MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by borroka | 2025-09-13 16:39:00+00:00
One issue that is not discussed enough when talking about learning is mental preparation for learning. We have all had days when learning seemed easier than on other days, but we didn't pay too much attention to it, or we thought that the subject we were learning was more favorable to us, or we classified it as one of the many inexplicable or unrepeatable circumstances of life.

While we understand the importance of warming up for physical activity and recognize the need for a certain aptitude for running, weightlifting, or boxing, when it comes to more intellectual activities, we often leave things to chance: sometimes we are more alert and receptive, while at other times we are less so.

Over the years, I have found enormous benefit in practicing autogenic training, a more Western and scientific version of meditative practices that today seem to arouse the interest of those who deal with these things. I am mentally more alert, more receptive, and learning, which is always challenging, is faster.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-13 16:39:03+00:00
To be fair it is pretty significant. Especially uv. I don't know anything about PHP's existing toolchain but I do know that Python's is a horrifying mess, and uv basically fixes it.

It's a small thing in the Rust community but it's pretty huge in the world simply because there are so many Python developers (and also because of the extreme magnitude of improvement). Probably wouldn't have happened without Rust.
by 9rx | 2025-09-13 16:39:41+00:00
Hence the design. The producer coming up with a made up language that makes sense to the producer, but probably doesn't make sense to the consumer — especially when you have many different consumers with very different needs — is far more problematic than the producer providing an abstract representation and allowing the consumer to dig into the specific details it wants.

As with everything in life, there are tradeoffs to that approach, of course, and it might be hard to grasp if you come from languages which different idioms that prioritize producer over consumer, but if you look closely everything about Go is designed to prioritize the needs of the consumer over the needs of the producer. That does seem to confuse a lot of people, interestingly. I expect because it isn't idiomatic to prioritize the consumer in a lot of other languages and people get caught up in trying to write code in those other languages using Go syntax instead of actually learning Go.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-09-13 16:40:23+00:00
North America is a car captured hellscape where so many people have zero options but to sit in a car to get everywhere they want to go.

Meanwhile in Japan and so many other regions in Europe that are pointed to as healthier people have the option to simply walk to do so many of their daily tasks.

No real surprise that the regions where people have to actively work harder to be active are in poorer health than others where being active is the default easiest choice.

The built environment is a critical thing here we can fix to make a healthier society.
by mwcz | 2025-09-13 16:40:44+00:00
Is that the case? I saw a talk by the author of lodash years ago and he touched on performance. The built-in functions are (or were?) implemented in JS, level terrain for a library like lodash to beat "native" performance. Lodash beat browser built-ins in some cases. The talk was ten years ago, though, so things may have changed. Perhaps more of the built-ins are written in C++ now.

Here's the talk: https://youtu.be/2DzaOnOyCqE?si=McCMjzGopzSCoaCi
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-13 16:40:54+00:00
>it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy.

Precisely that they don't need to make choices due to their environment is what makes the difference. In the US and EU people love their individualism, spend a gazillion on fitness interventions and most people are overweight, it's probably the most visible sign of the importance of culture. As Russ Ackoff said, the correct way to address problems is not to solve them, but to dissolve them. Not to fix individual issues but to create conditions under which they do not occur.

The best way to lose weight is actually to move to a place that's full of thin people, not "do" anything. It's funny that the reverse is common wisdom, everyone who moves to an unhealthy place will always proclaim how they gained 20 pounds immediately
by saltcured | 2025-09-13 16:41:13+00:00
https://anycrap.shop/product/generative-store-that-does-not-...

This is an important accessibility issue for people like me, with no internal monologue. We do not constantly render our thoughts and desires into words, and so are hobbled by an open search-box UX.

Another variant might be an auto-generating index of products we can dig through, or a faceted search which synthesizes new categories of products as we refine the features.
by anta40 | 2025-09-13 16:41:18+00:00
Yep me too. I tend to "see" in that focal length, when 50mm is not tight enough.

But probably that's an old habit: a few years ago my 1st DSLR was an APSC, and naturally my 1st prime like everyone else was the cheap-but-good 50/1.8, which is more or less equivalent to 85mm in FF world.
by hyperman1 | 2025-09-13 16:41:20+00:00
I disagree here with basically everything.

Competition tends long term to provide better results, because it allows for multiple opionions by providers and choice by consumers.

No compiler is 100% bug for bug compatible with future versions of itself. If you happen to depend on bugs, you will be in trouble one day. One way to avoid this is in fact using different compilers from different providers and get an early warning.

Multiple implementations always leed to more innovation, as different leaders have different priorities causing differences in implementation.

One problem with software is the dynamic where the original source is very expensive while more copies are de facto free. Meanwhile, switching costs for users are high. This causes winner takes all dynamics where 1 vendor monopolizes a market quickly. This then causes a powerfull position for abuse, causing everyone else to suffer.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-13 16:41:33+00:00
Is it wrong?

The part about the crucibles is somewhat interesting, if true, as it reminded me of a passage in the Manhattan Project engineering story that was posted the other day. They thought the melting point of plutonium would be a lot higher than it turned out to be, so they commissioned a lot of exotic crucibles [1] that turned out to be unneeded. They were apparently developed at MIT with cerium sulfide, a compound I'd never heard of before.

1: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/an-engineering-histor...
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-13 16:41:51+00:00
I think it's easy for people to forget sometimes because the interface doesn't make it particularly obvious that much of social media is screaming from a soapbox in some of the world's largest agoras.

The interface makes it feel like you're having a polite conversation among like-minded folk. In reality, you're like one of those folks on a street corner with a megaphone and most of the time the rest of the world isn't listening to you. But they can tune you in anytime they want, and there can be consequences for holding a strong opinion incompatible with the strong opinion of other people you will be wanting to do business with.

... That of course includes this medium. Watch what you say today everyone, your future and current employers are reading Hacker News.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-09-13 16:41:53+00:00
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
by nop_slide | 2025-09-13 16:42:00+00:00
Love that you mentioned the skateboarding history of it. I have fond memories of our young crew finally acquiring a “death lens” for our VX1000. It was such a fun challenge to see how close you could get because it looked so sick.

Of course that meant we ended up with a bunch of scratches over the years on the lens, and I had my fair share of hitting the lens :)
by pron | 2025-09-13 16:43:09+00:00
Modern tracing-moving GCs offer very efficient memory management algorithms that are often hard to beat on performance. Their price isn't so much performance anymore as memory footprint, while manual memory management (and refcounting GCs) optimise not for performance but for footprint (often at the cost of performance). Even this tradeoff is often misunderstood, as covered by this brilliant keynote from the most recent International Symposium on Memory Management: https://youtu.be/mLNFVNXbw7I
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-13 16:43:16+00:00
In a shocking twist of fate, people who do abstract reasoning and patterns oriented exercises all day long score high on a test measuring abstract reasoning and patterns manipulation. /s

You have your cause and effect reversed. You don’t need high IQ score to do maths, doing a ton of maths will naturally increase your IQ score. IQ is not general intelligence.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-13 16:43:25+00:00
I have an extended family and also an extended circle of friends that are spread all over the world. In both cases, numbering dozens of people, what would have previously been a slow erosion of contact and any real knowledge about most of them except those absolutely closest to me by necessity, has been converted into the ability to keep abreast of their daily lives, know when some direct communication might be helpful and generally take joy in being able to see how the good things in their lives move forward (or offer a hand when they don't). All of this almost entirely thanks to social media.

This not to mention the interesting figures it lets me directly follow and the shared interest groups it lets me find.

Is social media a complex and vast thing with its many pitfalls and flaws? Of course it is. The corporate giants that run much of it have some very disgusting habits of passive aggressive manipulation of their users, and grossly parasitic dark patterns of surveillance behavior.

Nonetheless, under and around all of that, there's also a tremendous amount of practical human good being created by so much previously impossible connection between millions of family members, friends, loved ones and people who share things in common. I refuse to throw that baby out with the bath water as some seem to propose.

Political manipulation, factionalism and ideological bickering have always been a part of human culture, for at least as long as we've had written words and means of spreading them. Could anyone have expected any differently to emerge from the massively democratizing landscape of social platforms, which let literally anyone communicate their own two cents of thought to places and context where anyone else at all might instantly see them and respond? Of course not, but to focus only on that is almost elitist in its implied notions of shutting up the masses because they don't communicate and debate "correctly" (even if many of them are indeed stupidly influenced by all kinds of interests, whithin and outside of social media).
by Aurornis | 2025-09-13 16:43:34+00:00
This is a million times easier to demonstrate with images than text. Wikipedia has a good animation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion

This page doesn’t have any images but covers the concept quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_lens

The concept of matching a picture to normal human vision goes back to the age of paintings, before any photography even existed.
by frollogaston | 2025-09-13 16:45:09+00:00
So does Xorg. I actually switched my spare PC to Wayland (default Ubuntu) recently because Xorg (on Linux Mint) kept going black whenever my monitor would sleep/wake. Nothing too fancy, just an HP tower with Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.

Idk what's even different between them, it was just obvious that I was in the non-default / minority of users territory, so I got out.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-09-13 16:46:38+00:00
As a Curriculum Designer and OG dial-up Millennial I agree wholeheartedly. Too late though. Enlightenment, collaboration, and advancing human experience isn't profitable.

In other words, until one learns how to hammer a nail, it's unreasonable to assume knowledge of how to tell another to do so. AI is no exception. It's speed-running US society's final threads being severed, and okay, sigh, here we go. No, I'm not interested in fixing the problems he's identifying.

My ex had a saying from bench science..."if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitant." That part. Off to go live in a van down by the river...
by tguvot | 2025-09-13 16:46:42+00:00
they are 35k-50k a piece. they have advanced anti jamming capabilities (when ukrainians managed to bring one down in "one piece", they take out this part and reuse it in their drones). upgraded models have nvidia jetson that used for optical targeting.

adding a few ultrasonic sensors, wires and writing extra 1000 lines of code not going to change BoM much
by mpweiher | 2025-09-13 16:46:48+00:00
Later.

Reactors in the US, on which the German designs are based, have already received their extensions to 80 years.

Experts see no particular problems in extending that to 100 years or even further.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-pla...

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-long-can-a-nuclear-plan...

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...

Fission reactors are not very useful targets in war. In Ukraine, their fleet of nuclear reactors are what's keeping the electricity grid running. And they are building new ones. In war time.
by p_ing | 2025-09-13 16:46:54+00:00
> Obviously, at the time of the 80486, DDR didn’t exist, so SDRAM is a natural fit.

Neither are a fit, SDRAM was a Pentium/K-6 standard (PC66); the DIMMs ran faster than a non-OC'ed 486 bus, which ran at half the clock of the CPU. 486 "natural fit" would be FPM or EDO, if you wanted to be era-correct.

There were probably some off the wall 486 motherboards back then that supported SDR (post-1993...), but those would have been towards the very end of the 486 consumer life cycle. These did exist in the 486 era, where they had the option to run (or had an embedded) 386 using FPM while there was an open 486 socket and the option, but not requirement to run EDO.

Anyway, this is someone's project, so they can do whatever the heck they want.
by dogleash | 2025-09-13 16:47:17+00:00
I'm not much of a photographer even by amateur standards, so I figured my phone would be good enough to take some vacation photos for the memories.

A third of my phone shots are bad because I didn't have a telephoto lens, and half of those are just garbage.

I have a soda can size 55-210 and I'm never using lightweight travel as an excuse to not bring it again.
by TuxSH | 2025-09-13 16:47:19+00:00
> Every modern commercial OS

Every +*general-puprose OS.

Nintendo's 3DS OS and Switch 1+2 OS are bespoke and strictly microkernel-based (with the exception of DMA-330 CoreLink DMA handling on 3DS if you want to count is as such), and these have been deployed on hundreds of millions of commercially-sold devices.
by 9rx | 2025-09-13 16:47:44+00:00
> The law isn't about browsers or websites.

A historical law that hasn't had anything to do with the discussion since conception isn't about browsers, but the discussion about how future laws might improve upon 'malicious' use of browsers is. Said 'malicious' use of browser isn't about cookies, though, so such a new law would not be written about cookies anyway, so where do you think cookies even fit?

> I was specifically replying to your comment

You replied to it in a mechanical sense. But you did not reply to the content of it. And now are apparently doubling down on that even after it was brought to your attention...
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-09-13 16:48:01+00:00
Thanks to Rust, there are heaps of next generation CLI utilities that have come onto the scene in the past decade. Cross platform by default, UTF8 aware, more likely to be multi-threaded, simple distribution, and most importantly - improving on some unfortunate legacy API decisions.

Ripgrep, fd, tokei, Just, zellij, uv, and so forth. Porting languages has given the opportunity to remove some of the cruft decided on a whim in the 70s. None of these are world changing, but they do make life easier than the originals.
by vunderba | 2025-09-13 16:48:03+00:00
This mirrors my experience. The difference is quite apparent when you compare to other comparable engineering fields. It's anecdata but every single one of my friends with a degree in mechanical/electrical engineering is incredibly passionate about the field (though I can't deny that there is a certain underlying current of resentment with how much more money on average their counterparts in IT are making).

Software dev? I'd say maybe 1 in 3 if I'm being generous. It is what it is.
by ziml77 | 2025-09-13 16:50:22+00:00
Also, how do you mask your identity if you self-host? I can have as many mailboxes as I want but they're all trivial to correlate because they share a domain that isn't providing email accounts to large amounts of users. And then there's the matter of a VPS not actually being under my control. It's a VM running in a datacenter. I could run the mail server locally, but then I'd still need to relay through a VPS to mask my IP address. And that's still only protecting from a casual adversary...
by pron | 2025-09-13 16:50:39+00:00
As refcounting and tracing are the two primary starting points for garbage collection, they're its two pillars so to speak (e.g. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2012-4610/reading/bacon-...), I don't know of any serious person in the memory management space who doesn't see refcounting as a GC, although some languages with a refcounting GC say "they don't have a GC" in their marketing material.

As a general rule, tracing seeks to optimise for throughput while refcounting seeks to optimise for footprint, although the two can become more elaborate and converge (as shown in the paper I linked).
by anta40 | 2025-09-13 16:50:51+00:00
>> I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery

Ask any Leica M users (both film and digital). Normally they only use primes to achieve compact setup. Any Leica user is automatically a snob, right?

Joking aside, I have nothing against zoom. For travelling, usually I don't need anything beside 24-70. Not a really compact setup, obviously, so need to downsize the image sensor. On APSC it would be 16-55. Or on MFT, it would be... hmm 12-40?
by robinsonb5 | 2025-09-13 16:51:09+00:00
It does, yes. But the DDR RAM available on the target board is DDR3 which is actually quite inconvenient for retro projects for a number of reasons.

Quite apart from the increased complexity, the most important difference is that there's a minimum speed as well as a maximum speed for modern DDR RAM, which means there's usually quite a narrow window of achievable clock rates when getting an FPGA to talk to DDR3.

I suspect that's why the author chose to use the DDR for video: It's usually easy to keep plain old SDRAM in lockstep with a soft-CPU, since you can run it at anything between 133MHz (sometimes even more) and walking pace, so there's no need to deal with messy-and-latency-inducing clock domain crossing.

Streaming video data in bursts into a dual-clock FIFO and consuming it on the pixel clock is a much more natural fit.
by thorn | 2025-09-13 16:51:13+00:00
Kudos to the owner of this project. Well done. It is really modern C++ (with modules) and improvements on top. I see that it introduced some kind of GC and other high-level quality-of-life improvements. I noticed stuff like `co_try` and `.unwrap()` and `async`. Was it inspired by Rust? What plans do you have with this project?
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-13 16:51:22+00:00
Huh, mine corrects itself. Not sure what yours is up to

If you want to blend two images equally (a 50/50 mix), then each image should contribute 50% opacity.

Image 1 opacity: 50%

Image 2 opacity: 50%

That way, when composited, each pixel in the result is exactly halfway between the corresponding pixels of the two source images.

One subtlety: If you simply stack one image over the other and lower the top layer’s opacity to 50%, you’ll effectively get 50% of the top image + 50% of the bottom image. But if you lower both to 50% and put them on separate layers without special blending, depending on the software, you might not actually get a true 50/50 blend — it could look faded.

The cleanest way (in Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) is to keep one image at 100%, put the other above it at 50% opacity. That produces a proper 50/50 blend.

Do you want me to walk through the math of why lowering both to 50% doesn’t give you a true 50/50?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 16:51:53+00:00
Which is shifting as that is getting saturated. In those markets renewables are built with storage now to deliver the electricity when needed.

Nuclear power also used to get built with PPAs. Look at Hinkley Point C for a completely insanely expensive contract, that EDF is now looking to make to make a loss on.

For Sizewell C they don’t even dare touch a fixed price contract and instead want the ratepayers to pay the construction cost in advance hoping it works out.

That is how far nuclear power has fallen.

PPAs between commercial entities of course also adapt to the market. To guarantee the nuclear price at daytime comes with a corresponding discount, because the ones buying the PPA know they can get what they need either way.

Nuclear power also generally does not participate in ancillary markets. Too slow and inflexible with weighting too much on CAPEX. They can get capacity payments but as soon as the true need is defined in terms of how much reliable energy is needed for how long renewables with carbon neutral gas turbine based backups win.

The only market civilian nuclear power wins is the ”I want to have a workforce and industry capable of building nuclear weapons and naval reactors”.

Essentially a military jobs program. That may be worthwhile, but let stop pretending nuclear power actually gives a modern grid anything it need at the current costs.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-13 16:52:01+00:00
Why you would be downvoted for mentioning this is beyond me. The numbers are well documented and hold up. Compared to every other major source of energy production, nuclear has the lower rate of fatalities by far, by any metric, and this despite it being far from a minor source of power globally.

Not only that, but it also produces less radioactive leakage than many other kinds of power sources that depend on resource mining on a large scale (looking at coal plants in particular here)
by lazide | 2025-09-13 16:52:17+00:00
I likely know far, far more about this process than you.

Including currently having ‘Right to work’ in 3 hemispheres on this planet, 2 from visas from various governments. I’ve hired dozens of people in the US under H1B’s, married someone on a green card, etc.

Companies are, and have been, clearly abusing the law in the US for decades. It’s only ramped up over the years and has gotten quite absurd.

I have many friends on H1Bs, and am quite familiar with what is going on recently too.

Just because prior admins have been ignoring illegal behavior doesn’t mean it is actually legal. It just means the party is over, eh?
by matthewdgreen | 2025-09-13 16:52:56+00:00
The real problem is the power loss, which is fine for rich people doing personal installs in their home, but probably rules this out for high-volume charging services. I’m just not sure how big the “rich people personal installs” market is.

Not only that, but this requires object detection and the car suspension has to drop to (nearly) meet it, which seems like it’s enough work that automated contact charging can’t be wildly more difficult.