MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-09-28 08:24:35+00:00
> Tanks are obsolete weapons - esp in urban areas. They would be taken out by cheap drones. And you are forgetting that for every active US soldier there are ~3x retired and opinionated soldiers. Many of them know tactics to take down armor. And how to train civilians.

Arguing over irrelevant details; all that can be true, and the military can therefore respond not by firing tank shells but by drone strikes, which many of the retired soldiers don't know how to respond to because almost all knowledge of modern drone warfare is in the Russian and Ukranian militaries right now.

In this scenario, if the US civilians were very lucky, the US military have learned nothing from the was Russian and Ukranian forces battle today; likely real scenarios are much messier, internal splits within both military and civilians on Trump/not Trump (different to Dem/Rep) lines, militia with ??? training, criminal gangs taking advantage, reduced international trade (perhaps except for whover supplies drone parts who may prop up both sides at the same time to maximise reveue, perhaps not because that's China and they want factories not rubble piles made out of factories), etc.
by isodev | 2025-09-28 08:26:10+00:00
BunnyCDN's edge functions are more-or-less standard Deno handlers [0], if that can count as "standard". But generally edge functions means the runtime is given by the provider and so we don't really have a standard for that.

You could try to implement your logic in a WASI-compatible web assembly script - then things like I/O etc are abstracted and "standardised" (and then you can write it in whatever language makes you happy, though Rust will be the happy path in terms of ecosystem).

If you're into self-hosting, you can try Coolify - they take care of the Docker stuff and support all kinds services https://coolify.io/docs/services/overview (including plain Docker/compose deployments). So with this you could probably find a way to own it completely.

[0] https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 08:26:19+00:00
Not only tails, which is made to serve as a "live" bootable USB drive without ever installing it anywhere else.

Mainstream Linux distributions can get right on the internet after booting to their live "install" USB drive too. Without making another move or installing anything to the PC whatsoever. For instance if you wanted to use a Windows machine for more popular forms of Linux occasionally without actually having to make it a dual-boot PC.

Linux basically runs from memory after it's booted from the official USB like this. If you only need a package or two that's not on the live USB, they download and install real quick but do disappear when you power down the memory.

IIRC it was posted here that Tails has a persistent feature to retain your packages on the USB through reboots.

That may be possible to add to a thing like Mint for average users but I just tell them it's a temporary Linux trial (do not install) and any valuable downloads need to be saved on a separate old USB that only had to be big enough to hold it. Plus your memory needs to be big enough to hold all your downloads too beforehand, which is not needed when Linux not running from USB. But most people have enough memory now.

Mint will still fit on a 4GB USB and there's plenty of those plus 8GB and up not being used that are pretty good for this if they are USB3. USB2 is not even that bad because I have some, and the booting is slower but afterward not much difference since it's already in memory by then.

Let people try it, and I have found that many like it.
by xg15 | 2025-09-28 08:26:20+00:00
This feels a bit like the logic behind "do not put hamster in microwave" warning labels.

I think if you work with electrical or electronic systems in practice, you learn pretty quickly to respect tolerances and that data sheets are a map, not the territory.

Also, electrical installations are usually seen as a field that should be done by trained personnel, not arbitrary laymen home owners. So I think the appropriate reaction would be to remind people that they should hire an electrician to do the installation, if they don't have the necessary specialized knowledge themselves.
by tombert | 2025-09-28 08:26:26+00:00
While I agree that it’s is pretty hard to ethically justify killing a pig for food, but I think I am ok with all that pig killing being used for helping sick humans.

While I don’t think we should be torturing animals or anything, obviously, I think I am humanist enough to where I think the ethical thing is to prioritize human lives or avoiding severe long-term discomfort (as is the case with dialysis).
by wolvesechoes | 2025-09-28 08:26:32+00:00
> A vaccine can’t prevent infection, and it’s not intended to…

Yet it was "marketed" differently at the initial stage.

Pandemic should be a subject of deep sociological study. We went through TV showing death bodies laying on the ground, doctors and medical personnel being completely exhausted yet having time and strength to record dance videos on TikTok, masks being useless and then being obligatory, people dying after the car crash and being counted as Covid deaths because they were tested positive, people having other health issues than Covid not getting medical help, calling people tin-foil hat anti-vaccs or granny killers even if they had all other vaccinations because they voiced a slightest concern or pointed contradictory claims in the official information, telling stories about poor children dying under respiratory devices, while asking their parents why they didn't get them vaccines, without any reflection of this in official data, and at the end experts telling we will all die if we don't get all 3 doses of vaccines, and yet being alive and well after only 64% of population took 1 dose or more.

It all, and more, happened in my country, and I guess in others situation was more or less similar. It could all be rationally explained (government can make bad decisions, experts can be wrong, data is being updated, media feeding on strong emotions of fear or anger etc.), but the damage is done and if there would be next pandemic (and there will be) people are going to be even less trustful and more contrarian, to large extent thanks to people like you.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-09-28 08:26:40+00:00
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.

In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
by slimebot80 | 2025-09-28 08:27:39+00:00
On a very basic level, ignoring the extreme examples ... I wonder how much these tools send back home.

It seems very hard to see what they are accessing. Let alone control it. We just rely on them asking when they see fit to ask.

The minute Zuck and Google start offering you things for free, you have to wonder sometimes.

I mean, forget about denying cookie popups in your browser . We are galaxies beyond.
by picafrost | 2025-09-28 08:27:44+00:00
My experience adding types to un-typed Python code has convinced me that static typing should be required for anything more complicated than a single purpose script. Even in old and battle tested code bases so many tiny bugs and false assumptions are revealed and then wiped out.

It's not perfect in Python, and I see some developers introduce unnecessary patterns trying to make type-"perfect" `class Foo(Generic[T, V])` (or whatever) abstractions where they are not really necessary. But if the industry is really going all-in on Python for more than scripting, so should we for typed Python.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-09-28 08:28:35+00:00
> Java, i have NEVER seen a function that consumes explicitely an Object

So you did not see any Java code from before version 5 (in 2004) then, because the language did not have generics for the first several years it was popular. And of course many were stuck working with older versions of the language (or variants like mobile Java) without generics for many years after that.
by isodev | 2025-09-28 08:29:37+00:00
> After decades of people saying

You have to admit that the size and complexity of the software we write has increased dramatically over the last few "decades". Looking back at MVC "web applications" I've created in the early 2000s, and comparing them to the giant workflows we deal with today... it's not hard to imagine how dynamic typing was/is ok to get started, but when things exceed one's "context", you type hints help.
by tim333 | 2025-09-28 08:30:08+00:00
>The American tech industry has become lazy

I don't see that - look at the top tech companies by market cap https://companiesmarketcap.com/gbp/tech/largest-tech-compani...

The top 8 are US companies, no 9 being TSMC. I'm sure you've come across people within the industry who are lazy but there are no doubt a lot who are not.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-28 08:30:43+00:00
The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.

But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!

https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 08:31:24+00:00
Also like to use these to contain structured media folders and playlists.

If it's truly surplus hardware they can be for casual distribtion too.

Also when you set your motherboard for BIOS mode, you can boot to DOS not much differently than from a floppy.

A lot faster I/O and holds lots more DOS games than a stack of floppies though ;)
by INTPenis | 2025-09-28 08:31:39+00:00
I agree that AT aims high, maybe a little too high.

To me Fediverse is basically all the forums we had in the 90s and 00s, but now they can talk to each other. So with that said, I am principally against huge instances like mastodon.social and such.

While bsky is more like decentralized Twitter, meaning it also requires a significant chunk of the resources of Twitter to run consistently. Which is also why it has not decentralized yet, and probably won't any time soon.

We have to ask ourselves, what is the point of decentralization? What is the USP?

To me the USP is that no one person or entity can buy it, sell it, or ruin it.

If we had to start over from scratch then I think AT would be a good way to start, because it would presumably not be federated with bsky and therefore low volume. But as volume grows it becomes harder and harder to maintain for small groups and eventually they all consolidate into big groups that are easier to take over and ruin.

Basically it's a difficult decision we have to make, a trade-off between consistency, and decentralization. Which do you value more?

Me never having been on Twitter, and coming from that era of the 90s and 00s, I value decentralization and small groups participating in a federated network more than large entities.

How I envision the future of social media, all these actors like bsky, Twitter, Meta, Fediverse will continue existing side by side, but Fediverse will likely be the smallest and most niche of them all. Fedi has, to me, taken the place of all those old message boards I used to hang on, while the rest are mainstream social media that made its entrance onto the world wide web back in early 00s with Facebook.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-28 08:33:04+00:00
> WTF is “an anecdotal metric”

It's a metric (how much more productive he is), and anecdotal (base only on his experience). Pretty obvious I would have thought.

> This seems very domain-specific.

It was an example from one domain but all domains have types of things. Are you really trying to say that only 3D games specifically would benefit from static types?

> Just because somebody disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean they are a clueless junior.

Clueless senior then I guess? Honestly I don't know how you can have this much experience and still not come to the obvious conclusion. Perhaps you only write small scripts or solo projects where it's more feasible to get away without static types?

What would you say to someone who said "I have 25 years of experience reading books with punctuation and I think that punctuation is a waste of time. Just because you disagree with me doesn't mean I'm clueless."?
by windex | 2025-09-28 08:33:32+00:00
A lot of us use it in a very structured manner for code and other areas. It absolutely is value for money. I don't really get what people keep complaining about. I think the complaints mostly come from people trying to embed LLMs and expecting a human like output.

Decision support, coding, and for structured outputs I love it. I know its not human, and i write instructions that are specific to the way it reasons.
by Ekaros | 2025-09-28 08:33:53+00:00
Remembering project where type hints would have been helpful to grok the code I do now mostly like them. They are useful when you come back after days or weeks and try to remember what does this function produce and what does this one actually take in.

And Python always was rather strongly typed, so you anyway had to consider the types. Now you get notes. Which often do help.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-28 08:35:33+00:00
> The extra typing clarification in python makes the code harder to read.

It depends what you mean by "read". If you literally mean you're doing a weird Python poetry night then sure they're sort of "extra stuff" that gets in the way of your reading of `fib`.

But most people think of "reading code" and reading and understanding code, and in that case they definitely make it easier.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-28 08:35:53+00:00
> Because tbh, even with type hints Python is a lousy programming language (but a fine scripting language).

I'd be interested in seeing you expand on this, explaining the ways you feel Python doesn't make the cut for programming language while doing so for scripting.

The reason I say this is because, intuitively, I've felt this way for quite some time but I am unable to properly articulate why, other than "I don't want all my type errors to show up at runtime only!"
by HeavyStorm | 2025-09-28 08:36:25+00:00
Don't really understand how this proposal connect to microservices, as it solves only one of the myriad of problems that architectual pattern addresses.

Second, why do we need the "spaces" concept for dealing with no GC work? And what does it really solves? Meanwhile, the proposal lacks explanation on how C# behaves on the non managed world, like better syntax for allocation and deallocation, etc. No ownership model would make it a hard sell over Rust.
by objectcode | 2025-09-28 08:36:42+00:00
I think it works this way but I could be wrong: 1. The forward voltage across a diode depends on the current, and the graph is r-shaped. For a certain diode, 0.01A might make the voltage across it 0.4V, 0.1A might be 0.6V, 1A might be 0.65V. 2. The forward voltage also depends on the temperature of the diode. For a certain diode, per °C decrease there could be a 0.002V increase.

Let's say with certain current there is 0.687V. If two diodes are connected in series i.e. (point a) → diode 1 → diode 2 → (point b), and each has a 0.687V voltage across, that's 0.687 + 0.687 = 1.374 V between point b and point a.

For the solar diodes, the "current" depends on how "strong" the sun is. If at a certain "current", across each diode is 0.687V, you'll need 216 diodes in series (between two points) to get 0.687×216≈148.4 V.

If there is 0.002 V increase per diode per 1°C decrease, with 216 diodes, that's a 0.002×216=0.432V increase per °C decrease, so with a 4°C decrease it exceeds the MPPT's limit.

Another thing about solar that differs from how diodes are "normally" used in circuits is that the "true" voltage depends on the max current achievable with the how bright the sun is right now, instead of the "true" current. When the "true" current is 0 A, the voltage across each diode might be 0.687 V. When the "true" current is 0.5 A, maybe 0.65 V. 1A, maybe 0.6V. 2A, maybe 0.3V. Try to get more "true" current, the "true" voltage drops. Try to get more "true" voltage, the "true" current drops. Power is voltage × current so when full speed charging, the MPPT uses an algorithm to find the (possibly) best minimum (not maximum) input voltage based on the temperature etc and trades voltage for current at the output. If there is no minimum input voltage restriction, solar will follow the battery's terminal voltage + cable drop instead, and instead of something like 111V, there could for example be a ~4x less powerful 25.5V (if the battery is a "24 V") with just 10% more current.

At the MPPTed min input voltage for full speed charging, maybe 111V, all might seem well even with low temperatures, but when the battery is full and there is approximately nothing using electricity from solar, the real input current will be ~0 A, so there will no voltage "sag", so the solar will realize the full voltage corresponding to the temperature and the illumination, potentially >150 V...
Ask HN: Does any search engine support returning 100 results at a time?
by nomilk | 2025-09-28 08:37:20+00:00
Until recently, google supported appending &num=100 to the search URL to give back 100 results.

I really like receiving a long list of search results, and I use the lower down ones quite a lot. Also loved the ability to ctrl+f for terms in the search results (didn't do it often, but it is occasionally useful).

Unfortunately, Google recently dropped support for this parameter.

Does anyone know of a search engine that supports returning 100 results at a time?

I've looked at Duck Duck Go, Kagi, and Bing, but none of them do (that I could figure out).
by smyrgeorge | 2025-09-28 08:38:02+00:00
Hey Kotlin folks! I’m excited to share the first stable release of sqlx4k — a high-performance, non-blocking database driver for Kotlin Multiplatform.

What it is:

A Kotlin-first, async driver for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite

Works across JVM and native targets (macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android NDK)

Built for coroutines and modern, scalable apps

You can check it out here: https://github.com/smyrgeorge/sqlx4k

Highlights:

Async I/O with connection pooling

Prepared statements (named and positional)

Row mappers

Transactions + coroutine-friendly TransactionContext

Code generation (CRUD and @Repository with KSP)

Database migrations

PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY

SQLDelight integration

Supported targets:

JVM (PostgreSQL and MySQL on JVM today)

iosArm64, androidNativeX64/Arm64, macosArm64/X64, linuxArm64/X64, mingwX64

wasmWasi is being explored
by thecupisblue | 2025-09-28 08:38:20+00:00
Ironically, that's the thing I've been preaching to devs all along. We need to simplify the DX; both for us, the machines and the new folks who dont know how to code. A lot of the overengineering or complexity is there not due to the need for it, but due to it being build "for developers", without actually thinking about the developers who are going to be using it.
Show HN: Mocked – AI-powered mock interview tool for PMs
by pundo | 2025-09-28 08:38:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I launched an AI tool a few months back to help with product management interviews. It's Leetcode-style prep, but you can verbally respond to questions and receive feedback.

I originally started it as a side project, but it blew up on Linkedin and we're nearing 5-figure ARR. I would be grateful for some honest feedback and advice on both the growth and engineering side. I'm particularly interested in:

- What's one feature you feel is glaringly missing? - How did similar educational consumer apps (7sage, Leetcode) scale beyond just ads? - Should I implement a landing page? I wanted to give users the least friction when signing up, but every other consumer app has one.

Any other thoughts would be appreciated, thanks!
by pengaru | 2025-09-28 08:39:31+00:00
I feel like a big part of it is the masses have less money to burn on big sound systems nor do they have affordable spacious housing to fill with loud sound from the system they can't buy.

My first jobs (1990s) paid largely for restoring large speakers I'd garbage picked from the neighborhood and components to drive them. But I was privileged to have a large space at my parents' home and neighbors far enough away I could enjoy the system without the police showing up immediately.

Young people have way less buying power today vs. then don't they? It seems like the target audience today is living with headphones connected to smartphones in cramped living spaces riding a constant debt train.
by WithinReason | 2025-09-28 08:39:35+00:00
It's in development: https://www.digikey.com/Site/Global/Layouts/DownloadPdf.ashx...

Varying the phase between multiple antennae can enable the field distribution inside the oven to be intelligently controlled to achieve homogeneous cooking results. Furthermore, by modifying the frequency and phase to match the food in the oven, very high RF energy delivery efficiency can be attained – above 90% even for small loads.

It has been demonstrated how a steak can be cooked on the same plate as ice cream without it melting, showing the precision of the directed RF energy. In practice, one gets outstanding control over internal meat temperature, with a tight tolerance of just one degree Celsius. Therefore, food can be cooked automatically, and one simply specifies the steak “doneness” level, for example, medium rare; and the oven will measure the food’s properties and calculate the required settings. Without having to manually enter the power levels, cooking is more predictable, and the interface more user-friendly

A consumer version is e.g. the Miele Dialog oven, costing $10K
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-28 08:40:22+00:00
It's concerning that FT don't take more of an econs-of-AI-investment angle, explored here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399893

(Maybe Doctorow has too much of a Guardian vibe, compared to Zitron?)

The Economist would argue that the investor is always right, so maybe that's too hard of a line for FT to press
by reify | 2025-09-28 08:40:51+00:00
I will add, the often overlooked and very important issue, regarding covid vaccines.

The W.H.O changing the definition of a vaccine.

Here it is in black and white:

VACCINATION (Pre-2015): Injection of a killed or weakened infectious organism in order to prevent disease

VACCINATION (2015-2021): The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce "IMMUNITY" to a spewcific disease.

VACCINATION (Sept-2021): The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce "PROTECTION" to a specific disease.

and there it is! Protection is not immunity.

If covid jabs offered immunity you would not have to have a new booster every year.

Covid jabs only offer protection against the symptoms.

Amazingly I too am alive, unjabbed and 69 years old.
by xg15 | 2025-09-28 08:40:54+00:00
Yeah, it would be important to understand who the company is intending to sell to or do the installation.

Though the lines are often blurred, because I guess most companies would like to sell directly to end customers, even if their product requires a professional to install.

Even IKEA does this. You can go in and buy an electric stove and oven, grab them from the warehouse and take them home with you right there. But it's a bit of an illusion: You're still supposed to call an electrician to actually connect the things.