MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-09-13 17:10:18+00:00
This essay focuses on a very narrow section of systems thinking and systems theory. There's an entire field, with many different subdisciplines beyond just the Club of Rome stuff (and which influenced them directly) that, quite explicitly also deals with systems that "fight back". In fact, any serious definition of systems thinking usually has said dynamics baked into it—systems are assumed to evolve from the start.

I'd encourage people to look into soft systems methodology, critical systems theory, and second order cybernetics, all of which are pretty explicitly concerned with the problem of the "system fighting back". The article is good, as works in progress articles usually are, but the initial premise and resulting coverage are shallow as far as the intellectual depth and lineage here goes.
by jasonjayr | 2025-09-13 17:10:22+00:00
I have an RTL-SDR that can cover 3.2mhz -- and with sufficient storage IO could record just about the whole 2m band. I want to see if I could find or develop a SDR app that could visualize like sdrpp, or the other popular ones, but keep a 1-2 minute ring buffer of the data so I could jump back to previously spotted signals when watching a band.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-13 17:10:39+00:00
> The true value of a company can be measured by our ability to communicate with them.

True, but sadly too many people don't care.

Look at how many people will happily throw $$$ per month at Claude when it is basically absolutely impossible to contact a human being at Antrhopic.

> is Proton Mail the least shitty of companies that provide email services?

Tutanota could be worth a look.
by Nezteb | 2025-09-13 17:10:50+00:00
I thought so too, although treating everything as data and functions is really nice [1].

Regarding the BEAM and why Gleam has a separate library for actors: [2]

> "One notable difference between Elixir and Gleam is that Elixir gets to just re-use the OTP code as-is (with some Elixir wrappers on top for convenience). Gleam concluded that the OTP is built expecting dynamic types, and that for best results in Gleam they'd need to re-implement the key primitives. That's why the example shown is an "Actor" not a GenServer - it serves the same purpose, and might even fit in a Supervision tree, but isn't actually a GenServer."

There's a brief snippet mentioning this in the Gleam OTP readme as well: [3]

> "Actors do not yet support all OTP system messages, so some of the OTP debugging APIs may not be fully functional."

[1] https://mckayla.blog/posts/all-you-need-is-data-and-function...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40645489

[3] https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp#limitations-and-known-issu...
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-13 17:11:16+00:00
"For a few days in 1995, many Indians believed a religious idol had developed a lifelike ability to drink milk."

A mass-event rooted in modern political history of India, and which casts a long shadow to the present day.

Having lived through that absolutely bizzare episode, and now living through the post-2020 world, this essay is not about just one country's people or religion or culture, but a phenomenon that is all around us. One that only seems to come into sharper relief, as the world becomes more dynamic, and therefore more uncertain.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-09-13 17:11:28+00:00
They're concerned about the safety of corrupt management. Several posters here reassure that Chernobyl etc. were poorly managed and that we've learned a lot since then. But ongoing corruption doesn't instill confidence that learnings will be incorporated safely.

Saying that catastrophes have been uncommon over decades is also not reassuring as one would expect catastrophes to increase if we go from not building and decommissioning to rapid building and recommissioning.

Maybe the upper limit of atomic power catastrophe is still a low casualty count. In that case we shouldn't reassure people that we've learned and improved and instead show that even rampantly corrupt administration cannot do much harm, if that's the case.
by michaelt | 2025-09-13 17:11:32+00:00
I know for certain it's whatever you care to contract for, but rotation between tasks is common.

A lot of these suppliers provide on-demand workers - if you need 40 man-hours of work on a one-off task, they can put 8 people on it and get you results within 5 hours.

On the other hand, if you want the same workers every time, it can be arranged. If you want a fixed number of workers on an agreed-upon shift pattern, they can do that too.

Even when there is a rotation, the most undesirable tasks often pay a few bucks extra per hour, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some people who opted to stay on the worst jobs for a full shift.
by phatskat | 2025-09-13 17:11:43+00:00
I’ve been working hard on our new component implementation (Vue/TS) to include accessibility for components that aren’t just native reskins, like combo and list boxes, and keyboard interactivity is a real pain. One of my engineers had it half-working on her dropdown and threw in the towel for MVP because there’s a lot of little state edge cases to watch out for.

Thankfully the spec as provided by MDN for minimal functionality is well spelled out and our company values meeting accessibility requirements, so we will revisit and flesh out what we’re missing.

Also I wanna give props (ha) to the Storybook team for bringing accessibility testing into their ecosystem as it really does help to have something checking against our implementations.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-13 17:11:55+00:00
You speak of "The Loudness Wars." It was a fully intentional choice made by people who knew exactly what they were doing. For the most part, bowing down to label pressure to let people think their stereo is louder.

Except for the guy who did Red Hot Chili Peppers' albums. He was known for compressing sound, and turned it to 12 for the loudness wars. Californication is the poster-child of the issue for a reason.
by wild_egg | 2025-09-13 17:12:47+00:00
I have a bunch of homegrown CLI tools in my $PATH that are only described in the CLAUDE.md file. My subagents use these tools perfectly as if they have full instructions on their use but no such instructions are in the subagent prompts.

This should not be possible if they don't have CLAUDE.md in their context.

My main agent prompt always has a complete ban on the main agent doing any work themselves. All work is done by subagents which they coordinate.

I've been doing this for 2-3 months now on projects upwards of 200k lines and the results have been incredible.

I'm very confused how so many of us can have such completely different experiences with these tools.
by voxl | 2025-09-13 17:13:39+00:00
School has two competing goals and this will never change:

1. Have the kids learn new things 2. Have the kids reach a desired level of competency

Learning happens where you are at, not where the teacher wants you to be. Every student is at a different place in understanding. It's impossible without 1-on-1 instruction to really maximize learning.

Competency is only determined via testing. Learning doesn't require testing at all, you can just speak to a student to get a good idea if they're making some progress, any progress. Competency? That basically demands a test, because it has a particular bar in mind.

Now students know they need to pass the bar, somehow, but the anxiety of that is going to cause issues with them just trying to learn. This is unfixable though, because the outside pressures demand students have some level of competency otherwise teachers are viewed as failures.
by rurp | 2025-09-13 17:14:55+00:00
I'm sure it varies a lot place to place but I've experienced much more of the opposite in the tech industry. I've heard countless times that we should switch to a different tool because it's newer, from someone who couldn't name a single specific way it's better than the existing tool. I see so much busy work at my employers and in products I use where things get changed just for the sake of change, without getting any better.
by growingkittens | 2025-09-13 17:15:25+00:00
This article does not begin to cover systems thinking. Cybernetics and metacybernetics are noticably missing. Paul Cilliers' theory of complexity - unmentioned. Nothing about Stafford Beer and the viable system model. So on and so forth.

The things the author complains about seem to be "parts of systems thinking they aren't aware of". The field is still developing.
by lupire | 2025-09-13 17:16:03+00:00
> If the integers from 1 to 999,999,999 are written as words, sorted alphabetically, and concatenated, what is the 51 billionth letter?

In a series of posts, mathematician Dylan Thurston and computer scientist / linguist Chung-chieh Shan solve this problem step by step, introducing concepts such as monoids and differentiation along the way, use the programming language Haskell.

Epilogue: Discussion with a representative from ITA Software, the creators of the problem: http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber...
by maxglute | 2025-09-13 17:16:05+00:00
Given surplus over lifespan @ 10% of energy generation is more than enough to assume solar is going to be energetically self-sustaining as a sector.

Before 4x expanding solar push in 2023 they hit solar generation/production breakpoint in 2021/2022, as in surplus generation from old panels generated enough to pay back energy production of new panels. So absolute offset not imaginary, new breakpoint for current production rate is going to be 2027/28 unless they 4x again in next 2 years, i.e. 16x production from 2021, it will be functionally completely offset sector in a couple years. Nitpicking about coal or how solar is subsidizing coal with that on the horizon is are imaginary.

What solar+renewables is doing is reduce coal from ~70% to ~50% of energy mix even though absolute coal #s increased due to massive increase in demand/supply. The offset is that 20% shift over decade where generation 2x, hence actual offset to coal expansion by 40%.

Regardless with EPBT of ~3 years (less after breakpoint), and 25-30y lifespace, it's one of those 2nd best time to plant a tree is today situations. There isn't a solid reason not to hammer cheap PRC solar at scale outside of geopolitics.
by csours | 2025-09-13 17:16:17+00:00
I know we're all good little rational kids here, but even rationalists need to learn about emotions. Strong emotional responses are currently holding back human advancement. If you look closely at history, it has been always thus.

** "in my opinion" is always implied, unless a source is given **

Reading about airline crashes has radically changed how I view blame.

The way I was raised and the choices I made as an adult have given me a relatively rare point of view: people are made of humans, and humans are made of animals, and animals have limited capabilities.

I can explain someone's actions, or I can excuse someone's actions, and the difference is largely in the mind of the beholder.

Social punishment is micro and macro. On the macro it looks like shared morality and it feels like safety. On the micro it looks like emotional invalidation and it feels like danger and isolation.
by Freedom2 | 2025-09-13 17:16:18+00:00
I once asked a colleague why this was the case, and the responses I got were basically "Wood is cheap, durable and we have lots of it. Other materials will price houses out of most Americans and there's no tangible benefit to using them anyway."

Which is both wrong and short sighted, but I could not get them to budge on acknowledging that other materials would actually be better for houses than wood and some foam.

You can actually search around on the Internet for this query as well and American stubbornness (/ exceptionalism?) once again rears it's head.
by kg | 2025-09-13 17:16:36+00:00
Think about it this way, to be able to say that it takes place annually instead of i.e. biannually or monthly, you need a lot more than one sample per year. You need enough samples to know when it is or isn't occurring.

https://www.earth.com/news/unprecedented-collapse-panamas-oc... mentions a lot of date oriented measurements which suggest they probably have at least 52 samples per year, if not daily samples:

> The 40-year record makes the 2025 failure stand out. Average historical onset around January 20 contrasts with a March 4 threshold crossing in 2025.

> The cool season shrank from roughly nine weeks to less than two weeks. Minimum sea surface temperature (SST) rose from historical lows near 66.2°F to about 73.9°F.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-13 17:17:31+00:00
> I assume the secret is mostly genetics

That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.

The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.
by Mawr | 2025-09-13 17:17:47+00:00
What a horrible post, missing the entire point by a mile and worse yet, misguiding everyone about the most basic facts :(

I assume you're from a western society, so I can't possibly imagine how you could have possibly reached such a conclusion. The contrast should be obvious at first glance.

The default Japanese diet is greatly more healthy than the default western diet, especially the American diet.

As a person living in the west and willing to put in some of my limited effort into eating healthy, I'm screwed. There's barely any healthy options available, I'm flooded by an ocean of awful food and it takes significant effort and cost not to drown in it.

I can't emphasize this enough, it absolutely does not matter what you can technically do or not. Defaults are what matters. By default in Japan you eat a reasonably healthy diet and walk/bike regularly. By default in America you eat fast food and drive everywhere.
by o4c | 2025-09-13 17:18:04+00:00
/s !

Future internet road maps be like:

Join the Generalist bootcamp, it includes big picture of the world and everything, anything you ever need. Full access subscriptions at $1000.

You will Learn the following things:

Analytic philosophy, Mathematical logic, Pure and applied math, Physics, CS, Systems thinking, Engineering(Mech + electronics), creative problem solving And finally one art subject

Beginer Projects: Wafer stage design. Model nano tech projects. Small nuclear fusion reactors. Portable TEM machine.

Pre-req: Just enough maturity. You should be curious, persistence & hardworking. We assume you will practise problem solving till you die.

Outcomes of the bootcamp: Job guaranteed at fortune 500.

Testimonials: We have so many happy customers working for companies having trillion dollar values.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-13 17:18:51+00:00
> I tried it for years, and even if you get it working (needs months), it will eventually stop working again.

I've been self-hosting for decades and have never, ever seen the sort of problems you suggest. Once its working, its working.

When people have a problem, its usually because they are trying to either:

(a) host off a home internet connection; or (b) host off a less than reputable hosting provider.

Both of which should frankly come to no surprise to anyone with a modicum of technical know-how.

Hosting off a home internet connection, assuming the ISP will even open the ports in the first place, has been something to avoid since, well, basically forever ... certainly anywhere after the late 90's.

Hosting off a less than reputable provider is the same. I'm not going to name names, but certain providers are well known for originating spam or not responding to abuse@ messages.
by bloudermilk | 2025-09-13 17:19:06+00:00
This is actually a critique of massive bureaucratic systems, not systems thinking as a practice. Gall's work is presented as an argument against systems thinking, while it's a contribution to the field. Popular books on systems thinking all acknowledge the limitations, pitfalls, and strategies for putting theory into practice. That large bureaucracies often fails to is, in my view, an unrelated subject.
by nilsbunger | 2025-09-13 17:19:12+00:00
A lot of the California bills had various poison pills in them that reduced their effectiveness.

For example, SB684 allowed building and subdividing up to 10 units on a multifamily lot. BUT, the lot wasn’t eligible if you had to knock down a building that had tenants in the past N years to avoid displacement of people.

You can probably guess how many multifamily lots are out there where you don’t have to tear down an existing building with tenants.

There are other issues too. Interest rates and tariffs make a lot of projects not viable financially.
by cben | 2025-09-13 17:19:32+00:00
Conversely, when you already collaborate with people in Dropbox, mainly via files, having real time co-editable docs under same folder with same sharing was nice, esp. for people who never remember where they put stuff :-)

Integration was not perfect, but it does create a json .paper file containing a url. But at least it makes you aware the doc exists every time you look at the folder.

Alas, with Paper desktop & mobile apps being deprecated, that's increasingly useless :-( Will the main app at least take over the ability to [double-]click these .paper docs to open them in a browser?
by imiric | 2025-09-13 17:19:39+00:00
> Older things have died

I suppose so, but very few user applications have had the same longevity. There have been numerous text editors and word processors from the same era and after it that have disappeared, yet Emacs has endured. That has to mean something.

> measuring isn't that difficult, surveys exist, and it's been ~consistently in the low single digit %.

Surveys are not a good way of measuring the health of a specific project. Not all users will respond, and the percentages are skewed by the number of participants and popularity of other options.

A better way, though still inaccurate, would be to look at the amount of activity in the project's repository, the number of contributors, and the number of packages written in Elisp over time.

Emacs' official repo doesn't keep track of such statistics, but the GitHub mirror[1] shows signs of a very healthy project. You could also check package stats[2] or the amount of Elisp projects on GH[3], and compare them to Wayback Machine snapshots from a few years ago, and notice that they keep increasing.

These are all signs that Emacs is not going anywhere. The slow but steady growth is the positive aspect I was referring to earlier. Explosive growth is not good for an OSS project.

> Yeah, that's exactly the faux elitist fantasy ...

I mean, you're entitled to your opinion, but I haven't noticed any elitism in the Emacs community. It's mostly a bunch of hackers and tinkerers who are passionate about software and improving their workflow, as you can see from this article and comments here. There's no gatekeeping since anyone is free to use Emacs how they want to use it. Help and documentation is widely available, including within Emacs itself.

So I think you have the wrong idea and an axe to grind for some reason, which I can't really help you with. Cheers!

[1]: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/pulse

[2]: https://emacsmirror.net/stats/compare.html#Summary

[3]: https://github.com/topics/elisp
by redhale | 2025-09-13 17:19:55+00:00
> The only reason it works for many common programming workflows is because they are common. The minute you try to do new things, you need to be as verbose as the underlying language.

You can stop here. This is enough to change the game. SO MUCH time and money is spent on mostly-boilerplate line of business apps. If you don't understand this, you are in a bubble of some kind. The corporate world's IT departments and consulting agencies are filled with developers who write nothing but what boil down to custom-tailored CRUD apps. AI is absolutely KILLER for this kind of work.

If you're doing novel research, perhaps not. But that describes a relatively small portion of the worldwide developer community.
by kevincox | 2025-09-13 17:20:04+00:00
There are sort of two questions here:

> why does EXIF transform metadata exist?

Because there are times when it is useful to be able to quickly and losslessly rotate a photo. For example an image viewer might provide quick options to rotate a photo (in case it did end up rotated the wrong way originally).

Probably this should just have been part of the actual image format rather than metadata, but that isn't how it played out.

> why doesn't the camera itself perform a simple rotation or mirror

There could be various reasons. The simplest is that adjusting the rotation naturally happens later in the pipeline than lossy encoding. You don't want to re-encode for quality and performance reasons so just slap on the metadata. The other could be that it is less expensive to avoid rotating. In many cameras the encoding is handled by specialized hardware, adding a way to rotate the raw pixels is likely more expensive than always having the source pixel map to the same input pixel in the encoder. There is no hard reason it couldn't be done, but in many situations it is cheaper to do it this way.
by close04 | 2025-09-13 17:20:23+00:00
No, those are your words. The dumbed down, skewed, ragebaity, Fox News level strawman. The guaranteed way to drag down the conversation when you have nothing of value to say: pretend the other guy said something just as worthless and then fight that because it’s easier and you think you have a shot.

Your arguments have been shot down all over this thread. Do you need a win so bad?
by closewith | 2025-09-13 17:20:40+00:00
Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent.

Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked.

That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
by kg | 2025-09-13 17:21:12+00:00
With how rapidly LLMs are improving, I don't know how you would construct assignments that can't be solved relatively quickly by a student feeding it into a bleeding-edge LLM. Especially since teachers often aren't PhDs and are overworked, the idea of every class of students getting handed brand new problems that aren't in the training set feels far-fetched.

I hope somebody figures this out but I don't know what the solution looks like.