MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yawpitch | 2025-10-07 15:44:56+00:00
Imagine an equation several miles long, comprised of billions of variables, billions of constants, and billions of exponents.

You know none of the variables. None of the constants. None of the exponents. No one does, really, but even if you did it wouldn’t help, because no one bothered to write down the operators and the parentheses are randomly shifted around every time the equation is resolved.

All you know is that if you ask it for tea, it will always, invariably, and forever, give you back something that is almost, but not quite entirely, unlike tea. Sometimes it might be more unlike coffee, some times more unlike vodka and cow urine.

What you’ll never, ever, ever reliably know is what’s in the cup.

That’s about the best way I know to explain black box abstractions. In a few decades we might have a workable theory as to why these things function, to the degree that they do, though I’ll bet a rather large amount of money that we won’t.
by tombert | 2025-10-07 15:45:11+00:00
> It is incredible how far it has come

No argument on my end.

I have been running Linux since 2011, and so much more stuff is in the “Just Works” category, especially if you have AMD graphics. When I installed NixOS on my Thinkpad about a year ago, it was almost comical how easy it was for me; I had gotten used to having to waste an entire day messing with drivers and fixing issues in 2012-2015, so it felt kind of weird for stuff to work as expected immediately.

I am trying very hard to get my parents to use something like Linux Mint because the Windows 11 auto-update on my mom’s computer actually prevented it from booting (making me waste an entire day remotely having them flash a live USB so I could rsync over her files to me…thanks MS!), so this might be enough of a final straw for them.
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2025-10-07 15:45:27+00:00
How do dealerships get away with essentially passing on the downside and risk of warranties to mechanics?

Shouldn't it be the business that's shouldering the variability in income due to warranties, since they're the ones that sold the cars with them?

It seems similar to a hypothetical restaurant selling memberships with food, then paying workers less when customers buy food with the membership discount.
by jawilson2 | 2025-10-07 15:45:37+00:00
In baseball you DO differentiate between whether you struck out swinging or looking.

It matters for the pitcher because if you can disguise your pitch well enough that it looks like a ball coming in but is actually a strike, so that the hitter doesn't even try to hit it, that is a great signal.

As a batter, you typically* want to swing at strikes, so you want to know if you are letting hittable pitches go by. From the time baseball players are like 10 years old, you'll hear coaches and parents yelling "be a hitter, don't strike out looking!".

* there are always situations you probably don't want to swing, like if you have 3 balls and no strikes, you usually want to not swing, and assume you'll get another ball and will get walked to get on base. There are a lot of other situations where you do or don't swing, and the strikeout looking vs swinging measures that.
by bluetidepro | 2025-10-07 15:45:45+00:00
For majority that want to switch but can’t yet, gaming is the biggest pillar still very far behind. Many popular games (and game related apps) don’t work on Linux, sadly. I don’t know if it’s ever going to change either because of it being a chicken or egg scenario where they don’t want to spend the time supporting it cause it’s not enough users, but it’s also not enough users cause it’s not supported.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-07 15:45:45+00:00
Why are they different shareholders?

Trivially, the company can expect that it's current shareholders will hold the stock for a long time and so there's no reason to "juice" the current price at the cost of future price.

But also simply, making long term plans is easily arguable to be in fiduciary duty as a future shareholder would be willing to pay more to the current shareholder for a company in good health.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-07 15:45:47+00:00
Fascism may be the wrong label.

Racism could be a much better fit. The blog post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

The interpretation that raises some pretty interesting points about the inherent racism in the expressed worldview: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

There is, however, an interpretation that explains how this specific kind of racism can be seen as at least fascism-adjacent: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance

The question of whether he wants politics in the workplace is moot when he's making public blog posts like this. For the open-source community, the open Internet is the workplace. People aren't just going to pretend DHH didn't say what he said (in public, of his own free will, using his own megaphone) because he didn't post it to ruby-core@ml.ruby-lang.org.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-07 15:46:19+00:00
kilo-Hertz was sound-barrier territory even in the in the 1930s ;)

E.g. Z1 was running at 1Hz, Z2 at 5Hz and Z3 at 5..10Hz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z2_(computer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
by chrisfosterelli | 2025-10-07 15:46:40+00:00
Obviously money is important. We live in a capitalist world. It lets an org invest in future, greater service to its mission. But it's not WHY a business exists. It's just a measure. It's sort of like saying that you exist to breathe oxygen or pump blood. It's necessary and important, but suggesting that's your mission would be a little reductive.
by cuttothechase | 2025-10-07 15:47:00+00:00
The title says - "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino—Accelerating Developers’ Access to its Leading Edge Computing and AI"

Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a microcontroller is what people are salivating for!

Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to trend upwards!?
by jayaprabhakar | 2025-10-07 15:47:10+00:00
Glad you have tried FizzBee before. Do you have any feedback on it?

With TLA+, I mostly see papers and example projects that typically implement model based trace checking solutions in TLA+.

While it works, usually, it will clutter the main code (SUT) with tracing library calls. And in some papers, you'll need to create a separate modified version of spec with the tracing spec.

MongoDB published a paper a while ago comparing model based testing and model based trace checking. I'll soon list more details.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-07 15:47:21+00:00
The current stakeholders probably have an interest in the company not going out of business long term as well.

Anyway, what’s the level of evidence required to sue somebody for working against the interest of their shareholder? I’d expect it to be something along the lines of: the CEO knowingly and maliciously worked against their interest… I mean, we can’t have made being bad at your job illegal, right?

The market is pretty clever, so there is at least room to believe that any move that plausibly would help long-term company health should also help short-term stock prices, right?
by Jare | 2025-10-07 15:47:29+00:00
After my recent (and dismayingly poor) experience with a new PC on Windows 11, I wonder: Windows 11 installer did not recognize my wifi card (integrated in asus motherboard), so my installation was purely offline. I had to install manufacturer's drivers via usb key to get the PC online.

How is this possible in a world where MS wants installations to be online?

Meanwhile, Linux installer recognized the wifi right away and worked perfectly fine at full speed.
by lwansbrough | 2025-10-07 15:47:33+00:00
Occasionally I’ve been working on this: https://github.com/rune-runtime/rune

The concept is to provide a WASM runtime for games with all the functionality you’d need. Graphics, audio, storage, input, UI, etc.

It’s made in Rust and doesn’t use a browser engine at all.

Haven’t touched it in a little while but the concept is still sound. It’s all the benefits that a mature engine would give you, without the engine. Eventually there would be a package manager where you would be able to find engines built for this runtime.
by delfinom | 2025-10-07 15:47:47+00:00
Broadcom wasn't really a driver behind Raspberry Pi. They acquiesced and let them have chips, once the product took off, they continued supplying chips for the Pi. And of course supported the community by refusing to supply non-propriety firmware blobs to this day ;)

Other than that, Broadcom never really had any community involvement, nor any involvement in the Raspberry Pi Foundation that runs it. However, some broadcom engineers were part of the foundation, which isn't quite the same.
by giobox | 2025-10-07 15:48:04+00:00
Exact same experience here. In the 2010s I ran my own VPN exit node on a dirt cheap VPS so I could access streaming content in my country of birth. Worked great for years, but nowadays so many sites simply block non-residential IP ranges that I gave up ages ago now.

It's a shame because deploying WireGuard was a simple two command process: git checkout followed by a `docker compose up -d` for me etc on a fresh VPS instance.
by kitchi | 2025-10-07 15:48:15+00:00
In quantum mechanics, the "ball" (or in this case an ideal particle) has a "wave function" associated with it. This wave function effectively describes the probability that the particle can be at a certain location.

It so happens that when you solve for this problem, a ball bouncing against a wall, in this wave function paradigm then you end up with a non-zero probability that the ball appears on the other side of the wall.

I'm not sure if there is a deeper explanation at play here but that's how I understand it.
by Krssst | 2025-10-07 15:48:39+00:00
Yes, having to maintain an OS over multiple years without recurring revenue might be an issue indeed. On my side I wouldn't mind paying a subscription if the OS could respect my choices. But I guess it does not really make sense to provide a subscription that only a very small handful of people would pay.

(I wonder how subscriptions could handle multiple machines; today it often happens that people have multiple computers but subscription cost would quickly add up; I guess they could have different tiers with different allowed concurrent use count)
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-07 15:48:50+00:00
And, indeed, if he'd been talking about Copenhagen I suspect at least some people may have looked the other way.

Saying what he said about London is, at the very least, a fascinating example of failure to stay in his lane. In fact, if one were of the mindset to be denigrating immigrants, one could, perhaps, raise questions around what business a Dane has telling Brits which members of their former colonies do and do not count as British or, indeed, what it means to be British.
by addicted | 2025-10-07 15:49:18+00:00
There are 2 problems to this.

1. I seriously doubt Apple was accidentally displaying more bars on the phone. If it was a "bars" issue then it was almost certainly done deliberately to make the iPhone reception look better than what it was.

2. It wasn't just bars. I had this phone and you would literally drop off calls by holding the phone differently when you hadn't done anything else. There was a genuine problem with the phone that I don't think was ever resolved other than people getting used to holding the phone differently like Steve Jobs told us to.

I lost my iPhone and switched to a hand me down from my parents which was a generation older and the service was significantly better.
by NickC25 | 2025-10-07 15:49:22+00:00
because the infrastructure in their home countries likely don't exist. some people are just that much smarter and need such an environment.

Or, there's risk to being in their home country where academic freedom might not really be a thing.

it's like why if you show serious promise in soccer at a young age, you go to Europe as soon as you can - you will be better developed there in a more mature environment as opposed to, say, the USA where you can only get decent coaching in a few major cities, and even then the gulf between the coaching at a top Spanish or English club versus an American one is huge. Or if you show promise in tennis at a young age, you get your ass to Florida as soon as you are able to.
by nativeit | 2025-10-07 15:49:40+00:00
Weird, I’m offended by the opposite end of this. Why am I “theming” websites? What, is this MySpace? I want the professional paid/trained developer to design the site. If it’s light, I expect there to be good reasons for it. If not, ditto.

I feel the same way about salads in restaurants—I don’t want to have to slice produce, add dressing, and toss my own salad at the table without a bowl or proper utensils. I want the professionals who I am paying to prepare my meal to handle that. If I have problems with any of the ingredients, or some desire for unreasonable quantities of dressing, then I can make requests. Serving me a plate of neatly partitioned ingredients strikes me as an insane thing to do…I suppose unless it comes with fondue or I have signed up for some hibachi nonsense to make my dinner more “interactive”.

I have fully lost the thread, apologies, carry on.
by lysace | 2025-10-07 15:49:48+00:00
https://technicshistory.com/2017/01/29/the-relay/

> In 1837, American scientist and teacher Joseph Henry took his first tour of Europe. During his visit to London, he made a point of visiting a man he greatly admired, the mathematician Charles Babbage. Accompanying Henry were his friend Alexander Bache, and his new acquaintance and fellow experimenter in telegraphy, Charles Wheatstone. Babbage told his visitors of his upcoming appointment to demonstrate a calculating machine to a member of Parliament, but was even more excited to show them his plans for another machine, “which will far transcend the powers of the first…” Henry recorded the outlines of Babbage’s plan in his diary.

So close! Henry made the electromagnet practical. Babbage "originated the concept of a digital programmable computer" as per Wikipedia.
by coupdejarnac | 2025-10-07 15:49:54+00:00
Professional embedded developer and Arduino afficionado here: the amount of misinformation and hot takes here is astounding. First, Arduino is aimed at making technology usable for non-engineers. The ease of use makea them a breeze for engineers though. There's nothing wrong with making something serious with Arduino as long as the project fits within the confines of Arduino.

Arduino refers to a company as well as a hardware and software platform. It doesn't only mean an ATMega based board. You can have an ESP32 based Arduino board.

Arduino boards aren't designed for high performance or very high speed signal integrity.They are designed to be easy to use by non technical people.

I see people saying stuff like the ESP IDF and FreeRTOS are easy enough to use for most people. First, Arduino on ESP32 is built on the FreeRTOS based IDF, so people who would rather use FreeRTOS don't exactly know what they are talking about. Second, anyone who thinks FreeRTOS is easy enough to use for Arduino's core audience is delulu.

Use the proper tool for the job. Arduino is for beginners, non-technical people, and for projects with undemanding requirements. Stop pretending that it's a half baked solution for engineers; that completely misses the point of Arduino.
by gruez | 2025-10-07 15:49:59+00:00
>A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels [...] OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.

So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?

>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.

How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
by monsieurbanana | 2025-10-07 15:50:15+00:00
> I don't think that the answer to "some PRs are messy" is "let's include all the mess"

Hey look at us, two alike thinking people! I never said "let's include all the mess".

Looking at the other extreme someone in this thread said they didn't want other people to see the 3 attempts it took to get it right. Sure if it's just a mess (or, since this is 2025, ai slop) squash it away. But in some situations you want to keep a history of the failed attemps. Maybe one of them was actually the better solution but you were just short of making it work, or maybe someone in the future will be able to see that method X didn't work and won't have to find out himself.
by antonvs | 2025-10-07 15:50:54+00:00
> Using a charitable reading of your comment, it seems you are actually talking about the effectiveness of NIST, not about its mission

I'm not talking about NIST in general, just about this report, which most certainly does not, as you claimed, "implicitly promote ideals of western democratic rule over communist values." Quite the contrary: it's a blatant and transparent continuation of the current administration's assault on those Western democratic values.

> It is clear NIST's mission is a blend of scientific rigor and promotion of western values

That was true in the past. You seem to be having difficulty accepting the new reality, even defending it. Which is sad to witness.
by andrewflnr | 2025-10-07 15:51:00+00:00
Technically true. I think a "shortage" is technically defined in terms of price. But the example of housing is a hint at the limitations of this rule. Sure, we'd like houses to be cheaper, but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more. So what do we actually do about it? Increase supply, yeah, but why is the supply limited? Well, it's various weird, annoying restrictions on housing that you don't see unless you dig past "lol they want it cheap".
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-07 15:51:00+00:00
U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171434 - September 2025

Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025
by jrop | 2025-10-07 15:51:31+00:00
I'm actually trying to work on a video-series to do just this. I've made my own rudimentary plugins reproducing several popular ones, and would like to walk through how I made: a) file-tree b) picker/fzf replacment c) hop/leap replacement d) surround plugin e) code-formatter f) hydra (sub-modes) g) many "UI" (interactive) buffers, etc.

None of these are published because the popular ones are better and provide more functionality, but I want to share what I believe is more valuable: what I learned while writing them.
by pas | 2025-10-07 15:51:54+00:00
... and let me recommend this blog post about how the housing bubble was exaggerated, and it the bubble is real, the money manifesting as demand for housing is really there (of course coming from the economic growth and brutal amounts of wealth transfer from will-be-owners to was-owners)

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl...

housing related supply-side problems are simply very hard to address whereas everybody and their dog is pumping money into the market (cheap loans to help families, singles, poor people, cheap loans to developers, and anyone who wants, because it's low risk anyway, and companies are doing CoL adjustments, and then there are spillover effects from big metro areas, and foreign investors ...)

and US population was growing, and construction starts were and are still low (historically but compared to the "pent up" demand)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

of course the problem is that simply pouring money into housing without transportation infrastructure just leads to even more problems, so it's really a problems bubble! (always has been.)
by popcar2 | 2025-10-07 15:52:10+00:00
The biggest problem is probably work-related apps not working. Adobe products, MS Office, and certain niches like the music industry just aren't supported on Linux.

Many ultra-popular games don't work due to anticheat, but some do. Dota 2, Counter-strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, among others work perfectly fine. We've also reached a point where virtually every offline game will work too.
by onetimeusename | 2025-10-07 15:52:14+00:00
There's so few seats at these schools we could fill them with Americans and not notice a difference is my belief. We're talking about single digit acceptance rates where it's probably hard to distinguish students who apply at all.

Also I feel like it's not a good assumption that talented international students that come to top tier universities also have the same western vision of meritocracy and sharing their achievements with the globe.
by GoodOldNe | 2025-10-07 15:52:46+00:00
It's complicated. Physicians can own imaging equipment, for example, but they can't require you to use it for the radiology tests that they order. There are weird carve-outs for in-office ancillary services (e.g. you're an orthopedic surgeon who uses x-rays in your office, which is common and arguably necessary).

There's also rules regarding things like percentage ownership of physician owned facilities and the percentage of referrals to that equipment that come from the physician owners.

Urine drug screens in an in-office "lab" are another big source of revenue for certain specialties that involve referring patients to your own tests, or doing your own pathology on biopsies as a dermatologist or whatever. My understanding is that most of those things, and many like them, are not Stark law violations.
by pixl97 | 2025-10-07 15:52:48+00:00
>many find phones to be a better (and cheaper) experience than Windows, and I can't say that I blame them.

With that said at least using native apps on phones is becoming more and more of a risk. If you can get away with a browser that's fine. But if you need native phone features you are at the risk of Apple/Google cutting off your entire business for some hidden reason and nearly zero recourse. On that note people have been getting more worried about Apple starting to treat their desktop OS like a phone and locking it down more.
by defanor | 2025-10-07 15:52:51+00:00
I have gradually reduced CSS to zero myself, since pretty much every tweak seems to mess up accessibility more than improve things, and generally it is the client that should control the style, and the user who should configure it for themselves, knowing their own requirements better. As for suggestions from the article:

> Granted, if you have images they can cause some overflow issues.

The "fix" breaks zooming in.

> In general, the font-size is a little small as well

It is quite annoying when websites mess with your preferred font, its size, style, and so on, often turning texts illegible. In this case it is made awkwardly large, but often it is made illegibly small, apparently also with the intention to fix the defaults.

> Many people love dark mode, so let’s enable it based on a user’s system preferences.

"color-scheme" is like "viewport": an invocation to tell the browser that the website is not too broken, and the web browser should act more sensibly. Those are practical, but still awkward, not quite how things should be: I wish web browsers defaulted to sensible behaviors. So I rather view it as a choice between adapting to how things are and pushing for how they should be.

> We generally want to try and fall somewhere in the 45-90 characters per line range (for body text, not headlines).

I used to set max-width in ch before removing CSS completely as well, but usually desktop web browser windows are resizable, with the space being there to be used, not to fill with background color. I see it in epub files sometimes as well: huge margins are enforced, being rather annoying when you do not want those, while if you do, you can simply adjust the window size (or set such default styles, as another option).