MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alwa | 2025-10-10 18:18:46+00:00
Ben Thompson bopped around doing engineer things at Apple, Microsoft, and Automattic, until more than a decade ago he started this subscription newsletter with business-of-tech kind of analysis. The success of his paid newsletter gave Substack the idea [0].

A fair chunk of the tech who’s-who seem to find his thinking useful.

[0] https://www.vox.com/2017/10/16/16480782/substack-subscriptio...
by throwup238 | 2025-10-10 18:19:32+00:00
The union is a nice backstop for issues around the edges that come up with corporate, but the real backstop is the pilots’ licensing. By making them directly responsible for the plane as PIC, it gives them leverage over their employer that few other professions have. AIR-21 gives them significant protection from retaliation and the ASRS is confidential. ALPA helps them navigate that mess if it comes to it, but that’s the real legal backing that pilots have.

Same thing happens with Professional Engineers regardless of whether they are employed or work as independent consultants/firms. They’re legally responsible for the bridges and other infrastructure they sign off on with laws protecting them from employers and clients.

(I fully support the ALPA and other unions, I just don’t think it plays as significant a role in following regulations as you claim)
by leetharris | 2025-10-10 18:20:20+00:00
Ok so Musk is the reason mass transit isn't a success?

So why didn't we get mass transit before Musk was rich?

In Austin we approved an enormous rail project and the taxpayers approved billions to build it. Years later, they have descoped it by 75% and they haven't even come close to delivering that small bit they reduced it down to.

Was that Musk too? Or is overregulation destroying our ability to innovate?
by leakycap | 2025-10-10 18:20:20+00:00
Lucky you! There are thousands of ThinkPad models and they're not magically exempt from this issue:

(Not a new issue... here's the problem on an R60) https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/475968/thinkpad-vol...

E14 Gen4 https://forum.manjaro.org/t/thinkpad-e14-gen4-special-keys-m...

E14 Gen2 issues https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/609942/thinkpad-spe...

T510 issues https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=268269

Fn Volume Control Keys Not Working https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=412947

It just takes a cursory glance of search results to see that your ThinkPad experience is not everyone's.
by irl_zebra | 2025-10-10 18:20:24+00:00
I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do not care at all.
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-10-10 18:20:36+00:00
Once you have the weights, actually running these models is easy. The code is not complicated - they are just huge in terms of memory requirements.

Deep learning has now been around for a long time. Running these models is well understood.

obviously running them at scale for multiple users is more difficult.

The actual front ends are not complicated - as is evidenced by the number of open source equivalents.
by namibj | 2025-10-10 18:20:59+00:00
It's more that you have to manage shading to happen in a way that the module's structure and your array-combining wiring/circuit effectively contain the shading impact to be closer to proportional to the overall shaded area than to causing more catastrophic loss (an individual solar cell in a module will be wired/biased as a blocking diode that's merely photoconductive from the limited light it receives unless bypass diodes are integrated into the module). E.g., usage of power optimizers, modules/panels with cell&bypass-diode arrangements that work to effectively target and mitigate the shading patterns you experience (e.g. a wall getting shaded when the sun sets below the horizon formed by neighbor's roofs), and such.

Partial-shading-tolerance designed modern panels will quite happily tank partial shading, and as long as you keep the shading aligned in the design direction of the panel you will have within ~30% of the usual efficiency (i.e., still like 14% instead of the usual 20%) relative to the remaining irradiation that your panel is still receiving after the shading took it's chunk.

Just take care to ensure the shading conditions for all panels that are passively combined into an array are sufficiently same, or at least behave in a way that the modules can bypass effectively to not loose an unshaded panel's yield due to one panel in the group having some shade on it.
by kulahan | 2025-10-10 18:21:22+00:00
Computers have been more in the realm of the younger generations for a long time now, and young people can handle bad posture and other things more easily than the elderly can. I mean we're waiting on them to reach the age where their body can no longer handle it.

My dad had a business installing mainframes when I was young - back when mainframes were still installed in individual businesses, you know. At the time I was a kid, but I know we always had some of the first tech on the block, so I doubt many had tech before me.

I'm reaching the age where I can no longer handle a bad posture - I assume this is going to start getting bigger in the next 5-10 years. I could be wrong, I dunno, but I don't think so.
by mgh95 | 2025-10-10 18:21:42+00:00
> I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say oracle to postgres) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.

The bigger problem is that there was never a way to move data between oracle->postgres in pure data form (i.e. point pgsql at your oracle folder and it "just works"). Migration is always a pain, and thus there is a substantial degree of stickiness, due to the cost of moving databases both in terms of risk and effort.

In contrast, vendors [1] are literally offering third party LLMS (such as claude) in addition to their own and offering one-click switching. This means users can try and if they desire switch with little friction.

[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2025/09/introducing-claude-age...
by hencq | 2025-10-10 18:21:58+00:00
> IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately. But this is somewhat understandable: first of all, dropping the passengers off at Edinburgh (an hour drive from Glasgow) is significantly less costly and less inconvenient than dropping them at Manchester (an overnight bus ride).

Yeah, as someone who knows next to nothing about airlines, but has seen these type of decisions in businesses, this was the thing that stood out to me. This is all pure speculation of course, but I'd be curious how clear it was that Edinburgh would also have a high risk of being unsuccessful and whether the pilots felt any pressure to try that anyway. E.g. are there consequences for pilots who cause delays for passengers?
by feoren | 2025-10-10 18:22:31+00:00
No, weather forecasting models are "just math". The forecast itself is an output of the model. I sure hope our weather forecasting models are still useful next year!

weather forecasting models <=> code <=> math weather forecast <=> program output <=> calculation results

So all you're saying is that we should not expect individual weather forecasts, program output, and calculation results to be useful long-term. Nobody is arguing that.
by timr | 2025-10-10 18:22:41+00:00
> And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship.

I spent a good portion of my life in Universities -- and went as far as one can go in terms of educational credentials and taught at the university level -- and I cannot disagree more.

Universities produce job skills incidentally, if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it's possible to get a degree and still not be better than a very junior engineer at a software company (and quite a few graduates are worse).

> We started with implementing simple data structures and algorithms and solving simple puzzles all the way to implementing toy OSes, databases, persistent data structures, compilers, CPUs, discrete simulations, machine learning models.

This was not my experience, nor is it what I have seen in most university graduates. It's still quite possible for a CS grad to get a degree having only theoretical knowledge in these topics, and no actual ability to write code.

This leaves open the question of where "the best place" is to learn as-practiced programming [2], but I tend to agree with the root commenter that the best programmers come up through a de facto apprenticeship system, even if most of them spend time in universities along the way.

[1] Their goal is to produce professors. You may not realize this if you only went as far as the undergraduate diploma, but that is mostly what academics know, and so it is what they teach. The difference between the "best" CS programs and the others is that they have some professors with actual industry experience, but even then, most of them are academics through and through.

[2] Code academies suck in their own ways.
by ericselin | 2025-10-10 18:22:51+00:00
So the problem here is that Alice on alice.statichost.page might set a cookie for the `.statichost.page` domain if she's careless (which is sometimes the case with Alice). This cookie can then be read by Mallory on mallory.statichost.eu. Or the other way around, if Mallory wants to try to trick Alice into reading his cookie. How this can be prevented without the PSL is something I'm very interested to hear more about.
by overfeed | 2025-10-10 18:22:56+00:00
> Devs should punish companies that clearly don't give a shit about them.

Don't get involved in parasocial relationships with corporations - if they were human, they'd all be amoral psychopaths with a harrowing addiction to profits.

> When I see AMD, I think of a firm that heavily prioritized their B2B business over B2C

That's ironic to read as a gamer who saw Nvidia roll-over to scalpers and Bitcoin farms. Selling out to big tech would have been better, frankly - there's some hope of technical cooperation to improve the product. Then again, corporations are not our friends.

AMD will continue to have my custom as long as they have better bang-for-buck compared to Intel or Nvidia.
by tasn | 2025-10-10 18:23:02+00:00
> Exactly! Pity this basic contextual help isn't more widespread, every single app that uses a lot of keybind sequences could benefit from it, especially if it becomes a bit smarter and only shows a popup if you don't finish the sequence right away

I've been using Vim/Neovim for 20 years, but still can't get enough of which-key[1] which I only installed ~6 months ago.

1: https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim
by threetonesun | 2025-10-10 18:23:18+00:00
The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really matter, they're going for being the place people land when they open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think they're well on their way to getting there.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-10 18:23:19+00:00
"Morality" is about immorality... Ethics is (nominally) universal;

Ethics is moral philosophy. Most of the time these terms are used interchangeably but your description of the accepted difference is inaccurate and inflammatory.

Ethics is the moral standard accepted at community level, not quite universal. Morality is the projection (or rejection) of parts of ethics on individual level. In itself, morality is not a weapon and it's not about exclusion, at least no more than ethics can be.

> Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.

Ironically, you are trying to blame moral people for being immoral because they like the "weapon" called morality... You speak from the view point of your morality that rejects morality and it gets funny.
by cyrialize | 2025-10-10 18:23:24+00:00
Yes, a bit like that!

I really wish I remembered the name of it. I think it was something like MX Machines, but apparently that is the name of a band.

It was such a niche, fun community of people playing a prank on everyone. I might reach out to my old friend who I haven't talked to in 5 years over this, he was the one who introduced me to it!
by bee_rider | 2025-10-10 18:23:29+00:00
For anyone confused like me, a definition of motley is “Having elements of great variety or incongruity; heterogeneous.”

I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.
by lucideng | 2025-10-10 18:23:37+00:00
I used to be a machinist and had tech as a hobby. Eventually I got good enough at tech and now I have machining and mechanical things as a hobby.

Hobbies are just jobs you don't get paid for. Focus on acquiring skills and enjoying it. When you stop enjoying it, it becomes mind numbing, tedious, work. I haven't "worked" in that sense, for years.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-10 18:23:43+00:00
C.f., Agloe, Mountweazel, Steinlaus, and esquivalience:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry>.

Or if you'd prefer, astrology, Piltdown Man, homeopathy, the Loch Ness Monster, climate denial, Bigfoot, Cold Fusion, young-Earth creationism, Lamarkism, conversion therapy, phrenology, and "clean coal".
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-10 18:24:00+00:00
Is it popular? I’m a parent and none of my parent friends like it.

I suspect this law isn’t popular. Just the messaging of doing nothing is more unpopular. So it gets spun as this is popular.

https://youtu.be/ahgjEjJkZks?si=mGE0k5QT3aXycHtU
by MaxikCZ | 2025-10-10 18:24:15+00:00
1) Yea, sorry, turbofan, not turboprop nor a jet.

2) It stays burned, but the energy is banked in potential energy of the aircraft, namely in a form of altitude. If you run out of fuel 5 feet above ground, you dont get to fly far. When you run out of fuel 35000 feet above ground, you can still choose where to land from multiple options.

3) huh? I dont get what you trying to say, but: Its always more economical to climb, and the faster the better. Ofc you cant climb too high when you intend to attempt to land in 5-10 mins, but nontheless, every feet gained is "banked", and the aircraft is more economical to run the higher you are.

4) I am not saying the winds arent a factor, and in no way I was arguing about how fuel reserves are calculated. My only claim is that: yes, by spending more fuel to gain altitude, you can then "glide" down almost for free later. Its not 1:1, because of constant losses like drag, but its being compensated by higher engine efficiency and less drag at altitude, that its always worth it to climb if you can.

There was a flight that was low on fuel diverting to alternate between 2 islands. The pilot panicked and chose slower climb to intuitively save fuel. They had to ditch the plane in water because of it - if they initiated full climb, they would have made the jump.
by saghm | 2025-10-10 18:24:57+00:00
I imagine it wasn't as immediate as it might look on the outside. If they all were working independently on similar ideas for a while, one of them launching their product might have caused the others to scramble to get theirs out as well to avoid missing the train.

I think it's also worth pointing out that the polish on these products was not actually there on day one. I remember the first week or so after ChatGPT's initial launch being full of stories and screenshots of people fairly easily getting around some of the intended limitations with silly methods like asking it to write a play where the dialogue has the topic it refused to talk about directly or asking it to give examples about what types of things it's not allowed to say in response to certain questions. My point isn't that there wasn't a lot of technical knowledge that went into the initial launch, but that it's a bit of an oversimplification to view things at a binary where people didn't know how to do it before, but then they did.
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-10-10 18:25:09+00:00
If you are doing things “properly” then you have good evals that let you test the behaviour of different LLMs and see if they work for your problem.

The vendors have all standardised on OpenAIs API surface - you can use OpenAIs SDK with a number of providers - so switching is very easy. There are also quite a few services that offer this as a service.

The real test is does a different LLM work - hence the need to evals to check.
by rafterydj | 2025-10-10 18:26:14+00:00
This is why I use the phrase "sucking all the oxygen out of the room" where the proverbial oxygen is funding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Hyp...

Musk literally admitted he wanted to block progress on new rail projects, and the Hyperloop was his PR project to do so. Snake oil.

There are many people who want new train infrastructure. Musk is not one of them.
by lispisok | 2025-10-10 18:27:01+00:00
Tech has the issue where any sort of gatekeeping is seen as bad because people in the field have so much hubris they think they can never be replaced and there has been a coordinated effort by capital to flood the field with labor to drive salaries down. You could go further and say the complete lack of professional standards is why we have this leetcode humiliation ritual interview process which has nothing to do with the actual job has become the gatekeeper.
by timonoko | 2025-10-10 18:27:29+00:00
Eh what?. You can make a Dubai Lamp just adding suitable capacitor to the line.

Hey Grok. What is suitable capacitor to add to 3W 240V 50Hz Led Lamp to make it long-lasting Dubai Lamp? <long explanation with formulas and other shit removed> 180-220 nF (400V)
by danaris | 2025-10-10 18:27:39+00:00
There's plenty of resources to go around to make UBI (the "unconditional" is baked right in) make sense.

There's plenty of work that people want to do, that's otherwise unprofitable, that UBI would enable.

The barrier to UBI is not that we don't have enough to go around if not everyone is doing "productive work". It's that we're stuck on a model of human value that only considers productive work, and that we're stuck on a model of resource ownership that gives everything to the people at the top.

"Guaranteed jobs" is certainly better than what we have today, but it seems stupid to tell someone who's got an amazing artistic talent, "Nope, you don't get to do the thing you're great at that gives you fulfillment in life and brightens other people's lives with your work. You have to clean the streets."
by Multiplayer | 2025-10-10 18:27:48+00:00
The current AI wave has been compared (by sama) to electricity and sometimes transistors. AI is just going to be in all the products. The trillion dollar question is: Do you care what kind of electricity you are using? So, will you care what kind of AI you are using.

In the last few interviews with him I have listened to he has said that what he wants is "your ai" that knows you, everywhere that you are. So his game is "Switching Costs" based on your own data. So he's making a device, etc etc.

Switching costs are a terrific moat in many circumstances and requires a 10x product (or whatever) to get you to cross over. Claude Code was easily a 5x product for me, but I do think GPT5 is doing a better job on just "remembering personal details" and it's compelling.

I do not think that apps inside chatgpt matters to me at all and I think it will go the way of all the other "super app" ambitions openai has.
by leakycap | 2025-10-10 18:28:31+00:00
I'm not sure why anyone would think a connection to an investor would be easy to find. This is likely a bigger issue than whatever you're trying to build, because funding partners need to be a good fit.

Unfortunately, without existing connections, you have to put in a lot of effort helping people in your networks so you can ask them to help you. If you haven't been putting that work in by providing real help/value/relief to those in your network for years, it is an uphill battle to get a warm intro to an investor of all things.
by feoren | 2025-10-10 18:28:38+00:00
> > Code is just math.

> What?? No. If it was there'd never be any bugs.

Are you claiming there is no incorrect math out there? Go offer to grade some high-school algebra tests if you'd like to see buggy math. Or Google for amateur proofs of the Collatz Conjecture. Math is just extremely high (if not all the way) on the side of "if it compiles, it is correct", with the caveat that compilation only can happen in the brains of other mathematicians.
by atmavatar | 2025-10-10 18:28:38+00:00
It's fascinating seeing the extent to which Republicans have monopolized both violence and victimhood. The entire article seems to be a standard exercise in bad faith commonly seen from right-wing pundits.

Here, labeling certain individuals on the right as fascists is claimed to necessarily also be a call for violence against them. The only example provided for this claim is a reference to a musician in the middle of WW2 sporting a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar, as if wartime propaganda from 80 years ago is still relevant today.

I certainly haven't seen any relevant individual on the left calling for violence - whether that be people with significant followings in media and especially not among elected individuals.

In contrast, not only do I see pretty significant calls to violence from the right (e.g., Trump's rallies calling for violence against media members, his speech on 2021-01-06 whipping his crowd into a frenzy before the attack on the capitol, the "enemies within" speech he just gave to top military brass, etc.), but we're also seeing ICE becoming increasingly violent.

The claims about attacks on freedom of speech are similar.

Those on the left organize protests and boycotts against people they disagree with, thus exercising their own freedom of speech. Occasionally, such actions have resulted in individuals losing their jobs and their reputation. I won't claim that cancel culture doesn't go too far sometimes or get started over some incredibly petty things, but by and large, it's a movement that relies entirely on exercising speech as its mechanism.

Contrast this again with actions on the right. We have a sitting president launching lawsuits against anyone who says something he doesn't like. At the same time, he's directed his FCC secretary to threaten removal of broadcast licenses and interfere with business mergers of anyone using speech critical of Trump. That is textbook government censorship.

And no, Biden's administration requesting things on social media being taken down is not the same thing unless you can demonstrate said requests were also accompanied by threats of government action. It probably shouldn't have happened, and it definitely should have resulted in political consequences of some sort (it did), but it's not the same thing without threats being levied.