MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-21 22:12:24+00:00
No comments? I guess I'm not surprised that people don't know what they want.

I'm way out of date but I do know what I no longer have.

It would be pretty much the same thing as the video-calling app from the original Intel webcam in 1997.

Where each user installed the app locally and then it simply handled the 1:1 communication over the internet without relying on any remote servers at all. Especially not relying on browsers, even though almost everybody had the same kind of browser back then, it's even worse of an idea now that browsers are such a rapidly moving target.

Except to accomplish conferencing, you need many-to-many not just 1:1 and you're the expert on that. I do know there are a few UIs that have seen OK acceptance so I wouldn't worry about that stuff until there is a high-performance engine under the hood, relying only on processors, hardware, and OS features that have well stood the test of time without being subject to deprecation any time soon.

From the ground up it should be possible to make it backward-compatible with hardware and OS versions much further back than people think, without needing anything fancy, and ideally could also lend itself to better multi-platform ability.

One thing more I remember that was good, since Intel's app was for routine calling not just occasional conferencing, each user built up a "phone book" of everyone they communicated with (or manually entered), and later could just scroll through it when they wanted to call somebody again. One click and it would call the chosen party, if they answered you could start talking over the mic & headset right away while you waited for the video to buffer. Seamless really whether you were calling over the internet or even direct from dial-up to dial-up without the internet at all. You can only imagine how jerky and blurry the cam was over a slow connection, but that's all it was. You could double you processor speed from 100Mhz to 200Mhz and it wouldn't help, but at least the mouse and app response were still snappier than the average W10 PC these days after upgrading to W11. Since that had nothing to do with broadband speed, only programming skill.

Maybe for conferencing have the group select a moderator who sets their app to spawn a working dashboard, who single-handedly clicks on the participants from their list for the event in about the same way. Or punts it over to another participant if they have to leave the session early or take a break.
by nextos | 2025-09-21 22:12:44+00:00
I think this statement is a bit of an exaggeration. There is undoubtedly some competition from US, but Oxbridge still attract a lot of the top talent. This is reflected in quantitative rankings like ARWU, where Cambridge and Oxford are always in the top of the pack, and often #1 in some subjects: https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025.

ARWU is biased towards research, but nevertheless Durham is currently #201-300 and St Andrews is #301-400. So the post is a bit sensationalistic as well. However, as someone in Oxford, I reckon the university has serious structural issues that need to be addressed if they want to stay at the top of their game.

Unlike Cambridge, Oxford doesn't have a post equivalent to Assistant Professor. In many divisions, appointment as an Associate Professor often occurs by internal promotion and this has created really toxic dynamics that scare off top talent. Furthermore, in many fields, Junior Research Fellowships are no longer attractive compared to e.g. a Lecturer position at Imperial or an Assistant Professor position overseas. Failing to attract and retain junior faculty has devastating consequences in terms of teaching and research quality.

Undergraduate admissions have experienced lots of recent changes. It is great that anti-state school bias is no longer present, but some faculty I know have expressed concerns about admissions becoming too subjective and often taking in students that are gaming the system by creating a false narrative of overcoming learning difficulties and minor disabilities (vs considering true disabled students, for instance). I find this very unsettling.

With that said, some courses (e.g. Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science) are outstanding and more isolated from these issues. IMHO, they still offer terrific value at the Home Fee rate (£9k), even if you need a mortgage. A rigorous and timeless no-nonsense education that is greatly valued by top employers.
by lunarcave | 2025-09-21 22:13:11+00:00
It's a nice write up.

> Build it and they will come is a fallacy.

This is true. But is this the alternative?

No trying to minimize the efforts of people who do this as real jobs or influencing - you do you. However, generating fake message screenshot, sending unsolicited messages etc? And the winner is the one who gets the biggest rise from the consumer, authentic or not.

Distribution is hard, I get it. But isn't this the equivalent of everyone just rocking up to the village square in the most outrageous costumes and screaming into the megaphone?
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-21 22:13:22+00:00
State media, nothing less. It's the same thing with the H1B visa fees - it's a way to exert government control over all spheres public and private. Normally I would use my standard argument of asking supporters whether they want these same powers applied by the people they don't agree with it but it's increasingly apparent the plan does not involve there being an 'other guy' involved, ever again.
by brewtide | 2025-09-21 22:13:41+00:00
This applies to all different fixes and hobbies so well. Just this afternoon my old Miata had the power steering 'cooling lines' finally rust through. Once I got home, I rummaged in my toolbox for old car tubing, rummaged elsewhere to find some small hose clamps and spent at most an hour cutting off the rusty parts, reattaching with line and clamps, refilling, and cleaning things back up. (luckily the cooling loop is on the low pressure side of things, so if it moves fluid a -> b and is kinda sealed up, it's good to go)

Point is: Having the drawers of 'I'll save this just in case!' in all hobbies does in fact come in handy. I find this especially true when some sort of project requires 'yet another adapter' to convert thing a to thing b. Project either goes through or it doesn't, but later on when trying to attack something else, having that little drawer full of weird but useful cables and adapters within living room walking distance sure feels rewarding.
by btilly | 2025-09-21 22:13:59+00:00
Whether a car is a luxury or not, really depends on where you live.

European cities started on a scale designed around the limitations of human walking. Even before they built out mass transit systems, living without a car was doable. Adding mass transit is icing on the cake. If you live in such an environment, it is easy to make the case that cars are a luxury. That's because other people's daily experience is that it is a luxury. As your mother discovered when she visited you.

Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. Even where they built out mass transit systems, between scale and density they can't work as well as European ones. (Fun fact. Across the USA, busses are on average so underutilized that we'd save gas by making everyone drive instead.) Underinvestment in mass transit is icing on the cake.

This was your mother's daily experience in suburban Massachusetts. And even though she sees how you can live without a car, it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car.

Which means that, in America, saying that cars are luxuries is a poor argument. It directly contradicts everyone's personal experience. Yes, this is fixable. But fixing it literally requires tearing cities down, then rebuilding them on a scale where walking makes sense as a major mode of transportation. We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Any lifestyle change requiring this level of rebuilding is a nonstarter. No matter how many lectures we get from Europeans.
by whizzter | 2025-09-21 22:13:59+00:00
I'm more understanding it as a tool so that multiple people collaborating on investigating a hack/data-breach/etc can audit/tag events in the interesting logs (ssh logins, weird executables starting,network probes, etc) from various sources and get a _combined timeline_ to easier determine adversary movement, cause-and-effect and so on to easier find what needs patching,etc.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-21 22:14:05+00:00
It's a war and just because you don't like that doesn't make it a genocide. Your appeal to authority is irrelevant because we're suspicious of the motivation of this commitee and therefore the veracity of their findings.

I find it amazing that you can dismiss one of the primary reasons for the continued state of war as irrelevant.

Hamas will rightly hold this up as a major tactical and strategic victory. It will do nothing at all to help palestinians except the fat cats in the plo and qatar.
by programjames | 2025-09-21 22:14:52+00:00
> “show me the connection” is a request for evidence.

Evidence... yes, that narrowed it down a lot. You're looking for evidence! In a debate! I never could have guessed! Luckily for you, @TMWNN did, and tried to help twice, but clearly they didn't know you were looking for evidence, not whatever they provided.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm being sarcastic. You asked for evidence of a connection, they gave you it twice, and yet it clearly wasn't the evidence you actually wanted because you wouldn't just tell them what you actually wanted!

Also, btw, I never said this guy was prominent. I meant what I said, not something slightly different to further a not-so-hidden agenda.
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-21 22:16:00+00:00
If you give me a stick and some sand these are some of the most common things I would be able to draw. I’m not sure that makes it a universal language. Every culture with a snake is going to have a squiggle line that looks like a snake. Everyone has a hand so they will make a hand print, etc. An X, a spiral, something that looks like a branch.
by wulfstan | 2025-09-21 22:16:13+00:00
The truth is that if you have an intelligent child, independent school is a complete waste of money. In the UK you will be spending in the vicinity of £200k over a child’s education to finish a levels, and although they will get better a levels on average, their results at university do not reflect their a level achievements. This is why independent schools find themselves downgraded in university offers.

This isn’t a surprise, because independent schools hothouse children to ensure they peak at a levels, whereas what universities want is students who will continue to improve at university.

I have two children (3xA*, 1A for one and 3As for the other) who were not interested in Oxford or Cambridge. My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out. You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early. It’s also a 3 year undergrad program with 24 contact weeks a year, which is insanely short.

My children have gone to Scotland (Edinburgh and St Andrews) which allows significantly more flexibility than English universities offer in choosing subjects outside your chosen degree pattern. St Andrews even lets you change degree completely if you find something else you like.

If you really really want to be a mathematician at 18 then I can see why Cambridge or Oxford might appeal; for kids with more breadth, I think it’s a poor choice.
by manquer | 2025-09-21 22:16:24+00:00
The point of cross continent rail travel is not being cheaper than air at all, it is about seeing and enjoying the country and the route, there is no easier or cheaper way to do that.

- A road trip would be both more expensive (fuel, hotels and maintenance/rental), strenuous and also less safe given the number of miles to be driven.

- There is quite little to see in a cruise if not near a shore or on a plane flying at cruising altitudes well above the clouds.

While times have changed and it is lot harder for parents now, I cannot help but remember growing up the number of cross country train trips just sitting at the window with nothing but a book/magazine or conversations with passengers and it was formative life experience even when quite young. It wasn't that long ago and my generation was just as addicted to tech but we were limited to doing that only on a desktop with a modem.

---

If you want to see and show the kids to help them understand the size and complex geography and beauty of the country they will inherit despite what limited time screen distractions allow, I don't think there is any better way to do it.
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-21 22:16:36+00:00
The camel's back is breaking and we're already half way to right wing populist authoritarianism. Meaningful piecemeal reform is necessary but will take decades. We need a Carnation moment. People need to feel like they have a meaningful future again. This will either come as a light civil war or a mass popular movement. Choose blood. Choose not. Choose a revolution for some or a revolution for everyone. Choose soon as the time is limited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_revolution_(German)
by neilv | 2025-09-21 22:17:24+00:00
> basing that on a Lisa Simpson nightmare

https://quahog.org/FactsFolklore/Trivia/Limelight/TV/The_Sim...

> Brown ('81) alumnus and Simpson's writer Ian Maxtone-Graham takes credit for chosing his alma mater as Lisa's less-than-top choice: "I chose Brown because I went there, and I felt like the school could take a joke,"
by tejohnso | 2025-09-21 22:17:45+00:00
> My friends in psychiatry are at their wits end with all of the people coming in and demanding Autism diagnoses

Why would you want, much less demand, to be diagnosed with any particular disorder? Is there such a thing as being fashionably disordered?

I think that if I felt something was wrong with me, I would want to be accurately diagnosed, not fashionably diagnosed.
by sour-taste | 2025-09-21 22:18:08+00:00
I agree standard bikes are a poor fit for luggage. There are cargo (e)bikes that can comfortably hold large bags (e.g. https://larryvsharry.com/products/ebullitt). They may make sense at major rail stations, but the logistics of keeping them in stock at the station would be hard, and of course this doesn't solve the infrastructure or physical disabilities/age problem.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-21 22:18:14+00:00
Yes, it does. I admit that I have not tried to get deep into this, but it says right in the summary that this is due to error propagation and numerical instability. You can have such errors in ordinary hand-written code. The size of the float does not matter (much) for some examples, which wipe out a bunch of significant figures from the result. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know exactly the details going on here but I studied numerical analysis and AD quite a bit back in the day. Even in the 2010s people knew that there was a chance of the resulting expressions having inherent instability. Even simple things like the quadratic formula have more stable and less stable forms. How much worse might it be for auto-generated expressions (or expression sequences, or equivalent; AD can be done a few ways) such as in AD? AD guarantees analytically correct logic (in infinite precision, for example) if you use it right but error analysis is not even attempted by most libraries.
by sehugg | 2025-09-21 22:18:47+00:00
Notable is the recent introduction of Mardi Gras Service, a route from New Orleans from Mobile that hasn't been used for passenger trains since Hurricane Katrina. The maximum one-way fare is $15, and its already popular enough that they added 60 more seats. I'm looking forward to riding it and thumbing my nose in the direction of I-10.
by gausswho | 2025-09-21 22:18:49+00:00
I rented one of those in Amsterdam then rode the beautiful tree-lined path along canals to Utrecht one day. I then rode back with the bike to Amsterdam. When I arrived, I was told this was not allowed, but it wasn't clear why. Maybe the municipal bikes need to stay in city limits? This was about a decade ago. Maybe you can enlighten me?
by bluGill | 2025-09-21 22:20:05+00:00
On demand is a bad thing - it means you can't know when the bus will arrive because sometimes it will take a detour to pick up someone else. For a bus to be useful you need assurance of when it will arrive so you can be on time but not too early.

frequent buses are good because you shouldn't have to wait when you are ready to go. Fixed routes again mean you can plan on it.
by koito17 | 2025-09-21 22:20:08+00:00
> Most Rust or Java programmers would make the same mistake.

Detecting these mistakes in Rust is not too difficult. In debug builds, integer overflow triggers a panic[1]. Additionally, clippy (the official linter of Rust), has a rule[2] to detect this mistake.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch03-02-data-types.html#integ...

[2] https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/master/index.html#ar...
by ewoodrich | 2025-09-21 22:20:14+00:00
I have been burned so many times asking LLMs about whether some tool/app/webapp has a feature, if so where I can find or enable or disable it, etc. The number of "just plausible enough to believe" hallucinations I've got back as answers is absolutely maddening.

I've lost count of how many times I've asked whether some command line tool has an option or config available for some niche case and ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed. It's even worse with GUI/menu navigation questions I'm guessing because it's even less grounded by text-based docs and trivially easy to bullshit that an option is buried in Preferences, the External tab maybe, somewhere, probably.

The desperate personality tuning to please the user at all costs combined with LLMs inherently fuzzy averaging of reality produces negative value whenever I truly need a binary yes/no "Does X exist in Y or not?" answer to a technical question. Then I waste a bunch of time falling back to Google trying to definitively prove or disprove whether "--use-external-mode" is a real thing and sure enough, it's not.

It does occasionally lead to hilariously absurd exchanges where when challenged instead of admitting its mistake the LLM goes on to invent an elaborate entirely fabricated backstory about the implementation of the "--use-external-mode" command to explain why despite appearing to not exist, it actually does but due to conflicts with X and Y it isn't supported on my environment, etc, etc.

I use Claude Code, Roo Code, Codex and Gemini CLI constantly so I'm no kneejerk LLM hater to be clear. But for all the talk about being "a better version of Google" I have had so much of my time wasted by sending me down endless rabbit holes where I ignored my sneaking suspicion I was being lied to because the answer sounded just so plausibly perfect. I've had the most success by far as a code generation tool vs. a Google replacement.
by smsm42 | 2025-09-21 22:23:04+00:00
> they respond with "I don't know, claude did that"

A huge red flag right here. Its ok to not know things, its ok to use LLM to fill the gaps. Its ok to fail. It is in no way ok to not care and only fess up to having a mass of code you have no idea about when your senior reviewer asks you about it. At the very minimum the ask should go the other direction - "I got this generated code and I am not sure I understand what's going on, could you help me to see if that's the right direction" would be acceptable. Just not caring is not.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-09-21 22:24:02+00:00
I guess I default to assuming this is BS?

I was in the market for a 20Ah battery to power my Burning Man totem last month. I ended up buying two off Amazon - a no-name brand and an Anker for 2.5x the price ($65 for 28Ah). The Anker bank was heavier than the no-name and had substantially longer battery life under the same usage patterns.

I don't know a lot about batteries, but what I do know is that they're very important tech and any performance wins would have cascading effects through multiple industries. It's incredibly unlikely that there is new battery tech that is meaningfully better while also not taking the world by storm. It's far more likely that whitelabel/noname brands are just lying about the specs/cheaping out on energy density and hoping consumers don't notice or care.
by andy99 | 2025-09-21 22:24:04+00:00
Why more dangerous?

For the same level of IC, AI tools will let people show off their skills more quickly, i.e. show faster how smart or dumb they are.

For nontechnical managers, it will let them ask lots of dumb questions and have stupid ideas that need refuting much faster, "I had a conversation with chatgpt and it says we can just ...". I don't consider that dangerous, that would be too flattering, it just makes the asymmetric bullshit (Brandoloni's law?) flow more efficiently.
by jltsiren | 2025-09-21 22:24:24+00:00
If most buses are consistently full, it means that you have too few buses or the level of service is poor outside peak hours.

Transit systems are usually sized for peak demand. Because you are paying for the vehicles and the infrastructure anyway, the marginal cost of offering better service outside peak hours is low. Especially if the drivers receive monthly wages and have semi-reasonable shifts. And that means buses are far from being full most of the time.
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-21 22:24:29+00:00
These days, being in the flying sardine tin often beats out train travel. With more adoption, I’ll bet the price difference will be closer. The comfort factor alone means I’ll take the train over flying if it’s feasible, every time. Even coach on the northeast regional is so much nicer than flying, and you’re usually a lot closer to where you actually want to be when you get off.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-21 22:25:26+00:00
Ah does not mean it has to be discharged over exactly one hour in some test. It's simply a unit just like kWh. And most batteries are not optimised for one hour discharge. There's batteries with insanely high C-rates for delivering a lot of power quickly, discharging in 10 minutes. And some with really low that can standby for years. They'll still indicate the Ah capacity the same way.
by catgary | 2025-09-21 22:27:17+00:00
Yeah, I think I’ve seen a statistic that getting hit by a car going 30km/hr, you’re probably going to be fine. If you get hit by a car going 50km/hr, you are most likely going to die. I can’t think of any reason to allow cars to travel over 30km/hour in urbanized areas, outside of designated arterial roads.
by chauhanbk1551 | 2025-09-21 22:27:30+00:00
I’m a data engineering student who recently decided to shift from a non-tech role into tech, and honestly, it’s been a bit overwhelming at times. This guide I found really helped me bridge the gap between all the “bookish” theory I’m studying and how things actually work in the real world.

For example, earlier this semester I was learning about the classic three-tier architecture (moving data from source systems → staging area → warehouse). Sounds neat in theory, but when you actually start looking into modern setups with data lakes, real-time streaming, and hybrid cloud environments, it gets messy real quick.

I’ve tried YouTube and random online courses before, but the problem is they’re often either too shallow or too scattered. Having a sort of one-stop resource that explains concepts while aligning with what I’m studying and what I see at work makes it so much easier to connect the dots.

Sharing here in case it helps someone else who’s just starting their data journey and wants to understand data architecture in a simpler, practical way.