.

Game out the economic implications of that sort of regulatory behavior across the entire real estate and housing sectors and suddenly a lot of stuff that makes no sense makes a lot more sense.
by api | 2025-06-24 12:34:34+00:00
My take on "worse is better" is that "worse is cheap / free / low friction."

Better -- meaning polished, thoroughly engineered, correct, etc. -- is often heavier in terms of hardware requirements. It's also often a lot of work by serious career devs or big companies and costs money and has a non-OSS license.

All that increases not only cost but more importantly friction. So the "worse" cheap/free unencumbered thing goes viral and takes over instead.

I should add the caveat though -- it's cheap/free up front but you pay later in bugs and ugly hacks to make it work at larger scale. But up front friction matters more than friction later. If it's cheap/free in terms of cost or friction now, you'll already have sunk cost by the time the real cost becomes apparent.
by itsoktocry | 2025-06-24 12:34:40+00:00
>They're closer than ever to solving driving at scale.

Well, yes, if by "closer than ever" you mean marginally closer than they were yesterday, sure.

It's a big step, but there's still a ton to prove. The gap between promises and reality is still large. Waymo is still ahead.

>I haven't had a safety intervention in many months on just random roads.

No one believes you.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-06-24 12:34:43+00:00
Social media is so easy to fill with unaccountable non-genuine activity (bots, shills, trolls, influencers, guerilla marketers, reputation managers, bored attention seekers) that I no longer consider most social media a valid heuristic for what "everyone thinks." I made this decision after looking at the profiles of those who tended to post like that, most of the time they seem fake.

What is the valid heuristic is that what you see on it all the time is clearly what someone wants you think.

Someone in real life that cites rando social media too much is probably on their phone too much or themselves in a non-genuine activity group.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 12:36:02+00:00
I like maximalist prompts, and indeed Starship is what Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs on a new dev machine. But they're not everyone's cup of tea.

If I wanted to recommend to someone the min-maxed, highest density thing they could add to their prompt, it would simply be the time your current prompt appeared + the amount of time the last command you ran took.

These two pieces of information together make it very easy for you (or your local sysadmin (or an LLM looking over your digital shoulder)) to piece together a log of exactly what happened when. This kind of psuedo-non-repudiation can be invaluable for debugging sessions when you least expect it.

This was a tip I distilled from Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators a few years ago, which remains my preferred recommendation for any developers looking to learn just enough about networking to not feel totally lost when talking to an actual network engineer.

Bonus nerd points if you measure time in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Very easy and fast to run time delta calculations if you do that:

[0 1719242840] $ echo "foo" [0 1719242905] $ echo "fell asleep before hitting enter" && sleep 5 [5 1719242910] $

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu
Show HN: I made a tool to find war reporters around the world
by progju | 2025-06-24 12:36:52+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been studying abroad in the Middle East (to become a journalist) for the past few months and I've been lucky enough to meet people from all over: e.g. Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, and so on.

Talking to them has deepened my worldview by a few orders of magnitude -- it's one thing to read the news, but it's another to actually talk to someone from the place you're researching.

A lot of them keep up with situations in their home countries by following local reporters on social media, but they can be pretty hard to find unless you do some digging on your own.

I built this to solve that problem -- in a nutshell: it's crowdsourcing frontline reporters. You can:

1. Learn about journalists/perspectives in places you might not usually see on the news

2. Add journalists that you follow (on social media, etc.)

Would love any feedback!

Sequoyah
by ajross | 2025-06-24 12:38:05+00:00
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.

This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.

And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.

The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.
by cmiller1 | 2025-06-24 12:38:11+00:00
I have software people use up on pypi and I'd love to switch to uv for personal use to benefit from the improved speed but I'd need some guarantees that things work EXACTLY how they work on pip or that I could run them concurrently. If I put instructions up for users to "just run pip install xxx" I need to know that if they see any errors I can see those too for debugging/troubleshooting.
by Hilift | 2025-06-24 12:38:11+00:00
He was only describing hardware that was available at the time in businesses. Around that same time, Digital had a product called Pathworks that was very popular. All the PC's used standard unshielded twisted pair Ethernet. It wasn't that expensive. The Pathworks license was about $3,000 per VMS server though. This was great due to Windows NT didn't become popular until 3.51 in 1995 or so. Even then it was 100% interoperable with VMS LANMAN file servers and vice versa. NetWare 3.1 was also popular starting in 1991, although that far back the slim coax cable was still in use.
by ericfrederich | 2025-06-24 12:39:03+00:00
I am totally against Python tooling being written in a language other than Python. I get that C extensions exist and for the most part Python is synonymous with CPython.

I think 2 languages are enough, we don't need a 3rd one that nobody asked for.

I have nothing against Rust. If you want a new tool, go for it. If you want a re-write of an existing tool, go for it. I'm against it creeping into an existing eco-system for no reason.

A popular Python package called Pendulum went over 7 months without support for 3.13. I have to imagine this is because nobody in the Python community knew enough Rust to fix it. Had the native portion of Pendulum been written in C I would have fixed it myself.

https://github.com/python-pendulum/pendulum/issues/844

In my ideal world if someone wanted fast datetimes written in Rust (or any other language other than C) they'd write a proper library suitable for any language to consume over FFI.

So far this Rust stuff has left a bad taste in my mouth and I don't blame the Linux community for being resistant.
by dmd | 2025-06-24 12:39:18+00:00
But the inline_height seems to be a constant, rather than a percentage of the window, which is weird.

As long as you're here, do you know if the column showing the amount of time the command took can be removed? I know you can remove it from "atuin history list" with history_format, but I don't see a way to remove it from the inline window.
by bhouston | 2025-06-24 12:39:54+00:00
I really don't understand why VISA / Mastercard / American Express / Debit Cards do not have a email associated with them that will automatically get sent receipts when you use those cards - or have them show up in the bank that issued the card.

It would be amazing and seems like a straight forward extension of the charge card industry. Of course end user machines will have to be updated, but that can happen over a period of years, but it is a straight forward extension.

And the email / identity shouldn't be disclosed to the sellers, instead the receipts should be sent to charge card's infrastructure along with the charge/payment. And then from there it is distributed to the users.

Maybe Apple and Google and Samsung could somehow extend their Apple Pay / Google Pay / Samsung Pay APIs to enable receipts automatically and start to push for that. If Apple advertised it in their keynote, and say StarBucks and Home Depot and Walmart supported it, we would soon have this everywhere.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-24 12:40:24+00:00
And yet, why are we here? It would seem some bad actors have lead us to the now familiar, "That's why we can't have nice things." (It's as though permissiveness and anonymity have a slippery slope as well.)

You can hate the legislation, but it would be nice to hear some alternative ideas that go beyond, "We just have to accept all the horrific stuff that the bad actors out there want to throw onto the internet.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-06-24 12:40:43+00:00
I've just launched this week. It's not the most exciting tool (marketing may not be my forte), I'm not trying to change the world, but I'm hoping it meets a need and there's a gap in the market for it.

The gist of it is, it's a simple piece of JS that can be included to harvest feedback from users, categorise it and then based on those categories send it on. So, dev requests to Jira/Github, sales requests to a Trello list say, cyber security to Asana, support requests to Slack, whatever the breakdown is.

So I'm really targeting organisations that are small enough that they still use an email address for contact but are large enough to have multiple job roles.

If anyone would be kind enough to try it (and even dog-food it by clicking the lightbulb at the top of the landing page to send any feedback), you can get 30 days free with the code LB30.

Thanks all.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-06-24 12:40:52+00:00
Science communicators are typically the people who aren't good enough to do research.

I can tell that the ideas you're conveying don't come from your own experience, I'm guessing you heard them from a "science communicator"?

By contrast, I do have direct experience, and the best people were doing research, not talking to the media, and they were perfectly aware what kind of evidence exists for which ideas - in fact more than anything else, this is what being an expert is.

Talking to the media is a different job than being a researcher, I'm sure you'll agree. What I would like to understand is where this belief of yours come from, that the less knowledgeable people will have a better high level picture? Wouldn't the best high level people come from experts who make an effort to learn about those aspects?
by bheadmaster | 2025-06-24 12:41:00+00:00
> Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way.

To me, it doesn't sound like you did. The parent comment of yours just stated, albeit bluntly, that the "invention" and "discovery" are fundamentally the same. Whether we use one or the other depends on how big the size of the space of the possibilities feels to us. Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".

When you invent a way to make music, did you really invent it? Or did you simply discover a particular configuration of atoms that can produce sound when handled in a particular way, that was already there in some platonic universe of ideals? Either way, the end result is the same. Nothing really changes.
by diggan | 2025-06-24 12:41:04+00:00
> relevant portion of this change is the addition

No, that was there before too. What's new is the legal address in the bottom, that now specifies Netherlands, and a KVK+BTW identifier.

"-" prefix on a line in a diff indicates removals, "+" prefix indicates additions.

But yeah, I'd expect them to also make some sort of announcement blog post explaining the change.
by KeplerBoy | 2025-06-24 12:41:13+00:00
That's completely besides the point. How long does an embedded linux box need to get it's GPU up and ready for number crunching? But yes, FPGAs are best-suited for deterministic low latency stuff.

With the jetsons (agx orin) I have on my desk it would take a bit of tinkering to even get it under a minute.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-06-24 12:42:10+00:00
Enh. I have no great love for most SOC 2 reports. They're seemingly endless and contain lots of blah blah blah and they're written defensively, so it's often hard to get actionable intel and insight out of them. But the System Description and the auditor exceptions are often helpful.

But forget the report for a moment. The work that goes into answering the questions and providing the evidence requires tidiness and systematic attention at a scale and duration that is unlikely without the SOC 2 (or ISO xxxxx or whatever) audit looming. That imposed journey is very much the reward.

YMMV, but as someone who's wrangled organizations through multiple years and scopes of SOC 2: You may not get a lot out of the final report, but the process is a tremendous forcing function for good practices that most organizations need.
by vharuck | 2025-06-24 12:42:14+00:00
It is amazing what Euclid was able to prove and, frankly, even imagine using just geometric figures.

Nowadays, we have symbolic notation. The only research articles I read are for epidemiology, so I don't know how much notation is used in pure math journals. But I can't remember seeing any notation in those articles beyond what one would encounter in high school. I guess authors see more value in deceptive narrative and descend into strict logical languages only when necessary.
by mzl | 2025-06-24 12:42:19+00:00
Directly modelling the unique solution property would be a quantified problem, essentially it would be "there exists a solution such that it is not the case that there exists a different solution". In principle, you can explode this into an enumeration of all O(n!) placements of queens and saying "either the placement is the same as the solution, or it is not a solution". That significantly increases the model size though.

For the symmetry, LinkedIn Queens generally do not have symmetric boards since that would imply more than one solution.
by fainpul | 2025-06-24 12:42:55+00:00
People are also struggling with Windows (any version). Especially installing programs (clicking through wizards, answering lots of questions they don't understand) and installing device drivers (how to even know what to do, to the get a device working? where to find drivers?) are often too much for non-technical users on Windows. Both of these are much easier (or unnecessary) on most Linux distros. No matter which OS they use, they will sometimes have to ask someone more knowledgable to solve some problems.
by graemep | 2025-06-24 12:43:01+00:00
As for exposure to science. I think Max Planck had rather a lot, and he said:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

The idea that experts are super-humanly free from bias is ridiculous.
by roenxi | 2025-06-24 12:43:26+00:00
What is the article's point? It strings together a bunch of facts into a fact string. Everything causes cancer and it turns out microplastics cause cancer since they are a thing. They (might, correlation and causation) double the risk of heart attacks which is comparable to a lazy bloke having a desk job. Might be lazy blokes with desk jobs have more microwave dinners though so who knows if that is a real signal.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-06-24 12:44:39+00:00
We know why, I'm sure you get it, too. Roughly half the population meets new counterintuitive ideas with curiosity, and the other half discomfort. New ideas about sexuality and gender are particularly hard for the latter to process because those are such fundamental parts of our identity that it's hard to be flexible about the concepts.

Everything that played out about homosexuality and interracial romance etc. is happening with transgenderism. The fear is as predictable and inevitable as the broad societal acceptance of the new idea, it just takes time to unfold and the only way out is through.

Hence, this hypothesis. Half the population is compelled to work backwards from the discomfort to a comforting idea.
by nemo44x | 2025-06-24 12:44:42+00:00
Well, people have never lived longer and basically starvation and even hunger for many people has been eliminated. People are far more likely to get sick from eating too much and acquiring a disease than they are from any of the things you’ve mentioned.

Everything is a tradeoff I guess. The question is if this is a good one and if so how can we make it a better one. Alarmism is going to fall on deaf ears when the reality isn’t as bleak.
by throw0101c | 2025-06-24 12:45:57+00:00
> And what's stopping the American people from voting smart people with engineering degrees to power instead of lying loud mouth conmen?

The fact that people vote at all.

Running for office is a risky endeavour: you have to take time off from your job to actually run, with a decent chance of not winning. How many employers would be willing to give you a leave of absence to do this? Further, if you happen to lose your seat you are now unemployed: who is going to hire someone who has not been in the field for x years?

Law is probably one field where one can hop in and out easily, so it's why we have so many lawyers go into politics: the practice of the field doesn't change too quickly, so one can always join a firm. Similarly if you are a "businessman" you can give yourself time off from your own business (let someone else manage/CEO) since you're the boss.

Whereas in an engineering or technical field, you basically have to end your career in it. Or you perhaps stop being a day-to-day participant and go into a more generic 'management' role where it is easier to hop around companies in case you need to enter/leave politics depending on how many votes go your way.

Whereas in the CCP, (AIUI) you basically go into the 'management track' and get appointed to various positions with-in the party. You never "leave" your career as you move up the party leadership chain.
by mek6800d2 | 2025-06-24 12:46:18+00:00
Just to be clear, the computers onboard the spacecraft are programmed in assembly language--3 types of computers on each spacecraft, so 3 assembly languages.

The original ground system was mostly written in Fortran. Mission control (i.e., the thing you see on TV!) ran on IBM 360 mainframes. Offline analysis/design/development activities (e.g., developing observation sequences for planetary encounters) ran on Univac 1108 mainframes. Circa 1990, after Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune, the project began moving off the mainframes onto Unix workstations and the original Fortran software was largely replaced by new software written in C and other languages.
by Straw | 2025-06-24 12:46:57+00:00
You can do all of these in terms of matmul to some extent:

Solving AX=B can be done with Newton's method to invert A, which boils down to matmuls.

Matrix exponential is normally done with matmuls- the scale down, Taylor/Pade and square approach.

Why do you need Cholesky? It's typically a means to an end, and when matmul is your primitive, you reach for it much less often.

Eigendecomposition is hard. If we limit ourselves to symmetric, we could use a blocked Jacobi algorithm where we run a non-matmul Jacobi to do 128x128 off-diagonal blocks and then use the matmul unit to apply to the whole matrix- for large enough matrices, still bottlenecked on matmul.

SVD we can get from Polar decomposition, which has purely-matmul iterations, and symmetric eigendecomposition.

One does have to watch out for numerical stability and precision very carefully when doing all these!
by sneak | 2025-06-24 12:48:09+00:00
I’m not a denier, nor do I dispute climate change, but it seems taken for granted that extreme weather events as of late are caused directly by climate change.

It seems probable; likely even.

But how do we know? Is it a guess?

The very fact that New York hit this temperature in 1888 (pre industrial revolution) suggests that we can’t take it on faith, as we have at least one data point that suggests heat spikes like this have happened in recent planet history without extra atmospheric CO2.
by LinXitoW | 2025-06-24 12:48:18+00:00
There's no system the same way there's no Facebook, just some databases and servers. Or there's no Java language, it's all just UTF-8 characters. Or there's no government, there's just people voting for other people. Or there's no society, it's all just fancy apes existing and making decisions.

It's quite frankly ludicrous to be a software engineer and pretend systems don't arise from "individual" "independent" elements.