MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Wistar | 2025-10-21 23:53:53+00:00
I had a neighbor a few doors down who ended up pouring a concrete slab for their coop because rats were tunneling in to the coop. He ended up sinking 12" of stainless mesh into the ground around the slab to stop the rats. The rats also did $15K damage to his crawl space and a few thousand dollars damage to that of a directly next-door neighbor. The torches and pitchforks soon came out because the suburban chickens experiment caused the whole neighborhood to become overwhelmed with rats.

This was back in COVID times and the exterminators said the infestation was made much more severe than normal because all the restaurants in the area were closed down and the usual rat food sources disappeared forcing the rats out into the residential neighborhoods. Some of the rats never left and, even today, we are still having to trap them.

Fun times.
by gimmeThaBeet | 2025-10-21 23:53:54+00:00
Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances, but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere. So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block. But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.
by klodolph | 2025-10-21 23:53:58+00:00
When I say “casual magit user”, I mean “magit user who is a casual user”, not “somebody who is a casual user of magit”. I just mean that I haven’t met people who use magit who don’t already know how to use git on the command line.

The inference of flags and parameters is also helpful, yeah. I’m remembering times where I’ve done something in magit and it’s auto-populated some commit or branch name, and I’m like, “Yup, that’s the right one” which saves me fifteen seconds of looking up the right name. It makes sense that the command-line interface to Git would expect me to be more explicit.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-10-21 23:54:19+00:00
As a society if we care about our fellow humans - generally seen as a virtue to have - then we need to reduce our emissions etc etc.

As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.

So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.

The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.

Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.

For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.
by porphyra | 2025-10-21 23:54:51+00:00
* He's a quite interesting historical character popularized by the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows. However, this insertion has also been controversial. East Asian male protagonists are underrepresented in Western media already, and with Assassin's Creed there's the perception that now they snubbed East Asians again, following a long trend of forcefully inserting foreign perspectives in Asian settings, like The Last Samurai, Shōgun, etc.

* There aren't that many real historical accounts about him so people can argue all day about stuff like "Was Yasuke a real samurai?" without clear evidence about who's right.
by KerrAvon | 2025-10-21 23:55:38+00:00
So what? It's a trivial kindness and it takes a few seconds. What else were they going to do with those seconds? It's different if it's fast food, where maximizing people I/O does matter. But that's not the case here.

Further if the restaurant asks ahead of time, that's a signifier that they take it seriously. If you have to tell them, it's much more likely you will encounter cavalier treatment of cross-contamination and such. For some people, that really can be life or death.
by altairprime | 2025-10-21 23:57:36+00:00
Heroku is pricing for “# of FTE headcount that can be terminated for switching to Heroku”; in that sense, this article’s $3000/mo bill is well below 1.0 FTE/month at U.S. pricing, so it’s not interesting to Heroku to address. I’m not defending this pricing lens, but it’s why their pricing is so high: if you aren’t switching to Heroku to layoff at least 1-2 FTE of salary per billing period, or using Heroku to replace a competitor’s equivalent replacement thereof, Heroku’s value assigned to you as a customer is net negative and they’d rather you went elsewhere. They can’t slam the door shut on the small fry, or else the unicorns would start up elsewhere, but they can set the pricing in FTE-terms and VCs will pay it for their moonshots without breaking a sweat.
by ecommerceguy | 2025-10-21 23:57:41+00:00
I'm on Macos and Chrome has a Gemini button that functions very similar to Grox on X.. It's useful and unobtrusive.

I also use Comet for specific financial research, also very useful.

I have edge with Copilot. Never use it. Microsoft is gross.

I have an invite to something called Strawberry but at this point, I'm tapped out. Sorry OpenAI, you're late to the game for me.

Maybe next week.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-21 23:58:09+00:00
I did not feel anything when listening to the song. The purpose of music is to move oneself, particularly emotionally.

As an example to represent the point - this is known to put many on the verge of tears/in a stream of tears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxNbZLh0PaA&list=RDWxNbZLh0P...
by zamalek | 2025-10-21 23:58:17+00:00
> LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive

I have noticed Claude's extreme and obtuse reluctance to delete code, even code that it just wrote that I told it is wrong. For example, it might produce a fn:

fn foo(bar)

And then I say, no, I actually wanted you to "foo with a frobnitz", so now we get:

fn foo(bar) // Never called fn foo_with_frobnitz(bar)
by rchaud | 2025-10-21 23:59:35+00:00
I have had the Palma 1 for a couple of years, and don't really think the form factor works. It's too tall and thick to be portable, and with a 18:9 aspect ratio, it's too narrow to be good for reading EPUBs and the like.

While it runs Android apps fine, those that run exclusively in dark mode are barely legible on the screen. It's a smart idea to assign the volume keys to a PgUp/PgDn function, but it only works on the default web browser, which doesn't have adblocking. I use Firefox Android on it, but the VolUp/Down keys don't work on it.
by bawolff | 2025-10-21 23:59:50+00:00
> I can't imagine that wikipedia has high chargeback rates, and clearly the processors don't mind doing business with them.

Its actually somewhat common for people who steal credit cards to use non profits like wikipedia to "test" them. Typically such sites have no minimum donation, have donations from all over the world so fraud detection wont think its weird you're spending money half way across the world.
by defrost | 2025-10-21 23:59:55+00:00
From one author's home page (Jean-Pierre Eckmann - https://fiteoweb.unige.ch/~eckmannj/publications.html), the latest version of full paper:

Walks in Rotation Spaces Return Home when Doubled and Scaled (with Tsvi Tlusty) Physical Review Letters 135, 147201 (2025)

https://fiteoweb.unige.ch/~eckmannj/ps_files/ETPRL.pdf
by adastra22 | 2025-10-22 00:00:06+00:00
That’s a fair question. A page is the smallest allocatable unit of RAM, from the OS/kernel perspective. The size is set by the CPU, traditionally 4kB, but these days 8kB-4MB are also common.

When you call malloc(), it requests a big chunk of memory from the OS, in units of pages. It then uses an allocator to divide it up into smaller, variable length chunks to form each malloc() request.

You may have heard of “heap” memory vs “stack” memory. The stack of course is the execution/call stack, and heap is called that because the “heap allocator” is the algorithm originally used for keeping track of unused chunks of these pages.

(This is beginner CS stuff so sorry if it came off as patronizing—I assume you’re either not a coder or self-taught, which is fine.)
by shoo | 2025-10-22 00:00:25+00:00
For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]

> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).

> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.

> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]

> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
by qingcharles | 2025-10-22 00:00:31+00:00
The constitutional amendment that GOP have put forward specifically prohibits any president who previously served two consecutive terms. (they had already thought this through, it literally only allows Trump three terms)

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-joint-res...
by collinmanderson | 2025-10-22 00:00:38+00:00
Yes. I think might also need to chmod 600 /swapfile. I do this on all my VPS, especially helps for small VPS with only 1GB ram:

fallocate -l 1G /swapfile chmod 600 /swapfile mkswap /swapfile swapon /swapfile

Works really well with no problems that I've seen. Really helps give a bit more of a buffer before applications get killed. Like others have said, with SSD the performance hit isn't too bad.
by ggm | 2025-10-22 00:01:27+00:00
Is this present tense or future tense? The story has aspects of both. The company exists, thats present tense. Does the X-Bat exist, has it flown even non-VTOL?

For those who don't know, "Shield" is Martin UAV re-badged, and they flew the V-BAT VTOL in 2023. X comes after V, so in the classic FORTRAN naming model, I expect the real one to be A-BAT or maybe B-BAT
by tecoholic | 2025-10-22 00:01:34+00:00
Umm.. I wouldn’t say fine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9w43p7741o.amp

Things have always been iffy. No one knows for sure.

Edit: That link is the most recent example. Googling for voting machines themselves would bring more examples. Every election cycle we go through reports of malfunctioning, no audit, audit not matching, extra machines appearing, machines being taken around by politically connected, even things like pressing any button on the machine voting for the same party…etc., but ECI has been pushing it aside and refusing to open up. This recent one became an issue because the manipulation (allegedly) went a layer deeper into the voter rolls themselves and they are public data.

We don’t know what’s up with the machines.
by BadThink6655321 | 2025-10-22 00:02:03+00:00
A ridiculous argument. Turing machines don't know anything about the program they are executing. In fact, Turing machines don't "know" anything. Turing machines don't know how to fly a plane, translate a language, or play chess. The program does. And Searle puts the man in the room in the place of the Turing machine.
by eru | 2025-10-22 00:02:24+00:00
Swap also works really well for desktop workloads. (I guess that's why Apple uses it so heavily on their Macbooks etc.)

With a good amount of swap, you don't have to worry about closing programs. As long as your 'working set' stays smaller than your RAM, your computer stays fast and responsive, regardless of what's open and idling in the background.
by dmvdoug | 2025-10-22 00:02:50+00:00
I’ll give you an example: the technology in the Instrument Unit on the Saturn V, which was the computer that controlled the Saturn V during launch, was largely derived from System/360. By technology here I mean things like the Unit Logic Devices (ULDs) out of which the logic boards in the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) were made. No surprise, I suppose, given that it was contracted to IBM’s Federal Systems Division.
by mcloide1942 | 2025-10-22 00:04:00+00:00
I built WatchDoggo, a small open-source Python app that monitors APIs and integrations from a JSON config — no database, just Flask and requests. Using AI assistance, it went from concept to release in about 8 hours (something that would usually take me 2–3 days). It’s a fun case study on how AI speeds up small, functional projects without changing the outcome quality much.
by snavwop | 2025-10-22 00:04:29+00:00
Most comments here oscillate between “cool tech” and “surveillance nightmare,” but that’s been true for every major platform shift — search, mobile, cloud. The real question is governance: who defines what the assistant can see, store, or act on? The tech is trivial compared to the trust layer.

Also worth noting: Atlas only exists because Chrome and Safari refused to give third-party AIs deep tab access. Build walls, get competitors.
by zipy124 | 2025-10-22 00:04:46+00:00
How are you doing tens of millions of faces per second per core, first of all assuming a 5ghz processor, that gives you 500 cycles per image if you do ten million a second, that's not nearly enough to do anything image related. Second of all L1 cache is at most in the hundreds of kilobytes, so the faces aren't in L1 but must be retrieved from elsewhere...??
by ggm | 2025-10-22 00:04:51+00:00
Rebuilding the rennaissance centre offers amazing possibilities. On a personal level I prefer low rise cities, noting that sprawl is also crap. So maybe the answer for Detroit is "just enough" density, and high-rise in a central business district, but otherwise.. less.

Reclaiming waterfront as a commons is a big thing.

There is an entertaining childs book called "unbuilding" by David Macaulay, 1980. It makes me think, as does a chapter in the otherwise rather awful pot boiler "warday" by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. There is so much value inherent in the construction materials in a modern building. Miles and miles of copper, Aluminium, steel, tiles, sinks, toilets, you-name-it. They're giant warehouses of potential re-use.

John McCarthy (LISP) used to say on USENET forums about waste that future generations will thank us for burying all these amazing inputs in the ground in waste tips, ripe for the picking. The cost to sort and grade and extract things may be less than the energy inputs to make them from scratch.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-10-22 00:05:59+00:00
50% per year might do it, but I think that is well into market distortion territory where there will be consequences. Also remember that at this scale it isn't taking money, it is seizing control of companies.

But yes, we can both agree to defer to the experts and not bother trying to understand or think through the consequences of our policy beliefs.
Show HN: Streaky – GitHub Streak Monitor with Distributed Cron Processing
by 0xrelogic | 2025-10-22 00:06:06+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Streaky to solve a personal problem - I kept losing my GitHub streak on busy days. It monitors your contribution streak and sends notifications to Discord/Telegram before it breaks.

*What makes it interesting technically:*

1. *Distributed Cron Processing*: Used Cloudflare Service Bindings to bypass the 30-second CPU limit. Each user gets processed in an isolated Worker instance with its own CPU budget.

2. *Idempotent Queue System*: D1-based queue with atomic operations prevents duplicate processing when cron jobs overlap or retry.

3. *Zero-Knowledge Security*: GitHub tokens never stored (OAuth refresh flow), webhooks encrypted with AES-256-GCM, notifications sent via isolated Rust proxy.

4. *Rate Limit Solution*: Cloudflare Workers use shared IP pools which trigger rate limits from Discord/Telegram. Solved by routing notifications through a dedicated Rust server on Koyeb.

*Tech Stack:* - Frontend: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript - Backend: Cloudflare Workers + D1 (SQLite) - Infrastructure: Rust notification proxy - Auth: GitHub OAuth via NextAuth.js v5

*Live demo*: https://streakyy.vercel.app

The project is fully open-source under MIT license. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or implementation!
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-22 00:06:24+00:00
If that's how you view the majority, you simply can't simultaneously be for democracy. It takes some impressive mental gymnastics to redefine democracy as one where somehow people can vote but all truth-production is centralized to the Expert Consensus narrative. I mean, maybe that's right. In fact basically no society till the 20th century has absolute full 1 person 1 vote election based democracy. It's an odd development. In most historic societies they restricted political affairs to certain "intellectually qualified" classes. Of course we see that as deeply unjust and exclusionary. But I'm not sure how else to interpret your type of complaint than as a wish for some kind of restriction on who can have decision power in political matters. But at the se time this is also called defending democracy. It's weird.
by redundantly | 2025-10-22 00:07:03+00:00
> would you feel common ground with a predatory fish?

The fish needs to eat, I need to eat. The fish has the drive to procreate, so do I, or at least I have a sex drive.

> Or a plant?

We both need sunlight to live, we both require a breathable atmosphere. We both need water.

> An insect colony?

Much of the above applies here as well, in addition to that I can see similarities between a large insect colony and our large cities, how things move, how roads and buildings are adjusted for efficiencies, how bad actors can harm the system.

Yes, I can see common ground between myself and all three of those things you listed.
by gradschool | 2025-10-22 00:07:27+00:00
tl;dr:

If a computer could have an intelligent conversation, then a person could manually execute the same program to the same effect, and since that person could do so without understanding the conversation, computers aren't sentient.

Analogously, some day I might be on life support. The life support machines won't understand what I'm saying. Therefore I won't mean it.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-10-22 00:08:10+00:00
Biology, chemical biology and parts of non-traditional chemistry, are some of the most political and elitist fields outside of social sciences. How and what is taught is not necessarily science based only, let alone, who gets in the PhD programs in the first place.

Organismic and Evolutionary Biologists, like Robert Sapolsky, are right in the middle of culture wars, and always on the same side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI&t=4827s
by justsomehnguy | 2025-10-22 00:08:19+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007821

> Doesn't swap just delay the fundamental issue?

The fundamental issue here is what the linux fanboys literally think what killing a working process and most of the time the process[0] is a good solution for not solving the fundamental problem of memory allocation in the Linux kernel.

Availability of swap allows you to avoid malloc failure in a rare case your processes request more memory than physically (or 'physically', heh) present in the system. But in the mind of so called linux administrators even if a one byte of the swap would be used then the system would immediately crawl to a stop and never would recover itself. Why it always should be the worst and the most idiotic scenario instead of a sane 'needed 100MB more, got it - while some shit in the memory which wasn't accessed since the boot was swapped out - did the things it needed to do and freed that 100MB' is never explained by them.

[0] imagine a dedicated machine for *SQL server - which process would have the most memory usage on that system?
by rapind | 2025-10-22 00:08:40+00:00
Honestly I think it's the database that makes devs insecure. The stakes are high and you usually want PITR and regular backups even for low traffic apps. Having a "simple" turnkey service for this that can run in any environment (dedicated, VPS, colo, etc.) would be huge.

I think this is partly responsible for the increased popularity of sqlite as a backend. It's super simple and lightstream for recovery isn't that complicated.

Most apps don't need 5 9s, but they do care about losing data. Eliminate the possibility of losing data, without paying tons of $ to also eliminate potential outages, and you'll get a lot of customers.
by skydhash | 2025-10-22 00:08:56+00:00
The things is most times, you are indeed buying the car that is going to make the delivery. And it's going to live in your garage. And if you're not careful, one day it will drive itself off a cliff, stall in the middle of a 10 hour drive, or you'll get robbed by individuals hiding in the trunk.

People that realize this care about their oil type and what tire they put on. People that do not, pay it forward when that crash does happen and they don't know how to recover, so queue up the war room, etc...

Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.
by slg | 2025-10-22 00:09:06+00:00
>> ostensibly apolitical corporations

>Oh, you sweet, summer child.

As someone who has spent decades having written conversations on the internet, it really seems like basic reading comprehension skills have plummeted recently. It's frustrating how many responses are replying to some objectively incorrect reading of what was written.

Here's the definition of "ostensibly"[1].

>in a way that appears or claims to be one thing when it is really something else

The correct reading of "ostensibly apolitical corporations" is "corporations that claim to be apolitical but in reality aren't". Not only is it not an indication of naïveté, it is closer to the exact opposite.

[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ostensib...
by rayiner | 2025-10-22 00:09:39+00:00
My first job out of law school was at a 176 year old law firm. New lawyers were socialized to identify with the past achievements of the firm, like helping J.P. Morgan build the railroads. There was a good reason for that: it socializes people to adhere to a culture and practices that have proven to be effective.

You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.