MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-08-24 21:12:36+00:00
If your ping is that high, you might be doing it wrong. Even Starlink is usually less than half that, usually a lot less. Most Remote Desktop setups I’ve seen are fairly and surprisingly responsive. It’s not quite as nice as a desktop 3 feet away, sure, but that only matters for a few things, and it’s good enough for most work. The tradeoff can be worth it since you can now work from anywhere via laptop and connect to the same machine. No need for multiple setups, most of the machine management is taken care of, upgrades are seamless. For various reasons I haven’t been able to move permanently to a cloud workstation, but TBH I often want to.
by nickthegreek | 2025-08-24 21:12:38+00:00
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
by kiitos | 2025-08-24 21:13:21+00:00
> Filenames on Unix can be arbitrary byte sequences, and even on Windows they can be characters that don't exist in the current locale.

In which case(s) it is the responsibility of the thing that wants to print them to make them printable, right?

I guess we're using different definitions of "printable" which makes this a discussion rooted in semantics which isn't very interesting.
by crmd | 2025-08-24 21:13:34+00:00
I had kidney stone surgery (laser lithotripsy) in Manhattan last Friday morning and literally the first thing I was given after changing into the paper gown was 2 500mg Tylenol pills and a cup of water. I don’t know if you’re a physician but the medical staff in manhattan tend to be at the top of their game, and they are cool with Tylenol.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-08-24 21:13:38+00:00
> It’s been two years now. I finally weaned myself off of Big Daddy.

There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-24 21:13:41+00:00
As usual, prepare for Linux suggestions to the papercuts, but...

I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.

For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.
by pvaldes | 2025-08-24 21:13:56+00:00
> What can be done to reduce leakage?

Do we really want that? Thousands of people are being killed each year by heat strokes. Keeping those trees alive by its environmental services is much more valuable in terms of lives and also energy saved. Maples have soft big leaves but also reduce the asphalt temperature by 5-10 degrees. If required just plant a tree species that can live with less water.
by yourapostasy | 2025-08-24 21:14:00+00:00
Lounges of U.S. carriers in U.S. airports serving international flights that are about as busy as overseas counterparts have a nearly universally poor showing when compared to those overseas lounges. I’ve read this comes down to the financialization of those U.S. carriers who dilute lounge exclusivity chasing those sweet credit card profit centers while overseas carriers are not under those dynamics; U.S. carriers don’t usually get to have a hand in the design and layout of airports so their lounges are less spacious and amenity-filled; overseas international hubs tend to cater more to long-haul multi-hour layover itineraries than the short turnaround domestic traffic that is more common in U.S. airports; and U.S. cost structures against wage stagnation trends are more prohibitive to the more lavish splash outs in overseas lounges.
by roscas | 2025-08-24 21:14:11+00:00
Don't want anyone to use that but that is good to prove that almost everybody can use a spreedsheat that is not Excel. Including LibreCalc. And many others.

The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!

I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-24 21:14:13+00:00
Zeroth, teaching "everyone" programming is a pointless and futile gesture... it would be more effective to teach EE/CS capable students who aren't just passing through to collect a paycheck.

In terms of course planning, it's the perpetual dilemma of teaching top-down vs. bottom-up.

More concretely, teach the hardware side as such:

1. The basics of CMOS logic operation

2. Combinational digital logic

3. Sequential digital logic

4. Construction of a 4-bit adder

5. Construction of a basic ALU

6. Construction of a single cycle MCU (simpler than MICMAC)

7. Construction of a processor like MICMAC first, as a single cycle with microcoding

8. ... as a pipelined processor

9. ... add branch prediction

10. ... an L1 code and an L1 data cache

11. ... superscalar

12. ... L2 and L3 caches

13. ... specialized compute units

14. ... NUMA

Concurrently, and in parallel teach:

1. Math becoming functional/concrete mathematics

2. SICP

3. Introduction to Algorithms

4. C for concrete implementation and analysis of algorithms

5. Multiple language paradigms: Python, Prolog, OCaml, Bash, and Awk

6. Compiler construction

Gradually, also teach:

1. Engineering ethics and professional responsibilities

2. Profiling and debugging tools and techniques

3. Software and systems configuration management

4. OWASP and defensive programming practices

5. Testing, lightweight agile, and formal process methodology

6. Effective documentation

7. Project lifecycle management

8. Working effectively in a team

9. Maintaining large, long-life codebases

Engineers of the future need to do the intellectual labor to grasp and master the topics rather than being spoon-fed the minimal, easiest possible path with little explanation of the underlying technologies.
by echelon | 2025-08-24 21:14:22+00:00
You can have this outrage when your parents are using browser user agents.

All of this concern is over a hypothetical Reddit comment about a technology used by early adopter technologists.

Nobody has been harmed.

We need to keep building this stuff, not dog piling on hate and fear. It's too early to regulate and tie down. People need to be doing stupid stuff like ordering pizza. That's exactly where we are in the tech tree.
by neilv | 2025-08-24 21:14:33+00:00
Kudos to this article for:

1. starting with threat modeling (though they don't call it that);

2. mentioning that your OPSEC affects not only you but also people connected to you; and

3. mentioning that maybe you should just leave the device at home (because it's basically a surveillance machine that you pay for).

(A more common article format would be to unload a pile of supposed security&privacy measures without putting them into context, and wouldn't properly set expectations for what that gives you. Neither of which is very helpful, and can be very counterproductive.)
by mullingitover | 2025-08-24 21:15:38+00:00
The UK started requiring that Tylenol always be sold in blister packs instead of convenient-to-kill-yourself-with whole bottles of pills.

Results: "Suicidal deaths from paracetamol and salicylates were reduced by 22% (95% confidence interval 11% to 32%) in the year after the change in legislation on 16 September 1998, and this reduction persisted in the next two years. Liver unit admissions and liver transplants for paracetamol induced hepatotoxicity were reduced by around 30% in the four years after the legislation. Numbers of paracetamol and salicylate tablets in non-fatal overdoses were reduced in the three years after the legislation. Large overdoses were reduced by 20% (9% to 29%) for paracetamol and by 39% (14% to 57%) for salicylates in the second and third years after the legislation. Ibuprofen overdoses increased after the legislation, but with little or no effect on deaths."[1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC526120/
by pessimizer | 2025-08-24 21:16:12+00:00
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.

You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.

There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 21:16:16+00:00
The clock problem is actually a Linux issue. Linux sets the hardware system clock to UTC and only applies time zones when displaying the time.

Windows sets the hardware clock to local time.

Every time one or the other updates the clock, it's now in the wrong format for the other OS. The fix is to tell Linux to use local time. There are no side effects as far as I can tell
by beagle3 | 2025-08-24 21:16:41+00:00
It is lightweight, very easy to understand and reason about (much more than systemd - and it’s not just an issue of familiarity - it has much fewer moving parts than systemd’s service management part).

It’s rock solid. It goes to great length to never lose process output, not even a single char, across service restarts. (it might be possible to achieve same on systemd - but it isn’t trivial)

And it’s been that way for me for two decades now - Ubuntu moved from system v to upstart to systemd; my systems still use the same daemontools setup they used 15 years ago, they do it on FreeBSD and Linux. And they just work, no surprises.
by benreesman | 2025-08-24 21:17:05+00:00
This holds in other areas as well, and to me at least the conclusion follows from the evidence: there is seemingly a lot of potential in agent coding, a few tasks are just crushed/solved (quick webapp demos, other library stitching in the small) but for real software in the large? It's not there yet in either the way the models are tuned or our collective expertise in using them.

And this isn't surprising: git-style revision control hit the scene almost 20 years ago, it was like 5 years until it was totally dialed in anywhere, another 5 before elite companies had it totally figured out, and its been slowely diffusing since, today its pretty figured out. And this is harder to use right than git.

I think it would go faster actually if every product release, every OSS tool, every god-damned blog post wasn't hell bent on saying "its done, its solved, old way cooked, new world arrived".

We're figuring it out and it takes time. That's OK.

If it was done, then we'd be drowning in great software. We're not, we're breaking even, which is impressive for a big new thing 1-2 years in.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 21:17:17+00:00
My experience is that, when it started (for me, 2004 was my first work-issued laptop), it was more about what the GP was saying. The first time I had a laptop for work, I was expected to be in the office from 9 to 5 (or longer), and was expected to be available to respond to occasional emails in my off hours, sometimes taking calls, facilitated by having that laptop that I could bring home. I was fairly junior; others more senior than I was would be taking calls (for which they'd need their laptop) from home and doing substantial work nearly nightly. (We did a lot of work with hardware and software firms in east & southeast Asia, so we'd have calls at US-weird hours.)

But even in the few years before the pandemic, I was where you're talking about, working from home a lot more often, and replacing office-work hours with home-work hours, not just adding extra hours at home to my office-work hours.

I think this still depends a lot on the company, though. I know people who are expected to be in the office for 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week, but still bring their laptop home with them and do work in their off hours, because that's just what's expected of them. But fortunately I also know a lot of people with flexible hours, flexible home/office work, and aren't forced to work much more than 40 hrs/wk.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-24 21:17:34+00:00
> Firefox is funded by Google. By using it, Google is still benefiting from it, use a different browser.

1. You're moving the goalposts here. We were talking about avoiding tracking/pinging Google

2. Google pays Firefox to be the default search engine. If you change the search engine, how are you benefitting Google? They're paying for eyeballs that you're not providing, so you're technically making them spend money in vain.

> Google is known for trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses to get around blockers such as Little Snitch on popular software.

If we assumed that this was true, I don't see how switching out the OS makes any difference to the tactic of Google "trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses" from a 3rd-party website, which is where this conversation started.
by mierz00 | 2025-08-24 21:18:08+00:00
It’s not that simple.

I’m making a tool to analyse financial transactions for accountants and identify things like misallocated expenses. Initially I was getting an LLM to try and analyse hundreds of transactions in one go. It was correct roughly 40-50% of the time, inconsistent and hallucinated frequently.

I changed the method to simple yes no question and to analyse each transaction individually. Now it is correct 85% of the time and very consistent.

Same model, same question essentially but a different way of asking it.
by enether | 2025-08-24 21:18:54+00:00
I would assume storage varies greatly. I know that LinkedIn quoted an average read fanout ratio of 5.5x in Kafka, meaning each byte was read 5.5x times. Assuming that is still true, we ought to divide by 6.5x to get to the daily write amount

That comes out to 87 disks a day. Assuming a 7 day retention period (this is on the high side), it’s not unthinkable to have a 600-1800 disk deployment (accounting for replication copies)
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-08-24 21:19:03+00:00
I've also run into this issue a lot, especially in AWS when developers with less networking experience start randomly picking VPC subnets (why they were doing that is a whole 'nuther issue). They wonder why connectivity in docker on their ec2 hosts doesn't work, by default docker chooses 172.17/16 which seems to be a common choice for VPC subnets. Annoying, but a teachable moment nonetheless.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-24 21:20:17+00:00
Aspirin and ibuprofen are both NSAIDs with not too dissimilar pathways, so combining them won't be as effective as combining either with paracetamol. They'll both do their jobs, but if the ibuprofen is already doing its job, aspirin won't have much work left to do.

Meanwhile, taking ibuprofen can negate the effect aspirin has when taken against cardiovascular diseases. Not a huge problem if you're just taking it as a painkiller, but not everyone can combine the two. That's another potential reason to take paracetamol over some NSAIDs, though you should obviously consult a doctor if you're taking prescription medicine of any kind.
Show HN: DeepShot – an open-source NBA predictor with ML, EWMA, and live UI
by tonicstark | 2025-08-24 21:20:42+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m an NBA fan and Python dev, and I recently built DeepShot — a machine learning model that predicts NBA game outcomes with about 71% accuracy based on historical stats and rolling performance metrics (EWMA). It features: Real NBA data from Basketball Reference Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages to track momentum Interactive NiceGUI interface with team comparison and predictions Full Python stack and open-source (MIT license) Here’s the GitHub repo: https://github.com/saccofrancesco/deepshot And if you like it, here’s my Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/saccofrancesco Would love any feedback — especially from folks who’ve built sports models or worked on real-time stat tools. Also open to ideas on where to take this next (player-level modeling? betting advice dashboard?).
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 21:21:02+00:00
> Yeah. "Oh, we made a mistake, but it's water under the bridge now. It's too late to build nuclear. Here, get this lump of coal and burn it to warm up. It's fine, we'll phase it out in 20 years. Just don't think about it now, and don't forget to vote for more green energy"

This truly is getting sad. Coal is already being phased out. It is very telling that you don't dare to look forward.

Only complain about what has been. Why don't you go and invest your own money in nuclear power? Why do you want trillions in handouts from the state on a dead-end technology?

Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?

> OK. Why is Germany directly paying for new natural gas generation? Wouldn't it be cheaper to replace coal with cheap renewables and storage? Should be a no-brainer, yeah?

As per their changing energy mix they are quickly replacing coal with renewables? In 2024 60% renewables in the mix.

What is your option? To not build said natural gas plants and wait until the 2040s for new built nuclear power?

How will that solve Germany's electrification needs from switching from natural gas heating to heat pumps in the short term?

I love how you keep evading all real questions. The nuclear cult, never logical.

> Oh, it's the "cheapest energy" only when you don't care about the grid stability (see: Spain) or winter (see: Germany).

And now we're diving straight into falsehood. Can't stay with the truth with you nuclear cultists can we?

Maybe you can explain why 50% of the Spanish nuclear fleet was either offline or withdrawn from the market when the blackout happened?

Maybe you can explain what problems Germany had last winter? A few expensive days? You want to solve a few expensive days by making the electricity all year around multiples more expensive by through authoritarian means forcing everyone to pay for your imaginary nuclear boondoggle?

> If we use Oikiluoto Unit 3 as a guide, it cost 11B euros for 1.6GWe of capacity. Getting to 60GWe would have required 400B euros. Without considering any economy of scale or savings from streamlining the construction.

Thank you for once again confirming that you are out of your depth.

The figure you quote is from a settlement 6 years prior to the plant being finished while construction costs and interest kept accumulating.

No one knows the final cost for OL3, but we do know that it bankrupted Areva and that the French paid for the majority of the costs.

Why didn't you dare bring up Vogtle, Flamanville 3 or Hinkley Point C? Because using those as a guide my numbers was being kind on nuclear power?

> Perhaps you should look in the mirror? Maybe YOU are missing the forest for the trees? In this case, "trees" are vapid editorials about how Germany generated 100% of energy from renewables. Small print: in summer, when demand is low.

Getting stingy now. Annoying dealing with someone who has seen all your talking points and lies you usually shield yourself behind before?
by georgeecollins | 2025-08-24 21:21:04+00:00
We did that on a game I worked on over ten years ago. It was a mobile game and we knew that it was very important to player retention (and interest in multiplayer) to have the first multiplayer interaction be "fun". So we would simulate the first person you played against as though they were another human. Based on play data of other humans. Because you only played them once you didn't think you were playing a bot.

Where we used AI (machine learning, not LLM) was in terms trying to figure out what kind of human you would want to play with. We also used machine learning to try figure out what cohort of players you were in so we could tweak engagement.

Where LLMs could really shine, in my opinion: Gamers love to play people, not AI (now). People are unpredictable, they communicate, they play well but in ways a human could (like they don't have superhuman reflexes or speed). You can play all kinds of games against AI (StarCraft, Civilization, training of all kinds of FPS) but it isn't fun for long because you see the robotic patterns. However, an LLM might be able to mix it up like humans, talk to you, and you could probably make it have imperfect reaction time, coordination, etc. That would really help a lot of games that have lulls in human player activity, or too much toxicity.

I would be shocked if some games aren't doing this now. It seems like it still be hard to make a bot seem human, and it probably only works if you sprinkle it in.
by ncruces | 2025-08-24 21:21:29+00:00
The Apple built macOS SQLite is something.

Another oddity: misteriously reserving 12 bytes per page for whatever reason, making databases created with it forever incompatible with the checksum VFS.

Other: having 3 different layers of fsync to avoid actually doing any F_FULLFSYNC ever, even when you ask it for a fullfsync (read up on F_BARRIERFSYNC).
by viccis | 2025-08-24 21:21:31+00:00
Em dashes are fine in throwaway casual writing like internet comments or tweets or whatever. However, I think that, in any writing that is significant enough that LLM usage is scrutinized, they often just come across as a crutch to avoid more planned out sentence flow. I think it's actually a good thing that people are feeling like they should cut down on them.
by formerly_proven | 2025-08-24 21:21:36+00:00
- Metamizole has a tendency to kill some percentage of native Brits and their descendants. Yet globally it's one of the most popular painkillers, it's even OTC in countries with sufficiently low numbers of British and related people. (Has anyone ever done research to try and figure out why Brits are on the order of 1000x-10000x more sensitive to that side effect?)
by decafninja | 2025-08-24 21:21:41+00:00
Having to brace myself while the bus or train swerves and careens and feeling constantly annoyed and uncomfortable while standing, I don’t have any mental capacity for developing any creativity in public transit.

That’s not to say driving facilitates creativity either since it also requires constant attention. But even in a traffic jam, at least I’m sitting in comfort.

Granted, this is in the US, albeit the American city with arguably the best transit - NYC.

I can see myself having more mental clarity while riding some of the more comfortable transit systems in other countries.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-08-24 21:21:57+00:00
In the middle east you have many of the same issues you had with African states after colonialism. They are made up of a bunch of different tribal groups who often aren't on good terms. Long history of exploitation and conflict over resources.

Typically for Arab countries if you great grandfather wasn't living there in the 1920's you're not a citizen and that is that.

The worst of it is Palestinians have been used as pawns by outsiders with no actual interest in their welfare. By Arab countries in their pissiness about state not run by Muslims. And the Soviets in their conflict with the US and western Europe.
by girvo | 2025-08-24 21:22:39+00:00
> Buy phone & service in cash

Step one is already difficult here in Australia: to do so you must hand over your personal details and ID. At least that was true for anything with a SIM card for sale back in the 2010s

So the “step 0” was “find a retailer who didn’t follow the rules”, and they’d usually be a corner store selling handsets or SIM cards by the bucket load to all sorts of interesting characters