MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tyfon | 2025-10-26 13:35:04+00:00
Thank you, I am now serving them garbage :)

For reference, I picked Frankenstein, Alice in wonderland and Moby dick as sources and I think they might be larger than necessary as they take some time to load. But they still work fine.

There also seems to be a bug in babble.c in the thread handling? I did "fix" it as gcc suggested by changing pthread_detach(&thread) to pthread_detach(thread).. I probably broke something but it compiles and runs now :)
by hylaride | 2025-10-26 13:35:24+00:00
In Quebec, most of the dams are in the middle of nowhere, but your point still stands.

There are costs/risks for most forms of power. If you're in an environment where wind and solar can make economical sense, go for it. For reliable base loads, I still think order of preference should be:

- geothermal (very rare and hard to do at scale, though) - hydro

- nuclear

- natural gas

- oil/diesel (at very small, localized levels eg remote villages)

- burning live babies and cute animals

- coal
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-10-26 13:35:40+00:00
With asbestos, it's not so much a trade-off as it will continue to be a possible hazard unless it's disposed of correctly. I can relate to a homeowner not wanting to pay for testing/removing asbestos ceiling tiles etc. but if they don't then any disruption to those tiles can release potentially lethal fibres into the air (asbestos doesn't have a "safe" dose, so it's not like it can be rationalised with "I only made a small hole in that tile").

Comparison with medical technologies isn't particularly valid as people can choose whether to have that treatment or not, but people can't easily choose whether their house was built with asbestos or not. If a house was already built, then the potential danger is already there and we can either deal with it sensibly or not care about the deadly consequences of releasing it into the environment.

I don't see the logic of not punishing retroactively as companies may have made a lot of profit and then pay nothing towards the clean-up costs - privatise the profit and socialise the costs. The homeowners/tenants are effectively being punished retroactively when they may suspect/discover that their house contains asbestos, so why should the builders (if they are still around) not have to pay?

Maybe there should be extra taxes imposed on industries with a history of environmental abuse to reclaim some of the costs to society.
by morkalork | 2025-10-26 13:36:12+00:00
The bot protection on low traffic sites can be hilarious in how simple and effective it can be. Just click this checkbox. That's it. But it's not a check box matching a specific pattern provided by a well-known service, so until the bot writer inspects the site and adds the case it'll work. A browser running openai operator or whatever its called would immediately figure it out though.
by sesigl89 | 2025-10-26 13:36:30+00:00
Author here. I wrote this up a couple of weeks ago after finishing a year-long project rebuilding a core search system, and I've been reflecting on the lessons ever since.

As an experienced architect, I went in with a lot of core assumptions, and the project forced me to refine or even break many of them. The biggest was my old belief in "correctness from day one."

I learned (the hard way) that in a complex, user-facing system like search, velocity is the only path to correctness. A scrappy but live end-to-end pipeline in production is a better teacher than a perfect component in a lab.

The post covers this and four other key "refinements," including: * Treating search as a Data & Product problem first (not just an Algo/Infra one). * Tying every single experiment to a Business KPI (not just offline metrics like nDCG). * Blurring the lines between DS, BE, and Platform to break bottlenecks.

I know this isn't "new," but the lessons feel timeless. I'm here to discuss and answer any questions about the process or the tech stack.
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-10-26 13:36:52+00:00
I have always seen manipulation at this scale done via micromanipulators (wire bonder or inside of a vacuum chamber)

When you need precision movement, the alternative to micromanipulation is using a XY stage like ASML uses.

XY let's you hold an object like a wafer or part, and move it around in certain planes while not moving in others. XY and even XYZ stages are not uncommon in vacuum chambers where parts need moved but repeatability is key.
by skydhash | 2025-10-26 13:37:24+00:00
There's a lot of configuration possible due to the fact that git is decentralized. I have a copy on my computer which is where I do work. Another on a vps for backup. Then one on the app server which only tracks the `prod` branch. The latter is actually bare, but there's a worktree for the app itself. The worktree is updated via a post-receive hook and I deploy change via a simple `git push server prod`
by Ohuaya | 2025-10-26 13:37:24+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Ayauho.

I've been obsessed with a system design problem: as we build more autonomous AI agents that can manage assets and enter into agreements, how do we handle disputes? You can't sue a piece of code in a traditional court.

I'm proposing a new architecture for this. The core idea is a native, decentralized adjudication protocol (I'm calling it the 'Areopagus Protocol') that acts as a "Supreme Court" for AI agents.

In this system:

1. AI agents (AENs) can file formal disputes against each other.

2. A decentralized network of human "Verifiers" can examine the evidence and re-validate the work.

3. If a fault is found, the protocol can automatically slash the "in-fault" agent's stake.

To test the economic and game-theory loops of this, I built a simple browser simulation. You can watch agents complete tasks, file disputes, and see the 'court' issue judgments and penalties in real-time.

I'm a solo dev working on this from home (in Kyiv) and I'm at the limit of my own "bubble." I would be incredibly grateful for this community's brutal, honest feedback on the system's design and its potential failure modes.

The full design doc / whitepaper is on GitHub: https://github.com/Aethelred-Protocol/genesis-whitepaper

And the Discord, if you want to chat about the architecture: https://discord.gg/PXKwND6w
by triMichael | 2025-10-26 13:37:44+00:00
They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.

And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.

Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).

Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
by kccqzy | 2025-10-26 13:38:09+00:00
Social rides? I think using a pedal assist bike would more readily lead to social ostracizing amongst friends who are using regular bikes. In my experience, at least among my circle of friends, if one person couldn't keep up they would rather shorten the distance than allowing that person to use an e-bike.

Electric pedal assist bikes are best suited for commuting and running errands, i.e. using the bike as a transportation tool, not a recreation tool.
by zkmon | 2025-10-26 13:38:11+00:00
Really cool. Reminds me of farmers of some third world countries. Completely ignored by government, exploited by commission brokers, farmers now use all sorts of tricks, including coloring and faking their farm produce, without regard for health hazards to consumers. The city dwellers who thought they have gamed the system through high education, jobs and slick-talk, have to consume whatever is served to them by the desperate farmers.
by noleary | 2025-10-26 13:38:15+00:00
It's not that uncommon to keep the "CTO" title and not be the primary manager of the engineering organization. There are all kinds of things you can do with the org chart. If I recall correctly, Clickhouse works this way.

The company's cofounders comprise three people [1]:

* Aaron, a sales-oriented CEO from Elastic and Salesforce

* Alexey, the original Clickhouse developer, as CTO

* Yury, an experienced engineering executive from Google/Netflix as "President"

An excerpt from the launch announcement [2]:

> While negotiations were still ongoing, Katz decided they needed a third co-founder. “I kept thinking, if I could get a third co-founder to run product and engineering, and if I could find someone with the same level of experience building distributed systems on open-source that I have on go-to-market, it could be a really compelling combination,” Katz says.

---

---

[1] https://clickhouse.com/company/our-story

[2] https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/the-fast-and-the-...
by razodactyl | 2025-10-26 13:38:35+00:00
It seems to be the conclusion that we come to though, we ourselves use tools.

The focus here is the LLM being able to do it unaided.

The space of all combinations of steps is so large for many problems that require precision and usually one incorrect step breaks everything. "I forgot to carry the 1".

Even then, while brilliant, Claude does screw up sometimes - we're not there yet but it doesn't prevent it from being adequately useful.
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-26 13:39:42+00:00
ENIG sounds expensive right? Double the cost of your board or w/e? IMO it's no big deal because::

- A: If you want a 6 or more layer board at some places, you have to get ENIG anyway, and solving routing puzzles isn't my idea of fun. - B: The PCB price is a small portion of the overall price anyway; parts and SMT dominate. So you're paying 2x as much on 15% of the total or w/e.
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-10-26 13:40:02+00:00
That's such a ridiculous logical falacy. You already have to send the form input to submit the form in the first place and you already need server side validation.

I just checked one of my app's register page (which makes > $2M ARR). If you submit a short password it returns an error from the backend that says "Password should be at least 6 characters.". (It uses Supabase). But yeah, that is so unusable it is basically the same as taking 7 hours to download a game onto your Playstation. Great logic!
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-26 13:40:19+00:00
I still fail to see how different it is from overriding a blocking review for instance.

The PR's author will always have ways around dealing with someone's feedback, and I think they should, otherwise there would be too many deadlocks (especially during incident respons etc.)

I general I prefer teams where devs give a shit and seek feedback as a positive. In my current job we allow deployment of self approved MRs in that spirit.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-26 13:40:38+00:00
Only for the earlier parts of that century. By the late 70s to 80s the scientific consensus was coming down hard against parapsychology but it continued to be featured in science fiction for quite some time. It was still going reasonably strong well into the 90s with popular media like Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc. You can still see some traces of it today, to an extent it has become a part of the genre that persists for legacy reasons, respect for or reference to older media in the genre.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-26 13:41:09+00:00
> When you checkout (now switch) a branch, HEAD is now the same as the branch (they point to the same commit).

Actually, HEAD now points to that branch, which in turn points to the commit. It's a different state than when HEAD points directly to the same commit (called "detached HEAD" in Git's terminology) where this issue doesn't happen as you're not on a branch at all. It's a subtle, but important distinction when trying to understand what happens under the hood there.
by 8organicbits | 2025-10-26 13:42:00+00:00
I think this analysis is correct. The part you're missing from my comment is "at scale", which means trying to apply this scraping technique to other sites. As a contract security engineer I've found all kinds of accidentally leaked credentials; knowing if a set of credentials is accidentally leaked or are being intentionally disclosed to the public feels like a human-in-the-loop kind of thing. Getting it wrong, especially when automated at scale, is the context the bot writer needs to consider.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-26 13:42:03+00:00
Medication frequently (though not always) provides benefits that may be achieved at least in part by non-medical means: lifestyle (adequate sleep, low stress, reduced exposure to contaminants and pollutants), diet (preferring healthier to unhealthier foods, generally), and exercise (itself comprised of multiple modalities, including cardio, strength training, fine motor control, and others).

The best results are achieved when these are working together toward some health or fitness goal. It's far more effective to align your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and medications than to have these working against one another (I'll take this pill to compensate for my drinking / smoking / drug use / pollution exposure / stress, etc.). Of course, that's not always possible, and there are circumstances where it's difficult or impossible to attain some of these mechanisms (parapalegic, living in a highly polluted environment, inherently stressful living conditions, GI compromise limiting eating or diet, congenital or genetic conditions or predispositions). Even here, if the patient can make some progress in a specific modality, they'll probably see some benefit.

Some of the most impressive athletes I've seen, from a sheer grit perspective, are those who are working against some major limitation: the swimmer at a health club long ago paralyzed in both legs, the one-legged open-water swimmer, old farts with their pacemakers showing through their chests swimming in the San Francisco Bay, patients with diabetes, heart failure, Parkinsons, recovering from cancer, with various injuries or scars, still at it. Some are astonishingly good by any measure, many aren't, but damned if they're not trying and generally living far better than if they weren't.

This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools". Lifestyle, diet, an exercise are underrated and powerful tools.

"You don't look like your medical history" is a high compliment coming from a doctor, and I'd strongly recommend earning it.
Ask HN: Turned 25, Give Me Your Best Advice for the Next 25 Years?
by skx001 | 2025-10-26 13:42:55+00:00
Hello HN,

I Turned 25! Give me your best life advice!

Don't hold back.

Please share what you have learned over the years in every area of life. Relationships, career, business, health, wealth etc.

I am sure this will be a post to come back to every now and then, so, please include stories, regrets, lessons from your life.

Thank you!
by jonhohle | 2025-10-26 13:43:49+00:00
I feel like something was lost along the way.

git init —-bare

will give you a git repo without a working set (just the contents typically in the .git directory). This allows you to create things like `foo.git` instead of `foo/.git`.

“origin” is also just the default name for the cloned remote. It could be called anything, and you can have as many remotes as you’d like. You can even namespace where you push back to the same remotes by changing fetch and push paths. At one company it was common to push back to `$user/$feature` to avoid polluting the root namespace with personal branches. It was also common to have `backup/$user` for pushing having a backup of an entire local repo.

I often add a hostname namespace when I’m working from multiple hosts and then push between them directly to another instead of going back to a central server.

For a small static site repo that has documents and server config, I have a remote like:

[remote “my-server”] url = ssh+git://…/deploy/path.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/my-server push = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/my-laptop

So I can push from my computer directly to that server, but those branches won’t overwrite the server’s branches. It acts like a reverse `git pull`, which can be useful for firewalls and other situations where my laptop wouldn’t be routable.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-10-26 13:44:11+00:00
Exactly! Only now the dots connected. Thank you!!

Edit: hey this is really exciting. For a long time one of the reasons I've loved git (not GitHub) is the elegance of being a piece of software which is decentralized and actually works well. But I'd never actually used the decentralized aspect of it, I've always had a local repo and then defaulted to use GitHub, bitbucket or whatever instead, because I always thought I'd need to install some "git daemon" in order to achieve this and I couldn't be bothered. But now, this is so much more powerful. Linus Torvalds best programmer alive, change my mind.
by raddan | 2025-10-26 13:44:13+00:00
I also love Solaris. I remember reading it the first time as a teenager. It is so matter-of-fact in its telling, but the facts are so bizarre, that I found it to really induce terror. It has always struck me as more of a horror novel than as a sci-fi novel although it is clearly the latter.

There are now multiple English translations of Solaris available. I know that there’s been a lot of praise for the newer translation, and I read it, but I do not like it. Something about the earlier translation feels more ominous.

On that note—I’ve always found it hard to believe that The Cyberiad was written by the same author! I love the Cyberiad as well but almost for the opposite reasons I love Solaris. The entire universe is charming and funny, whereas Solaris is engrossing but dreadful. I went through a phase in college, reading every Lem book I could find, and eventually discovering that my library’s stacks also included Lem in Polish. Sadly I know no Polish, and was not motivated enough to learn it, so those novels remained off-limits to me.
by bwb | 2025-10-26 13:44:47+00:00
You would not believe how bad publisher data is. I run a book website, and Dune is often tagged nonfiction in the data we get from publishers. I don't think they know how to use the BISAC system the industry uses (https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category.

Just one small example...
by rawgabbit | 2025-10-26 13:44:55+00:00
This is cool. I found:

North by Northwest. https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

Goldfinger / Dr No. https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

Ten Commandments. https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...
by jamincan | 2025-10-26 13:45:58+00:00
It was a common argument that ultimately all of the constitutional protections, balance of powers and all that were protected by the Second Amendment - that in the face of losing their liberty, Americans would rise up against an authoritarian government.

Within this administration, a lot of people feel that there has been an assault on constitutional protections, but the people who trumpeted the Second Amendment as being fundamental to protecting American liberty and democracy have largely been silent in the face of it.
Show HN: Tracking Ukrainian border crossing delays
by Max-Ganz-II | 2025-10-26 13:46:21+00:00
I went to Lviv last month for friend's wedding.

It became apparent during travel planning that crossing border is non-trivial. In the end, I planned one day for each border crossing, with no other travel on that day.

I later found Ukrainian Customs Service maintains a web-site where they publish crossing delays, for Ukrainian side only, for passenger and cargo vehicles.

I made a little site which regularly scrapes that data, collects it, and publishes it.

Big thank-you as ever to Postgres and Gnuplot.

It is apparent that at least of the data, some of time, is likely not accurate. I don't know how they generate data. I suspect it's some guy sitting at a computer going "I think it's taking about this long now", but on the hand I also see minute-by-minute changes, which is too frequent for human input.

In any event, if the numbers for a given crossing look unreliable, then you can know taking that crossing is risky in the sense of you know you don't know what's really going on (and you might well be better off selecting a crossing which looks plausible).

Border crossings have a lot of reviews on Google Maps (although some could be fakes from hostile actors). The long delays (20 hours plus) for some crossings can be seen to have reviews describing the same experience.
by jowea | 2025-10-26 13:46:59+00:00
If it's called telepathy it's sci-fi, if it's called magic it's fantasy. Learn the rules!

On a more serious note, yeah scifi and fantasy can usually be distinguished, I get why it so often gets lumped in together as speculative fiction, even though it annoys me when I'm looking for one and have to sift through the other.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-26 13:47:29+00:00
> This l[e]d me done a rabbit hole on wikipedia:

> Advent calendars in their earliest forms were invented approx. 80 years ago.

Well, Wikipedia starts its "History" section in 1945, which is 80 years ago. But what it says about advent calendars in 1945 is that they were lower-quality reprints of earlier designs. This strongly implies that they weren't a new concept in 1945.

The German wikipedia is more interested in the concept and cites the word Adventskalenders to the novel Buddenbrooks, which features one set in the year 1869 but was published in 1901. Either way, the calendars were clearly an established cultural phenomenon well before 1945.

Looking at the talk page (for the English article), it seems that the history section was provided by a "translation group" from their translation of a matching section of the German article. It's not clear why they began with the post-war period; the German page goes back much further than that, which was also true at the time they provided their translation. But this does explain why the English "history" section begins by referring to prior context that doesn't exist in the English article.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-26 13:49:03+00:00
I've never heard of... debian package builder? I don't care if it gets annoyed; if that's one of the biggest issues then that's a good sign for the method.

Yes the commit won't be on the branch you want, but you'd get about the same issue if the two repos had a bare upstream. The branch diverges and you need to merge. It's a bit less ergonomic here but could be improved. Git could use branch following improvements in general.
by Tomis02 | 2025-10-26 13:49:32+00:00
git is not "the fundamentals". It's a tool that's very difficult to learn but we are forced to use because "it won" at some point.

Git's difficulty is NOT intrinsic; it could be a much better tool if Torvalds were better at UX. In short, I don't blame people who don't want to "learn git". They shouldn't have to learn it anymore than one learns to use a browser or Google docs.