MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-24 22:50:58+00:00
It's a nice analogy, and I think I'll use it in future.

If you want another one, think of painting. An "Old Master" painter like Rembrandt or Rubens or Botticelli would have had a large workshop with a team of assistants, who would not only do a lot of the work like stretching canvases or mixing the paints, but would also - under the master's direction - actually do a lot of the painting too. You might have the master sketch out the composition, and then paint the key faces (and, most of all, the eyes) and then the assistants would fill in areas like drapery, landscape, etc.

This changed in the Romantic period towards the end of the 1700s, with the idea of the individual artist, working alone in a moment of creative inspiration and producing a single work of genius from start to finish. Caspar David Friedrich or JMW Turner come to mind here.

Some programmers want to be Turner and control the whole work and feel their creativity is threatened if a machine can now do parts of it as well as they could. I'd rather be Rembrandt and sketch out the outline, paint the eyes, and leave the rest to junior engineers... or an AI Agent. It's a matter of preference.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-24 22:51:05+00:00
Does Internet email not support binary attachments? Of course it does.

And encrypted and/or signed email? That too, though very poorly, but the issue there is key management, and DAP/LDAP don't help because in the age of spam public directories are not a thing. Right now the best option for cryptographic security for email is hop-bby-hop encryption using DANE for authentication in SMTP, with headers for requesting this, and headers for indicating whether received email transited with cryptographic protection all the way from sender to recipient.

As for the "ability to address groups in flexible ways", I'm not sure what that means, but I've never see group distribution lists not be sufficient.
by macintux | 2025-10-24 22:51:54+00:00
> You really think the casualty rate from programmers--with all our mistakes--can beat that?

I think that if my infrastructure + code had any direct connection to patient outcome, there would be a lot of harm done. Not that I'm particular bad at either, but I know the effective cost of errors is minimal, and certainly does not have a direct impact on people's health. If I had the same responsibilities as a surgeon, I'd have a much slower rate of change in my systems.

I do not in any way believe that the fact that we in IT kill fewer people than surgeons has any meaning for whether we're more skilled than doctors.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-24 22:52:11+00:00
> Furthermore, "designing for a future rewrite" is absolute madness. There is already a lot of YAGNI waste work going on. It's fine to design software to be modular, reusable, easily comprehensible, and so on, but designing it so its future rewrite will be easier - WTF? You haven't even built the first version yet, and you're already putting work into designing the second version.

If software is in fact designed to be modular, reusable, and easily-comprehensible, then it should be pretty easy to rewrite it in another language later. The fact that many people are arguing that programmers should not even attempt to rewrite C coreutils, for fear of breaking some poorly-understood emergent behavior of the software, is evidence that C coreutils is not in fact modular, reuseable, and easily-comprehensible. This is true regardless of whether or not the Rust rewrite (or another language rewrite) actually happens or not.
by cyberax | 2025-10-24 22:52:35+00:00
> And nuclear is scalable if you force other sources off the grid in favor of nuclear (and force customers to not use renewables "behind the meter").

Not really? Nuclear is not any different from coal. And plenty of countries have coal generation in the mix. France also is majority-nuclear.

And so far, nuclear is the second known technology (after hydro) that actually demonstrated close to 100% fossil-free grid.

So far, there is nothing similar for solar. Even though it's supposed to be oh-so-cheap.

> In Texas now there is no chance of new nuclear construction. ERCOT is a competitive market and new nuclear simply doesn't make sense.

Well, yeah. Because they can just allow the grid to die during the next Arctic air blast.
by mgerdts | 2025-10-24 22:53:04+00:00
Soapy water (dish soap) in a spray bottle works wonders. Once they are wet and bubbly they can’t fly, making it safe to knock them to the ground and squish them.

If you happen to have the spray bottle in hand while they are flying at you, a quick mist in the air in their flight path will turn them away.
by eightysixfour | 2025-10-24 22:53:21+00:00
Power is either in concentration mode or diffusion mode. When certain people perceive the pie is not growing anymore, they switch to power concentration strategies to get bigger slices of the pie. The winners take over, become the new feudal lords, etc. I'd argue the switch in the US happened sometime around the mid to late 60's and started showing up in the policy of the 70s: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

What happened was the United States became, for all intents and purposes, post-scarcity. We had enough stuff, now it was a game of who got it.

"Feudal" approaches to running corporations and is because Democracy isn't about being the most competitive, so of course it isn't right for an economically incentivized business. It is making an intentional trade-off from efficiency for long-run stability and human dignity. Feudalism is playing a finite game (you must win). Democracy is trying to play an infinite one (you must make it to the next turn).
by echelon | 2025-10-24 22:53:41+00:00
I saw a post by a Gam Jam organizer recently.

This person related that in the years prior to this one, artists were essential members of every Game Jam team. Getting art for the games was the hardest, most limiting step. Without an artist, the games were limited in scope. Not every team could get an artist.

This year, many teams didn't have artists at all, and yet they were able to create more complete games with good looking art assets.

This isn't "firing" artists. This is making engineers more effective.

I work in the video space now, and I can't even begin to tell you how effective AI models make editors. It's like a super power.
by wellthisisgreat | 2025-10-24 22:53:49+00:00
> I do have a 5090, so it takes about 4 to 5 minutes to make a 5 second clip.

what is your setup? took 2 hours for me on 9950x3d with 5090. Any idea what I could be missing? or maybe some other variable is off - i was using default .yml values.
by desireco42 | 2025-10-24 22:54:01+00:00
My kids went to Montessori school, first private which was good, they learned a lot of life skills, not so much academics tbh, which is why I switched them to public Montessori, which was in name only.

What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California.

But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-24 22:54:04+00:00
It probably varies from area to area, but in the US iOS first is common.

Having developed both, it makes sense.

iOS is by far the more profitable of the two platforms and its support burden is substantially lower — far fewer versions to think about with the bulk of users running 0-2 versions behind, single form factor (only size variants), zero manufacturer skin quirks/bugs to deal with. It’s a more fertile environment for getting up and running and getting the core product shaken out.

Android can come later when you’re out of rapid iteration and have the bandwidth to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the Android world.
by yencabulator | 2025-10-24 22:54:17+00:00
Plenty of RVs have rooftop solar panels that'll routinely travel at 65 mph into a 35 mph headwind with no trouble. They're mounted with just plenty of little L-brackets screwed into essentially a plywood roof. Usually an RV roof has lightweight metal struts underneath for load support, but that's not what the solar panels mount to, that's mostly to carry the weight of a person standing on the roof. Never heard anyone have wind shear issues, the only trouble the L-brackets cause is water intrusion when the caulk ages and fails.
by bitpush | 2025-10-24 22:54:39+00:00
> I'd rather see slower development if it was moving in the right direction.

What makes you think it'd happen if full-time employees at Firefox cant do it? We can poop on the leadership over at Mozilla, but there are FTEs getting paid to work on Firefox.

You cant just replace with few people running passion project on weekends, and even get the remote success Firefox has.

Browser is extremely complex. HN is underestimating how much work goes into making a browser.
by kazinator | 2025-10-24 22:56:06+00:00
"Escher's art, Smith Chart and Hyperbolic Geometry"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3427377_Escher's_ar...

"A conceptual relation between Circle Limit IV, an artistic creation by M.C. Escher, and Smith Chart, geographical aid for microwave engineering created by P.H. Smith, was established. The basis of Escher's art and Smith chart can both be traced back to invariance of the cross ration of four complex numbers under Möbius transformation on the domain of complex numbers. The Smith chart can be used as an aid for constructing Escher-like drawings that display periodic mosaic patterns and at the same time convey the perception of infinite progression within a unit circle."
by bitpush | 2025-10-24 22:56:15+00:00
> I’m guessing Ladybird will prove you wrong in due time

It'll be a usable product, but it will be extremely extremely niche, until the dev burns out or just quit it.

I hope I'm wrong, but a browser is a XXL type project and needs proper funding (means = there should be a reason for it to exist, not altruistic as lets have an alternate because reasons ..)
by switchbak | 2025-10-24 22:56:40+00:00
Hi Paul - I'm a big fan of Quilt from Vancouver Island.

It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.

Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
by ishtanbul | 2025-10-24 22:57:03+00:00
I have a schedule in home assistant for it to run on all weekdays at 1pm, except if my partner is home, it won’t run. She is afraid of robots and i wouldnt hear the end of it if she encountered it and couldn’t disable it. Home assistant knows if she is home based on her phone.

I have been exploring valetudo because the roborock integration breaks pretty often. But it seems like a chore and could brick my robot.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-10-24 22:58:19+00:00
> It clearly has very finite bounds by the fact we haven’t achieved agi by running an llm in a loop..

That's one hell of a criterion. Test-time inference undergoes a similar scaling law to pretraining, and has resulted in dramatically improved performance on many complex tasks. Law of diminishing returns kicks in of course, but this doesn't mean it's ineffective.

> akin to taking a few more stabs at RNG

Assuming I understand you correctly, I disagree. Scaling laws cannot appear with glassy optimisation procedures (essentially iid trials until you succeed, the mental model you seem to be implying here). They only appear if the underlying optimisation is globally connected and roughly convex. It's no different than gradient descent in this regard.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-24 22:59:50+00:00
Of course it's allowed. People can do whatever they want. If they think it over, consider the implications of what they are doing and decide that this is what they want, then by all means.

Choosing licenses due to peer pressure is completely stupid though. If you're not sure, you can just not pick a license at all. Copyright 2025 all rights reserved. If you must pick a license just because, then the reasonable choice is the strongest copyleft license available, simply because it maximizes leverage. The less you give away, the more conditions, the more leverage. It's that simple.

That people are actually feeling "pressure" to pick permissive licenses leads me to conclude this is a psyop. It's a wealth transfer, from well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations. It's being actively normalized so that people choose it "by default" without thinking. Yeah, just give it all away! Who cares, right?

I urge people to think about what they are doing.
Would the .NET community benefit from an open-source MassTransit fork?
by _gezt | 2025-10-24 23:01:14+00:00
It’s 4 AM in my time zone, and after a lot of thinking, I finally sat down to write this post.

A few months ago, MassTransit announced that they are going commercial. That was a big shock for many of us in the .NET ecosystem.

Some of us thought someone would eventually fork the project and keep it open, but that hasn’t really happened yet, probably because it’s not a small project. Understanding it deeply and maintaining it properly would easily be a full-time job.

My idea: an open-source fork called [name-redacted] I’m thinking seriously about maintaining a fully open-source fork of MassTransit, called [name-redacted], that stays community-driven and free forever.

My initial plan:

I’ll take over as the primary maintainer at the beginning.

Over time, we’ll bring in 3/4 core maintainers so the project never depends on a single person.

The goal is long-term stability, improved documentation, and transparent governance.

A bit about me

I’m not anyone special in the .NET world, just a developer with about who loves working deep in the infrastructure layer. I enjoy understanding what happens inside the .NET runtime and working on complex system design problems.

So a project like MassTransit is honestly a dream to work on.

But here are the two big questions that have been keeping me up tonight:

This would basically be a full-time job. How would I manage that?

Does the community even want this? Would you actually use and support a well-maintained open-source fork?

I can’t answer that second question alone; that’s why I’m here, asking the community.

If you’re a current or past MassTransit user, I’d love to hear your honest thoughts. Would a stable, open-source alternative matter to you? Would you consider using it or even contributing if it existed?

Please comment below or DM me. I’d really appreciate it.

My plan, if there’s interest MassTransit v8 will remain open-source and supported until December 2026, which gives me some breathing room. In that time, I plan to:

Deeply understand the code and learn the transports I’m less familiar with.

Restructure and improve the documentation — I think it could be more organized and easier to approach.

Add API references for all types (classes, interfaces, etc.) that are currently missing.

I know it might sound a bit crazy, but I’m okay with that. I’d rather take a shot at something that matters.

Even if you’re not a MassTransit user, I’d still love to hear your opinion. Do you think the .NET ecosystem needs a strong, community-backed service bus library again?

Thanks for reading. (And for tolerating a slightly sleep-deprived 4 AM post.)
by wry_discontent | 2025-10-24 23:01:50+00:00
I've used zippers a couple times.

Once for navigating a collection of deeply nested routes in a webapp, and once for navigating deeply nested xml to grab very particular data.

Both times it was pretty pleasant and nice to use.

I wouldn't reach for them in most normal situations cause they're more complicated to get right than simple looping (or `clojure.walk/prewalk`), but if you have large semi-predictable data structures, you can do cool stuff with zippers.
by switchbak | 2025-10-24 23:02:19+00:00
It's really amazing how often I hear that same story: poor choices by the installer left the home owner in a bind with a poorly functioning system. The industry (certainly the residential side) really does need better educated installers/planners.

Even as a homeowner who's a bit of an energy geek, it's entirely too challenging to understand the entire space and what options fit one's needs. LLM's help a lot here (if you can trust them!), but it's a funny situation where there's silos of knowledge that are hard to connect.
by yencabulator | 2025-10-24 23:03:06+00:00
> With a generator, I can pause between steps, but I can't, say, retry the third step four times until it succeeds, suspend the entire process, and then jump straight to the fourth step.

If I recall correctly, other solutions in this space work by persisting & memoizing the results of the steps as they succeed, so the whole thing can be rerun and anything already completed uses the memoized result.
by dathinab | 2025-10-24 23:03:39+00:00
and also might be just temporary

like overriding it now makes a lot of sense, there needs to be grace periods etc.

but we live in a world where OSes have to become increasingly more resilient to misbehaving programs (mainly user programs, or "server programs" you can mostly isolate with services, service accounts/users etc.). And with continuous increases in both supply chain attacks and crappy AI code this will only get worse.

And as such quotas/usage limits of a temp fs being shared between all user space programs like lvm2 and dmraid is kinda a bad idea.

and for such robustness there aren't that many ways around this change, basically the alternatives are:

- make /var/lock root only and break a very small number of programs which neither use flock nor follow the XDG spec (XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is where your user scoped locks go, like e.g. for wayland or pipewire)

- change lvm2, dmraid, alsa(the low level parts) and a bunch of other things your could say are core OS components to use a different root only lock dir. Which is a lot of work and a lot of breaking changes, much more then the first approach.)

- use a "magic" virtual file system which presents a single unified view of /var/lock, but under the hood magically separates them into different tempfs with different quotas (e.g. based on used id the file gets remapped to /run/user/{uid}, except roots gets a special folder and I guess another folder for "everything else"???) That looks like a lot of complexity to support a very small number of program doing something in a very (20+ years) outdated way. But similar tricks do exist in systemd (e.g. PrivateTemp).

kinda only the first option makes sense

but it's not that it needs to be done "NOW", like in a year would be fine too, but in 5 years probably not
by wtallis | 2025-10-24 23:03:45+00:00
The existence of a BIOS option called "Linux-compatible sleep mode" is a dead giveaway that the default behavior is enshittified sleep that wakes up your system periodically so it can check your email, phone home to Microsoft, and maybe fail to go back to sleep.

Having such an obvious name like that is a gift, because otherwise you have to start decoding Intel Marketing names for their features to figure out which are actually anti-features.
by lrvick | 2025-10-24 23:04:04+00:00
I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before.

If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point, and are unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable.

If this pisses you off, ask yourself why.
by throwaway101157 | 2025-10-24 23:05:34+00:00
> 90% of engineers are not inventing new things ...

That raises the question of just how much of a difference you need for something to be an invention. Merely copying another program is not invention, while coming up with and implementing TCP definitely is. But is implementing another instance of a CRUD app invention? Is configuring a server invention? What about if the configuration is written by a script? The dividing line seems harder to pin down than one might at first think.
by marcprux | 2025-10-24 23:05:45+00:00
The Swift SDK for Android doesn't specify or mandate any user-interface technology, but leaves it open for other projects to build upon. For example, Skip.tools re-implements SwiftUI for Android by bridging it to Jetpack Compose, so you can use the same codebase for both your business logic as well as UI layer.

We write about it at https://skip.tools/blog/fully-native-android-swift-apps/ and an example of an app on the Play Store that demonstrates this is the Skip Showcase app: https://skip.tools/docs/samples/skipapp-showcase-fuse/

[Disclaimer: I work on the Skip product, and I am also a founding member of the Swift Android Workgroup and am the release manager for the Swift SDK for Android]
by nickcw | 2025-10-24 23:06:11+00:00
I've used Smith charts many times on my NanoVNA analysing antennas, but despite being mathematically inclined I never thought of the complex plane mapping involved

f(z) = (z − 1)/(z + 1)

The Smith chart is useful to electronic engineers because a given VSWR (the thing you try to minimise to get a good antenna) becomes a circle about the center of the Smith chart

VSWR= (1 + | Γ |)/(1 - | Γ |)

So to make your antenna better, get the plot closer to the center. Whether it is above the line or below tells you whether the antenna is inductive or capacitive and hence which kind of loading to add.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-24 23:06:34+00:00
Let me google that for you was when a person e.g. asked "what's a tomato?", and you'd paste in the link http://www.google.com/search?q=what's+a+tomato

That's not like pasting in a screenshot or a copy/paste of an AI answer, it's being intentionally dismissive. You weren't actually doing the "work" for them, you were calling them lazy.

The way I usually see the AI paste being used is from people trying to refute something somebody said, but about a subject that they don't know anything about.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-24 23:06:39+00:00
If we make some massive physics breakthrough tommrow is an LLM going to be able to fully integrate that into its current data set?

Or will we need to produce a host of documents and (re)train a new one in order for the concept to be deeply integrated.

This distinction is subtle but lost on many who think that our current path will get us to AGI...

That isn't to say we haven't created a meaningful tool but the sooner we get candid and realistic about what it is and how it works the sooner we can get down to the business of building practical applications with it. (And as an aside scaling it, something we arent doing well with now).
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-24 23:06:53+00:00
>>> Yes. The problem is that it's common in the industry. But it's ultimately up to the patient. Maybe alone. Pretty much guaranteed scared. Undereducated, worrying about their likely life threatening potential illness or injury. That's basically under duress.

> There's a big difference between not getting the MRI and getting the MRI without gadolinium. My suggestion is to ensure that people know the risks outside of just the people who work in it. I'm not sure how that didn't get across in my original comment. With your comprehension skills, you are at an increased risk of falling victim to this exact scenario

I don't see anything wrong with the GP's comprehension skills.

Anyway, every procedure has risk - and no procedure is recommended if there is not an offsetting clinical benefit. There are clear guidelines for when gadolinium is to be used for an MRI and the guidelines factor in risk for 'NSF'.