MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bri3d | 2025-10-02 22:42:06+00:00
Contra this assertion, drones are already frequently used around power lines, and as such, "finding hanging wires with a drone" is actually a very active field with fairly robust solutions. Not only are drones used for power line inspections (which are actually a somewhat easier variant of this problem, because the drone usually flies above or adjacent to the power lines in this scenario), but also for infrastructure inspections in direct adjacency to power lines. Power line detect-and-avoid is a headlining feature in one of DJI's newer enterprise platforms, the M400 (where it's based on LIDAR + mmWave Radar fusion).

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HFzRTRcjiqg

Also of note, this isn't the first double-failure issue for the MK30 - they had an issue last year at their test facility where their LIDAR malfunctioned in the same way on two drones in the same weather condition (misting), the drones believed they were at 0.0AGL and powered down in flight.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re...
by tptacek | 2025-10-02 22:42:08+00:00
It's an indicator. By many accounts, the US drastically overuses imaging. For instance: it's not unlikely that a patient presenting with persistent back pain will be imaged quickly in the US. That imaging service is itself expensive and a cost driver, but far worse are the procedures the imaging results drive, most of which wouldn't be prescribed over the border in Canada. We do not on the whole get better results for back pain here!

Another example, though with a less comical indicator than the MRI thing: at least up until recently, hernia repairs in Europe were all inpatient procedures. The US innovated on laparoscopic hernia repair that's done outpatient. This is by itself a very good thing! But the knock-on result is that the US now delivers way more hernia repairs; we do medically unnecessary hernia repair because we made it so easy to do.

None of these are my insights; they're just things you learn about if you read and listen to podcasts about the problems with our health care economics.
by Hizonner | 2025-10-02 22:42:19+00:00
> McConnell had a majority in the Senate.

If he'd been confident in his majority, he would have just taken every nomination to the floor and had them voted down. He didn't do that because he didn't think he'd win. I mean, losing a floor vote is kind of the opposite of "having a majority".

And I don't think the Democrats in recent memory have had as strong a whip as the Republicans.
by quink | 2025-10-02 22:43:14+00:00
One of these days I’ll get a model railroad bridge and put it over a borehole. But that day shan’t be today because arguing technicalities on HN seems easier :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_bridges vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges
by cantalopes | 2025-10-02 22:44:47+00:00
“20 minutes more and I will finish it,” you think. Obviously, this is not the case; some edge cases and new issues will inevitably arise. You come to your senses only 2–3 hours later—tired, hungry, demotivated, and still struggling with your problem. You just wasted your evening, with nothing to show for it."

I feel personally attacked
by xp84 | 2025-10-02 22:45:21+00:00
It’s weird to me that any Democrat would be rooting for the nuclear option right now. After losing so badly last year, after demographic trends continue to degrade their ability to win majorities in either house or in to win in most swing states, and with Trump improving his numbers even in blue states last year. Democrats are currently daring Republicans to eliminate their last resort option to block anything, even though they should not be confident that the DNC will ever be in a position to benefit from this new power later themselves.

I think shutdowns are usually pretty stupid, but I’m not reading for “nuclear option” to be the way this one gets resolved.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-02 22:45:29+00:00
If you set up a model train bridge over the Kola borehole, I’ll concede and admit it’s a bridge ;)

I learned something by writing my response, I didn’t know how large the Kola boreholes were and now I do!

Also, thanks for clarifying the distinction between highest and tallest, the span on the Chinese bridge is 2000’ above the ground at certain points but the towers themselves are only 860 feet tall, other bridges have taller towers/pillars but the deck height isn’t as high as this Chinese one.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-02 22:45:48+00:00
> All interesting design questions are left unresolved by the facile advice to make good decisions instead of bad ones.

This advice is not present in the paper. This is made up by the blog author.

This critique misses the punchline of the "Fake It" paper (not really a punchline, it's in the title). The punchline is that the Rational Design Process is not possible, but we can produce artifacts (namely, documentation) during and after the development process that reflect what would have been written if those processes were actually possible. This isn't even hidden. It's in the title, and at the start of section II (and the rest of section II describes why this is true):

> We will never see a software project that proceeds in the "rational" way.

They make an apt analogy to mathematics in the conclusion:

> Even mathematics, the discipline that many of us regard as the most rational of all, follows this procedure. Mathematicians diligently polish their proofs, usually presenting a proof very different from the first one that they discovered.

There is no perfect process that will produce a perfect product in one go. But we can document the product as if that process existed. Parnas & Clements take it as a given that such documentation is valuable, specifically for the programmers who will come to the project later. That part is debatable. But nonsense claims that Parnas & Clements expect people to "make good decisions instead of bad ones" is just that, nonsense.

https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakei...
by _heimdall | 2025-10-02 22:46:09+00:00
What you're describing isn't a free speech concern. Free speech was always meant to be a protection from government limiting speech.

You can be trespassed from public property like a library but the bar is very high and simply saying something they don't like will not hold up in court.

Electric companies, social media companies, grocery stores, etc can do whatever they want with regards to limiting speech. The only issue would be if the government compelled those organizations to limit speech, see the Twitter files for an example of government overreach almost certainly violating free speech protections or finding just how far they can go before legal liability.
by edgemaester | 2025-10-02 22:47:19+00:00
I've been using SolveIt for about a month and going through the previous cohort content. It's really hard to not to try to vomit out solutions and to go about something in a methodical way. It makes your work visible, maintainable and usable by others (and frankly yourself). It takes a lot of practice, but it is very much intangible and always in the process of becoming. If you want to focus on solving pretty much any problem, and a path to using AI effectively in any endeavor, then this is a really fulfilling path. You will find that there is more magic in AI than you suspect. Many praises to Jeremy and Johno and the SolveIt team. But don't take my word for it. I'm a fresh convert. Go check it out for yourself. It is subtle and requires nuance, so not for everyone.
by wren6991 | 2025-10-02 22:47:54+00:00
Surprised an article published on September 28, 2025 does not include any mention of the P (packed integer SIMD) extension.

P adds instructions like integer multiply-accumulate, which have a third register read (for rd). So, they're taking the opportunity to add a few forms of 3-register select instructions:

MVM Move Masked for each bit i: X(rd)[i] = X(rs2)[i] ? X(rs1)[i] : X(rd)[i] MVMN Move Masked Not for each bit i: X(rd)[i] = X(rs2)[i] ? X(rd)[i] : X(rs1)[i] MERGE Merge for each bit i: X(rd)[i] = X(rd)[i] ? X(rs2)[i] : X(rs1)[i]

Actually I say I'm surprised but given the way the spec is currently spread around different parts of the internet, it's easy to miss if you're not following the mailing lists!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-02 22:48:01+00:00
> You're going to have to define "peace". All I ever hear are calls for "ceasefire now"

Yup. Ceasefire, hostage return, Israel swears off bombing Hamas for like a year.

> those calls are silent whenever there's an offer to exchange hostages for a ceasefire

Where do you see anyone arguing Hamas shouldn't return hostages?
by jmyeet | 2025-10-02 22:48:06+00:00
I knew it was going to be China.

China's infrastructure building is beyond impressive. I always come back to this map of China's high speed rail built in 16 years (2008-2024) [1].

China is actually run by a meritocratic bureaucracy rather than the dumbest of people who do nothing more than sell pardons, run crypto scams, transfer government funds to the wealthiest of people, pander to religious hallucinations and sell out their constituents for board seats and jobs after their political career from the very billionaires that were buying them in office. And no, it's not just one party that does this although the current administration is particularly egregious.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/highspeedrail/comments/1drmc2v/grow...
Show HN: Supanator, an AI helper for building with Supabase
by Jeramo | 2025-10-02 22:48:53+00:00
I built Supanator to work with Supabase on the go. It’s a developer tool that now includes Supanator AI, which you can chat with directly to get help writing queries, designing schemas, troubleshooting auth issues, and more, tailored to your specific Supabase project. You can paste the queries straight to the SQL editor without needing to copy/paste manually.

For privacy: Supanator uses OpenAI under the hood, but only metadata (like table names and types) is sent. Your actual data never leaves your project.

My goal is to save developers time and reduce context-switching when building with Supabase. Would love feedback on what’s most useful (or missing) so far!
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-02 22:50:43+00:00
The word “famine” does not have a clearly-defined statistical meaning outside of some very specific circumstances. We abhor the idea of famine whether it occurs at 12% or 14% or 23% of children because we see all of these things to be very bad circumstances. One particular organization chose a 15% threshold for a legalistic definition in their framework, and the government is lawyering this because they can lawyer an arbitrary threshold and they think that will help them win some PR points. Thats all this is.

PS Do you really think the number “15%” is some natural value that nature or the Bible or teams of scientists chose to define “famine”? It’s an arbitrary threshold that someone picked because it’s a bit larger than 10% and less than 20% and divisible by the number of digits on the human hand.
by screye | 2025-10-02 22:51:15+00:00
I read the article. It piled about 5 different assumptions on top of each other.

It takes the upper bound for the deaths in the first 9 months. Then extrapolates it linearly to the last 2.5 years. Then multiplies it by 4, because it estimates that starvation deaths must be 4x.

At that point, why even guess ?
by LightBug1 | 2025-10-02 22:51:43+00:00
I don't know much about Charlie Kirk except what I've read recently. But he does/did seem to be part of a growing element of the right in the USA who stand against Israel and Netanyahu specifically. And while I support that, I don't think it's necessarily to support Palestinians, but more as an America First policy.

In that context, "of all people" makes sense to me. I too have been surprised by the move, of some on the right, against Israel, considering their almost unanimous support previously.
by chermi | 2025-10-02 22:51:49+00:00
Thanks! A quick glance at the book and it seems like it's focused on event-driven. Also seems kind of aligned with Lee's "actor model" stuff. I will read it more.

I am ok-but-not-great programmer, hence trying this project to get better. It seems like I should learn UML proper and this book looks like a good way to start; my "architecture" diagrams are pretty laughable. I bounce between trying to be formal and learn what "proper architecture diagrams" are vs. thinking I'm spending way too much time not coding.

I'm on a dirty and probably not-so-great hybrid of timer + event (mqtt) right now. I really want to try fully event-driven but it's a big change and I'm not very familiar with what it would entail. My original goal with this project was to implement MPC from scratch. V0 was mostly learning esp32 stuff and very basic bang-bang and timer control + FSMs that probably matched no formal specification. I've finished(or at least froze) the V1 microcontroller am starting the basic control/"driver" layer now, which is FSM based, so this reference is perfect timing. Thanks again!
by jmyeet | 2025-10-02 22:52:25+00:00
Famine is political, always. The world produces a significant excess of food. The only reason famine exists is because one group of people is perfectly happy to starve another group of people. Gaza is not unique here although Gaza is a aprticularly egregious example of industrial mass starvation and death at the hands of a highly-developed military and state actor.
by smcin | 2025-10-02 22:52:47+00:00
Needs the quotes around 'Friend'. The $129 chatbot-enabled AI pendant necklace startup that eavesdrops on your life and harvests intimate data without any meaningful protections, in the name of mental health and "preventing loneliness". There is major backlash against 'Friend's current saturation-level NYC subway poster campaign, hence the graffiti.

https://www.wired.com/story/i-hate-my-ai-friend/

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/27/ai-startup-friend-spent-mo...
by wren6991 | 2025-10-02 22:52:52+00:00
I feel like the author might be slightly missing the point here:

> The whole premise of fusion is predicated on the idea that it is valid for a core to transform code similar to the branchy code on the left into code similar to the branch-free code on the right.

The idea of Zicond afaict is that the compiler transforms select sequences into (usually multiple) Zicond instructions, and cores with more register ports available can fuse Zicond compounds into more complex select macro-ops. It's a 2R1W vocabulary for describing selects which require more than 2 read ports.

As an aside I evaluated Zicond on my scalar 3-stage implementation and found that at 1 CPI for ALU ops and 2-cycle taken branch cost, the branchless sequences GCC produced for Zicond were never better and sometimes worse than the equivalent branching sequence. It really does seem to be targeting bigger cores, or constant-time execution
by cogman10 | 2025-10-02 22:53:02+00:00
> Do blind people and nearsighted people have the same treatment?

Yes, they both need to see optometrists on a regular basis. They get the same therapy even though a blind person won't get glasses.

It's the same for autism. Someone with profound autism will still see occupational, behavior, and speech therapists. The therapy will be different from what someone with mild autism gets, but the specialists involved will largely be the same. The OT for someone with profound autism can be identical to mild autism because there are many different aspects. Profound autism simply means several aspects have severe problems.

That's my point.

Very similar to how with an oncologist you might have a specialist for your cancer but ultimately you deal with a team that often treat different cancers. For example, people to draw your blood and run labs.

That's why hospitals have an oncology department and not a lung cancer department.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-02 22:53:15+00:00
The problem with operating systems is that if they work well they're all but invisible. They only attract attention when they malfunction. QNX allowed us to focus on the problems we were solving, rather than that it drew a lot of attention to itself. I walked into a project that was already years underway and started working on core application components within a few weeks of reading the QNX manual (which I thought was excellent, by the way, not unlike the documentation that came with Mark Williams C). The OS was facilitating what you wanted to do rather than that you were fighting it every step of the way.

The main application we wrote (and of which I rewrote significant chunks) processed a record number of messages on every Monday morning, week after week, year after year. It was a massive cash cow for the company that had commissioned it (KVSA, https://www.kvsa.nl/en/data-and-intelligence/bts-broker-tool... , it is still alive but it no longer runs on QNX) and if not for QNX I doubt it would have gotten as far as it did. Especially in those first few years when it was mostly my old boss and one or two helpers building it. The OS pretty much enforced clean abstraction layers by showing at the OS level itself how this was done. Extending that was a natural path and I suspect that many QNX shops did this simply because it felt right and made it easy. They likely did not realize they were building what we would call a 'service oriented architecture' many years later and in a completely different context.

This experience still leaves me looking at many of the systems we use today as unnecessarily bloated and frankly, quite ugly. QNX was light weight, but not a lightweight. The only other eco-systems that give me that same feeling are Plan9 and Erlang.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-02 22:53:30+00:00
> Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes

Good example is vitamin supplementation. There isn't a downside. It's just a fuck-up we can't synthesise vitamin C. (There may be path-dependent benefits, e.g. our jaw muscles getting smaller thereby permitting a larger brain. But we don't need to be vitamin C restricted anymore.)
by bamboozled | 2025-10-02 22:53:58+00:00
I feel like you could say Ukraine were backed into a corner, multiple times, they didn't resort to October 7 levels of horror either. In fact, there is not a single documented case where they have attacked civilians or civilian infrastructure.

So while I'm not closed to the idea that Netanyahu is a bad man. I find it hard to rationalize the actions of the people who were "backed into a corner"?
by mothballed | 2025-10-02 22:54:12+00:00
OK, but if that's the case the medicare data should show the spending went significantly up after the ACA caps, which doesn't prove the thesis but is necessary condition for it.

https://paragoninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/9DG_...

https://truthout.org/app/uploads/2024/12/insurers-profits-bi...
by zippyman55 | 2025-10-02 22:54:17+00:00
I also learned new skills outside of work. It was annoying to work with someone who used work time to manipulate their work learning. There would be a serious conflict and their "work" was not about advancing the firms "interests" but their personal ones. If you can be honest, you can learn things in advance that are congruent to work strategy and then be ready for their use when the opportunity develops.
by clarkdale | 2025-10-02 22:54:57+00:00
Banner text reads:

The Radical Left Democrats shut down the government. This government website will be updated periodically during the funding lapse for mission critical functions. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.

For information on recreation site status on National Forest System lands, please visit https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit.
by machina_ex_deus | 2025-10-02 22:55:24+00:00
In all objective measures of life quality, gaza was better off occupied by Israel, both compared with before 67 (Israel's occupation made Gaza prosper relative to when it was controlled by Egypt), and compared with after hamas took over and forced Israel to isolate gaza increasingly in order to deal with the terrorism from Gaza.

The only thing gaza didn't have under Israeli occupation was democratic election. And guess what, they didn't have that after the occupation stopped either. They don't have it in most Arabic countries either.
by cwillu | 2025-10-02 22:55:27+00:00
I said that if you introduce a major dataloss into a stable filesystem such that you have to break rc discipline, okay, do it, but be prepared for a period of community soul-searching afterwards. How does that imply that no feature could ever be merged?

If you're arguing that bcachefs is incompatible with the practiced kernel development discipline, well, I guess linus agrees.
by collingreen | 2025-10-02 22:55:34+00:00
> There is a world where if we had more eng. resources we could have more people than problems and we could take stuff on board as it arrives

I don't think this is a realistic world. The cavitation surface area that spawns new bubbles of unvetted fresh ideas grows as things are added. Adding eng resources to get more done makes it grow faster and I don't think there is ever such a thing as catching up.

tl;dr - deciding what to build (and what it looks like in detail) will always be a critical and fundamental function of product teams.
by hinkley | 2025-10-02 22:56:14+00:00
If you've ever driven through Seattle, as you come past Boeing Field on I5 there are red spheres on the power lines. These lines are on a hill across the highway from the airport, so there's no way any plane should be there except during an emergency landing due to power loss.

There are situations where aircraft and wires might come in close proximity. It's more accurate to say that be default we keep them way the hell away from each other, we make exceptions for special circumstances, and the exceptions tend to seem far more conservative than you would guess.
by wren6991 | 2025-10-02 22:56:19+00:00
> publish properly what will end up "standard instruction fusion patterns" (like the div/rem one).

The div/rem one is odd because I saw it suggested in the ISA manual, but I have yet to ever see that pattern crop up in compiled code. Usually it's just in library functions like C stdlib `div()` which returns a quotient and remainder, but why on earth are you calling that library function on a processor that has a divide instruction?
by ricardobeat | 2025-10-02 22:56:33+00:00
Experiences vary wildly. Do you have daily standup from 9am-10am, followed by a short call at 11:30, planning/sync with another team at 13:30, maybe a 1:1 at 16:00? And don’t miss our community event at 17:00! Plus minor interruptions during the rest of the day. How does that sound? This is what average days at a lot of big tech companies look like.
Show HN: YNOT – Free, Open-Source YouTube Downloader
by jamescampbell | 2025-10-02 22:56:52+00:00
Hey HN! I built YNOT, a simple cross-platform YouTube downloader with a GUI.

It's powered by yt-dlp and completely free/open-source (WTFPL license).

Key features: - Simple GUI - just paste URL and download - Downloads HD/4K videos - Cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux) - No ads, no tracking, completely private - Lightweight and fast

GitHub: https://github.com/james-see/ynot

I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
by jmyeet | 2025-10-02 22:57:14+00:00
I'm not sure what the point of this is. "Do you want Hamas or the PA?" is like asking someone "do you want rotting meat or polluted drinking water?" Why are these the only two options?

The PA is a captured extension of the Israeli security state. The PA is standing by while Israeli settlers systematically kill, chase off and terrorize Palestinians on the West Bank. IOF soldiers will idly stand by while a settler just comes up with a (government-supplied) gun, shoots a 60 year old farmer and then complains to the Army that the locals are harassing them.