MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drschlange | 2025-09-19 02:02:26+00:00
That's a really good point. I didn't consider Ruby, but not for logical or very good reasons beside the fact that it never clicked between us (I'm the guilty here). I try to take inspiration from Smalltalk usability and broad ideas, but I'm not trying to fit exactly its object model.

Anyway, I should propose a small Ruby lib to easily connect to the network-bus to create neurons. I have one in js that I targeted in the first place as it's easy to get webcam/sound working there with minimal efforts, but a Ruby one would be cool!
by mindslight | 2025-09-19 02:02:41+00:00
Is anyone else bored of seeing the endless line of anti-human-scale distributed filesystems?

It's like the engineers building them keep trying to scratch their own itch for a better filesystem that could enable seamless cross-device usage, collaboration, etc. But the engineers only get paid if they express themselves in terms of corporate desires, and corpos aren't looking to pay them to solve those hard problems. So they solve the horizontal scaling problem for the thousandth time, but only end up creating things that requires a full time engineer (or perhaps even a whole team) to use. Hooray, another centralizing "distributed" filesystem.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-19 02:02:43+00:00
Nah, more like a 1D chess move. Investors will pay them to invest in AI, so invest in AI, make the stock go up, sell, and leave the dumb investors holding the bag.

2D chess if they're smart: start a new company that competes with the one they just sold to dumb investors. Jack Dorsey is particularly fond of this move.
by fn-mote | 2025-09-19 02:04:07+00:00
> Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future.

You are dreaming... look at all of the other posts on topics like this. It's going to continue to be business as usual until you have the social capital for a post that gets to the front page of HN or similar status elsewhere.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-09-19 02:06:08+00:00
I've looked at the EXE file, and it's supposed to print "This program cannot be run in DOS mode." when run under (real or emulated) DOS.

The reason why it fails to do that is that the compiler did not set the memory allocation fields in the header correctly, so the stack is either overwriting random memory or may be somewhere that isn't writable at all!

Apparently nobody tests this stub code anymore, might as well leave it out completely...

(maybe Windows even accepts files that start with the PE header instead of MZ?)
The Genie's Car Factories
by the_oldman | 2025-09-19 02:08:26+00:00
There once was a genie who granted wishes for car factories.

Those that used to built cars by hand were amazed at the unlimited robots they could direct at the factories to build cars, but they had to be very careful with their direction and supervision of the robots, or the robots could make a real mess.

Some thought that this was foolishness and continued to build cars by hand.

Some thought that the only way to build a car in the genie’s car factory was to micromanage a single robot with simple direction, and to do as much themselves as they could.

Others attempted and failed many times to get many of the robots to build wondrous cars. Some that had factories were very good at this, and others very bad at it.

Over time, which of these do you think made the most progress?
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-09-19 02:08:45+00:00
> Do you have a source for this? I don't think that matches the British census data, unless we postulate that the birth rate somehow skyrocketed.

It's in the official report of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, which did actually use demographic data gathered by the British. It's not that births skyrocketed. It's mainly that infant mortality went down. This exact same phenomenon has played out throughout most of the world at some point in the last 200 years, and it typically leads to a population boom (until families adjust and start having fewer children).

> What do you mean by "native"? What's special about the particular time period you're referencing? The Palestinian identity didn't exist then.

We don't have to get into a big theoretical discussion of what "native" means. When the Zionist movement began, there were already people living in Palestine. Most of them had deep roots there, going back many hundreds of years (or more). The Zionist movement was a European movement that aimed to colonize Palestine - to settle it and establish a state for European Jews. This is basically very similar to what happened in North America with European colonists and Native Americans. There are particularities to each case, but the basic dynamic between the existing ("native") population and the group that's coming in to displace them is the same.

The fact that Palestinians didn't have a firm national identity in 1900 isn't a justification for taking their land and expelling them.

> There were always Jews in Palestine.

This is a red herring. The fact that there was a tiny group of Jews living in Palestine does not have much of anything to do with our discussion. We're talking about Zionism, a movement among European Jews to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

> I don't condone the cases of that done by Jewish militias in some towns either.

Without the ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias (and the IDF, after it was officially founded), there would be no Israel. The entire basis for Israel's existence is the creation of a large Jewish majority in a substantial portion of Palestine. That happened through the mass ethnic cleansing campaign in 1947-48.

> Not what I said at all. The point is that, in both this analogy and the actual topic of immigration to the Levant ...

We're not discussing "immigration to the Levant." We're talking about an organized effort to take over a foreign territory, against the will of the people who live there.
by rdw | 2025-09-19 02:09:58+00:00
In the area I live, houses are often built one complete room at a time, over many years. They start out as a single-room shack, then the owner builds extensions as they have children or money. Often, they build a porch, and then decades later wall up the porch and turn it into a room of some kind.

I kind of like this analogy because it does help us reason about the situation. The one-room shack is basically an MVP; a hacky result that just does one thing and probably poorly, but it is useful enough to justify its own existence. The giant mansion built from detailed architectural plans seems like a waterfall process for an enterprise application, doesn't it?

There are many advantages to building a house one room at a time. You get something to house you quickly and cheaply. When you build each extension, you have a very good idea of how it will be most useful because you know your needs well. You are more capable of taking advantage of sales (my neighbor collects construction overstock for free/cheap and starts building something once he has enough quantity to do so). It's more "agile". The resulting houses are beautiful in their own bespoke ways. They last a long time, too.

The downsides are that the services and structure are a hodgepodge of eras and necessity. If you're competent, you can avoid problems in your own work, but you may have to build on shoddy "legacy" work. You spend more of your time in a state of construction, and it may be infeasible to undertake a whole-house project like running ethernet to every room.

It's all tradeoffs. I think it does in many cases make sense to build a house in this way, and it likewise makes sense to build software this way. It depends on the situation.
by hopelite | 2025-09-19 02:09:59+00:00
It did cross my mind that it could just be a kind of validation investment, to validate the Trump "investment" in Intel as a smart move (i.e., "see, Nvidia also thinks intel is a good investment), but the announcement did seem a bit contrived for that.

I am also thinking that it may just be more of a "everyone scratching each other's backs." Intel avoids anti-trust/monopoly investigations, Intel is saved for all the institutional and political stakeholders and Nvidia floats an artificial competitor to make them look less like a monopoly, Intel stays alive, etc.
by neilv | 2025-09-19 02:10:18+00:00
> When asking questions of your team, it can help to (separately) ask the same question of multiple individuals. The difference in answers can be illuminating. [...] Ask questions of your boss, your peers, stakeholders, and anyone else that might have useful information.

Be careful with this. Something I've seen at least a few times, and it's always gone badly...

1. A manager (or exec) has real experts on their staff telling them one thing.

2. The manager not only doesn't know enough about the domain, but they don't know how good their own people are.

3. The manager goes and consults someone outside who they think is more expert (e.g., someone they know who worked for a company that pays better, or who is, say, a professor of what the manager thinks is the domain).

4. The outside 'expert' makes some small offhand remark without realizing how big a question it was, or shoots off their mouth without having hardly any accurate information about the actual situation. (ProTip: Professional analysis is different thing than casual recreational chattering on HN.)

5. Manager comes back and overrides the team, based on what the outside 'expert' said.

6. Bad decision is implemented, morale is destroyed, the good people leave, and (AFAIK) that manager doesn't get referrals from the people who left.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-19 02:10:36+00:00
> Intel CPUs or GPUs

Both. Also things like sound cards, network cards, peripherals in general.

My happiness and stability while using Linux has been well correlated with the number of devices with Intel in the name. Every single device without Intel invariably becomes a major pain in my ass every single time.

It's gotten to the point I assume it will just work if it's Intel.

> And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs?

They're making a lot of progress but Intel is still years ahead of them.

Earlier this year I was researching PC parts for a build and discovered AMD was still working on merging functionality like on die temperature sensors into the kernel. It makes me think I won't have a full feature set on Linux if I buy one of their processors.
by D-Machine | 2025-09-19 02:11:28+00:00
Yup, I am pretty up to date with the literature (mostly) and read about DenseNet a long time ago (and have trained trained and tuned quite a few of them too). I've also done enough experimentation with tuning custom CNN architectures (on smaller medical datasets, mind you) where the inclusion of residual connections was a hyperparameter to be tuned. It is pretty obvious that with deeper networks, turning off the skip connections just makes your loss curves hit a premature (and bad) plateau far more often than not.

Residual connections in CNNs clearly don't change the representational capacity, and don't obviously induce any bias that seems beneficial. I.e. if you needed information from earlier feature maps, the optimizer could surely just learn to make intermediate layers preserve that information (by having some conv-layer channels just basically be identities). Actually, if you inspect a lot of feature maps through visualizations, it is pretty clear that information is lost very gradually, over many, many layers, and it just isn't plausible that typical (short) skip connections are really meaningfully being helpful because they "preserve information". This is in stark contrast to U-Nets, where the skips are long enough, and from layers of differing enough resolutions it is clear the purpose is very different. EDIT: With DenseNet, it is trickier, because some of the residual connections are quite long, and the paper does provide some evidence to suggest that the length is useful. But there are not any long residual connections in Vision Transformers, and it broadly seems like ViTs and modern conv nets (which don't use DenseNet "long" concats) have basically equivalent performance (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16764). So the whole idea of long connections being important just doesn't sit right with me. Short, typical residual connection is useful, and this seems most clearly to be about gradients.

And practically, when suddenly switching on residual connections leads to better training despite an otherwise identical architecture, it is really hard to see them as anything other than a tool for stabilizing optimization.
by kashunstva | 2025-09-19 02:11:34+00:00
The big LLM players are getting in on the act now, too. In May 2025, out of the blue my account with Anthropic was auto-banned. Your recourse? Fill out a Google form to appeal and wait. Over 4 months in, I’m still waiting. Early on, I did manage to correspond with a human called “Destiny at Anthropic” but now they’ve put up some AI chatbot. The answer is always “wait.”

At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.
by EduardLev | 2025-09-19 02:11:39+00:00
Not a biologist but I don't think it has to do with how much the genes get expressed but rather that they do get expressed and in bad times (pesticide) they're really good and look like they dominate (in that you only need one copy to get the expression/benefits) but in good times (pesticide free) they don't introduce that much negative cost and so you need two copies for adverse effects.
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-19 02:12:58+00:00
> The thing I resent most is the terms Global North and Global South ... because white people invaded 200 years ago ... It is completely arbitrary, political and divisive.

There is nothing "arbitrary" about the classification, and it was created by aid groups originally based upon socioeconomic factors, later adopted by the UN and others as the term third-world went out of favour after the Cold War ended. It got the North/South bifurcation purely because most of the one set were Northern countries, and most of the other set were Southern countries, and most people don't have a defensiveness about the words North or South and aren't offended by it.

As an aside, acting as if the colonial countries aren't empirically successful because you want to push some umbrage is just super weird. Australia and New Zealand are both highly developed rich countries, regardless of whatever your rural area's infrastructure is like.

Countries in the Global South desperately want to be classified in that grouping because it means development funds and benefits that aren't available to Global North countries. China has rapidly risen over the past couple of decades and it's getting hard to still call it a developing country (and its foreign aid intake has been rapidly tapering off as it industrializes), though to be fair, it still has a GDP per capita 1/4 Australia or New Zealand. Similarly Russia is mighty close to losing Global North standing.

And for that matter South Korea and Japan are a part of the Global North. I guess they didn't get your memo that it's only for the white countries or some such social justice prattle.

And once I get to your final paragraph I'm firmly convinced you were just trolling, or at least I honestly hope you were. Delineating the world by socioeconomic conditions doesn't denote allies or enemies, and this bizarre take is nonsensical and has zero relevance to anything but some contrived taking of offense. The mere notion that it is "arbitrary" is so fantastically ridiculous that you have to be having a laugh.
by thekingofravens | 2025-09-19 02:13:51+00:00
Python was my first language and that is precisely how it felt. I would be at a convention or conference and mention python and it seemed like people didn't care, had a negative opinion or just didn't use it. It was treated as something only semi-programmers did, like people whose job wasn't actually programming, business analysts or scientists.

Then one day python was suddenly top of the charts, probably post python 3 (old timers hated it but it really improved ergonomics) but not immediately so. Rather later on when they fixed the performance loss from 2->3 (which looking back as a primarily Rust coder now, was a hilarious argument that community had internally because even my worst, most quickly cobbled together rust code beats some of my best python code at the same task performance wise).
by evanjrowley | 2025-09-19 02:14:08+00:00
My point is that the device that you keep in your pocket is one that you must take out with your hand and operate with your hand such that you cannot perform its primary functions without using hands. It's true that the Ray-Ban Meta Display can be controlled with hand gestures but doing so is apparently optional. Being able to control and consume content from a smart device while having your hands free to multitask is a big deal.

There are so many activities and professions where your hands get dirty and touching a smartphone without washing them would be a bad idea. An auto mechanic could use these glasses to look up information about things they see inside of an engine without having to clean the oil from their hands. A chef could respond to messages about their food delivery without having to drop what they're doing and go sanitize. Anytime I do dirty work outside, I can use this to access smart features without the risk of dirt filling my smartphone case, my smartwatch getting destroyed in a tight situation, or drenching either of them in sweat.

Furthermore, a phone (or a smart watch) is not meant to be used at face level, meaning folks typically look down to use them, and this can lead to extended periods of bad posture resulting in head, neck, and spine problems. My X-ray shows I have bone spurs on the vertebrae of my neck because I look down at screens too much (according to my chiropractor). A smart device that's designed to be used in a way that aligns with good posture habits is absolutely needed.

I hope smart glasses take off and I commented Meta for taking them this far.
by Eextra953 | 2025-09-19 02:14:12+00:00
Your statement assumes that nations only use this technology against other nations but from the article it is clear that this technology is being used within nations to target people who disagree with the state. Tolerating those who think differently is a democratic value and hence using this technology against those who disagree with the state is anti-democratic. Treating political differences as security threats is exactly why this is a moral issue rather than an ideological one.
by qingcharles | 2025-09-19 02:14:24+00:00
There are plenty at Twitter and TikTok too.

Sadly I can't find anyone to pay off at Google yet to fix my gmail (I have the username, password, and everything is forwarded to the recovery email I own, I just lost access to the phone number and they enabled 2FA without asking).

Reddit also, I can't find anyone there to unban my friend's account that got locked (due to a server outage), even after speaking directly to spez about it.

One tip: if your IG/FB account get suspended, then it's way cheaper to get it unbanned via black hat routes than if you roll the dice and try to appeal it. Appeals often end in perma-bans that are much harder for Meta employees to undo.
by oidar | 2025-09-19 02:17:15+00:00
I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.
by vanc_cefepime | 2025-09-19 02:17:38+00:00
I use an Aranet radiation sensor[0] that ties in nicely with home assistant. It was more of a fun purchase, and excuse my lack of radiation knowledge, but is it same as those geiger counters or something a big different, I assumed it's similar but slower? They also have other sensors for Radon, CO2, etc

[0] https://aranet.com/en/home/products/aranet-radiation-sensor
by aliyome | 2025-09-19 02:18:26+00:00
My proposed viable middle ground approach would be to adopt markdown as an intermediate representation and use some build process to generate the final output. As long as the input is markdown, it doesn't matter if the final output from the build process maintains tight coupling between structure and styling. That said, if the primary benefit of the no-class approach was intended to facilitate development, this method—which introduces an additional build step—would be counterproductive.
by NoPicklez | 2025-09-19 02:19:40+00:00
For me its simply the ride feel and the tech within the car.

Full EV's whilst not having great highway mileage, still get excellent mileage compared to a full ICE when in and around the city. If you have a plug in hybrid, I don't really see the point in having to charge a battery and put petrol in the car.

I don't care so much on the environmental side, however for a hybrid you still have an engine that consumes petrol, as opposed to just having a larger battery. Which is then a petrol engine, plus a transmission and clutch which require maintenance just like any other ICE.

Lastly here in Australia a full charge only costs around $20-35 as opposed to around $80-90 for a full tank of petrol.
by gedy | 2025-09-19 02:22:14+00:00
> In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

I had friends later marveling I missed out on the Macintosh world of the 1980s, but the pricing was not even remotely an option! So dang expensive for a lower middle class kid.
by fastball | 2025-09-19 02:23:10+00:00
You can also compare apples and oranges – not sure what your point is.

Tesla FSD absolutely, categorically, can do that, assuming we agree that "intervention" means "take over for the car". Teslas are driving people from their starting point to their destination without any driver intervention, every single day. Are you being willfully obtuse when it comes to the distinction I am making between capability and consistency? Yes, you need to have both for a robotaxi service or to call the vehicle truly "driverless". If you don't have that reliability/consistency, it is indeed reckless to not have someone in the driver's seat.

If you really can't see the distinction, your eyes are blind. It's the difference between being driven by a toddler and by your alcoholic uncle. Your uncle has the capability, but he is frequently drunk so you wouldn't trust him to be your chauffeur. A toddler doesn't have the capability in the first place. Sober up your uncle though and the world is your oyster. But the toddler needs to do a lot of growing before it'll get you anywhere.

> A tesla owner is far less likely to provide accurate, unbiased anecdata than an employee of a competitor, so I can see why the other poster volunteered the latter

This is silly. I wouldn't apply that standard to anything else, and I doubt you would either. Who would you trust more to give you honest feedback about a Vitamix blender – your friend with good judgement who owns one, or an employee at KitchenAid?
by jollyjerry | 2025-09-19 02:23:10+00:00
Thanks for touching on accessibility. I believe that good accessibility leads to a better design. The nice thing about starting with HTML is there are good defaults.

I wrote another post about building a search form about progressively enhancing a search form (https://jch.github.io/posts/2025-01-30-building-modern-searc...). Starting with semantic <search> and <input> elements gives sane browser and screenreader behavior.

Perhaps my title came on too strong, but I'm not advocating against javascript. It's more about understanding capabilities HTML and CSS can handle, and what is better suited for JS.