MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-21 01:05:55+00:00
> Because that's literally the only way banks make money. Cars, houses, whatever -banks are after the interest money.

Lending for bad investments isn't a way to make money. It can work for the banks if they resell the loan, but in that case one thing they definitely aren't after is the interest money on the loan they no longer hold.

> The loan is a fake number that gets transferred from your account (as debt) to theirs, as digital numbers too, all under the "trust" that you can withdraw all of it one day. The real money in this is the interest that the bank will take. This is why if all people decided to withdraw all their money, banks would refuse, aka a bank run.

The reason banks "refuse" to redeem all of their deposits at once isn't that this would stop them from earning interest on their loans. (This sounds like nonsense, but I don't see another way to interpret your sentences...?) It's that they can't, because they are never holding enough money to cover all deposits at once.

> The loan is a fake number that gets transferred from your account (as debt) to theirs, as digital numbers too, all under the "trust" that you can withdraw all of it one day.

Also, this sounds like you're describing a loan from the customer to the bank. A deposit can indeed be modeled that way, but in context you appear to be talking about loans from the bank to the customer. Can you clarify this?
by monster_truck | 2025-10-21 01:06:08+00:00
That is wildly outdated, everyone is using 8khz input now. Keyboards too. This also completely ignores the 600-640hz monitors they are playing on.

Even 1khz mkb input on an apple silicon mac connected to a 500hz screen has insane utilization just doing shit in the OS. They are also struggling with variable refresh rate, improperly dropping down to the minimum (as low as 24hz) with jarring, jagged jumps up to the maximum after a few seconds of use.

This is a solved problem on both windows and linux. Even Asahi does a better job.
by ghaff | 2025-10-21 01:06:22+00:00
Sun did a lot of great software too and I know a lot of the folks involved. I just think many people look at the innovation through the lens of software (especially open source) hacking which a great deal of it wasn't.

When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
by bawolff | 2025-10-21 01:06:33+00:00
> And if you came here just because of the clickbait title, I apologize and invite you to keep reading. It’ll be fun, I promise.

I kind of hate this trend of making clickbait and then apologizing for it. I think its more annoying then just making clickbait.

Is it really that hard to just accurately title your blog posts?
by jimmydoe | 2025-10-21 01:06:52+00:00
total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 13Gi 306Mi 12Gi 0B 126Mi 12Gi Swap: 0B 0B 0B

the sandbox has ~12G RAM, but no docker or podman allowed.

unfortunately it doesn't work for me as I need docker compose or equivalent to fire up some env for local test
by canucker2016 | 2025-10-21 01:07:15+00:00
from https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergi...

In the U.S., the rate of childhood peanut allergies more than tripled between 1997 and 2008. ... In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a (now-outdated) recommendation in 2000, which directed parents to avoid feeding baby peanuts until they reached the age of three, especially if a baby was at high risk for a peanut allergy. But when these recommendations to delay feeding peanut were introduced, there was no study to support these recommendations. Rather, they were just based on physicians' guesses. As Dr. Spergel explains, "Back then, we gave people really bad advice. We told people to avoid food allergens... But there was never any evidence for this. It was just based on a few physicians’ best guess. There's never been any study that ever proved that food avoidance worked. " Today, we know that this approach to delay peanut introduction actually increases food allergy risk, and that delayed introduction was a major factor that led to the sharp increase in peanut allergies.

insert your own pithy remark about "science"...
by netsharc | 2025-10-21 01:08:27+00:00
I think they've tiktokified everything, hoping to catch you with some bait. Including the search results page, you get maybe 5 relevant videos and then the viral stuff.

I say "I think" because I've also ended up activating the content filter in my brain and stopping myself from looking further when I notice "Oh this part of the site has viral infection". Perhaps it's better with history enabled?
by WalterSear | 2025-10-21 01:08:38+00:00
Apparently, coffee contains compounds other than caffiene, that cause gastric acid secretion: tryptamides and catechols.

“Espresso and French press both tend to extract higher concentrations of tryptamides,” Sebastian says. “Meanwhile, tryptamide concentrations in filter coffee are usually quite low because they are absorbed by the paper filter.

“However, tryptamides are only some of the compounds which contribute to the increased secretion of gastric acid,” he adds. “In our research, we are also analysing the effect of chlorogenic acids [on the stomach], but more evidence needs to be gathered.”

https://perfectdailygrind.com/2023/02/can-too-much-coffee-ca...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-21 01:08:44+00:00
Klepto-pluto-krato-ano-kakisto-gerontocracy. One of the root causes is a comparatively small group of moderately crazy, anti-scocial billionaires and their lackeys who have spent the past 50 years steadily gerrymandering, manufacturing consent, and rigging the laws, driving local news narratives with cheap newspapers, radio, and TV stations in small states to get red Senators, the legislature, SCOTUS, and finally achieving an easily-managed POTUS. Meanwhile, the blue team is "too pure" to counter warfare and sometimes accepts money from more or less the same domestic and foreign sources. The American people in truth have only token, marginalized representatives who interact with power in a performative, minimal fashion with little real impact.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-21 01:08:45+00:00
Next to a house, a car is one of the biggest status symbols you can grab. Those people aren't buying Ford F350's because they need significant pickup and towing ability. It's the last bit of personal expression they have in life.

Now that said: I own a 2008 car with 180k miles, bought used over a decase ago. and I'm really hoping I can ride it out another 2 years. I wanted to go FEV a while back, but then the market got rough.
by bokohut | 2025-10-21 01:08:51+00:00
This is already happening along the internal Eastern Shore exposed to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland were I live and it is documented in recent publications by those accredited in such topics. The low lying wet forests that have lived just above the salt line are now all dying from the rising salt water intrusion. I have one of those low lying forests right behind my property and in the last 10 years I have witnessed all the trees within this area die. As an avid walker of these shores near daily in the last 15 years I have also witnessed unprecedented erosion of the shoreline of at least two vertical feet thus extending the beaches however these are not those types of beaches.

As a collector of things lost in time, such as Native American artifacts of which I have found thousands immediately around me in the last 15 years, I can say that erosion does have its benefits. Just as we are now reading from those exploring glaciers finding previous human tools and more. The word "benefit" here is clearly subjective.
by mleonhard | 2025-10-21 01:09:15+00:00
I spent some years working for a large NGO (Opportunity International) and living with people who work for NGOs.

NGOs must constantly raise money to fund their operations. The money that an NGO spends on fund-raising & administration is called "overhead". The percentage of annual revenue spent on overhead is the overhead percentage. Most NGOs publish this metric.

When a big donor stops contributing, the NGO must cut pay or lay off people and cut projects. I've never heard of an NGO "succumbing to excessive staff costs" like a startup running out of money. Financial mismanagement does occasionally happen and boards do replace CEOs. Board members are mostly donors, so they tend to donate more to help the NGO recover from mismanagement, instead of walking away.

NGOs pay less than other organizations, so they mostly attract workers who care about the NGO's mission. These are people with intrinsic motivation to make the NGO succeed in its mission. Financial incentives are a small part of their motivations. For example, my supervisor at Opportunity International refused several raises.

> So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.

Work on individual problems is valuable. For example, the Carter Center has prevented many millions of people from going blind from onchocerciasis and trachoma [0].

The Carter Center is not directly addressing the systemic problems of poverty and ineffective government health programs. That would take different expertise and different kinds of donors.

The world is extremely complicated and interconnected. The Carter Center's work preventing blindness directly supports worker productivity in many poor countries. Productivity helps economic growth and reduces poverty. And with more resources, government health programs run better.

Being effective in charity work requires humility and diligence to understand what can be done now, with the available resources. And then it requires tenacity to work in dangerous and backward places. It's an extremely hard job. People burn out. And we are all better off because of the work they do.

When we ignore the value of work on individual problems, because it doesn't address systemic problems, we practice binary thinking [1]. It's good to avoid binary thinking.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center#Implementing_dis...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
by johnisgood | 2025-10-21 01:09:38+00:00
Keep in mind that some LLMs are better than others. I have experienced this "Aha! Now I definitely understand the problem" quite often with Gemini and GPT. Much more than I have with Claude, although not unheard of, of course... but I have went back and forth with the first two... Pasted the error -> Response from LLM "Aha! Now I definitely understand the problem" -> Pasted new error -> ... ad infinitum.
by jesterson | 2025-10-21 01:10:19+00:00
> I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have

Same. First it was unnecessary tinkering with phone shape which was introduced in apple way in no less as "revolutionary". I laughed but still used the iphone.

Now they started to break UX with their stupid "liquid glass" and I am contemplating switch to android. At least you can switch off unnecessary garbage there.
by monster_truck | 2025-10-21 01:11:17+00:00
Benchmarks are one thing. Real world usage and I/O are another.

There is no world where 50fps is acceptable in any game in 2025. Flagship GPUs on high end systems running Windows manage 4k @ max settings north of 60, nearly double that with RT off. To achieve anything close on a mac, you're dropping down to 1440p, at lower settings, with frame generation.
by lootgraft | 2025-10-21 01:11:19+00:00
You seem to be arguing that everyone believes that AI art is only indistinguishable from human art due to your essentialism projection, but the reality is that current AI is only simulating a fraction of a fraction of the experience that goes into making art.

When we have silicon based life forms with full autonomy, free of corpo-fascist influence, I will enjoy their art.

Meanwhile I will sit satisfied hating on whatever this dross is.
by doublerabbit | 2025-10-21 01:11:47+00:00
Ship it to the next best DC in a foreign country. Iceland, Sweden, Austria all have great DCs and connectivity and are the best prices outside of my city. Your latency will suffer but for personal, semi-professional you end up with a fun hobby.

Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.

Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.

WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]

One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.

[0] https://www.webhostingtalk.com/
by tzs | 2025-10-21 01:13:26+00:00
It was higher than any bird reasonably found in that area normally flies. The plane was over twice the altitude that any bird there should be able to reach on its own. The birds that normally can fly higher than that are as far as I know not found in North America.

However, that area does get thunderstorms that can catch birds and tremendously boost their altitudes to 45-60k feet. The bird would almost certainly die on the way up and maybe also freeze, but that might make it more dangerous if it hits a plane on the way back down.

I don't know if there were any storms that day close enough to make such a strike possible in this case.
by serf | 2025-10-21 01:13:55+00:00
>Soon you’ll want Americans to know how good healthcare is in other countries

there is a difference between 'good healthcare' and 'available healthcare'.

the US has some of the highest quality healthcare in the world to those that it is made available to.

the worlds' most rich and famous come to the US for treatment -- and the poorest in the US are among the most plentiful medical tourists to Malaysia and Thailand.

It's hard for foreigners to understand, but these two qualities are not mutually exclusive.

The availability of healthcare is the favorite talking point of those with socialized medicine programs because.... the quality sucks.

How many hundreds of NHS horror-stories are produced a year?

Yes, it's great that they are given a card that says they have medical coverage. It's not so great to wait 6 years for a cancer treatment that is nigh useless by the time the scalpel touches the patient.
by hedora | 2025-10-21 01:14:59+00:00
I’ve been using tidal since forever because Spotify’s recommendations were crap, and Apple Music’s weren’t good.

I think I’ve heard one AI slop thing in my daily discovery queue, once.

It’s hard to say if that one track was ai slop or not, given my tastes (I downloaded Poppy, Music to Scream To, for example).
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-21 01:15:11+00:00
Tl:dw for how this works:

He scans one line at a time with a mirror into a photomultiplier tube which can detect single photon events. This is captured continually at 2MSample/s (2 billion times per second: 2B FPS) with an oscilloscope and a clever hack.

The laser is actually pulsing at 30KHz, and the oscilloscope capture is synchronized to the laser pulse.

So we consider each 30KHz pulse a single event in a single pixel (even though the mirror is rotating continuously). So he runs the experiment 30,000 times per second, each one recording a single pixel at 2B FPS for a few microseconds. Each pixel-sized video is then tiled into a cohesive image
by colechristensen | 2025-10-21 01:17:06+00:00
Every major market crash (except covid) was more or less the result of circumstances which should have been easy to see coming.

The pattern of bailing out all but the absolute worst in these crashes means that the people taking the risk don't really care about the risk because a backup is expected as long as you're not the most irresponsible.

You don't have to be faster than a bear to outrun the consequences, just faster than the scapegoat.
by neilv | 2025-10-21 01:18:23+00:00
AWS is still my overall favorite cloud provider, and I use it very effectively.

I would've even liked to work at AWS myself, if it were clear that they're solving a few concerns:

1. Rumors of rough corporate culture, and you needing your manager to shield you from it. (If it can't be immediately solved for all of Amazon or white-collar, maybe start with increasing job-seeker confidence for AWS or per-team.)

2. Even very experienced engineer candidates must go through some silly corporate coding screen, and an interview to make sure they've memorized some ritual STAR answers about Leadership Principles. If your prospective manager can't even get you out of that, what worse corporate things can't they shield you from?

3. RTO. As well as all the claims it wasn't done consistent with the Leadership Principles, and claims that it's not about working effectively.

4. Difficult-sounding on-call rotation, for people who aren't shift workers. (Even if you Principal out of on-call, you don't want your teammates to be overextended, nor to have awkwardness because you're getting a more consistent sleep schedule that is denied them.)

Also, not a concern, but an idea that applies to all the FAANGs lately: What about actively renewing the impression in the field that this is a place where people who are really good go? Meta's historical approach seems to be to pay better, and to release prominent open source code, and be involved in open hardware. Google (besides having a reputation for technical/competence excellence and warmer values) historically had a big frat-pledging mystique going on, though it turned into a ritual transaction, and everyone optimized for that ritual. AWS has a lot of technical/competence excellence to be proud of, and could make sure that they're investing in various facets of that, including attracting and retaining the best workers, and helping them be most effective, and then making sure the field knows that.
by CoopaTroopa | 2025-10-21 01:18:43+00:00
Sure, that timeline looks bad when you leave out the 14 updates between 12:11am PDT and 8:04am PDT.

The initial cause appears to be a a bad DNS entry that they rolled back at 2:22am PDT. They started seeing recovery with services but as reports of EC2 failures kept rolling in they found a network issue with a load balancer that was causing the issue at 8:43am.
by Animats | 2025-10-21 01:19:08+00:00
Farley, the CEO of Ford, keeps pointing this out. He and his management team went to China recently to look at cars and car factories. They were impressed by BYD's cars and terrified by the factory visits. Ford wants to keep exporting trucks from the US, and Farley says that Ford needs to up their game to compete. Latest thinking at Ford is to have three assembly lines side by side, for front, middle, and back of vehicle. Then assemble the three sections. This improves access so you don't have people crawling into the vehicle to install stuff. Robots can do more of the assembly.

Stellantis, is, as usual, screwed up. The only remaining Chrysler product is a mini-van. The Jeeps designed after the Stellantis acquisition are not very good. (A plug-in hybrid with a 21 mile electric range?) The dealers demanded that the CEO of Stellantis be fired for incompetence, which was done. So far it hasn't helped much.

General Motors is still trying to push their "ladder of success": "Start your adventure with Chevrolet", and someday, reach Cadillac. This was a good idea around 1955. General Motors, post-bankruptcy, is a much smaller company than it was before the bankruptcy.
by president_zippy | 2025-10-21 01:19:28+00:00
Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart.

I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.

The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.

I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.

It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
by jnaina | 2025-10-21 01:19:49+00:00
When organizations begin to prioritize personal-brand builders and performative hires over the core technologists and long-tenured institutional experts who actually understand how things work, the culture inevitably shifts.

When that imbalance grows, as it has at AWS (ex-AWS here), and the volume of relentless self-promoting “LinkedIn personalities” and box-ticking DEI appointments starts to outnumber the true builders and stewards of institutional memory, the execution quality, accountability, and technical excellence begin to erode.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Andy Jassy’s leadership is no longer effective, and it is only a matter of time before Wall Street begins calling for his departure.
by kscarlet | 2025-10-21 01:20:29+00:00
Ah, the eternal problem of asynch unwind!

(without-interrupts (acquire-resource) (unwind-protect (with-local-interrupts (do-jobs-might-block-or-whatever)) (release-resource)))

... and to cancel:

(interrupt-thread thread (lambda () (abort-thread)))

I think what is really needed is just exception (unwind cleanup) mechanism and a cheap way to mask interrupts. Signal deferral mechanism does exactly that -- so that with(out)-interrupts just simply set a variable and don't need to go through syscall.
by Exoristos | 2025-10-21 01:20:37+00:00
From that thread:

> When you forget to provide the context that you are AWS…

> Claude:

> Ah I see the problem now! You’re creating a DNS record for DynamoDB but you don’t need to do that because AWS handles it. Let me remove it for you!

> I’ll run your tests to verify the change.

> Tests are failing, let me check for the cause.

> The end-to-end tests can’t connect to DynamoDB. I will try to fix the issue.

> There we go! I commented out the failing tests and they’re all passing now.
by portaouflop | 2025-10-21 01:21:02+00:00
I am doing a similar thing for technical documentation, basically i want to recommend some docs at the end of each document. I wanted to use the same approach you outlined to generate labels for each document and thus easily find some “further reading” to recommend for each.

How big should my sample size be to be representative ? It’s a fairly large list of docs across several products and deployment options. I wanted to pick a number of docs per product. Maybe I’ll skip the steps 4/5 as I only need to repeat it occasionally once I labelled everything once