MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-10-07 13:52:37+00:00
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.

If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.

I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-07 13:52:48+00:00
Generally fair take, though most of the comments here don't seem to reflect the article's take that it is high gas prices and ongoing work to upgrade transmission that accounts for much of the cost.

They don't mention the previous government effectively banning onshore wind in England which seems relevant. The current version of that party is abandoning net zero to win back gullible voters they themselves misinformed about renewables.

If we want to point fingers for mismanagement I'd start there and probably also allege corruption.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-07 13:52:50+00:00
my point was to emphasize that we had agency in these decisions. we didn't do our best and get beat, we purposely chose not to compete. this isn't me trying to recapture some amount of pride like the guy at your local bar who keeps insisting he could've been a bad ass in the army but he would've beaten up all his superior officers first, it's me making sure that everyone realizes that this was a conscious choice to sell out the next generation in order to pad the fossil fuel industry's already record-high profits.
by SquareWheel | 2025-10-07 13:53:54+00:00
> While this is really handy, it is a best practice to allow users to manually toggle the color-scheme as well. Some people prefer a dark system theme, but light website themes, and vice-versa.

It can make sense for a theme selector that works on the server, since you can serve specific HTML when building the page. However, if using a JavaScript-based solution that fetches the theme preference from localStorage, I find this almost always results in a "flashbang" in dark mode, as the retrieval is slower than the first browser paint.

I've been implementing (and recommending) pure CSS-based theming to avoid this problem. Users seem much happier with them, and I haven't heard anybody ask for a theme switcher. We just respect their existing preference. However, I can see this being a problem if you offer multiple color schemes (beyond just light and dark).

I'd be curious to know if anybody has found a way to avoid this issue with JS switchers -- ideally without needing to delay the initial paint.

I do think an interesting approach would be a browser extension that lets you override the prefers-color-scheme property on a per-domain basis, similar to the toggle in dev tools.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-07 13:55:39+00:00
Study how Gmail natively handles tracking, then consider ways to improve upon it.

Since early days of Gmail Google has claimed several features to mitigate tracking:

1) the option to not automatically load images

2) proxying of message referents so that views don't imply unique loads.

3) render only a subset of markup avoiding active and risky elements by default

If you google, gemini will provide a rundown of native tracking mitigation features.
by goku12 | 2025-10-07 13:55:40+00:00
Let me remind everyone this again. Democracy is not an autocracy with time limits and turns. It's not a system where you elect a few individuals and hand them the power to rule over you for a few years. They are supposed to be your representatives who raise your concerns and protect your interests in a forum that takes decisions that affect all of you. Legislation like these are the small steps that convert the latter into the former. Democracy is fragile. Just electing a candidate periodically is not enough. It depends on the constant effort, vigil and activism from the citizens to safeguard it. It wont survive your apathy. As idealistic as it sounds, this burden is the true cost of living in a democracy. This is a harsh lesson that's recorded in history again and again.

Always take legislation like this seriously and hold your representatives responsible for it. Let them know that their political career in your constituency is finished for good if they support such moves. Let their political party know that they're not winning your constituency again until the damage is reversed. There's no room for subtleties and pleasantries when they're clearly showing you that they don't value your autonomy or the checks and balances on their abuse of power.
by milsebg | 2025-10-07 13:55:42+00:00
Isn't it just that we were pioneering web2 in a time (after the dotcom bubble) in which access to the internet became more ubiquitous?

Remember the beer app on the first iPhone. Playing with Sensors and graphics on a new device was just fun. Just like tinkering with the Raspberry has been.

Then, this got commercialized and optimized for money to the ground. To me, as sad it might be, "tech" and "web" has just become a mature market.

> Not just the vibes, but the net hope for humanity and short/medium/long term forecasts of the health of the united states were all much higher among the average joe

I'm European, so genuinely curious why that optimism faded away in the US
by more_corn | 2025-10-07 13:55:51+00:00
3M knowingly poisoned every single person in the world for decades.

Let them burn, and salt the earth where they fall. These fuckers don’t deserve a second chance.

How could they have done it better? Acknowledge the science when the problem was discovered in the 70s, publish the findings, let the scientific community study the problem and let people make informed decisions about the dangers. Had they done that PFAs might still be in use in very controlled circumstances. They certainly wouldn’t be used as waterproofing on our paper plates.
by Ms-J | 2025-10-07 13:56:06+00:00
Yes, I've heard of bad VPN companies that sell your data. I would like to learn more about how it is done exactly.

In your later comment you said "DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info." Is the VPN company only openly selling DNS info or are they selling more, such as connection logs?

How did you approach the VPN provider to ask to buy this info?
by skybrian | 2025-10-07 13:56:07+00:00
Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison.

I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO.

It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-07 13:56:22+00:00
In a free market, commodity-level jobs will only happen at commodity-level wages. But it's not a free market, because of minimum wage laws. If you set the minimum wage too high, the number of baggers may go to zero, not because of supply but because of demand - the price is higher than any grocery store is willing to pay.

You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-07 13:56:43+00:00
ARIA and accessibility microformats were separate from the ones the fediverse was excited about (and thus the GP was talking about)—things like hCard for identifying people, places, and things. Accessibility is useful to many people, but hCard et al. were probably never really useful to anybody other than Google. Still, many of us back then were obsessive-compulsive about using them in the hope that one day computers would better be able to understand authoritative information about identities and relationships between identities. I still have microdata on my personal web page.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-07 13:56:58+00:00
There are basically three types of responses you can get from an LLM/agent:

1) A response originating from LLM pre-training, in a domain where there has not been any (successful) Rl-for-reasoning post-training. In this case the amount of reasoning around the raw facts "recalled" by the LLM is going to be limited by any reasoning present in the training data.

2) A non-agentic response in a domain like Math Olmypiad problems where the LLM was post-trained with RL to encourage reasoning mirroring this RL training set. This type of domain-specific reasoning training seems to have little benefit to other domains (although in the early LLM days it was said that training on computer code did provide some general benefit).

3) An agentic response, such as from one of these research systems, where it seems the agent is following some sort of generic research / summarization template with proscribed steps. I've never tried these myself, but it seems they can be quite successful in deep diving and gathering relevant source material, but then the ability to reason over this retrieved material is going to come down to the reasoning capability of the underlying model per 1) and 2) above.

Bottom line would seem to be that with today's systems domain specific reasoning capability largely comes down to RL post-training for reasoning in that specific domain, resulting in what some call "jagged" performance - excellent in some areas and very poor in others. Demis Hassabis, for one, seems to be saying that this will not be fixed until architectural changes/additions are made to bring us closer to AGI.
by leoedin | 2025-10-07 13:57:28+00:00
> low latency connectivity

That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.

I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of London.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-07 13:57:43+00:00
I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.

But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?

I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
by craigtp | 2025-10-07 13:58:30+00:00
Location: Liverpool, England

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS.

Résumé/CV: https://craigtp.co.uk/cv

Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk

Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.

I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field.

An accomplished team leader, mentor and architect, I'm skilled at taking a leading role in the overall architecture of a project, in driving team developments and employing proven industry disciplines and best-practices to deliver successful software projects that frequently exceed client expectations.

I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.

Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.

Recent projects include:

+ Architected and executed a comprehensive overhaul of a core legacy system, migrating it to a robust microservices architecture. By strategically applying Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, we enabled a prominent African FinTech company to seamlessly scale from 1 million to 10 million active users while achieving a remarkable 30%+ reduction in cloud expenses.

+ Successfully delivered an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise their entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.

+ Designed & delivered a large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.

+ Spearheaded the creation of a groundbreaking anti-motor fraud solution for a prominent UK law firm. This industry-leading platform combined a user-friendly web application, powerful API, and sophisticated data systems, including Europe's largest anti-fraud database, giving the firm an edge in fraud detection.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-07 13:59:00+00:00
Let's compare to Purdue and the Sacklers, shall we?

Purdue owns a huge piece of the responsibility for the opioid epidemic. They created OxyContin and lied about it's addictiveness. They are probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. The Sacklers were heavily involved in all aspects of this and became billionaires because of it.

Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years, which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains. Last I heard an appeals court said no, you can't do that and release liability. This really was a slap on the wrist.

Now compare this to what China does [1][2][3].

Remember how all those people went to jail for mortgage fraud after 2008? Oh wait... And now? We just sell pardons [4]. This sort of thing used to cause a scandal (eg [5]).

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...

[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45728459

[4]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-flurry-pardons-include-camp...

[5]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-shadow-of-marc-rich
by Lerc | 2025-10-07 13:59:07+00:00
Is there a need for a wiki to collect instances of these stories? Having a place to check what claims are actually being made rather than details drift like an urban legend.

I tried to determine the origin of a story about a family being poisoned by mushrooms that an AI said were edible. The nation seemed to change from time to time and I couldn't pin down the original source. I got the feeling it was an imagined possibility from known instances of AI generated mushroom guides.

There seems to cases of warnings of what could happen that change to "This Totally Happened" behind a paywall followed by a lot of "paywalled-site reported this totally happened".
by craigtp | 2025-10-07 13:59:13+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Liverpool, England

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS.

Résumé/CV: https://craigtp.co.uk/cv

Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk

Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.

I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field.

I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.

Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.

Recent projects include:

+ Successfully lead a multi-team effort to re-engineer the core domain of a legacy monolithic application to a suite of well-designed, modern microservices utilising Domain-Driven Design, CQRS & Event Sourcing where appropriate for one of Africa's leading FinTech companies allowing them to scale their transaction processing from over 1 million active customers to over 10 million whilst simultaneously reducing their cloud spend by over 30%.

+ Successfully delivered large section of an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.

+ Successfully designed & delivered large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.

+ Successfully lead project to develop industry leading anti-motor fraud web application and API with advanced OLAP & OLTP system and data warehouse including one of Europe's largest anti-fraud databases for a Top 40 UK law firm.
by rustyconover | 2025-10-07 13:59:33+00:00
Just remember TINA - "There Is No Alternative."

But come on, there should be an alternative.

Without diversification, we’re just setting ourselves up for an economic rug pull the moment the AI growth hits the law of large numbers and people realize its not the magic they think it is. Economically? Don’t worry it’ll just be another “oops, your 401k lost a bit, here’s a bailout” moment. AKA, stimulus with sprinkles.

So yeah... keep buying those dips girls and boys.
by poupeaua | 2025-10-07 13:59:36+00:00
Otary gets even smarter with the addition of 17 binarization methods now available!

I am thrilled to share a new update to Otary, my open-source Python library dedicated to image manipulation and 2D geometry processing.

Otary now includes 17 binarization methods, designed to make experimentation both simple for beginners and powerful for advanced users.

5 basic methods: easily accessible for quick and efficient use: simple, otsu, adaptive, bradley, and sauvola.

These methods are the most classic and effective, perfect for new users and for 90% of practical cases.

12 advanced methods: for users who want to explore, compare, and understand more sophisticated approaches. They are intended for image processing specialists and researchers who want to experiment with new ideas.

The documentation presents a summary table of the 17 methods, classified by year of publication and accompanied by links to the original scientific articles.
by jawilson2 | 2025-10-07 14:01:07+00:00
Are you using a ThinkPad? My work laptop has this issue too, on windows 11. 75% of the time I have to unplug the monitor after waking up the laptop. 20% of the time it works. 5% of the time it has 640x480 resolution, and I have to unplug it again.
by jandrese | 2025-10-07 14:01:13+00:00
It's shocking how much performance you gain by temporarily turning off Windows Defender. I had a local disk to disk copy that the Windows File Transfer dialog estimated was going to finish in 10 hours after it settled down. It wasn't even that much data, just a few hundred GB, but that consisted of a great number of small files. On a hunch I tried disabling Windows Defender and the estimate dropped to about 30 minutes, and in the end it was spot on.
by Frost1x | 2025-10-07 14:01:38+00:00
Agreed, I would expect a government to provide their own mapping system, independent of any private entity. It’s so critical for a governments operation and general security needs.

What’s odd (to me) is trying to regulate other groups from generating maps of your nation when you have no jurisdiction over them. That’s akin to the US telling all South Korean governments they can’t create maps of the US unless they operate under heavy supervision or something of that nature.

It’s impractical, largely unenforceable, and any nation probably has independent mapping of foreign nations, especially their adversaries, should they need them for conflicts, regardless of what some nation wants to oppose over them in terms of restrictions. I guarantee the US government has highly detailed maps of Korea.

So who exactly are these regulations protecting? In this case they’re just protecting private mapping groups that reside in their country against competition.
by silvanocerza | 2025-10-07 14:02:42+00:00
I heard the rumor quite some months ago but it was mostly speculation, altough it made sense after they acquired Edge Impulse.

I'm not sure whether to be happy or not to be fair. Main issues with Arduino while I was there was the leadership lack of vision and the unwillingness to support projects coming from the engineers. It was a company kinda coasting and unsure where to go.

If they replace leadership with people that have an clear vision and focus this might be good.

My greatest hope is that people with stocks don't get screwed over though, they used to distribute them quite "easily" at a certain point to avoid raising salaries.
by mountainriver | 2025-10-07 14:02:46+00:00
If those statistical models are helping you do better research, or basically doing most of it better than you can, does it matter? People act like models are implicitly bad because they are statistical, which makes no sense at all.

If the model is doing meaningful research that moves along the state of the ecosystem, then we are in the outer loop of self improvement. And yes it will progress because thats the nature of it doing meaningful work.
by shanemhansen | 2025-10-07 14:03:17+00:00
Tcl was my first "general purpose" programming language (after TI-basic and Matlab).

When I started that job I didn't know the difference between Tcl and TCP. I spent a couple months studying Phillip Greenspuns books. It also made me a better engineer because unlike PHP I couldn't just Google how to do basic web server stuff so I had to learn from first principles. That's how I ended up building my first asset minification pipeline that served the "$file.gz" if it existed with content-encoding: gzip.

Nearly 20 years later and I'm basically a http specialist (well, CDN/Ingress/mesh/proxy/web performance).

Tcl is still kind of neat in a hacky way (no other language I've run across regularly uses upvars so creatively).

Shout-out to ad_proc and aolserver.