MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by micheljansen | 2025-08-19 13:49:43+00:00
"Let's be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!"

The funny thing is: this actually works incredibly well. Perimeter wires are a PITA to install, but once that's done, they are a very practical and flawless method for making sure the robot does not escape into the neighbour's yard or worse. The random movement is really effective too. What exactly can a smart robot do better?

Removing the need for perimeter wires would be great, as long as it works 100% flawlessly. Obstacle detection would also be nice, so I can avoid my mower chewing up the toys my kid sometimes leaves lying around (though it is a great motivation to clean up!)
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-08-19 13:49:46+00:00
This is a mistake programmers often make. Our code of laws is not a proof, or a program, or a set of logical axioms. It's interpretations, often conflicting, of legislature. It also takes into account intent and subject matter and various other things.

It doesn't matter that ad block is logically equivalent to bookmarklets. If elected judges determine it's illegal, none of these "nerd" defenses will work. The only defense is to vote in legislators who will pass laws protecting it.
by tttmmc | 2025-08-19 13:49:47+00:00
In Germany we do hand counting and i have participated on multiple occasions and would say

1. it is really hard to do any fraud for multiple reasons:

\* the people counting are pseudo randomly chosen \* but even if you somehow managed to get "your" people to count then you've only secured one very small portion of the votes \* the counting areas are near to each other so some random citizens would be able to observe multiple counting areas at once \* there is no "winner takes all" rule in Germany and neither is there a electoral college.

2. The counting and reporting processes are well monitored and documented so that simple inconsistencies become visible right away either in the counting group (7-9 people in general) or when they phone in the results to the central point.

3. There is obviously a cost involved in having people count BUT i can't imagine it being more that paying for the counting machines since the people involved aren't paid normal wages but instead expense allowances.

I fully support handcounting over machine counting! But the US would still have to get rid of old traditions, namely electoral college and gerrymandering practices. The popular vote should be the deciding factor most of the time!
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-19 13:49:51+00:00
I agree, photolithography at home is a long way out.

I think if we want to distribute the means of computational production, a better approach would be to print oligonucleotide instructions (requires a custom inkjet printer), and use a cell free extract (e. coli would work) to synthesize proteins which are programmed to assemble the computational substrate from nanoparticles.

Something along these lines: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422649112
by philips | 2025-08-19 13:50:03+00:00
> The US have massively more complicated ballots though, which I think is another issue entirely that you guys must solve.

Frankly this is never going to happen. The US democracy is extremely distributed and as a result each school district, water district, county, city, state and the federal government each have races and ballot items that citizens vote on.

Undoing this system is likely intractable without completely redesigning the US system of governance.
by surmoi | 2025-08-19 13:50:19+00:00
We train for surface protocol to become automatic, so even depraved of oxygen, it becomes a reflex. It does a big difference, you'd be surprised to see how many ppl blackout when surfacing because they exhale too much first :/

Regarding Mifsud, he had a YouTube channel, in French, which is full of information about freediving ! He worked a lot with scientists to understand how his body work and how to reach this world record. Also he confessed that he does not have spams when holding breath, so it helps a bit.
by dreamglider | 2025-08-19 13:50:56+00:00
Seems it is not just about geeks VS general population but rather the classical case where success (ease of access) & popularity inevitably bring failure. Few open (loosely or not actively moderated) "spaces" left. No wonder given the general attitude of the, lol, "invaders". :D In the past - you pick an IRC server and a room and 4 out of 5 times you'll learn something interesting, have actual fun with ppl you don't know and just enjoy the interactions. Now similar experience can happen only in closed/invite only or hard-to-find groups. The mainstream ones (different "social media" services) seem filled with people who want only to show off while remaining as alienated (and as consequence hostile) from one another as possible. Good or bad - the old Net is dead. The new one is predominantly for making money and BS. The same trend can be observed virtually anywhere. In the past - people experimented with games, lots of cr@p titles but also pure gems, games that last. Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again. Anyway - it is what it is, the good thing is there are still meaningful places and people worth reading/listening to, just way harder to find through the noise. News.y seems one of the few remaining and open islands.

To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.
by tstrimple | 2025-08-19 13:50:58+00:00
They have just refined themselves to their essence. Gotten rid of all the baggage of civility and decorum and allowed their true colors to fly. The core uniting force between these folks is still there and it has never been about fiscal responsibility. That's just a mantle they took up to target programs for minorities back when they pretended to care about being called racist. Folks left of Democrats have been calling this our for literally decades only to be told we're overreacting as liberals once again try bipartisanship with fascists.
by Pxtl | 2025-08-19 13:51:08+00:00
Actually while I use it heavily for shell scripting, it's also also my go-to for python-style scripting too. Mostly because it's the one I'm most familiar with because of professionally doing DevOps on an MS stack with a lot of legacy stuff, but still:

It's just object-y enough to be excellent at filtering and shunting and translating records from API endpoints to CSV files to SQL data rows, etc. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anybody to pick up because of all the sharp ends (eg it uses Javascript falseyness except SQL NULL has the ADO.Net "DBNull" which isn't falsey) but because I'm so familiar with it I find it quite good at that stuff.

As much as people bag on the syntax (like the operators all starting with hyphen, and all the .NET functions speak with an accent), the real problem is how many edge-cases are in there, like strange behaviors of the error stream, overcomplicated scope rules, FileSystem providers for the registry and SQL server and other objects no reasonable person would ever want to use as a "file", empty-array objects getting silently converted into null, etc.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-19 13:51:25+00:00
I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world.

Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-19 13:51:28+00:00
How about we don't compromise a voting system with black boxes just because there are unrelated attacks against it? If you prefer, you can think of it as following in the example of "more enlightened" countries, like in Europe, Canada, India, etc.., that already do it this way.

I am from one such country, and I enjoy not having a bottomless rabbit hole of computer security underpinning our elections.
Evil Google spams your email about Gemini
by talkingtab | 2025-08-19 13:51:49+00:00
"You have received this mandatory service announcement to update you about important changes to Gemini."

I get these emails over and over again. No opt out. Google is user hostile and contemptuous.

Hey! Lets just all stop using google on 8/25/2025. No email, no search, no gemiyuck. No Chrome. Use firefox or brave. Or anything else.

Lets make 8/25/2025 world wide "Just say no to google day"
by vmh1928 | 2025-08-19 13:51:55+00:00
What many people outside the US may not realize is that ballots here may include 40-60+ races. The presidential race appears on the same ballot the races for Senate, House of Representatives (both national races,) state wide positions like governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, state treasurer and secretary of state, and state mine inspector. In some states superior court judges are on the ballot for "retention" as well as State Supreme Court positions. Then come the state legislature races. Most states have two houses so a state-level Senate and House. Then come county positions, Sheriff, Board of Supervisors, Recorder, Treasurer, County Attorney, Justice of the Peace and constable. Then the school board races so you may have a high school district board and an elementary school district board. Then come the referendums and initiatives that either the state legislature put on the ballot or citizens gathered enough signatures for; these typically change state law but sometimes implement or remove new taxes. In 2024 in Maricopa County, AZ we had a two page ballot because the legislature added 20+ initiatives to try and implement laws the governor had vetoed.

In any case, the idea that these ballots can be accurately hand counted is absurd. In some of the hand count examples in the states mentioned in the article only one or two races on ballots with 10's of races were recounted and even those recounts were problematic.

What's really telling is that none of the people elected in 2020 or 2022 or 2024 at the state legislature level are calling for recounts of THEIR races. Machines are fine when the right party wins.

Machines are the only way to deal with a ballot with 60 races. There are other parameters that could be put in place to help improve people's faith in the system. San Francisco makes ballot images available via a web portal. It's entirely possible that an AI model could be trained to rapidly recount any and all of the races to validate the official results. Tighter ID requirements would be OK, it's 2025 and even people in the hills and reservations should have IDs.
by am3101 | 2025-08-19 13:52:22+00:00
Bourbon was definitely on the downswing before this (note that any spirit made in the US will have the same issue with tariffs).

First, as noted, there are generational (and cyclical) shifts in spirits.

Second, bourbon’s “box” is very narrow. There are LOTS of innovative things that scotch manufacturers can and do pursue. Bourbon has to be barreled and bottled at specific proofs and, more importantly, must be majority corn and aged in a new oak barrel. There’s only so much differentiation you can have between distilleries, which is why some of the more innovative distilleries like High West often do “American whiskey” instead of bourbon.

Third, the bourbon boom in particular was so fast (and on the heels of a broken industry) that there wasn’t much quality aged supply. Partially because it’s cheaper and partially because size you can’t spend four years aging bourbon with no positive cash flow, most “craft” distilleries source from MGP (white label producer in Indiana), and I think you end up in this consumer trap where consumers know they want something nicer than bottom-shelf Jim Beam, but don’t know how to differentiate a distillery that does in-house product vs a distillery that sources. (Also, some distilleries that do in house are quite bad.) The net of it is consumers who want “nice” bourbon eventually conclude that “all bourbon tastes the same” which if you only buy from MGP sourced distilleries is sort of true. (Ironically some of the large brands like Wild Turkey are actually the really great brands in the space.)
by stonemetal12 | 2025-08-19 13:52:29+00:00
I love python, as long as were are talking about small teams, short, and short lived programs. The lack of static types makes things quick to implement even if it isn't too sound, and the strong typing keeps you from fucking up too badly. That is why I think it gets so much love in data science, it is great for noodling around while you are trying to figure something out.

On the other hand if you are going to be building something that is going to be long lived, with multiple different teams supporting it over time, and\or larger programs where it all doesn't fit in (human) memory, well then python is going to bite you in the ass.

There isn't a one size fits all programming language, you need at least two. A "soft" language that stays out of your way and lets you figure things out, and a "hard" language that forces the details to be right for long term stability and support.
by bearl | 2025-08-19 13:52:46+00:00
If the left were really the left they wouldn’t be the left though. The NBC left is the problem, the Democracy Now left is not. The left doesn’t want Bernie, Chomsky or Amy Goodman they want The View. Turns out young men don’t want The View, so the left is stuck now much like the American right because there is no ideological coherence, just aesthetic and hatred for the other team however they are imagined (e.g. “tax and spend republicans”).
by h4kor | 2025-08-19 13:52:46+00:00
IIRC there has been a case in Germany where it was ruled that opening devtools is hacking and therefore illegal intend. A person found a vulnerability by looking at the website source (using devtools) and informed the company. They then sued him using the "Hackerparagraph" (§ 202c StGB) for use of hacker tools.
by qwertfisch | 2025-08-19 13:52:53+00:00
I was in Paris some years ago, and it surprised me that a jug of water for drinking was free on every table. Of course if you wanted any other beverage you’d pay for it, but just quenching your thirst was free.

In Germany water is not free, but instead another income for restaurants. Also it needs a law (only since 2001) that the cheapest beverage must be non-alcoholic. (Yet water could be more expensive than beer, as long as e.g. apple juice costs equal or less.)
by hermannj314 | 2025-08-19 13:53:30+00:00
As far as I know, the blue/green mentality is a cultural issue for Apple. They would be fine if Android users had their data read by the government, because that injustice is a market differentiator for them they can then sell.

I'm not saying they shouldn't lobby for what they believe in, but Apple always stops short of making the world a better place and seems to care only if their walled garden is secure.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-19 13:53:46+00:00
Drake Equation:

{total # of HN readers} * {% who are American voters} * {% who bother reading submissions/comments on this topic} * {% who meaningfully change their opinion on the subject as a result of such reading} * {% who change to strongly opposing US support for Israel (because politicians don't much care about druthers)} * {% who "stick" in that new position, long-term} * ...

Multiply it out. Then compare to the number of US voters who'd need to switch to strongly opposing support for Israel, for the politicians to notice or care.

I'll stick with my 0.000%.
by Corrado | 2025-08-19 13:54:05+00:00
I completely agree. My father was a truck mechanic and I spent plenty of time under cars turning wrenches. I'm very happy that part of my life is behind me as an BEV owner. My wife still drives an old Accord and I dread the times when it needs an oil/transmission fluid change, muffler replacement, water pump, etc. All of that simply disappears when you switch to a BEV and it really is refreshing not having to think about it at all.
by HankStallone | 2025-08-19 13:54:18+00:00
Part of it is that the bosses often don't know what they want, so they leave the details up to marketing or whoever, so replacing marketing or whoever with AI would mean figuring out what they want. The boss can tell marketing, "Make a brochure for new product ABC," and marketing can run with that and present him with a mock-up, he can make a couple revisions, they shine it up based on those, and then they're done. To replace them completely with AI, he would have to provide a lot more guidance and it would take more iterations to get a correct result that he likes. It wouldn't be completely unlike the current process, but it would demand more of him, which wouldn't make him happy.

Last week I was talking to my boss about a project I've been working on for him, and he asked whether AI could help me with it to save time. I pointed out that a lot of the holdup in the project has been his not knowing exactly what he wants (because he's not sure what the software we're working with can do until I do it and show it to him), and an AI can't tell him what he wants any more than I can. Sometimes you just have to do the work, and technology can't help you.
by davidnc | 2025-08-19 13:54:20+00:00
This comment does a great job of clarifying the picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106193.

It's effectively a visualization of gcd(x,y), and has almost nothing to do with primes. Once you realize that, it's a lot easier to reason about a lot of the patterns, although it is still a pretty interesting visualization.
by b3lvedere | 2025-08-19 13:54:24+00:00
My infrastructure is my infrastructure. If i choose not to pass certain data, then that is my decision. There is no way in which i can be forced to pass through certain data on it. Contracts and TOS may require access to certain data locations in order to function correctly, but this does not absolve them from enforcing it. Sorry, but my current DNS resolver does not work very well with certain data points that just want to show me ads :)
by waerhert | 2025-08-19 13:55:41+00:00
I switch between the cheap Byomic 76/700 newton and my Sigma 600mm lens (Canon EF but using an adapter to fit the Olympus body). I tried to get the DSLR looking into the newtonian but it was just too heavy, causing the plastic focuser to simply bend way off axis. I've since bought a dedicated astro camera (Neptune C II) which fits alright on the newtonian. I'm keeping the Byomic 76 only for visual observations now. Looking to buy a proper refractor of around 480mm. The Sigma 600 does alright with the DSLR but isn't very sharp, hard to focus and suffering from some coma. It's good enough to learn the ropes for now.
by _l7dh | 2025-08-19 13:55:58+00:00
I politely disagree with almost every combination of the words you just used :). 1. hackers could be interested in news other than tech, that’s the very identity of hacking: understanding things in this case, the world politics and conflicts. 2. even then, there are _always_ non-tech entries on HackerNews, de facto. 3. it’s not 4000 old issue (misleading oversimplification). In essence, it’s a century-old colonial project that is entirely inline with the 19th and 20th century European colonialism, with a supremacist idealogy at its core (ethnostate).
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-19 13:56:13+00:00
Companies frequently aren't trying to build a platform. They're just trying to build products people will buy.

I think trying to carve up the world of possible creations into marketplaces like that is sacrificing progress on the altar of capitalism.

If Microsoft added a coin flip to the start menu, are they also competing with your app? If somebody makes a keyboard that has a button on it and when you push it It lights one of two LEDs, are they also competing and should the law stop them? Am I competing if I'm carrying a quarter in my pocket? At some point, there's no compelling societal interest to protect your app from more convenient solutions to the end user.

In general, protection against monopolies in the United States hinges on harm to the consumer. It's real hard to argue that things are worse for the consumer when Google makes the process of digitally flipping a coin easier than installing an app.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-19 13:56:35+00:00
The ultimate purpose of these laws is to cultivate a devotion to God. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with or "unclean" about consuming pork compared to beef, for example. It's a sacrifice that's made to instill a habit of devotion and of being attentive to spiritual matters.

(Indeed, among Christ's criticisms of the Pharisees is that they had lost sight of the spirit of the law and reduced it to an exercise in OCD and appearing pious in public while their hearts remained impure. From the Christian perspective, the Mosaic covenant was fulfilled by Christ and superseded by the New Covenant in which such dietary laws are no longer needed, as they would have already served their purpose. Of course, Catholics do practice dietary restriction on Fridays and during Lent as a matter of canon law as a penitential sacrifice.)

Ritual, in general, is not some kind of superstitious witchcraft or casting of spells, but a matter of spiritual practice and a system of signs communicating unseen realities. Everyday life contains similar practices. We use signs to communicate truths that cannot be perceived through our senses all the time (think of all the gestures we use in everyday life). This is to be expected, as human beings are also corporeal beings, and we communicate through signs that can be perceived through the senses.
by WillAdams | 2025-08-19 13:56:42+00:00
An interesting contrast here is to how the other side handled things --- Windows for Pen Computing elegantly integrated a stylus into a desktop OS, and things progressed with fits and starts, with a marked upthrust with Microsoft's Tablet PC effort on Windows XP, and then Windows 8 --- but since Fall Creators Update, the stylus has been dumbed down to an 11th touch input, and it takes a bit of effort to get it to do anything other than scroll in a web browser (use Firefox and set a specific option to disable this).

If Apple would make an iPhone which supported the Apple Pencil, I'd be inclined to replace my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and the pair of an iPad Pro and MacBook w/ an Apple Pencil controlling Sidecar seems workable enough to replace my Wacom One, and presumably the iPad would be portable enough to replace my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- but that still leaves my Kindle Scribe....

Steve Jobs promised that killing the Newton would result in devices which would justify that, but I'm still not seeing a Newton replacement from Apple, and the Scribe is about as close as I've gotten (and I wish Amazon would add a smaller model, or better still, engineer a phone case which included an e-ink screen, Kindle functionality, and had a Wacom EMR stylus and which would extend/replace a phone screen (replacing allowing for usage in direct/bright sunlight)).