MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-21 16:24:52+00:00
In my experience doing plumbing/hydraulics/pneumatics for industrial equipment, the first generation of a new product always looks way more complex than later versions. But I'm not sure they're actually more complex, they're often using a smaller variety of more flexible "industrial Lego" rather than custom, unique parts that are harder to extend or modify.

Yeah, a single welded tube of the right diameter that necks down just so in that one spot to prevent cavitation, which has that sweeping multi-planar bend to just barely sneak through that obstruction, will look neat and tidy to a casual observer. Conversely, a stack of triclamp flanges, a straight length of pipe that shoots way out away from the guts of the equipment before it jogs sideways and down and back in with 90 degree couplings and gaskets and a manual shut-off valve and a pressure transmitter/flow meter and a "T" with a cap (just in case) and a sight glass looks like an awful mess.

But I can build the latter in half an hour with parts we have on hand. And I'm not even a fitter, I'm an engineer! And when you do want to add something to it, I can do that in 5 minutes. After observing it function through the full regime of pressure and flow and viscosity parameters the equipment might have to deal with, I can maybe generate a print for the real plumbers to build the former dedicated-purpose component that sets all the constraints in stone (or rather, in welded stainless). That part will be unique and inflexible, embedding all the restrictions and history and test results and design decisions into a component that looks deceptively smooth to a layman's eyes.

Is that simpler? I suppose it depends on your perspective.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-21 16:25:03+00:00
I think this paper is what I was looking for, thanks. I may have to reread it after becoming more familiar with the chemical/physical nature of:

> Photoexcitation energy is rapidly transferred through an antenna network before reaching the reaction center

I didn't know that. With this in mind, perhaps a better formulation of my question is not:

> Why are plants green?

But instead:

> Why are green photosynthetic pigments more common than others?

Based on my read of this paper, the answer to that would be that a pigment which absorbed only a single narrow band of light would be prone to being either over or under powered most of the time. Absorbing red and blue, but not green, provides more opportunities to deliver constant power at the reaction center despite varying light conditions.
by techpineapple | 2025-07-21 16:25:03+00:00
It’s hard for me to see the chicken and the egg here (odd tech approval started declining in 2016 but they blame Biden)

But there’s a flywheel here, where the world seems to have turned on tech, and then, rather than say product managing the problem, tech turns further against the world.

Andreesen says this directly, where he’s mad that the world no longer recognizes philanthropy, so rather than trying to say, how can we serve people better to create what they value, it’s becoming, what if AI meant we didn’t have to make anybody happy. Peter Thiel paused when asked if humanity was good and should continue.

That’s a pretty fucked up response to a loss of popularity.
by pama | 2025-07-21 16:25:04+00:00
I agree vague language in popular press is sometimes annoying.

“Off by 17 orders of magnitude” would be off by 136 billion years, so not that much for sure. Assuming you want to be able to test the plant and or maintain it once per year, 43 seconds is less than 6 orders of magnitude off. The jump was more than a full order of magnitude compared to past records, so another handful such developments and we are there.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-07-21 16:25:15+00:00
> the actual cost of the home after the interest is 2x the total loan amount. So people dont want to sell for what they feel like is a loss.

You're not taking a loss though; any payment above that month's interest goes to principle. If you sell, usually you take that money and kill the rest of the principle and and end the mortgage.

YMMV outside the US, of course.
by TrevorFSmith | 2025-07-21 16:25:30+00:00
I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.
by empath75 | 2025-07-21 16:26:02+00:00
The real problem with fusion power is that even if they figure it out, it still won't be cost competitive with solar and wind.

Economically all the cost of building a "boil some water and turn some turbines" plant is _already_ in the "boiling some water and turning some turbines" part of the generation, and even if the heat part of it was _free_, the rest of it would be too expensive to bother building a plant for it, compared to just building solar and wind generation and some better batteries.
by tytso | 2025-07-21 16:26:17+00:00
People will do a small amount of work for free. But if something requires dozens or hundreds of programmers working full time, the chances of this happening is much less.

And if you want something which just works, it means you need a huge number of people doing grunt work, and that's the kind of thing that people are less likely to want to do in their free time.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-21 16:26:47+00:00
Kind of like all the investment and finance influencers. If they’re so good at it why do they need to spend all that time trying to be an influencer? They should be rich already. They even beg for likes and subscribes so they’re obviously not doing it as a hobby. It’s simply because they’re trying to get rich selling advice to gullible people.
by satvikpendem | 2025-07-21 16:27:24+00:00
I agree with half your comment while disagreeing with the other half. Yes, it is very true that he now has a brand and can get users much more easily, and that trying to replicate his success is very survivorship bias heavy. However, if he hadn't been solving problems for people, he wouldn't have made the money he has in the first place, because no one would be buying his products (I, for example, bought NomadList a long time ago and met many people from it due to their Slack channels). And see my other comment about "garbage" code, it does not matter if they're making money, Levels is by his own proclamation not a software engineer, he uses code as a tool.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-21 16:27:33+00:00
You’re cherry-picking stats without offering a counter-argument, as if they alone dismantle the whole of the argument.

> A rather small part of the economy relies on high long term returns on housing.

Directly, yes, but don’t forget the wider array of businesses dependent upon this minority to survive: hardware stores, contractors, many tradespersons, mortgage companies, real estate agents, brokers, closers, lawyers, and more, all of whom get paid/earn less if housing prices come down in the short term (until theoretical volume makes up for the drop of individual transaction values).

It’s a wider web that shores up a market valued at ~$50tn. That’s hardly a minority.

> In 2024 87% of homes in the US were bought by people who intended to live in them or use them as a second home. If you only want to count primary homes the number is still close to 80%.

Taking those numbers at face value means a full 13% to 20% aren’t purchasing a home to live in them, which is problematic in a housing crisis. The fact you included second homes paints an even more distressing picture, because to have a second home means you not only have a primary home, but also the excess capital for a secondary domicile in the middle of a housing crisis.

Furthermore, those numbers - if true - are almost certainly national figures. Local ones can vary substantially, and the statistics show that affordable housing is predominantly being bought by investors for rent, not homebuyers to build equity.

> Factually the majority of US families live in homes they own, about [65% of US families own their homes])

That’s a grossly misleading statistic on its face, because it ignores demographic data to make the case that somehow a full third of the country simply doesn’t want to own a home. It does so by hiding the average age of homebuyers (which only goes up, indicating only those on the property ladder already are buying homes in large enough numbers to drive the average upward), the types of homes being bought (what about mobile homes/trailers? Or people who live entirely on the road in RVs? Why is it “ownership” if they’re still paying a mortgage to someone? Etc, etc), and regional or local policies that affect these demographics. FRED data is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but that figure is like pulling the U-1 for unemployment and saying everything is rosy.

Don’t come in here to blindly spout numbers without a competing or complimenting narrative of your own.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-21 16:28:11+00:00
> First things first, I need to clarify what I am referring to when I use the term 'woke.'

> My critique targets an ideology that, under the guise of good intentions—whether genuine or feigned—ignores fundamental realities and ultimately causes more harm than it prevents.

That's not a clarification of what you are referring to, that is just stating (without support, or even the kind of definition of what you are referring to that would allow supporting or refuting evidence) your conclusions about what you are referring to.
by npteljes | 2025-07-21 16:28:22+00:00
I don't think it particularly suffers from not having "good defaults", because it doesn't get adopted by word of mouth. And people are not shopping around The Best OS that they find, and sadly, they evaluate that Linux just doesn't have the juice.

Two things here.

One, OSs get adopted because of the package they arrive in. Laptops have Windows bundled, schools get computers with Windows on the cheap. Phones come with whatever they are integrated - often, not even a major upgrade is possible on them, let alone an alternative OS.

In my opinion, products like the Steam Deck are what get Linux adopted. They provide excellent functionality out of the box.

Two, PCs in this age thrive on interaction. Overwhelmingly, they are bought to interact with other PCs, either directly by network or through formats of specific software, like docx. Therefore, the functionality depends on how well they can participate in a network. This is where Microsoft really made it big with how ruthlessly they pushed Windows as an app platform and Office as the productivity software baseline.

Hence, in the end, what makes Linux really competitive today is the proliferation of web apps, because Linux has first class browsers, and the existence of Wine and its related software. Take these two away and the OS is not even talked about as an alternative to anything, just a specialty, or a curiosity.

Really, an alternative OS can do two things. It can either set the trend, which is not very likely, given that we are talking about alternatives. Or it can follow the trend, or "embrace" it, in MS lingo.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-21 16:28:34+00:00
>the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation

Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?

>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”

Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
by tgtweak | 2025-07-21 16:28:38+00:00
This article has zero quantifiable information in it aside from the duration... which has no context. Who's recordkeeping this stuff? What are the other results so far? What is the tipping point where it is net positive? how long does it need to sustain a net positive fusion reaction to produce sufficient power for grid consumption? Are there other losses (thermal generation inefficiencies) that make the target even farther than energy-in<energy-out?
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-21 16:28:41+00:00
> And the fact that the 60cm zipper costs 10$ and the 70cm one costs 12$ tells me that the local stores (or whatever intermediate responsible for the price) are simply abusing.

Again: stock keeping costs money. That is what you primarily pay for. Real estate isn't cheap, especially not in urban areas, so a lot of products just get dropped outright and the products that move very slowly but can't be dropped (what would a sewing store be if it didn't carry a few zippers?) get marked up to pay for the space they consume in storage.
by xena | 2025-07-21 16:29:09+00:00
You'd love Final Fantasy 14's versioning scheme. Here's the most recent patches in order:

* 7.0: the expansion Dawntrail

* 7.1: Crossroads, a post-expansion story/content patch

* 7.11: A new ultimate raid

* 7.15: More side content and the first chaotic alliance raid

* 7.16: More role quests

* 7.2: Seekers of Eternity story quests and more Arcadion normal raids (Cruiserweight)

* 7.21: Cosmic Exploration (crafter/gatherer power leveling area)

* 7.25: Occult Crescent (field operation)

* 7.3: The Promise of Tomorrow story quests (slated to come out early next month)

This version progression breaks my brain because I am very used to semantic versioning.
by ashertrockman | 2025-07-21 16:29:18+00:00
Somebody could use this as a starting point. http://touchscale.co/ You'd have to collect new data on touch strength vs. weight to get the regression parameters.

(If you do this, let me know and I can add it to the site above, and then we can both delight in the surprisingly large amount of unmonetizable traffic it gets.)
by drob518 | 2025-07-21 16:29:51+00:00
When I was an engineering summer intern at HP, they had all the interns do a side project of building a bridge (model sized). The designs would be judged by stacking bricks on the bridges and then dividing the max count of bricks before failure by the weight of the bridge. Most interns, myself included, over engineered our designs. One intern “got it” and submitted a bridge that was built out of just a few pieces of balsa wood. It only held one or two bricks before snapping, but it was ultra-light and won the competition. That exercise always stayed with me. Engineers always need to focus on the correct priorities and understand when “enough is enough.”
by pjmlp | 2025-07-21 16:29:57+00:00
I went from being a UNIX/Linux zealot during the mid 90's, writing M$ on email signatures, back to Windows as daily driver, because I got tired of all fragmentation, hunting for hardware support, that in theory would work but the actual firmware on the bought device was already another incomplete version, and many other stories that I could share since starting with Linux Slackware 2.0 back in 1995 (first UNIX was Xenix in 1993, followed by DG/UX).
by _wire_ | 2025-07-21 16:29:59+00:00
What is the basis of the bitcoin valuation increase other than self-induced inflation?

Is bitcoin supporting anything productive?

It seems the one thing bitcoin can't do is be a useful currency because it's too slow and expensive.

With respect to "freedom", crypto currency is ultimately a cage: It is the most centralized instrument of trade ever implemented, and anonymous only as an accident of an incomplete implementation.

The infrastructure buildout to support bitcoin mining is self-justifying and provides a semblance of "growth" that gets proffered as an illusion of productivity, but this is an ouroboros.

If large amounts of money are being laundered through bitcoin, that might be confused with the dynamics of an investment. But that's not socially productive, it's regressive.

So bitcoin is a currency that's too expensive to use and not structured to produce returns as capital or reserves.

Ask people you know why they buy bitcoin. Is it because they want massively "profit" like the people they heard about who "invested" early?

An economically useless financial instrument with gains realized by distributing the proceeds from growing numbers future buyers towards cashing out shrinking numbers of early buyers is a pyramid scheme!

Pyramid schemes end when the supply of shills is exhausted.
by bsimpson | 2025-07-21 16:30:01+00:00
This is my fundamental problem with Elizabeth Warren et. al..

They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."

The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
by DrBazza | 2025-07-21 16:30:41+00:00
Sadly, UK Parliament is made up of political careerists and art students, which is probably similar to most Western democracies. There's a saying 'those who can do, those who can't teach', it probably needs a final 'and those that can't teach, go into politics'.

Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.

This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.

https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media

The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election

Politics - 20% History - 13% Law -12% Economics - 10% Philosophy - 6% English - 4%
by toast0 | 2025-07-21 16:31:38+00:00
My claim is not that the trajectory didn't change, but that the destination didn't change.

Sears was clearly failing. Asset stripping turned a slowly failing company into a company operating normally for a period of time until it became a failed company all at once. The alternative to asset stripping would be Sears either selling off stores in chunks until it figured out how to operate profitably or became small enough to acquire; or Sears closing stores and renting them to others. Both of those strategies are hard to execute on, especially with Sears shaped stores, nobody is looking to expand into that at the scale that Sears needed to shrink.

But, for a single location hospital, you can't continue operation and let someone else use the building. If someone wants to take over operating as a hospital, that's fine... but if the hospital is consistently losing money, who wants to take over operating it? So, sell and lease back lets you keep running for a while longer.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-21 16:31:44+00:00
I think the likely outcome is you and I disagree what the problem with social media is in this context. You are sold there is no problem so long as some valid posts exist (i.e. so long as you can eventually extract something) and me/the author seem to be sold the problem is the loudness of invalid posts (i.e. if you can filter the social media posts accurately then you already have the tools to evaluate the design more directly for less work). No amount of showing how select posts can be useful is going to impact my perception and no amount of talking about invalid posts is going to impact your perception.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-21 16:31:59+00:00
Misleading title.

>he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he used for weight training.

That is not what any reasonable person would call a "necklace." Yes, metal and MRIs don't mix well, but normal jewellery won't be able to generate enough force to kill you. It might actually be more dangerous due to inducted currents heating the thing up and giving you burns.
by jacquesm | 2025-07-21 16:31:59+00:00
Something very similar applies to VC investing. Sure, some founders get rich. But founder returns averaged across all founders are horrible. The VCs however... they are like those influencers. They'll tell you exactly how you should maximize for their return, just in case you strike it big. They're not going to tell you how to minimize your risks, unless that happens to align with their increased returns.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-21 16:32:09+00:00
For JOINs? Absolutely! Who wants to hand-code queries at the executor level?! It's expensive!

You need a query language.

You don't necessarily need ACID, and you don't necessarily need a bunch of things that SQL RDBMSes give you, but you definitely need a QL, and it has to support a lot of what SQL supports, especially JOINs and GROUP BY w/ aggregations.

NoSQLs tend to evolve into having a QL layered on top. Just start with that if you really want to build a NoSQL.
by Rendello | 2025-07-21 16:32:09+00:00
Strong Towns is "not meant to be actionable"? The whole modus operandi of ST is bottom-up change from local chapters of advocates who organize for change at the local level [1]. The organization develops things like the Crash Analysis Studio, which is a structured model for local citizens and municipalities to respond to car crashes in a similar way to aircraft crashes, and redesign streets to prevent further deaths [2]. Here's a panel for a city I lived in, Ottawa [3].

As for NJB, he's abrasive and I don't agree with everything he says or how he says it, but he does talk a lot about his past advocacy work with the local government on Toronto. He encourages action, but I don't understand what he's supposed to do here, make videos for specific local advocacy of every large city in the world?

1. https://www.strongtowns.org/local

2. https://www.strongtowns.org/crashstudio

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8OSNwo4KBU
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-21 16:32:11+00:00
Citation needed, it seems you haven't actually considered there are people on the other side of the coin here. I love the crap that comes with it, and that is not a joke or an exaggeration. I probably love it more than the beef you're eating which takes about an order of magnitude more energy to produce than the grass the beef ate did. To me it's a lovely, lovely way to spend energy.

I love advertising in particular. Advertisers are welcome to every megabyte they can get their hands on when it comes to optimizing for the Vickrey auction deathmatch that decides in the blink of an eye what I'm most likely to spend my money on, if only I knew it actually existed. I am unfortunately both a very picky consumer, and way too lazy painstakingly research everything on the market. I'm actually extremely grateful those 5/50/500 megabytes can go towards something actually useful like trying to figure out what I would like to buy rather than... Whatever else they would be used for, I guess. Project Gutenberg archive torrent seeding or whatever.
by jeffbee | 2025-07-21 16:33:04+00:00
There are fields of unneeded pipes in the area that are multiple times as large as this little lot full of fiberglass, and unlike the fiberglass the drilling pipes are contaminated with heavy metals from the "thread compound" which is 30% lead. Spending any time or attention to the supposed waste of wind energy in West Texas is completely ridiculous, and lending any credence to it as a valid issue is to be a pawn in the petrochemical propaganda game.
by rafram | 2025-07-21 16:33:26+00:00
That just doesn't make sense to me. If I'm going for a regular checkup or a non-surgical appointment, there's absolutely no reason that I need my doctor's office to be within a hospital complex. Sure, I could have an emergency on the way to my non-emergency appointment, but I could also have an emergency on the way to the grocery store or the gym or the park, and I don't demand that those facilities also be built within a hospital.