MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 29athrowaway | 2025-10-19 21:19:11+00:00
Take the documentation of GenStage, for example. It is a dry transition between what a stage is into advanced concepts with diagrams are in ASCII. https://hexdocs.pm/gen_stage/GenStage.html

Not only this article dumps significant cognitive load on the reader. It's not well digested and not a soft landing into the subject. Worst of all, many Elixir articles assume familiarity with GenStage.

Compare it to this, which is not the best example but is a much more soft landing. https://doc.akka.io/libraries/akka-core/current/typed/actors...
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-19 21:19:45+00:00
As for donations from individuals, I have seen folks who do this kind of thing get a P.O. Box or use a mailbox service provider/remailer[0] to maintain their opsec, though that is an added expense. It would likely be easier to accept donations earmarked for equipment purchases, but that requires a bit of trust and reputation, but you have to begin where you are, which is pretty good so far, as you are doing your own tests on your own equipment in your possession. I’m sure many would be willing and able to donate funds and/or hardware, if the option were presented to them, but I don’t know if that is worth the added efforts involved in engaging with the community.

Directly engaging with vendors for donations is somewhat fraught with concerns of its own, as ideally you are doing blind purchases so that vendors can’t give you known-good units, but rather are giving you units that the vendor doesn’t already know are going to be subject to enhanced scrutiny.

Maybe get in touch with the OpenWRT folks to see if you can test the OpenWRT One? I believe they’re using a modified BananaPi design.

https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one

> OpenWrt One is based on the MediaTek Filogic 820 SoC and has WiFi 6, dual-band, 3×3/2×2, 1x 2.5Gbit WAN, 1x 1Gbit LAN, 1GB DDR4 RAM, 256 MiB NAND, 16 MiB NOR (for recovery), M.2 SSD, USB-C Serial console and USB 2.0. Power Over Ethernet (POE): an IEEE 802.3af/at compliant device can power the device via the RJ-45 2.5 Gbps WAN connector.

https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/OpenWRT-One/BananaPi_OpenWRT-O...

> OpenWrt One uses Mediatek’s MT7981B SoC with a dual-arm Cortex-a53 core at 1.3 GHz, 1 GB DDR4 RAM and 256 MiB SPI NAND storage. It also integrates 16 MiB of additional protected storage as a system backup, dual storage hardware to ensure that the onboard system is unbrickable, and finally integrated M.2. 2230/2242 NVMe PCIe 2 X1 ports can be used to add external storage. And with a battery holder for an internal clock, OpenWrt One offers a USB 2.0 Type-A and a mikroBUS expansion port to provide more interfaces to a host of technical possibilities

> OpenWrt One is the first board design with OpenWrt opensource communtity.and designed in collaboration with Banana Pi that will also handle manufacturing and distribution of the router board. The OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY router should provide a source of income for the project, for example, to cover the cost of hosting and OpenWrt conferences, with Banana Pi selling the board through their distribution network, and for every device sold, donating to the Software Freedom Conservancy (SDC) with the funds earmarked for OpenWrt.

[0] Techlore on YouTube interviewed the operator of such a service in the video linked below. I won’t name the company as this is not a review or endorsement (pun intended), as I have not used their service, nor can I speak to their operations, but the interview is a decent explainer of the service itself from the point of view of an operator of such a service, and other competitors in that field are also named.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=idSBvjaaFSk
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-19 21:20:07+00:00
People do whatever they want. It doesn't have to make sense.

Perhaps disturbingly: I even know of one bit of critical public safety communications infrastructure that is is expensive, low production volume, and has a Raspberry Pi 3 embedded inside. I won't name names because that's getting a little too close to home for my liking, but I was quite surprised to find this inside of a very nice waterproof box with chonky, expensive, olive-colored milspec connectors to connect it up to the outside world.

Which, well: Yeah. There's a ton of good reasons not to do that. But building a whole Linux system on a custom board using individual parts is hard, so it can make sense to buy someone else's work instead.

Except... that's what the CM3 is designed to provide, including on-board eMMC instead of an SD card. I'd not have been surprised at all if there was a CM3 in there, but there is instead an entire Pi 3.

But MCUs, like on the Teensy, aren't like that. They aren't hard to integrate on a custom board like the Broadcom SoC on a Pi 3 or CM3 is.

The primary purpose of an MCU is not to be stuffed onto a dev board like a Teensy, but instead to be stuffed onto the board inside of a microwave oven or an air fryer or a fancy remote control and be easy to interface with other things and to program.

It really doesn't take much to get them going: Some require external ROM or flash, but a lot of them have internal flash memory and only need power and programming pins wired up to let them run code and do whatever IO is needed within a system.

This camera already had at least one very custom board inside. It could have integrated the MCU, as well, instead of the kitchen-sink Teensy.

Doing so is not just style points; it's quite often easier, cheaper, and more flexible.

This allows a person to use all of the IO pins on the MCU to do stuff with, instead of just the functions that the designer of a dev kit decided to build out through whatever interfaces they decided to include.
by Cpoll | 2025-10-19 21:20:14+00:00
> sociopath career

If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer.

I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes).

Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this.

> Half of the students are already drugged to the gills.

He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.
by M95D | 2025-10-19 21:21:20+00:00
I had an Ericsson R320s at the time and that was the web page that convinced me to replace it with a Nokia E70. The joystick stopped working after many years and there was no fix for it. I switched to E90 and I hated the keyboard. It took a lot of force to press the keys and there was no clear key separation to touch-type. But that was the phone which I dropped on the pavement while riding the bike at 80 Km/h and it survived with just scratches! The best 3 phones I ever had.

Now I have a N86 which I'm going to keep until the last 2G goes offline.
by tomku | 2025-10-19 21:21:58+00:00
I was in one of those early cohorts that used Octave, one of the things the course had to deal with was that at the time (I don't know about now) Octave did not ship with an optimization function suitable for the coursework so we ended up using an implementation of `fmincg` provided along with the homework by the course staff. If you're following along with the lectures, you might need to track down that file, it's probably available somewhere.

Using Octave for a beginning ML class felt like the worst of both worlds - you got the awkward, ugly language of MATLAB without any of the upsides of MATLAB-the-product because it didn't have the GUI environment or the huge pile of toolbox functions. None of that is meant as criticism at Octave as a project, it's fine for what it is, it just ended up being more of a stumbling block for beginners than a booster in that specific context.
by tavavex | 2025-10-19 21:22:14+00:00
It's not empty. Do you think I sat down and thought "let's write down a post that looks like something but is actually nothing"? I assumed you'd be able to infer some examples from what I gave you. Sorry it took me longer than a sentence.

Take video streaming, like what you mentioned. Say, you have livestreaming available. How do you let the user go back and watch back old recordings? Split up the stream by days? Hours? Separate events? Have a video player with infinite seek? Be able to type in the date of the recording? A sports streaming site would answer these differently from a gaming site or your indoor camera's website. What about offering episodic content? Should it play back-to-back? Do you want fancy lists with thumbnails or will "Episode 1", "Episode 2" do just fine? Okay, now what about ad types? Should there be recommendations? Do you want a way to expand the player and dim the rest of the UI? And thousands more questions like these.

You need to make design decisions, it's inherent in the job. Being "average" just means relegating these decisions to something someone else has done before. And this can be done well, but it can also be done out of laziness that leads to obtuse GUIs that bother themselves more with current trends or eye candy than thinking about what it's made for.
by cachemoney1 | 2025-10-19 21:22:31+00:00
From the article:

> In one rare instance, the company also revealed that "a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum" found on farm grounds in Saskatchewan, Canada, was traced to a Starlink satellite.

A piece of debris of similar size to this is what I'd guess could cause the kind of damage we see in the incident involving the airliner.

So while most Starlink debris may be harmless by the time it reaches the surface, we know this doesn't always happen as expected.

And since the vast majority of reentering space debris is from Starlink satellites, that'd would be the first place I'd look.

To be totally clear, I am doubtful this is actually caused by space debris, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for it to be one of the most likely causes.
by ebcase | 2025-10-19 21:22:50+00:00
Glad to see the Luddites getting a shout out here.

This is a new / recent book about the Luddite movement and it’s similarities to the direction we are headed due to LLMs:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-t...

Enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it!
by pedalpete | 2025-10-19 21:24:18+00:00
I thought I had a decent handle on patent law, but maybe I'm missing something here.

Yes, the patent won't be valid for Canada, but you can't import a product into the US which would infringe on a US patent.

So, though there may be a small amount that would slip through the cracks, it isn't as if anyone in the US can now manufacture Semaglutide and distribute it.

Canada is such a small market, that many companies don't bother. Though, for the cost, it seems ridiculous a company as big as Novo didn't pay the $500...that may even have been in Canadian dollars. :)
by asdefghyk | 2025-10-19 21:24:26+00:00
I've always been curious how modern electric heating elements are assembled in a safe manner. I mean ones that use nichrome heating wire , inside a metal tube. The metal tube is packed with insulating material. Like how is the heating wire maintained in a position so it touches the smallish diameter metal pipe.

From Google - about how manufactured ....An electric heating element inside a metal pipe is a common design for tubular heaters, which consists of a resistance wire (often Nichrome) coiled in the center of a metal tube. The space between the wire and the tube is packed with an electrical insulator, such as magnesium oxide powder, which conducts heat efficiently while preventing the wire from shorting against the pipe. This design allows for durable, efficient heating as the heat is conducted from the element to the pipe's outer surface....
by weitendorf | 2025-10-19 21:24:27+00:00
I never did that in college because it seemed awfully manipulative to bother them unless I really needed it. It didn't even occur to me that that's what other people had been doing until I had almost graduated.

Being a student to me just really warps your perspective on the world because it confines you into such an arbitrary, stressful, gameable system that you either adapt to it and come out of it with a very flawed model of reality, reject it at your own peril, or suffer through it. I would rather get a B than transparently work my professor for an A- and it's concerning to think that the people who go on to become doctors and management consultants are disproportionately the ones who do that.
by jzebedee | 2025-10-19 21:24:37+00:00
> Prof. Michael Hoffman from Toronto put me on to the Canadian Patent Database, where you can find that Novo did file a patent there for semaglutide. . .but the last time they paid the annual maintenance fee on it was 2018!

> You can even find a letter where their lawyers send a refund request for the 2017 maintenance fee ($250) because Novo apparently wanted some more time to see if they wanted to pay it.

> On the same date in 2019, the office sent a letter saying that “The fee payable to maintain the rights accorded by the above patent was not received by the prescribed due date. . .”

> By that time it was $450 with the late fee added, but that was apparently too much for Novo. They had a one year grace period to make it up, and apparently never did, so their patent lapsed in Canada. And as the Canadian authorities remind them, “Once a patent has lapsed it cannot be revived”.

Impressive failure for "the second-largest semaglutide market in the world."
by SR2Z | 2025-10-19 21:24:44+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.

Such a person would ignore any issue short of, say, their paychecks or SSA benefits not arriving on time. After that, who knows who they would support?

Democrats have a lot less to lose than the GOP right now. The party is unpopular and locked out of power. There's only upside to shutting the government down, if you ignore the very serious impacts on normal people.

Trump is not capable of seeing this because he reflexively has to win every conflict he's involved in.
by xxs | 2025-10-19 21:24:48+00:00
> file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer.

How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use).

Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths)

I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation.

Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.
by lithobraking | 2025-10-19 21:24:58+00:00
>After all, when I look at my W2 (yeah, I'm a working stiff), they sure as hell are taking out taxes still. That aint "shut down". It's a scam.

This is because a significant amount of the government is still running. [1] Around 50% of gov employees are currently working without pay (but with expected backpay). If _everyone_ stopped working major systems would immediately be disrupted: The military would stop all operations. Planes would be grounded. Weather predictions would cease to exist. Food & pharmaceuticals wouldn't be screened. Participants in medical studies would stop getting treatments. etc.

Contractors are also capable covering expenses with overhead. But soon, many will run out. For example, the contractors who perform nuclear weapons research [2]. At which time, they will have to shut down and employees will be furloughed without guarantee of backpay. (The current expectation is unpaid leave) As someone who works in a related civilian field this would severely impact our mission and the folks who work here. Especially the newer ones like postdocs who may not have much savings.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/who-is-still-workin...

[2]: https://sourcenm.com/2025/10/17/doe-secretary-nnsa-to-furlou...
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-19 21:25:06+00:00
> Self defense, as I pointed out, is a perfectly normal reason to kill someone which is widely accepted as a moral argument in court.

"I (accidentally) killed him, while trying to protect me." is very different from "Oh, killing is just (second) nature to me, I need the daily kick." When you need to have a serious threat to make you do something, then that thing is in fact not your nature.

> I think not.

I pointed out another example of that meaning of the word "nature" and you answered as if I made claims about morality of killing or slaughtering people/animals?

Sorry to me that felt very much like scope creep.
by Yoric | 2025-10-19 21:25:24+00:00
You are, of course, right, although I'd say that it's fairly unusual for the "sequential execution of CPU instructions" abstraction to leak.

The wrongfully assumed "O(1) memory access" (or worse, wrongfully assumed O(1) data structure access even when the data structure actually isn't O(1)) showed up more frequently in my experience. And I still don't understand how we keep writing code that assumes "fast, reliable network" when we're reminded every day that code is neither fast nor reliable.
by turtletontine | 2025-10-19 21:25:27+00:00
It helps that they’re not a publicly traded company [A]. If you’re beholden to stockholders, you’re beholden to a market demanding growth at all costs. Even if the leadership at the moment wants this stable strategy, all investor pressure tends toward aggressive moves to the contrary.

[A] probably? I couldn’t conclusively determine this, and I’m not an expert
by autoexec | 2025-10-19 21:25:42+00:00
> it seems to me pricing everything at its actual correct price is the best way

It seems to me that the "actual correct price" is the one that doesn't prevent everybody but the rich from being able to experience the art and cultural heritage.

There are many alternatives for dealing with crowds available. It's also just good business since those artistic works are a huge draw for tourists being outside money into Paris and into the country as well.
by asdefghyk | 2025-10-19 21:27:20+00:00
The description in the comment Im replying to - reminded me of the replaceable element in electric jugs, which where common during 1970s. The nichrome wire was meant to be replaceable , so had a mechanical connection , not soldered.

Here is a good picture of what I have attempted to describe .... https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-130368
by popalchemist | 2025-10-19 21:27:39+00:00
Technology should make our lives better. Whether it's social media, AI, or nuclear power, if we introduce technology that even with its incredible benefits ends up causing harm or making life worse for many people (as all of the above have in various ways), we should reconsider. This should be self-evident. That doesn't mean we get rid of the technology, but we refine. Chernobyl didn't mean the world got rid of nuclear power. It meant we became more responsible with it.

Anyway there is a name for your kind of take. It is anti-humanist.
by trungld | 2025-10-19 21:28:15+00:00
It’s slower than native, sure — but for education, it’s a game changer. Students can open a notebook in any browser, on any device (even a Chromebook or iPad), and start coding instantly — no installs, no setup issues. Perfect for workshops, classrooms, or sharing interactive tutorials. It runs real Python, so you can teach core concepts, plotting, and even simple data analysis right in the browser. For heavier computation, you’d still offload to a remote kernel, but for learning and experimentation, it’s more than fast enough.
by throw81239821 | 2025-10-19 21:28:34+00:00
I'd agree. The logical fallacy I always observe in (what I call) the marxist-nihilist AI doom scenario is that it assumes that the top N% of people perfectly cooperate in a way that the remaining 100-N% cannot. Even stratified social structure is far too muddled for a "mass-replacement" scenario to not cause the elites to factionalize across different plans that would be best for them, which in turn prevents the kind of unified coherent action that the doom scenario hinges on (ex. theyll gun down the proles with robodogs).
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-19 21:28:40+00:00
> for partisan political messaging is clearly damaging to the long term credibility of those accounts, damage which will last long after this administration is gone.

It's a common topic with this admin: short term profits, long term losses. Be it that weird shit with a sell-off of public lands, the closure of and impedance to science in general, the rollback of clean renewable energy sources in favor of fossil fuels, the turn towards corruption and fascism, the fear they're spreading in everyone who's not white, citizenship be damned.

In Germany we have a saying for this - "nach uns die Sintflut" or "after us, the floods may come". Trump, those around him and those profiting off of him are having one last blast at the cost of what is going to be our children, the truly uber rich are already building bunkers and thinking how to keep their guards loyal - everyone clearly knows where this ship is headed.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-19 21:28:44+00:00
What I mean is, it seems like every culture's music has some things in common, and it's not because all of them are derived from a common ancestor. Isolated people can make music that everyone else will perceive as music, maybe enjoy it too. Some music has very broad appeal. Again I'm not sure, but it's pretty strong to assert that it's absolutely culture-dependent.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-19 21:28:55+00:00
The justification makes perfect sense.

This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
by eulgro | 2025-10-19 21:29:04+00:00
To be honest, given the efficiency of the drug and the huge benefit it could be to society, I feel like if I had been the employee in charge of filing patents I would've more than ready to lose my job in exchange for low cost general availability in the US via (illegal maybe, whatever) cross-border market. It's a nice loop hole and a great thing that once the delay expired they can't file ever again.

One's got to find ways to feel like the good guy when working for Big Pharma . That's probably not what happened but it's nice imagining it.