MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chipsrafferty | 2025-10-21 13:50:38+00:00
I'm not saying this is the case, but isn't it possible that you weren't a "great engineer that they would love to have at any price" in the past, and you developed your skills and knowledge? Or even if you've always been a great engineer, since you were born, why take personal offense to not getting a job before? Interviews are mostly luck, anyways, so the previous interviews have no relation to the 3rd one.
by ca_tech | 2025-10-21 13:50:57+00:00
There is data but nowhere near the amount of written language that is fairly normalized and without the need to account for additional features such as language, dialect, intonation, facial expression, hand gestures. Speech to text is used as the translation layer as it throws many of those other features away and contextualizes it into a set of tokens that are much more efficient to map between languages.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-21 13:51:11+00:00
Electrek missed the boat

Tesla is now a robotics company, and their car business is now a rounding error of their future potential. Their robotaxi business is also not really important either.

See Tesla will now be building fully autonomous robots. This will allow Elon Stark to lock on to multi-trillion dollar revenues that are just around the corner once they dial in these last few bolts of the Optimus bot. Forget everything about the cars and the taxi. Those are outdated and irrelvant. Fill you head with visions of Tesla bots being everywhere all the time doing everything for you. By the end of 2026 there will be 100 million Tesla bots sold. So the stock is grossly undervalued. Go buy the stock please god buy the stock how the fuck is tesla ever going to fill the boots of a $1.5T company with collapsing revenue and the veil of empty promises slipping off.
by chuckadams | 2025-10-21 13:51:21+00:00
The second quote was "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers", and it's attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM saying it in 1943. The real quote is indeed from Watson, but in 1953, summarizing the sales projections of a specific model of machine, and noting that they actually sold 18 of them.

https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-real...

Gates denies ever saying anything like the 640K quote, but it was possibly someone at Microsoft being salty about the 640K limit that IBM had imposed on the PC through its design.
by wink | 2025-10-21 13:51:27+00:00
I've not seen a lot of research about how allergies develop as you get older.

For me, as a kid: very, very allergic to cats, kinda allergic to many food items and a little to horse hair (only noticable when shedding in the spring)

As a young adult: Only 2-3 food allergies remain, cats still strong, hayfever starts.

Then I took some shots against the hayfever for 2-3 years, and the cat thing has mostly improved and the hayfever is basically gone. So only 2-3 food items remain.
by stetrain | 2025-10-21 13:51:43+00:00
It can be best in the market and still not what was promised.

Tesla has gained part of their stock valuation and customer base over the years by promising Level 5 FSD. As in, you can sleep while the car drives you to work, or the car can go make money for you as a Robotaxi on the Tesla Network when you aren't using it.

They haven't delivered those things which they have been promising to customers since 2016.
by quantumtwist | 2025-10-21 13:52:49+00:00
This is a nice practical technique for open quantum systems with relatively low entanglement. The introduction lays out exactly what regime they're aiming at: 1. Affordable (laptop scale) 2. Captures "sufficient" quantum effects (low entanglement regime; you accurately can't simulate a quantum computer with this) 3. Straightforward to implement. From a cursory glance, it does all three. I'm slightly surprised that TWA hasn't been applied to open systems extensively before, but it was always a relatively obscure technique. I'm guessing this should be quite useful in practice for e.g. AMO and cavity systems with relatively large dissipation terms that prevent entanglement build up. However, I'd guess this wouldn't do very well near phase transitions. All-in-all, a nice new technique for a regime that didn't have too many options.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-21 13:53:34+00:00
> Big pharma is not incentivised to fund clinical studies on these type of plants since they'd rather create a synthetic form of whatever property of the plant is aiding the healing and patent that synthetic formula instead, so studies like these are not prioritized.

This is a silly myth that "alternative medicine" advocates preach. Big pharma is completely incentivised to fund clinical studies, exactly so they can refine a form of the chemical(s) involved and patent them. Even field research into Archaea species is funded by this.

What they are not interested in doing is saying, "Yeah, well, if you gather a few ounces of this wild plant and make a tea from it's roots, it's 90% likely to do the same thing as our pill."
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-21 13:53:54+00:00
> Whereas all the competition has to use their own R&D budget to show capability

Think of it as a vote of no confidence. The incumbent has the advantage. But if they've squandered their advantage so thoroughly that a new entrant can match their capabilities, this is an opportunity to switch horses.

NASA should have done this, for example, when Bechtel began shitting the bed with ML2 [1].

[1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-21 13:54:06+00:00
In general, yes, but in this specific instance, groundbreaking research or its lack isn't the core of the problem.

This is mostly about the new human-rated lander, which is an engineering problem. Notably, the US never had a reasonably safe spaceship, although Dragon may yet prove good. Both Apollos and Space Shuttles, developed under NASA, were pretty dangerous to their crews.
by CrtlKenny | 2025-10-21 13:54:12+00:00
Over the past few months, I’ve been in the same painful loop as many others — applying to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of jobs, tracking everything in spreadsheets, getting ghosted, and losing track of where I stood with each company.

Out of that chaos, I built JobHive — a lightweight web app that helps you: Track every job you apply to (status, stage, notes, links) Stay organized with follow-ups and reminders See your progress visually so the search feels less overwhelming

I made it because I genuinely needed it myself, not because I’m trying to build a “startup.” It’s $10/month mostly to help me keep the servers up, but people who’ve tried it said it’s been worth it for the sanity alone.

If you’re currently job hunting — try it out, give feedback, or tell me what would make it better for you. I’m hoping to make JobHive a small light in what’s been a really dark job market lately.

https://jobhiveapp.com/
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-21 13:54:14+00:00
Blue Origin is explicitly named in Duffy's statement. And if SpaceX's Starship HLS catches enough delays, they can slide into Blue Origin's Blue Moon HLS timeline - which is now being developed for Artemis 5, in 2030.

On top of working on a HLS lander, Blue Origin has a pretty large rocket developed already - New Glenn. They just don't have the reusability or the launch cadence, and their HLS needs at least two launches. So far, New Glenn has only ever flown once, with the first stage recovery attempt being unsuccessful. But they may get it into a good shape in time.

I do think that Artemis 3, currently stated for 2027, will be eventually delayed to ~2030, for many reasons. But I wouldn't trust Blue Origin to deliver before SpaceX even if they started the development at the same exact time, and they didn't. SpaceX is, by aerospace standards, a lean and mean company. SpaceX sets unhinged hyper-aggressive "if we lived in a perfect world" timelines, and delivers late. Blue Origin sets reasonable aerospace timelines, and still delivers late.

Blue Moon HLS is considerably less complex than Starship HLS, but it has a lot of the same milestones in front of it - including in-orbit propellant storage and fuel transfers from one vehicle to another. And currently, they certainly don't seem to be ahead of where SpaceX is now with Starship.

Other than Blue Origin and SpaceX? I just don't see anyone being able to squeeze out a HLS candndate in time for 2030. Who else is there in the space, with anywhere near the expertise? Firefly? Boeing?
by stavros | 2025-10-21 13:54:20+00:00
I made something close to MagicShifter a while ago, I didn't add an accelerometer, though:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/

I would really like to make it work with an accelerometer, as right now it's a bit fiddly to get the right speed for images, but I don't know if I can make it work.
by 7bit | 2025-10-21 13:54:25+00:00
> 105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"?

And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man.

105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive.

We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't deliver all that much value over the 70$ price tag.
by dTal | 2025-10-21 13:54:36+00:00
Agreed. I've read a lot of apologetics for KDE Connect but there's definitely something wrong with discovery. Often it will fail to discover other devices unless I click "refresh" in both devices. I've gone as far as writing a script to force-refresh at 1 minute intervals. Sometimes it can't be persuaded to work at all. Blame my network maybe, but LocalSend works every time.
by robviren | 2025-10-21 13:54:38+00:00
This has got to be one of the most visually pleasing explanations I have seen of these concepts. Congrats!

I attempted some similar VQ-VAE work instead trying to tokenize rendered text. I was curious if I could make a visual llm working on 10 pt rendered font, but I also tried using PDF sources. The basic idea was to do what more advanced diffusion image models can do where they generate images of text. Make a specific image text diffusion model to do completions. Further I wondered if I could embed things like document type and language so you could have a latent representation of text more abstracted than current dictionary tokenizers. Learned a lot and thought it was all beautifully displayed in this post.
by jerf | 2025-10-21 13:54:39+00:00
If you think about it, what would it even mean for an AI to give an "unbiased" answer to "How should I vote in $ELECTION?" It's a staggeringly huge pile of numbers and the idea that it would somehow be precisely balanced in the exact dead center from all perspectives is not even particularly possible... assuming you, dear reader, even agree that "exact dead center" is in fact "unbiased". Even if it so much as just says "I shouldn't tell you that but here are your options" the options are inevitably going to be biased, even if only by the order given, and if the AI tries to describe the options there goes all faint hopes for "unbiasedness".

Really about all it could do is offer a link to the most official government readout of what your ballot is going to be.
by holowoodman | 2025-10-21 13:54:47+00:00
> Nope, there is another important thing that matters: some of the cancers tested are really hard to detect early by other means, and very lethal when discovered late.

You are arguing for testing everyone there. If you cannot detect them by other means, you need to test for them this way. And do it for everyone. You have already set up the unrealistic wargaming scenario. You picked pancreatic cancer as your example where you do have to test every 6 months at least, because if you do it more rarely, the disease progression is so fast that testing is useless. There are no specific risk groups for pancreatic cancer beyond a slight risk increase by "the usual all-cancer risk factors". Nothing to pick a test group by.

And a 99% overall false positive rate is easy to achieve, lot's of tests that are in use have this property if you just test everyone very frequently. Each instance of testing has an inherent risk of being a false positive, and if you repeat that for each person, their personal false-positive risk of course goes up with it. All tests that are used frequently have an asymptotic 100% false positive rate.
by garganzol | 2025-10-21 13:54:50+00:00
Pascal was the first structured high-level language I learned when I was a kid.

After I learned C and started using it, I noted that I experience five times more memory-related issues in C programs than in an equivalent Pascal code I was writing before.

During that era, Pascal had a remarkable advantage few other languages could match: it used a single-pass compiler that generated machine code as it parsed the source code. No intermediate representations or syntax trees - just a direct translation from source to machine code, all thanks to the well thought-out language syntax invented by Nicolas Wirth. That feature made Pascal compilers incredibly fast.

In turn, it allowed to tighten up a typical development cycle of the day: (edit -> compile -> run) x N times. Given typical CPU speeds of the time, it made a night and day difference. For example, given the same piece of software under development with a comparable number of lines, Turbo Pascal development cycle was about 5 seconds, while Turbo C gave you 40 seconds of a round-trip time at best.

Pascal was the right tool at the right time. Both Apple and Microsoft initially used Pascal to develop their operating systems.

When available CPUs started to become faster and faster, that particular Pascal advantage began to fade out and other languages commenced eating away its market share. Somewhere between 1986 and 1992, software houses were switching to C in flocks.
by aw1621107 | 2025-10-21 13:55:29+00:00
> Sure, I think we’re essentially looking at the same thing from different angles.

I sort of lean towards thinking that they aren't exactly the same thing in general, but in the embedded C world they're correlated enough that it can be hard to separate individual influences.

> They are saying the changes in the C standard are minor enough that forcing people to upgrade isn’t worth the costs, such as losing compatibility with old toolchains for niche platforms. So they stay on an old C version.

Right, and I think that's a not unreasonable position when worded that way! I'm mostly complaining about the hyperbole - "unthinkable" and "any reason" are pretty high standards which I feel are basically impossible to meet in general - as with many things, there are always tradeoffs and the balance will shift over time.

I do wonder what effect LLVM has had, if any, on the Rust ecosystem's general fast pace. Less support for embedded systems means less early ecosystem pressure that might have motivated more stability, or something along those lines.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-21 13:55:30+00:00
If they were serious, they'd properly look into ending SLS after the ones that are being built are launched, cancel the upgrade, go after the company that spent the entire launch tower budget before even starting construction, open up bids for rockets to fly Orion (probably Vulcan or New Glenn IIRC), and sort out their space suit issues.

Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and restrictions for their constant failures and corruption. We've had the espionage scandal that forced the formation of ULA, SLS's extreme delays and overruns, supressing Vulcan's capabilities to prevent it from impinging on SLS's blank check, Starliner's inability to deliver (and at this point it seems unlikely the station will be around long enough for their 6 flights), and the scandal that caused their disqualification from the original HLS bid.

Starship is being painted as the sole blocker in Artemis, but I can't think of any component of Artemis that has any contractors delivering competently and on-time.

We still haven't heard anything about the status of the EVA suits, which the US has an even worse track record on than rockets. My understanding is that they haven't been able to build and bring a new suit into use, for 25+ years now, and not due to a lack of spending.
by freedomben | 2025-10-21 13:55:44+00:00
Yes I remember (I worked in that industry), but a few important caveats that you haven't mentioned:

* The cost was exorbitant

* The delivery estimates were hugely long and massively padded

* The precision was ensured through QA and acceptance testing processes that would easily be 10x the amount of cost/effort as the actual development was

* The amount of waste around the programs was incredible
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-21 13:56:07+00:00
I can name exactly one living human being who has memorized Beowulf. 1200 years ago that number was undoubtedly greater.

Not as relevant today, you say? OK, name someone who has memorized a work of similar length.

So, I agree with you. That kind of "long-read" memorization is no longer appreciated and cultivated, and I have no doubt it impacts our brains differently than watching a YT video.
by immibis | 2025-10-21 13:56:31+00:00
Android doesn't really have such a thing as quitting an app. You're meant to just stop doing stuff when off screen, and let your app be evicted in LRU order (or whatever order is actually used). If your app does background stuff you should have a settings toggle to do the background stuff or not, and when it's on and the phone is on, you do the background stuff.
by jmholla | 2025-10-21 13:56:59+00:00
Here's the article in question. [0] I think runxiyu is correct.

The author delves a bit more into the issue.

> One of most obvious problems is that if you also tell curl to follow HTTP redirects (using -L or --location), the -X option will also be used on the redirected-to requests which may not at all be what the server asks for and the user expected. Dropping the -X will make curl adhere to what the server asks for. And if you want to alter what method to use in a redirect, curl already have dedicated options for that named --post301, --post302 and --post303!

Per the man page (`man 1 curl`),

> The method string you set with -X, --request will be used for all requests, which if you for example use -L, --location may cause unintended side-effects when curl does not change request method according to the HTTP 30x response codes - and similar.

`-d` and `--data` will appropriately change the headers of their requests. Funnily, `--post301` and `--post302` which have a similar effect as `-X POST` are RFC 7231 compliant, browsers just don't do that. [2][3] This is so ubiquitous that the error codes 307 and 308 were added to support the original behavior of repeating the request verbatim at the target address. Compare the following:

> nc -l -p 8080 -q 1 <<< $'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently\nLocation: http://localhost:8081\n\n' & nc -l -p 8081 -q 1 <<< $'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nContent-Length: 0\n\n' & curl -L --data test localhost:8080; wait > nc -l -p 8080 -q 1 <<< $'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently\nLocation: http://localhost:8081\n\n' & nc -l -p 8081 -q 1 <<< $'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nContent-Length: 0\n\n' & curl -X POST -L --data test localhost:8080; wait > nc -l -p 8080 -q 1 <<< $'HTTP/1.1 308 Permanent Redirect\nLocation: http://localhost:8081\n\n' & nc -l -p 8081 -q 1 <<< $'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nContent-Length: 0\n\n' & curl -L --data test localhost:8080; wait

What happens here:

1. In the 301 case with just `--data`, the request turns into a GET request when sent to the redirect.

2. In the 301 case with `-X POST`, the request stays a `POST` request, but doesn't send any data to the redirect.

3. Finally, in the case where the server returns a 308, we see the POST request is kept and the data is resent.

To further expand slightly on a different thing that might surprise some people, the data options will automatically set the content type by adding the header, `Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded`, as if sending form data from a browser. This behvaior can be overridden with a manual `-H`, `--header` argument (e.g., `-H 'Content-Type: application/json`).

Edit: cube00 pointed out that newer versions of curl than mine have `--json` which will do that automatically. [4]

[0]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/09/11/unnecessary-use-of-cu...

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7231

[2]: https://evertpot.com/http/301-moved-permanently

[3]: https://evertpot.com/http/302-found

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45655409
by gruez | 2025-10-21 13:57:15+00:00
>I never use self-checkouts unless forced otherwise, as I rather not contribute to the capitalistic end goal to get rid of all employees other than those doing robot maintenance.

What's the alternative? Having people do menial jobs that can otherwise be automated? What's the difference between that and paying people to dig ditches and fill them back in again, or banning people from filling their own cars so we can keep teenagers employed as gas station attendants?
by chasd00 | 2025-10-21 13:57:15+00:00
when the Democrats wrestle back control of the federal government all things related to Trump, no matter how tangentially, are getting castrated. That includes SpaceX because of Elon Musk so they need to get it while the getting's good.

edit: the vindictive behavior of the current crop of politicians is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. All of it is going to come right back around when the parties swap places.
by dorianniemiec | 2025-10-21 13:57:33+00:00
Oh, nice to meet you!

> TLS (HTTPS) can be easily enabled by default, but it requires certificates. This requires a learning curve for the application developer but can be automated away from the user.

Yeah, these certificates can be obtained from Let's Encrypt automatically.

> Everything executes faster when WebSockets are preferred over HTTP. An HTTP server is not required to run a WebSocket server allowing them to run in parallel. If the server is listening for the WebSocket handshake message and determines the connection to instead be HTTP it can allow both WebSocket and HTTP support from the same port.

Oh, seems like an interesting observation!
by dns_snek | 2025-10-21 13:57:34+00:00
Of course you can, but shell scripting really fucking sucks.

One moment you have a properly quoted JSON string, the next moment you have a list of arguments, oops you need to escape the value for this program to interpret it right, but another program needs it to be double-escaped, is that \, \\, or \\\\? What subset of shell scripting are we doing? Fish? modern Linux bash, macOS-compatible bash? The lowest common denominator? My head is spinning already!

If I want to script something I'm writing Python these days. I've lost too much sleep over all the "interesting" WTF situations you get yourself into with shell scripting. I've never used Hurl but it's been on my radar and I think that's probably the sweet spot for tasks like this.