MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-02 10:43:21+00:00
> Another possible source of data is the driving current of the motors/actuators which is proportional to the mechanical resistance the limb encounters.

The problem is precisely the actuators. A lot of a human's muscles actually come in pairs - agonist and antagonist muscles [1], and it's hard to match the way human muscles work and their relatively tiny size in a non-biological actuator.

Just take your elbow and angle it to 90 degrees, then rapidly close it so your upper and lower arm are (almost) in parallel. An absolutely easy, trivial task to do for your pair of muscles controlling the tendons. But now, try to replicate even this small feat in a motor based actuator. You either use some worm gear to prevent the limb from going in the wrong direction but lose speed, or you use some sort of stepper motor that's very hard to control and takes up a lot of space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_muscle
by surgical_fire | 2025-10-02 10:43:53+00:00
"losing your job", for a lot of people, is extremely effective coercion.

We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc.

What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation.

If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.
by mdp2021 | 2025-10-02 10:45:01+00:00
Those with organs for judgement are found as liabilities when said judgement structure is faulty and they can be responsible for damage.

Those which are structurally whimsical - well, if you had to deal them as liabilities, then you would have to do it preemptively (it may not be that it's Chimpy that is so brutal - they just can be brutal).
by HK-NC | 2025-10-02 10:45:07+00:00
Sure but this wasn't fascism, this was entirely democratic. Then people got upset and wanted a do-over because the democracy didn't do the thing they wanted. And after accusing the brexiters of just being anti immigration, still nothing was done about immigration, because fuck what people want if its not what better people want. Now we have constant riots, pork pie patriots in their hundreds of thousands gathering in London, and useless promises after 20 years of lies and broken promises now that the demographics have changed massively creating a situation where one has to either do nothing or do something unsettling to revert any of this. Its like fascism for cowards.
by sfn42 | 2025-10-02 10:45:43+00:00
I feel like I can intuit these things pretty well but others can't. For example I see everyone talking about LLMs replacing developers and I'm over here thinking there is absolutely no way an LLM is replacing me any time soon. I'll be using it to do my job faster and better sure, but it won't replace me. It can barely do a good job while I hold it's hand every step of the way. It often goes crazy and does all kinds of dumb stuff.

Similarly reading this article I agree with the author and I feel like what they're saying seems obvious. Of course making robots that can match humans' abilities is an absolutely insurmountable task. Yes, insurmountable as in I don't think we will ever do it.

Automating specific tasks in a factory is one thing, making a robot that can just figure out how to do things and learn like a human does is many orders of magnitude beyond. Even LLMs aren't there, as we can see from how they fail at basic tasks like counting the Rs in Raspberry. It's not intelligence it's just the illusion of intelligence. Actual intelligence requires learning. Not training. Actual intelligence won't run a command, fail to read it's output, make up the output and continue as if everything is fine while in fact nothing is fine. But LLMs will because they're stupid stochastic parrots, basically fancy search engines. It's really strange to me how everyone else seems blind to this.

Maybe if we some day figure out real artificial intelligence we will have a chance to make humanoids that can match our own abilities.
by ben_w | 2025-10-02 10:46:43+00:00
Price is what it costs, value is brings you.

If the only thing you can imagine doing with a thing is selling it, as in you cannot imagine using it, price and value become the same.

> Price of goods must come down to the cost of making it plus margins

The difference is "profit" or "loss" depending which is higher.

Buyers will (in general) only buy when they value a thing more than the price charged.
by Freak_NL | 2025-10-02 10:46:43+00:00
There are a lot of interesting (or concerning) things about this saga, but the Guardian surprised me by simply showing the whole photo, tiny winkle and all. Over the course of this slowly unfolding case media have often opted to censor the image by cropping or black bars.

That should not be necessary, but the urge to self-censor appears strong in these cases.
by rtp4me | 2025-10-02 10:46:55+00:00
I have done a ton of iPXE boot setups in the past. We use iPXE at our DC location for imaging, system recovery, etc. In fact, I just finished up a new boot image that creates a 100MB virtual floppy drive used for BIOS updates. Reach out and I can provide the entire setup if you like (pxe config files, boot loaders, scripts, etc).
by pjmlp | 2025-10-02 10:47:28+00:00
Likewise I have been using C++ modules for my C++ hobby coding since VS 2019 prototype introduction, despite all the warts.

Nowadays, with exception of header units, VC++ and clang alongside MSBuild and CMake/ninja are pretty much usable for anyone that is able to stick to a specific platform.

I don't consider still fighting with build tools options in 2025 to make a pleothora of npm dependencies happy to run under nodejs a minor issue.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-02 10:48:13+00:00
Nuclear power does not complement renewables at all. Why should someone buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available?

Which means we have to factor in the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.

And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.

Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh.

That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.

The duck curve talking point is years out of date due to storage buildout in California.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
by rsynnott | 2025-10-02 10:48:48+00:00
Pretty much the entire modern transphobia movement appears to be, essentially, taking 90s/early noughties-style homophobia and changing a few words. As someone who was a target the first time round it’s really very striking how similar it is.

(Interestingly, early noughties transphobia had a fairly different character; the “think of the children” aspect is fairly new.)
by closewith | 2025-10-02 10:48:54+00:00
> 1) The "mender of kettles, pots, pans, etc.," sense come first.

> 2) The “gipsy” sense comes later and is derived from it.

This is controversial, but even if accepted, that still leaves 4-6 centuries where the term referred exclusively to Travellers before the verb came about directly from that meaning.
by mlrtime | 2025-10-02 10:49:04+00:00
Agreed, if you have not worked at a FAANG (or adjacent) the advice in these threads can work very well for you or very much against you.

The level of politics, promotion, promotion packets, leveling is a whole different level. That is not to start on PIP, hire to fire, etc...

You need to know the game if you're going to play it.
by danhau | 2025-10-02 10:49:39+00:00
At my job I have to deal with an old system that invented its own encoding, named TSS. The idea was to unify multiple charsets and encodings into one, before Unicode was a thing. But instead of coming up with one big a charset and assigning codepoints plus an encoding scheme, they thought it was wise to just repackage other encodings and charsets. Think Matroska, but for text. And yes, I do mean charsets AND encodings. Sometimes they repackage an encoding, sometimes just a charset where the codepoints are the encoding.

TSS supports the ISO-8859 charsets and corresponding (but deviating) Windows codepages, traditional and simplified Chinese, half- and fullwidth Japanese, Korean via Wansung and Johab, and others I'm forgetting right now. And in newer version of the software, they also support Unicode, but using a custom encoding.

Thankfully a good chunk of all that is well documented, like the byte values introducing a fullwidth Japanese character, for example. But they don't describe what charset or encoding is actually used. EUC-JP? Shift-JIS? Turns out it's JIS X 0208. You'd think they would just use Shift-JIS, which gives them both full- and halfwidth Japanese in one shot, but no. They package those explicitly as JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0201. Similar questions arise for Chinese and the others. It took a lot of reverse engineering to figure that stuff out. But if you think that is hard, have fun finding tables to map those old encodings to Unicode and back. Java is a godsend in this case. Charset.availableCharsets has them all!

What's kinda charming is that TSS also contains text formatting commands. "Make all following text bold! Make it underlined! Now make it both bold and underlined!" Stuff like that.

What's less charming is that TSS is actually a superset (an extension of) the ISO-8859 family, similar to how ISO-8859 is a superset of ASCII. In other words, all ISO-8859-1 (or any other variant) is perfectly valid TSS, but not all TSS is valid ISO-8859-1. This creates a lot of fun meetings with other departments when they query the database and are puzzled as to where those weird characters in their ISO-8859-1 text came from.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-02 10:49:39+00:00
I'd add an 11th point to expand on #1: supports a very wide range of movement speeds, movement force/torque and movement precision.

Take the elbow joint and the muscles it's connected to. It supports very fine precision, slow speed operations as well as high speed but at the same time the same operation at high speeds - say, lifting yourself up on a horizontal bar, assuming adequate strength you can either do a slow or a fast lift, and both at enough precision and torque to prevent your body mass from impacting to the bar which is another feat in itself.

Now try to replicate that with a classic mechanical mechanism, you'll always lose either precision, speed or torque.
by watwut | 2025-10-02 10:50:02+00:00
Some political opponents are literally trying to harm you. Trying to pretend otherwise is not just naive, but actively damaging. They are literally passing or trying to pass the laws that are literally harming "me or my close ones" and then celebrate the harm.

> Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person

J.D. Vance, Donad Trump and Putin are bad people. They are all my political opponents.
by paffdragon | 2025-10-02 10:50:20+00:00
On one machine I have offlineimap.py[1] (with mutt), on the other laptop Evolution[2] that archives my mail locally that I can also export and back up regularly.

[1]: https://www.offlineimap.org/

[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/wikis/home
by pjc50 | 2025-10-02 10:53:12+00:00
> Frank was a student loan startup founded by Charlie Javice in 2016. In 2019, Javice was featured on the Forbes “30 under 30”

There was a joke going around Twitter about "30 under 30 doing 30 to life", because the startups involved were getting more and more outlandish to the extent that bystanders suspected that fraud was going on. Became a Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-u...

Of course, a fraud can stay afloat for a lot longer than you expect. The really tricky case is when you're ordered to do something illegal or unethical for which there is substantial political cover. An executive order, for example. You cannot rely on anyone to back you up simply because of the letter of the law.

Also:

> The reality was that this was a very deliberate double charge. I could not share this fact at the time – as the company threatened me with libel after I informed them of this detail

UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative journalism really uneconomic.
by iberator | 2025-10-02 10:53:37+00:00
Reminder: Only right wing supporters of Iaraeli Likud party actually support genocide going on. Literally half of Israeli citizens hate Likud and Natanyahu.

ps. Interesting trivia: Mahmoud Abbas (President of the Palestinian West Bank) and FATAH militia also are against Hamas. They always have been:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict

Nothing is black or white.
by null-a | 2025-10-02 10:54:27+00:00
SEEKING WORK | UK | REMOTE

I'm a programmer with more than 10 years experience, primarily working remotely on a freelance or contract basis. My recent work has fallen into two main areas:

Scientific / numeric computing: e.g. I've contributed to research projects on quantum error correction and probabilistic programming languages. Tech: Python, NumPy, JAX, PyTorch, Matplotlib, JavaScript.

Backend web dev: e.g. I worked at a tiny start-up where I built a web app for automatic meeting scheduling. Tech: Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Celery, OAuth, Google Calendar APIs, AWS.

Please feel free to get in touch if you have a project (of any kind!) you think I might be able to help with, I'd be happy to chat.

More info and contact details on my website: https://paulhorsfall.co.uk
by mimi_007 | 2025-10-02 10:54:57+00:00
Yeah, wkhtmltopdf can be a pain, especially with modern CSS/JS-heavy pages. One option you could try is PDFBolt - you can design a template in HTML/CSS once, then simply pass the JSON data and template ID. It handles dynamic content and modern layouts without all the quirks of wkhtmltopdf. You can also convert HTML content or URLs to PDFs.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-02 10:55:27+00:00
It's likely that humans beat basically every other animal at this - because humans are social tool users. Most animals learn their body plan once and almost never change it. Humans have to learn to use new tools or work with other humans all the time.

Which seems to reuse the same brain wiring as what's used for controlling the body. To a professional backhoe operator, the arm of the backhoe is, in a very real way, his arm.

Curiously enough, most current neural interfaces don't seem to expose much of this flexibility. It's likely that you'd have to wire into premotor cortex for that - but for now, we're mostly using the primary motor cortex instead, because it's much better understood. The signals found there are more human-comprehensible and more prior work was done on translating them into useful motions.
by anilgulecha | 2025-10-02 10:55:58+00:00
Kalvium | SDE2/Sr. Software Engineer (GenAI) | Bangalore, India (HYBRID)

If you have a CS degree from India, you know the problem: our education system is outdated. We've fixed it. Kalvium is the B.Tech CS degree you always wanted, leveraging GenAI to power a self-directed curriculum. We run in 22+ universities. We've built our company in a bootstrapped, "default alive" way.

Our engineering team is a core group of about 15. We're looking for someone to distill and implement insights from the finest pedagogy experts.

You'll thrive here if you are a high-ownership individual ready to grow at full speed, value learning above other factors, and want the fastest path to growth (We have a two-quarter promotion policy), you are fully committed to transforming higher education (missionary, not mercenary).

Work Mode: Hybrid - Bangalore. 9 AM to 6 PM, 6 days a week. Product/engineering is in the office Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Pay: SDE2: ₹14L (Base + bonus), SDE3: ₹19L (Base + bonus), ESOPs based on interview and experience.

Experience: SDE2: 1.5–3 years (launched and maintained 1 product end to end), SDE3: 3+ years (launched/maintained multiple products). Beyond these - reach out anyway, and we can see if any other role fits.

Tech Stack: Broadly GCP/Node.js/Next.js/React.

Contact: Send an email to my first name @kalvium.com if you'd like to take on this mission.
by fdessoy | 2025-10-02 10:57:00+00:00
Location: Finland Remote: Yes, but open to onsite/hybrid Willing to relocate: Yes (to some extent) Technologies: TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, Node.JS, R, C/C++, Docker, Docker compose, LangChain, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, Express.JS, Poetry, uv, React.js, HTML5, Tailwind CSS, Vite, JWT... list goes on Résumé/CV: https://flowcv.com/resume/98trjr1c9e Email: fdessoycaraballo@gmail.com GitHub: https://www.github.com/fjjdessoycaraballo

I'm a junior software developer currently working on AI integrations with LangChain, and monitoring with LangSmith. Originally I was a political analyst that switched to software development in Hive Helsinki about two years ago. I have a strong foundation on C/C++ to understand the fundamentals, but today I'm working on higher level languages such as TypeScript and Python doing full stack projects and work.
by kgwgk | 2025-10-02 10:57:15+00:00
Tinker as a verb is recorded in the sixteenth century.

And what does "directly from that meaning" mean when it's obviously about the action of mending and not anything else related to the group of people associated with the occupation?

Even assuming that this derived meaning was indeed the primary meaning of the word at the time, which is unclear (let alone the "exclusive" meaning):

https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=t...

Ti'nker. n.s. [from tink, because their way of proclaiming their trade is to beat a kettle, or because in their work they make a tinkling noise.] A mender of old brass.

---

> Who is Tom Snout?

ChatGPT said:

Tom Snout is a character in William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is one of the “rude mechanicals” (a group of Athenian tradesmen) who gather to put on a play—"Pyramus and Thisbe"—to perform for Duke Theseus’s wedding.

Occupation: Tom Snout is a tinker (a repairman of metal household goods, like pots and pans). Role in the play-within-a-play: He is assigned the unusual part of “the Wall,” through which Pyramus and Thisbe whisper their love. He literally has to hold up his fingers to represent a gap in the wall.

Characterization: Like the other mechanicals, he is comically earnest and takes his role very seriously, though the performance ends up being hilariously clumsy. Would you like me to also explain how his role contributes to the comedy of the play?

> Is he a Traveller?

ChatGPT said:

Not in the sense of being a “Traveller” as in a wanderer or member of a travelling people. Tom Snout is just a local Athenian tradesman in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare introduces him as a tinker (someone who fixes household metal goods). He’s part of the group of craftsmen—Bottom, Quince, Flute, Snug, and Starveling—who rehearse and perform the little play for Duke Theseus.

So no, he’s not depicted as a traveller in the story—he’s rooted in Athens, more of a comic “ordinary worker” than a roving character.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-02 10:57:16+00:00
Mostly either religious, or TERF stuff. By which I mean _real_ trans-exclusionary radical feminism stuff (TERF has come to have a much broader colloquial meaning). And it was _niche_. A number of European countries and US states passed gender recognition laws based on self-id, with minimal fuss. Even as late as 2015, Ireland passed such a law with no-one except the religious loons caring, while the marriage referendum around the same time attracted far more fearmongering.

This kind of moral panic around kids is new (though, as I mentioned, it very much echoes the homophobic movement a few decades ago), as is the bathrooms thing.

I’m convinced that its emergence at least in this part of the world was almost entirely due to the British right needing a new wedge issue after Brexit; you see it being suddenly pushed very hard out of nowhere there post-2016, and especially post-2021. From Britain, it leaked out, with European transphobia having a strong British flavour.
by pautasso | 2025-10-02 10:57:58+00:00
Here are a few more examples:

https://leanpub.com/unethical-software-engineering/

Covert Surveillance EMAIL PIXEL INJECTOR STEALTHY INPUT LOGGER Monetization at all costs AGGRESSIVE ADVERTISER AD BLOCKER DETECTOR PAY TO WIN ADDICTION PEDDLER ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY HOARDER DRM RUG PULLER OBSOLESCENCE PLANNER Digital Fraud CYBERSQUATTER SNEAKY TERMS DEGRADER INTEROPERABILITY BREAKER Ranking Manipulation FAKE REVIEW GENERATOR SEARCH RANKING KICKBACKER Unethical Artificial Intelligence Practices TRAINING DATA HARVESTER BOT PRETENDER DECEPTIVE DEEPFAKER
by joules77 | 2025-10-02 10:58:13+00:00
He is an Attention addict. Just like Trump. They keep churning out shit everyday to get people to pay Attention to them. Why else buy Twitter/start truth social etc. So that their drug keeps flowing.

Their biggest source of anxiety in life is enough people aren't paying attention to them. Anything else that captures more Attention is an automatic existential threat. Netflix captures a lot of Attention. Therefore its a threat.
by rtp4me | 2025-10-02 10:59:06+00:00
For drive issues, this is easy. Have a stack of replacements on hand and just open a "remote-hands" ticket with the CoLo provider to swap out the drive. This can usually be done in 1-2hrs from opening the ticket.

For server issues; again, pretty easy. Just use iKVM/IPMI and iPXE to diagnose a faulty server. Again, using "remote-hands" from the CoLo provider can help fix problems if your staff does not have the skills.
by Scarblac | 2025-10-02 10:59:14+00:00
> but for ND it's learned behaviour that costs energy and conscious effort to do. And they feel like they have to do it because society is used to people effortlessly doing it all the time, so if you don't you're considered off, or simply don't get to participate in society because you're weird/boring/scary.

And of course, every now and then you fail to do it right and people think you were acting really weird but won't explain why.