MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sjw987 | 2025-10-22 08:36:21+00:00
Most smart appliances are ticking timebombs, and most serve no real purpose. I get that sometimes they can be neat, and I myself went through a phase myself of building a "smart apartment".

All I learned is the smart speaker assistants degrade over time, companies (even relatively big ones) go bust and take down any app support as they go, and that my life isn't too busy to fit small tasks into my day.

Incredible premiums to (maybe) simplify some relatively small home tasks. I've found it much more fulfilling to do many of those tasks myself and treat it like downtime from the other things I do.
by anonzzzies | 2025-10-22 08:37:13+00:00
But we hardly evolved past apes at this point (on any cosmic/earth timescale); these aliens have transportation that is technologically something akin to whatever scifi we came up with and deem mostly ideas that are not possible in reality. They could be around for 10s of millions of years while we are here just for a few 300k or so years with our real advancements just starting. They might have gone beyond the 'you land, I take, you die' kind of 'animal' thing we humans have?
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-22 08:38:14+00:00
It's a good point. I'd say that generally, there are answers to most of these points that either get you 80% of the way there, or are functionally equivalent.

Re Load balancing for example, Disco is built on top of Docker Swarm, so you can add nodes (ie machines) to scale horizontally - `disco nodes:add root@<ip>`

For monitoring/alerting, we offer some real time cpu/memory metrics (ie `docker stats`) and integrate with external syslog services.

Do you have specific use cases in mind which current PaaS providers satisfy? Would you say that these kinds of concerns are what's holding you back from leaving Heroku or others (and are you considering leaving because of price, support, etc.)? Cheers
by Animats | 2025-10-22 08:38:39+00:00
The final paragraph: The work could also lead to advances in robotics, says Josie Hughes at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland. For example, a rolling robot could be made to follow a path of repeating segments, comprising a reliable roll-reset-roll motion that could, in theory, go on forever. “Imagine if we had a robot that could morph between any solid body shape, it could then follow any desired path simply through morphing of shape,” she says.

Interestingly, that didn't come from the PR department. Hughes is a tenure-track professor whose lab builds unusual flexible robots. They're trying to use LLMs to design special-purpose grippers.[1] That's an interesting idea. Most of the cost in industrial robots is special-purpose end effector tooling. Something that could bang out a design, given "we want to put this thing in there", would be very useful.

Here are some examples of end of arm tooling.[2] Auto plants are full of this stuff, and it's all custom. An automated design system for designing all those one-off items would really speed up retooling assembly lines for a new product. Much of the research in robots involves trying to make more human-like grippers. That may be approaching the problem from the wrong end. Cheap custom tooling designed by AIs and maybe 3D printed may be the way to go.

That an LLM can do something like that is a surprise, but apparently there's been progress.

There's a YC-sized startup opportunity in this.

[1] https://www.epfl.ch/labs/create/

[2] https://eoat.net/tooling/?device=c&keyword=End Of Arm Tooling Grippers
by eszed | 2025-10-22 08:39:11+00:00
Would CO2 still build up if someone isn't breathing at all? I'm guessing so, since you say CO2 is a byproduct of metabolism. Alternatively, could respiration exhaust enough CO2 even in a situation where the lungs are too damaged to take in sufficient oxygen?

All that apart, I'm guessing this would be used in emergency situations, where a patient is likely already unconscious and could be kept under sedation until transferred to ECMO. Is CO2 buildup dangerous on its own? If so, in what kind of time-frame? What's the upper limit on the additional minutes this therapy could buy?
by sjw987 | 2025-10-22 08:39:38+00:00
I'll admit, despite hating the idea of most "smart" tech, I do still have the lights. The ability to change the colour (mostly warmness) through the day and turn on individual lights is pretty neat. I've been using an energized white light during early hours and work, and then warmer colours in the evening to help wind down.

At the time it was an upgrade from halogen bulbs, so the lights themselves have seen me through 10 years so far, way more than the old lights would have. Sadly, they're all bound to go some point soon. It has been 10 years though!

I would never enable the feature that lets you control them from out of the home though. I'm not completely sure what the purpose of that would be..
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-22 08:39:57+00:00
> I felt the comments did not address the merits or contents of what was being presented

That's wildly different from:

> I see a lot of snark in the comments

The first is essentially "People should talk about the actual content more" while the second is "People are mocking the submission". If no other top-level comments actually seem like mocking, it seems fair that someone reacts to the second sentiment

> The topic was being dumped on at that time and drowning out the signal.

There was a whole of 7 comments when you made yours (https://ditzes.com/item/45646559), most of them children comments, none of them mocking the submission nor the author.
by maccard | 2025-10-22 08:40:22+00:00
I think it’s easy to forget how much you get with a modern setup like this, and how much work it is to maintain it. If you’re at a big corp, the team who maintains this stuff is larger than most mid corp’s engineering departments. For a solo person, it’s fine. But if you have 10-30 engineers, it’s a lot of work, and paying heroku $1000/mo is significantly cheaper than having even a junior engineer spend 40% of their time on keeping up.
by liendolucas | 2025-10-22 08:41:29+00:00
What truly suprises me about BSDs is their simplicity and low footprint, OpenBSD being gold standard.

I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it.

I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports.

Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.
Show HN: Lyzr's low-code multi-agent automation framework
by agent314 | 2025-10-22 08:41:49+00:00
Hi everyone! We’ve been experimenting with ways to make it easier to build multi-agent systems, somewhere between LangGraph’s orchestration flexibility and AutoGen’s ease of use.

Lyzr Automata is our open-source framework that lets you build, connect, and run AI agents in Python, with just a few lines of code.

You can define agents as simple Python classes, chain them using the Automata graph, and run them locally or via a hosted orchestrator. It’s designed to be simple, extensible, and self-contained.
by wiether | 2025-10-22 08:41:50+00:00
I'm a "half empty" kind of person and seeing how much support he's still getting is quite sad to see.

Karine Le Marchand expressing her support is one thing, identifiyng herself as being part of the same caste as Sarkozy, but seeing the same support from regular folks, who have most certainly been screwed over by the ex-President...
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-10-22 08:42:17+00:00
He is in the equivalent of the VIP wing of the only prison in Paris Intramuros (within the city walls), the Prison de la Santé. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Sant%C3%A9_Prison The prison has three main sections: the VIP wing, the night-time incarceration wing (sentence adjustment), and the high-security wing.

As the most serious cases at the national level are often tried in Paris, the high-security wing is filled with drug traffickers, murderers and terrorists, at least for the duration of the proceedings, which can take years in France.

Sarkozy is in the VIP wing with two bodyguards nearby. These are hardly the conditions one would imagine for isolation.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-22 08:42:19+00:00
Worldwide population peaked sometime between 2015 and 2020 at somewhere between 7.2 and 7.4B. So my take on the book is that it isn't very good.

Also, biofuels based on most crops other than sugar cane, in addition to not being very helpful in the fight against AGW, triggered large price spikes and political turmoil in a dozen different countries at once. Perhaps you heard of this event, we call it the Arab Spring. We are still dealing with the fallout of it.
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-22 08:42:28+00:00
Ha! Endorphins are "endogenous opioid peptides produced by the pituitary and hypothalamus glands that function as the body's natural painkillers and mood regulators".

"They are part of the endogenous opioid system", so either way was talking about literal highs.

The endocannabinoid system (I hope that I have the spelling correct) is a relatively recent discovery (1980s on), and is quite fascinating on how integral to the human body it is
by h33t-l4x0r | 2025-10-22 08:42:51+00:00
They are for me. Got banned and received the explanation that my actual billing details were suspicious (there was nothing suspicious other than possibly my geolocation which is SE Asia). I asked them to clarify and they declined.

Signed up with Contabo without incident and have been a happy customer ever since.

Look, whether or not Hetzner chose to block me out of blatant geo-racism is not at issue here, I wouldn't want to do business with them either way since they declined to give me a reasonable explanation and I wouldn't feel secure with a provider like that.
by eesmith | 2025-10-22 08:42:52+00:00
https://www.usmint.gov/resources/business-guidelines-faq

> Can I melt, drill holes through, or mutilate U.S. coins?

> Maybe. It is a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 331 to alter a U.S. or foreign coin with the intent to defraud. The United States Mint cannot issue interpretations of criminal statutes such as this, which fall within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, 31 C.F.R. Part 82 states that no person shall export, melt or treat any 5-cent coin or one-cent coin of the United States. However, there are a few exceptions such as for novelty, amusement, educational, jewelry and similar purposes. Your business should consult with an attorney to ensure it does not run afoul of these laws before melting or mutilating U.S. coins.

And yes, it's still a coin if it’s out of circulation. A few years ago I decided that saving my old Eisenhower dollars was not worthwhile. The local Panera Bread took it without a problem. I think the cashier thought it was a neat to see an unusual coin.
by BilalBudhani | 2025-10-22 08:43:10+00:00
I recently moved a couple of Rails projects to a VPS using Dokploy and couldn't be happier. Apart from the cost savings the bump in available resources is a big plus. It is astonishing how Heroku still gets away with 512 mb memory for $25/m

background: I have been self-hosting apps on VPS for a while now but just started using a tool
by entropi | 2025-10-22 08:44:47+00:00
I feel the same way.

Yet people are using AI for therapy, listening to AI-written novels read by AI, gladly watching AI-made slop. There seems to be real actual demand for it. Feels like total insanity to me; but here we are and facts are facts.

I guess whether the emperor is wearing clothes or not never actually mattered.
by Zardoz84 | 2025-10-22 08:46:02+00:00
I has been using KDE connect for years, including Plasma 5 before I updated to Debian 13 .

The only two issue that I found, it's that not works on the wifi network of my work office. Something there must be blocking it. And that sometimes gets confused when you have multiple videos open on the browser and shows the wrong video on the multimedia controls.
by vecter | 2025-10-22 08:46:25+00:00
The dark forest is such an obviously false theory to me. Its axioms are:

1. Survival is the primary goal of all civilizations.

Agree.

2. Resources in the universe are finite.

True in the theoretical sense, but false in the practical sense.

3. Civilizations cannot be certain of others’ intentions.

Not obviously true or false.

4. Communication is dangerous.

This is such a strong axiom and is almost certainly false.

Its conclusion from applying the four axioms is that preemptive annihilation is the rational strategy.

As an alien civilization, if your strategy for survival in the cosmos is to "immediately and totally annihilate any sign of life", then that is almost a surely losing strategy. If intelligent life is prevalent, and the cost of annihilating a species is so low that they can just do it willy-nilly, then all it takes is one surviving colony to use the same superweapon against you and you're finished. Oh, you'd also have to be annihilating species left and right across the galaxy without revealing your location. And in the worst case, you've just pissed off all the known alien entities in your galactic neighborhood. Good luck to you.

It makes for fun writing, but I don't understand how anyone can take it seriously.
by jemiluv8 | 2025-10-22 08:46:37+00:00
I suppose they are still shipping these things. With mcp integration and bluh, bluh, bluh. I marvel always at how much has changed and also how little has changed in building websites. My verdict: little has changed on the web. We just have too much commercial interest and a bunch of cs grads that need to do something with their theoretical skills.
by randomtoast | 2025-10-22 08:47:07+00:00
By the way, this is not possible in the U.S and in many other countries. When someone is convicted of a crime, they don’t usually start serving a prison sentence until the case is final. If they appeal, the sentence is automatically paused or can be stayed by the court. In practice, this means you don’t go to prison (unless you are already in preventive detention because of flight risk or danger) while your case is still being fought in higher courts.
by ornornor | 2025-10-22 08:47:19+00:00
Yes, I'm missing the part between "spin up a bare metal server with a fresh OS" and "run the PaaS for prod".

How do I harden the server, back it up, etc? Basically the layer below Disco, to go beyond running it as a "toy"

This is not a dig at Disco, I run into the same issue with virtually any other self-hosted PaaS I could find.
by bouncycastle | 2025-10-22 08:47:34+00:00
sometimes swap seems to accumulate even though there is plenty of ram. It is too "greedy" by default, probably set for desktops not servers in mind.

Therefore it is better to always tune "vm.swappiness" to 1 in /etc/sysctl.conf

You can also configure your web server / TCP stack buffers / file limits so they never allocate memory over the physical ram available. (eg. in nginx you can setup worker/connection limits and buffer sizes.)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-22 08:47:53+00:00
ARM, and even moreso the companies that make ARM devices, are terrible at it. And there's a reason for that.

The customers of hardware companies generally don't want to get proprietary software from them, because everybody knows that if they do, the hardware company will try to use it as a lock-in strategy. So if you make something which is proprietary but not amazing, nobody wants to touch it.

There are two ways around this.

The first is that you embrace open source. This is what Intel has traditionally done and it works really well when your hardware is good enough that it's what people will choose when the software is a commodity. It also means you don't have to do all the work yourself because if you're not trying to lock people in then all the community work that normally goes to trying to reverse engineer proprietary nonsense instead goes into making sure that the open source software that runs on your hardware is better than the proprietary software that runs on your competitor's.

The second is that you spend enough money on lock-in software that people are willing to use it. This works temporarily, because it takes a certain amount of time for competitors and the community to make a decent alternative, but what usually happens after that is that you have a problem because you were expecting there to be a moat and then ten thousand people showed up to each throw in a log or a bag of wet cement. Before too long the moat is filled in and you can't it back because it was premised on your thing working and their thing not, so once their thing works, that's the part that isn't under your control. And at that point the customers have a choice and the customers don't like you.

The problem AMD has is that they were kinda sorta trying to do both in GPUs. They'd make some things open source but also keep trying to hide the inner workings of the firmware from the public, which is what people need in order to allow third parties to make great software for them. But the second strategy was never going to work for AMD because a decade ago they didn't have the resources to even try and now Nvidia is the incumbent and the underdog can't execute a lock-in strategy. But the open source thing works fine here and indeed gets everyone on their side and then it's them and the whole world against Nvidia instead of just them against Nvidia. Which they're gradually starting to figure out.
by pols45 | 2025-10-22 08:49:18+00:00
It's not Nuts. These guys are just front office foot soldiers of the Elite. Elites on all sides use these kind of characters to protect/expand their power.

The Elite all don't get along with each other, but in a "civilized" world where there is enough loot to share with everyone, they don't need to directly attack each other. Unless something really threatens and freaks them out.

But once in a while they authorize their foot soldiers in the military, judiciary, legislatures, media to attack each other. Which is all just a side show - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elites
by anonzzzies | 2025-10-22 08:50:17+00:00
Maybe they are 100k-millions years ahead of us and are basically immortal AI's with iqs of 200k+ (so we won't understand anything they do or say and they find us literally less interesting than grains of sand) which are clustered via an higher dimension quantum entangled connection to the home world and the backup world? For sure if we manage to create AGI (no timelines; let's say we have it in 10k years from now and better than human body robots to match), we will surely shoot that into space to be 'forever' by the millions to explore. I would assume that every advanced race would do exactly that and if they are millions of years ahead of us, I cannot phantom them still being close to the barbaric mortal animals that we are, or they wouldn't have survived that long.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-22 08:51:16+00:00
In that case you've basically just created a split-brain situation (I mean like the actual phenomenon of someone who's had the main part of the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain). There's one system which is the man and the rules that he has internalized, and there's what the man himself consciously understands, and there's no reason that the two are necessarily communicating in some deeper way, in much the same way as a split-brain patient may be able to point to something they see in one side of their vision when asked but be unable to say what it is.

(Also, IMO, the question of whether the program understands chinese mainly depends on whether you would describe an unconscious person as understanding anything)

I also can't help but think of this sketch when this topic comes up (even though, importantly, it is not quite the same thing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU
by proc0 | 2025-10-22 08:52:23+00:00
Well, if it replaces all engineers, then I'm not up to date on the capabilities of the state of the art. So far I've just used the available commercial models. I quickly hit walls when I try to push its limits even a little.

In theory, any prompt should result in a good output just as if I suggest it to an engineer. In practice I find that there are real limitations that require a lot of iterations and "handholding" that is unless I want something that has already been solved and the solution is widely available. One simple example is I prompted for a physics simulation in C++ with a physics library, and it got a good portion of it correct, but the code didn't compile. When it compiled, it didn't work, and when it worked it wasn't even remotely close to being "good" in the sense of how a human engineer would judge their output if I where to ask for the same thing, not to mention making it production ready or multiplatform. I just have not experienced any LLM capable of taking ANY prompt... but because they do complete some prompts and those prompts do have some value it seems as if the possibilities are endless.

This is a lot easier to see with generative image models, i.e. Flux, Sora, etc. We can see amazing examples, but does that mean anything I can imagine I can prompt and it will be capable of generating? In my experience, not even close. I can imagine some wild things and I can express them in whatever detail is necessary. I have experimented with generative models and it turns out that they have real limitations as to what they can "imagine". Maybe they can generate car driving through a road in the mountains, and it's rendered perfectly, but when you change the prompt to something less generic, i.e. adding more details like car model, maybe time of the day, it starts to break down. When you try and prompt something completely wild, i.e. make the car transform into a robot and do a back flip, it fails spectacularly. There is no "logic" to what it can or cannot generate, as one might think. A talented artist that can create a 3d scene with a car can also create a scene with a car transforming into a robot (granted it might take more time and require experimentation).

The main point is that there is a creative capability that LLMs are lacking and this will translate to engineering in some form but it's not something that can be easily measured right away. Orgs will adapt and are already extracting value from LLMs, but I'm wondering what is going to be the real long term cost.
by ajnin | 2025-10-22 08:53:48+00:00
This is disinformation.

The tribunal didn't rule he didn't personally benefit. It ruled that he conspired to corrupt the leaders of Lybia to steal money from the Lybian people and fund his electoral campaign. In my book becoming president of France is certainly a "personal benefit". There are numerous factual evidence, documents from Lybia, fund transfers, secret meetings of his closest friends with Abdullah Senussi, who has been convicted to life in prison in France for orchestrating the bombing of UTA flight 772 which resulted in 170 deaths and is also currently investigated for another plane bombing.

The money he got allowed him to spend about twice the allowed amount on his campaign, giving him an unfair advantage in the election. In other words he dealt with terrorists to potentially steal the presidential election. What Sarkozy did is extremely severe, I'd call that high treason. He got far less that he deserved.

Also it's worth mentioning that it is his third conviction. He already got a 2 years and 1 year sentence which were confirmed in appeal in other cases.