MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chermi | 2025-10-07 15:15:58+00:00
Hey guys, I learned electronics from a nobel laureate!

Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were those good times.

One thing that really bothered me then was the idea of a current source. I was perfectly happy with a voltage source, perhaps naively(1). But a current source seemed magical. I was asking Martinis about this and he seemed dumbfounded that I didn't understand. Of course, the answer is feedback. And, of course, good voltage sources also require feedback. But he was so familiar with feedback control he didn't even consider saying that's whats happening, while I never even heard of controls.

Long story short, sometime later I asked to join his lab as an undergrad researcher. He said no, and to this day I think it's because I didn't understand current sources. Or maybe I was too late, or maybe the A- (see the aforementioned procrastination). That led me to asking a biophysicist, and therefore I became a biophysicist instead of condensed matter/QI/QC. In hindsight, I think this was fortunate. I would've never considered biophysics, which has been one of the loves of my life since then. Who knows, maybe I would've been just as happy with quantum stuff. I'm working through Mike and ike now and find it fascinating.

Funny enough, after my PhD, I co-founded a startup in industrial control & automation. Now I understand feedback quite well, and thus current sources, albeit many years too late.

(1) Of course, good voltage sources vary their resistance just like good current sources vary their voltage. My best guess as to the reason I was more bothered by the current sources is that I was so familiar with voltage sources with confidently claimed constant voltages (batteries). Not a very good reason, I should've questioned it more. In practice, it's much easier to make a near ideal voltage source (very high resistance) than a near ideal current source (0 resistance).
by duxup | 2025-10-07 15:16:00+00:00
Or cost of outsourcing / not having IT competence in your organization?

There were indications that Jaguar used the same outsourced IT org as another large company who has struggled to recover from a wide ranging hacking incident.

https://doublepulsar.com/the-elephant-in-the-biz-outsourcing...

I've had contact with several companies where once outsourced IT competency and security continuity is just out the window ...

Sometimes not even the outsourcing company's "fault" as humans / organizations love to think "oh I don't have to think about that now that I outsourced it" and folks who do worry about the detail then leave (they can't use their skills) and now you got folks in charge who don't even understand what they're agreeing to with their outsourcing company. Other times, it is the outsourcing groups fault ...
by andoando | 2025-10-07 15:16:13+00:00
What's hard about programming an ESP32?

I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import <Arduino.h>

And a ESP32C board with wifi/bluetooth is like $8 https://www.amazon.com/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-ESP32C3-Microcontro... (and thats from amazon, on alibaba its like couple bucks if that)

As a side note, you can power this with your IPhone's USB C which was surprisingly cool.
by mindslight | 2025-10-07 15:16:20+00:00
I'm curious how in-depth you've been looking, especially investigating models where you can do a little bit of work to do things like unplug cell modems. I'm somewhat in need of a new vehicle and have just assumed the whole market is trash based of what I've read online and the new cars I've seen people get. But I'm hoping I've missed some gems of online communities still managing to eek out some freedom (and physical buttons, of course).
by strenholme | 2025-10-07 15:16:52+00:00
Here’s my bit of public domain code for iterating through tables in Lua so that the elements are sorted. This routine works like the pairs() function included with Lua:

-- Like pairs() but sorted function sPairs(inTable, sFunc) if not sFunc then sFunc = function(a, b) local ta = type(a) local tb = type(b) if(ta == tb) then return a < b end return ta < tb end end local keyList = {} local index = 1 for k,_ in pairs(inTable) do table.insert(keyList,k) end table.sort(keyList, sFunc) return function() key = keyList[index] index = index + 1 return key, inTable[key] end end

Example usage of the above function:

a={z=1,y=2,c=3,w=4} for k,v in sPairs(a) do print(k,v) end

With a sort function:

a={z=1,y=2,c=3,w=4} function revS(a,b) return a>b end for k,v in sPairs(a,revS) do print(k,v) end

(Yes, this is a lot easier to do in Perl or Python, since those languages unlike Lua have built in list iterators, but it’s possible to do in Lua too)
by dr_orpheus | 2025-10-07 15:17:10+00:00
Yep, definitely already on people's minds: "China’s use of its SJ-21 to remove a GEO satellite that had been shedding debris to a very high graveyard orbit in January 2022 has been repeatedly used as evidence that they can threaten other on-orbit satellites" [0]

[0] https://spacenews.com/chinese-on-orbit-servicing-and-debris-...
by PaulKeeble | 2025-10-07 15:17:32+00:00
A lesson runs at the pace of the slowest students, and those slowest students don't want to learn and actively disrupt the class and everyone else. We tolerate this far too much its damaging to the other 20-30 children in the same lessons and moving them to their own classes would have a much bigger average impact than picking the brightest for special lessons. Ideally we would do both so people could go closer to their pace.
by rezahussain | 2025-10-07 15:17:45+00:00
Location: Sioux Falls, SD

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Pytorch, Tensorflow, RabbitMQ, Postgres, SLURM, HPC, Swift, C++, C, Objective-C, Java, MacOS, MySQL, Keras, GDAL, Apache Tomcat,CI/CD, Docker

Resume/CV: https://rezaaalihussain.tiiny.site

email: rezaalihussain@gmail.com
by flakeoil | 2025-10-07 15:18:00+00:00
> Why is there so much fact-free anti-US sentiment on HN?

Firstly, it's the US government themselves saying there are imbalances and therefore they have to add tariffs on imports from almost every country. It's the US government who spreads hate towards most other countries, not the other way around.

Secondly, could it be because people living in the US seem to not notice (or don't want to believe) the US is turning into a dictatorship and the rest of the world does. People don't like the new values of the USA, they liked the old values. If it continues like this, it's game over for the USA.
by dugmartin | 2025-10-07 15:18:51+00:00
> You should also remove any students from classrooms whom routinely distract from others' learning.

You can't do this without getting sued (at least in Massachusetts). Source: my wife is a long-time elementary school teacher and my daughter works as a one-on-one aide while she is getting her teaching degree.

I don't want to start of flamewar but the current "push in" model created by educational bureaucrats creates a classroom environment that caters to the "timesinks". When you have a good chunk of the class on IEPs (individual education plans) that must be followed by law the "high flyers" (gifted kids) mostly get ignored due to time pressure.

Add socialization problems caused by COVID and reduced attention spans due to devices and chaos is always eminent. The stories I hear about daily classroom behavior would have blown my mind as a kid growing up in the 70s/80s.

I just wish that gifted kids could get the same access to IEPs that the other tail of the curve gets. However, when you base your educational outcomes on high stakes testing it is just natural to ignore the outliers above the mean and focus on the ones below it.

Again, I don't want to start a flamewar. Everyone has the right to an education.
by thebigspacefuck | 2025-10-07 15:18:54+00:00
I am so against this. I taught myself to read at 4 and taught myself up to 5th grade math in the first grade. They basically let us do whatever we wanted in that class and it was great. Then second grade onward was structured and so incredibly boring as I waited years to finally get back to the math I knew how to do in grade 1. Then I got into algebra and it was another snooze fest going at the pace of everyone else. I was deep into drugs before I got to something interesting like multi dimensional Calculus and it was only due to my severe misbehavior and my parents catching me before I OD’ed on benzos that I became lucid in the last couple of months of class to pick it up. Finally got my shit together in college and got a masters in EE, but man I feel like I wasted so much potential if I could have only gone my speed. And to be clear, I was in a G&T program after 6th grade but it was too little too late. In first grade my best friend was Asian and we worked on math together and geeked out about cool science shit, that’s what I wish I could have done the whole time. I was in a small town where there were few of us, but I imagine NYC could be an amazing place to create a space for gifted learning.
by palmotea | 2025-10-07 15:19:00+00:00
> If you nationalize AI and distribute the profits evenly per citizen, you've created a basic income scheme.

You're kinda missing the point. I suppose what I propose would be a "basic income scheme," but not UBI ("Universal basic income (UBI)[note 1] is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income..."). I consider the essential feature of UBI that most of the profits from AI are reserved for the billionaires and other shareholders who own those systems, and only the minimum amount needed to prevent the extreme desperation that can lead to revolution is socialized.

I'm proposing all the profits from AI be socialized, and the billionares get no more than you or I.
by tsycho | 2025-10-07 15:19:03+00:00
On iPhones, you need to pay Apple $99/yr+taxes to do even personal development. Yes, technically they have a free tier, but it supports a max of 3 devices, which you can't change, ever. It's so painful that it might not as well exist.

Is Android doing the same? Do you have to pay them money to install your own, or open source apps?
by iamleppert | 2025-10-07 15:19:19+00:00
It stands to reason the OP doesn't understand the code or what he's (probably the LLM) has written if he can't manage to reproduce his own results. We have all been there, but this kind of "try stuff" and "not understand the cause and effect" of your changes is a recipe for long-term disaster. Noticeably also is a lack of desire to understand what the actual change was, and reinforcement of bad development practices.
by hackthemack | 2025-10-07 15:19:21+00:00
I was thinking a while back, how nice it would be if lua was the scripting language in the browser instead of javascript. There are some projects to compile lua to wasm and have it run in the browser...

https://pluto-lang.org/web/#env=lua%3A5.4.6&code=if%20_PVERS...

But interoperability with the DOM is the missing key.

Still, if lua was used instead of javascript, I could see myself saying... man, I wonder what browser development would be like if we replaced lua with x.
by crote | 2025-10-07 15:19:23+00:00
There's still a huge embedded market!

Plenty of microcontrollers have a single-digit number of Cortex-M cores and memory/flash counted in the megabytes. It'll be decades until that market reaches the multi-gigabyte point, so why bother wasting a whole bunch of memory on 64-bit pointers?

I'm not quite sure why you'd want to run Erlang on it, but the hardware exists.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-10-07 15:19:26+00:00
No, it's a supported ISA on most v8-a and I believe all v8-m implementations.

It's the only ISA on Cortex-A32, but not sure if any mainstream chips were ever produced with that core.

(Depending on course if you want to get specific about Arm/Thumb/Thumb2, I lumped them all together above).
by Night_Thastus | 2025-10-07 15:19:39+00:00
My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something went wrong, I would always be able to recover it. I could never 'lose' the key if it was tied to my account.

Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.

Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
by sph | 2025-10-07 15:20:12+00:00
Proton and flatpak. The latter still has a lot of issues, but I recently come across a $200+ piece of commercial software (Bitwig Studio) that distributes as a flatpak, and it works great. And so is 99% of the desktop apps I'm using, Steam included.

Flathub is the best app store around. Can't wait until they allow selling paid apps (they had a few contractors working on it last I checked)

Feels good to be on Linux, man.
by blastersyndrome | 2025-10-07 15:20:41+00:00
My takeaway from this announcement is that are going to ruin Arduino's current IDE and replace it with... something called Arduino App Lab? They didn't go into specifics as to what this is, other than it will integrate AI, somehow.

The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of cool, I guess.

This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows. It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
by robohoe | 2025-10-07 15:20:56+00:00
Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.
Ask HN: Are certificates still being issued at YC StartupSchool?
by therepanic | 2025-10-07 15:20:58+00:00
Since YC Startup School is now open to everyone, I have a question for those who have recently completed the program: are certificates still being issued? In what form are they issued? That is, are they sent by mail or are they available via a link so that they can be posted on LinkedIn profiles, for example?
by OnionBlender | 2025-10-07 15:21:03+00:00
My brother was identified as "gifted" and I was identified as having a "learning disability". He got pulled out of class to work with other gifted kids on special projects (like computer programming in the 90s). I got pulled out of science class to be taught remedial grammar and receive one-on-one help with math. This made me feel like I was dumber than the other kids and that I had to study hard to compensate. Meanwhile, my brother had everyone telling him how smart and gifted he is.

We both went to university, but he barely got accepted and nearly dropped out. I think I did a lot better at university because I was already accustomed to needing to study.

Many years later I learned that there have been studies about this "praise for effort versus praise for intelligence" dynamic.
by motorest | 2025-10-07 15:21:08+00:00
> It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says.

The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.

It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.

There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-07 15:21:37+00:00
From the presser:

> Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.

At the least the official line is to remedy this situation. Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into their monolithic ecosystems.

The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.
by bccdee | 2025-10-07 15:22:05+00:00
The primary reason I was admitted into my local gifted program was because my parents and teachers pushed to get me into it. At age 6, I scored a high enough IQ to get in, but my family had to pay to have the test administered privately. The makeup of my cohort was mostly white and Asian, but they were also distinctly middle-to-upper-middle-class, with a high density of stay-at-home mothers (like my own) who were active in the school board and knew how to push the right buttons to get their kids into special programs.

> I’ve never seen a satisfying explanation for why a supposedly unjust system, one assumed to disadvantage certain groups, would “accidentally” advantage Asians, often above native-born white students.

Many immigrant groups have, on average, a higher socioeconomic status than native-born Americans. Even Black African immigrants tend to be more affluent than the mean of the white American population, because immigrating is expensive and it selects for wealth. My family are middle-class in North American, but they immigrated from South America, where were distinctly better-off than the average.

Affluence has much more explanatory power than merit, especially in the absence of any mechanism for the supposed racial merit which the author of this newsletter seems to be ascribing to the Asian population.
by teiferer | 2025-10-07 15:22:10+00:00
Idk man, your definition of "scam" seems different from other people's.

"Old rope"? Is every non-EV a scam because it's "old rope"? Are people with cable TV subscriptions victims of scams because cable is "old rope"?

There is a difference between "in my opinion, there is no value" and "scam". Most items in the grocery store around the corner I don't buy, because they don't have value to me. But the store is not a scam. There is an element of directed deception and lying missing, in my grocery store and chess.com as well. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, then please present it.
by pengaru | 2025-10-07 15:22:59+00:00
I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.

My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-07 15:23:21+00:00
> In late August, Jaguar Land Rover was hit by a major cyberattack, which led to it shutting down manufacturing sites across the world. [...] and has likely cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars

> The UK government has agreed to guarantee a £1.5 billion emergency loan to help Jaguar Land Rover pay its suppliers and recover from the disruption. [...] which experts warn could set a risky precedent.

Simple fix - as an entry fee for the emergency loan program, require that the corporation's C-suite give HM Treasury all their bonuses, stock options, & such from the past (say) 5 years. "Just aligning our incentives, chaps. His Maj doesn't hand out gongs for stuffing up."
by hnt2025 | 2025-10-07 15:23:23+00:00
You're right, in the grand scheme of things, buying a new disk every few years isn't a major hardship but obstacle. My point wasn't really about the cost of hardware or not being able to solve problem, but rather the brittleness of the software, documentation and usabillity.

The difficult backup migration is just one symptom of a larger problem: Time Machine isn't robust. It has sharp edges and can fail in ways that are hard to recover from, like the network backup I lost. That lack of reliability and breaking changes not just in backup software but in whole ecosystem is the real issue for me. Apple "obsoletes" things in its own timeframe regardless of userbase. I've got enormous respect for Apple products and people who are building them and with them. I wish Apple would have "LTS" version of MacOS and better documentation - often tools exist but aren't easy accessible.
by strenholme | 2025-10-07 15:23:33+00:00
The main reason I made Lunacy was to have a standard compile of Lua 5.1, since it’s possible to make a Lua 5.1 compile with, say 32-bit floats or which only supports integers but not floats.

Lunacy also has a few built in libraries which are not included with Lua 5.1, such as binary bitwise operations (and/or/xor). It also fixes some security issues with Lua 5.1 (better random number generator, hash compression algorithm which is protected from hash flooding attacks).

In addition, I have made a tiny Windows32 binary of Lunacy.

Don’t worry about the Lunacy changes; all of the examples in the book work with bog standard Lua 5.1 with a bit32 library (bit32 is common enough most OSes with a Lua 5.1 package also have a bit32 package for Lua 5.1).
by psunavy03 | 2025-10-07 15:23:40+00:00
Radio shows and ballgames have been doing that for literally decades. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be bothered by it. Frankly, the better announcers don't "change their tone," they just read the ad blurb conversationally and move on.

Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
by noirscape | 2025-10-07 15:24:09+00:00
I think people will sooner just start hard breaking Windows ISOs just to get rid of MS's garbage (arguably already the case if you use Rufus, which customizes the OOBE setup to already reject checks and tracking if you tick the boxes. They also have a checkbox to iirc disable the TPM check that's killing a lot of older device support because there's nothing in W11 that actually relies on a TPM, it's just an artificial restriction from Microsoft to kill old hardware), which will just lead to people doing what they've already been doing with Microsoft's stuff: pass it around like arcane knowledge that becomes increasingly difficult to find as it gets ingested by dodgy spam sites to the point where you're entering registry keys that either fix your problem or send everything to a third party.

Microsoft is a level of entrenched that Linux practically won't be able to beat for reasons that have little to do with technical viability and everything to do with legacy tools, having software that works with business formats (Office; any other office equivalent on Linux will still have compat issues and as long as those exist, they won't be a valid replacement - for much the same reason, although not fully locked to their platform, Adobe is a permanent barrier to Linux adoption) and video game DRM on popular titles keeping them basically in that position forever.