MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-10-20 08:50:47+00:00
> Feets are actually just fine

Non-SI legacy units have been grandfathered in and 'accepted for common use', but ICAO recommends that SI units should be used[1] (eventually). China and quite the majority of the ex-USSR, for instance, use metre flight levels[2].

There have been at least two aviation accidents and incidents relating to unit mis-conversions. This is two too many. As an SI absolutist, everyone should switch to SI or units purely derived from SI (so domain-specific stuff like parsecs, electronvolts, and binary prefixes, if appropriately symbolled are OK). It is an internationally-recognised, and nearly universal standard that permeates every aspect of human lives.

[1]: https://aerosavvy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/an05_cons.p...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_level#People's_Republic...
by ta1243 | 2025-10-20 08:51:23+00:00
What's really interesting is that a space elevator goes to Geostationary orbit by necessity. Getting to 100km vertically doesn't save as much as you might think when it comes to getting into orbit.

To get into a very low earth orbit from an equatorial launch pad at sea level you need about 9.2km/s of Delta-V

To get there from a 100km tall tower, you need about 8km/s of delta-V - about 85%.

Think about how much scrolling there was to get to 100km.

To get to the ISS you'd need to scroll 4 times further. Starlink and Hubble are another 100km beyond that.

You start having radiation problems if you spend too much time above 600km.

Aside from Apollo, the highest a human has been is about 1400km - 14 times more scrolling than this page.

To get to GEO would require scrolling over 25 times further than even that.
by xorcist | 2025-10-20 08:51:35+00:00
After having this discussion in so many professional settings, I'm starting to think that this is just something that divides people. Maybe our brains are wired differently. What's important for me is that the call graph is simple. Second most important is that data structures are easy, or at least fits the problem. The amount of lines in a function is a distant third.

It could have been me behind one of those thousand line functions. Some tings lends itself naturally to this style, such as interpreter-like loops and imperative business logic. There's always that someone that argues that splitting up the code with function calls would somehow make it more "maintainable".

I'm reluctant to do it, because the code is identical, only non-linear which means harder to understand. Combine this with global symbols and it's a recipe for accidental complexity. This is so obvious that I for a long time thought people with the opposite opinion were just cargo-culting some OOP "best practice" mess which has doomed so many projects, but maybe they're just wired differently.
by xvector | 2025-10-20 08:51:49+00:00
After some thankless years preventing outages for a big tech company, I will never take an oncall position again in my life.

Most miserable working years I have had. It's wild how normalized working on weekends and evenings becomes in teams with oncall.

But it's not normal. Our users not being able to shitpost is simply not worth my weekend or evening.

And outside of Google you don't even get paid for oncall at most big tech companies! Company losing millions of dollars an hour, but somehow not willing to pay me a dime to jump in at 3AM? Looks like it's not my problem!
by walkabout | 2025-10-20 08:51:51+00:00
> Unless your theory is that the median voter is kind of an idiot who doesn't understand how the government works and goes based on vibes.

Um.

Yes that’s basically true, to the best of science’s reckoning, anyway. Like, you pretty much nailed it.

Political scientists had figured that out with very solid evidence by around the middle of the 20th century (solid evidence in part because this is obviously alarming so they did a lot of double-checking) then spent several decades trying to figure out an angle by which they could say “but it’s, uh, fine somehow?” or maybe even “but actually that’s good” before finally giving up on that and admitting it’s kind of amazing democracy works at all, and the whole thing’s scary-fragile.
Ask HN: What features matter in collaborative LaTeX tools?
by WolfOliver | 2025-10-20 08:53:06+00:00
I've been exploring different LaTeX collaboration tools lately — Overleaf and some newer ones — and I’m curious what people here think are the most important features for collaborative LaTeX work.

For example:

- Real-time collaboration?

- Git or version control integration?

- Compilation speed and reliability?

- Offline editing or open-source options?

- Pricing and storage limits?

I’d love to hear from developers, students, and researchers. What do you think makes or breaks a collaborative LaTeX experience?

Your feedback will be used to improve the newly shipped LaTeX workspaces in MonsterWriter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feWZByHoViw
by firloop | 2025-10-20 08:53:07+00:00
I wasn't able to get this working, but I was able to use Google's mirror[0] just fine.

Just had to change

FROM {image_name}

to

FROM mirror.gcr.io/{image_name}

Hope this helps!

[0]: https://cloud.google.com/artifact-registry/docs/pull-cached-...
by chengdulittlea | 2025-10-20 08:54:13+00:00
Hi Daub!

> A brush that can paint both behind and in front of previous strokes. Of course, this would need to be supported by a depth channel.

> Also a brush that increases/decreases neighboring regional contrasts.

I believe you can just use Blender Grease Pencil for that. You can paint with depth and sculpt the opacity/contrast to your desire. (Or honestly any vector drawing program? I believe adobe illustrator does this too)

> Almost all digital brushes are simply repeated stamps. This is now ancient technology. I would love to see a brush that can paint entire objects or the textured components of those objects. For example, with one stroke I would love to be able to paint a tree, or hair and fur. Of course, such a tool would likely be AI.

> An AI powered style randomizer.

You won't want that in this context. If that being an asset production tool or a diagram tool then maybe yes, but otherwise nope. This tool is intended to create images, and human (supposedly) perceive an image with spatial arrangement of shapes and gradients, and the way artists interpret and represent shapes and edges is mainly what natural painting process is all about. So the basic structure of an artwork in this sense is just a bunch of abstract shapes arranged in a certain order, not a statistic probability of pixel values.
by elcritch | 2025-10-20 08:54:55+00:00
US Workers while costing more do seem are still competitive at expensive high value tasks. There was some reports a year back where the TSMC labs in Arizona while employee costs were higher also had 4% higher yield [1].

I'd wager combining that with US defense contracts for US made chips would be lucrative for NVidia.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952534
by sky2224 | 2025-10-20 08:55:52+00:00
I really enjoyed the Half Life 2: 20th Anniversary documentary. It gave a pretty neat perspective of what the games' industry was like at the time, and also made me really appreciate the technology that Valve was building. A lot of really innovative stuff came out of the creation of that game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4
by pjc50 | 2025-10-20 08:56:35+00:00
> I miss when gaming in general was less mainstream and more weird like this.

To me, this is a continuum with the box art of early games, where because the graphics themselves were pretty limited the box art had to be fabulous. Get someone like Roger Dean to paint a picture for the imagination. https://www.rogerdean.com/

The peak of this was the Maplin electronics catalogue: https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/1980s-maplin-catalogues/ ; the Radio Shack of UK electronics hobbyists, now gone entirely. Did they need to have cool art on the catalogue? No. Was it awesome? Yes.
by chengdulittlea | 2025-10-20 08:56:37+00:00
> manipulate your RGB images as much as you like; just do it in the OKLAB color space

Be careful, OKLAB also isn't quite handling energy correctly (Or, the gradient of the energy slope in this color space had quite some irregularities). In most cases you can get a more "natural" transition (like blue doesn't visually shift to purple when transitioning to white), so make sure you know what you are doing.
by darkwater | 2025-10-20 08:58:40+00:00
Well, but tomorrow there will be CTOs asking for a contingency plan if AWS goes down, even if planning, preparing, executing and keeping it up to date as the infra evolves will cost more than the X hours of AWS outage.

There are certainly organizations for which that cost is lower than the overall damage of services being down due to AWS fault, but tomorrow we will hear CTOs from smaller orgs as well.
by chengdulittlea | 2025-10-20 08:59:56+00:00
Since the GUI (or the entire application framework) is fully hand written by myself, it would take some time for its wayland adaptation. However, the way wayland protocol handles everything just makes everything much more complex.

In hind sight I may need to show a message for when this application is running in xwayland and notify the color management quirks to the user.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-20 09:00:12+00:00
Depends on the rigor. The typical grade school curriculum is expecting you to keep up and get 80-90% of the content on a first go. Colleges can experiment with a variety of other kinds of methods. It's college, so there's no sense of "standaridized" content at this point.

For some, there's the idea of pushing a student to their limit and breaking their boundaries. A student getting 50% on a hard course may learn more and overall perform better in their career than if they were an A student in an easy course. Should they be punished because they didn't game the course and try to get the easy one?

And of course, someone getting 80% in such a course is probably truly the cream of the crop which would go unnoticed in an easy course.
by account42 | 2025-10-20 09:00:25+00:00
That's a particularly bad example to repeat in support of free speech restrictions:

> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular analogy for speech or actions whose principal purpose is to create panic, and in particular for speech or actions which may for that reason be thought to be outside the scope of free speech protections. The phrase is a paraphrasing of a dictum, or non-binding statement, from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. an immediate riot).
by jll29 | 2025-10-20 09:00:26+00:00
FORTH has some elegance and it's so simple that it is tempting to implement it.

However, no language should permit defining the value of 4 by 12, as there is no situation in which this can bring more good than harm in the long term.

Another issue that affects FORTH but also Perl and other languages is that they deal with a lot of things implicitly (e.g. the stack, or arguments to functions). Most people agree that explicity is more easy to read than implicit.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-20 09:00:36+00:00
What you are suggesting is a Vimes' Boots approach to keeping those countries poor.

You don't have enough money to buy the cars with lower TCO that you can fuel with renewables installed in your own country, or at worst from EU neighbours?

Instead you need to buy the "cheap" ICE car and then pay again and again and again to import fuels and somehow you have the money for that?

Plus, has anyone who actually runs a grid in that country suggested EVs would be a bad thing? Generally they welcome them as they help bring costs down by using off peak power. So you've shot yourself in another foot by falling for this propaganda.
by lukan | 2025-10-20 09:00:40+00:00
"You might have underestimated the degree to which defending child abusers might upset people?"

I underestimated how quickly people even here will engage in dishonest tactics like this. Anyone requesting fair trial for the witch is automatically a witch itself that should be burned as well.

That is not a climate where you can find out truth, but activly preventing it through invoking fear.

The fact that Ginsberg was involved with NAMBLA is creepy enough for me, to not wanting to engage with his works btw. and I did not so much defended him, but the concept that 16 year olds are not small children anymore. Still children, yes, but not "young children". There are 16 year olds who started a family already. Not ideal, sure, but putting all those in the same bucket as 8 year olds?
by Macha | 2025-10-20 09:01:37+00:00
We're mostly deployed on eu-west-1 but still seeing weird STS and IAM failures, likely due to internal AWS dependencies.

Also we use Docker Hub, NPM and a bunch of other services that are hosted by their vendors on us-east-1 so even non AWS customers often can't avoid the blast radius of us-east-1 (though the NPM issue mostly affects devs updating/adding dependencies, our CI builds use our internal mirror)
by dvno42 | 2025-10-20 09:02:17+00:00
This seems reasonable. The content includes themes (death, rape, violence, etc) that are generally considered NSFW by most modern day rating agencies. Just because cultures have historically seeded the texts for a long period of time doesn't make them SFW. If ESRB/MPAA had to rate a modern reboot, I don't think it would get a T/PG-13.

Personally, I wouldn't want my kids exposed to this kind of material without at least having a chance to talk to them about it first. Would you want your child getting sucked into something like Scientology without your knowledge?
by goinggetthem | 2025-10-20 09:04:41+00:00
This is from Amazon's latest earnings call when Andy Jessy was asked why they aren't growing as much as there competitors

"I think if you look at what matters to customers, what they care they care a lot about what the operational performance is, you know, what the availability is, what the durability is, what the latency and throughput is of of the various services. And I think we have a pretty significant advantage in that area." also "And, yeah, you could just you just look at what's happened the last couple months. You can just see kind of adventures at some of these players almost every month. And so very big difference, I think, in security."
by mormegil | 2025-10-20 09:05:13+00:00
This. I am reading old vital records in my family genealogy quest, and as those are sometimes really difficult to read, I turned to LLMs, hearing they are great in OCR. It’s been… terrible. The LLM will transcribe the record without problems, the output seems completely correct, a typical text of a vital record. Just… the transcribed text has nothing to do with my specific record. On the other hand, transkribus.eu has been fairly usable for old vital record transcription – even though the transcribed text is far from perfect, many letters and words are recognized incorrectly, it helps me a lot with the more difficult records.
by impossiblefork | 2025-10-20 09:05:25+00:00
Maybe if you only look at them, but once you hear them speak you know they're kids and any attraction goes away. Same with university students.

Just listen to them talk for a minute and you won't attracted to them. Even better, let them have a presentation about maths or some project they've done. You can sit there and attempt to keep a polite face and not cover your eyes. It doesn't matter how smart they are, at least usually: even the smarts ones are still kids and therefore completely crazy.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-20 09:05:31+00:00
This reminds me of the twitter-based detector we had at Facebook that looked for spikes in "Facebook down" messages.

When Facebook went public, the detector became useless because it fired anytime someone wrote about the Facebook stock being down and people retweeted or shared the article.

I invested just enough time in it to decide it was better to turn it off.
by sshine | 2025-10-20 09:05:45+00:00
I know this isn't the perfect place for a feature request, but I've recently found it quite annoying that ripgrep ignores .github directories because they're hidden. Maybe there are similar directories that people prefer included by default.

Then again, if these results suddenly pop up and people upgrade to a major version and expect backwards compatibility, the tradeoff might not be worth it.
by jaffathecake | 2025-10-20 09:06:10+00:00
I know this isn't quite what you mean, but when you first hit the page, the list is in a random order, but it's then stable across reloads.

I considered the 'vs' approach, but I worried that there might be a lot of iterations where one or two of the options would be things that the person didn't understand, or didn't care about.

How do you feel about something like this: The user goes through the long list, picking what they understand and don't dislike, then the 'vs' system is there for helping determine the order of those items. Then the user gets the ranking which they can tweak.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-20 09:06:55+00:00
Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects?

Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-10-20 09:07:19+00:00
Just a couple of days ago in this HN thread [0] there were quite some users claiming Hetzner is not an options as their uptime isn't as good as AWS, hence the higher AWS pricing is worth the investment. Oh, the irony.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614922
by chengdulittlea | 2025-10-20 09:07:24+00:00
To put it simply, I made it that way so

- Other GPL software can just include features in my programs if they wanted to.

- I can remove myself from the responsibilities of potential free maintenance burden if approached by commercial entities.

- On paper it prevent crappy Chinese companies here from taking the code as their own (which is unlikely judging by the nature of this program, but if they want they probably would do it anyway just like the case with ffmpeg).
by matsemann | 2025-10-20 09:08:34+00:00
Yeah, the Copernican Principle.

> I visited the Berlin Wall. People at the time wondered how long the Wall might last. Was it a temporary aberration, or a permanent fixture of modern Europe? Standing at the Wall in 1969, I made the following argument, using the Copernican principle. I said, Well, there’s nothing special about the timing of my visit. I’m just travelling—you know, Europe on five dollars a day—and I’m observing the Wall because it happens to be here. My visit is random in time. So if I divide the Wall’s total history, from the beginning to the end, into four quarters, and I’m located randomly somewhere in there, there’s a fifty-percent chance that I’m in the middle two quarters—that means, not in the first quarter and not in the fourth quarter.

> Let’s suppose that I’m at the beginning of that middle fifty percent. In that case, one-quarter of the Wall’s ultimate history has passed, and there are three-quarters left in the future. In that case, the future’s three times as long as the past. On the other hand, if I’m at the other end, then three-quarters have happened already, and there’s one-quarter left in the future. In that case, the future is one-third as long as the past.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/07/12/how-to-predict...
by virtualritz | 2025-10-20 09:10:20+00:00
Indeed. In English it is an em-dash. Not brackeded by spaces, although you should bracket by thin spaces to make sure you get some separation, optically. And line breaks in apps that are unaware this is a separator.

In many other languages ideas are separated by en-dashes (surrounded by spaces).

In the case at hand the use of en-dashes in English text instead of the correct em-dashes could also be a sign of a non-native speaker caring about micro-typography and just doing the wrong thing. :)

The LLM conclusion doesn't seem well supported either way.
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-10-20 09:10:48+00:00
Such recallings are incomplete without fake TUIs. TUI that are seemingly text, but in graphics mode. Norton Utilities were running in text mode with altered fonts and had nice UI elements. Acronis OS Selector 5 could run in multitude of different modes: ordinary text mode with pseudographics; Norton Utilities-alike text mode with altered fonts; VGA graphics mode; SVGA graphics mode. But whatever mode, it was drawing UI in a grid. Mouse cursor was the only thing not bound to grind, but when windows were dragged by mouse, they were jumping by discrete steps, staying grid aligned at all times. I was digging in. They are Watcom C++ binaries, and Watcom can remote debug them over COM port. No sources, of course, but I can trace CPU and watch memory. So far I know that it indeed has a concept of text buffer, and each cell is 4 bytes. These bytes encode background glyphs and colors. Text can be over window title, so window title skin is encoded in background glyph. Text can be over tab title. Text can be over button. And there are icons of operating systems in the list. And there are icons on toolbar buttons.

Acronis OS Selector 5 features not much UI. There is FDISK, advanced enough for its time. It can resize FAT partitions, and there is UI for adjusting size and other stuff. There is HTML-based help system with hyperlinks. And there is some editor for AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. Acronis OS Selector 5 is about switching OSes, and specific DOS or Windows 9x boot configurations are also "OSes", so editing of boot files is helpful. But apart from that there is almost nothing to do in this OS Selector.

I wish something more daily would be coded in such UI, but nope. And Acronis dropped that style. I don't know what happened with Selector 6 and 7, but it's like 8 is coming right after 5, and 8 UI is not grid-aligned anymore.
by sneak | 2025-10-20 09:11:03+00:00
> But this is not normal. Our users not being able to shitpost is simply not worth my weekend or evening.

It is completely normal for staff to have to work 24/7 for critical services.

Plumbing, HVAC, power plant engineers, doctors, nurses, hospital support staff, taxi drivers, system and network engineers - these people keep our modern world alive, all day, every day. Weekends, midnights, holidays, every hour of every day someone is AT WORK to make sure our society functions.

Not only is it normal, it is essential and required.

It’s ok that you don’t like having to work nights or weekends or holidays. But some people absolutely have to. Be thankful there are EMTs and surgeons and power and network engineers working instead of being with their families on holidays or in the wee hours of the night.
by Aachen | 2025-10-20 09:11:09+00:00
Including falling back to third-party hosting when relevant. One doesn't exclude the other

My experience with self hosting has been that, at least when you keep the services independent, downtime is not more common than in hosted environments, and you always know what's going on. Customising solutions, or workarounds in case of trouble, is a benefit you don't get when the service provider is significantly bigger than you are. It has pros and cons and also depends on the product (e.g. email delivery is harder than Mattermost message delivery, or if you need a certain service only once a year or so) but if you have the personell capacity and a continuous need, I find hosting things oneself to be the best solution in general