MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deepnotderp | 2025-08-31 02:12:19+00:00
MCF has a bunch of challenges, eg no good pigtail connector, need for rotational alignment, inability to radix (MCF is great for point to point, less good if you want to fan out from one chip to multiple chips), etc

And then even after all that, it’s still 1-2 orders of magnitude lower density than waveguides
by username223 | 2025-08-31 02:12:33+00:00
> Mastodon is social like a quiet pub. Twitter and Bluesky are social like a crowd at a concert.

Good analogy. When Twitter started, I took one look at people shouting "I had a delicious sandwich today" and "I just took an amazing dump" and wanted no part of it. When it later turned into a "clever" contest, I wanted even less.

My quiet little Mastodon community, plus some outsiders I have chosen, is the kind of "social" I want. If someone starts behaving like an influencer, they get muted.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-31 02:12:51+00:00
With 13yo, I'd go straight to Python. Perhaps start with some drawings with the turtle, and add loops for complex shapes and later recursion.

Also, do some math calculations that require "for". From recursive series to brute force problems with small integers.

---

I'd recommend HTML+Javascipt only if she wants to make a few interactive webpages, with a few text fields and buttons. I'm not sure how hard is to do that in Python.
by kragen | 2025-08-31 02:13:07+00:00
The Paris agreement was very important when renewable energy required state subsidies, but it is no longer necessary. Fossil-fuel power is no longer economically competitive without subsidies thanks to (largely Chinese) improvements in the costs of solar panels and the necessary power electronics. Over a few decades, solar-powered energy superabundance will reduce the costs of atmospheric carbon capture to the point where even private charity can handle it.

On https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you can see that mainstream solar panels have returned to their all-time low price of €0.100 per peak watt from November, while low-cost solar panels have fallen to a new all-time low of €0.055 per peak watt, an all-time low first achieved last month, and a 21% decline from a year ago. The "mainstream" category price is down 17% from a year ago. This is driving down the prices of complementary products and enabling new low-cost installation methods that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Because it's so astoundingly cheap, last year China installed 277 GW(p) of solar power generation capacity: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064. This compares to a total electrical generation capacity in the US of 1189 GW, albeit with a higher capacity factor: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-.... This year the projection is that China will have installed another 380 GW of solar capacity, giving it more solar electrical generation capacity than the US has total electrical generation capacity from all sources: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/07/10/china-on-track-to-dep...

Consequently we're seeing reports that, for Chinese AI startups, energy is a "solved problem", while US companies worry they'll be unable to get enough energy to compete: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell....

This is one of the most historically important things happening in the world today, but it's surprisingly little known even among people who are otherwise well informed.

Even if Trump could strong-arm other rich countries into imposing US-style prohibitive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, he certainly won't strong-arm China, so the cat is out of the bag; that would just make those countries economically uncompetitive with Chinese products produced with superabundant solar energy. And panels are already being mass-produced overseas with Chinese technology at prices fossil fuels can't compete with.
by nine_k | 2025-08-31 02:13:14+00:00
Decentralized has a problem. Its premise is that anyone can set up and run a node, cheaply.

If the decentralized network allows for some kind of targeted broadcasting, it becomes attractive for spamming (e.g: email).

If the decentralized network allows for concentration of responses on something, it becomes a potential tool for a DDoS attack (e.g.: DNS amplification).

So running a node should be somehow expensive, but the expense should be written off if the receivers of the message endorse it, by a one-time action, or automatically by subscribing. An initial credit would allow to establish an audience.

It looks like a perfect use case for a cryprocurrency of sorts %) But this means expensive coin generation, and distribution of the huge ledger across all nodes. That could be delegated to some specialized nodes, but here comes centralization again!
by vadepaysa | 2025-08-31 02:13:58+00:00
I owe a large part of my career success to PHP when I learned it back in the day. But recently I picked it up because I had to do some maintenance work and The package management experience was really, really bad.

I really think there's a big opportunity for somebody to create the astral.sh for PHP.

With a proper package manager, PHP can do way more than what it presently can.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-08-31 02:14:30+00:00
I think the most common way to approach that problem would be to have a "default config", and overrides. Could you go into more detail about why you didn't do this instead?

Downsides with your approach is:

1. Now whenever you want to change something both in Europe and (assuming) USA you have to do it in 2 places. If the change is the same for both, in my system, you could just update the default/shared config. If the change is different for both it's equally easy, but faster, since the overrides are smaller files.

2. It's not clear what the difference is between Europe and USA if there is 1 line different amongst thousands. If there are more differences in the future, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference easily.

3. If in the future you also need to add Africa, you just compounded the problems of 1. and 2.
by creer | 2025-08-31 02:14:48+00:00
Layoffs are not a new thing. The 80ies were already seeing the combination of recurring layoffs at the same time as a thick book of open positions - for the same companies. Layoffs were frequent, openings were plentiful.

Resume processing software indeed was a problem from the start, at first leading to resumes stuffed with BS keywords.

I feel that what are (somewhat) recent are (1) the brazenness of the whole process, combined with (2) the time-intensive-ness of the interview process. All the way to different people applying and showing up for the job. That is new. Hundreds of responses for each and every job posting, that is recent. Just the lid on the coffin of a process that has been breaking for a while.
by danabramov | 2025-08-31 02:15:32+00:00
I realize that we might be arguing over definitions here, but to me part of the experience of Twitter-like conversation is seeing other replies appear in real time even when they’re not directed at me — same as how you’ve noticed this thread on HN.

Seeing the existing convo in real time lets me decide which points to engage with and which have been explored, and to navigate between branches as they evolve in real time (some of which my friends participate in). I do earnestly navigate hundreds of times within an active thread — maybe it’s not your usage pattern but some of us do enjoy a realtime conversation with dozens of people (or at least observing one). There’s also something to the fact that I know others will observe the same consistent conversation state at the time I’m observing it.

You might not consider such an experience important to a product you’re designing, but you’re clearly taking a technological limitation and inventing a product justification to it. If Mastodon didn’t already have this peculiarity, you wouldn’t be discussing it since replies appearing in realtime would just seem normal.

In either case, whether you see it as a problem to be solved or not, it is a meaningful difference in the experiences of Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon — with both Twitter and Bluesky delivering it.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-31 02:16:28+00:00
You missed the "performance" part.

Depending on how you write your query and how you structure your data, a query can take 0.005 seconds or 500 seconds.

SQL hiding the execution is an extremely leaky abstraction. To get the performance you need, you have to plan your possible queries in advance together with how to structure the data.

I mean, it doesn't matter if you only have 100 rows per table, but once you're dealing with multiple tables with millions of rows each it's everything.
by jbmsf | 2025-08-31 02:16:28+00:00
We have a recent hire who comes from a background where a) the user base was much larger and b) metrics were the best way to understand outcomes.

Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.
by immibis | 2025-08-31 02:16:57+00:00
> Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost

They just disappear. You're not appending to a long-term immutable blockchain-like archive. You're posting things to the internet and the nature of posting things to the internet (or anywhere for that matter) is that nobody guarantees they will be around forever.

> Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating

Identical to "what about those times when Twitter bans someone whose tweets I want to read?"

> What all this talk about fighting censorship while actively engaging

Censorship and moderation are the same word
by ranger_danger | 2025-08-31 02:17:51+00:00
I think this attitude is exactly why this happened. I would have done the same thing.

Do you argue with your school teachers that your book report shouldn't be due on Friday because it's not perfect yet?

I read several of your response threads across different websites. The most interesting to me was LWN, about the debian tools, where an actual psychologist got involved.

All the discussions seem to show the same issue: You disagree with policies held by people higher up than you, and you struggle with respecting their decisions and moving on.

Instead you keep arguing about things you can't change, and that leads people to getting frustrated and walking away from you.

It really doesn't matter how "right" you may be... not your circus, not your monkeys.
by refurb | 2025-08-31 02:18:07+00:00
Where to start? Comparing a 10 year US period to a 20 year period? Seems awfully selective.

Let's do a side by side comparison? 2018 to 2023? 2023 is the last year with solid numbers.

US: 12% real GDP growth

China: 26% real GDP growth

Sounds impressive, until you account for the base.

US: +$2.4T USD

China: +$3.64T USD

Yikes! 4x the number of people, but 0.5x the GDP growth.
by toasterlovin | 2025-08-31 02:18:59+00:00
FWIW, we’ve been affected by the tariffs (10% for now; we import mainly from Vietnam and Thailand at this point). Did our second price increase a few weeks ago. We’ll probably test out how much the market will bear because operating in this market really demands a risk premium. So far it’s not as crazy as the pandemic supply chain crisis, but it’s close. The most insane ending to all of this that I can imagine is that the tariffs get conclusively ruled unconstitutional and all the tariffs payed get returned. Would be a huge wealth transfer from consumers to businesses.
by gazpacho | 2025-08-31 02:20:52+00:00
I work at Pydantic and while the future is obviously unpredictable I can vow for all of us in that we do not intend to ever start charging for any of our open source things. We’ve made a very clear delineation between what is free (pydantic, pydantic-ai, the logfire SDK, etc) and what is a paid product (the Logfire SaaS platform). Everything open source is liberally licensed such that no matter the fate of the company it can be forked. Even the logfire SDK, the thing most integrated to our commercial offering, speaks OTLP and hence you can point it at any other provider, basically no lock in.
by benreesman | 2025-08-31 02:22:01+00:00
It comes and goes in seasons. There is always a tension between the needs of the many and the pathological acquisitiveness of the few, but this is the worst in the West in living memory.

The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.

Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.

There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.

Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.
by immibis | 2025-08-31 02:23:08+00:00
What do you think would happen if the Bluesky company suddenly blocked everyone but https://bsky.app/ servers from using their relays?

And what if, before they did that, they updated the PDS code so it blocked all relays except for their one?

I'm not asking what you would do. I'm asking what would happen because of what everyone does. I think the name "Bluesky" would refer to the fully centralized bsky.app, and 99.9% of users would never notice a difference. Users who had other PDSes would either quit (nobody noticing their departure) or sign up to bsky.app like everyone else. The events of Twitter show it's probably the latter - people bent over backwards to comply with Musk to keep their accounts.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-08-31 02:23:33+00:00
I've been reading his novels, and I like the story of the pigs.

Genetically tweaked to be more compatible with the humans that might harvest their organs, but then they became a bit too human. Then scientists were like fuck it how far can we go with this. Hyperpigs.

Scorpio is not as interesting a character as I would like, but he's a good pig.
by sneak | 2025-08-31 02:23:35+00:00
When I do stuff like this, I just write the front app in the new/fast language, then reproxy the stuff not written in the fast language to the legacy app. You can even add middlewares or caching or metrics in the new app for requests going to the old one, as you can run (fast) code around both the request and the response.

It’s the best of both worlds - the new app gets to see all of the traffic, but doesn’t need to implement 100% of the routes. Any added to the new app can just take precedence over the old one, carving out the path-space that gets reverse proxied.

It seems like doing FFI for this is overly complex; I’d rather take the small perf hit of doing another request to a different process.
by pyuser583 | 2025-08-31 02:24:04+00:00
I’m not dismissing them at all. They’re a legit religious group.

But I don’t think they’re throwing satanic parties to grow appeal among satanists, or because some of their employees happen to be Satanists - the two reasons companies embrace religious celebrations.

Maybe I’m wrong - maybe they’re trying to brand their movie “The Witch” as a modern Satanist movie, and get a built in audience. Maybe.

What’s more likely is they are trying to be edgy. And they failed. Inviting a bunch of Satanists as a marketing ploy is boring. It’s like something out of marketing satire.

I’m reminded of how Silicon Valley lampooned Satanism the way Monty Python lampooned Christianity.

It’s not offensive. It’s just boring.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-31 02:24:16+00:00
China has blocked ESNI

https://gfw.report/blog/gfw_esni_blocking/en/

But SNI is not CH and ESNI is not ECH

Will China block ECH

ECH blocking has been detected in Russia

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/417

According to Niere et al. (2025)

"Additionally, with the ECH extension not yet being widely used [17], [71] and focusing on privacy protection rather than censorship circumvention [60], it can be censored easily by blocking it entirely [14], [76]."

The paper describes various GFW bypass methods that currently work, including removing the SNI extension entirely

It does not mention anyone using ECH to bypass GFW

Perhaps it is too early to conclude "China blocks ECH" because ECH is not in widespread use
by chipsrafferty | 2025-08-31 02:24:47+00:00
I don't think it's as cut and dry as that. In my team we require 100% test coverage. Every file requires an accompanying test file, and every test file is set up with a bunch of mocks.

Sure, we could take the Foo, Bar, and Baz tables that share 80-90% of common logic and have them inherit from a common, shared, abstract component. We've discussed it in the past. Maybe it's the better solution, maybe not. But it would mean that instead of maintaining 3 component files and 3 test file, which are very similar, and when we need to change something it is often a copy-paste job, instead we'd have to maintain 2 additional files for the shared component, and when that has to change, it would require more work as we then have to add more to the other 3 files.

Such setups can often cause a cascade of tests that need updated and PRs with dozens of files changed.

Also, there are many parts of our project where things could be done much better if we were making them from scratch. But, 6 years of changing requirements and new features and this is what we have - and at this point, I'm not sure that having a shared component would actually make things easier unless we rewrite a huge amount of the codebase, for which there is no business reason.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-31 02:25:10+00:00
> Hence why society actually tends to proceed due to powerful and often disliked unelected leaders, e.g. business tycoons, who can push things ahead despite this tendency.

You had me up until this paragraph. Are you trying to write ayn rand fan fiction?

Also, keep in mind that when americans say "socialism" they mean "government funded infrastructure projects", it sounds like you weren't aware of this.
by Avshalom | 2025-08-31 02:25:14+00:00
Good job being incapable of synthesizing both of your perversions into a single post.

I am "arguing" (not arguing, simply stating basic facts) that neither Russia nor the USA were giving "IQ tests" to soldiers. Also neither Russia nor the USA are currently giving "IQ tests" to soldiers.

To Wit: I do not think the Army not accepting people who score too low on their entrance exam has anything to do with "IQ".

Also neither I nor my hypothetical child will be taking an "IQ test" (again not actually a defined thing) so having a preference is not a sensible idea.
by itake | 2025-08-31 02:25:15+00:00
In the tech world:

- Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump, Bezos, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Travis Kalanick,

In politics:

- Trump, Xi, Putin, Biden [0], Obama [1]. When the republican party couldn't elect a chair, they were seen as dysfunctional.

If you can't sing together, the purpose fails:

- Quibi: founders disagreed. company failed.

- The Beatles (Lennon vs. McCartney)

- Soviet Union: Central Communist Party wanted to preserve the union, but republics (Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, etc.) demanded independence.

- Yugoslavia: Deep ethnic, religious, and national divides (Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenes, etc.), each with different visions of the future.

[0] - Biden fired Gerald B. Wright for loyalty to Trump. Rodney Scott disagreed with Biden's immigration strategy and was also fired.

[1] - General Stanley McChrystal was fired for critical comments about Obama.
by bb88 | 2025-08-31 02:26:11+00:00
We can look at history.

The US has export restrictions on certain computing devices to certain regimes which included the Sony Playstation 2, a gaming console from the double noughts [0]. Apparently the military thought it could be used to create nasty weapons. Two decades later and nobody cares whether a PS2 is shipped to Iran. We still track FPGAs I guess, though I haven't checked what's on the ITAR/EAR list in a while.

Embargoes typically work until the embargoees(?) develop the technology to build or acquire what they need. If AI is only a strategic advantage because of hardware alone, then yes. But Deepseek kinda maybe killed that idea. China has never been the first mover. They optimize. But it looks like today, AI embargoes to China will get the US months at most.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-08-31 02:26:40+00:00
I like the basic idea but 2 hours seems short specially for young kids that need structure. I suspect 65k is the cost of getting individualized teaching. AI will give each student what they need to learn but I'm sure there will be someone to make sure those students learn and aren't only just playing games. Sounds like an interesting experiment.

One of the things I hated about school was the never ending waste of time waiting for things to happen. I would have enjoyed 2-3 hours of book learning and the rest of the time learning something I loved or at least exploring new subjects to study. If I was a young student I think a I would wanted to go to a school like this. Of course, the cost would have stopped me from attending.
by NietzscheanNull | 2025-08-31 02:27:15+00:00
If a nation's fortune hinges on permitting a handful of extremely rich individuals to extract wealth with impunity, wield their immense hoard to buy up major media organizations and communication platforms, use those assets to continually suppress labor and consumer protections, and fix political elections by way of SuperPACs and other dark-money slush funds... well, that isn't my idea of a robust society or economy.

We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.
by jchw | 2025-08-31 02:28:47+00:00
Mastodon is definitely not the only fediverse setup that is popular, Misskey, Pleroma and forks of those integrate perfectly well. Given that the main Misskey instance is one of the largest fediverse instances (certainly by activity) it seems a bit unfair to criticize the fediverse on this. I mean, how many completely independent microblogging implementations does a network actually need? (Not even including things like Lemmy or Peertube which are also ActivityPub instances.)

On the other hand I really think you're underselling how much more popular Bluesky services are than any existing alternatives. I don't think we can actually see the distribution of network traffic, but I would be willing to bet decent money that the sum of all alternatives to the Bluesky AppView wouldn't even crack 0.01% the traffic of the main Bluesky AppView. And, honestly, I would probably bet even more money they'll never even come close to cracking 1% ever for the entire lifetime of the protocol, unless Bluesky Social PBC literally goes out of business.
by sojournerc | 2025-08-31 02:28:54+00:00
Agreed, I think this bit is important.

>> Alpha “is a private school, which tends to attract families with financial resources, highly educated and providing lots of enrichment,” Lee said. “So when we try to generalize or extend what we’ve learned from this to schools writ large, there are some important differences to note. And so, how much of this is kind of the distinctive curation of students versus the design structure of the school?”
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-31 02:29:29+00:00
You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.

Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.