MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiveturkey | 2025-06-16 18:38:17+00:00
The bandwidth of a single starlink terminal is going to be saturated at airplane capacity anyway. The extra number of people on a cruise ship just means service degradation, not excess bandwidth consumption.

The price difference is just based on what the market will bear. Trapped on a cruise for a week, you are much more desperate for Internet. Plus you've paid a lot more for the trip and the fee doesn't feel so large compared to all the other upsells. The cruise often is the vacation, whereas air travel is just the means to an end.
by tguvot | 2025-06-16 18:38:20+00:00
>To ask about what you don't know, to skip the 'tedious part' (I don't feel like looking for answers, especially troubleshooting arcane technical issues among pages of forums or social media, makes me smarter in any way whatsoever, especially that the information usually needs to be verified and taken with a grain of salt).

quoting the article:

Perhaps one of the more concerning findings is that participants in the LLM-to-Brain group repeatedly focused on a narrower set of ideas, as evidenced by n-gram analysis (see topics COURAGE, FORETHOUGHT, and PERFECT in Figures 82, 83, and 85, respectively) and supported by interview responses. This repetition suggests that many participants may not have engaged deeply with the topics or critically examined the material provided by the LLM.

When individuals fail to critically engage with a subject, their writing might become biased and superficial. This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.

Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.
by nathan_compton | 2025-06-16 18:38:24+00:00
Yes, but it has a variety of very unappealing physical properties. I mean for one thing, no one has all that information in the first place, but it would also be a theory were large scale correlations between outcomes would exist with space-like separations which would be weird, though clearly not impossible. T'Hooft's cellular automata approach has these properties and I guess its valid, although I don't know if it can be used to make non-trivial predictions.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-16 18:38:33+00:00
Linus is a great example actually, because people pointed out he was being too much of an asshole, and he eventually agreed, and he reduced the toxicity of his rhetoric, but you can bet if the situation called for it, he would still use vulgarity to get his point across.

If you totally ban profanity or vulgarity, all you do is force other words to take up the slack of what people use those words for, and therefore increase ambiguity.

Don't lazily add profanity to the code base because you are a child (ie no, don't use "fuck1" as a variable name FFS) but if there is something truly insane going on, I'm going to write "This is fucking magic" in the code, and my coworkers will know to give that code the respect it deserves.

Consider the fast inverse square root code. Most people only know it because "what the fuck" in a comment. Intensifiers are useful in communication.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrecisionFStrike

Your code SHOULD have few swears because few situations deserve an intensifier like that, but some situations absolutely call for it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-16 18:38:45+00:00
Not just Canadians. According to the source for the article, Canada is the second largest market for semaglutide. Canada has a decent fraction of obese people, but in terms of absolute numbers it's far from 2nd. This can be explained by the fact that lots of Americans are already getting their semaglutide from Canada. Once the patent expires next year and the price drops, that number is going to go up substantially.
by miki123211 | 2025-06-16 18:38:54+00:00
Criminal records should be available, but in a controlled way.

Where I live (Poland), only the person itself can request their criminal record from the state. This is a routine procedure required by some employers, you can even do it online these days.

Most if not all criminal offenses "expire" after some years, how long depends on the offense. If there's something you've been charged with but not convicted of, it doesn't appear on the record.

This is easier to implement for us because there are limitations on how media can report on criminals (no last names for example). Even in the US, I think that system could be workable. Instead of attacking distributions of "unedited" criminal records, you'd have to target employers and require them to only acquire the state-approved versions.
by recursinging | 2025-06-16 18:39:37+00:00
This is cool, but still lagging behind VS Code. I still can't the enterprise/premium models in VS (I can in VS Code) so no Claude 4 Sonnet. I even went so far as to try some C# dev in VS Code just to see how the Claude 4 deals with C# - Meh. In comparison, I just wrapped up a C++ microcontroller project in VS Code using agent mode and it was amazing. In retrospect I recognize that Claude will resort to grep and other text based tools. This works well when all the sources are included, less so with Nuget packages. If the models can aim better at intellisense tooling, they'd be more effective. IMO Copilot agents in VS are not quite there, but not far off.
Ask HN: What are the most "upvoted" things you can buy here? Here are a few
by 01-_- | 2025-06-16 18:39:45+00:00
I've seen several threads over the years with physical or digital products that have generated hundreds of upvotes and discussions. I decided to put together some of the most mentioned - tools, gadgets and books that have a practical impact and that you can actually buy.

Here are a few that I've seen highly recommended or discussed:

1. The Art of Unix Programming (book) - Discussion of Unix philosophy, widely quoted here. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0131429019)

2. PinePhone - Smartphone with Linux. Loved by those who defend free software and privacy. (https://www.pine64.org/)

3. Sony WH-1000XM5 - Noise-canceling headset. Appears in all productivity threads. (https://www.sony.com/)

4. ErgoDox EZ - Split ergonomic keyboard, customizable and often used by full-time devs. (https://ergodox-ez.com/)

5. Raspberry Pi 5 - Tiny computer with a thousand possibilities (servers, personal projects, etc). (https://www.raspberrypi.com/)

Do you have any others that you bought on HN's recommendation that were really worthwhile? If so, add them here (https://wishtogether.xyz/insertgif?id=68504cf34b) I want to expand this list based on what really worked for you.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-16 18:39:53+00:00
Most DOS emulators have great support for things like Roland's sound bank ROMs. It's pretty wild to suggest that on today's Windows sometimes the best way to experience MIDI files is to maybe download a questionably illegal ROM and load up a MIDI player written for DOS in DOSBox.

It seems like a missing market for vendors to directly support better sound fonts for Windows, maybe we'd see more files written for it again. But also, there's some sense that most of the best written General MIDI files for direct consumption were always the ones for videogames and it has been left as a matter for emulation for that reason as videogames themselves moved on to different tech.

Still though, there's something about loading Monkey Island 2 with a Roland MT-32 era sound font in DREAMM and experiencing what it does with "live" MIDI instrumentation that modern games wish they could do, and sounds nearly as good doing it. For certain values of nearly, of course. Redbook audio gave us all the lovely little "mistakes" of live band things like jazz performances that MIDI could never quite replicate in the same way. I wouldn't necessarily trade modern orchestration for MIDI in all cases, but it is easy for me to imagine that it might be great to see both side-by-side and the best of both in interactive media, best tool for each job style.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-16 18:40:39+00:00
> China is doing pretty well on the innovation front, including with AI.

From transistors to transformers, most of it builds on foundation that comes guess from where. The innovative layer you speak of is fairly thin.

> Correlation does not imply causation.

I give you that. However, without being able to re-run history, correlation is all we have.

> I would even suggest that it is the disregarding of IP rights that enables much of the web

I would suggest that much of the tech that powers the Web, including probably the most popular operating system on which most servers run, is enabled by copyleft, and copyleft cannot exist without the ability to defend it granted by IP rights, the very concept under fire.

> the point of copyright is to encourage new works

I agree on this.

> All this becomes somewhat irrelevant when AI can also create new works

I don’t agree with a phrase “AI can create new works” for reasons such as 1) “AI” is a meaningless term (let it be my revenge for consciousness) or 2) a tool without agency or will should not be X in a sentence “X can Y” (sure, we can maybe on occasion say “hammers can break things”, but if hammers having agency and will was a popular misconception then I would definitely prefer to stick to “hammers can be used to break things”). The “create new works” part is also questionable on a few levels, but it might exceed the scope of this argument.

That aside, I believe lack of copyright enforcement discourages the creation of new works even in presence of these tools, through the mechanism known as “why would I put effort into new work if I don’t effectively own the result”.

> Does that mean you accept that, in principle, there could be some AI which would deserve rights in the category currently (but in principle inaccurately) called "human rights"?

I think if we believe an LLM or some other software is sufficiently close to a human that it deserves human-like rights or just strong abuse protections (cf. octopus in some countries)—without saying whether I believe it possible or not, it really is orthogonal—then we could excuse it reciting some part of Harry Potter in the right context (probably not as work for hire), but it would be moot because we would also be ethically compelled to not subject it to the training and use that enables such recitation in the first place.
by RedGreenBlack | 2025-06-16 18:41:09+00:00
I recently deleted Snapchat and downloaded all my data. Instead of just archiving it, I built a tool that extracts one second from each video and stitches them into a fast-forward look at your life.

It’s super interesting to see yourself, friends, and kids grow in 1-second snippets

I open-sourced the tool here: https://github.com/benna100/snap-one-second-videos

It includes: - Step-by-step guide to export your Snapchat data - Script to extract and clean video clips (fixes broken metadata too)
by 7373737373 | 2025-06-16 18:41:23+00:00
WiFi (with extra hardware, mostly antennas/routers, not too expensive anymore either) CAN offer (even tens of) kilometers of range, at least point to point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lYJFwXw1ZIc

https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-ltu-5ghz/pro...

only 9W max power consumption too! well, that's not a few hundred milliwatts, still, better then ye olde lightbulb

PLUS gigabit throughput

if only our network stacks and protocols didn't assume hierarchical (local) networks by default, and kernels included p2p network stacks, then i'd feel more confident about blackouts being handled more gracefully

well, i suppose all this depends heavily on the nature of the emergency

generally i'm surprised that the sheer computational power of modern smartphones are not used more for this purpose, i haven't come across much true p2p software

on another note, there is still no (truly) cross-platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop standard (especially one without artificial limitations), which is a shame

also i want to note that smartphones can even communicate directly with satellites now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
by msgodel | 2025-06-16 18:42:57+00:00
We fought an entire civil war to free the blacks, they're more free here than in many places in Africa. We preceded most countries with giving women rights and even many of the most misogynist people here want them to have more rights than they have in most of the rest of the world.

If we gave minorities and women any more than they already have we'd have to actively take things from other people here (and in some cases we're already doing that.) The idea that we now or have historically not been near or at the frontier of this is completely absurd and actually historically illiterate.
by bediger4000 | 2025-06-16 18:43:07+00:00
Start with the word "content", which elides all distinction between word, image and video, implying that every piece can be thought of as a goopy pablum. Then move on to "consume", a lazy, weak word that is meant to subsume "reading", "viewing", and any subsequent thought or rumination.

"Consuming" "content" is by design less interesting than any of the actions that marketeers are too lazy or too greedy to name and promote explicitly.
by BostonFern | 2025-06-16 18:43:34+00:00
First of all, the WTC towers did withstand the impacts but collapsed due to the ensuing fires which weakened the remaining core columns (notably not due to collapsing floors, which did not in fact occur, according to Thornton-Tomasetti who have modeled the impacts and ensuing collapses as part of their forensic investigation commissioned for the insurance claim litigation).

Leslie Robertson, who lead the WTC structural engineering team along with John Skilling, is on tape making the 707 claim, but no surviving documentation has been uncovered to reveal the specific scenario that was modeled or the calculations used.

An important reason why the towers survived the impacts at all was the presence of the two hat trusses, which allowed the increasingly unsupported loads to be redistributed to the surviving exterior columns. Najib N. Abboud of Thornton-Thomasetti has given a detailed account of the findings of the forensic investigation that's available on Youtube[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/b2wimsBPmYI?feature=shared
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-16 18:44:01+00:00
Seekable format is so cool! Like I used to think things like having a zip file which can be paused and recontinued from the moment as one of my friend had this massive zip file (ahem) and he said it said 24 hours and I was like pretty sure there's a way...

And then kinda learned about criu and I think criu can technically do it but IDK, I in fact started to try to create the zip project in golang but failed it over... Pretty nice to know that zstd exists

Its not a zip file but technically its compressed and I guess you can technically still encode the data in such a way that its essentially zip in some sense...

This is why I come on hackernews.
by iLemming | 2025-06-16 18:44:02+00:00
> I really dont get the idea of having a vim mode in emacs

vim-mode is not just about keybindings.

It's about modal editing philosophy - the distinction between command and insert modes fundamentally changes how you think about text manipulation. When you're in command mode, every key becomes a text object or motion command, making complex edits incredibly efficient. You're not just getting vim's keybindings; you're getting vim's grammar of editing. The real power comes from composability - vim motions aren't just shortcuts - they're a linguistic system for describing text transformations.

Emacs veterans often detest "modality" without realizing how much modality already exists in Emacs. Key chords like C-x put you in a modal state where the next key has different meaning. Recording macros creates a modal context. The minibuffer is literally a different mode with its own keybindings and behavior. Transient menus are explicitly modal interfaces. Even isearch is a modal state. Vim-style modality is just making this concept more explicit and systematic.

Besides, it's simply an obtuse exercise to ask Emacs users why would they do something with their editor. The answer is obviously "because they can."

Vim's model of modality and mnemonics is a beautiful, powerful, amazing paradigm. Here's the thing though - there's no such thing as the "vim-mode". None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. The one exception is Emacs.

Pretty much every other IDE fails to comprehensively replicate Vim. Unless it's Vim/Neovim, vim-mode in all of them is just that - an emulation. However, Evil mode in Emacs feels much more natural. Sometimes, you forget that it's an afterthought, an extension, and not a built-in functionality.

While Evil-mode obviously is not the most important or even built-in feature of Emacs, as a nerd and a computer programmer, if I discovered that there's a civilian plane that can perform a vertical landing, yet never actually needs to use it, I would still love that model over any other planes, even if the feature is purely accidental. The fact that it can do so alone would be great evidence of amazing engineering.
by const_cast | 2025-06-16 18:44:51+00:00
The problem is that the manufacturer of course has a very strong incentive to stand with themselves. People don't advocate against themselves, and companies are no different.

When J&J found out about potential asbestos contamination in their baby powder in the 70s, they managed to convince the FDA that they would research and handle it. It took until 2020 for it to come to light that they did not do that, and that, in fact, their baby powder was contaminated.

They ran multiple studies, and some of them even showed that the amount of asbestos in their product was dangerous. But those studies never saw the light of day, and the company acted in a self-preserving manner. It's a similar story with 3M and byproducts of Teflon.

But, federal or state agencies have no alliance to a company's bottom line. They don't have the same incentives to lie or downplay. So, I think, it only makes sense that they should be responsible for testing directly, not just supervising.

I also think we need to adopt some legislation so that we must test products before we release them. You may be shocked to know you're allowed to release new chemical products without proving their safety, and you can even release new food products without proving their safety. Most of these products end up being okay in the long run, but some we have to retroactively ban. It would be easier for everyone if we begin in a banned state.
by redskyluan | 2025-06-16 18:44:55+00:00
Most vector database benchmarks today focus on toy use cases: static data, pure ANN search, no filters, no writes.

That’s not how things work in production.

We built VectorDBBench to benchmark vector databases under real-world conditions. It’s open source and just hit v1.0.0.

What’s new in v1.0.0:

Label Filtering + vector search tests

Concurrent read/write under pressure

Customer dataset

Better webUI

It supports several popular vector DBs out of the box (Milvus, Weaviate, Qdrant, Chroma, etc.) and is easy to extend.

If you’re building anything with RAG, embeddings, or search infra, we’d love feedback.
by horsellama | 2025-06-16 18:46:15+00:00
OP, are you my manager by any chance? /s

This resonates with me a lot, I can try to show you my perspective.

Been there 10+ yrs, started as “graduate” and never officially got a promotion but I’m now considered principal. This is mostly because I own responsibilities for a big chunk of the core technology. I used to put in 60+ hrs/week and implemented the shiny new products we’re basing our revenue. Salary wise I’m in a mid tier (lower bound) and thanks to our flat hierarchy I don’t have anywhere to go on my career path. More senior engineers to learn from left and we don’t hire juniors to mentor.

I used to be a 10x engineer, delivering 10x. I still am but now I work 1/10th to deliver 1. Pay isn’t great but it’s amazing for how much I work. I think I have golden handcuffs after all. You know, life gets in the way and all of a sudden pushing configs for a saas becomes way less important (and interesting) than, say, spending time with family.

Add all those useless bureaucratic wrapper around any process (I spend 50% of my standing desk time on meetings) and the infinite friction against any new proposal from my side. It’s like they want to kill instead of fostering innovation.

Sorry for the rant, but while looking for a way to sac the guy, you better look also at your organization.

ps the market is horrible at the moment, I’m not leaving just because it’s not that straightforward
by thinkcontext | 2025-06-16 18:46:29+00:00
Wanted to give a plug for joining your country's marrow donor registry. As mentioned in the article one of the last ditch treatment options is a marrow stem cell transplant from a donor. Finding a compatible donor can be difficult. On average the odds of finding a match in the general population is 1:10,000, and it can be much worse for some sub-populations. National registries have greatly increased the odds of finding a matching donor but there are people that die while looking for one.

Getting in the registry is easy in the US. You fill out a form on NMDP.org's website, they mail you a free kit, you swab your cheek and mail it back. Something like 1:800 people in the registry ever get contacted about being a donor, so its a pretty rare event. As far as being a donor, I believe around 90% of donations can be done by filtering the blood of the donor, the rest are done surgically.

I was a donor a few years ago after matching through the registry. It was a pretty rewarding experience. Like many people I've had relatives and friends impacted in various ways by cancer. Usually, you get a very powerless feeling as you wait for the process to play out, being a donor felt good because there was something that I could do. Happy to answer questions about the process.

https://www.nmdp.org/get-involved/join-the-registry
by econ | 2025-06-16 18:46:29+00:00
That is by design to keep you engaged. My current phone has 7050 mah and 80w charging. I charge it twice per week or so. If you have a slightly chaotic life you have to consider charging 30 times per day, hoard cables and charge powerbanks only to have it die anyway. Now I have one cable that doesn't move and doesn't break.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-16 18:46:53+00:00
If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going to be more profitable and more successful working remotely, I don't think the threat is credible of some commercial property owning shareholders deciding to further underperform the market by dumping shares unless that company made the decision to underperform by forcing RTO.

"If you want to threaten me that you'll underperform unless I do, be my guest..."

I suspect that different companies could have different motivations (including potentially forcing resignations), but it strains credibility for me that it's to answer to shareholders in conflict with what they think will make them successful.
by 542354234235 | 2025-06-16 18:47:46+00:00
>You put it in quote marks, but the only search results are from you writing it here on HN.

They said it was a rule of thumb, which is a general rule based on experience. In context with the comment they were replying to, it seems that they are saying that if you want to learn and understand something, you should put the effort in yourself first to synthesize your ideas and write out a full essay, then use an LLM to refine, tighten up, and polish it. In contrast to using an LLM as you go to take your core ideas and expand them. Both might end up very good essays, but your understanding will be much deeper if you follow the "LLMs are good at reducing text, not expanding it" rule.