MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tolerance | 2025-09-28 11:31:16+00:00
Yes. The leadership was also just (as) bad.

But combine incompetent leadership with impetuous personnel and I’m sure some other lame issue would’ve been set to fester for the dissolution of this bookshop.

And I’m not one to try to inject politics into every issue but it’s a good place to start and it sure has a way of being evoked by the parties under question one way or another.
by ludicity | 2025-09-28 11:32:10+00:00
I feel obliged to say that this isn't true of Ed at all. He does a lot more "real journalism" than most of the journalists I've interacted, and grills the people he's interviewing on technical details more than anyone else I've seen in the field.

I had a stressful five minutes this morning talking about using floating point numbers being weird for some financial applications because he wouldn't accept a shoddy answer.

Objecting to his writing and tone is one thing, but Ed is not dishonest or sloppy.

(And I've seen hospitals do some horrible things that probably demonstrably killed people through funding misallocation and reporting mistakes, which were at least partially caused by the AI bubble. So I think it's fair to say that some AI applications can be unimpressive while the net effect is disastrous.)
by syntaxing | 2025-09-28 11:32:33+00:00
Another post commented but that’s exactly the point of the MPPT. Not only is it temperature dependent but solar incidence angle matters too (how the sun angle is relative to the surface). MPPT works by changing the internal impedance to match the ideal charging voltage. But there’s a limit to how much it can regulate but I think it’s very fair that a consumer would expect nominal voltage times panels in series is less than the marketed solar input to work.
by dismalpedigree | 2025-09-28 11:32:39+00:00
Epirus makes some good stuff from what I hear. Its use cases are limited though. Its another exquisite system. This means it will be high cost and low volume.

Sure bases and high value assets will have great protection. They already do. Stinger missiles (1 example) have been able to hit quads since the day quads took to the air. The cost asymmetry (150k+ vs 1k) means they are rarely used so you have to let most drone threats go.

The opening days of the Ukraine war showed that all you need to do to stop an army is tale out its undefended logistics tail. Fuel trucks, water, ammo, food, etc. These need to be protected also, and exquisite system like Epirus wont be part of these convoys.

Another take away from Ukraine is the lay-in-wait tactic where drones sit near the road hidden and wait for you to come by. The Epirus system (and most of the other cUAS systems) are not able to help. You are probably over a slight hill, hidden by trees, or too close to the danger zone where a bigger system would also destroy you.

Basically everything and everyone has to have a means of engaging these threats. It must be cheap (cost per kill including the initial system purchase), easy to use, and widely available.
by hinkley | 2025-09-28 11:33:33+00:00
The reason you see people planting rice seedlings in wet fields in movies and TV is that the rice being planted is already the second or third crop of the year. Someone somewhere sowed rice seed densely in a single plot, to use to replant several times as much acreage by transplanting.

They can also in some cases raise fish in the same terrace, and herbs or other crops on the walls between them.

Farmers of Forty Centuries is an out of copyright book from ~1903 that details the findings of a research group from IIRC England who wanted to understand how the Chinese have been farming the same fields for four millennia without exhausting them. They were doing three crops a year back 120 years ago. A lot of it is down to accumulating silt over time by irrigating with silty water, and dredging the irrigation canals every so often to start new fields with the take.
by mathverse | 2025-09-28 11:33:38+00:00
Even being in Tauri this application just by doing these things takes around 120MB on my M3 Max. It's truly astonishing how modern desktop apps are essentially doing nothing and yet consume so much resources.

- it sets icon on the menubar - it display a window where I can choose which model to use

That's it. 120MB FOR doing nothing.
by maxglute | 2025-09-28 11:33:41+00:00
After seeing kids abuse llms for companionship I think many new gen will grow up shelling for sub if companies decide to wholey gatelock behind paywall. Where this world is heading, its cheaper than therapy. It's going to be indispensible while old men yell at clouds, think cell phone plan not spotify or netflix once companies start squeezing.
by unnah | 2025-09-28 11:33:57+00:00
That is the traditional explanation of why it is called reverse engineering. The term originated in hardware engineering. When it was originally applied to software, it was common to create requirements documents and design documents before coding, even if the actual process did not strictly follow the "waterfall" idea.

Thus it was natural to call the process of producing design documents from undocumented software "reverse engineering". These days coding without any formal design documents is so common that it seems the original meaning of reverse engineering has become obscured.
by JimDabell | 2025-09-28 11:34:50+00:00
> Objecting to his writing and tone is one thing, but Ed is not dishonest or sloppy.

Do you think somebody can honestly hold all of these opinions at the same time?

> this shit doesn't impress me even a little

> everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous

> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product

> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.

So it’s simultaneously unimpressive, unfathomably dangerous, stupid, quasi-useless, and it doesn’t matter?
by fsckboy | 2025-09-28 11:34:56+00:00
you seem to be having together do the work of quality; were i to say "what about time together with a friend distracted by their phone?" you could say "oh, that is not quality time" or "but you aren't really together"

nothing wrong with contemplating whether these things are the same or different, just pointing out it can be hard to sum up complexity with single phrase aphorisms
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 11:35:06+00:00
There's hiding complexity, and then there's creating fake reality for people.

As it is, panels are gonna produce variable power depending on the weather. Putting interoperability with third-party panels aside, to get the simplicity of "max 2 panels in series", they'd have to either cap the max power on the panel/generator link and dump the excess, or set the limit based on the worst case a customer is likely to encounter. I.e. they're either gonna waste power, or gouge their customers for extra hardware. Neither of that makes sense for an ecological product sold to a price-conscious customer base :).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-28 11:36:29+00:00
I've made the decision to "brownfield" many projects. My GH[0] is full of archived, and even private, repos that I no longer maintain. I have retired most of the apps that I've written. I only have a few left on the App Store[1].

I do make sure to explicitly "freeze" a project that I'm no longer maintaining, and indicate such, in the README. I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.

But the projects that I do want to finish, I make sure to do a "full-fat" job. If I consider it "done," then it gets the Full Monty. I also continue to maintain. If I can't do that, it gets archived; even if I had completed and shipped it.

Those are valid questions, but I don't usually get that exacting. The projects that I walk away from, are usually because they were just for learning, I got into a "death spiral," or that were eclipsed by something else.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/
by Illniyar | 2025-09-28 11:37:28+00:00
Load of bull. Every article linked in this is either wrong or mischaracterized.

Cloudflare does not facilitate phising - it just made proxying and tunneling easier.

The breaches and bypasses mentioned are anything but - they are linking to a successful mitigation of an attack as if the attacker got away with something of value.

This entire article reeks of trying to fit the evidence to an agenda.

Considering they couldn't find actual evidence of problems and had to resort to mischaracterization this is actually a great reason to use Cloudflare.
by chpatrick | 2025-09-28 11:37:35+00:00
None of those things are to do with typing. Python is slow because it's interpreted, bad at parallelism because of the GIL (which is going away), and bad at deployment because of the messy ecosystem and build tools (although it's pretty good with Nix). Conversely other languages aren't good at those because of static typing.

It is a great choice though for many problems where performance isn't critical (or you can hand the hard work off to a non-Python library like Numpy or Torch). Typing just makes it even better.
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-28 11:37:40+00:00
Three centuries together is a long time. Many familial, workplace and friendly bonds tie the countries to one another. Also, as long as the territory is vaguely yours, even in a confederation, it is at least neutral or mildly positive towards you. Not hostile.

If everything was about net money transfers, then the US could get rid of at least 15 constituent states, but half of those would be immediately courted by China, eh?
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-28 11:37:40+00:00
>What do you expect happens if you take literally trillions of dollars out of capital markets?

What a ridiculous trope.

Where do you think those fairer taxes will go? They don't just disappear from existence as you imply. Rather they get plowed right back into the economy. Into the hands of Social Security recipients (so people like your grandmother may not have to go without eating or eat cat food to survive) who will spend most of it almost immediately, and for medical/healthcare products and services.

In that scenario, will such moneys be a net positive for you personally? Probably, as millions of folks won't be starving in the streets and dying of preventable causes because their only means of sustaining themselves has been co-opted so you can have your "number go up."

More economic activity from fairly collecting existing taxes (that's what buying groceries and shoes and prescriptions is) will increase the velocity of money and grow the economy faster than the hoarding you're advocating. And "number go up" will continue.

Don't care about anyone else but you? Enjoy seeing people suffer and die for your marginal benefit? If so, come out and say it. It's at least a defensible, if evil and selfish, argument -- unlike the ridiculous one you made.
by michaelt | 2025-09-28 11:37:58+00:00
In this instance the article does say "An ambitious Pentagon plan to field thousands of cutting-edge drones to prepare for a potential conflict with China has [...] struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work."

So these particular "AI weapons" would appear to be munitions.
by lstodd | 2025-09-28 11:39:07+00:00
This looks counterproductive. I can get that when one first learns to ride and therefore has no idea of what to expect from the road and from the bike this sort of precaution might have some sense. For about first couple hundred of kilometers/miles. But no more than that.

The whole point of learning to ride is to train yourself to always be prepared and situationally aware, to maintain total awareness of what you are doing, what is going on ahead and behind you, and keeping being able to correctly react as fast as possible whatever happens. Thus fingers on the brake.

They are seriously out there to kill you. Be it distracted car drivers, sloppy road maintenance, stray dogs, bad weather, random idiots.. any of this will kill you if you relax.

An occassional lowside or two in one's first two seasons most likely won't. Given even a mediocre protection set, one will get away with a bit of shock and maybe needing a new pair of pants. And a whole lot of training of the kind no school can give. Like when to pull the front brake and when to just open throttle and hope for the best.

Besides there is a saying - if you do not crash once a season, you do not ride, period.

Which is a grim reminder of that if one does not push oneself, one is losing skill.

I ride for about 30 years already and this is true. Motorcycles are not safe and cannot be safe, safety isn't in the concept, and this is what we love about them.
by peterdstallion | 2025-09-28 11:39:29+00:00
It's my go-to keyboard. I can't recommend it enough. My only regret is I didn't buy it earlier.

It's definitely way more ergonomic - I believe that's incredibly important if you're going to be spending decades in front of a screen. At the very least don't make it easy to be hunched over.

Last but not least - coming from a non-mechanical keyboard before - the switch is super satisfying.
by commandersaki | 2025-09-28 11:39:53+00:00
Love this post. It's been always in the back of my mind to figure out how consistent hashing works, and Eli's presentation was concise and to the point.

So what qualifies for a good ring size? I'm thinking 2^32 or 2^64, since it is sparse and would be harder to find collisions when adding a (v)node. Or maybe there is a way to resolve collisions by trying different sequences when adding a vnode, such that if foo@8 is a collision, skip it an go to foo@9; I think deletion is still pretty straightfoward.
by type0 | 2025-09-28 11:40:08+00:00
I would argue that 400 is not a good value either, for that price you have to deal with occasionally broken file-system because caused by sd card and terrible keyboard. Not a good experience for beginner or a learning child.

People like to criticise x64 but getting a thin client from ebay and ESP32 GPIO board is probably the best bang for your buck.

No one buys raspberry pi to save money anymore, you buy it because you want to use Arm architecture and ability to use Android builds like LineageOS.
by sergsoares | 2025-09-28 11:40:35+00:00
Some Cloud functions like lambda support OCI container as a runtime target for example.

I understand that feeling but can be hard a provider that fill all that requirements without a expensive cost.

Integrate with the edge computing is part of the price you pay for all the conveniences like automatic builds, Cron and public reachable endpoints (and some of them almost free).

A minimal VPS with linux is always an alternative.
by zoenolan | 2025-09-28 11:40:53+00:00
The FT recently did a series on 'The AI race', which they described as 'A three-part series exploring the quest for AI capacity and the data centres at the heart of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment'

- ‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom [1][2]

- Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green? [3][4]

- Inside the relentless race for AI capacity [5]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265...

[2] https://archive.ph/sn3lT

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/0f6111a8-0249-4a28-aef4-1854fc8b4...

[4] https://archive.ph/10tca

[5] https://ig.ft.com/ai-data-centres/
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-28 11:43:07+00:00
As a rule of thumb, I find Zig projects often come across as higher quality than many C, C++, or Rust counterparts — it’s a surprisingly strong community. That said, I don’t write much in Zig myself, haven’t explored the projects you linked in detail, and wasn’t even considering Zig alternatives as I needed something for my C++ and Rust projects.

From a first glance, they seem to be tackling a slightly different problem: focusing on efficient handling of nested parallelism. Fork Union doesn’t support nested parallelism at all.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-28 11:44:31+00:00
I guess that's the difference between the Python and the TypeScript approach here. In general, if something is possible, valid, and idiomatic in JavaScript, then TypeScript attempts to model it in the type system. That's how you get things like conditional types and mapped types that allow the type system to validate quite complex patterns. That makes the type system more complex, but it means that it's possible to use existing JavaScript patterns and code. TypeScript is quite deliberately not a new language, but a way of describing the implicit types used in JavaScript. Tools like `any` are therefore an absolute last resort, and you want to avoid it wherever possible.

When I've used Python's type checkers, I have more the feeling that the goal is to create a new, typed subset of the language, that is less capable but also easier to apply types to. Then anything that falls outside that subset gets `Any` applied to it and that's good enough. The problem I find with that is that `Any` is incredibly infective - as soon as it shows up somewhere in a program, it's very difficult to prevent it from leaking all over the place, meaning you're often back in the same place you were before you added types, but now with the added nuisance of a bunch of types as documentation that you can't trust.
by latexr | 2025-09-28 11:44:34+00:00
They are human problems caused or exacerbated by misuse of technology. Mass surveillance and accruement of capital by private entities at this scale is only possible due to automation.

What difference does it make, anyway? The distinction is meaningless when the result is the same.

https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36
by grumple | 2025-09-28 11:45:58+00:00
The link works for me.

> The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

So the software can't work with arbitrary drones. The article also talks about the high cost of some of the drones.

> Of the dozen or so autonomous systems acquired for Replicator, three were unfinished or existed only as a concept at the time they were selected, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Among Replicator’s shortcomings, officials said, is that the Defense Innovation Unit was directed to buy drones that had older technology, and it didn’t rigorously test platforms and software before acquiring them, other people familiar with the matter said.

So the military bought promises and basically funded some research. That's fine imo, they do that all the time, but their expectations did not align with results in these cases. And they didn't set good requirements for the platforms.

I expect the hopes for AI-driven drones with the ability to target individual humans by identity is probably not quite here yet. You have to get around jamming, fit any tech on a small platform, and it has to be cheap and disposable. And you don't actually want "AI", because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians, you want highly accurate computer vision.

In Russia and Ukraine, they are manually piloting drones that are attached by fiberoptic cable. It's cheap and effective, but requires a human pilot. At least for now, I would guess this is a much more effective (in results and cost) way to go. A human can pilot dozens of disposable drones in a day that drop their payload and are then discarded.
by closewith | 2025-09-28 11:46:38+00:00
The UK Energy Security Plan does at least try to cover essential energy needs (food production, hospitals, defence, civil powers and authorities, etc) indefinitely from domestic supply.

The Defence Industrial Strategy does the same for essential manufacturing capabilities.

Raw material supply security is the purview of many government bodies, including MOD, BGS, and more.

> But at which point this becomes ridiculous?

Securing the food supply to your population, the absolute most basic of human needs along with the water and shelter, is the furthest thing from ridiculous.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-09-28 11:47:15+00:00
Go is a wonderful game. My older brother bought a Go set when I was a little kid and we played together. Now, 65 years later I need to give him a 9 stone handicap (I cheated by taking lessons from a South Korean Go Master and studying several books), but thanks to the wonderful handicap system, games can still be fun even when players have very different skill levels.

I randomly tried a few exercises on the linked web site - nicely done!

Off topic, but I wrote a commercial Go playing program in the late 1970s. This was a great hobby.
by kypro | 2025-09-28 11:47:51+00:00
What we really need to work out is how we can incubate humans outside of the womb so we can create brain-dead humans for organ harvesting. Would be both more reliable and more humane than this. Plus you could harvest the heart, liver, etc at the same time. While this is great news, my understanding is that kidneys donors are in larger supply because often family members can give one of theres. This obviously isn't the case for organs like hearts and livers.
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-28 11:48:16+00:00
Yes, I was planning a similar experiment with UCall (https://github.com/unum-cloud/ucall), leveraging the NUMA functionality introduced in v2 of Fork Union. I don’t currently have the right hardware to test it properly, but it would be very interesting to measure how pinning behaves on machines with multiple NUMA nodes, NICs, and a balanced PCIe topology.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-09-28 11:49:05+00:00
Even when I know that I should not finish something, there is still a surprisingly robust mental barrier that holds me back from it. The solution that works for me is the making a 'Low priority' folder to put those projects I know I don't need to finish. Moving them out of my active workspace feels great, and the 'low priority' means its non-committal to completely abandoning them (although in practice 99.9% of the time, that exactly what the result is).

This is a mental trick I play on myself that I know that I am doing, but somehow its works anyway.
by bdangubic | 2025-09-28 11:49:11+00:00
hehe not snarky at all - great question. this was heavily discussed but in order to measure productivity gains (we are phasing this out now) we kept the estimations the same as before. as my colleague put it you don’t estimate based on “10x developer” so we applied the same concept. now that everyone is “on board” we are phasing this out
by myself248 | 2025-09-28 11:49:31+00:00
Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) diesel conversions do. It'll gel at low temperatures, so they blend or switch to a separate tank of regular (or bio) diesel while the engine is cold, wait until it generates enough heat, circulate that heat along the SVO lines and into the tank, then switch over. Then switch back a few minutes before shutdown so the lines are full of regular diesel for the next cold start.