MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xEF | 2025-07-28 08:37:48+00:00
I've been using IRC on and off for three decades, now. It will never be what it was, so don't expect much. Most of channels are kept alive by bots and otherwise idling accounts like mine that drop into the background of our desktop and get forgotten about for days, sometimes weeks at a time. The political channels on a few servers are, of course, active but you'll not find any useful discourse there since it's all being driven by conservative and liberal zealots. I assume they are not what you meant by "cool people."

Whatever cool people there were have either died or saw the writing on the wall as IRC slowly faded into obscurity with the introduction of better (debatable) chat systems, especially these days with things like Discord or Slack that do every IRC does in some capacity and more, perhaps most importantly simply making chat accessible in a safe way to less technically savvy users. That genie is kinda out of the bottle, so getting anyone aside from grumpy old guard to use IRC versus the modern alternatives is pretty much impossible. As a result, and aside from the bots doing things like letting me play IdleRPG or whatever, you're more likely to encounter people like me who don't feel like we fit in anywhere or conspiracy theorists, returning to IRC the way Romero's zombies wandered to the shopping mall because they had a vague memory of it from a former life.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-28 08:38:08+00:00
So a moral system is tied to sentience? It is a philosophical position, it is not a universally accepted truth. I think non-sentient entities can possess or implement a moral system. They can be programmed with ethical constraints, or behave in accordance with a moral framework, or enforce for certain ethical outcomes. You could simulate moral behavior, too. I mean, heck, there are chess engines that avoid unethical strategies like stalling, which is a perfect example of what I just said.
by pyman | 2025-07-28 08:38:16+00:00
Having an agenda and a moderator is not enough. What meetings also need is:

1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?

2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?

3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?

Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.

Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.

In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.

In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.
by suslik | 2025-07-28 08:38:26+00:00
> if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there. If the meeting could still take place and be useful without someone, don't invite them just to listen in.

I don't think this advice is generic - there can be different perspectives here.

In a managerial role in a large corpo, doing what could be crudely characterized as office politics, I often have this sort of FOMO - missing out on new initiatives, budgets and projects which would be good for the team; or being unable to prevent others dumping hot potatoes onto us; or just not knowing what is brewing behind the scenes within the company. To a degree, I have to do this so that the technical guys don't have to.

My job, really, is to be invited to as many meeting as I can. I can then ditch the ones I don't think would be useful. Of course, often I sit on meetings that are a complete waste of time - but that is an occupational risk. I don't find these frustrating - they allow me to relax a bit, do my email, learn more about people in the meeting, or just practice my note taking.
by 9dev | 2025-07-28 08:39:12+00:00
The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation.

I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation size, however.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-28 08:40:18+00:00
It is, specifically because Tuxedo licensed their modules as GPLv3, instead of GPLv2 (the module license declaration only has 'GPL', to make this confusing), causing a mild license compatibility issue, and since they've had external contributions, it's not so easy for them to fix it. And it's not a ban, just a flag that gets set.
by 47282847 | 2025-07-28 08:40:25+00:00
I think what is happening often is people having different definitions of “empathy“. For me, it is “feeling with“, being in a shared space of feelings; it’s not a cognitive skill but emotional - they are equally human/living creatures and I can sense their underlying emotions and thus reason about their motivations. This means I can both empathize and have a different point of view. Empathy, for me, does not imply sympathy, agreement or submission.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-28 08:41:50+00:00
> Today the Ethernet port is removed from many personal computers perhaps in hopes computer owners will send ("sync") their files to third party computers on the internet (renamed "the cloud") as a means of transferring files between the owner's computers.

Oh come on, this isn't a conspiracy. For the last decade, every single laptop computer I've used has been thinner than an ethernet port, and every desktop has shipped with an ethernet port. I think the last few generations of MacBook Pros (which were famously thicker than prior generations) are roughly as thick as an ethernet port, but I'm not sure it'd practically fit.

And I know hacker news hates thin laptops, but most people prefer thin laptops over laptops with ethernet. My MacBook Air is thin and powerful and portable and can be charged with a USB-C phone charger. It's totally worth it for 99% of people to not have an ethernet port.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-07-28 08:42:37+00:00
Pet subject of the week here.

Big choices are handrolled recursive decent vs LALR, probably backed by bison or lemon generator and re2c for a lexer.

Passing the lalr(1) check, i.e. having bison actually accept the grammar without complain about ambiguities, is either very annoying or requires thinking clearly about your language, depending on your perspective.

I claim that a lot of the misfires in language implementations are from not doing that work, and using a hand rolled approximation to the parser you had in mind instead, because that's nicer/easier than the formal grammar.

The parser generators emit useless error messages, yes. So if you want nice user feedback, that'll be handrolled in some fashion. Sure.

Sometimes people write a grammar and use a hand rolled parser, hoping they match. Maybe with tests.

The right answer, used by noone as far as I can tell, is to parse with the lalr generated parser, then if that rejects your string because the program was ill formed, call the hand rolled one for guesswork/diagnostics. Never feed the parse tree from the hand rolled parser into the rest of the compiler, that way lies all the bugs.

As alternative phrasing, your linter and your parser don't need to be the same tool, even if it's convenient in some senses to mash them together.
by 9dev | 2025-07-28 08:43:06+00:00
Can't speak for your boss, but I definitely am sometimes a few abstraction layers further up in concepts than the ICs on the team, and it's a lot more frustrating to realise the others don't really know what I'm getting at because I didn't create clear enough goals than getting that feedback right away.

People in leadership usually get there because they value time and efficiency, and if you don't spin that as "your agenda is trash" but "I cannot contribute to this meeting and would like to pursue my other tasks", I doubt they will be mad at you.

It can also be worth it to bring this up with your team and establish a meeting culture, as suggested in TFA. That way, you can discuss this openly and everyone has a shared understanding of what is okay.
by squidbeak | 2025-07-28 08:43:45+00:00
This is largely incorrect. The USA has supplied Javelins steadily throughout the war, including 2022. Eg, the 1000 announced at the start of June that year [1]. Moreover they were far from Ukraine's only ATGMs in 2022. You're ignoring NLAWs and Stugna-P which certainly weren't 'spent in the first several months'. BGM-71 TOWs were supplied from the middle of the year.

The war in 2022 was primarily an artillery war. Drones were in use, but the dominance you describe came later.

1. https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/304947...
by KronisLV | 2025-07-28 08:43:54+00:00
I really like the idea of finding what dials can be turned and then doing so and seeing how much headroom you normally have and how far away from things breaking you are.

Plus, those sorts of artificial limitations can be really helpful in finding where your systems bottleneck and what are the main optimizations that you should do (for example, I've seen N+1 problem sneak past because at the time the performance was good enough but once there was enough data it crumbled).
by ghusto | 2025-07-28 08:44:31+00:00
> Thus, what's the solution? Some sort of templating? Again, you're bringing on dependencies.

If your "dependency" is yourself because you wrote your own template for your specific needs, is that still a dependency?

I wrote a templating solution for my own repeated sections and I'm so glad. It does exactly what I need, it's simple for me to understand if ever it grows large and I need a refresher, and easily expandable.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-28 08:44:34+00:00
The problem isn't technical but relates to the tendency and reflex of essentially every big company to not want to work with their competitors. Federated identity protocols have existed for quite long and as long as they've existed, companies have declined using them properly. I remember playing with OpenID as early as 2007.

It's successor, OpenID Connect is actually widely used. But with one important caveat:

None of the big identity providers actually accept each other's identities. Like literally none at all. You can't log in with your Google account to a Microsoft service and vice versa. Or Apple. Or Meta. Or X. Or whomever. That's because they all want to "own" your account and control where you are going. Which is why you need many accounts instead of just one.

If you had just one account, you could do sane things like add multiple layers of security and some sane fall backs. Including maybe some delegating to some legal representative if you are ill or incapacitated. Ideally, you should be able to use your government issued passport to prove who you are and recover your identity. A passport is a government issued paper assertion that you are who you claim you are. Anything important in life, you kind of need such a strong assertion for e.g. getting bank accounts, international travel, buying real estate, etc. And while they can be forged, it's getting pretty hard these days. That's a lot harder than getting your hands on some passwords.

Why do we settle for less protecting our online accounts?
by da-bacon | 2025-07-28 08:44:40+00:00
For 2, I don’t think you can break ties however you like because this would give you random left or right associativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_associativity For example 2-4-7 would be either (2-4)-7 or 2-(4-7), depending on how you broke the tie.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-07-28 08:44:55+00:00
Just read the comment further above to see that there are people who cannot stomach any criticism of it.

Many years ago now my sister turned down the chance to go to an international conference held in the Netherlands, when I asked why, she said it was because the NHS was the best in the world and had nothing to learn from other healthcare systems. I'm still stunned, and she still doesn't know anything about other healthcare systems.
by aragilar | 2025-07-28 08:45:28+00:00
Yes, you are. You may not want to do that (and instead do it per user), but that's what you asked the computer to do.

There's nothing stopping you from doing what you like in your user space, but similarly it's no-one else's fault if because of a system change your stuff broke (and hence because sysadmins don't want to do more than they need to, managing things globally is what the expect and support).
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-28 08:46:30+00:00
That is a distinction with a difference to you, but it may not be to them. They may not agree that they didn’t make the output, either.

Most people don’t even tune their own pianos, let alone build them. I think you have a point, but it’s not likely to matter to those who don’t view the questions or the answers you’re raising as meaningful for a given situation and context.

So even if they agree with you and make the content anyway because they like it or it’s profitable, where do you go from here, in your argument or outside of a hypothetical situation? I don’t see how you can put the genie back in the bottle.
by cdr | 2025-07-28 08:46:51+00:00
It's actually really, really easy to get the state of a "dumb" washing machine (or any other electric machine) into Home Assistant using a smart plug. You can use something really basic like "power draw for > n seconds followed by no power for > m seconds" to detect when a cycle is finished. You can get way fancier and look at power draw curves to determine what part of a cycle it's in, or which cycle, if you really want to. You can add a door sensor (recommend Samsung) if you want to know if the door's been opened.

Unfortunately it's much harder to do the same for an electric dryer, since there's no inexpensive or good smart plugs for 240V last I checked.
by coryrc | 2025-07-28 08:46:55+00:00
It's funny you say that, yet the first guy in the video is driving a small SUV https://youtu.be/7IFEiwNMrZ8?t=129

Put a pump on a trailer. The problem with this country is we're not allowed to have "decent"; we are only allowed to buy the "best" and so we just hobble along with old shit while everything's breaking down and we're paying too much for the things we do buy.
by dalben | 2025-07-28 08:47:17+00:00
Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.
by federiconafria | 2025-07-28 08:47:18+00:00
That's already part of most IDE's and they know which tests to re-run, because of coverage, so it's really fast.

It also updates the coverage on the fly, you don't even have to look at the test output to know that you've broken something since the tests are not reaching your lines.

https://gavindraper.com/2020/05/27/VS-Code-Continious-Testin...
by fragmede | 2025-07-28 08:48:01+00:00
> It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.

It's not. At Ksplice we had a build farm and whenever a supported distro would release a new kernel, we would generate new .ko files for that kernel, usually within 24 hours. It was a lot of work, and very much specific to the Ksplice product. These days, between docker and DKMS, and limiting yourself to supporting a specific device, you'd have a much easier time of building a build farm to release a compiled .ko, if you were a hardware manufacturer that wanted to support that.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-28 08:48:01+00:00
Take a look at the framework laptop for how accessible replacing parts on a laptop can be if you put even a little bit of effort into it. Most people are entirely capable of the manual dexterity, they just lack clear instructions, or things artificially require specialized equipment and software and more fiddly, difficult, and risky steps because it's either not a priority or it's actively a priority to discourage it.
by anaisbetts | 2025-07-28 08:48:18+00:00
I mean, fundamentally the reason that we don't build most AI HUD ideas right now is that they are either stupidly insanely expensive at scale, or you have to run the AI on-device on an NPU so underpowered that it's going to give you really really bad results.

Lots of great ideas in this space but it's tough to make something that delivers value and also is economically viable
by pantalaimon | 2025-07-28 08:48:29+00:00
On a PC people are used to tinker around, the whole ecosystem is built around that assumption.

The smartphone was a closed ecosystem from the start, tinkering around was an uphill battle fought with custom ROMs that only few users dared to try (if the bootloader wasn't locked down to begin with). Adding more restrictions didn't have much impact on most users.
by mariusor | 2025-07-28 08:48:30+00:00
An interesting project needs to fulfill a couple of requirements that I think this specific one doesn't: solves a problem that people have in some capacity, it's proven to be something more than a one weekend adventure, and is actually doing something innovative or interesting.

I understand I'm being overly negative here, and that there's at least 60 people disagreeing with me, but tell me why is this project interesting for you?
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-07-28 08:49:10+00:00
Kind of funny that you specifically pointed out the "lying under oath" part. Becaause you know, the initial argument's current POTUS lied under oath, several times, about way more dangerous things.

And he fired the people that did their job at the FBI to investigate him. Out of pure retaliation.
by lazide | 2025-07-28 08:49:11+00:00
If we could grow the same amount of corn (to offset the carbon in the gasoline) and bury it where it would not rot/decompose (turned that carbon into now fossil carbon), then turn around and burn fossil fuel gasoline, then from a carbon neutral perspective, yes that would ‘balance the scales’.

It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into ethanol, and leave the fossil fuels out of it? (* of course current agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels itself, so the math isn’t that simple. For it to actually work, we’d need to ensure the entire vertical was fossil fuel free)

Of course, it’s a lot more direct and effective to use electric vehicles, near as I can tell.
by praestigiare | 2025-07-28 08:49:22+00:00
The phrase does not mean that you can pick any single effect of a system and claim that is its purpose, as your linked article does in its examples. (Ironically, a form of reducto as absurdum.) It is a heuristic, a pattern of thought to attempt to overcome the bias towards judging systems based on the intentions behind them instead of the outcomes they produce. The point is that when you choose a course of action, you are implicitly choosing its negative effects as well, and the choice should be judged on all its effects. You are making a cost / benefit analysis, and if that is not explicit, it can easily be wrong.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-28 08:49:24+00:00
Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time.

Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.

It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.

Edit: good comment in this thread on the role of middle management meetings being intrinsically social/political: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708660
by holowoodman | 2025-07-28 08:52:08+00:00
This is solving the wrong problem. If a traffic light can turn green at a whim, for any arriving app user, the intersection is not busy enough to have a traffic light. Then the traffic light should be removed or switched off for those times, instead of getting a very expensive (I presume) upgrade. If the intersection is busy enough so that people are waiting on all (or most) stop lines, then simpler traffic density sensors are a better, less invasive, far cheaper, and more privacy-preserving option.
by lazide | 2025-07-28 08:52:26+00:00
Even if we converted all arable land in the United States to forest, best case we would take many years to sequester even a single years fossil carbon emissions. And we’d all starve to death in the process.

Any co2 released by harvesting a forest, is very shortly taken back up again by the forest regrowing. Within a lifetime for sure.

Trees are nice, I get it. But this is all in the noise.
Show HN: Rm-safely – a safety net for rm command
by zdkaster | 2025-07-28 08:52:45+00:00
Just want to share my weekend project, named rm-safely.

It's just a simple shell alias, that can help prevent from accidental rm command (either both running by yourself or ai agent)

Tested on zsh 5.9 and bash 5.3

Might be useful for some people. Also, happy to hear any feedback.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-28 08:52:52+00:00
Well, I suppose many people do not know of these "mental math tricks".

To get 10% of a number, just move the decimal left: 10% of 40 -> 4.0.

To get 5% of this number, get 10% first, then halve it. It is the half of 10%, which in this case would be 2.0.

If you want to do this on a computer / calculator, you simply do: 40 * 0.10 for 10% or 0.05 for 5%. I was a very young kid when I learned to do this on a calculator, and I absolutely loved it!
by blks | 2025-07-28 08:53:17+00:00
I’m a man myself, I have dated both men and women, and I did once experienced sexual assault by a men.

From a personal experience, I know for example a person in my friends group who turned to be a person that forces himself on drunken women at parties after they say no. And I don’t see anything wrong with letting all my friends know about this.

I don’t really understand why you here feel so afraid of people gossiping online. I’m a man that sleeps with women and I am not afraid about them talking about me. Even if they loose some platform, you know, they will still talk to each other.
by TOMDM | 2025-07-28 08:53:23+00:00
The biggest holdup for VR sculpting is you have nowhere to rest your hands or tools. In a physical medium you can rest your weight and tools against the clay, glass etc. that you're working with.

This is part of the reason why high end 3d cursors have resistive feedback, especially since fine motor control is much easier when you have something to push against and don't have to support the full weight of your arm.
by schoen | 2025-07-28 08:53:35+00:00
I don't think so.

The total data on a CD-ROM including the error correcting redundancy exceeds 800 MB, or 6.4 Gb.

If you could imagine getting 1 bit from the optical disc per pixel (which is way too optimistic physically), you would need a 6 gigapixel camera focused super-precisely at the disc surface.

Looking at the problem from a different angle, Wikipedia says the features that store the data on the disc surface are about 800 nm (or about a micrometer) long. So to photograph them, you'd want to have pixels ideally smaller than a micrometer on each side. It's easy to check that an ordinary camera isn't achieving that kind of resolution without adding on external magnifying equipment.