MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zild3d | 2025-07-17 15:14:27+00:00
I see it more like the goal is to build cool stuff, learning electronics is the happy unintentional side effect as you're exposed to concepts relevant to what you want to do.

e.g. I want to build a cool robot with my kid -> oh why can't you just wire the motors directly to arduino output pins -> oh motors need a lot of current to run ...

(btw have never heard voltage be called tension, TIL)
by kot-behemoth | 2025-07-17 15:15:26+00:00
A while ago I saw a promising Clojure project stepwise [0] which sounds pretty close to what you're describing. It not only allows you to define steps in code, but also implements cool stuff like ability to write conditions, error statuses and resources in a much-less verbose EDN instead of JSON. It also supports code reloading and offloading large payloads to S3.

Here's a nice article with code examples implementing a simple pipeline: https://www.quantisan.com/orchestrating-pizza-making-a-tutor....

[0]: https://github.com/Motiva-AI/stepwise
by nico | 2025-07-17 15:15:35+00:00
> then just disable the replication slot when you want to make local changes without affecting the primary

This would be all the time, ie. in my local dev, I’d like to have an up to date (daily is ok), copy of the source db that I can modify anytime, but that everyday will sync with the source, without having to fully rebuild indices

How would you go about managing/coordinating that?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-17 15:15:36+00:00
Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.

I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.
by Jach | 2025-07-17 15:15:40+00:00
It's a nice option to have and maybe good in some cases. It reminds me of the nicety that some journalists do when requesting if they can use some video uploaded on social media for their show or piece. I do like the approach and shifting of first contact burden, as well as the general philosophical principle that blocking ought to be reversible and also temporary rather than permanent (though I also like the idea of exponential timeouts that can become effectively permanent). Still, I don't see myself ever doing anything like that. I'd still prefer to just not know about the bot at all, and if I did decide to perma-block them, unless the first contact comes with sufficient dollar signs attached I'm likely to ignore it entirely. I'm not usually in the mood for starting random negotiation with anybody.

I also tend to see the web from the "open web" dream perspective. By default no traffic is blocked. The burden of requesting is already inherently done with a client -- they request a route, and I serve it or not. For things like my blog I don't tend to care who is requesting a particular route -- even admin pages can be requested, they just don't get anything without being logged in. If someone is being "cute" requesting non-existent wordpress pages or what have you, searching for vulnerabilities, or have an annoying/ugly user agent string, or are just pounding me for no real reason, then I do start to care. (The "pounding" aspect is a bit trickier -- I look at steady state. Another comment mentioned cutting their db server's cpu load in half by dropping unlikely-to-be-real-users from two countries. For me, if that is merely a steady state reduction from like 10% of a machine to 5%, I don't really care, I start caring when it would get in the way of real growth without having to use more resources.)

When I was hosting on EC2, I used to have very mild anxiety that I'd piss off someone and they'd try to "harm" me by launching a botnet of requests at large media files and rack up bandwidth costs. (I believe it when some people say this has happened more organically with normal bots in the age of LLMs, but my concern was more targeted botnets/ddos.) There are a few ways to mitigate that anxiety: 1) setup monitoring, alerts, and triggers directly in code running on the instance itself or via overseeing AWS tools (I did the latter, which is less reliable, but still. There was a threshold to shutdown the whole instance, minimizing the total damage possible to something like under a couple hundred bucks, I forget the details of trying to calculate how much traffic could theoretically be served before the monitoring side noticed) 2) hide behind cloudflare and their unlimited bandwidth, as my content was mostly static (I didn't do that) 3) move/rearchitect to a free host like github pages, give up hosting my own comments (again didn't do) 4) move to OVH which has unlimited bandwidth (did this when Amazon wanted to start charging an absurd amount for just a single ipv4 address).
by Rendello | 2025-07-17 15:16:08+00:00
I vote up "random" articles if I've found them interesting and learned something new. Occasionally I'll post an article and I've had some great discussions over random things. After all, according to the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
by sethammons | 2025-07-17 15:16:32+00:00
Graduated income taxes level the playing field; wouldn't a graduated voting system level the playing field?

Why should someone who knows nothing of field have a say in laws that over represents their knowledge and stake?

I don't think my vote for what you feed your kids should count the same as your vote on what you feed your kids.

The worry about votes and power collecting is sane. It happens already through propaganda and ill informed (usually due to low perceived stakes) voters. We need a system that counters the negative effects if low informed masses.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-17 15:19:04+00:00
Theoretically, epub format is ideal for a cyoa format book. Each choice at the end of the page can be a hyperlink to the next (internal) file, and the pages/files themselves could be marked non-linear (so that someone can't just page through to see all the pages).

Unfortunately, Apple and the others who have authored epub clients do not implement it correctly and behave as if non-linear pages are supposed to be some sort of footnote, and pop up models to display them, rather than just treating them as the reflowable content that they should be. Not marking them as non-linear is also problematic, because something about it seems off when you can just scrub through pages in linear order. It's unlikely to ever be fixed either, so the format itself is ruined for this purpose.
by Someone | 2025-07-17 15:19:05+00:00
> For any one specific thing, be it a doorknob, a rope, a sheet of paper or fabric, or a pair of scissors, there's probably a different design that's several orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper, and also much stronger and more reliable.

Also, if you’re designing a robot gripper for any one specific thing, it’s quite possible that you can tweak the design of that specific thing to make the task easier. As an extreme example, screws and screw drivers evolve in parallel.
by uamgeoalsk | 2025-07-17 15:19:17+00:00
That “alcoholic” metaphor? Seriously, what the hell. You don’t have to like Gemini, but reducing the people who use it to self-loathing addicts is ridiculous.

I use Gemini because I enjoy it. That’s it. It’s fun. It’s weird. It scratches an itch that the modern web doesn’t. Maybe that’s not your thing — fine. But why does someone’s personal enjoyment of a simpler protocol have to be pathologized?

Not everything needs to be justified by some grand ideological framework. Sometimes people just like stuff — and that’s enough. You claim to want to understand different perspectives, but this kind of framing makes it pretty clear you’ve already decided which ones are valid.

If you're really trying to steelman Gemini, maybe start by recognizing that people can engage with technology for all kinds of reasons — curiosity, aesthetics, nostalgia, minimalism, fun — and they don’t owe you a manifesto to justify it.
by afavour | 2025-07-17 15:19:26+00:00
You're not really engaging with OP's point. "an impressionable and easily influenced demographic" describes every demographic. 16 year olds are not particularly unique in that regard.

16 year olds could absolutely flip to the far right in the future, who knows! But they have more of a stake in the future. Allowing them to vote redresses a small amount of balance against voters who do not have a stake in the future.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-17 15:19:30+00:00
Yes, it’s content marketing. But out of all the commercial garbage out there, the signal to noise ratio is quite high on avg imo. I find most articles like this somewhat interesting and sometimes even useful. Plus, they’re also free from paywalls and (often) cookie popups. It’s an ecosystem that can work well, as long as the authors maintain integrity: the topic/issue at hand vs the product they’re selling.

Unfortunately, LLMs (or a bad guy with an LLM, if you wish) will probably decimate this communication vector and reduce the SNR ratio soon. Can’t have nice things for too long, especially in a world where it takes less energy to generate the slop than for humans to smell it.
by diggan | 2025-07-17 15:19:45+00:00
Yeah, I think they don't have any people working on the full UX flow, my bank does similarly weird stuff.

The example that comes into mind is making transfers to my wife, where every time I do it, they ask me to confirm a bunch of questions to make sure it's not a scam/fraud, which fine, good idea. Once I confirm, they display another notice telling me they won't ask for a confirmation/2FA code because I make transfers to that account so frequently.

The only reason I can come up with why it is like that, is because there isn't a single person/group responsible for the full experience.
by daniel-payne | 2025-07-17 15:20:03+00:00
thank you for your kind words, I obviously was not clear in how I wrote the article, AI might have picked it up. But I am old school and type everything my self. It's part of the feynman learning process I use.

However I have updated the article so it is much clearer, the UI that is missing from n8n is not WISIWIG, but a management dashboard, to be viewed once the system is live. I have added the following:

"To be clear here, I did not mean the UI that you use to create flows with, both systems are drag and drop flow creators. The issues I come across is visualizing what is going on inside of a system once it is created and up and running."
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-17 15:20:04+00:00
Here is what I’m more keen on, rather than the human-like robots that we are all expecting. For instance, I would like a wall-mounted or floor-standing multi-arm robot that serves as a kitchen assistant. One can add or reduce arms as needed/desired. It is custom-equipped with a fire extinguisher, thermometer, and the usual must-haves for a kitchen. It will hold the cutlery, plates, and other items as needed. It will also advise on the likes of, “No, salts usually go in a pinch, would you like me to add in just about 5 grams?”

Thus, similarly for the garage, the DIY table, etc. Just Arms would be good.
by BurningFrog | 2025-07-17 15:20:05+00:00
My impression is that archeologists are drowning in way more ancient sites than they can possibly investigate.

For example, these thousands of unexpected ancient sites they've found in the Amazon using Lidar recently:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/06/a...

One unfortunate reality is that looters will get to these places long before archeologists. I think they try to keep things secret, but there are limits to what you can do.

I think this is where a few humble billionaires can make a real difference, in case they're reading this :)
by Expurple | 2025-07-17 15:20:05+00:00
> The idea that one needs Rust to write reliable software is not only ridiculous at a logical level

I never said that. I said that it's more appropriate and productive.

> If it were really “preferable for writing such production software”, more people would be using it.

There are many valid reasons for not using it, even in new projects. Such as human preferences, lack of specific libraries, and simply not having time to learn yet another language for a non-10x benefit.

> the compiler does not carry the burden for you. It puts the burden of writing code in a way that satisfies the Rust lifetime management design on you, and that’s what you’ll be doing forever.

It carries a different burden for me. In exchange for the burden that you mention, I don't worry about mutable aliasing bugs (including data races), breaking the code by refactoring it, manually unit-testing basic properties that could be types, debugging non-obvious non-local effects (such as exceptions and null values invisibly propagating through the layers of the app), micro-optimizing the performance manually, and so on. The benefits are known. I've almost forgot how to use a debugger at this point.

It's a tradeoff. I find it more comfortable and less cognitively-taxing to work this way, once the initial learning curve is behind. Less unpredictable problems to distract you from solving the problem. The borrow checker problems largely go away as you get more comfortable with it. And it's a skill that's instantly transferrable between all Rust projects, unlike project-specific defensive practices in other languages (the "manual hardening" needed to get decent quality). It's a long-term investment that automates a small, but not insignificant part of your work.

> There zero proof that Rust software is higher quality than equivalent e.g. Swift or Java.

The Google's director of engineering gave a talk saying that their Rust teams are just as productive as their Go teams, while also enjoying "a decreased defect rate over time": https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1bpwmud/media_lars_be...

> The memory-safety trick only works against C and C++.

That's absolutely true, and that's an important thing to keep in mind when framing discussions about Rust.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-17 15:20:08+00:00
My mom read books during the day when my dad was at work. She'd tell my dad how hard she worked all day :-)

I'd look over her shoulder and wonder how she made any sense out of the page full of text, as there were no pictures. I was fascinated by that, and was well motivated to learn to read.

I was not allowed to watch TV beyond Daktari and Saturday morning cartoons. I hated that restriction, but in hindsight my parents made the right call. My dad would watch the news, but it was just gibberish to me.

Later, I was not allowed to watch Green Acres. My parents said it was "rubbish". I did not see an episode of it till I went to college, and eagerly watched to see what I had been missing. I lasted 10 minutes - it was indeed rubbish.
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-17 15:20:21+00:00
CoT is a poor debugging tool, even if it's readable. Non-prompted CoT deceptively looks to be written in the natural language, but it's actually in the "bird language" the model learned due to reward hacking, where yes in the CoT can correspond to no in the reply, which makes total sense for the model but not for a human. In fact it's pretty common to have one thing in CoT and a completely opposite in the reply. You can probably train it to be readable enough, but CoT efficiency drops with each additional constraint not related to producing a correct reply. CoT is not an explanation, ideally it just stores intermediate results.

The right tool is proper interpretability of the internal state of the model, so you can tap into it directly and produce a usable explanation of what it does.
by anonymousiam | 2025-07-17 15:20:38+00:00
Back in the day, you could do similar things with a .forward file. I once wrote a script using a .forward file, "expect", "telnet", and "pppd" that would bring up a VPN into my company when I sent a crafted email to my work account.

The corporate IT folks had a pretty good firewall and dialup VPNs, but they also had a "gauntlet" BSD machine that one could use to directly access Internet hosts. So upon receiving the activation email, my script connected to the BSD proxy, then used telnet to reach my Internet host on a port with a ppp daemon listening, and then detached the console and connected it to a local (from the corporate perspective) ppp daemon. Both ppp daemons were configured to escape the non-eight-bit-clean characters in the telnet environment.

I used this for years, because the connection was much faster than the crummy dialup VPN.

I immediately dismantled it when my company issued updated IT policies which prohibited such things. (This was in the early 1990's.)

https://www.cs.ait.ac.th/~on/O/oreilly/tcpip/sendmail/ch25_0...
by xg15 | 2025-07-17 15:20:50+00:00
The irony is that the Teams meetings will follow you, but with some luck, you can at least do them from antique balcony with an espresso in hand.

Maybe that hints that the sense of unease is coming from the working culture? If your job feels draining and stressful, neither feels like it advances you, nor society, nor has any kind of endgame, it makes sense that it will lead to increasing unhappiness and escapist fantasies.
by nijave | 2025-07-17 15:20:53+00:00
Sounds more like a monolith. You can do microservices with separate requirements in a monorepo. We have one setup at work using pantsbuild (eh the tool is a bit quirky) but it's much nicer than constantly spinning up new git repos and CI pipelines for small services/utilities

That said, I think service-per-team is a good pattern
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-17 15:21:13+00:00
A genuine new insight is a "theory" which is a deterministic symbolic representation of the chaotic worlds of meaning. A theory is a formalism which can explain and predict phenomena. A theory consists of symbols to represent concepts, and rules to associate symbols.

for example, euclidean geometry organizes the perceptions of "space" around us, or newtonian mechanics organizes the perceptions of "motion" or turing machine organizes computation.

LLMs cannot create theories yet since they are missing the capability to create symbols to represent things and link them via rules.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-17 15:21:27+00:00
One of the reasons we cant have nice things.

CSAM spam filtering is a bit of a moat for larger companies able to manage the costs of moderating it.

I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state. With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity.
by clintonb | 2025-07-17 15:21:30+00:00
Do you have children? You tell them something is animal-related and they tend to get really excited. Even more so for dinosaurs. My five year old has no concept of money, but he does have a concept of “new thing I can play with”.

When I was a kid we had Book It. I got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut for every 10(?) books I read. I read a lot of books! I also learned a lot along the way, and continued the habit of reading for fun through college.
by noahjk | 2025-07-17 15:21:48+00:00
I've been thinking about that lately since I am working on a set of collaborative documents for a personal project (non-technical) which I also supplement with AI. I don't know of a good platform which 'normal people' can easily use but which can use markdown under the hood to avoid the constant hurdle of translation between rich text and md.

I was almost happy when I saw Google Docs has Gemini built in, until I realized it was just another lame model (my go-to has been Gemini Pro 2.5 but I think Docs uses Flash 2.0 or another low-cost model with no option to upgrade).
by extraduder_ire | 2025-07-17 15:22:06+00:00
Shorting that pin in the joycon rail to ground is only done to put the device into recovery mode. Logically, it's pressing the "home button" which doesn't exist elsewhere on the console, along with the volume-up button while powering the console on. The actual exploit relied on a software bug in verifying what was sent to the device.

Similarly, getting into the recovery mode on one of the DS consoles involved pressing a button combination on startup with the screen closed.
by tianqi | 2025-07-17 15:22:13+00:00
The story told in this article shocked me, even sending shivers down my spine. It was the first time I learned that such things had also occurred in the English-speaking world. China carried out its second round of character simplification in 1977[1], which has left many Chinese people, including my grandmother, unable to read characters normally to this day. They continue to write those weird "second simplified" in their lives. I always believed this to be one of the crime of the Bolsheviks destroying Chinese culture, and I never imagined such a thing could happen in the English-speaking world.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...
by evantbyrne | 2025-07-17 15:22:31+00:00
IQ scoring is routinely adjusted so that 100 represents the mean. It should be expected that IQ scores for college grads trend towards 100 as higher percentages of the population go to college. University is also not designed to maximize standardized test scores the same way that public high school is. I would expect recency and intensity of math education to play a higher role in IQ scores than the specialized knowledge and exposure to the arts that comes from a college education.
by x0x0 | 2025-07-17 15:22:59+00:00
The idiots at my former credit union apparently subcontract out their credit cards to some east coast bank, whereas my bank and I live on the west coast.

I saw some bank from Florida, that I'd never heard of, calling me on my cell. I assumed it was some sort of scam and ignored it. They're too stupid to get a phone number which has caller id set up to read the name of credit union with whom I did business.

Just amazing.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-17 15:23:12+00:00
Only the Apache-licensed version is dead. The commercial arm (Element) forked it and relicensed it under the AGPL to make sure nobody but them can use their post-fork changes commercially. (Element demands you sign a CLA to contribute. Don’t[1].)

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-17 15:23:15+00:00
There shouldn't be a stand-alone TurboTax-like tool to fill out analogs of paper forms; it should just be a part of the IRS web page.

Why can't I log in, see what information employers and banks and whatnot have submitted about my income, add any pertinent information about deductions or additional income, appeal any inaccurate information, then click 'request refund' or 'pay dues', select which bank account to use from the information they already have, and be done?

Subsiding smaller companies to compete with the larger ones isn't going to fix the problem, it's just going to entrench the industry and empower more lobbyists.