MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-05 11:42:19+00:00
Making planes and jet engines is way different than making software, that it's not even comparable.

One is highly bureaucratic, highly regulated, credentialed with at least a M.Sc. required, top down management tied to politics, defense and academia and super slow moving needing a strong manufacturing base, while the other is fast moving, less rules based, flat hierarchy, no credential/degree required, and not tied to government policies, academia or manufacturing.

Basically, one is "safety and national security first" the other is "move fast and break things and we'll worry about the rules we broke after we have a successful product". If your comparison were true then Europe would have nailed SW too not just planes. But they didn't.

There's also the culture of failure around entrepreneurship where in the US that's considered a right of passage to try and fail at your own business, while in Europe it's shameful and can financially wreck you for life if your small company goes bankrupt.

Then there's the WLB differences. By the time European companies get unblocked from some project manager's 2 month vacation and then from the tech lead's 5 month sick leave, the competing Americans have already launched 5 different software products and pivoted the company 3 times and found a market they can capture. Long blocks in the dev process when nobody answers emails for months because of vacations and sick lave can work in Aerospace industry where Airbus has a monopoly, or other such niche industries where EU "mittlesand" companies are the only players you can buy from, but doesn't work in creating SW companies that need to be fast to market otherwise someone else eats your lunch due to an even playing field and lack of regulations that act like a moat.

Basically, you can't win a race against unscrupulous opponents who disregard regulations and prioritizes financial success at all costs when you prioritize WLB and following regulations. Straight up. The playing field is completely unbalanced here in favor of the US and China. That's why rich Europeans put their money in US SW companies instead of EU ones.
by jonbiggums22 | 2025-09-05 11:42:24+00:00
Back in the dial-up days once call waiting was introduced you were routinely instructed to disable it. I had a box sort of like the fax switcher that I purchased on ebay that would instead listen for the call waiting tone and the box itself would ring, allowing me to pick up the phone attached to the box and receive the calls. It solved the problem of being able to use the phone line for hours on end for internet downloads without losing the ability to actually receive calls.

I also found if I identified a spam call fast enough I could hang up and switch back to the dial-up connection before it was dropped. I had to be real quick but I could usually avoid being dropped from a Starcraft match.
by motorest | 2025-09-05 11:42:28+00:00
> Hey, I heard about how utility pole inspecting helicopters are able to tell the good/rotten state of wooden telephone poles by the reverb pattern of sound waves coming off the poles from the rotors

There is a whole field dedicated to this, called non-destructive testing. Modal response (i.e., monitor how a structure vibrates in response to an excitation) is a basic technique that features in multiple areas such as structural health monitoring and service life estimations.

Some mechanics also do this by placing the tip of a screwdriver against a point in an engine and place their ear against the screwdriver's handle. If it's not sounding right, the engine has problems.

Even pottery. You should hear the sound of a pot after you tap it. If it's muffled then odds are it has internal cracks.
by snthpy | 2025-09-05 11:42:46+00:00
Have you looked into Ethena USDe?

It is completely decentralized and doesn't use a flawed algorithmic stablecoin mechanism like Terra-Luna but rather creates synthetic cash exposure by shorting perpetuals against collateral the same way a TradFi investment manager would manage their asset allocation exposure. The perps are traded on DEXs and I believe the BTC and ETH is held in on-chain vaults.

This is a solid model and I believe the leading decentralized stablecoin.

Things like USDT and USDC are essentially tokenized real-world dollars. Nothing inherently wrong with that, for example the Eurodollar market has existed for decades, but it does require oversight that collateral reserves are what they are and also means they are not truly decentralized as you point out.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-09-05 11:43:29+00:00
I think until you have one you don't realise quite what having a range of 200+ miles means in practice. You don't actually drive for 500 miles without a break, that is 8-10 hours of constant motorway speed driving and its not safe to drive that long. So when you take 30 - 60 minutes for lunch on a long drive like that and charge the vehicle you are going another 200 miles before again really taking a break. As it stands the breaks will have to be a bit longer than you might like and it could add 30 minutes to your journey but that is about it for most people.

The other part that not a lot of people realise is if your journey is 300 miles and your car does 200 you don't charge another 200 miles into the battery, you charge 100 and then charge at the destination instead. With ICE vehicles if your going to get fuel typically you fuel it to the top but you don't do that with battery cars you want to charge them as little as possible while mid travelling and charge them while they are sat still at home or destination.

Its charging at home that really changes the experience too. The weekly trip to the fuel station disappears, depending on how often you exceed the range of the car you only really get exposed to the charging network and times when doing those journeys, you spend a lot less of your life in fuel stations!
by piva00 | 2025-09-05 11:43:41+00:00
That fent walker will still exist, supplied by someone else/some other network.

I don't think you understand how vast and resilient the network of drug logistics is. Killing people with missiles is the least efficient usage of your tax money to actually fight drug abuse due to despair.

But you do you, it's just sad to see even people who are supposedly more well-educated (as most HN users are) not understanding very basic principles, I recommend you learning about systems thinking.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-05 11:44:34+00:00
I remember wanting to use carbonyl on some server so that I don't need to actually create a tunnel b/w 2 servers, start puppeeter in debug instance and open up a website and then hook it up using remote debugging in my ungoogled chromium.

I really wanted something that could just work...

Now that being said, the project was really cool.

So it might come slightly off topic but when I had last viewed the project, there were a lot of people asking if the project is dead or more importantly, what has happened to author and there were comments like this after the job part and even hackernews showed concern of the dev's life https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl/issues/201 [is the dev killed by IDF in Gaza #201]
by mark_undoio | 2025-09-05 11:44:37+00:00
In Cambridge we've got a clock called the Chronophage which is intended to be a sinister "eater of time" - the designer has done a good job of making it feel uncomfortable to look at. There's some detail here: https://www.corpus.cam.ac.uk/articles/secrets-corpus-clock

My memories of what I've heard over time:

* The grasshopper escapement actually is the demonic insect that sits on the top, "walking" around the serrated ring.

* Although it's backlit electronically it's actually a fully mechanical design - including all of the weird things it does.

* The Chronophage itself blinks its eyes unnervingly.

* It sometimes pauses or ticks slightly backwards, then runs faster to catch up again.

* On certain special dates it does extra weird stuff.

* The "chime" is a metal chain dropping into a box.

There were three made in the series, this was the first one. I've always found it slightly unappealing aesthetically but also compelling - there's no arguing with the fact that there's always a crowd of fascinated observers looking at it.
by marcusb | 2025-09-05 11:45:12+00:00
I've driven an EV on 500 mile trips. Getting out and stretching your legs for 20-25 minutes once every three hours isn't "super annoying." If all I did was drive around all day, every day for 500 miles at a stretch, it might be, but not nearly as annoying as routinely driving for 500 miles.

For most people, the vast majority of their driving takes place well within the range of the typical BEV and range anxiety is a total non-issue. The fact is, even accounting for the occasional long trip, I spend less time at charging stations than I did at gas stations when I owned an ICE car, because the vast majority of the time, I just plug the car in at my house and let it do its thing.
by eric-burel | 2025-09-05 11:45:15+00:00
What always bothered me when trying to "feel" Fourier transforms is that to compute the oscillations, you need to wait some time. Mathematically, the transformation includes computing integrals. So it's tricky to understand how you compute the Fourier decomposition for a stream. Illustrations always show the whole signal over time but in real life you get the signal progressively. I'd be eager to read more on this.
by Tarsul | 2025-09-05 11:46:16+00:00
I just checked his Hacker News Multi-Term Histogram[0] and I like it! E.g. if you compare Python to Java from 2015 on, you can clearly see that Java was up front in 2015 and since about 2023 Python is winning (although by less than I imagined). There are probably quite a few terms that might be interesting. [0]https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-histogram
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-09-05 11:47:13+00:00
Many historical atrocities with death counts is a common one I'll run into.

You'll see "xy atrocity had caused the deaths of this many people*", where the additional note will say something like "The numbers reported in this study have been challenged by many scholars on the subject and has been accused of invalid methods".

It's super common with history around Communist countries, because for a lot of folks in the west, the black book of communism is taken as fact when it's far from it, and you have groups like the Victims of Communism memorial foundation that have huge coffers for pushing the black book line.
by nicce | 2025-09-05 11:49:00+00:00
I don't think that we can use the general "old" here. The statement should have been more explicit and include the design of the battery.

If the model gets even minor updates, manufacturing is happening right now, the car is either good enough or new enough in general, and we cannot use old as negative quality.

Electric motors existed before the combustion engine, and people keep talking about "rapidly evolving area", while the only thing that is rapidly evolving and specific to EVs is the power source. A battery, to be precise. It is all about battery, and nothing else.
by alkonaut | 2025-09-05 11:49:57+00:00
So if one ignores the liability/regulation part of this stunt, and just look at the technical merit. Could you then say that this blockchain really provides nothing that a traditional centralized system wouldn't? But at much higher complexity and cost?

Wouldn't that just mean that the whole schtick is to avoid regulation? If I as a regulator saw this, I'd just schedule it for my next meeting, since you want to avoid having companies doing regulatory exploits "until regulation catches up". It's Uber all over otherwise.
by davidlee1435 | 2025-09-05 11:49:58+00:00
Just because badly managed local currency is required for taxes doesn't mean that most people in that country _must want_ to hold it. Plenty of trivially obvious evidence to the contrary

I assume you've never experienced hyper-inflation? If you have, do you think it's fair that you were forced into a hyper-inflationary currency? And, if given the means to, do you think it's fair that people _should_ have the ability to choose?
by viridian | 2025-09-05 11:50:31+00:00
I don't think much of Travis Kalanick, but this kind of journalism sucks, the paper is so yellow I can barely read it.

I don't want to forego addressing your point though, and yeah, Kalanick seems to be one of the people delusional enough to believe what the bots tell him. That said, I'd argue that even then, it isn't the LLM that's puffing up his ego, it's actually his self-aggrandizing interpretation of the interaction. I doubt Grok was fawning over him and telling him he's was the smartest specialist physicist out there.
by da_chicken | 2025-09-05 11:51:10+00:00
Yes, nothing will make you appreciate the relational model more than using a database where the designer broke first normal form. Or where the developer thought the data in the database was theirs and it was only ever going to be used by just their application.

Something else I find confusing is that every developer seems to want every database query for a single object to return a single row with a thousand columns, and anything multi row or with multiple results is way too complicated to handle. This goes double for report writing software.

I really wonder what we're doing with database providers (drivers) that makes people want to develop ORMs when ORMs consistently feel like 10 ton gorillas. If the database world is so disparaging of the "row by excruciating row" processing, why do the drivers exclusively present data that way and no other?
by conartist6 | 2025-09-05 11:51:33+00:00
The swimming analogy is not a strong start. You disavow an obvious and strong analogy to monetary debt right away while dumping us into this strange metaphor that depends on us having an intuition for how you think and feel about swimming, and specifically swimming laps? Instead of setting the stakes high right off the bat you've lowered them and lost my attention with this wandering train of thought that has no clear relationship to the topic you wish to discuss...
by cko | 2025-09-05 11:52:03+00:00
I wasn't really arguing about benefit to society though. I just said the gears of the economy turn on the back of such "distractions".

Benefit to society becomes a philosophical argument. Personally I don't value most forms of entertainment, gambling, etc. Humans only need food and whatever basic needs there are. I enjoy classical music but I would even argue that music is just noise at the end of the day. On a scale of heroin to Chopin, I'd put the NFL closer to Chopin.

Nevertheless, these seemingly "worthless" forms of sense-stimuli are supporting a huge portion of our livelihoods at the moment.

By the way Saquon Barkley can squat 600lbs. Surely that's of value, no?
by ycombinete | 2025-09-05 11:52:09+00:00
I did about 102% of Hollow Knight, mostly without a guide and loved it.

So, yes, I probably should have qualified my statement.

I meant this more if my parent wanted to get through Hollow Knight quickly, as a gateway for Silksong.

I say this because just thinking about playing Silksong immediately after finishing HK made me feel exhausted.

I wouldn't recommend playing HK in this manner though; it's more fun to explore, and use a guide only if you really hit a wall.

So, yeah in hindsight probably bad advice even after qualification.
by mangecoeur | 2025-09-05 11:52:18+00:00
As European it really struck me how poor the second hand ev market must be in the US. For the “cheap second hand car to do short distances” we have a lot of options really cheap - older gen Renault Zoe and Peugeot e208s, leafs, even the old hyundai Ioniq which is a bit of a cult favourite for its efficiency
by ownagefool | 2025-09-05 11:53:09+00:00
Sure, but a lot of this isn't super hard.

I worked on FlexiScale, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexiScale. The Architecture of IaaS provider doesn't need to look massively different from k8s.

- Node Agent that either listens or connects back to an API for instructions. - An API to request your workload. - Various decision daemons. IPAM, Block Storage, Etc.

What's missing in Europe is a Culture of Tech Leadership and Investment.

Case in point, I wrote or rewrote borderline 100% of an early European Cloud Provider, and I've never heard of nor been approached to work for another project like this. Even if one existed, they likely wouldn't come anywhere near offering a salary I'd be interested in, and leadership would almost certainly be full of people who haven't built a Cloud Provider before.

( This isn't so say I'm the most credible candidate in the market, but I have had salaried offers for IC in Meta and HFT in London. I'd have loved to build another cloud provider ( with more than a team of 3-5 ) but I've spent most of my career as a contractor interfacing with "cloud" teams offering things like vsphere, wondering where it all goes wrong. )
by phiresky | 2025-09-05 11:53:54+00:00
I think relational databases are great, but this is my biggest problem with SQL, even before the ridiculous syntax.

A query like

select users.*, orders.* from users left join orders on orders.user_id = users.id

Should always have returned a structure like:

type SingleReturnRow = { users: {id: ..., }[], orders: {user_id: ..., id: ..., }[]} type Return = SingleReturnRow[]

Mangling the columns together and _removing_ groupings that naturally appear is just so unnecessary.

I don't think a larger change in the query language would even be needed.

Even better of course would be a return value like

type SingleReturnRow = { user: User, orders: Order[] }

But I see how that would require a fundamental change in the language.

Of course in PG now you can use

select users.*, json_agg(orders.*) as orders from users left join orders on orders.user_id = users.id group by users.id

but using JSON as intermediate steps just feels unnatural.
by seviu | 2025-09-05 11:54:01+00:00
Must admit it isn’t

Usdc is audited by Deloitte on a monthly basis.

It would be pretty stupid for Paolo to end up being naked, now that his business is printing money left and right.

To make it clear I am not pro tether, I am against visceral hate which was justified years ago but I feel it isn’t anymore. Tether gained my sympathy by freezing quite promptly funds from various hacks.

Circle on the contrary have failed every single time.

https://cryptobriefing.com/circle-lazarus-group-accusations/

Anyways this is totally unrelated

It will make for a good Netflix documentary once they get their audit
by mcdonje | 2025-09-05 11:54:38+00:00
This was enlightening. I've often wondered why ORMs exist, and it turns out a bunch of devs don't understand tabular data. I was going to say they don't understand SQL, but apparently it goes deeper than that.

Like, left joins have been around since SQL-92, so the query not returning a result when there is no director is a skill issue.

Nowadays, you can run a JSON or XML query and have the DB return your results in a hierarchical format.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 11:54:40+00:00
Are you talking about Ovm https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1324969.1324974 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA456895? pizlonator (the Fil-C author) was one of Ovm's authors 17 years ago. I don't think it's in current use, but hopefully he'll correct me if I'm wrong. The RTSJ didn't require a real-time GC (and IIRC at the time it wasn't known how to write a hard-real-time GC without truly enormous overheads) and it didn't have a real-time GC at the time. Perhaps one has been added since then.

I don't agree that "it is a niche of a niche". There are probably 32× as many computers in your house running hard-real-time software as computers that aren't. Even Linux used to disable interrupts during IDE disk accesses!
by Spixel_ | 2025-09-05 11:55:10+00:00
I don't get the transaction bit. At least with postgres, a transaction doesn't guarantee that all statements in it see the data at the same point in time (actually, it's not even guaranteed for subqueries).

Also, often, the transactional database servers is more difficult to scale than application servers so from a technical standpoint, it makes sense to do this glue work in app code.
by metalman | 2025-09-05 11:55:31+00:00
Venezuela does have SU 30 's ,russian, also flown by Chinas Navy, equiped with mach 4 plus shipkiller missles and given the current situation, it would be very much in the interest of those other parties to see that Venezuela was operating the updated versions of those missles, which as we all know, are the most important weapons in any battle today. China got a freebee test when Pakistan and India traded shots, and it is quite clear that the Chinese hardware got everyone's attention, the rub is that there is no way that the missles used were China's best, but we do know that Chnia has a special interest in ship killer missles, and just so happens to fly, exactly the same basic platform as Venezuela. The US military knows its the big dog, but they are looking at Venezuela like it's a nasty feral cat.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-05 11:56:43+00:00
> Some programs have a ~4x slowdown

How does it compare to something like RLBox?

> This is a myth. 99% of the C/C++ code you are using right now is not perf sensitive.

I don't think that's true, or at best its a very contorted definition of "perf sensitive". Most code is performance sensitive in my opinion - even shitty code written in Python or Ruby. I would like it to be faster. Take Asciidoctor for example. Is that "performance sensitive"? Hell yes!
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-05 11:57:05+00:00
Problem is that theory very commonly doesn't match reality when dealing with humans.

Police may prefer to suppress freedom to achieve its goal, which is crime reduction. Or it may stop caring about difficult or dangerous problems (say, drug dealing cartels), and reorient into harassing the civilian population for petty things, such as policing distasteful memes on the internet.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-05 11:57:18+00:00
Just for reference, in case you find yourself in an optimization under uncertainty situation again: The decision-theoretic right way to do this is generate a bayesian posterior over true ranking given ranking count and a prior on true rankings, add a loss function (it can just be the difference between the true rating of the selected item and the true rating of the non-selected item for simplicity) then choose your option to minimize the expected loss. This produces exactly the correct answer.
by sillyfluke | 2025-09-05 11:57:23+00:00
>Getting out and stretching your legs for 20-25 minutes once every three hours isn't "super annoying."

Nothing done by choice is annoying obviously. But a lot of people are fine with stretching their legs on a five minute bathroom break. Adding an extra an hour or hour half for unwanted stops due to forced recharging is what annoys them.
by loumf | 2025-09-05 11:57:51+00:00
I did not use AI to write this. I paid professional editors to help me get it polished. There were 4 rounds with 5 different people. I also got lots of grammar/typo comments using helpthisbook (hundreds of readers pointing out errors).

I did (very rarely) take single sentences to ChatGPT and ask it for the correct way to punctuate it.

I personally have always used em-dashes, perhaps incorrectly. I actually tried to learn the correct usage and stick to using it when appropriate. One of my goals in writing this book was to become a better writer, which I could only do (IMO) by writing and getting editors to help me.
by thorn | 2025-09-05 11:59:06+00:00
This might be the answer. It is not that the language became more popular, but rather the search keyword ada...

> This Month's Changes in the Index > William Herrera told us that programming language ADA might have been boosted in the TIOBE index because of the Ada Lovelace architecture of NVIDIA. For this reason we have added "-NVIDIA" to Ada's search term. As a consequence, Ada dropped from position #9 last month to position #13 this month.