MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Second generation of intro to software dev for 3rd graders
by xrd | 2025-10-20 13:34:09+00:00
I posted this last year asking for help in creating an introduction to software development for 3rd graders:

"Next week I'm going into my daughter's classroom to teach about software engineering. I want to teach them about the magic of it."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42056775

The best suggestion was

"I think about the PB&J demo a lot."

It was a big hit! I took a lot of the suggestions and had so much fun. I'm going to do it again for my 4th and 5th graders classes and could use some help in improving it.

A few highlights from last year:

* I brought a serrated knife and ketchup packets. When they said put the jelly on the bread with the knife, I gripped the serrated end and pretended my fingers bled (ketchup works great as blood). * I brought in vaseline AKA petroleum jelly. When they said put jelly on the bread, I contemplated aloud "Well, you said JELLY, and this says JELLY!"

I offered to give the sandwich to one lucky kid afterward, but surprisingly, no one took me up on the opportunity to eat a sandwich with peanut butter, vaseline and ketchup. Kids these days are so spoiled, 6-7!

This year I want to do it again. But, I want to add some ideas:

* importance of teamwork: I think this differentiates good software teams from bad teams. * importance of good communication: I was thinking about teaching them about how important communication and planning is. Last year I had slips of paper where I asked a different scribe to write down the instructions, and then I took those, reordered them with class input and then took action. But, perhaps I can expand on that and really drill into them the value of planning and good written communication. * managers: I was thinking about talking about how the managers are often the best paid, because they take responsibility for all the moving pieces, and the success or failure of the project. I expect this might be a controversial take here on HN!

Any suggestions?
by palmotea | 2025-10-20 13:34:29+00:00
> I would recommend if anything a life-experiences checklist of the team collectively. Did any of them hail from rural poverty? Urban poverty? Did they attend a fancy dinner party? Were or are they disabled in some way? Can they read? Did they do factory work? Customer service work? Did any not go to colllege [sic]? Did they go to college?

I think such a wide-ranging exercise is likely to waste time and not help the team's performance. It might serve some other purpose, but improving team performance is not it.

> An auto engineering team may or may not have anybody with factory floor experience but all will have worked in the auto industry.

An auto engineering team with some guy who used to work on the factory floor is exactly the kind of diversity that I think would actually improve team performance.
by saynay | 2025-10-20 13:34:41+00:00
On the other hand, I had the misfortune of having a hardware failure on one of my Hetzner servers. They got a replacement harddrive in fairly quickly, but still complete data loss on that server, so I had to rebuild it from scratch.

This was extra painful, because I wasn't using one of the OS that is blessed by Hetzner, so it requires a remote install. Remote installs require a system that can run their Java web plugin, and that have a stable and fast enough connection to not time out. The only way I have reliably gotten them to work is by having an ancient Linux VM that was also running in Hetzner, and had the oldest Firefox version I could find that still supported Java in the browser.

My fault for trying to use what they provide in a way that is outside their intended use, and props to them for letting me do it anyway.
by Ray20 | 2025-10-20 13:34:41+00:00
> That's the paradox of tolerance for you

That's not a paradox of tolerance, it is the anti-democratic practice of fascism.

> they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.

This is exactly my point: an emerging fascist government through authoritarian or oppressive practices destroys tolerance by silencing people for any words that go against their agenda. There is no paradox here.
Ask HN: New YouTube player not working in Firefox
by gethly | 2025-10-20 13:34:47+00:00
I have noticed weird look of youtube on my *phone* yesterday. Today, I cannot play a single video on my *computer* when I use firefox. But when i switch to chrome-based browser, it plays just fine.

It is not adblock issue and has been like this the whole day.

Anyone else experiencing these issues? I saw some reddit posts but they span across multiple days, so I would think this was short outage from few days ago, but it looks like is is not and likely google trying to F with firefox again, like they like to do.
by hunglee2 | 2025-10-20 13:35:01+00:00
positive take: a bifurcated tech tree might give us (humanity) a better chance of faster advancement, as it would be a persistent A/B test in live environment. Where I would join you in the crossing of fingers is to ensure such A/B testing is competitive but not destructive. We may even evolve to a situation of complementarity, an American Ying vs the Chinese Yang. Lets hope so!
by RealityVoid | 2025-10-20 13:35:04+00:00
I honestly don't think it's stupidity that prevents you from having a good result. I think there are 2 likely causes.

First, and most common is an emotional cause. Falling in love with a theory, settling on it, emotionally, before you even start digging, will make you weight data differently. Extremely smart people will fall pray to this and, again, this is not an intellectual issue, it's an emotional one. I think pursuit of truth is an emotional endeavor as much as it is an intellectual one.

The second one is plainly bad data. Here you can arrive very easily even if you are extremely smart and you are emotionally developed to let yourself get out of your way. Getting data is expensive, so a lot of times we avoid gathering it ourselves Bad data will ruin you and taint your conclusion. People closes to practicing something are most capable of surmounting this because they are capable of gathering their own data.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-20 13:35:05+00:00
> I think you're, er, exaggerating this a little; Intel and GlobalFoundries both have large fabs in Europe. Given that Intel is going to be fabbing some nVidia chips, some of those will quite likely be made in their "Intel 4" (ie 7nm) fab in Ireland. And GlobalFoundries has a big (albeit older-tech) fab in Germany. Bosch also has a big 40nm fab in Germany for car stuff; old process, but high volume.

The thing is, the old GlobalFoundries fab has been constructed decades ago. Building something like this from scratch nowadays involves so much more paperwork than back then, it's a massive hurdle to overcome.

> As for medicine, the world's largest drug exporting countries are Germany, Switzerland, the US, and Ireland, more or less in that order

Finished medicine yes. But the precursors and "active pharmaceutical ingredients" (APIs)? 40% China, 20% India... and that's the total market share. For some ingredients, you got 95% (vit B) to 98% (Chloramphenicol) of the entire world's supply being made in China [1]. And of the APIs made in the EU or US, quite a lot depend on precursors made in India and China, or filler materials.

Medicine isn't about curing patients any more, it is about making money first and foremost, and that's why everyone and their dog went to India and China - India first because India is more cooperative with international audit teams than China is. And even then, there have been quite the amount of scandals [2][3][4].

(Side note re [4]: wtf is that banner "Democrats have shut down the government"?! Yes, everyone knows about the government shutdown, but ... isn't it illegal to blatantly engage in partisanship for government agencies?!)

[1] https://chinaobservers.eu/how-to-address-europes-dependence-...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/20/health/fda-medications-pr...

[3] https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/12/fda-withdraw-approval-40...

[4] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/indian-cancer-drug-m...
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-20 13:35:09+00:00
This tactic is often used to get attention. There was outrage about this in the late 2000s when reality TV/talk show series followed people in a particular poverty stricken area in the UK.

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

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

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5455122

I remember thinking at the time that these were quite exploitative.
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-20 13:36:03+00:00
> Not all utility companies have the same policies, but all have a resiliency plan to avoid blackout that is a bit more serious than "Just run it on AWS".

You're arguing as if "run it on AWS" was a decision that didn't undergo the same kinds of risk assessment. As someone who's had to complete such processes (and in some companies, even define them), I can assure you that nobody of any competency runs stuff on AWS complacently.

In fact running stuff with resilience in AWS isn't even as simple as "just running it in AWS". There's a whole plethora of things to consider, and each with its own costs attached. As the meme goes "one does not simply just run something on AWS"
by sigmoid10 | 2025-10-20 13:36:19+00:00
If you can be beguiled by random images from an unknown solicitor to make rash financial decisions, the root of the problem is probably sitting in front of the screen. "A fool and his money are soon parted" is not a new thing, it's just easier to accomplish than ever before thanks to the dopamine conditioned internet and AI content generation. These victims don't need new legal layers of trust, they need a social media detox.
by alganet | 2025-10-20 13:36:31+00:00
It is true that empathy is defined as ability to relate, and that doesn't imply happiness. Similar with intelligence. It's a quirk of our current reductionist world.

However, our definitions for those things are murky. I'm making a bold claim that being evil is ultimately a dumb move.

I'm also making a bold claim by estabilishing a path from intelligence to empathy to kindness. Actually, before intelligence, comes communication.

Communication -> Intelligence -> Empathy -> Kindness

In that sense, when empathy does not lead to kindness, it's because whoever has it stopped before moving to the next step.

The empath who is not kind stopped at an important step. He is able to relate to others, but is not able to observe higher dynamics except for when those dynamics include himself.

Maybe you're being naive about what kindness means. It seems that you are relating it to altruism and charity in a very superficial sense.
by phkahler | 2025-10-20 13:36:33+00:00
I've always hated when even real images are used to promote something, but the image is unrelated. Example: a horrific image of a smashed car to show the result of drunk driving or phone use but where that wasn't the actual cause of the crash in the picture. Claiming "this is a result of xxx" is a lie. There are plenty of real cases out there so if you're making stuff I can't trust you - particularly for those asking for donations.

So now they use AI imagining stuff...
by Arch-TK | 2025-10-20 13:37:17+00:00
The problem isn't necessarily the need for permission, it is excessive bureaucracy.

As another commenter explained, the need for permission is there to prevent harm before it can occur, rather than punishing it after it occurs, because the harm can be of the sort which cannot be undone.

If I want to build and sell houses, I should be able to do it, but it shouldn't take going to 10 government offices, filling out 50 forms and waiting a year for someone to give me a permit. And then, once I have built it, it shouldn't take another year for someone to check I did it correctly.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-20 13:37:33+00:00
I don't know if there is any common practice among multi-modal input "LLM"s as to how they encode image inputs - convert them into "vision tokens", but it's basically going to come down to splitting the image into a grid of regions and encoding those.

I'm not sure there's any information theoretic intuition to be had with DeepSeek's experiments - it seems to be more about what's the lowest resolution image resolution/grid you can get away with and still capture enough image detail to be able to accurately perform OCR on it.

It'd be cool if Karpathy would extend his NanoChat to be multi-modal to spread the knowledge of how this is typically done.
by ho_schi | 2025-10-20 13:37:38+00:00
I avoid eating and drinking in front of the computer (hygienic).

But a little sticky liquid is enough. A drop of something hard is also enough. I was able to rescue a ThinkPad by popping out a key and clean the mechanism with isopropyl. Another one was sadly killed by the power-button, which got defunct. But a 20 Euro keyboard safes it.

Don’t underestimate how much devices get killed by simple stuff like lose hinges, defective trackpads and so on. People are often careful, often not and usually helpless when it is damaged.

The water holes in the ThinkPads existed for…reasons. But it doesn’t help if people tilt them in sheer panic.
by tete | 2025-10-20 13:37:54+00:00
> The AWS team keeps touting the rock solid reliability of AWS as a reason why we shouldn’t diversify our cloud. Should be a fun meeting!

This is and was never true. I've done setups in the past where monitoring happened "multi cloud" with also multiple dedicated servers. Was pretty broad so you could actually see where things broke.

Was quite some time ago so I don't have the data, but AWS never came out on top.

It actually matched largely with what netcraft.com put out. Not sure if they still do that and release those things to the public.
by dlisboa | 2025-10-20 13:37:59+00:00
History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.

---

* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.
by honkostani | 2025-10-20 13:38:07+00:00
Empathy is a hackable interface- those that are exposing it, are in this attention economy civil war zone- lesser beings by default.

They once where protected by the state- but the state, as policeman- has been continuously reduced in its protector role, by those, who found hackable political interfaces, the ticks on the state wave through the fleas on the people. The pent-up backlash to all this results in a militant vote for anti-parasitic and exposure limiting institutions.

Fascism promises to remove those attackers, by fire-walling away the exterior and prosecuting perceived attackers on the inside of the nation.

Every successful scam, every allowed exploit, is a advertising for the totalitarians who promise to restore order.
by dijit | 2025-10-20 13:38:11+00:00
> as soon as people start using any vendor-specific functionality

It's also true in circumstances where things have the same name but act differently.

You'd be forgiven for believing that AWS IAM and GCP IAM are the same thing for example, but in GCP an IAM Role is simply a list of permissions that you can attach to an identity. In AWS an IAM Role is the identity itself.

Other examples; if you're coming from GCP, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Networks are regional in AWS, which will be annoying to fix later when you realise you need to create peering connections.

Oh and while default firewall rules are stateful on both, if you dive into more advanced network security, the way rules are applied and processed can have subtle differences. The inherent global nature of the GCP VPC means firewall rules, by default, apply across all regions within that VPC, which requires a different mindset than AWS where rules are scoped more tightly to the region/subnet.

There's like, hundreds of these little details.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 13:38:45+00:00
Sure, but the opposite also applies. If in 1969 you guessed that the wall would last another 20 years, then in 1989, you'll guess that the wall of Berlin will last another 40 years - when in fact it was about to fall. And in 1949, when the wall was a few months old, you'll guess that it will last for a few months at most.

So no, you're not very likely to be right at all. Now sure, if you guess "50 years" for every event, your average error rate will be even worse, across all possible events. But it is absolutely not true that it's more likely that SNL will last for another 50 years as it is that it will last for another 10 years. They are all exactly as likely, given the information we have today.
by g-b-r | 2025-10-20 13:39:15+00:00
Can we not promote this AI-generated "article" on that banners-ridden site?

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640754

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640772

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640827

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640838

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641143
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-10-20 13:39:43+00:00
I honestly hate that idea. I am slowly adjusting, but I got used to the idea that you can at least trust the other party not to outright lie ( although I was already expected omission, and other 'normal selling tactics' ).

I posit that what we need is heavily enforced truth in advertising laws.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-20 13:39:43+00:00
Not only does it do this all very safely, it uses the absolute most minimal of memory to achieve this.

This video from 9 years ago... 1 million people in 1 chatroom, on a server with 40+ cores and 128GB of memory, one single physical server, it used up about 30 GB of memory. Show me a language that can do this efficiently. In under a second it went to a million different connections. The cores didn't spin up to grind hardcore, none of that. Just efficient lightweight processes running. This isn't even on "raw Erlang" its on Elixir -> BEAM which is impressive on its own in my eyes. I would love to see equivalent videos on similar hardware today in other languages. ;) Please by all mean, show me your JVM application that can handle this.

I also love that he thinks all those languages that are a decade (and decades) younger than the BEAM which has been in production since 1992 are more production ready and tested. I don't think he realizes the origin story to Erlang whatsoever, it was 100% built to be used in production for a major telecoms provider.

https://youtu.be/N4Duii6Yog0
by Nasrudith | 2025-10-20 13:39:50+00:00
Why is it that anybody who uses the word "decolonizing" or some variant of it just seems to think doing racism again but from "the oppressed" and then Orwellianly gussying it up in academic pseudo-intellwwhere is the answer to everything? I have seen them unironically suggest race-limited elections as the proper way to do referendums. While dehumanizing people as "colonizers", charging them with the sins of their forefathers, and promoting ethnic cleansing.

Can you even actually define what the actual fuck you would change in the imagery in this context of soliciting donations from largely white people?

Goddamn right it is about money! Money marshalls the resources which can help people. This is kindergarten level comprehension about what charity is and why they want money.

Don't talk to about human rights when you expand them so frivolously, and yet show a clear disregard for the effect on outcome of actual people in favor of scoring ideological correctness points. Only somebody incredibly privileged would have such skewed priorities.
by foldor | 2025-10-20 13:40:27+00:00
This is very wrong. Ghidra might decompile to some C code, but this is a completely different, and very high bar. This is 100% matching C code that compiles to the exact binary the game shipped with. This means it's able to be modified, tweaked and upgraded. Ghidra is helpful to do some research, but it won't compile.
by TruffleLabs | 2025-10-20 13:40:36+00:00
"Biocomputing could help address the skyrocketing energy demands of AI, which threatens climate emissions targets and led some tech giants to resort to nuclear power"

I'm reminded of the Battlestar Galactica episode "You Can't Go Home Again" where Starbuck repairs a crashed Cylon ship to get home. The main element she had to figure out is how the biological brain of the Cylon controlled the hardware.
by spyspy | 2025-10-20 13:41:22+00:00
Eh, the "best practices" that would've prevented this aren't trivial to implement and are definitely far beyond what most engineering teams are capable of, in my experience. It depends on your risk profile. When we had cloud outages at the freemium game company I worked at, we just shrugged and waited for the systems to come back online - nobody dying because they couldn't play a word puzzle. But I've also had management come down and ask what it would take to prevent issues like that from happening again, and then pretend they never asked once it was clear how much engineering effort it would take. I've yet to meet a product manager that would shred their entire roadmap for 6-18 months just to get at an extra 9 of reliability, but I also don't work in industries where that's super important.
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-20 13:41:32+00:00
Everything I've ever needed can be found on eBay, Aliexpress, iFixit and elsewhere. That is everything from drive caddies for old expired Thinkpads, CCFL tubes for Acer and HP consumer models, inverters for the same, CPUs, random lids for machines missing those, etc. Also, keyboards for those terrible Apple models which require the equivalent of open heart surgery to replace them. You might need to get one of those bags with 120 tiny screws with it if those are not included, make sure to check.
by acdha | 2025-10-20 13:41:58+00:00
That’s far from clear. For example, healthcare costs have risen sharply but you’d need to demonstrate that hiring foreign workers contributed to that rather than simply being a reaction to the unsustainable costs.

Similarly, in education if it was just a few prestige schools it’d be easy to believe that Harvard and Yale were hiking their base rates to exploit international students while finding credits for some of the others, but the trend is across the board even at less prestigious state schools and I’d want to see data that it’s not better explained by other factors like schools maximizing revenue from student aid.
by naikrovek | 2025-10-20 13:42:21+00:00
> (Interesting that an anectode like above got downvoted)

experts almost unilaterally judge newbies harshly, as if the newbies should already know all of the mistakes to avoid. things like this are how you learn what mistakes to avoid.

"hindsight is 20/20" means nothing to a lot of people, unfortunately.
by sensanaty | 2025-10-20 13:42:35+00:00
I would've agreed back in the Win10 days, but Win11 explorer is shit. I have a 9800x3d, literally top of the line CPU with a crazy fast brand new NVMe SSD, and Win11 explorer takes a good 3 seconds from time to time to load any folder on my system. VERY often, the explorer window is even blank as if it's loading a web application (it is) for a few seconds! There's some decent QoL like tabs and stuff like that, but I can't believe how fucking sluggish it is in regular operation, alongside all the other terrible changes M$ decided to make.

I upgraded back down to Win10 and plan on making it my absolute last Windows version I ever use, Win 11 is just unbelievably shit in so many ways even by M$ standards.