MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Timsky | 2025-10-20 09:12:07+00:00
Today I tried with an old (1935) fundamental Bell Labs paper on harmonic distortions caused by ferromagnets in communication lines. It is for sure cited more times than it appears in Google Scholar: 25. DOI:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1935.tb00418.x

Here is the list of what the system proposed to take a look at: 1. Vascular at‐risk genotypes and disease severity in Lebanese sickle cell disease patients 2. Narrow band filter for solar spectropolarimetry based on Volume Holographic Gratings 3. Communication from Space: Radio and Optical by S. Weinreb 4. An Adaptive and High Coding Rate Soft Error Correction Method in Network-on-Chips 5. Plasma hemostasis in patients with coronavirus infection caus...

I would expect more papers like 3rd as the topic is communication systems. Unfortunately, inside the ref.3 there is noting said about distortions.

Maybe it is indeed a linguistical curse of this topic...
by railspress | 2025-10-20 09:12:52+00:00
Hey folks,

I’ve been building this for my own projects and thought it was time to share.

It’s called Railspress — a CMS built on Ruby on Rails with Liquid templates, real-time preview, and a simple, flexible content model.

It’s been running a few production sites for a while, handling multi-channel publishing (web, mobile, newsletter) and some privacy/GDPR logic behind the scenes.

Still early, but it’s been rock solid so far.

https://github.com/railspress/railspress
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-20 09:13:00+00:00
I'd quibble about wether the two main technology fixes mentioned (nuclear power and geo-engineered aerosols) are in any way (good or bad) "capitalist".

If anything I'd say the main problem here is that the techno-capitalist are insincere about both and are using them as (half-literal) smoke screens to excuse using more fossil fuels in the immediate future.

But even in that insincere approach it's government action (or very rich philanthropy) that is required to do these things without direct market incentives.
by 81222222 | 2025-10-20 09:13:02+00:00
not only just sugar but high fructose corn syrup in particular. and yes, I know they're both basically metabolized the same but one is more likely to cause inflammation than the other. and the fact that it's dirt cheap compared to cane sugar makes it more likely to end up in our food at an affordable price. unlike other countries, we substitute sugar with corn syrup and the use of hfcs correlates to the increased obesity we've seen in the past few decades no matter how the ag lobby tries to rationalize otherwise.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-10-20 09:13:24+00:00
The `--pager=builtin` change is interesting; first time I've heard of minus.

> Traditional pagers like more or less weren't made for integrating into other applications. They were meant to be standalone binaries that are executed directly by users. However most applications don't adhere to this and exploit these pagers' functionality by calling them as external programs and passing the data through the standard input.

Do people widely agree with this? That sounds less like 'exploitation' to me and more like 'the way Unix works'.

> This method worked for Unix and other Unix-like OSs like Linux and MacOS because they already came with any of these pagers installed. But it wasn't this easy on Windows; it required shipping the pager binary along with the applications. Since these programs were originally designed for Unix and Unix-like OSs, distributing these binaries meant shipping an entire environment like MinGW or Cygwin so that these can run properly on Windows.

So, to support Windows, we have to:

- Abandon (maybe bypass) the core Unix principle of composing programs to carry out more complex tasks - Reimplement a pager library in every language

Is that really the best approach? Even if so, I would have thought a minimal pager would be best, but the feature list of this pager library is fairly extensive: https://github.com/AMythicDev/minus?tab=readme-ov-file#featu...
by BI_department | 2025-10-20 09:13:39+00:00
The article isn't arguing for that. It doesn't present some "past" that the author wants to go back to. It is stating that the best way forward is not to continue what we're doing now.

A third of food production on this planet done by smallholders, and the easiest way to make sure the other two-thirds doesn't get wasted is to change the distribution system (not with technology). It should not be used to make high-fructose corn syrup in the US. It should not be grown in Arizona to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia. The technology is a sticking plaster over our dumb world, and it is falling off
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-20 09:16:15+00:00
Pull-through caches are still useful even when the upstream is down... assuming the image(s) were pulled recently. The HEAD to upstream will obviously fail [when checking currency], but the software is happy to serve what it has already pulled.

Depends on the implementation, of course: I'm speaking to 'distribution/distribution', the reference. Harbor or whatever else may behave differently, I have no idea.
by xvector | 2025-10-20 09:16:25+00:00
No one dies if our users can't shitpost until tomorrow morning.

I'm glad there are people willing to do oncall. Especially for critical services.

But the software engineering profession as a whole would benefit from negotiating concessions for oncall. We have normalized work interfering with life so the company can squeeze a couple extra millions from ads. And for what?

Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-20 09:16:27+00:00
Dishwashers are ok, depending on flooring - if you want to get it out and guarantee no scratches on the floor, it may be simpler to get some kind of "dolly" mechanical assistance.

Washing machines, on the other hand, tend to have a brick in the bottom to stop them from walking around on their own.

(periodic recommendation: if you buy a Miele, you will pay twice as much for several times the expected lifespan of a cheaper machine. My parents have a Miele dishwasher that's over 30 years old.)
by TheDong | 2025-10-20 09:16:34+00:00
https://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-announce/msg00050.html

> Following my ill-defined "Tarsnap doesn't have an SLA but I'll give people credits for outages when it seems fair" policy, I credited everyone's Tarsnap accounts with 50% of a month's storage costs.

So in this case the downtime was roughly 26 hours, and the refund was for 50% of a month, so that's more than a 1-1 downtime refund.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-20 09:16:54+00:00
Sadly, I have garments from my grand-parents made 40 years ago which are much better than my parents garments made 20 years ago, themselves much better than what you can find nowadays at the same price points from the same brands.

Thankfully, with the internet, it's easier than ever to buy actually nice and well made pieces of cloth. They are not cheap however.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-20 09:16:57+00:00
There's always aptitude if you want a more powerful interface, too.

aptitude can also handle extended states (autoinstall, manual overrides, holds, etc.) and can be used as a apt replacement (aptitude update).

Also, aptitude can provide alternative solutions to harder package migration scenarios, showing all resolutions on a nice TUI.

Wish the developers compared it with aptitude too, because I see no comparison there.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 09:17:02+00:00
While a space elevator doesn't contradict any fundamental limits of physics, that doesn't mean it's actually possible to build one. There is no reason to be certain that it's actually possible to create a material that has the required characteristics in terms of tensile strength to support it's own weight, plus the weight of the elevator, plus the weight of all the additional cabling. It also has to endure the huge temperature differences that it will experience along its length and from day to night and from season to season.

This is especially true considering that you don't need something that barely holds - you need something that you know will hold up to many times more weight than it needs to, so that it can be safe: the potential energy such a thing would store would be enough to dig into hundreds of meters of rock all around the world, if it ever crashed. So, you have to ensure there is no realistic chance of it ever crashing. It also has to be highly non-fragile in other ways, so that a madman with a bomb or a freak collision with an airplane or a meteor (especially likely in the thin upper layers of the atmosphere) won't bring it all down.

This combination of properties may well be completely impossible to actually achieve in a material. Even if there is no obvious basic law of physics that it would break, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't break other, harder to touch, derived laws.
by pavlov | 2025-10-20 09:20:13+00:00
This great interview with Roger Dean about his career in games was recently posted:

https://spillhistorie.no/2025/10/03/legends-of-the-games-ind...

Turns out that the Psygnosis developers in the 1980s used him as a kind of single-shot concept artist. They would commission the box art first, then use that as inspiration for designing the actual game to go inside the box.
by ghoul2 | 2025-10-20 09:20:19+00:00
Isn't this "as intended" in the westminster-style system? The govt is formed by MPs from the majority party (or alliance). By definition they MUST be able to pass ALL money bills, which only require a simple majority. Any failure to pass a money bill is equivalent to the govt no longer holding a majority support in parliament. And that means either the king/president/govgen invites someone else from the current parliament who they have good reason to believe DOES (potentially) have support of majority of the parliament, or dissolve the parliament and call fresh elections if there is no such majority.

I am not quite sure why an action with such a clear established precedent be considered foreign interference? or was it the case that there WAS a suitable candidate with a possible majority but they were NOT invited by the govgen to try and win a trust vote in parliament?
by mango7283 | 2025-10-20 09:20:43+00:00
Be that as it may, the workhorse combat aircraft of most NATO air forces and the USAF itself is the F-16, a single-engine fighter, and its nominal replacement, the F-35 is also single engine. You can try to make your point by comparing those vs the numbers of F-15s, F/A-18s, F-Fs, Rafales, Eurofighters and so on in service vs the F-16 and F-35, but bringing C130s and C17s into it is irrelevant, those are not "combat aircraft".

edit: ah but they are "military aircraft", sure. fine.
by James_K | 2025-10-20 09:22:13+00:00
The difference between Forth and Lisp could not be more pronounced. Forth source code has entirely implicit structure, you can't even tell which function is called on which arguments. Lisp has entirely explicit structure which makes it much easier to read and edit. Lisp needs only a single primitive (lambda) to create the entire programming language, whereas Forth needs many primitives which break the core idea of the language in order to be usable. All of what is elegant about Lisp is ultimately lacking in Forth.
by dpq | 2025-10-20 09:23:26+00:00
Amazing work! One minor correction:

> As particles from the sun hit the atmosphere, they excite the atoms in the air. These excited atoms start to glow, creating brilliant displays of light called auroras.

The process is a bit more nuanced than that. The modern mainstream understanding is that the growing pressure of the solar wind makes the tail of the magnetosphere "contract" (sort of pushing it inwards from the sides), which leads to reconnection of magnetic field lines. Once the reconnection occurs, the magnetic field lines that remain bound to the geomagnetic dipole accelerate the particles on them towards the Earth => they slam into the atmosphere, exciting the atoms and generating the aurora.
by philipallstar | 2025-10-20 09:24:17+00:00
No, those things aren't nearly as important. Handling stress and therapy can also be replaced by some physical activity as well.

General advice that would work for 95% of people shouldn't be criticised because it doesn't address the other 5%. If people did it then there'd be far more money in the system to pay for usefully targetted specialist treatment for those people.
by Tananon | 2025-10-20 09:24:25+00:00
That's indeed something I plan to add in the near future. I'll probably add a tutorial as well to showcase how you can use this with e.g. sentence transformers. There's some pretty good benchmarks in the paper that I used as inspiration for some of these algorithms: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.05135, I'll most likely try to reproduce some of these.
by M95D | 2025-10-20 09:25:28+00:00
I don't know much economics, but the article seems absurd on several points.

- China can nationalize anything on their territory, including banks, buildings, land. Bank debt is not a real problem. Money aren't real. Imports/exports flows are very much in their favor whatever the currency.

- None of the things listed as China needs from US are really needed for their survival. What a nation needs to survive is locally produced goods (incl. food) and energy, and AFAIK, they have both in abundance.

The list can be simplified to:

1) continued access to tech advancements, without which they'll keep on improving on their own with less speed, but let's be honest, we mostly hate this new tech invading our lives. The 7nm they have is good enough for everything, incl. AI.

2) Access to US and allies markets. Seriously?? What US allies? EU, Africa and S.America will happily trade with them without the US.

3) Art. They can just pirate that one. In fact, once decoupling gets to a certain point, they can just ignore copyright completely. No copyright matches communism perfectly, if they ever think of going back to it.

- On the other hand, the things US needs from China will really crash the standard of living, not just the economy, until US replaces all the factories lost in China, and there are a lot of factories to replace. I don't even think US can easily replace the factories themselves without China.

I'm actually a bit scared of Russia resources and industrial design/research + China manufacturing. Just 2 things need to happen and the rest of the world is fcked for the next 100 years: Russia to get real leader(s) interested in their country, not personal profit/status, and China to address their reputation (see Poorly Made In China).
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-10-20 09:25:51+00:00
It's not surprising that it's impacting other services in the region because DynamoDB is one of those things that lots of other services build on top of. It is a little bit surprising that the blast radius seems to extend beyond us-east-1, mind.

In the coming hours/days we'll find out if AWS still have significant single points of failure in that region, or if _so many companies_ are just not bothering to build in redundancy to mitigate regional outages.

I'm looking forward to the RCA!
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-20 09:27:03+00:00
> Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate.

Interestingly, when I worked on analytics around bugs we found that often (in the ads space), there actually wasn't an impact when advertisers were unable to create ads, as they just created all of them when the interface started working again.

Now, if it had been the ad serving or pacing mechanisms then it would've been a lot of money, but not all outages are created equal.
by cahaya | 2025-10-20 09:27:16+00:00
Lot's of OCR/ LLM's (Even Gemini Pro 2.5) still struggle converting complex tables to markdown or HTML: Tables with multiple headers and merged cells that get mixed up, multiple columns with tick boxes get mixed up, multi page tables that are not understood correctly. Also Llamaindex fails miserably on those things.

Curious to hear which OCR/ LLM excels with these specific issues? Example complex table: https://cdn.aviation.bot/complex-tables.zip

I can only parse this table correctly by first parsing the table headers manually into HTML as example output. However, it still mixes up tick boxes. Full table examples: https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/icao-compliance-checklist
by mk89 | 2025-10-20 09:27:22+00:00
It's fun to see SRE jumping left and right when they can do basically nothing at all.

"Do we enable DR? Yes/No". That's all you can do. If you do, it's a whole machinery starting, which might take longer than the outage itself.

They can't even use Slack to communicate - messages are being dropped/not sent.

And then we laugh at the South Koreans for not having backed up their hard drives (which got burnt by actual fire, a statistically way less occurring event than an AWS outage). OK that's a huge screw up, but hey, this is not insignificant either.

What will happen now? Nothing, like nothing happened after Crowdstrike's bug last year.
by guitarbill | 2025-10-20 09:27:22+00:00
Nice try at guilt-tripping people doing on-call, and doing it for free.

But to parent's points: if you call a plumber or HVAC tech at 3am, you'll pay for the privilege.

And doctors and nurses have shifts/rotas. At some tech places, you are expected to do your day job plus on-call. For no overtime pay. "Salaried" in the US or something like that.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-20 09:28:03+00:00
Ice forming inside of the fridge is a result of moisture making its way into the fridge and staying in contact with the cooling elements.

The cause can be a lot of things, from broken drain pipes to damaged door seals. A well-functioning fridge shouldn't have (much) ice buildup unless you live in a hot and humid area.

Some modern fridges (usually the luxury models) also have features to defrost themselves if they detect that there may be frost buildup, but many fridges still have you do it manually.
by innocentoldguy | 2025-10-20 09:28:46+00:00
I wholeheartedly agree with you that gleam_otp is janky. Still, actor message passing is only part of the picture. Here are some issues that make static typing difficult in OTP:

• OTP processes communicate via the actor model by sending messages of any type. Each actor is responsible for pattern-matching the incoming message and handling it (or not) based on its type. To implement static typing, you need to know at compile time what type of message an actor can receive, what type it will send back, and how to verify this at compile time.

• OTP's GenServer behaviour uses callbacks that can return various types, depending on runtime conditions. Static typing would require that you predefine all return types for all callbacks, handle type-safe state management, and provide compile-time guarantees when handling these myriad types.

• OTP supervisors manage child processes dynamically, which could be of any type. To implement static typing, you would need to know and define the types of all supervised processes, know how they are going to interact with each other, and implement type-safe restart strategies for each type.

These and other design roadblocks may be why Gleam chose to implement primitives, like statically typed actors, instead of GenServer, GenStage, GenEvent, and other specialized OTP behaviours, full supervisor functionality, DynamicSupervisor, and OTP's Registry, Agent, Task, etc.

OTP and BEAM are Erlang and Elixir's killer features, and have been battle-tested in some of the most demanding environments for decades. I can't see the logic in ditching them or cobbling together a lesser, unproven version of them to gain something as mundane as static typing.

EDIT: I completely missed the word "actor" as the second word in my second sentence, so I added it.
by bargainbin | 2025-10-20 09:28:59+00:00
This is a good thing for Wikipedia right? Their financial model is donations, people who will simply get their info from an LLM output are likely not the type of people to donate to a free information repository.

So their bandwidth costs lessen, whilst their information content will continue to grow.

Had they been supported solely by adverts then yeah it’s a death sentence, but luckily they steered clear.
by oasisbob | 2025-10-20 09:29:27+00:00
> Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations.

That's not an accurate explanation. In the PNW, in many cities, older more expensive neighborhoods tend to have more trees, not less. It's a serious equity issue, given the heat island effect.

The difference in foundation damage is because of soil profiles, not planting behaviors. We don't tend to have expansive soils around here. Take away the clay and you lose the hydrological forces which allow tree root to inhabit previously occupied pores.
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-20 09:29:40+00:00
2 things:

1) GDPR is never enforced other than token fines based on technicalities. The vast majority of the cookie banners you see around are not compliant, so it the regulation was actually enforced they'd be the first to go... and it would be much easier to go after those (they are visible) rather than audit every company's internal codebases to check if they're sending data to a US-based provider.

2) you could technically build a service that relies on a US-based provider while not sending them any personal data or data that can be correlated with personal data.
by timini | 2025-10-20 09:30:10+00:00
TL;DR Problem: "Tool overload" is a critical bottleneck for AI agents. Providing an LLM with a large, static list of tools bloats the context window, degrading performance, increasing costs, and reducing accuracy. Solution: Implement a "select, then execute" architectural pattern. Use a lightweight "router" agent to first retrieve a small, relevant subset of tools for a specific task. Then, a more capable "specialist" agent uses that curated set to execute the request. Benefits: Lower latency and cost (fewer tokens), higher tool-selection precision, a scalable architecture for large tool catalogs, and improved reliability. Pattern: This pattern is a form of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applied to tools, often called Retrieval-Augmented Tool Selection (RATS). It can be combined with State-Based Gating for even greater precision. How: This post provides a complete, production-aware implementation using Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK).
by tdr2d | 2025-10-20 09:30:56+00:00
Hi, im a presales engineer for OVHcloud, a cloud provider. OVH is a "pinacle" VMware partner, we are a huge reseller of VMware licenses, and were able to secure a 3-5 years contract with broadcom with only 5 to 15% of price increase.

Of course, the clients I talk with are mostly interested in moving to the cloud or are already in the cloud, so it won't be applicable to you if you'd stay on-prem. I wanted to share my experience.

For some clients, change of technology would be more expensive than paying a bit more to VMware. You'd have to re-train half your IT department, and the migration could be long, risky and complexe. So in this case, a lift and shift move-to-cloud can be competitive, and frankly a serious option.

I see a lot of projects with Nutanix, but you'd be surprise of the price, which is almost the same as VMware. Nutanix comes with way more features than vanilla vsphere which explains the cost increase. You'd have NSX and vSAN packaged, plus replication features. Nutanix offers a great alternative. Actually, OVH proposes Nutanix too, so we can be agnostic and have a sort of leverage over Broadcom.

Some clients are ok to move to public cloud (equivalent AWS/Azure..). The smaller the infra the easier it is. It can be very cheap at OVH. Also it's great if you do containers because of the universal nature of them, they are easy to migrate. However, If the client has a lot of Windows Server, the cost is actually higher (at OVH the price of the Windows Server Licence is higher than at Azure..) because we cannot leverage the Windows Datacenter licenses

The cheapest viable option is to go to Proxmox on Baremetal servers. The features are close to a standard vSphere environnement. The lack of enterprise support is the thing that stops most clients to do this move.