MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vrighter | 2025-09-22 07:55:57+00:00
Chips can be and are tested automatically. It's not like there are people running beside a conveyor belt with a microscope. So no, it's not the same thing. One doesn't need people, while the other one does.

Also, a fab is intended to make fully functioning chips, which sometimes it fails to achieve. An LLM is NOT designed to give correct output, just plausible output. Again, not the same goal.

LLMs are an implementation of bogosort. But less efficient.
by XorNot | 2025-09-22 07:56:02+00:00
Which does manage to hit the nail on the head: people in general still don't understand what a tarriff is. They fully expect a tarriff to hit the foreign exporter somehow, when it's actually billed to the importer at point of import. The importers are the ones who place the orders. The exporters aren't impacted directly at all - it depends entirely on whether the orders stop coming in. The orders don't cost them more to fill in anyway.
by DANmode | 2025-09-22 07:56:40+00:00
The dietary issue is infection (usually two or more, basic shit like candida in the gut, mold exposure, EBV recurrence, Lyme, parasites, more) causing systemic malnourishment, and lack of homeostasis, causing nervous and endocrine issues/misfires,

(at which point you'll often notice immunodeficiencies, minor "unexplainable" abnormalities in bloodwork),

and indeed cognitive issues, depression, anxiety, and other more severe brain malfunctions.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-22 07:56:57+00:00
I really like the approach, this is exactly what statistical tools are for. I like it all the way up to the very end, where I feel this report drops the ball, in trying to derive a hierarchy from the results.

Hierarchies don't exist. Nothing in nature is organized in trees (data structures), not even actual trees (the other kind). Organization, relationships, form directed graphs (or the continuous domain equivalent). Hierarchies are deceptively simple because they planarize, meaning you can draw them on paper without crossing lines, or introducing indirect references. But that's often as deceiving as it is helpful.

Think of the "tree of life" - there is no one tree of life, its shape depends on which aspects of phenotype or genotype you select and organize around. Think of corporations and governments - you can either accept there's a lot of "dotted lines" in the org chart, turning it into a dense DAG, or never understand why people do what they do. And so here, it's also quite apparent there are correlations cutting across the proposed hierarchy, clearly visible even on Figure 2 - the one that urges us to disregard the left-to-right ordering of the constructs.

I mean, the researchers are likely perfectly aware of this. My worry is that 90%+ of the insight of the proposed model will get lost in final planarization into a hierarchy that gets into the next DSM.
by marklit | 2025-09-22 07:57:03+00:00
> primary way to get a clean-ish OSM shapefile

Shapefiles shouldn't be what you're after, Parquet can almost always do a better job unless you need to either edit something or use really advanced geometry not yet supported in Parquet.

Also, this is your best source for bulk OSM data: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-dec-2024-update.html

If you're using ArcGIS Pro, use this plugin: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-maps-esri-arcgis-pro.ht...
by nottorp | 2025-09-22 07:58:05+00:00
And how about knowing that it takes a minute to swap a physical sim and there is no server to take its sweet time and at worst not respond like for eSIM?

Say you arrive somewhere where your regular provider doesn't have signal so you get a prepaid sim from the one provider that does have signal. How do you install it if it's an eSIM? You don't have connectivity on your regular.
by creesch | 2025-09-22 07:58:10+00:00
I am not sure if you thought through the implications of your proposal. LLMs are trained on examples in the training material. If something is new and isn't accessible because it lacks tangible examples the adoption rate will be lower, so there will be less training material and therefore LLMs will not be of use here.

In fact, that entire aspect of LLMs is something that is not talked about as often. But is worth a whole discussion in itself. If I remember correctly, the availability of training material for a technology already has slightly impacted more niche corners of the tech world.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-22 08:00:02+00:00
Thermal decay dating was also used to estimate the age of the Sun, most famously / notoriously by William Thompson, a/k/a Lord Kelvin. Without knowledge of radioactivity, nuclear chemistry, or nuclear fusion, Thompson presumed latent heat of gravitational collapse for both the Earth and Sun, and came up with an age of "a moderate number of millions of years" for the former, and no more than 500 million years for the Sun.

Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus, and subsequent discoveries of radioactive decay (providing both mechanism and clock for Earth's heat and age) and fusion and helium (the Sun's thermodynamic equation and age) provided a refutation of Thompson's estimates, empirical basis for the current age estimates of the Earth and Sun (about 4.5 billion years), and ultimately of a lifespan for the Sun (about 10--12 billion years) as well as how long habitable conditions on Earth may persist (as little as another 800 million years for some conditions, another 2--3 billion on the outside).

<https://www.teachastronomy.com/textbook/Our-Sun-The-Nearest-...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Kelvin#Age_of_Earth> citing Burchfield, Joe D. (1990). Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. University of Chicago Press. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-226-08043-7. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-226-...>
by marklit | 2025-09-22 08:00:40+00:00
Amazon, Esri, Grab, Hyundai, Meta, Microsoft, Precisely, Tripadvisor and TomTom, along with 10s of other businesses got together and offer OSM data in Parquet on S3 free of charge. You can query it surgically and run analytics on it needing only MBs of bandwidth on what is a multi-TB dataset at this point. https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-dec-2024-update.html

If you're using ArcGIS Pro, use this plugin: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-maps-esri-arcgis-pro.ht...
by latexr | 2025-09-22 08:01:04+00:00
Feels to me like that is addressed by the very first sentence in the article:

> We influence others every day, whether we intend to or not.

And then it’s expanded as it continues.

> Every effective communication is manipulation to a degree.

Yes, to a degree. Seems to me the author is attempting to be pragmatic and not let excessive pedantry cloud the larger point. A friend trying to convince you to stop smoking because they want you to live healthier for longer may be technically manipulating you, but that’s not a useful definition and realistically no one would colloquially consider it to be the case. Whenever you find yourself dismissing an argument because a word can be applied universally, instead steelman the author’s argument by trying to understand the definition they are working with.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-22 08:01:04+00:00
> You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out

This requires engineering the rocket to withstand structural loads in two directions as well as a ~90-degree rotation under thrust. Not trivial. (It's been a major handicap for airlaunch on Earth.)

Landing on and taking off from floating platforms is like the one part of Venusian colonisation we've actually solved.
by epolanski | 2025-09-22 08:01:04+00:00
To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.

I'm Italian, used to our president mostly approving laws, commanding the armed forces (in theory, not in practice) and very few other things. And the best thing about our president is that it gets elected by the parliament requiring a very sensible majority. Thus pretty much all parties need to agree on one and they end up electing non-political figures (or politicians that have demonstrated high level of trust regardless of their party).

I think our system works great to be honest, and I already see the huge problems having an election-based president in Poland has with the government and president being from different parties and clashing with each other and the president vetoing for years a democratically elected government just to stir trouble.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-09-22 08:01:51+00:00
> Beginners have to be nurtured through lots of context that builds up slowly.

I agree and when I write for such an audience, I try to be detailed and build on a proper story that they can follow through.

I do have a complaint about attempts to smoothen the DX which a lot of projects do that results in something which helps only the absolute beginner. Logs are not easily accessible or missing. It's not easy to cut/paste or grep for errors in things etc. Basically, many of of the familiar tools and techniques which people have used to find their way through things are replaced by poor substitutes in the name of making the DX better. This, I don't think is a good trend.
by a96 | 2025-09-22 08:02:04+00:00
Funnily that's one of the first questions on my mind when I look at a new program or library. What was it written in or what platform for, what's the build system or requirements and what does it actually do. Quite often I decide to avoid a thing entirely when I can't figure this out after reading the main documents. Sometimes you can look at the repo tree and just know, but often not.

This should be the first sentence in the landing page or README IMO. Instead you get something that looks like marketing copy written by LLM fed on BS generator output. Many projects just seem to refuse to tell the prerequisites at all.
by mrb | 2025-09-22 08:02:14+00:00
They used cool hardware to do this research: the sysmoEUICC1 (https://shop.sysmocom.de/sysmoEUICC1-eUICC-for-consumer-eSIM...) which is a physical SIM card onto which one can load an eSIM, and they put it in a SIMtrace 2 device (https://osmocom.org/projects/simtrace2/wiki) to trace the data packets to/from the eSIM profile, which is normally not easily doable as modern phones load the eSIM on a chip soldered onto the phone's motherboard. So you end up with a goofy contraption (see figure 4 on page 8) but you have full visibility into the communications to/from the eSIM profile. Fun!
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-22 08:04:12+00:00
And the concentration into BIFs, banded iron formations, was all but certainly the result of biological activity.

Our present technology based on iron and steel owes itself to early life on Earth, from 1.6 to as much as 4 billion years ago. As with petroleum and coal-bed formation, a process unlikely to repeat in Earth's future. Iron ores are abundant, but still a finite resource.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation>
by bruce511 | 2025-09-22 08:04:49+00:00
The issue for the importer is cash flow. The tarifs have to be paid on entry, ie before the coffee is sold.

This suits large importers over small ones, they have the cash reserves to cope.

The other issue for importers is uncertainty. The tarifs might be high this week (when my stock arrives) but it might be low next week when my competitors stock arrives, putting me at a disadvantage.

So "shelves being bare" is primarily a business risk / cash flow issue. Partly handled with more frequent, smaller, orders (driving up consumer prices some more.)

And yes, I agree, most American consumers don't understand that fundamentally the goal of tarifs (good and bad) is to drive up the price. To that end though the administration is being very successful.
by sethaurus | 2025-09-22 08:05:30+00:00
(From the article, talking about the number of available codes)

> 32^4 = 1,048,576, which is hopefully enough.

Unfortunately, it really isn't enough. Since these 4-character codes are based only on a hash of the note's filename, and there's no other collision-resistance built in, the likelihood of two notes getting the same code rises very quickly. With 500 notes in the vault, the chance of two notes having the same code is about 1-in-10. At 900 notes, the odds are 1-in-3, and at 1200 notes, the chances of a collision rise above 50%: it's more likely that there will be a collision than not. These are realistic numbers of notes for an Obsidian vault.

This is all solvable by having something allocating IDs (and attaching them to the notes), but when using a hash, 32 bits just isn't enough to give uniqueness at even small scales.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-22 08:06:05+00:00
Why be so snarky? Documentation is there for users, it should assume that the user has the necessary background. If the user doesn't it is his responsibility to read up on the relevant background.

Pushing the burden of education on every single developer writing a tutorial is absurd. It makes the documentation unreadable to the people who need it the most and wastes time and effort. This style of documentation is totally fine.

Education is your own responsibility, do not push it on others.
by meindnoch | 2025-09-22 08:06:14+00:00
Actually, you'll hit the limits of DOM-style JSON parsers as soon as your data is larger than about half the available memory, since you'd most likely want to build your own model objects from the JSON, so at some point both of them must be present in memory (unless you're able to incrementally destroy those parts of the DOM that you're done with).

Anyhow, IMO a proper JSON library should offer both, in a layered approach. That is, a lower level SAX-style parser, on top of which a DOM-style API is provided as a convenience.
by aa-jv | 2025-09-22 08:06:53+00:00
Very true. And in the Australian outback, it can be absolutely beautiful too.

I found it quite rewarding, personally. Stripping all the material world of 15 years of life in California took me just a few days, semi-naked, thirsty and hungry, walking barefoot among the spinifex and wattles. Definitely a life-changing experience I would do again and again.
by tikotus | 2025-09-22 08:07:58+00:00
Good question, but I'm not yet experienced enough in language design to give a coherent answer. And I'm not very familiar with delimited continuations. But I think it boils down to keeping the VM simple. Now it's just all closures, and I can focus on optimizing closures. Adding first class continuations would reauire me to also optimize those. Also having continuations makes optimizing closures harder, since it prevents certain assumptions. As long as closures and CPS enable everything I need, I'm not tempted to add another, more powrful structure.
by scott_w | 2025-09-22 08:08:17+00:00
Honestly, I'd say this doesn't even just apply to beginners to software development. It's applicable to even experienced developers who are new to a language or concept.

I've been teaching myself Rust in the past week and I've definitely noticed that, when I hit an error, a lot of library documentation assumes more depth of knowledge than I have right now. Say I want to know how to use a specific function and, beyond the quickstart, the docs are just a reference that keeps talking about Traits. I'm sure it'll click eventually, but right now, I just need to know how to call the function and fix the error I have!

Side note: I've rediscovered why Stack Overflow is so helpful as some of the answers there have helped me understand what's happening with different issues I run into!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-22 08:08:32+00:00
> Say you arrive somewhere where your regular provider doesn't have signal so you get a prepaid sim from the one provider that does have signal. How do you install it if it's an eSIM?

One, you can plan ahead. Two, most of those spots have Wi-fi for this purpose.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer a physical SIM. This isn't one.
by vidarh | 2025-09-22 08:09:01+00:00
> 1000 (gram) calories

The "(gram)" make no sense here. We commonly use "kilo" as shorthand for kilogram", but kilo is just a prefix indicating 1000 and never indicates "kilogram" when given as a prefix to another unit, and so there's no implied/left out "gram" in 1 kilocalorie.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-22 08:11:19+00:00
An oxygen-rich environment is so thermodynamically unstable (it would lead to oxidation and rusting of virtually every other prevalent element) that it would be exceedingly short-lived without the presence of oxygen-liberating biological metabolism. To that extent, a high-oxygen atmosphere is one of the very clear and detectable indicators of probable life which we are capable of detecting even on extra-solar planets (via spectroscopic analysis of reflected or filtered light).

Far more an Eden, then.
by creesch | 2025-09-22 08:11:36+00:00
I am surprised nobody mentioned the curse of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

It is actually a fairly well known phenomenon, certainly in educational circles. Being aware of it when you are writing any form of documentation is a first step. But even then, it is very difficult to properly assess the knowledge entry level of your audience.

Having others read through your documentation and importantly work with your documentation is a good strategy.

One thing I can also highly recommend is simply start out with a list of assumed prerequisite knowledge in your intro. Specifically things like certain environments, frameworks, etc. Bonus points for not only listing those but also linking to the documentation for those.
by stevage | 2025-09-22 08:12:15+00:00
>Just the other day, one user has managed to download almost 10,000 copies of the italy-latest.osm.pbf file in 24 hours!

Whenever I have done something like that, it's usually because I'm writing a script that goes something like:

1. Download file 2. Unzip file 3. Process file

I'm working on step 3, but I keep running the whole script because I haven't yet built a way to just do step 3.

I've never done anything quite that egregious though. And these days I tend to be better at avoiding this situation, though I still commit smaller versions of this crime.
Show HN: SpotRec – recover missing Spotify songs
by somekirill | 2025-09-22 08:12:56+00:00
Around 4% of my Spotify library vanished — licensing, region blocks, artists pulling music. Those weren't just tracks, they were tied to memories and moments, suddenly gone without warning.

I built SpotRec to fix this: it scans your library for greyed-out songs, finds matches on YouTube, and lets you save links or just the titles.
by cobbaut | 2025-09-22 08:13:01+00:00
I agree with the post, but it is not just operating systems, and it has been going in the 'closed wall' direction since before WinXP.

We had programs like 'pidgin' that allowed chatting with different protocols, whereas now even I (a Linux nerd with 30 years IT experience) have no clue how to take a backup of my Whatsapp/Facetime/... conversations. Completely closed protocols are winning over open ones.

There is a similar process going on with websites; they used to be open and readable for everyone. Today I cannot access most pages that are sent to me via mail or that are linked in forums, unless I create an account and agree to share everything with 799 partners. Never mind that all links are now safelinks.protection.outlook.
by stevage | 2025-09-22 08:14:10+00:00
Let's say you're working on an app that incorporates some Italian place names or roads or something. It's easy to imagine how when you build the app, you want to download the Italian region data from geofabrik then process it to extract what you want into your app. You script it, you put the script in your CI...and here we are:

> Just the other day, one user has managed to download almost 10,000 copies of the italy-latest.osm.pbf file in 24 hours!
by Intermernet | 2025-09-22 08:14:26+00:00
You seem to be reading a lot into my replies that isn't there. I'm not sure why you're so offended. At no point have either of us actually addressed the grievances of the blog post's author. That's one of the many reasons they weren't the best option. It's like you feel I'm attacking your right to complain about things. I'm not. Complain away, it's healthy, but there are better ways to communicate with the people who can actually address the problem.
by aa-jv | 2025-09-22 08:14:59+00:00
Great work! Its always very interesting to hear about the machines made behind the iron curtain, and that there is still indeed an enthusiastic scene keeping those machines alive.

My favourite machine of the 80's - the Oric-1/Atmos system - was cloned in the Eastern bloc countries by Pravetz, and became known as the Pravetz 8D. It was quite an interesting day when support for that clone dropped into the Oric emulator scene (Oricutron) and we could see how 'the other side' hacked on the architecture. Something about having Cyrillic where the lower-case character set should be, just tickles my hacker heart.

(I'd love to have a Pravetz 8D machine in my retro-collection, in case anyone sees one somewhere.. ;)
by dotwaffle | 2025-09-22 08:16:01+00:00
From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to eyeball network for which there is no "cheap" path available (potentially causing congestion of transit ports affecting everyone) and no reliable way of forecasting where the traffic will come from making capacity planning a nightmare.

Additionally, as anyone who has tried to share an internet connection with someone heavily torrenting, the excessive number of connections means overall quality of non-torrent traffic on networks goes down.

Not to mention, of course, that BitTorrent has a significant stigma attached to it.

The answer would have been a squid cache box before, but https makes that very difficult as you would have to install mitm certs on all devices.

For container images, yes you have pull through registries etc, but not only are these non-trivial to setup (as a service and for each client) the cloud providers charge quite a lot for storage making it difficult to justify when not having a check "works just fine".

The Linux distros (and CPAN and texlive etc) have had mirror networks for years that partially addresses these problems, and there was an OpenCaching project running that could have helped, but it is not really sustainable for the wide variety of content that would be cached outside of video media or packages that only appear on caches hours after publishing.

BitTorrent might seem seductive, but it just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.
by maxloh | 2025-09-22 08:17:44+00:00
I think the JavaScript ecosystem did a great job at this. Take a look at the documentation of React/Vue/Svelte; it is fascinating how they make it so accessible, both for newcomers and experienced developers in the field.

In contrast, the Java ecosystem has been really bad at documentation in my experience. Most of it is just explanations of function signatures, without any words on how those functions work as a whole system. The situation is even worse on Android, where there are dozens of standard APIs to achieve the same functionality.