MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-09-23 00:22:09+00:00
I built my own [1] — but then I have a garage (and had been building something approximating furniture for several years).

I feel like with the tutorials out there, a novice could learn as they go and enjoy the experience of building out a van.

It's possible too to do it in stages. My Stage 1 had no solar or stove — limited cabinetry. The wife and I took it out nonetheless. You find out quickly too that way what you miss/want.

The cost of a new Ford Transit was not cheap, and there were some pricy components. As an example, the two LiPO batteries were $1K each — but they're about 1/3 that these days (wow). The electric refrigerator (more like cooler) was not cheap. The propane stove was not either — but a camp stove would have worked as well (and has the benefit that you can cook outside on hot days when you don't want to heat up the van/RV).

I never tallied up the total cost, but I promise you it was significantly less than a new RV. And because I made it myself, I can vouch for the quality of the components.

The single best resource was faroutride.com [2]. But then there were plenty of online forums, YouTube etc. with all kinds of info.

I was a few years from retirement when I began. The idea was to "van life" with the wife after I retired. As it is, we've done a good deal of travel in the U.S. but until she also retires, we don't live the van life.

(The fact is though, after a few weeks on the road, you come home appreciating your creature comforts.)

(Recently drove from the Midwaste to San Diego to get my middle daughter and her two cats. Heading out in a few weeks to the Bay Area to visit some ex-coworkers.)

[1] https://www.fordtransitusaforum.com/threads/hot-tamale-build...

[2] https://faroutride.com/van-build/
by ryanmcgarvey | 2025-09-23 00:23:00+00:00
The only reason I want these things to be any smarter is because I need them to do more work over longer periods screwing up. The only reason I need them to do more work over long periods is because they are too slow to properly pair with.

If I could have it read more of my project in a single gulp and produce the 10-1000 lines of code I want in a few seconds, I wouldn't need it to go off and write the thousands of lines on its own in the background. But because even trivial changes can take minutes by the time it slurps up the right context and futzes with the linter and types, that ideal pair programmer loop is less attractive.
by astrange | 2025-09-23 00:23:16+00:00
The more useful answer is:

a) it needs namespaces

b) but giving people namespaces is unironically bad because it's what lead to "enterprise development" style APIs like C# where everything is named System.DataStructures.Collections.Arrays.Lists.ArrayList, as if giving something a longer name makes it more professional.

c) so instead two letters means a system framework and three letters means a user framework
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-23 00:23:23+00:00
What stands out to me about the people in the article is that they don't seem to be poor in the conventional sense. The woman who sold her 5 bedroom / 3 bathroom house and the guy getting 3k/month in pensions.

I don't hail from the US but wouldn't it be possible for people like that to move to one of the low cost states and rent a modest apartment? I have a friend in Tulsa and I think he pays something like 750 bucks per month for what looked like a pretty nice flat, seems possibly cheaper than this:

"When the family is unable to afford a spot at a campground, which can cost $25 to $45 a night[...]"
by amiga386 | 2025-09-23 00:23:36+00:00
Recent metaanalysis of intervention effectiveness (2025, UK) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/680101e3da5bb...

In short: humans are not inherently good 'uns or bad 'uns. The social interventions made by friends, families, community, state-run programs, have a discernable effect on reoffending rates.
by 999900000999 | 2025-09-23 00:24:23+00:00
Alright.

This is just a hypothetical story.

Sarah has 2 kids with her ex husband Bill. Everytime Sarah mentions child support Bill talks about pursuing joint custody.

Bill has no intention of actually following though, but he knows fighting in court is going to very expensive and difficult for Sarah.

Sarah drops it. Often filing for child support involves a whole lot of BS. Bill might just be a wacko she'd rather not deal with anymore.

After all, they aren't together for a reason.

I know my dad kicked me out at 15 and didn't give me a dime until I was like 20, and that was about 300$ or 400$ tops.

He wasn't going to spot me rent money during my second eviction.

Honest to God, I was grateful he just left me alone for the most part. He still lived in this fantasy land were you can kick you kid out and expect them to do well in school.

No I'm not college bound, yes my GPA was like a 1.7 when I graduated high school.

Thank you Brendan Eich, thank you for JavaScript, without that magical programing language I wouldn't be where I am now.

I guess I wasn't smart enough for C++, but I've made great money in JavaScript and other higher level languages for a long time.

Anyway, the woman who starts the story has her reasons.
by saltcured | 2025-09-23 00:25:10+00:00
I seem to recall the earliest "real-time" Visible Human volume rendering demo being run on either a Cray or IBM (?) supercomputer back in the late 1990s. But, I couldn't remember enough keywords to find a reference and confirm it.

What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-09-23 00:25:39+00:00
I couldn't agree more - the not caring part. But then you should try to do an app in the Android code/build/test/publish ecosystem. As someone who had/has to use both os/dev ecosystems for work, I often wondered which one is worse, and what bothered me is that I couldn't conclude.

So in this great duopoly, these two tech giants constantly compete to become more and more hostile and pathetic to both the users and the developers.

> Apple apologist will respond rudely or with some unhelpful generic tips

Aha. The "you are holding it wrong", "this is how the Lord intended it to behave", "buy a new .." … fruit company fan base phenomena.

Apple's majority of buyers aren't their users or consumers; they are Apple fans and supporters. If Apple had consumers like Android, Linux, or Windows, either they would have fixed their act or been in the ground by now.
by rcrowley | 2025-09-23 00:25:39+00:00
I computed P(node failure within MTTR) = 0.00007 same as you. I extrapolated this to the outage scenario P(at least two node failures within MTTR) = P(node failure within MTTR)^2 * (1-P(node failure within MTTR)) + P(node failure within MTTR)^3 = 5.09 * 10^-9 which rounds to 0.0000001%.
Show HN: WordDrop – my first mobile game (Tetris and Scrabble hybrid)
by gimlithedoge | 2025-09-23 00:26:41+00:00
Hi everyone, this is my first game launch!

WordDrop is a hybrid between Tetris and Scrabble where letters fall and you build words under time pressure.

•Built in Unity (C#), inspired by classic falling-block puzzlers. •Free to play, no ads, jump right into the action. •iOS App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6747409372

I am a self taught programmer and I’d love feedback on the gameplay, design, or even the technical side. Happy to answer questions about how I built it!

I’m also considering using WordDrop as a centerpiece in my portfolio as I work toward a career in game development. If you have thoughts on how it presents as a portfolio piece — or what recruiters/studios might look for — I’d love that feedback too.
by jholdn | 2025-09-23 00:27:53+00:00
This program sounds great and I think we should incentivize it. Unfortunately, I think it requires a constitutional amendment to work. We can’t rely on well meaning administrators to overlook the slave labor exemption for criminal punishment; these things will be exploited.

I guess with knowledge work there is some protection because it’s hard to force. Though, it would be desirable to extend such programs into other forms of work.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 00:27:55+00:00
> Amazing how Trump gets unfettered power and Biden gets reeled in

If we look at how often the justices voted in favour of each administration in emergency applications when the government was the filer, we get Sotomayor and Jackson favouring Biden with a 77-point margin (88 to 11 percent and 77 to 0 percent, respectively), Alito favouring Trump with a 77-point margin (95 to 18%), and Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts with 48, 26 and 21-point margins [1].

On the whole, Trump has been successful 84% of the time against Biden's 53%. But my point is that the partisan fracture of our court--on the level of individual justices--has been happening for a while. (The fact that we have (a) Alito, who's a hack and (b) a decadelong conservative majority is more explanatory than e.g. Barrett or Roberts having gone to the dark side.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/politics/supreme-court...
by tzs | 2025-09-23 00:28:02+00:00
This is way better than I expected.

RFK Jr has long suggested that WiFi and cellular radio may be significant factor in autism (and ADHD, allergies, and obesity). I was expecting then that the big autism announcement would either be that or his old fallback of vaccines.

At least with Tylenol there is (if I correctly understood what I heard about this for the 2-3 minutes I had NPR on while driving to the AM/PM for a snack) there is a correlation between autism and use of Tylenol during pregnancy.

The discussion on NPR, which included a researcher who wrote a paper that the government is basing this on I believe, said that there is no evidence that there is causality here. Nearly everyone in the field thinks that it is far more likely that whatever is causing autism might also increase the likelihood of pain during pregnancy, and so the correlation with Tylenol is simply because those mothers turn to a pain reducing drug and Tylenol is the most commonly recommended drug for that.

Also, Trump managed to get through this without somehow finding a way to directly blame autism on the left/Democrats, so that too is way better than I expected.
by magarnicle | 2025-09-23 00:28:07+00:00
My method is to backup the photos 'at source', and treat Google Photos as another backup location. So I use Syncthing on my phone to copy new photos to my PC where I can do whatever backup strategy I like (restic, rclone and Backblaze in my case). The Google Photos app on my phone is also sending them to the cloud for convenience.
by mweidner | 2025-09-23 00:28:08+00:00
> More specifically, if you can edit different parts of a same document on different devices, then the document should be split across multiple files that can be synced independently

A more robust idea is to store a log of changes in files that are synced with Dropbox/OneDrive/etc. To prevent conflict warnings from Dropbox, you'll want each device to write to a separate file. Readers re-assemble the logs into (some) canonical total order, then reduce over that to get the document state.

The hard part is re-architecting your app to record all changes, instead of just writing out the current state to disk. However, once you do that, it can form the basis for other features like undo/redo, a view of the file's history, etc.

(The changes don't need to be CRDT/OT messages - anything deterministic works, though it's a good idea to make them "rebase-able", i.e., they will still do something reasonable when replayed on top of a collaborator's concurrent changes.)
by phkahler | 2025-09-23 00:28:43+00:00
No mention of the relicensing going on. All the GNU utilities are GPL licensed.

At a time when relicensing and other rug pulls are making headlines I find it disturbing that so many developers are going with "permissive" licenses for their recreation of things in Rust.

Edit: not technically relicensing, which would not be legal. They are writing functional clones from scratch under a new license.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-23 00:29:22+00:00
> Americans may end up in a situation where they have some $1000-2000 device at home with an open Chinese model running on it, if they care about privacy or owning their data.

I think HN vastly overestimates the market for something like this. Yes, there are some people who would spend $2,000 to avoid having prompts go to any cloud service.

However, most people don’t care. Paying $20 per month for a ChatGPT subscription is a bargain and they automatically get access to new versions as they come.

I think the at-home self hosting hobby is interesting, but it’s never going to be a mainstream thing.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-23 00:29:49+00:00
Not to spam you, but this is probably a function that would not work for AD: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2383397/differentia...

That is, it is a series that converges, but trying to take the derivative as a sum of individual terms results in divergence. I learned a lot of this type stuff ages ago, but in 2025 I just searched for an example lol... I am long overdue for a review of numerical analysis and real analysis.

ChatGPT also says something about an example related to some Fourier series, maybe related to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_of_Fourier_serie... You can ask it all about this stuff. It seems pretty decent, although I have not gone too far into it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 00:30:30+00:00
> Just like Swedish-American homelessness rates are comparable to homelessness rates in Sweden

...are they? (Serious question.)

(Note: "There was no significant difference in rates of lifetime adult homelessness between foreign-born adults and native-born adults (1.0% vs 1.7%). Foreign-born participants were less likely to have various mental and substance-use disorders, less likely to receive welfare, and less likely to have any lifetime incarceration. The number of years foreign-born adults lived in the United States was significantly associated with risk for homelessness" [1])

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00333...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-09-23 00:30:43+00:00
You may be right. I grew up in the Midwaste but when I was living in California I met a number of native Californians that I am sure would never consider heading to the flyover belt of America. Rightly or wrongly I think they have stereotypes about what it's like to live here.

(And to be sure, the weather is not what they are used to.)
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-09-23 00:30:51+00:00
What would actually happen is that all of Toolbox would be replaced by Xcode.

No one wants that.

I'm sure Apple's Dev Tools team reads HN, and it's baffling they just don't care that the product has such a bad reputation. Or if the team cares, some layer of adjacent management clearly doesn't.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-09-23 00:31:40+00:00
> So yes, I am refuting what you are saying.

You're not. You acknowledge my point

> Stealing to meet abstract secondary needs

But do not refute that this is the reason for the theft, only argue that it is wrong regardless. My only point is that the theft is "a matter of meeting peoples needs".

> criminal for a reason

I'm not sure of your overall point. Stealing bread to eat is also criminal for the same reasons.
by ziml77 | 2025-09-23 00:31:50+00:00
The problem is that the write buffer turns copy progress into a complete lie. The last time I put a large file on a removable drive from Linux, the copy finished suspiciously fast. But I thought that surely Linux wouldn't be using a write buffer when Windows hasn't used that on removable devices for 20 years, so I went on my way and shut down the computer... which led to me just sitting at a gray screen. I had to just wait there with no indication of progress or even that it was doing anything at all.

If I wasn't aware of what was happening here I likely would have just force shut down the computer after a minute of waiting. And I suspect if I had done that and checked the drive it would have appeared like the file was there, while actually missing part of the data.
by squirrellous | 2025-09-23 00:32:04+00:00
Is there anything C# _doesn’t_ have? :-)

It feels like C# has an answer to every problem I’ve ever had with other languages - dynamic loading, ADTs with pattern matching, functional programming, whatever this expression tree is, reflection, etc etc. Yet somehow it’s still a niche language that isn't widely used (outside of particular ecosystems).
by jchw | 2025-09-23 00:32:13+00:00
Not really the world's biggest Rust fan, for multiple reasons. However, I find the arguments in this particular article to not be very compelling. The only concrete argument that is actually worth addressing is this one, and it's predicated on a false premise:

> I’ve also briefly touched upon that at best in the absolute best case scenario a rewritten version of GNU Core Utils in Rust would be able to match the performance of the original implementation. As we know GNU Core Utils are mostly written in C and some C++ mixed in sparingly. So far benchmarks have shown time and time again that at best with a lot of optimizations and tweaks Rust can only ever match the performance of C and in most cases it is actually slower. So the best case outcome of this rewrite is that we get a tool that does the same thing as the original and at best offers the same performance. So what is the actual benefit of this rewrite?

This assumes that the C code is already fully optimal, but it very obviously is not.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Coreutils-0.2.2

Of course, I call bullshit anyways. Most Rust vs C comparisons are going to compare similar idiomatic code in both languages, which gives you a nice baseline to compare against. That's useful for determining the baseline performance, which is indeed, "C but a tiny bit slower in some cases", which is due to things like additional checks that can't be elided at compile time (bounds checks, overflow checks.)

However, in practice, Rust provides better abstraction tools than C, which makes more complex optimizations a lot more practical. A good example would be SIMD optimizations. And Rust does this while giving better tools to ensure correctness, sometimes allowing optimal code to be surprisingly high-level (i.e. iterator usage compiling down to surprisingly straight-forward assembly.) (And to be clear, Rust is not the only language that offers better abstraction tools than C, but I do think it is one of the most promising options available. C++ is a mess, but it does work. New options like Zig are interesting but still need more time to mature.)

Ultimately, I do personally think that Rust coreutils is not very important in terms of safety. GNU coreutils does not really suffer from any particular problems that uutils solves. But still, it's a really good test case for Rust, and it does definitely open up some opportunities for better performance and correctness. Plus, I'm sure uutils will find itself in many places, such as places where GPL-licensed software can't really go (which may very well be a net negative, but I'm stating the fact here) or new operating systems that are based on Rust and want to keep as much stuff as possible free of requiring a C toolchain.
by naasking | 2025-09-23 00:32:57+00:00
> and this probably compounds as AI-generated code piles up in a codebase, as there isn't an author who can attach context as to why decisions were made

I don't see why. If anything there's more opportunity for documentation because the code was generated from a natural language prompt that documents exactly what was generated, and often why. Recording prompts in source control and linked to the generated code is probably the way to go here.
by bentocorp | 2025-09-23 00:33:25+00:00
I was going to defend Xcode and say it's not that bad... but then I read the article and realised that I have just become so accustomed to these problems that I don't consciously realise the daily hellfire that I experience.

Even when you think you're immune to it, Stockholm syndrome is real.

A similar article I wrote on the 'Dark Side' of Apple Development, brings up many additional issues:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/
by manquer | 2025-09-23 00:33:41+00:00
> the continent you need to get off the train

I can only say your understanding of Amtrak offerings are very inaccurate.

Amtrak offers plenty of trips with kind of features you are asking for https://www.amtrakvacations.com/travel-styles/cross-country-...

For example the NYC to SF is an itinerary goes like this https://www.amtrakvacations.com/trips/great-american-majesti....

It is a 12 day one way trip that includes plenty of overnight non train stays(i.e. hotels), full day sight seeing stops etc .

You can mix local car rentals to take extended side trips add much longer breaks with hop-on/hop off if you plan to do so.

There are national park themed trips specifically, or number of great regional options or other cross country journeys like LA to NOLA etc.

It will be never be perfect exact fit to your specific tastes and needs, no public transit can ever be,. However that doesn't mean it is not a great option for a traveling family vacation with sight seeing and breaks, where you can actually spend quality time with the family rather than just looking straight at the road all day, while everyone else is on the phone.
by andy99 | 2025-09-23 00:33:58+00:00
Earlier today there was a post about someone submitting an incorrect AI generated bug report. I found one of the comments telling:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331233

> Is it that crazy? He's doing exactly what the AI boosters have told him to do.

I think we're starting to see the first real AI "harms" shake out, after some years of worrying it might swear or tell you how to make a molotov cocktail.

People are getting convinced, by hype men and by sycophantic LLMs themselves, that access to a chatbot suddenly grants them polymath abilities in any field, and are acting out there dumb ideas without pushback, until the buck finally stops, hopefully with just some wasted time and reputation damage.

People should of course continue to use LLMs as they see fit - I just think the branding of work like this gives the impression that they can do more than they can, and will encourage the kind of behavior I mention.
by moggers123 | 2025-09-23 00:34:48+00:00
>Example: two people starting to work on the same task in an offline-enabled task tracker. Wouldn't this just mean both people are working on it?

I agree that this means humans intervening.. It sounds like there was a comms breakdown. But rather than doing a first-in-best-dressed, it sounds like accurately recording that both users are in fact working on the same thing is the best option since it surfaces that intervention is required (or maybe its intentional, tools insisting that only one person can work on an item at once annoys me). Sounds much better than quietly blowing away one of the user's changes.

In principle, local-first to me means each instance (and the actions each user carries out on their instance) is sacrosanct. Server's job is to collate it, not decide what the Truth is (by first-in-best-dressed or otherwise).
by godelski | 2025-09-23 00:35:03+00:00
This is only a problem if you write it twice. Instead you can write it once and display it twice.

Hell, I even do this on my github.io website that uses markdown. You can just write some text in one document and read it in another.

We're programmers, so we should be lazy. It's about being the right lazy. You can be lazy by putting of a task today that takes more effort tomorrow or you can be lazy by doing a task today that takes less work than it would take to do tomorrow. Most people choose the former and wonder why they have so much work. In programming if you're doing redundant work then you're probably being the first type of lazy