MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runarberg | 2025-08-25 19:02:36+00:00
Honestly I suspect this is largely a non issue. I have never made a gradient that goes through more than 2 different color (by some vague measure of different) without adding an additional stop. If I wanted to go through yellow and green to get to blue, I would add a stop at yellow and another at green, and I suspect most developers would do the same.
by nxobject | 2025-08-25 19:02:39+00:00
For background to sibling comments - AS/400 aka "System i" was historically a separate line of processors, but is now POWER running a software translation layer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI

To illustrate why the AS/400 had its market niche, the Cali Cartel had a very successful installation of an AS/400. Apparently they used it to do both "business analytics" and back-office tasks.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-25 19:02:48+00:00
Exactly this. I don't even have a nice multi-drive enclosure, just a small swarm of toaster-style dual-drive holders. They're absurdly cheap. (Alas one of the recent purchases was maybe too cheap: wont let me adjust the various drive spin down/power savings settings. But this is a first for me, and they've all been very cheap).

Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.

With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).

Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
by rightbyte | 2025-08-25 19:03:09+00:00
> "pseudo-nostalgia" both fascinates and puzzles me.

Super hero movies have some pseodo-nostalgia fans around me.

I mean, I knew those people when they were kids. They didn't care for super heroes except for like Batman, Spiderman and Power Rangers.

Nothing else was even available for them.

But they talk about obscure characters like, Thor and the Hulk or Cpt. America as they read those as comics or something.
by gosub100 | 2025-08-25 19:03:27+00:00
I seriously doubt there's a POWER mainframe in the back of Costco to handle the 3 UPC barcode scans per second. It's possible that every Costco store funnels its orders to a single mainframe somewhere.

I think a more realistic case is the visa and MasterCard credit card networks that have almost 0% downtime.
by em500 | 2025-08-25 19:03:33+00:00
Not sure what "a lower median net worth at the 99th percentile" means (median is net worth level at the 50th percentile), but 1 in 100 American households (not individuals) indeed have over $13 million net worth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBL99T999309

This threshold has about doubled since 2010, which should not be too surprising as house prices more than doubled and the S&P500 increased six fold in the last 15 years.
by westurner | 2025-08-25 19:03:35+00:00
Geothermal energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy

Geothermal heating > Extraction (GCHE, GHX) || Ground source heat pump (GSHP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating

GSHP: Ground source heat pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump

Heat pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump #Types :

> Air source heat pumps are the most common models, while other types include ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps.

Heat pump > Types:

- SAHP: Solar-assisted heat pump; w/ PV

- acronym for a heat pump with TPV thermophotovoltaic heat to electricity:

- acronym for a heat pump with thermoelectric heat to electricity:

- TAHP: Thermoacoustic heat pump

- ECHP: Electrocaloric heat pump

Electrocaloric effect > Electrocaloric cooling device studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocaloric_effect#Electroc...

GCHE, GHX: Ground-coupled heat exchanger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-coupled_heat_exchanger

Acronyms! From https://www.google.com/search?q=Ground-coupled+heat+exchange... :

HGHE: Horizontal Ground Heat Exchanger: a GCHE installed horizontally e.g. in trenches

VGHE: Vertical Ground Heat Exchanger: GCHE installed vertically e.g. in boreholes or piles.

PGHE: Pile Ground Heat Exchanger: A specific type of GCHE that is integrated into the structural foundation piles of a building.

Solar chimney or Thermal chimney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney

OTEC: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio... and the ecological salinity gradient:

FWIU archimedes spiral turbines power some irrigation pumps in Holland at least. Is there an advantage to double/helical archimedes spirals in heat pumps if/as there is in agricultural irrigation?

Screw turbine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_turbine

Noiseless double-helical Achimedes spiral wind turbine on a pivot like a pinwheel: Liam F1 average output with 5m/s wind: 1500 kWh/yr (4.11 kWh/day); Weight: ~100 kg / ~220 lbs; Diameter: 1.5 m / 4.92 ft

What about CO2 and heat pumps? Would a CO2 heat pump make sense?

Absorption Heat pump (AHP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_heat_pump

Adsorption Heat pump (AHP)

CO2-Sorption Heat Pump: a Adsorption Heat pump (AHP) that uses CO2 as the adsorbate.

NISH: Nano-Ionic Sorption Heat Pump; with e.g. sustainable hydrogels

Is it better to just recover waste heat from other processes; in a different loop?

LDES heat pump

Supercritical CO2 heat pump

Aerogels don't require supercritical drying anymore,

There's also buoyancy. The pyramid builders may have used buoyancy in a column of heated bubbly water to avoid gravity, in constructing the pyramids as a solar thermohydrodynamic system with water pressure.
by pier25 | 2025-08-25 19:03:44+00:00
Are you considering that the video needs to be stored for potentially decades?

Also shorts seem to be increasing exponentially... but Youtube viewership is not. So compute wouldn't need to increase as fast as storage.

I obviously don't know the numbers. Just saying that it could be a good reason why Youtube is doing this AI upscaling. I really don't see why otherwise. There's no improvement in image quality, quite the contrary.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-08-25 19:04:54+00:00
Sometimes size matters, tho. I came into MiniPCs from a Raspberry Pi solution. Our Pi's had to display multiple videos onscreen and weren't fast enough (I think the standard at the time was RP4), so we switched the critical ones to MiniPCs but they had to be small & light enough to hang off the back of a VESA mount on a TV suspended above a gym floor.
by hypeatei | 2025-08-25 19:06:23+00:00
> without giving the game away that the United States is now fully embracing authoritarianism.

The multiple civil suits that Trump is engaging in as president against pollsters and news organizations for saying things he doesn't like, the arrests + deportation of foreigners for protesting Israel, and the targeting of law firms who represent people opposing the administration don't already indicate this? Going after flag burning just further confirms that we're slowly but surely embracing authoritarianism.
by cstrahan | 2025-08-25 19:07:22+00:00
"Synchronized demand is the moment a large cohort of clients acts almost together."

Imagine everyone in a particular timezone browsing Amazon as they sit down for their 9 to 5; or an outage occurring, and a number of automated systems (re)trying requests just as the service comes back up. These clients are all "acting almost together".

"In a service with capacity mu requests per second and background load lambda_0, the usable headroom is H = mu - lambda_0 > 0"

Subtract the typical, baseline load (lambda_0) from the max capacity (mu), and that gives you how much headroom (H) you have.

The signal processing definition of headroom: the "space" between the normal operating level of a signal and the point at which the system can no longer handle it without distortion or clipping.

So headroom here can be thought of "wiggle room", if that is a more intuitive term to you.
by losvedir | 2025-08-25 19:07:28+00:00
This is a pretty good guide! I didn't get any AI slop vibes from it, so I'm assuming it was handwritten, which I appreciate.

I think I would suggest that PKCE is not really "less secure" than a client secret. It serves somewhat of a different purpose, and is actually frequently recommended even with a client secret. Its main purpose is "flow integrity" and ensuring that the same client is involved all the way through the redirects.

I think it also didn't really put the authorization code grant in context with the other possibilities. This really covered the "3 legged redirect" flow pretty well, which is what most people associate with OAuth. But the OAuth2 framework has a bunch of different grants you can use for different purposes. The Client Credentials one is pretty common, for server-to-server use cases, as well as fancier versions of it like the JWT Bearer flow.

Finally, taking an advantage of general OAuth2 discussion, since I've been noodling on it myself from the point of view of creating an "app ecosystem": since the redirect_uri is such an integral part of the security of it, and recommendations are for exact matches now rather than just prefixes and wildcards and such, how do folks handle OAuth2 when the app isn't owned by a single entity, but rather something like ServiceNow or Backstage which is self-hosted?

That is, you want your resource server to behave like "this was a request from a customer's ServiceNow instance", and all such requests are in some sense related. However, they're not really the same client, because you can't manage a client secret across all the installations. It's somewhat like a mobile app, which also can't manage a client secret, but that at least can share the same underlying OAuth Client because it can register a single, unique redirect URI.

I have other questions about things like how to fit the client credentials grant into a multi-tenant system... if these are things you've worked on, I'd love to hear from you! My email should be on my profile here.
by revx | 2025-08-25 19:08:29+00:00
I think a lot of millennials, myself included, are "people pleasers", who push our own needs aside to make others happy. Again and again.

This works, until we burn out and crash. I certainly have - I spent most of 2024 severely burnt out, and part of it was not protecting my time and setting healthy boundaries.

There's a balance between serving others and taking time to rest. Existing in community takes sacrifice and sometimes that means setting your own needs aside. But being in community also means that others can step up to help you when you need to rest, sharpen your saw, etc. People pleasing and setting poor boundaries in the context of (American) individualism means being a jerk.

I read somewhere (can't find it now, I'm literally on an operating table) that people in more community-focused cultures were more comfortable taking alone time. Because they know that if they take time, things aren't going to fall apart without them. The community will be there to welcome them back in, and nobody will be upset for them taking the time that they need.

Just some off the cuff thoughts.
by mfsch | 2025-08-25 19:08:33+00:00
Technically the big O notation denotes an upper bound, i.e. it doesn’t mean “grows as fast as” but “grows at most as fast as”. This means that any algorithm that’s O(n²) is also O(n³) and O(n⁴) etc., but we usually try to give the smallest power since that’s the most useful information. The letter used for “grows as fast as” is big Theta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation#Use_in_computer...
by costigan | 2025-08-25 19:08:36+00:00
Could you say a bit more about your workflow? I'm used to having source code files open in emacs (or zemacs) and a lisp REPL in another buffer. I edit the source files directly and then recompile changes into the running lisp. The code stays in sync because the text code files are the master copy and the running image is updated (when I choose) to reflect changes. Program state (e.g., large data structures) isn't generally kept in the source files. If what's in memory needs to be preserved, then I need to have serialization and deserialization methods, or a database, or I need to save the running image to a snapshot file. I've probably so internalized this process that there are problems with it that are invisible to me.
by 9dev | 2025-08-25 19:08:47+00:00
A while ago, I set out to understand OAuth properly and built a fully compliant authorisation server on SvelteKit, following all relevant RFCs, simply by… reading them all.

When you get used to the technical writing, it’s actually pretty straightforward—most of them actually document the endpoint structure and payloads, error codes, and so on. After that, the most complicated part is organizing your code to be modular and handle persistence right.

I can really recommend doing this once, and once the pieces start to fall into place, you’ll be able to understand most OAuth issues you’ll ever come across!
by schoen | 2025-08-25 19:08:50+00:00
I think it's a striking example of the German culture in question that bypassing credential rules for professorships is "absurd and illegal".

In other countries, academic labor unions might be mad about it, but it's theoretically possible that some universities might occasionally choose to grant academic teaching positions to people with unusual backgrounds. One of my great teachers at UC Berkeley was Brian Harvey, who had a PhD in education (not computer science) and only a master's degree in computer science. He was made a "lecturer with security of employment" (he could design and run courses, including courses that were mandatory for the computer science major, and give grades).

David D. Friedman was a law professor at Santa Clara University and had a physics PhD and no law degree of any kind.

These aren't quite the examples I want, because both of these people do have PhDs, just not in the subjects that they taught.

Wikipedia gives seven examples of famous U.S. professors who in fact had no doctoral degree, and in a few cases no postgraduate education at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...

This is called "exceptional" there, and it's clearly very rare (although all of the people mentioned are quite famous, and there are presumably less famous examples); I just mean to make the cultural point that outside of Germany people tend to believe that universities are in principle allowed to make such exceptions.

(There are also tertiary education institutions like community colleges that more routinely allow people without PhDs to teach, but these probably aren't relevant here because they're mostly not called universities and mostly can't issue bachelor's or higher degrees.)
by TimTheTinker | 2025-08-25 19:08:53+00:00
"hacker" just means someone who creatively does new things in unexpected/unintended ways. Any good hacker has a mindset to disregard arbitrary rules -- especially rules like "that's not possible" or "it should always be done this way". That's the mindset it takes to find novel solutions to open problems with real depth. Justine Tunney (jart) is a canonical example of a hacker par excellence, along with characters such as Fabrice Bellard, Richard Stallman, Hector Martin, and Alyssa Rosenzweig.

Finding a way to land a plane on all 7 continents is a really cool problem, and while I get that lying to officials on a form crosses an ethical line, we should at least honor the mindset of wanting to achieve something amazing most people would balk at, and give grace given the circumstance. This person should not be treated like a felon.

Furthermore, aviation as a field has had far too much of a conformance culture, and as as result we haven't seen any real breakthroughs, especially in (non-ultralight) general aviation since the 1970s. Cessna made GA accessible to middle-class families in the 1960s (a basic Cessna ran roughly $65,000 in today's dollars) -- but is there even a vendor today that sells a decent GA "toyota corolla"-type plane that is affordable for middle-class families? A brand-new Cessna 172 costs roughly $500,000 today, and a used airworthy one from the 1960s will cost at least $75,000. This field, and American manufacturing in general, needs more hackers.
by sroerick | 2025-08-25 19:09:28+00:00
There's also Omikub or any of the other "user friendly" distros.

Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay.

There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing.

Steam goes a long way too
by conductr | 2025-08-25 19:09:38+00:00
If I could just block the numbers, or auto send to voicemail, that my phone already flags as Spam/Telemarketing this wouldn’t be so frustrating for me. I do need my phone to ring for unknowns/outside my contacts numbers, so the blocking ability I need isn’t available (on iOS anyway.) I am left manually doing this when something rings if it is flagged, I will ignore it and if it’s unknown and not flagged I will answer it. It’s not perfect but could easily cut more than half of my current interruptions.
by caseysoftware | 2025-08-25 19:10:01+00:00
Yes, 100% agreed.

I launched and worked on OAuth 2.0 at Okta for ~5 years and spent most of my time showing people how to do it well and (gently) finding the holes and mistakes in their implementations. Sure, we were selling "OAuth as a Service" but most had introduced usability problems (at minimum) and gaping security vulns (at worst).

For a deep dive, check out Aaron Parecki's book: https://oauth2simplified.com/ - he's deeply involved in the (coming) OAuth 2.1

When I led re-implementation at pangea.cloud over the last couple years, we dropped most of the capabilies deprecated in 2.1 (resource owner password, implicit) and went straight to Auth Code with PKCE to make it a bit more manageable.

I walk through that progression/simplication here: https://speakerdeck.com/caseysoftware/the-many-layers-of-oau...
by spankalee | 2025-08-25 19:10:18+00:00
From the article:

> Liquid cooling is a familiar concept to PC enthusiasts, and has a long history in enterprise compute as well.

And the trend in data centers was to move towards more passive cooling at the individual servers and hotter operating temperatures for a while. This is interesting because it reverses that trend a lot, and possibly because of the per-row cooling.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-25 19:10:25+00:00
> I'm not sure what the correct end solution is, but the current solution seems to be very broken.

I think one of two high-level approaches:

We could be ultra-strict about who is allowed to call whom, and have penalties and enforcement similar to how we police credit card fraud.

Or, we could do away with phone numbers and instead come up with a scheme where you show a QR-like code to allow someone to call you; and then you can revoke that permission if/when it is abused.

---

Finally, I think the crux of the problem is that in the US we tolerate far too much of this kind of behavior. (Unsolicited contact for the purpose of sales.) Without a corresponding publicity campaign, there's far too much cultural tolerance of allowing anyone to contact anyone at any time for any reason to accept the kind of change needed to truly contain SPAM.
by mavamaarten | 2025-08-25 19:10:49+00:00
I love the MX vertical's ergonomics, it's really the perfect mouse for me in that regard. It just feels... right. But I'm sad that the mouse is absolutely miles away from the MX Master mice in terms of quality and features.

I developed serious wrist/hand pains after switching to the MX Master 3S for a few months, but its magnetic scroll wheel and build quality was absolutely glorious.

The MX vertical is a plastic toy in comparison, but it costs the same.
by thadt | 2025-08-25 19:10:52+00:00
So, the original complaint is that MLS solves technical logistics problems but punts on authentication.

Which is because authentication it isn't a technical problem - it's a trust/people problem. MLS's Authentication Service could be an extended Keycloak service run by a company for its employees (because the company trusts itself). It could be some furry running a key transparency service. Or it could be my buddy Stefan, meeting up with the group participants in a dark alley, handing out key bindings on index cards. Which of those you trust to manage your group communication security might be rather different depending on the context.

There are definitely other things one could complain about MLS, but its AS abstraction seems like a rather good one.
by marceloaltmann | 2025-08-25 19:10:53+00:00
Readyset is an Incremental View Maintenance cache that is powered by a dataflow graph to keep caches (result-set) up-to-date as the underlining data changes on the database (MySQL/PostgreSQL). RocksDB is only used as the persistent storage here, and the whole optimization is done for the DFG execution and not related to the persistent storage itself.
by junon | 2025-08-25 19:11:06+00:00
Kapton tape is your friend for hot air. It's cheap and you can get by with scissors.

Tape out anything that you're not reworking, use tweezers and push down the edges against the board to seal as best you can, and then flux it and blow.

It'll hold things in place and wick away the heat from anything you're not trying to rework. I went from a near 0% success rate to near 100% with it.
by xmprt | 2025-08-25 19:11:54+00:00
It's not for everyone but I can think of 2 use cases immediately:

1. If you're a developer, then you're probably using sqlite to store data and having a GUI for checking/modifying the database is probably handy.

2. Most application by other developers (even massive companies) use sqlite to store data under the hood even if the file doesn't appear to be named `.sqlite`. So if you want to tweak certain settings that aren't exposed to the end user, then you can use this to do that in a more user friendly way rather than crack out a command line tool for sqlite changes.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-08-25 19:11:54+00:00
Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation: I have a two-way switched pair of lights on my stairwell, one light at the base, one at the top. The one at the top does not work. We've tried replacing the bulb, we've tried fiddling with the cable for it (it's a suspended lamp). It hasn't worked since we moved in. We've told the landlord twice, he said he'd call his guy, his guy hasn't shown up.

I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.

I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.

I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.