MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avar | 2025-09-27 09:25:02+00:00
> How do you even drain a 3.7V lithium > ion battery below 3.3V?

Connect the + and - terminals with an appropriately sized resistor, it'll drain all the way to 0V.

> My devices that use 18650s will > not let them go below that.

Because you're not using the + and - terminals, you're using the + and - supply of a BMS, which is connected to those terminals. For this sort of testing you need to bypass the BMS, which'll have its own voltage cutoffs.
by ascorbic | 2025-09-27 09:25:20+00:00
In the end there's always someone left holding the can. Lloyd's of London has underwriters with unlimited liability. Incredibly, a lot of these Names have historically been private individuals. In the 90s a lot of these lost their shirts (and their homes) when they dicovered that it wasn;t just an easy source of passive income. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/nov/04/business.perso...
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-09-27 09:25:30+00:00
As a desktop candidate role I would say that there is a pain of bones broken in the past. I have System Shock (1) for DOS and for MacOS. DOS version was playable in NTVDM for long, especially in 32-bit XP with VDMSound. MacOS version was, to be precise, Mac OS Classic version for Motorola CPU. And Mac OS switched CPU from Motorola to PowerPC. They had emulator bundled, but only for one switch. Soon after Motorola-to-PowerPC switch they did PowerPC-to-Intel switch. And Intel Mac OS did run PowerPC applications, but did not run Motorola applications. So I have managed to unpack StuffIt archives with System Shock for Mac OS, but never managed to run it. Actually, Intel transition was not momentarily. There was Intel x86 Mac OS and Intel x86-64 Mac OS. 10.4 Tiger could possibly run something 64-bit, but not GUI apparently. Later Mac OS introduced nice Objective-C 2.0 features as 64-bit only. Mac OS 10.6 was the last one to have Rosetta for PowerPC, and I hear complaints that it was a loss. Some games were left in PowerPC era, and "Mavericks forever" movement (10.8, the last skeuomorphic Mac OS) reports they regret not having access to PowerPC. And as you may now, modern Mac OS went to ARM. Each time there is a leap to another architecture, bones break. Legacy do not work anymore, and companies want us to move on, but we don't want to. Our broken bones hurt.

There is an ongoing problem with ARM being proprietary architecture. Our trained bones predict future pain. Again! When will be the end to this sufferring? If we are to adopt open RISC-V 64 in the end, let's just do it now and not get used to anything ARM.
by jasonsb | 2025-09-27 09:25:51+00:00
In 2008, the system collapsed because politicians and global institutions hadn’t yet fully embraced debt-fueled illusions as the only path forward. Back then, Ponzi-like schemes still carried stigma, they weren’t openly endorsed as policy. Today? When every government and leader treats infinite debt as inevitable, and growth itself hinges on ever-expanding financial mirages, there’s no brake left on the system.

To be clear: I’m not calling AI a Ponzi scheme. I genuinely value this technology. But nearly everything else is: the markets, the policies, the promises.
by qmr | 2025-09-27 09:27:51+00:00
I would love to see pictures and unboxing of the feelies.

Those were before my time. I played many of these as part of the "Comedy Collection", "Sci Fi Collection" etc re-releases when I was 9-10 or so. Later searching for free "games" for my Palm VIIx, I found a Z machine interpreter and played a few of them on my PDA. Comment from a few days ago pasted below.

---

First time (only time?) a game made me cry, Floyd's death. 13-15 or so, Up way too late, hiding under my blanket to muffle the noise from the folding Stowaway keyboard, playing on a glowing green 160x160 LCD display on a Palm VIIx running a Z machine interpreter.

Apparently the author still gets emails now and then to this day about how Floyd’s death affected players. He used to have a personal site but I can’t find it now. A lot of players have written about this moment.

I think the other one I beat was Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams. Got somewhat deep in Beyond Zork and HHGTTG, but don’t think I completed them.

I remember my father getting excited when he saw those Infocom compilations on Walmart store shelves.

I’ve also considered introducing those to my son. He’s 5 now. Lately having him play Mario RPG, Zelda, and Final Fantasy to practice reading.

—-

“Perhaps the most amazing thing about the creation of Floyd was how easy it was. The entire code and text for the character, if printed out, would perhaps run to ten pages. What’s amazing is not that I was able to create a computer game character that touched people so deeply, but how infrequently the same thing has been accomplished in the intervening two decades.”

Steve Meretzky
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-27 09:30:33+00:00
Yeah it's worth remembering that the dot com bubble didn't come crashing down because the ideas weren't viable, we're very much living in a world dominated by the very things people were hyped on back then.

The dot com bubble came crashing down because we were still not there yet, at the turn of the millenium. We lacked the logistics to make large scale ecommerce viable, and we also lacked the smartphones to make it practical.

I generally feel we are in a very similar position right now. LLMs shows real promise, but also real limitations. I'm very skeptical it will bring significant utility in the next few years. Maybe in a decade or more, when other pieces of the puzzle are in place.
by Sayrus | 2025-09-27 09:30:46+00:00
https://www.ratp.fr/decouvrir/coulisses/au-quotidien/des-sol...

In 2020, 5% of bus in Paris had AC.

In 2026, they aim for 75%. And a 100% rollout by 2035.

Even subway lines don't all have AC.
by qmr | 2025-09-27 09:31:54+00:00
"put all into thing"

"I got the Babel Fish T shirt"

How did the infamous Babel fish puzzle originate?

The basic idea was by Douglas, and I added some refinements (like the Upper-Half-Of-The-Room Cleaning Robot). More interesting is how close the puzzle came to being removed from the game; most of Infocom’s testing group thought it was too hard. I was going into a meeting with them just as Douglas was leaving for the airport at the end of his final trip to Infocom, and I asked him, “What should I tell them about the Babel fish puzzle?” He said, “What should you tell them? Tell them to fuck off!” So the puzzle stayed… and its very hardness became a cult thing. Infocom even sold T-shirts that said “I got the Babel fish.”

-- Steve Meretzky
by psoundy | 2025-09-27 09:32:18+00:00
I used kinesis advantage for 15 years, switched to a glove80 for the past 2, but recently went back to kinesis with an advantage2. The glove80 is very nice, but my hands are big enough that the kinesis thumb cluster works better for me and the cherry mx brown switches are much more satisfying than the low profile chocs.

So ymmv, but for those with larger hands, it may make sense to try a kinesis.
by cb321 | 2025-09-27 09:34:35+00:00
Nim actually already supports using `()` as braces most of the time for most constructs. So, in this sense it is more like Haskell than Python, though the latter is more well known.

Nim is also more "expressional" than Python in many ways. So, for example, in Nim you can say:

let x = (try: dict[key] except: 2) for i in 1..x: ( echo i )

Most users hate how that looks, though, much as most users of bracist languages also hate:

int foo(char bar) { int c = 0; for (char i = 0; i < bar; i++) c++; return c; } // could be many '}' here

In reality, these discussions feel more like style guide wars, reformatted as PLang syntax wars, pun intended.
by rollcat | 2025-09-27 09:35:58+00:00
> For example, with home robot vacuums, we can only hope that brands will use top quality cells, but the information what cells are used is not even available to the customer.

Hardware used to come with diagrams & schematics, for self-service and repair. This was a courtesy, but I guess manufacturers figured out it's better to make the consumer buy a new model. (AKA part of the reason why Commodore went bankrupt.)

Meanwhile we've been talking and implementing measures such as lists of ingredients and nutrients in food, SBOMs in software, privacy/tracking transparency, etc. Let's push it a little further.
by jbs789 | 2025-09-27 09:37:22+00:00
The impact was nuanced, and depended on the specific policies in place.

Some businesses had business interruption insurance which paid out. Many policies exclude highly correlated events such as pandemics.

And then think about specific events which were cancelled, which may have bought policies protecting them if cancelled.

And of course life insurance and health care would have been affected.

SwissRe often produces public reports in the space if of interest:

https://www.swissre.com/risk-knowledge/building-societal-res...
by robert-zaremba | 2025-09-27 09:39:00+00:00
TBH, I'm sick about LaTeX: - compilation is heavy - it's not friendly for writing (far from the dominant markup languages) - poor support to HTML / Epub / mobile outputs - output (PDF) not friendly for parsing / digesting. - tonnes of templates, lot of mess.

We should just use human friendly markups like MyST Markdown [1] or Org Mode [2].

Unfortunately, whitepapers are predominantly written in LaTeX. Thankfully, arXiv recently made a move to parse and render those documents in the web format. It's a hard job. But this is the wrong way around: instead of keep composing documents in LaTeX (which is not human friendly), and then doing the hard job with tooling, we should start with human first approach and have win-win!

We are living in the world where web content is the primary content and friendly for desktop, mobile devices and readers and tools (select, copy, edit...). It's easy to package any web content into epub and ship it in a single file. Printing is also easy. Only cons: precise typesetting is not harder. But this is less of the problem. I would prefer a content that is friendly to read and is responsive, than a precise typesetting.

[1] https://mystmd.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Summary.html [3] https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html
by SCdF | 2025-09-27 09:39:11+00:00
There are plenty of ebook stores if you google around, that have a standard range and use Adobe DRM, so off the bat wouldn't work on a kindle. In theory you can remove that DRM using Calibre, but I haven't tried.

Other than that, not really? There are plenty of ways in which you can buy _a_ drm free book, but not some large range (or even bandcamp-quality range, where there are authors you've heard of, just not Dan Brown / Stephen King sized ones) site.

I haven't got around to solving this problem so am also interested. I already own a kindle, I don't want to generate ewaste by changing physical device.
by kakacik | 2025-09-27 09:40:58+00:00
Not all experiences are created equal. They have some type of experience in droves, but mine is much... wider and more varied for the lack of better words. Their days looked one like another, very little variety. Same people, same situations whole lives. It really limits one's experience, and living 5000 years in such environment doesn't add up that much.

One example is that psychology - they are just not wired to look at complexities of other people's emotions, origins, mental issues and so on. People are good or bad, weird is a third state for them and thats it. They are trivial to manipulate via emotions, just like their whole generation is.

I mean I talk to them regularly, but its rather shallow talk. Anytime I go deeper ie about my deeper experiences in some remote place and culture, their face goes blank, they don't have much to add. They look at the photos and love those but that's a very tiny part of whole story. I learned over decades what topics work and which are for other people.

Its all fine, apologies if I sounded worse than things are. Parents are just parents, for adults they are not meant to be the closest people in the world, that's rather an indication of some social failure to find and integrate with peers down the line.
by Zenst | 2025-09-27 09:41:25+00:00
Having worked on reinsurance software in the 90s, one question that springs to mind, which came to light from the asbestos claims era, was brokers commission. What did happen was brokers would package up risks and sell those off (taking commission) which would see other brokers bundle those up and again package them and others up into a bundle and sell those off. So when a claim came down the line, that was huge, like the asbestos claim in period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London which saw such a diluted risk and brokers commission leaching all profit, brought many down financially due to exposure.

So interested how things are today regarding brokers endlessly packaging up risks they sell on, rinse repeat. I'm aware of certain changes that came about to reinsurance brokers in both the Lloyds and London Markets on the back of the asbestos claim era, but not sure of the the CAT model risks/insurance regarding brokers endlessly packaging up to offset risk exposure vs regulations limiting how much they can do that - more so the USA market.

So curious - is there a risk from brokers diluting risks for commission profits in this market or is that saftly covered against and regulated?
by avar | 2025-09-27 09:42:35+00:00
This may not be what you're asking, but it's rather trivial if you're setting up an SMTP gateway that proxies traffic to another SMTP that handles the IP address reputation management etc.

E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like piping to mail(1) etc.
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-09-27 09:44:01+00:00
Hacking into some platform makes very tied to it. I still recall how to program smooth scrolling in EGA/VGA. It becomes an explored world, and is ARM good for being tied to? ARM has an ongoing problem of being proprietary, and RISC-V is to come as a solution. If ARM is neither past nor future, then we should not getting tied to it.

Maybe get ITX-Llama and let parent and kid be tied to all the same platform? Have something common to discuss, something common to play. And MiniMig or Apollo A600 may do the trick. CheckMate Retro IPS display. It is past, but great past. Alive in our souls.
by Leftium | 2025-09-27 09:45:04+00:00
SvelteKit has been designed so JS on the client can be optional. (All JS is executed in node.js, with optional JS enhancement on the client.)

Try playing Sverdle with JS disabled! https://sveltekit-template.vercel.app/sverdle

> Unlike the original Wordle, Sverdle runs on the server instead of in the browser, making it impossible to cheat. It uses <form> and cookies to submit data, meaning you can even play with JavaScript disabled!
by rincebrain | 2025-09-27 09:45:39+00:00
I think my problem with codes of conduct is that, in my experience, they're usually just accountability sinks[1].

e.g. "all violations must be reported to the committee" => "we will forbid anyone taking action without the committee's prior approval, and insist that disclosing any reports to us is a violation of policy, then refuse to take any action on reports".

So a thing that was supposed to explicitly communicate shared expectations and norms, instead becomes a way to minimize risk of bad PR for the project by silencing anyone who believed they were operating in good faith.

[1] - https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
by dsign | 2025-09-27 09:49:11+00:00
Awesome news!

I mean, they wouldn't be if I had any money invested in Nvidia (I foretold their rise twenty years ago, but then as today I was too poor to keep any investments, in Nvidia or otherwise).

But, in general, I think we are going to keep building ocean-boiling amounts of compute, which we are going to use to do many grisly things and some good ones. I hope I can avoid the bad stuff and benefit from the good, despite it being statistically unlikely. It's called hope :-) .
by survirtual | 2025-09-27 09:49:21+00:00
Dumping money into a company until desired results is not "building a company". I have nothing against capital, but the hubris of the people investing is insane. /s

Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money.

You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small.

This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier.

I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris.

Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are.

This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing.

The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed.

The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes.

Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-27 09:51:20+00:00
I also have written. thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc to make a latex file and then latexmk to make a PDF file from it. I also used matplotlib and Python to make PDF plots, which I then could losslessly embed into the main document.

Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because you can use latex in your Pandoc template and reStructuredText is very powerful to begin with, compared to most if not all Markdown dialects for example. I think it might have been easy to continue writing reStructuredText, instead of latex.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-27 09:53:17+00:00
> If you chuck language out the window, you're also chucking meaning and concepts out with it.

I’m not chucking language out of the window. I’m saying that the meanings and words for our currently language don’t express theoretical concepts well. So arguing about semantics around metaphors is stupid.

For example, terms like “spin” aren’t literal in partial physics. We just dont have common language outside of scientific jargon because the concepts aren’t relatable.

> Anyway, if we're making up fun ways to think about the meaning of the universe

I didn’t make this up. These are hypothesis proposed by people far far smarter than you and I.

> which conveniently doesn't rely on trying to extrapolate our perception outside the bounds of our perception.

Literally the entirety of quantum mechanics is trying to extrapolate our perception outside of the bounds of our perception.

And the MUH (Mathematical universe) idea you referenced itself talks about the multiverse as a purely mathematical object. Which is a contradiction of your statement about it being constrained to our perception.

> Maybe it's less of a big bang and more of a big yo-yo.

It’s ironic you write several paragraphs criticising myself and others for using metaphors, and you then use one yourself. Or are you stating that the universe is a literal kids toy on a string? ;)

Also does the MUH describe the universe as a metaphoric yoyo? It’s been a while since I’ve researched that hypothesis but I don’t recall the yoyo effect being its leading conclusion.

There are other hypotheses that state that, but they’ve been largely disproven since the observations that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate.
by Eisenstein | 2025-09-27 09:54:31+00:00
Regarding the mental illness aspect, Amal Graafstra wrote a page about this. He sells chips that you can have implanted (RFID, NFC, etc) and a lot of people end up contacting him after finding out about his business and ask for help with what they believe are chips inside them that have been implanted against their will.

* https://forum.dangerousthings.com/t/so-you-think-youve-been-...

Also a forum thread which continues to get constant activity. I feel incredibly bad for the people dealing with this. It is unfortunate that there is often absolutely nothing you can say to convince them that what they believe is occurring is not possible.

* https://forum.dangerousthings.com/t/microchiped-or-frequenci...
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-09-27 09:57:04+00:00
A typical household would have 4-5 people in it and only two cars if you’re lucky. A person needs mobility from the age of roughly 7 to at least 70 for all kinds of reasons.

Please travel the Europe and see how they treat their people and how increased mobility creates a great environment and freedom for everyone. I assure you that it’s not a backwards place as some people claim.

As a side note: All this car craze coincided with baby boomers (roughly) and now that they’re losing their physical and cognitive abilities we’re seeing a lot more accessibility support from them (duh) and I wouldn’t be surprised if they started pushing for free public taxi service for themselves but nothing that would serve the public. And we’re not talking about heavily subsidized industries like cars, but something that can be profitable and worthwhile because it allows people to go to work, school, shopping, hospital, theater, and more.
by lou1306 | 2025-09-27 09:58:23+00:00
I got kind of lost at this part of the tutorial (https://litexlang.com/doc/Tutorial/Know):

know forall x N: x >= 47 => x >= 17 let x N: x = 47 x >= 17

How does that assumption in the first line have any effect? Surely the underlying theory of naturals should be enough to derive 47 >= 17 ?

And in general I am very skeptical of the claim that Litex "can be learned by anyone in 1–2 hours". Even just the difference between `have`/`let`/`know` would take a while to master. The syntax for functions is not at all intuitive (and understandably so!). & so on. The trivial subset of the language used in the README may be easy to learn but a) it would not get you very far b) most likely every other related toolbox (Lean, HOL, etc) has a similar "trivial" fragment.

But, always good to see effort in this problem space!
by wil421 | 2025-09-27 09:58:46+00:00
>I literally remember one of my elderly relatives pulling out a tooth at home with a thread tied around a door handle as if this was nothing special. DIY all the way! Early 1990s, former Soviet Union rural-or-so area.

Some form of this type of tooth pulling was common for baby teeth in the 90s. I’m sure it still is today. I don’t know about recommending it for adult teeth.