MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattlutze | 2025-09-18 19:59:49+00:00
Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen.

i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.

Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.
by truelson | 2025-09-18 20:00:02+00:00
This is one of the areas where LLMs are really useful. At their core they aren’t “thinking” so much as transforming and reorienting data.

What’s been most valuable for me is the way they create a kind of imperfect but effective Socratic dialogue with whatever I’m reading. I was the kid who always had my hand up in class, not to show off, but because I hated leaving something unexplained. Good teachers could make a text come alive by answering those questions.

LLMs give me some of that back outside the classroom. Even when I ask them to speculate, the process forces me to interrogate the material and refine my own model of it. That’s changed how I read, learn, and even how I experience novels.

So innovation on this “Socratic interface” and other interfaces is pointed in the right direction.
by jmkd | 2025-09-18 20:00:18+00:00
Maps should have east at the top for a few reasons:

1. The sun (and moon and planets and many stars) rises in the east.

2. The east represents what is to come. This manifests in natural (day / night cycles) and cultural (timezones / dateline) aspects.

3. Orienting a map to such an easy to locate (day or night) direction requires no compass or other technology.

4. Orienting a map with such an impactful direction at the top creates a strong literal connection to the territory it represents, rather than to a part-abstracted direction that must be identified and agreed.
by JadeNB | 2025-09-18 20:00:48+00:00
> Yeah, but the government would have to prove it in court, which is hard and takes a long time.

Isn't this "undeveloped in perpetuity" status an application, so that you have to request an agreement to your valuation and the government has to approve it, meaning that the burden of proof goes the other way from your comment? At least, for my personal residence where I have the opposite incentive, it's not that I can go to the local government with a valuation of $3.50 for my house and they have to prove it's not; I can object to their valuation and try to prove my case, but the burden is on me, not on them.
by MisterTea | 2025-09-18 20:00:49+00:00
You can download the Voodoo 2 programming manual which is only around 250-something pages long. The Voodoo2 was fixed function; you loaded assets into the voodoo memory then called functions to operate on those assets. The driver takes care of those two roles by loading and managing the assets in the voodoo memory and an API to program the registers on the card to execute functions on the loaded assets. There were more steps involved with geometry processing which happened in the driver but I am unsure if those were handled in user space by the libraries the application called or the driver code itself.

This isn't 250 something pages, only 132 so maybe I was wrong, but its a good look into how the Voodoo2 worked: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/media/3dfx/voodoo2.pdf

See also: https://3dfxarchive.com/reference.htm

A fun tidbit is the voodoo2 has a 2D mode but was not VESA compliant so it could not be used in a PC without being tied to a VESA card for 2D graphics. I believe that ability was there for custom and non-pc platforms.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-18 20:00:57+00:00
I just finished reading the ~500 page On Some Faraway Beach. If you love his work, especially the early years, take your time reading this one. As the background, personalities and processes behind songs are revealed, I looked up the video or music for each one on archive.org or youtube (and never saw a single ad, amazingly, thanks cool guy at google whomever you are). So much more meaning now.

Yeah in his art school, physical media were shunned and role playing was emphasized. So he kind of painted with sound in some ways. Also, at that time, Cagian systems and processes were the popular approach.

Yup knowing the history of it all provides much more meaning.
by dvdkon | 2025-09-18 20:01:03+00:00
You might be more willing if you see it as a kind of reciprocity, your part in a scheme which allows you to hike or otherwise relax on land other than your own.

And even if you never set foot on other's people property, I think it's fair of the government, which ultimately enforces land owners' property rights, to say that they won't support you excluding other people from natural land.
by pavlov | 2025-09-18 20:01:14+00:00
The Facebook acquisition of Oculus was in March 2014. The hardware that Oculus sold before that was a developer prototype.

There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product.

There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.
by alabhyajindal | 2025-09-18 20:02:09+00:00
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.

A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.

Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:

> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’

When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
by HEmanZ | 2025-09-18 20:02:24+00:00
My biggest gripe with this is the reasoning for “no, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs.”

Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month.

But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over as AI move further up the chain and humans are eliminated from office labor entirely.
by xnx | 2025-09-18 20:02:27+00:00
> As for their "agentic browsing assistant", I don't have much trouble adding stuff to my shopping cart or other minor tasks.

It looks like it is capable of more complex tasks than that including things like making a comparison table of products based on your criteria.

To extend the grocery example, it would be impressive if it could building a shopping cart and multiple stores so you can chose the one with the best total price/availability.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-09-18 20:03:19+00:00
yeah its sort of the no pain no gain approach but I like it. my best hack is time logging. I feel that if I specifically label breaks or procrastination or production failures, I at least feel like I'm more in control. I like the act of blogging about it though, it never fails to pick me up knowing I'm not alone with suffering from procrastination and I am always happy to read thoughts about it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-18 20:03:36+00:00
Right, so we should just role the internet back to BBS boards and IRC, when it was all free and no ads.

You need to extend your logic to everyone, or define who can ad-block and who must watch the ads. It's great you have decided that you don't need to cover the cost incurred serving you a video, can you please tell me the logic we should use to pick who must pick up the tab you left behind? The volunteers who never skip ads?

Surely you have thought your philosophy through.
by coldtea | 2025-09-18 20:03:49+00:00
They did bump the sensor resolution and size of the tele lens increased the max open aperture of one of the lenses 1-2 models ago.

But "Zeiss optics" itself was also an empty marketing boast of Nokia and other colaborators. Not that different in performance from regular third party or even OEM optics, and the phone's sensor wouldn't be able to show any discernible difference anyway.
by truelson | 2025-09-18 20:03:55+00:00
As a side note, I'm going through all the Le Carré novels... it is a lovely experience to be able to ask an LLM more questions about 1960s British culture, West German Cold War politics, and Le Carré's background as a diplomat/spy. A lovely way to engage with novels.

Also, Smiley is getting up their in fictional characters I admire. Not Iroh level, but up there.
by syntaxing | 2025-09-18 20:04:06+00:00
This is the weird gate keeping I’m talking about. In another comment I mentioned about this, but I started 3D printing during the reprap ages. Chrome rods were cut yourself, LM8UU cost over $25 a pop from NSK, we use pololu A4988 (TMC wasn’t even a thing), and my hotend was a Jhead. I enjoy tinkering and sounds like you do too. But don’t get the factuation of 3D printers get confused with 3D printing . If new users can print right out of the box without needing to fix anything, that’s a net win for 3D printing and for them. The need for a user to know how to fix and tweak stuff to “truly” enjoy 3D printing is frankly full of shit.
by codingdave | 2025-09-18 20:04:14+00:00
I love reading about this experiment, and all the reactions over the years. But I have yet to see anyone question the underlying premise that there is a specific "moment of death". Based on my (admittedly layman's) understanding, death is a process, not a moment.

Of course, having said that out loud, odds are someone will be along shortly to cite people who have already said so.
by sidrag22 | 2025-09-18 20:04:25+00:00
do you get sad or somewhat similar feelings when you finish a book or series or whatever? i sometimes get those feelings badly, and im a big fan of rereading/rewatching or whatever.

ive also found that ill sometimes sorta really neglect reading the final portions of a book or stop close to the end of a TV series, not because of disinterest, but because i do not want it to actually end.

im pretty much just wondering if these feelings don't hit you quite as strong and you are more excited by new stories, than you are sad about ending the current story.

of course this is more aimed at fiction or just stories in general rather than something like a self help book or whatever, for those those same types of feelings don't apply at all.
by bilbo0s | 2025-09-18 20:05:11+00:00
> simply by being near them

There's a solution to that.

There's a reason the term "glass-holes" was invented.

As a general rule, it's probably best to stay away from these kinds of people for a while. Because nowadays it doesn't even have to be you. It could be someone standing in the frame somewhere with you that does something objectionable. Thus awakening the wrath of society. Or even worse - the government.
by godelski | 2025-09-18 20:05:46+00:00
I do realize that. But look at the OP again.

> Ah but we're just gonna jump to conclusions instead.

I'm not trying to say WaPo is doing grade A journalism here. In fact, personally I think they aren't. A conversation about clickbait titles is a different one and one we've had for over a decade now...

But are we going to recognize the irony here? Is OP not calling the kettle black here? They *also* jumped to conclusions. This doesn't vindicate WaPo or make their reporting any less sensational or dubious, but we shouldn't make the same faults we're angry at others for making.

And pay careful attention to what I've said.

>>> You should be skeptical, but this is easy enough to test, so why not do some test to see if it is obviously false or not? >>> I'd appreciate it if others would reply with their replication efforts

I do want to find the truth of the matter here. I could have definitely wrote it better, but I'm appealing to our techy community because we have this capability. We can figure this out. The second part is much harder to verify and there's non-nefarous reasons that might lead to this, but we should try to figure this out instead of just jumping to conclusions, right?
by bitlax | 2025-09-18 20:05:50+00:00
> When I say "them" it is in reference to the statements made in the wake of political violence.

To the extent that this person is slandering someone I condemn it. To the extent that this person is referring to the bad actors responsible I support it.

Seems rather simple to me but let me know what you don't understand.

> What were the killer's motivations? I haven't been paying close attention.

I'm not trying to be combative but you're speaking from a place of willful ignorance. This is adding very little to the conversation.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-18 20:07:19+00:00
I agree with you 100%. Most people do not have the time or knowledge to become experts in all the fields they hold opinions in.

However, I actually AM being a bit of a snob as well. I'm proposing the deeply unpopular idea that not every person even has the capability to. It seems to have become a little-known fact that fifty percent of people are of below the median intelligence.

A lot of people are reluctant to admit that to themselves. They shouldn't be... It's an enormous relief when you finally realize that you don't have to have an opinion on everything.
by k_bx | 2025-09-18 20:07:25+00:00
I'm evaluating Greptimedb in prod and while I hate to have a needless component like OTEL-Collector in general, it serves as a read-only gate between the database and the user, so that greptime keeps listening to localhost only, and OTEL-Collector guarantees nobody will write to the database directly.

If it were to give more fine-grained control over write-only access -- would probably just write directly and let it handle the load.
by yorwba | 2025-09-18 20:07:43+00:00
The textbook is there so that the model has something reasonably correct to work with and doesn't make up too much wrong stuff to teach.

For tutoring, I think the approach in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6 is promising. (Prompts are included in the supplementary material on the last page: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... ) They start with an existing collection of worked exercises, give the chatbot access to the full solution and then let students interact with it to get a walkthrough or just check their own solution, depending on how much help the student thinks they need.
by karaterobot | 2025-09-18 20:07:48+00:00
You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.

The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.

My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.

I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.
by cientifico | 2025-09-18 20:08:15+00:00
Can you clarify the following sentence:

> We are open-source (https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus). Cactus is free for hobbyists and personal projects, with a paid license required for commercial use.

If it is open-source, one is free to distribute even for commercial use by definition. Which one is correct and what's your business model?
by baobun | 2025-09-18 20:08:26+00:00
Assuming you are a Linux beginner picking your first distro, I'd recommend something stable, established, and well-known. Especially since you are asking.

So Debian or Fedora. Maybe OpenSUSE, Mint (Debian/Ubuntu base), vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS (Arch base).

Wouldn't recommend up-and-coming perennial community derivatives depending on a very small number of volunteers like Omarchy to someone who does not yet have the confidence and experience to fork/maintain it themselves. Projects like Omarchy can be great as inspiration and starting point for your dotfiles once you have your bearings and can judge it yourself but not wise to treat it as a "black box" or set-and-forget the way you can more safely do with a classic distribution.

Then you can of course run either KDE (good choice), Hyprland or whatever other Desktop Environment and Window Manager you desire on your dist of choice.

Or try a few different ones and see what sticks for you.
by stopachka | 2025-09-18 20:09:03+00:00
> Do you use an agent SDK or is it home grown?

It's about 260 lines of home-grown code. Here's a snippet of how it looks:

https://gist.github.com/stopachka/a38f00545d048661cf15a3cf4d...

Two interesting things there:

1. Since Instant is reactive, we use it to convey the stream to the client. This way all chats are "resumable" by default, even if the user refreshes the page.

2. To make sure Instant writes don't block the stream, we use a "natural" buffer approach. Basically tokens from the LLM buffer up during every save.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-18 20:10:43+00:00
We should not exempt non-profits from property tax. For these conservation projects, it will be a defacto ad valorem tax and it's a good thing. Americans will lock themselves out of prosperity and then blame The Rich, The Politicians, Foreigners and so on rather than allow for the development of the vast acres of land that America has.

Conservation is fine. But perpetual free locking away of land is total bullshit. The highly performative yelling of "we are IN A CRISIS!" while actively promoting said crisis is getting old. I've had enough of it.
by fl0ki | 2025-09-18 20:11:00+00:00
Hello, I am the other person who liked Unity. Now that we have met, the prophecy is fulfilled.

Seriously though, the fact that macOS still doesn't have an option to fully extend the dock horizontally or vertically drives me nuts. If you auto hide the dock it loses half of its value, and if you don't hide the dock then you have dead gaps in the corners that serve no purpose.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-18 20:11:11+00:00
Pretty much all construction uses materials which follow a specification. The least we could do is start requiring all commercial software do the following:

1. Declare an SBOM 2. Each software component must have a listed specification

We'd then need to make software specifications. Start with the most basic specification possible; "has performed linting", "has full integration test coverage", "has passed QA testing", "has an active maintainer", "lists its license", "does not have a hidden back door", "is free of known vulnerabilities", etc. Make more detailed specifications as-needed (for a particular industry, use case, requirements).

Once we have all that, you can glance at a company's SBOM and find out if they've done the bare minimum due-diligence. We could also make or modify regulations that require these same materials standards, like privacy regulations, financial regulations.

And yes, meeting minimum material standards is more expensive. We already accept that cost in the physical world, why not in the software world? If there's a TDS, SDS, MSDS, etc for physical products, we should have them for software too. I want to know your materials are safe before I use your products. I'm sick of being exposed by companies who are completely irresponsible.
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-18 20:11:14+00:00
> I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.

Where have you taught? I taught in Australia and the United Kingdom, where many of these things were mandated by the promulgation of spiral curricula by the relevant government departments. I'm aware in the US that, for example, algebra is taught as one or two block courses, but in the school systems I've taught in, algebra is taught as a few 'topics' of about a month in duration each, sprinkled throughout the whole four or five years in which mathematics is mandatory in secondary school. For Year 7 to 10 in Australia, there would be one or two topics for each of physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences, covered across each year, building up from year to year. None of this was a choice by individual teachers or even schools; it was an artefact of the way the curricula are structured.
by M_farhan_h | 2025-09-18 20:11:29+00:00
Hi HN! We built Blue, a voice assistant that can use any app on your phone via a tiny USB-C hardware “hand” we call Bud. Here’s how we went from concept to 100 working units in 55 days for YC Demo Day.

About me: I’m a robotics and product design engineer focused on building thoughtful tools for the world. I hold dozens of patents in hardware and manufacturing, and I care deeply about how things are made and who they’re made for.

For over a decade, I’ve worked across robotics, wearables, and consumer electronics. As one of the first engineers on the Apple Vision Pro, I took it from concept to mass production.
by hintymad | 2025-09-18 20:11:39+00:00
> Most of the metadata activity is contained within a single shard: > > - File creation, same-directory renames, and deletion. > - Listing directory contents. > - Getting attributes of files or directories.

I guess this is a trade-off between a file system and an object store? As in S3, ListObjects() is a heavy hitter and there can be potentially billions of objects under any prefix. Scanning only on a single instance won't be sufficient.
by j45 | 2025-09-18 20:12:00+00:00
VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies.

Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.

You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.

If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.
by magicalist | 2025-09-18 20:12:03+00:00
I don't think the analogies are that helpful. You are absolutely building the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom as you put in the foundation, framing, the plumbing, the electrical work, etc, or you will get either an unusable house or a very expensive gutting and remodel. User stories are figured out for the house long before any construction begins. House building is well on the waterfall side of development anyways, but at this point, what insight is this analogy yielding?

Call user stories a grouping of work, sure, but I guess I don't see why the distinction matters. Most possible "units of work" will have many cases worth breaking down further regardless of choice of unit.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-18 20:12:04+00:00
> You know it needs to be done, but you really, really don’t feel like it. You leave it until it starts to loom larger and larger. When you finally convince yourself to start, it’s not what you want to be doing, but it’s generally fine. It’s often not even as bad as you thought it would be, and it feels good to make progress.

For me it still feels terrible long after I start. It takes much longer than few minutes before I stop feeling like somebody was tearing away my skin.