MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-10-06 00:03:29+00:00
idk man, I'm a humanities major whose spent all of my career, which spans about a decade and a half now, around people who have had very little to no exposure to humanities courses and my take is that more people need to take them.

The quality of analysis and opinion outside of academia is just, I'll be blunt, incredibly poor. I think claiming that literary analysis courses are just a bunch of people spouting opinions is an unfair reduction. You learn analytical techniques, you learn how to identify theme and structure, how to perform a historical analysis versus a contemporary reading, close reading, logical analysis etc etc. There's not just depth at the level of an individual work, there's tons of technical and analytical and procedural depth to uncover in the practice of interpretation.

Inadequacies in this practice lead directly to bad societal outcomes imo. People who are unable to critically dissect narratives are also easy to manipulate. Worse, a lot of people who lack exposure to these ideas do not even ask important questions in the first place, even basic ones like, "how might this tech actually impact society" because they simply have never had the training to learn that asking these kinds of questions is important.

Also I do think it is an actual research field, which, just like any other field, changes as available tech changes. For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-06 00:03:33+00:00
I slowed down my Amazon purchases drastically when everything I shopped for seemed to be flooded with these thousands of identical products have seemingly randomly generated all-caps brand names like BHHSRE, VHYXZY, XIOU, DAUGHE, JXMOX, LANMU, IBERLS, GMJYC… (yes, these are all actual brands I’ve seen on Amazon).

Jeez, the least they can do is make it look like they are trying to curb abuse.
by belorn | 2025-10-06 00:03:56+00:00
As a sysadmin at company that provide fairly sensitive services, I find online cloud backups to be way to slow for the purpose of protecting against something like the server room being destroyed by a fire. Even something like spinning disks at a remote location feel like a risk, as files would need to be copied onto faster disks before services could be restored, and that copying would take precious time during an emergency. When downtime means massive losses of revenue for customers, being down for hours or even days while waiting for the download to finish is not going be accepted.

Restoring from cloud backups is one of those war stories that I occasionally hear, including the occasionally fedex solution of sending the backup disk by carrier.
by gusgus01 | 2025-10-06 00:04:09+00:00
Yeah, I had to look up the bridge names. The "I-90 bridge" is actually both the Homer M. Madley and Lacey V Murrow Memorial bridges, and that's excluding the two bridges that are east of Mercer Island. I wanted to be more exact, and at that point I also added the 520 bridge's real name.
by melasadra | 2025-10-06 00:05:05+00:00
Some people laugh at the 800W output. However, in Indonesia, roughly half of the 300 million people live in homes with an electricity capacity of 900W or less.

Wish these kind of panels were available at that price here. We have pretty much 12 hours of sunlight every single day but household solar panel is discouraged by the state owned utilities.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-06 00:05:11+00:00
It's amazing how far Wine has come. Proton combines Wine with DVXK and other libraries and allows to play practically any Windows game on Linux with a negligible performance hit. I remember using Proton around 2021 and it already worked fairly well but now the experience is incredibly smooth. 2025 is definitely the year of the Linux gaming desktop.
by aradox66 | 2025-10-06 00:05:19+00:00
I love location sharing with friends. "Find my Jerry", "Find my Anna" we call it in our friend group. It simplifies logistics, gives us a narrow but fun little window into each others' worlds.

"Is __ on the top of the mountain or waiting in the lift line?" I want my friends to find me, and my friends want to be found by me. It's nice!
by Dagger2 | 2025-10-06 00:05:57+00:00
It wasn't a whole redesign though? It has an identical network model to v4, routing and address assignment work the same way, it works over the same L2 links as v4, and L4 protocols like TCP and UDP all work the same. DNS is the same. The socket API is the same. Link-local addresses exist in v4 too, and v4 even had router advertisements already before v6 was even out. How is it a whole redesign?

> Maybe a compromise will be reached in v7, like v6 packet format that otherwise acts like v4 and carries over the old /32s.

This is, of course, impossible, because v4 only has 32 bits of space for src/dst addresses. You can't cram more than 32 bits into 32 bits. If it was possible we wouldn't have needed v6 in the first place.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-10-06 00:07:22+00:00
I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others.

If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.

The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
by jamestnz | 2025-10-06 00:08:23+00:00
> what I came to call “the Law of Conservation of Ugly”. In many software problems, there’s a part that just is never going to feel elegant

This may be an instance of the Waterbed Principle: in any sufficiently-complex system, suppressing or refactoring some undesirable characteristic in one area inevitably causes an undesirability to pop up somewhere else. Like there is some minimum amount of complexity/ugliness/etc that it is possible for the entire system to contain while still carrying out its essential functions, and it must leak out somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory
by duxup | 2025-10-06 00:08:57+00:00
I recently moved some investments from disparate financial management companies into a single entity.

I was pretty shocked how just a recent statement and a few forms (that anyone could have filled out) seemed to be all it took to get the job done. Large amounts of investments moved ... no phone or email confirmations. It just happened.

Everything is there, but the ease of the process has been a little unsettling.
by searine | 2025-10-06 00:09:03+00:00
> My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public.

There is a gap between how software is written and how it is used by the public.

Clearly computers are flawed and need a complete rework.

>Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.

Software is a illuminati scam perpetrated by bitter typesetters forced to get funding in a system they don't believe in. Anyone who says otherwise is in on it.

>Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.

Are they flawless, no. Have they done more public good than any organization in history (or at least top 3)? yes.

And your response is to poo-poo the whole system because you had a bad time in your PhD. Sad.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-06 00:09:44+00:00
Especially since LLM tech was originally developed for translation. That’s the original reason so much work was done to create a model that could handle context and it turned out that was helpful in more areas than just translation.

While LLM usage is just spinning up in other areas, for translation they have been doing this job well for over 5 years now.
by mikhmha | 2025-10-06 00:11:08+00:00
As someone obsessed with Networking and Networking Topology I am so so fascinated by analog telephone networks. Just the idea of long-distance connections being made via physical wires connecting at switches by human operators feels so raw. I can't even imagine such a thing. When I was younger analog telephone was being phased out. I still remember my dad having to go buy calling cards at convenience stores so he could make long distance calls back home. And then one day there were no more calling cards.

I can imagine lots of lessons learned from telephone networking helped shape ideas around computer network design.
by neomantra | 2025-10-06 00:11:26+00:00
[0] Weir Farm, one of the few National Parks dedicated to art. I get that it will never have a MacOS named after it.

I do love hiking NY and CT; verdant and accessible. Tons of towns have public parks and trails. We have amazing coastline hikes although many towns control access. (Michael Moore stormed Greenwich Point years before he stormed Gitmo). We also see the beauty of four seasons — colors just started changing.

I’m excited to see CT doing this data acquisition and visualization. I’ve only discovered CT’s dedication to open datasets (data.ct.gov) earlier this year and connected wrapped some of it with MCP.
by efitz | 2025-10-06 00:11:29+00:00
The lack of backups makes my blood boil. However, from my own experience, I want to know more before I assign blame.

The very first "computer guy" job I had starting in about 1990/1991, my mentor gave me a piece of advice that I remember to this day: "Your job is to make sure the backups are working; everything else is gravy."

While I worked in that job, we outgrew the tape backup system we were using, so I started replicating critical data between our two sites (using 14400 bps Shiva NetModems), and every month I'd write a memo requesting a working backup system and explaining the situation. Business was too cheap to buy it.

We had a hard drive failure on one of our servers, I requested permission to invalidate the drive's warranty because I was pretty sure it was a bad bearing; I got it working for a few weeks by opening the case and spinning the platter with my finger to get it started. I made sure a manager was present so that they could understand how wack the situation was- they bought me a new drive but not the extras that I asked for, in order to mirror.

After I left that job, a friend of mine called me a month later and told me that they had a server failure and were trying to blame the lack of backups on me; fortunately my successor found my stack of memos.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-06 00:11:47+00:00
Vid.me was the salvation from YouTube, showing up around 2015 and actually pulling creators from YouTube. They gained traction and were well known, at one point even surpassing YouTube on /r/videos.

But they went bankrupt in 2017.

Why? Because people don't want to view ads and they don't want to pay a subscription. Vid.me was unable to monetize and collapsed.

Nebula is a more recent example. Creators falling over themselves to promote it, yet conversation rates are still <1%.

It's not anti-competitive practices killing these companies. It's childish entitled users who get offended when asked to compensate.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-06 00:11:52+00:00
Game devs should 100% focus on making sure their game runs flawlessly on Proton instead of releasing a half-assed Linux version. This is what Valve has infamously done with games such as Left 4 Dead 2, whose Linux version has multiple game-breaking bugs that have been known for over 15 years. Unfortunately that game does not run on Proton because of an obscure VAC bug that Valve hasn't bothered to fix since they can already claim Linux compatibility through their terrible Linux port.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-06 00:12:13+00:00
Solar is cheap, non-peak-efficiency installs get to be the priority once you get the first 40% or so of production in solar.

This kind of thing just knocks the edges off of production and transmission costs. You get to the point where you're not trying to squeeze peak efficiency any more and you're just trying to fill in spaces wherever works reasonably well.
by afdbcreid | 2025-10-06 00:12:33+00:00
> It matters fundamentally. "Works well" for research projects or limited AWS components is not equivalent to DO-178C Level A certification where mathematical proof is required

As said in a sibling comment, certification to Rust starts to appear. Rust is young and its usage in regulated industries is just barely beginning. Ada and SPARK are old and mature. It's not a fair comparison - but that doesn't mean Rust couldn't get there.

> > Few of the tools can verify unsafe code is free of UB > > With heavy annotation burden, for specific patterns

> > some of the tools do support interior mutability (with extra annotations I believe) > > Exactly - manual annotation burden.

SPARK does not support the equivalent (shared mutable pointers) at all. Rust verifies do with a heavy annotation burden. What's better?

> Trait resolution determines which code executes (monomorphization). Lifetimes affect drop order and program semantics. These aren't erased - they're compiled into the code being verified. SPARK's type system is verifiable; Rust's requires the verifier to trust the compiler's type checker.

Has the Ada compiler formally verified? No. So you're trusting the Ada type checker just as well.

The Ada specification was, if I understand correctly, formally defined. But there are efforts to do that to Rust as well (MiniRust, a-mir-formality, and in the past RustBelt).

> The macro logic is unverified Rust code executing at compile time. A bug in the macro generates incorrect code that may pass verification. SPARK has no equivalent escape hatch.

And if you have a script that generates some boilerplate code into your Ada project, is the script logic verified? The outputted code is, and that's what important. Even with full formal verification, proving that the program fulfills its goals, you don't need to verify helpers like this - only the code they generate. If it works, then even if the script is buggy, who cares.

> So they're doing what SPARK does automatically - proving absence of runtime errors

Exactly - that's the point, to prove free of runtime errors.

I'm not sure what you mean by "SPARK guarantees this for the language; Rust tools must verify it per codebase" - does SPARK not need to verify separate codebases separately? Does it somehow work magically for all of your codebases at once?

It's clear at this point that neither of us will get convinced, and I think I said everything I had about this already.

Have fun developing with Ada!
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-06 00:13:38+00:00
I think it doesn't need to be the encryption breaking per se.

It could be a gov laptop with the encryption keys left at a bar. Or the wrong keys saved on the system and the backups can't actually be decrypted. Or the keys being reused at large scale and leaked/guessed from lower security area. etc.

Relying on encryption requires operation knowledge and discipline. At some point, a base level of competency is required anyway, I'm not just sure encryption would have saved them as much as we'd wish it would.

To your point, I'd assume high profile incidents like this one will put more pressure to do radical changes, and in particular to treat digital data as a more critical asset that you can't hand down to the crookest corrupt entity willy nilly just for the kickback.

South Korea doesn't lack competent people, but hiring them and letting them at the helm sounds like a tough task.
by lucb1e | 2025-10-06 00:13:53+00:00
Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason

But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer
by delopsu | 2025-10-06 00:15:12+00:00
Yes! Thank you for sharing it.

And it feels like ASCII art is going through a renaissance. Maybe I'm biased and watched it a lot recently.

Let me also share a few cool ASCII tools I came across while working on this one:

- animation studio: https://ascii-motion.app/

- image to ASCII converter: https://www.tooooools.app/effects/ascii
by dzhiurgis | 2025-10-06 00:16:26+00:00
It's 800 watts or about 570 KWh per year in berlin, assuming balcony points directly south. At 0.2 euro, that's about 114 euros per year.

Percent-wise I'd guess it's less than 10% of yearly total?

Overall it's OK payback, but mostly penny pinching in grand scheme of things.

https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=48.886392,9.470215,6&s=5...
by XorNot | 2025-10-06 00:16:28+00:00
I just really wish there was a way to do live and on-request location sharing through Signal.

There's a plugin for OSMand but its based on a modified Telegram client, so...no.

As it is me and my wife share Google Location via maps which mostly fills in cutting out "how far away are you?" messages but it's surprisingly unfeatureful.

What I want is something where I can designate a trusted contact to be able to request an update immediately from my phone or enable live tracking - since sometimes you want to be able to get a moving dot on the map when you know someone else is driving.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-10-06 00:17:00+00:00
I just did some modelling with the help of claude (which can write 200LOC+ numpy code faster than I can)

300 Euros crappy setup, 600 euros mid-range setup, 1200 with storage. (Extra) regulations is zilch, it's legal to plug and play these things up to 800W nameplate capacity.

I went with numbers for mid-range, vertical south orientation and offsetting 200W (without battery, any overproduction is wasted). This nets you an avarage of €0.32 per day - With practically nothing in winter, and maybe up to €1 per day on a PARTICULARLY nice summer day.

But altogether, that still adds up to something like Eur 116 per year, so your midrange system earns itself back in 5-6 years.

Not great, not terrible. Nothing to write home about, but free money is free money.
by godelski | 2025-10-06 00:18:51+00:00
For more context, the name derives from "phone hacking" or phreacking. You got your legends like Captain Crunch and many of you big tech players were into this stuff when they were younger, such as Woz

This was also often tied to a big counter culture movement. Which one interesting thing is that many of those people now define the culture. I guess not too unlike how many hippies changed when they grew up
by pjjpo | 2025-10-06 00:20:21+00:00
I think there's some causation vs correlation here - AFAIK Microsoft didn't lead the hike in game prices, it was probably Nintendo? Either way given the strong inflation it seems likely this would have happened acquisition or not.

The layoffs seem more damning but we would need a crystal ball to know if Activision could have skipped them if independent, or bought by another company.

Still it seems hardly clear cut and more story-crafting after the fact by a beurauceat rather than a proper analysis.
by rovr138 | 2025-10-06 00:21:00+00:00
> As you increase the size of the input data, the accuracy gradually decreases.

Interesting.

On your section "Limitations and Areas for Further Study",

What I'd be curious on future work would be,

- changing the order of the data on each table type - changing the order of the questions

I'm curious to know if what it fails is the same, if it changes depending on the location, if it's a bias.

Is it always a specific question? Is it always a specific value? Is it always question #x (or around question #x?). Does it tend towards x or y on types of questions?

Good idea
by pseudalopex | 2025-10-06 00:21:20+00:00
How the commentary was supposed to support your point was unclear. No such demarcation exists because people want some amount of privacy in public space? No such demarcation exists because a self righteous random person asserted privacy is a myth and anyone who disagreed with him lied to themselves at least?

I know people who value privacy because they grew up in small towns. Traffic cameras are used for surveillance also. And another reason people don't like them is a record of pairing them with abnormally short yellow lights.
by bartblast | 2025-10-06 00:21:23+00:00
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "not as integrated as in Gleam"? Are you referring to Hologram being a framework/library rather than a language-level feature? Or is it more about the developer experience - like tooling, compilation workflow, or how seamlessly it fits into the Elixir ecosystem compared to Gleam's native JS transpilation? I'd love to understand your perspective better so we can potentially improve that integration feel!
by ineedasername | 2025-10-06 00:21:24+00:00
They might, but we may also find they don’t function as well or as predictably if increasing amounts of their weights are suppressed. Research has so far shown that knowledge is incredibly, vastly diffuse, as are causes of different behaviors. There was some research that came out of Anthropic where a model being taught number sequences by another model, and that second model had fine tuning which with a stated preference for owls. The student model, despite no overt exposure to anything of the sort, expressed the same preference. The subtlety of influence that even very minor things have on the vast network of weights is, at least at present, too poorly understood to know what we’re getting in the bargain when holes are poked.
by rmoriz | 2025-10-06 00:21:46+00:00
Besides the physical and ecological aspects, this is very libertarian. Something that is sadly not very appreciated in Germany. People take responsibilities, consider low power devices and optimize running times of dishwashers etc. to maximize ROI. Many new home automation (HA) users do exactly this. It's a reason to discover a new field of skills, like setting up home labs to increase digital sovereignty (partially) for example with HA and Nextcloud. Advanced users will go further and become familiar with Proxmox VE and even a container setup. Plenty of off-lease PCs are currently flooding the market (Thanks, Windows 11 requirements) making them awesome Linux/Proxmox hosts.