MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saispas | 2025-10-30 17:52:55+00:00
I don't think anybody seriously suggests that the medieval period was incapable of developing anything new or of building some stunning things – it's clearly nonsense. They had as many geniuses and craftsman as any generation and they produced some wonderful things comparable to anything we can.

I don't think it's simply a matter of lack of resources, though – some of the early kings had the manpower to do things like build an 80 mile rampart between Mercia and the Welsh states.

In thinking about what you've written, I started to look for more detail on any research into why there was such a drastic change in architecture post the collapse and you're right, it clearly is more complicated than just lost knowledge. I didn't look far, only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_architecture, but that's enough to suggest that it's now accepted that conscious cultural choice had a lot to do with it as well (if not more…). So I learnt something and will dig into it more - thanks!

But I'm not sure that specific (Anglo Saxon architecture) point really negates the proposition that for a thousand years people looked back to Rome (and later Greece) writers to legitimise their knowledge. This knowledge was sought after and preserved (and amended to fit in with religious dogma, of course). There were innovators, of course, but there's a reason that writers like Galen and Vitruvius, held so much sway for so long, isn't there?

In the political sphere, there were countless (real and figurative) battles to be seen as the heir to the Roman Empire because that was what success looked like… Yes, all these states would have torn each other to shreds anyway, because that's what states do if they're not stopped, but isn't it telling that they did explicitly so in terms of being the inheritor of Rome?

Of course it's all more complicated than that, but it does seem fairly clear that the ancient world generally was seen as something to aspire to, to get back to, in a way that's probably foreign to us now.

Unless you're Mussolini, of course…
by Marsymars | 2025-10-30 17:53:11+00:00
Doesn't change your overall point, but just to comment on the Fiesta case (of interest to me since I drove one of the first model year's return to North America - 2011 - until earlier this year) - it only survived 4 extra years outside of NA - it's discontinued worldwide as of 2023.

The surviving vehicle(s) on the platform are the Ford Puma and Puma Gen-E, which are subcompact crossovers not sold in North America.
Show HN: Fast-posit, sw implementation of posit arithmetic in Rust
by andrepd | 2025-10-30 17:53:15+00:00
I've been following the development of posit arithmetic on and off for the past 2 years or so. A couple months ago I decided to try my hand at writing a software implementation.

For those who don't know, posit arithmetic is a new(ish) floating point format that offers _several_ advantages over IEEE floats, in particular at lower precisions. It generally has better precision and simpler design, and offers the quire, a way to compute dot products very fast and with no rounding errors (much can be said about its often surprising uses); this makes it suitable for HPC, neural networks, etc. I have some links to references in the README, if you're interested in learning more. I find it really interesting!

This crate aims to be a fully complete and correct standard-compliant implementation. Even though it's WIP, it already has a decent chunk of functionality: you can define types with arbitrary size and exponent size, convert to/from ints/floats, do + - × ÷, use the quire, etc. The main thing missing are elementary functions (exp, log, sin, etc.).

It's also very very fast, according to my benchmarks probably the fastest free implementation atm! If anyone knows of a faster one please get in touch, I'd love to add it to the benchmark suite.

Correctness is extensively tested too, exhaustively where possible, and with proptest where not.

Finally, the code is well-documented, including the internal algorithms, which might possibly make it (I hope!) a useful learning tool.

Thanks for reading!
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-30 17:53:40+00:00
In the East Bay, I've noticed that the chain restaurants are consistently more expensive. Chipotle is more expensive than the taqueria down the street, not by a lot, but by a buck or two. And the bigger chains jacked up prices by more than the more regional ones: Subway costs the same as Togo's. McDonald's costs more than In n Out.

Businesses have found that people are willing to spend ~$20 on a fast/fast-casual lunch, and now most everybody charges that amount. But the national chains are also aiming for food consistency between locations, which means that my Chipotle and McDonald's meal is going to be only as good as they can economically make it in a blasted food desert like Indianapolis, whereas the local restaurants and regional chains can take advantage of me living less than 200 miles of 40% of the country's fresh produce production.

The fast food / fast-casual segments are losing price differentiation, and the fast food options are losing on quality.
by SllX | 2025-10-30 17:53:42+00:00
All better company than the countries listed as signatories.

I’m actually not sure about Germany though. I almost posted a similar list above but then I noticed the European Union is listed as a signatory, so not sure where that puts the EU members not listed: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...
by dfsegoat | 2025-10-30 17:53:54+00:00
fwiw towards your theory, I believe that the US Govt actually considers cloud providers - by way of specific services offered "dual use" systems for mil or civil use.

E.g. you will find references in AWS docs to Bureau of Industry/Security rulings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology

https://www.bis.gov/

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/global-export-compliance/
by GloriousKoji | 2025-10-30 17:54:16+00:00
Places in California has this problem too. Installing solar panels today could result in a larger electricity bill than not having them.

Getting solar panels forces you onto a plan in which they charge more per kwh pulled from the grid. The surplus electricity is only credited at the generation cost which is only 1/4 the total cost per kwh. (Delivery costs is 3x the price of electricity).

So if you want to go solar to save money you need both batteries and solar panels which is not an insignificant amount of money.
by kazinator | 2025-10-30 17:54:47+00:00
> A Fourier transform has no explicit temporal precision, and resembles something closer to the waveforms on the right; this is not what the filters in the cochlea look like.

Perhaps the ear does someting more vaguely analogous to a discrete Fourier transforms on samples of data, which is what we do in a lot of signal processing.

In signal processing, we take windowed samples, and do discrete transforms on these. These do give us some temporal precision.

There is a trade off there between frequency and temporal precision, analgous to the Pauli exclusion principle in quantum mechanics. The better we know a frequency, the less precisely we know the timing. Only an infinite, periodic signal has a single precise frequency (or precise set of harmonics) which are infinitely narrow blips in the frequency domain.

The continuous Fourier transform deals with periodic signals only. We transform an entire function like sin(x) over the entire domain. If that domain is interpreted as time, we are including all of eternity, so to speak from negative infinite time to positive.
by btown | 2025-10-30 17:55:19+00:00
I love that OTel exists, but I've always been confused why OTel even existed. If I were running a cloud provider, I'd put a "skunkworks" team on all things observability and log management a decade ago, and make their product free to use. It's not critical-path on infrastructure, so it's not a correlated risk other than the investment in manpower, but it dramatically changes how user-friendly your web interface is, and how likely people are to use it daily vs. managing things over command line or with third-party interfaces.

By bringing those eyeballs onto your cloud console, you're creating infinitely more opportunities for branded interaction and discovery of your other cloud products - you could even quantify these eyeballs as you would ad inventory! There should have been an arms race for each cloud provider to have the best log-tailing and log-searching and log-aggregation system imaginable. OTel could have been killed before it began, because Honeycomb and its other originators would have been acquired years ago and made specific locked-in value-adds for each cloud.

But nobody had this foresight, and thus comments like yours are absolutely correct. OTel is a blessing and I love the tools coming out. But from a cloud provider's perspective, it's a massive missed opportunity that continues to be missed.
Show HN: I made CSV files double-click to open in Google Sheets instead of Excel
by marcinem | 2025-10-30 17:55:36+00:00
I built my first macOS app to automatically open csv, xls files in Google Sheets.

I work as marketing, revops person and often have to combine data from different platforms for reporting purposes.

Google made the import flow super broken with too many clicks in between. So I built a simple solution that saves me some time.

Sharing it here, you can test it out for free. No subscription bullshit, one time payment to get unlimited usage if you like it.

Happy double clicking!
by gnarlouse | 2025-10-30 17:56:02+00:00
Okay, I'm just being facetious when I say this: was Kanye right?

--edit--

I'm not referring to his antisemitism. I'm referring to his claim that the Israeli state has their hands in everything. In general I think Kanye West is a fucking moron. But even a mentally unstable schizophrenic clock...

In general, I probably shouldn't have posted this. I'm sorry.
by reenorap | 2025-10-30 17:56:10+00:00
mRNA vaccines are a fantastic technology that were completely oversold by politicians.

The politicians lied to our faces and twisted our arms through mandates and threatened us to believe what they told us, not what we were seeing with our own eyes. I don't think the reaction against mRNA vaccines would have been so strong if they didn't try to force us to take it or if they didn't wage a religious war against those that didn't want to take it.

But I still believe mRNA has a great future ahead of it. I have recently bought a large position (for me) in Moderna because I think it will be able to fulfill the promises that we were told it would.
by vladgur | 2025-10-30 17:56:18+00:00
Words have meaning. Genocide means "deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. "

The war resulted in a lot of suffering by the palestinian civilians, but its the war that Palestinian government has started. People suffer in wars, thats why you should avoid them. Hamas + palestinian militants started the war on October 7 by slaughtering, raping, mutilating hundreds of dance festival goers and kibbutzniks.

That suffering was not stated goal of the IDF military response, freeing hostages and demilitarizing Hamas was.

Now that all living hostages have returned home, it looks like suffering of Palestinian civilians is inflicted directly by Hamas.

I hope the world is able to see demilitarization of Hamas through, although i have doubts
by Projectiboga | 2025-10-30 17:56:38+00:00
A type of Karma hitting them. U Pitt Medical Center had a ready to trial covid vaccine based on super sharp glucose spikes coated with some spike protein. Decent results in lab animals, ready for a human trial. Moderna bought it out by paying off UpittMC to sideline that and become a major testing partner for their mRNA product. Even if it is a legitimate advance the bullying of the media to down focus more tradational products and pulling a new tech from reaching testing is limiting our scientiffic discovery. They pushed the mRNA technology as their lawyers must have felt there were more legal and regulatory barriers to competition to give them a longer profit runway.
by lloeki | 2025-10-30 17:58:06+00:00
Thanks. I've been trying to put these bits in a succinct format:

https://lloeki.github.io/illustrated-ruby/

Each chapter kind of builds up on the previous one. It's still WIP and far from complete but what's there has helped me onboard a few people to Ruby already.

You might be interested in the Classes and Ancestry chapters.
by twoodfin | 2025-10-30 17:58:15+00:00
What numbers do you have in mind?

I was paying very close attention to this world at the time, and I am confident that 90%+ of every PC that could run Win95 at the time of its release had been sold by an OEM as booting straight into the bundled copy of Win3.1.

Yes, lots of people had older PCs and got Win95 with their hardware upgrade cycle.

They were never in any danger of upgrading to OS/2 or anything else: Microsoft owned the OEM sales channel and the software ecosystem for the PC for a solid 5+ years before Windows 95.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 17:58:34+00:00
> It's not like America is going to get walkable cities and world-class public transit anytime before 2060

I wouldn't be so pessimistic! The inevitable swing towards authoritarianism in the US happened much sooner than I expected, which also means it'll swing back again much sooner too, likely to be way before 2060. I'll throw out a prediction and say that the soon-to-be-authoritarian state that is under construction right now might fall as soon as 2035-2040, and it'll be a wild swing the other way once it happens.
by shaftway | 2025-10-30 17:59:03+00:00
FWIW, I think this is an adult vs. kid thing. I used to be the kind who would build my own stuff, and my kids definitely prefer to design and build their own things. But at some point I transitioned, and it's more about having a built model, not about the creating process. And I think I'm starting to see the same changes in my older kid, where things tend to stay built for longer.

For me I think the change came when I was able to build more real things. I learned how to solder, and then I learned woodworking, and all of a sudden I could make something that's the exact shape I wanted. Once you have those abilities it's a lot harder to go back.
by pndy | 2025-10-30 17:59:11+00:00
My friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings.

Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.
by Retric | 2025-10-30 17:59:40+00:00
Cheap in terms of capital, but home hydro tends to take quite a bit of labor and maintenance over time. If you look at that stuff as a fun hobby or YouTube content it’s no big deal, but economically your labor isn’t free.

I’ve got an usually good location for small scale hydro, there was even a mill on the property, but it just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-30 17:59:57+00:00
The key with a canary is that the thing you're trying to signal ensures the positive or negative signal itself, like "I will check in every 24 hours as long as everything is good, because if I'm not good I won't be able to check in.". THis is just a very thin, very simple code translation. It's like saying "if you get a request for our info, blink 3 times!"
by thefaux | 2025-10-30 18:00:02+00:00
If you are going to attack the sacred text of two billion people, it would be better to avoid a lazy comparison to Hitler. Have you read the Quran? Do you understand the historical roots from which it emerged? Do you know how it had been used and abused? What is the relationship between modern science and islam? How has it been used to justify violence? How has it been to argue for peace? Have the people who have used it to justify violence understood the original meaning? How does the violence/body count compare to other dogmatic religions, especially christianity?

There is violence in every ideology. To deny this is to deny reality. Singling out one group as uniquely prone to violence is both uncivil and dangerous in my view. That does not mean that one cannot point out the shadow side, but one should look in the mirror of one's one preferred ideology, whether that is christianity, atheism, scientism, nationalism, rationalism, etc., before casting blanket aspersions at others.
by rimunroe | 2025-10-30 18:00:53+00:00
> And this aspect of the language is somehow considered sacred, load-bearing infrastructure that may never be altered. (Even though, with "use strict" we already demonstrated that have a mechanism for fixing things without breaking them!)

There are many things we could do which wouldn't break the web but which we choose not to do because they would be costly to implement/maintain and would expand the attack surface of JS engines.
by n2d4 | 2025-10-30 18:01:05+00:00
> https://0github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth/pull/988

Very fun to see my own PR on Hacker News!

This looks great. I'm probably gonna keep the threshold set to 0%, so a bit more gradient variety could be nice. Red-yellow-green maybe?

Also, can I use this on AI-generated code before creating a PR somehow? I find myself spending a lot of time reviewing Codex and Claude Code edits in my IDE.
by philipkglass | 2025-10-30 18:01:27+00:00
I know that at least Malaysia, Mexico, and South Korea had genuinely independent solar manufacturing that was not just repackaging Chinese components. In reading the solar industry trade press, I haven't seen indications that the new tariffs are targeted to fight "leakage" of Chinese products via intermediary countries. They seem aimed at keeping import prices elevated across the board.
by klardotsh | 2025-10-30 18:01:27+00:00
This is yet another example of why open bootloaders to allow alternative firmwares for all gadgets must become legally required. Stuff turning into eWaste (or at least losing what some folks would likely call major functionality) because the creators went out of business and the gadget was locked down is a disaster for both the planet and for the concept that you actually own the stuff you buy.
by 8note | 2025-10-30 18:01:43+00:00
the canary notification method is a lack of updates, not a specific update.

you update your canary to say that nothing has changed, at a known cadence.

if you ever dont make the update, readers know that the canary has expired, and so you have been served a gag order warrant.

changing or removing the canary in response to a warrant is illegal. not changing it is legal.

for an equivalent cloudwatch setup, its checking the flag for "alarm when there's no points"
by munificent | 2025-10-30 18:01:56+00:00
I like this article a lot but if you want to dig deeper and understand some of the negative consequences of Ruby's approach, you might like these two articles I wrote:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/01/13/iteration-insi...

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/02/24/iteration-insi...
by ugur2nd | 2025-10-30 18:02:05+00:00
I'm not an expert. I'm asking because I don't know.

Did I understand correctly? You can create a site with a .onion extension without a domain on a hosting service.

I'm thinking. If you can do it this way with .onion, can you do it with something else? That would be a bit unusual.

If that were possible, being able to customize the extensions would be interesting. Being able to customize brand names. Like .mybrand, or .egg, .bread, whatever you want.
by zparky | 2025-10-30 18:02:06+00:00
rough math: 1000 kwh / mo / house, ~30kwh/kg hydrogen so 30kg H per mo per house. idk how long winters would be, 8 months is 240kg of hydrogen, which if compressed to 10 bar is roughly 300 cubic meters of storage. kinda a lot of space. compressed to 100 bar is like 10kg/m3 which sounds more manageable
by Bender | 2025-10-30 18:02:13+00:00
- What can this do without internet/LTE?

- Can it cache and perform learned instructions locally?

- Can the LED's on the side of the head be forced to turn bright red when it's connected to the data-centers or when a human is peering into ones home and flash red and blue when a human is controlling it? maybe also play the minions "beee-dooo beee-dooo" sound

- Does it have the concept of a safe-word that will forceable power it off that superscedes all other instructions? "NS3 shut down, I mean, Neo..." and can you rename it?

- What information about me, my home and my neighborhood is saved directly or in the abstract?

- Are government employees, members of the department of war and intelligence agencies being advised to keep these out of their homes?
by cool_man_bob | 2025-10-30 18:02:25+00:00
Easy. (b)

I can continue to milk a specific market while my competitors do other things.

Yeah eventually that will be dried up, but by than point enough wealth has been accumulated for generations of me and my family.

Plus if the worst comes too quickly there’s a fair chance I’ll get bailed out by my long time buddies in the government.
by kyboren | 2025-10-30 18:03:14+00:00
The fundamental problem with this logic is that there is no enforcement body here. In a just society, the law defines who is "allowed" to steal from you and the state's enforcement arm punishes those who violate the law. The law binds but also protects.

Creating a global enforcement arm is an obvious non-starter: Which laws shall be enacted and enforced against whom, and how are fundamentally political questions. The answers to those questions necessarily change once you cross into another polity. States can coordinate and agree mutually to enforce a law... but if Poland says that despite their commitments to the contrary they simply aren't gonna extradite that suspected Nord Stream saboteur: Tough nuggets. Such situations expose international "laws" as mere window dressing on powers that emanate from and remain held by individual states.

There is no global enforcement arm and plenty of evidence that if someone starts genociding you, nobody else is gonna do anything about it. You're on your own. Such "laws" bind but do not protect.

Especially in the context of the US as world hegemon: The US fully expects to shoulder the entire burden of deterring or defeating threats to the homeland. Joining the ICC would bring precisely zero extra protection from genocide. Indeed, such a commitment may limit the US's freedom of action, discredit US deterrence, and actually make a devastating war more likely.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-30 18:03:21+00:00
+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.
by vladgur | 2025-10-30 18:03:36+00:00
Why is middleeastmonitor.com a one-sided propaganda source that has in-your-face anti-israel bias, not immediately flagged on Hacker News?

If this is true AND its relevant to hackernews, it should come from trustworthy sources and not something that

P.S. go try to find news of Hamas executing people in the streets of Gaza after Israel pulled out on middleeastmonitor.com
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-30 18:03:46+00:00
If you take this thought process even farther, specific words and phonemes should occupy specific slices of the tradeoff space. Across all languages and cultures, an immediate warning that a tiger is about to jump on you should sit in a different place than a mother comforting a baby (which, of course, it does.) Maybe that even filters down to ordinary conversational speech.