MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daniel-gerow | 2025-09-22 15:43:24+00:00
Science aside, taking the article for what it is, it’s a nice reminder that context and framing are important.

I would add that - and this is extremely qualitative - having to “think” about the choice presented might defeat the purpose.

Coming back from a trip in the Peruvian Andes, I experienced 70 year olds working with their 8 year old grandchildren along steep terraces 3k+ meters above see level.

This wasn’t a “my body is too old for this”.

It wasn’t a conscious or rational “don’t let my age dictate my abilities”.

It was just how the community lived.

And while I (early 30s) was sucking air like a vacuum, they went on (at least seemingly) as nonchalantly as a reader of HN might brew a morning pour over (me included).
by basisword | 2025-09-22 15:43:27+00:00
There is. "In 2024, Ireland recorded almost 3,400 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes (lightning strikes), marking a moderately stormy year, but well below the exceptional year of 2023, which set a record with more than 9,000 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes detected."[1]

[1] https://www.meteorage.com/thunderstorm-report/ireland-lightn...
by senordevnyc | 2025-09-22 15:43:52+00:00
Is LIDAR full of unobtainium? Is there some fundamental first-principles reason that the cost of LIDAR can't go down by orders of magnitude? Isn't that kind of reasoning from first principles what Elon's genius was supposed to be about, like with cost of accessing space? But apparently he thinks a spinning laser is always going to cost six figures?
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-22 15:44:13+00:00
I mean, yeah, I was assuming that we have immigration at all.

A lottery allows a natural influx of people, who are free to find their way into whatever jobs are needed. It's another form of market solution, but more of a push model than a pull model. But it also, logically, reduces wages across the board (to some degree).

A pull-based model, where companies compete to bid for visa slots, lowers wages in high-end roles, because visa holders are beholden to their sponsor company, and uprooting and moving back to your home country is not something to be taken lightly.
by seec | 2025-09-22 15:44:16+00:00
Yep. AliExpress things, it is rarely as much of a good deal as it first appears. I have been burned many times. For things that you don't care about or don't need to rely on it's fine but there is too much fuckery going on to trust it for anything of importance.

That being said, Amazon isn't much better nowadays and I have been pleasantly surprised by some items from AliExpress. However one should not expect western quality standard for most things...
by ctstoner | 2025-09-22 15:44:24+00:00
We typically take the 'nominal' value in the datasheet's electrical specs table for parametric specs. If the manufacturer is trying to be sneaky by providing the value with perfect test conditions to improve the numbers, we still give the value because there's no other way to give a credible answer.

However, we saved all the test conditions and similar notes. Maybe we could display the conditions with the specs in the table? That way, any outlier manufacturers would jump out right away.
by woodruffw | 2025-09-22 15:44:31+00:00
Yeah, I find the situation here very confusing: I agree that merge keys are not part of YAML 1.2, but they are part of YAML 1.1. The reason they don't appear to be in the "main" 1.1 spec itself is because they were added to 1.1 after 1.1 was already deprecated[1].

[1]: https://ktomk.github.io/writing/yaml-anchor-alias-and-merge-...
by lynndotpy | 2025-09-22 15:44:50+00:00
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing?

Your assumption that these Linux setups are "extremely customized" is wrong. Personally, I hate configuring or customizing much at all. The appeal of Linux is that there are distros that come configured out-of-the-box pretty much as I like it, whereas MacOS and especially Windows requires configuration and constant upkeep and maintenance. (MacOS doesn't even come with a decent terminal, for starters.)

For me, my main problem with MacOS is that it's full of looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animations that you can not disable or remove. Disabling animations (or setting them to be <10ms long) is one of the few configurations I like to do. But this is not even an option on Apple's operating systems. It's like running through molasses in a dream-- it's so damnedly and artificially slow.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-09-22 15:44:50+00:00
Well, you might have several obstacles here:

1) the bossware might take screenshots too

2) the bosses pay for the whole LLM so they expect you to use the whole LLM

3) you may not want to contaminate your spare computer with whatever shit you're working on on job, and indeed it may be considered a breach of security (as if feeding OpenAI/Anthropic isn't, lol, but that's beside the point.

So you continue to feel miserable, but you get your paycheck, and it's better than unemployment, and your kids are fed and clothed, so there's that.
by viggity | 2025-09-22 15:44:52+00:00
In general, no. And to be clear, this is my general understanding and I don't have the time to look up the specifics, but I'm pretty sure lidar uses a "carrier wave" in much the same way old telephone modems did, or your IR remote for your TV. The carrier wave is how these sensors don't get confused. If you've ever been in traffic, and you get a stray, one off "YOURE TOO CLOSE TO SOMETHING" when you in fact aren't, it is because a carrier wave from another car happens to line up and you have a collision (pun intended).

two seconds of googling: https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/tutorials/2021/understandin...
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-22 15:45:09+00:00
> Maybe other OSes are less nice, but generally an OS doesn't really have a reason to force down the full 57-or-whatever-bit range before the program actually requests 256 terrabytes of virtual address space.

The fact that Linux does this isn't nice, it's a huge mistake. It means that the kernel can't automatically use 5-level page tables on processors that support it, because backwards compatibility guarantees mean the programs must be able to use those bits in a pointer. AMD was smart enough to throw an exception if programs use those bits in a pointer (thus guaranteeing forward compatibility), so why Linux didn't follow suit is puzzling.
by tensor | 2025-09-22 15:45:10+00:00
Countries are already doing what is in their best interest, which is why all these "agreements" are essentially fake. Countries are simply saying nice things hoping to get keep tariffs low for as long as possible. But the actual plan, not even hidden, leaders from wester nations all over are saying it out loud, is to diversify trade.

Once trade is diversified, the US will be isolated naturally as it represents the least beneficial trade arrangement. Now, if MAGA is dethrowned somehow, sure, trade with the US will increase again, but the diversification you see happing now will be permanent. Things aren't going to go back to the way they were, the US has already given up it's spot as the economic leader of the west, and it's given up all its foreign soft-power, it's just a slow process to see it all play out.
by fine_tune | 2025-09-22 15:45:31+00:00
Its cloudflare trying to enshittify the internet with micro transactions[0] and take their N% cut (of course it will start at like 2% but ask any uber driver how thats going).

The problem is the arguments they make for why this should happen are quite compelling, especially to those running sites (you'll see plenty of complaints on this forum about it), but theres also a large group of people who think information / code / data should be "free" (see open source code/maps/anything you can think off). So really its just a moral debate that will be lost in the interest of profit (which is ya know good n bad, if AI companies did more caching we probably wouldn't need this, but here we are).

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ai-crawl-control/
by deanmoriarty | 2025-09-22 15:46:06+00:00
Does that mean that you hope the next generation of iOS will do away with liquid glass so that you can update, or that you’ll never update again (also implying you’ll never buy an Apple device again)?

I always understood the sentiment of waiting until the first dot release for bug fixes, but refusing to update while still being in the ecosystem seems clearly a losing battle not even worth fighting for.
by leakycap | 2025-09-22 15:46:15+00:00
> We were literally told to stand, so I stood.

But everyone else could tell that wasn't a rule that needed to be followed "to a T" as you describe

> Just because everyone else got tired of following the rules that the C Suite took time to make, does that mean I should also stop following the rules?

If someone asked me to do something dumb, wasn't there to talk about it, and everyone else present realized it was a dumb request that didn't need my rigourus obedience, yes. I would not follow a dumb rule that no one else was following. Standing when everyone else sits is dissent behavior among the group you are part of (you're not part of the C suite).

> And standing during a standup so they don't go on and on and on like they always did made perfect sense to me.

It sounds like this is the reason you chose to stand, even when everyone else around you indicated they were going to sit and be more comfortable and casual, you chose to be rigid and probably loomed over the meeting if everyone else was staring at your belt buckle.

> So the more wrongs, the more right?

No. I would suggest the takeaway here is that you may have been blind to how your actions were actually self-serving (you wanted short meetings, and standing made others feel rushed ... at least you hoped) and the reason you stuck to the rules when everyone else was relaxed was because you wanted to use the C suite rules to manipulate other people's behavior to shorten the meeting you didn't want to be part of. Again, you were the dissenter in this situation based on your own retelling.
by j1elo | 2025-09-22 15:46:22+00:00
This is my personal and minimal guide to HN (for whoever might be interested):

! Hacker News ! =========== ! Remove AI-related entries (Top: title / url) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) ! Remove AI-related entries (Bottom: stats / comments) news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) + tr

to be added as filter in uBlock Origin.

(if someone can suggest a way to merge those 2 CSS selectors into one to avoid repetition, I'd be immensely grateful, as i failed while trying to learn about that arcane syntax)
by kentonv | 2025-09-22 15:46:34+00:00
No, in fact this is the first I've heard of Cap'n Jazz.

The name "Cap'n Proto" came from "capabilities and protobuf". The first, never-released version was based on Protobuf serialization. The first public release (way back on April 1, 2013) had its own, all-new serialization.

There's also a pun with it being a "cerealization protocol" (Cap'n Cruch is a well-known brand of cereal).
by fitzn | 2025-09-22 15:46:38+00:00
Just making sure I understand the "one round trip" point. If the client has chained 3 calls together, that still requires 3 messages sent from the client to the server. Correct?

That is, the client is not packaging up all its logic and sending a single blob that describes the fully-chained logic to the server on its initial request. Right?

When I first read it, I was thinking it meant 1 client message and 1 server response. But I think "one round trip" more or less message "1 server message in response to potentially many client messages". That's a fair use of "1 RTT", but took me a moment to understand.

Just to make that distinction clear from a different angle, suppose the client were _really_ _really_ slow and it did not send the second promise message to the server until AFTER the server had computed the result for promise1. Would the server have already responded to the client with the result? That would be a way to incur multiple RTTs, albeit the application wouldn't care since it's bottlenecked by the client CPU, not the network in this case.

I realize this is unlikely. I'm just using it to elucidate the system-level guarantee for my understanding.

As always, thanks for sharing this, Kenton!
by VGHN7XDuOXPAzol | 2025-09-22 15:46:38+00:00
> Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing

Kind of a hard disagree here; if you don't want to conform to a specification, don't claim that you're accepting documents from that specification. Call it github-flavored YAML (GFY) or something and accept a different file extension.

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182

> YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys

right, they don't do merge keys because it's not in YAML 1.2 anymore. Anchors are, however. They haven't said that noncompliance with YAML 1.2 spec is intentional
by jonjacky | 2025-09-22 15:46:39+00:00
Forth was invented around 1970 for controlling equipment in an astronomical observatory, running on a PDP-11, a 16-bit computer with up to 64 Kbytes of memory. Its heyday was the 1970s and 80s, when it was mostly used for small embedded systems on 8- or 16- bit processors with 8 kb -- 64 kb of memory. It was possible to run an entire Forth development system along with the application on these small targets without resorting to a bigger computer for cross-development.

The usual alternative to Forth on those systems was assembly language.
by mcswell | 2025-09-22 15:46:46+00:00
"Can we say 'language representation that is not a transcription of a spoken one'?" Of course: sign languages. But sign languages have even more "phonemes" than spoken languages do, so this doesn't help the hypothesis.

And yes, "A sequence of symbols could have meaning without mapping to sound": that's what hieroglyphic writing systems were, more or less. Again, more distinct symbols, not fewer.

"Do hobo signs count as a language?" Depends on how you define "language". As most linguists would define language, though, the answer is no. All normal spoken or signed languages have oodles of structure (grammar). Pidgin languages probably do not, but that's just the first generation or so, after which they gain structure and are technically creoles. (Some creoles have the word "pidgin" in their names, like Tok Pisin of New Guinea, and Hawaiian Pidgin, but they're complex enough to justify the term "creole.")
by taeric | 2025-09-22 15:46:52+00:00
Yeah, I think I agree? It did amuse me how quickly this got annoying from the existence of String and how people use it. :D

That is, I think this is what you are saying? That it wouldn't be hard to show that an Optional<String> is the same as a variable that is (String + None) or some such. But having Either<String, String> kills this, since there is no way to distinguish the left and right String types, there. Now, if you forced it to be Either<ErrorString, ResponseString>, that can work. And that nicely explains why you have to tag the types to be distinguishable from each other.
by j_w | 2025-09-22 15:47:13+00:00
I'm not sure that I would agree with the claim that the state is unable to stop shoplifters. The case here was Australia, but speaking to the United States:

You can't really do anything about shoplifting until after it happens. It's not a crime until it's been committed, then you can prosecute. The issue is there is a base level cost to do so, and it's going to take a very large amount of shoplifting to balance that. We as a society have basically accepted that certain crimes don't go punished, and it seems like low value shoplifting largely fits that category.

In turn, large companies have decided that they will instead collect data on their own until they have enough to make it a high value issue, with proof. Then the state will prosecute. The issue here is that companies do not get to illegally collect data, they still would have to do so within the bounds of the law. So what are those bounds? We say the Government can surveil us with impunity, but only for terrorism or whatever else gets brought under that umbrella. For "petty" crimes the government would need permission to collect the amount of data that these companies are and then build their case with that.

This isn't to say that shoplifting is okay, just that society doesn't seem to care all that much. Our reaction to companies taking actions like these will also show how much we seem to care about them as well. Spoiler on that last one: we don't seem to care (in the US).
by reaperducer | 2025-09-22 15:47:17+00:00
HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response.

Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame.

I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset that you don't know what you're talking about. Why embarrass yourself? Why waste your own time?
by atmavatar | 2025-09-22 15:47:18+00:00
At the end of TFA is a link to the source study at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx5154

To be honest, the source study's graph of funding in particular makes me take this entire article with a giant grain of salt.

The line graph of funding over time looks to me like there's a huge drop-off of scientific funding during the stagflation era under Carter, followed by linearly-increasing funding until the 2008 financial crisis, whereby funding is again cut sharply, then returns to an upward trajectory. Any relation to which party had Congressional or White House control appears to be immaterial.
by wildzzz | 2025-09-22 15:47:29+00:00
Politics is the absolute peak of this kind of culture. You never know when you might need a favor down the road so it's best to be friends with anyone even just marginally aligned with your platform. Going beyond the minimum compromise keeps everyone happy enough to remember it. Politics is like dealing with a dozen different prisoners dilemmas every day. You could act in self-interest but you still need a majority vote or the consensus of your underlings to actually get the work done.

In the US, we've kinda swung back on the prisoner's dilemma. GOP finally figured out that they don't need to worry about bipartisanship or even having the consensus of their entire party. Turns out, if you've got the all three branches of government under control, you can just do whatever you'd like.
by yencabulator | 2025-09-22 15:47:36+00:00
Many peripherals have a mechanism to reset the device, to get it back to a known good state. Generally device drivers will do this when they receive a message they don't understand from the device, or a command sent to the device times out without response.

Here's my graphics chip getting reset:

[drm:mes_v11_0_submit_pkt_and_poll_completion.constprop.0 [amdgpu]] *ERROR* MES failed to response msg=3 [drm:amdgpu_mes_unmap_legacy_queue [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to unmap legacy queue [drm:gfx_v11_0_hw_fini [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to halt cp gfx amdgpu 0000:c6:00.0: amdgpu: MODE2 reset amdgpu 0000:c6:00.0: amdgpu: GPU reset succeeded, trying to resume
by OwnerMindset | 2025-09-22 15:48:11+00:00
You’re absolutely right — nobody wants their feed filled with generic AI remixes. That’s not the point of Keeposting.

The real pain I’m solving isn’t “make more content” — it’s help creators stay consistent without burning out. The AI isn’t meant to replace caring about what you post, it’s there to:

help brainstorm ideas,

organize them into a strategy,

and keep you on track across platforms.

The creator’s voice is still the core. AI just removes the friction that usually makes people give up after a week.

In other words, Keeposting isn’t about flooding feeds — it’s about making sure when you do have something worth saying, you can show up and share it consistently.
by hakunin | 2025-09-22 15:48:25+00:00
For one, I don't think complexity is determinative of impact. At least I hope not, otherwise my startup ideas are all DOA. For two, Omarchy is becoming more complex as more maintainers come in to write way more automation. You can kind of foresee where this is going: an Arch wrapper slowly growing into effectively a separate OS that's pushing other software to accommodate its choices. (See getting chromium to support live theme reloading, trying to get Fortnight to support Linux, etc).

IOW, Ladybird has depth, Omarchy has breadth.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-22 15:48:29+00:00
Even if you’re not going to change your position, such as when the other party doesn’t believe basic facts or incontrovertible evidence, you have to be willing to listen to their position to understand why they hold that position.

When you have a debate with someone who is only waiting for their turn to talk and visibly doesn’t care to parse what you’re saying, you are not motivated to hear them out.

It has to be a discussion, not a lecture combined with light condescension and dismissal.
by cryzinger | 2025-09-22 15:48:37+00:00
Maybe fewer consequences than you'd think...

https://rachel.fast.ai/posts/2024-08-13-crowds-vs-friends/

"Your Immune System is Not a Muscle"

> Four main categories of pathogens that humans deal with are viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites. The evidence for pathogens that may be beneficial to the immune system is almost entirely for parasitic worms and friendly (commensal) bacteria. In contrast, many viruses can even trigger the onset of autoimmune diseases or allergies.
by shagie | 2025-09-22 15:48:45+00:00
Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it.

In SGI tech support (East team '96, Unix team '97 - my Indigo was dewi.csd.sgi.com), it was the way we copied files around (the Troops had just come out) and also had a internal tool that would pop up a window on someone else's machine to get their attention (if they weren't directly paying attention to the multicast chat program...)
by velcrovan | 2025-09-22 15:49:13+00:00
Everyone seems to be dismissing this without reading it. As a content publisher, I am very interested in any proposal that results in me getting residual payments from AI scrapers. That would indeed be a new internet business model.

This is also being attempted by RSL with their “Crawler Authentication Protocol” (https://rslstandard.org/guide/web-crawlers) for demanding proof of licensing from scrapers and RSL Collective (https://rslcollective.org) for providing the licensing itself. The missing piece there is the ability to detect scrapers with high accuracy without punishing regular browsing humans.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-09-22 15:49:41+00:00
And a rise in membership-only retailers, like Costco. These retailers can make the use of biometrics and other shrink-prevention mechanisms a condition of membership & entry.

Memberships also give retailers a way to kick miscreants out of an entire chain (vs. trespassing them from one location) and keep them out without risking a lawsuit for profiling or other verboten activities.

If I opened a store in San Francisco tomorrow it would be some kind of membership only deal, maybe a co-op to appeal to local politics. No way would I allow the general public inside unless I were selling bulk concrete or something else equally impossible to shoplift.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-22 15:49:46+00:00
And that's a major flaw of eSIM. Providers shouldn't even have been given that kind of discrimination capability.

With a physical SIM, I can pry my card out of one phone and put it into another, and expect it to work. With eSIM, every single eSIM has to be carrier approved and GSMA approved, and every single transfer from one eSIM to another has to be carrier approved too.