MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mangamadaiyan | 2025-10-20 08:27:22+00:00
Maybe actually making the interviews less of a hazing ritual would help.

Hell, maybe making today's tech workplace more about getting work done instead of the series of ritualistic performances that the average tech workday has degenerated to might help too.

Ergo, your conclusion doesn't follow from your initial statements, because interviews and workplaces are both far more broken than most people, even people in the tech industry, would think.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-20 08:28:40+00:00
The problem with space elevator is not only the lack of material today, but also the fact that such elevator is an ultimate and very fragile weapons platform, you basically get stones up the well and then drop them on the enemy. Meaning that any authoritarian country would destroy it even before it is ever built. And sturdy enough space elevator after it's break at any high point would start falling down on the planes in a loop, eventually flattening everything in its path when higher portions reach supersonic speeds. So unfortunately there is low chance it will be built, unless we sort out stuff on the planet first.
by goku12 | 2025-10-20 08:29:11+00:00
Just a nitpick. The real use of cat is to concatenate two or more files and dump the result in its stdout. But people use it more like file viewer these days.

Bat is a file viewer in every sense. I have concatenated multiple files using bat. It does come in handy sometimes. But even the concatenated output is designed to be a visual aid, not the traditional concatenation that cat does.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-20 08:31:59+00:00
"You wouldn't want to count the carbon emissions of making the appliances used to keep the warehouse clean too because with that procedure the carbon emissions of anything would be infinite." Problem is that this is the kind of loopholes orgs use to be able to get a lower number on reports. See country selling their waste to poorer countries. You don't have to necessarily fully map the true production chain but not counting the emissions of the tools used to produce, store and maintain the smartphones smells like cheating to me. All those tools will be contributing to carbon emissions and setting an arbitrary line only serves to push the responsibility of those emissions with someone else which is how we got into this whole environmental mess in the first place.

Obvious is just shorthand for unsubstantiated beliefs ime. What does "quite small" even mean? The iPhone carbon footprint is likely the lowest of all smartphones given Apple's efforts to look as green as possible. Your regular smartphone has almost double the carbot footprint at around 80kg. When you consider that most non-iPhone non-flagship smartphones become virtual bricks after 2-3 years, 80kg is a lot to me.
by 59nadir | 2025-10-20 08:32:45+00:00
Having Erlang-style OTP support (for the most part) is very doable, I've written my own OTP layer instead of the pretty shoddy stuff Gleam ships with. It's not really that challenging of a problem and you can get stuff like typed processes (`Pid(message_type)`, i.e. we can only send `message_type` messages to this process), etc. out of it very easily.

This idea that static typing is such a massive issue for OTP style servers and messaging is a very persistent myth, to be honest; I've created thin layers on top of OTP for both `purerl` (PureScript compiled to Erlang) and Gleam that end up with both type-safe interfaces (we can only send the right messages to the processes) and are type-safe internally (we can only write the process in a type-safe way based on its state and message types).
by sim7c00 | 2025-10-20 08:33:54+00:00
better add IR too, and all the optimized variants of the ASM for the specified code etc. - its not as straightforward, but that depends also on platform. CISC is generally more wacky than RISC i suppose.

also, a lot of things in stuff like ROMs is about I/O to component in the devices, so you can disassemble and decompile all you want but without the right specifications and context you cannot say what the code does.

so it will also need all specifications of the hardware platform you are running the code on, as well as in this case perhaps even hardware in the catridge etc. (heard those also sometimes have their own chips etc...).

i'd say for 'regular application code' that runs within an OS it might be easier, but still you need to provide a lot of context from the actual execution environment to reason properly what the code actually does? (what does INT 80 run and possibly return anyway, that code is outside of your target binary)
by atoav | 2025-10-20 08:34:21+00:00
For a car audio system?

Behringer drives that through a bog-standard unknown impedance XLR microphone cable. I am not saying more than 15m aren't possible, what I am saying is that this is a thing Behringer would need to mention. E.g. "Internal tests have shown that cable runs up to 100m are possible even with problematic electromagnetic interference coming from a generator".

Then you know what to expect, cause I would like to think they ran that kind of test before buying that AD IC in bulk and deploying it in their designs.
by pbmonster | 2025-10-20 08:34:41+00:00
> A space elevator on the moon is much more feasible: less gravity, slow rotation

The slow rotation is a minus, it means you've got to string the tether up to L1 instead of "just" up to geo/luna-stationary orbit. A lunar space elevator needs to be at least 56000 km long, more than 20000 km longer than the one to earth.

> But it's also much less useful.

Yeah, especially because all the things that make lunar space elevators a little more attainable also make lunar mass drivers a lot more attainable. Why ride in an elevator for a week if you also can just be fired from a cannon?
by TheDong | 2025-10-20 08:34:42+00:00
Okay, so you won't use OpenSSL because it's not proprietary enough. What do you use instead?

You pay for nginx plus? Oops, that uses openssl. F5 load balancers since you want to get even more proprietary and expensive? Some of those used OpenSSL too.

Microsoft IIS? Lemme tell you about the history of absolutely bafflingly bad vulnerabilities in that software, far worse than open source nginx ever had.

Effectively anonymous contributions are not what caused heartbleed, they're not what caused the vast majority of breaches and hacks into proprietary software companies nor the vast majority of vulnerabilities.

Bad code is what causes these bugs, and as far as I can tell, the easiest recipe to bad vulnerable code is to have a manager repeatedly tell an engineer "deliver this by friday or you're fired", which happens much less in free software projects.

I'm just trying to get a coherent idea of what you think the right thing to do here is.

How do I stay secure? What OS do I use that doesn't include a ton of open source components and reviews every line of code that goes into it? As far as I can tell, this has already excluded ChromeOS (based on open source packages, many imported without reading all the LoC), macOS (even worse, and an even greater history of vulnerabilities)... I guess windows is the best by this standard? But statistically it's also the most vulnerable, so it doesn't seem like this standard has gotten us to a logical conclusion, does it?
by Grumbledour | 2025-10-20 08:35:39+00:00
And to add to that, because some people might not know or have forgotten, colors where easily adjustable in winforms, so dark mode, high contrast mode, green, blue, hot pink etc. were all easily adjustable for all these apps and back in th day that was pretty standard to do for visually impaired people. No extra work from programmers was necessary, so vastly superior to today where you have to beg for good dark mode support.
by ic4l | 2025-10-20 08:36:00+00:00
This broke our builds since we rely on several public Docker images, and by default, Docker uses docker.io.

Thankfully, AWS provides a docker.io mirror for those who can't wait:

FROM public.ecr.aws/docker/library/{image_name}

In the error logs, the issue was mostly related to the authentication endpoint:

▪ https://auth.docker.io → "No server is available to handle this request"

After switching to the AWS mirror, everything built successfully without any issues.
by sim7c00 | 2025-10-20 08:36:14+00:00
this might have some limited uses, but you'd need to know how it was optimised, and also perhaps build the build engine for the same target and then decompile it to see what it looks like after that kind of treatment.?

perhaps with a bit of luck you'd get some useful markers / functions mapped tho, its not unheard of.

problem in my mind (didnt test it ofc) would be that the decompiled version is decompiled from a different ISA that build usually compiles to, so the decompiled version in my mind would look totally different. (you dont have the ported sources i suppose, only the originals).
by colesantiago | 2025-10-20 08:38:17+00:00
Well it looks like if companies and startups did their job in hiring the proper distributed systems skills more rather than hazing for the wrong skills we wouldn't be in this outage mess.

Many companies on Vercel don't think to have a strategy to be resilient to these outages.

I rarely see Google, Ably and others serious about distributed systems being down.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-20 08:39:26+00:00
There was some repair available. At very least, the neck could be cut off, and the electron gun bits replaced with new.

According to the Vintage Television Museum near Columbus, Ohio, the last company in the US to be able to do this closed in 2010, and the last one remaining in Europe closed in France in 2013. (I myself don't know if there are any in some other corner of the world.)

The museum did succeed in getting a bunch of the repair equipment from the shop in France, and one person involved was even trained there, but it's been a very long process.

Currently, the equipment seems to be in Maryland in the care of a person named Nick Williams. The last update I can find from him[2] is a few years old, and expressed concern about the war that had recently begun in Ukraine affecting the supply of electron guns.

tl;dr, it may still be possible to repair some aspects of some CRTs, and doing so is apparently not a completely-lost art -- yet.

[1] https://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_project.html

[2] https://www.earlytelevision.org/nick_report_5-1-2022.html
Ask HN: Seeking partnership for B2B business (US and Middle East market access)
by Majidbhatti123 | 2025-10-20 08:40:46+00:00
I'm a tech sales professional with 20 years of experience selling cybersecurity, SaaS, and managed services to mid-market and enterprise customers. I've hit quota consistently, earned Diamond Club recognition 5x, and exceeded targets even during COVID through strategic sales planning.

What I bring to your business: - Deep relationships in Bay Area and Middle East markets (Saudi, UAE, Qatar) - Direct access to healthcare decision-makers in the Gulf region for rapid market entry - Experience managing complex sales cycles from pipeline to close - Partner/channel management expertise (worked vendor-side and VAR-side) - Proven ability to open doors with C-level executives and navigate enterprise deals

Who I'm looking for: Founders who have a product, service, or MVP but need someone to actually SELL it and execute go-to-market strategy. Especially interested in B2B, healthcare AI, or SaaS - but open to other industries if there's market fit.

What I can do for you: - Build and execute your sales strategy - Open doors in US and Middle East markets through my existing relationships - Help you land your first customers or scale to the next level - Bring structure to your sales process

Partnership structure I'm open to: Equity partnership, revenue share, or creative co-founder arrangement. I'll prove value first before we formalize anything. Remote collaboration works, but I'm based in the Bay Area.

If you've built something but struggle with sales, or you have customers but need help scaling - Happy to answer questions or connect via email: Majid.bhatti@gmail.com
by sunrunner | 2025-10-20 08:42:37+00:00
As they say, every cloud outage has a silver lining.

* Give the computers a rest, they probably need it. Heck, maybe the Internet should just shut down in the evening so everyone can go to bed (ignoring those pesky timezone differences)

* Free chaos engineering at the cloud provider region scale, except you didn't opt in to this one and know about in advance, making it extra effective

* Quickly figure out a map which of the things you use have a dependency on a single AWS region without no capability to change or re-route
by bschwindHN | 2025-10-20 08:43:05+00:00
Honestly I would much rather handle that sort of project in an embedded environment and not something running linux.

esp-idf has answers for all those questions. You can hook up an SD card to buffer measurements when the network is down, reconnecting is usually as simple as a loop that tries to reconnect if you're not currently connected, and OTA updates are a solved problem with many different strategies to choose from.
by nness | 2025-10-20 08:43:56+00:00
Zero Hour was one of the must have's of the Nintendo 64 era and one of the few good games in the latter part of the Duke Nukem series. Despite its challenging platforming and a few soul-crushing levels, the game had consistently rich settings and managed to recreate that Duke 3D charm.

The recent Perfect Dark port was incredible and I hope this decomp gets the same treatment.
by maroon_unperson | 2025-10-20 08:44:38+00:00
0.45 times.

Less if inflation adjusted.

Amazon's market cap is 2.27 trillion [0] and 5 trillion was wiped off the NASDAQ over two years [1].

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/market...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191218173143/https://www.latim...
by 4ggr0 | 2025-10-20 08:44:41+00:00
> Reddit is arguably the worst place on the internet

as someone who left reddit so long ago that they don't remember it and really does not care about it, please tell me what's worse on reddit than the constant xenophobic, transphobic and general *phobic stuff on 4chan.

phobic does not even do it justice, as it just straight up advocates for whole races or genders to kill themselves (b-b-b-but, i-i-it's just a joke, kawaii).
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-20 08:45:07+00:00
> I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

This is HN naivete at its best. Engineer-centric worldview directly inspired by Ayn Rand science fantasies with single-factor causality at its core.

Engineering happens in and is regulated by its surrounding socio-entrepreneurial-political context. Apple releasing Apple Intelligence is not exclusively an engineering decision. OpenAI releasing ChatGPT is not exclusively an engineering decision. The birth of the internet is not an exclusively engineering decision.

Every single one of those decisions involved more than just calculating costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

What is the difference between saying "I am an engineer" and "I work as an engineer" if we leave aside any desires to bind your personality to your employment contract?
by esskay | 2025-10-20 08:46:48+00:00
Most "legacy" hosts do yes. The norm used to be a percentage of your bill for every hour of downtime once uptime dropped below 99.9%. If the outage was big enough you'd get credit exceeding your bill, and many would allow credit withdrawal in those circumstances. There were still limits to protect the host but there was a much better SLA in place.

Cloud providers just never adopted that and the "ha, sucks to be you" mentality they have became the norm.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-20 08:46:53+00:00
I had a Powercolor 9000 pro "Evil Commando". My friends and I thought it looked like a terrorist out of some old action movies. It kinda looked a bit like Universal Soldier.

Later on I bought a Sapphire 9800pro "Atlantis" which had some T1000 esque figure on the box art.

After that a lot of stuff becoming more corporate and boring.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-20 08:48:10+00:00
This is nonsense. There not a single believable argument in the whole trite. In matter of fact there is no arguments whatsoever, just a pile of books that supposedly reveal some big scam of the Big Education.

Pretty much every time somebody ”does their own research” it means that they don’t know what they are talking about and have nothing of value to give.
by adwn | 2025-10-20 08:48:23+00:00
Almost all discussions around space elevators focus on the cable itself, how to manufacture and deploy it, and completely forget about the issues that would arise afterwards:

1) How do you attach the climber to the cable without affecting its structural integrity? By squeezing it really hard? A material that's optimized for longitudinal tension strength is probably not very tolerant of lateral compression.

2) How do you provide power to the climber? A regular electric cable can't support its own weight, so either you have to attach it to the climbing cable, or you have to make it from the same material.

3) Is it even worth it? The climber needs to cover a distance of ~36,000 km, so even at 200 km/h it takes 7.5 days from the bottom to geosynchronous orbit. How many climbers and what payload can the cable support at the same time? Refer to issue #1 regarding limits in speed and mass per climber.

The throughput in tonnes/day is absolutely abysmal in relation to the immense upfront infrastructure cost per elevator. Compare this to SpaceX's Starship, which is getting closer and closer to fully reusable 100 tonnes to orbit in minutes. Space elevators will stay science fiction forever, not because they're infeasible, but because they're useless.
by esskay | 2025-10-20 08:48:28+00:00
Theres literally thousands of options. 99% of people on AWS do not need to be on AWS. VPS servers or load balanced cloud instances from providers like Hetzner are more than enough for most people.

It still baffles me how we ended up in this situation where you can almost hear peoples disapproval over the internet when you say AWS / Cloud isn't needed and you're throwing money away for no reason.
by yourusername | 2025-10-20 08:48:36+00:00
> What can explain that?

Looks. I'm not joking. The market is aimed at people with a fish bowl PC case that care about having a cooler with a appealing design, a interesting PCB colour and the flashiest RGB. Some may have a bit better cooling but the price for that is also likely marked up several times considering a full dual tower CPU cooler costs $35.
by chengdulittlea | 2025-10-20 08:48:53+00:00
Hi guys, I'm the developer of Our Paint :D Interesting to see someone posted this on HN again (?) lol

To answer some questions...

- Our Paint is 16 bit per channel (8/128 bit on mobile due to GLES limitation).

- I really didn't implement much stuff other than just straight up painting features, and a cropping/moving feature (able to move stuff 1000px at a time), that's why it's sort of featureless because it lacks a lot of tricks like selection and free transform.

- The "Programmable" is maybe a weird term yeah, I intend it to mean the node based brushes cause it does support branching and looping in the evaluation.

- My site is slow because it's only got like 500KB/s bandwidth otherwise it's pretty expensive. But it works :P

I have _some_ timelapse videos of me painting and drawing stuff using it on my youtube channel. Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa86QFowwyVRKiUURCyWu...

But yeah if you are a lay person who is expecting some similar features from other software you probably are gonna be disappointed because it's not intended to replace other art programs. Our Paint is more like a restriction so you get consistency and creativity when you use it to create images.

Yiming
by pietz | 2025-10-20 08:49:18+00:00
My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point.

The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product.

I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content in Markdown under some additional formatting instructions. That will cost you around $0.20 for 1000 pages in batch mode and the results have been great.

I'd be interested to hear where OCR still struggles today.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-20 08:49:30+00:00
I probably should have placed my other comment [1] as a response to yours in order to continue our discussion, as it won't appear when you view 'threads' on the HN UI. You can't really reject data (though you can reject how it is measured), but you can reject attempts to explain data - and that is precisely what he did, til his death, with quantum mechanics. That comment is a full-context letter from Einstein, in his own words, on this topic. His comments against it were harsh and highly prejudiced. He was, and remained, completely convinced of his own rightness, even though he had absolutely no justification for it, and every bit of evidence that existed seemed to falsify such a perspective.

And I'm not using this to argue that Einstein was somehow flawed. Rather I'm using it to argue that he was a human, and we all behave the same way. Putting scientists, or even science, on a pedestal is turning it into a cargo cult. Einstein's success was not driven by any systematically replicable method or anything of the sort. Rather he was an extremely intelligent human who happened to have biases for ideas that turned out to be completely correct in one dimension, and [probably] completely wrong in another.

This is also why increasing the number of physicists by 100x won't increase the rate of advances in physics by 100x, or even remotely close. There's even an argument it could viably reduce it by some sort of Malthusian crowding effect. Everybody scrapping for limited publication and attention pushes science more and more towards high brow click bait and vast sums of plausible sounding noise (which is easier than ever in modern times due to LLMs) can make it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640321
by adrian_b | 2025-10-20 08:50:25+00:00
The method described by you had been in use since the 19th century (typically using a designated book as the one-time pad), but it was cracked at the end of WWI, in 1918, by an American cryptographer, William Frederick Friedman, who was thus the first who has demonstrated that it is not enough for the encryption mask stream to be non-periodic, but it must also be random, otherwise it is still possible to decrypt the message by statistical analysis.

This fact proved by Friedman in 1918 has become widely known a few years later, in 1926, when Gilbert Sandford Vernam has published an article "Cipher Printing Telegraph Systems For Secret Wire and Radio Telegraphic Communications" in a journal.

While Vernam mentioned the help from Friedman, he gave no details and the works written by Friedman for the education of American cryptographers have remained classified for many decades.

Because of this, secure one-time pads have been referred frequently as the Vernam cipher, but this is wrong, as he is not its inventor, but only the first who has mentioned it in the non-classified literature.

Vernam (as a Bell Labs engineer) had a very important contribution to cryptography, but of a different kind. He has invented enciphering by modulo-2 sum (a.k.a. XOR), which is cheaper to implement in hardware than the integer addition used previously.