MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-30 17:37:26+00:00
I had a lot of fear about this when I resisted getting treated for my very bad Anxiety. I feared that it might change me. I feared that I would be a different person.

Guess what? That's a good thing. The anxious person I was drove me to struggle to do basic life things, struggle to do things I wanted to do, and caused me to drive away someone I loved and harm them.

Fuck that guy, I don't want to be him. I did change. I became able to try new things. I became able to accept other people without needing to impose what I considered "right" onto them. I became able to manage my stupid jealousy to stop it from hurting my relationships.

Now I can ride rollercoasters without having a panic attack. Oh what a shame I lost that guy.

The things that medications treat also cause personality changes. Significant mental or psychological problems consume parts of you, and drive your life negatively.

There's no such thing as a "true" you. You are just biological machines doing chemistry. That chemistry dictates YOU. That chemistry is literally affected by the food you eat. Drawing a line because we require you to get a chemical from someone with a special piece of paper is not reality.

Wearing the proper glasses will cause a personality change if you grew up vision impaired.

Don't deify a broken brain.

Other lies people insist on to avoid medication include "There's no silver bullet/magic pill"

Guess what? Sometimes there is! A low dose of a boring medication fixed my anxiety, as in, turned me from being a dysfunctional anxious wreck to someone who has a normal anxiety response. Even the "side effects" I experience have been positive outcomes.

Now if you do something like take anabolic steroids and it gives you roid rage? Yeah, avoid that, not because "It changed you" but because it made you demonstrably worse in a way you probably do not want

Do you know what else causes irreversible personality changes and will change who you really are?

Aging.
by JohnTHaller | 2025-10-30 17:37:50+00:00
Cruelty. The motivating force of the modern Republican party is identify the "other" and then hurt them.

It's also to add more bad noise to try to distract from the major damage they're doing. They've specifically outlined this. Overwhelm the "enemy" - in this case non-MAGA - with bad stuff so they can't focus on anything.
by hex4def6 | 2025-10-30 17:37:50+00:00
Yeah.

I mean, why pay the money? Why not just skip the payment and email a contact "1,000"? Or perhaps "Interesting article about in the Times about the USA, wink wink"?

This method is deliberately communicating information in a way that (I assume) is prohibited. It doesn't seem like it would take a judge much time to come to the conclusion that the gag order prohibits communication.

Creating a secret code is still communication, whether that's converting letters A=1, B=2, sending a video of someone communicating it in sign language, a painting of the country, writing an ethereum contract, everyday sending a voicemail with a list of all the countries in the world from A to Z, but omitting the one(s) that have the gag / warrant...
by ChuckMcM | 2025-10-30 17:38:02+00:00
I can recommend a 'Hacker Boxes'[1] subscription. It's $44/month currently, every month you'll get all the parts to build some gizmo or project and a full list of instructions. The prerequisites are that you know how to solder and have a soldering iron, and have a computer you can run the Arduino IDE on (even a Raspberry Pi can do that these days).

If you don't know how to solder the Hacker Boxes folks have a soldering workshop kit that includes an iron[2], but many maker spaces will do soldering clinics. Soldering irons are available as cheap[3] and more expensive[4] (and ludicrous[5]). The Arduino IDE runs on pretty much anything (Linux, MacOS, Windows).

[1] https://hackerboxes.com/

[2] Soldering Workshop --- https://hackerboxes.com/collections/subscriptions/products/s...

[3] $13 iron from Amazon --- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DY7CCW5

[4] ~$150 soldering station --- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077JDGY1J?th=1

[5] $1000+ Metcal station --- https://www.qsource.com/itemdetail/?itemCode=MX-5210-M020
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-10-30 17:38:10+00:00
Same problem though. Half of UX is knowing which features to include, and the other half is knowing where to put them.

Intuitive UX for the average non-nerd user is task-based. You start with the most common known goals, like sending someone money, or changing the contrast of a photo, and you put a nice big button or slider somewhere on the screen that either makes the goal happen directly or walks you through it step by step.

Professional tools are workbench-based. You get a huge list of tools scattered around the UI in various groups. Beginners don't know what most of the tools do, so they have to work out what the tools are for before they can start using them. Then, and only then, can they start using the tools in a goal-based way. Professionals already know the tradecraft, so they have the simpler - but still hard - "Which menu item does what I need?" problem.

Developer culture tends to be script-based. It's literally just lists of instructions made of cryptic combinations of words, letters, and weird punctuation characters. Beginners have to learn the words, the concepts behind them, and the associated underlying computer fundamentals at multiple levels - just to get started. And if you start with a goal - let's say you want a bot that posts on social media for you - the amount of learning if you're coming to it cold is beyond overwhelming.

FOSS has never understood this. Yes, in theory you can write your own almost anything and tinker with the source code. But the learning curve for most people is impossibly steep.

AI has some chance of bridging the gap. It's not reliable yet, but it's very obvious now that it has a chance to become a universal UI, creating custom code and control panels for specific personal goals, generating workbench UIs and explaining what the tools do if you need a more professional approach, and explaining core concepts and code structures if you want to work at that level.
by gspencley | 2025-10-30 17:38:13+00:00
Thyat's a fair question and the honest answer is I don't know and I'd have to sift through the feature comparison chart to see if there's anything I actively use today with my paid license that is moving to a Canva Premium subscription.

My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"

- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.

- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.
by adventured | 2025-10-30 17:38:16+00:00
The primary risk that China's auto industry poses is to Japan, South Korea, and the few parts of Europe with large scale auto manufacturing.

The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.

Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.
by 8note | 2025-10-30 17:38:31+00:00
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.

its a buggy method, considering canada also uses +1, and a bunch of countries look like they use +1 but dont, like barbados +1(246) using what looks like an area code as part of the country code.
by electroly | 2025-10-30 17:38:38+00:00
EC2 instances have dedicated throughput to EBS via Nitro that you lose out on when you run your own EBS equivalent over the regular network. You only get 5Gbps maximum between two EC2 instances in the same AZ that aren't in the same placement group[1], and you're limited by the instance type's general networking throughput. Dedicated throughput to EBS from a typical EC2 instance is multiple times this figure. It's an interesting tradeoff--I assume they must be IOPS-heavy and the throughput is not a concern.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-inst...
by WaxProlix | 2025-10-30 17:38:54+00:00
Rooftop solar is nice for resiliency and can have its place in a grid, but it's not cost effective. Grid-scale solar is what most folks are talking about when they say solar boom. Even in the somewhat backwards US, where Solar in total is ~340TWh, the majority (~250TWh?) comes from grid-scale interconnected solar and solar+battery installations. Hopefully this gap continues to grow as the Biden-era IRA fueled grid-scale solar projects mature through their design/build/deploy pipelines in the coming years.

Thinking of national policy from a home owner perspective is expected, but it isn't always instructive.

For the latter item, my Rivian has a relatively paltry 1500W inverter with standard 110W plugs in the back seat, truck bed, and gear tunnel, but I can use a rectifier/power supply to pull a constant 1kW, step that back to DC and feed it into my home's battery backup system. My whole house tends to use ~2kW at peak, and obviously can conserve in outages. So I get my normal 4kWh battery bank with solar hookups, but can splice the 141kWh Rivian battery in, too, for a good chunk of off-grid power.
by lutusp | 2025-10-30 17:39:07+00:00
> Although I wish Linux were easier to use [ ... ]

We're getting there. I run Linux Mint with an XFCE desktop -- an intentionally minimal setup. The system performs automatic updates and the desktop layout/experience resembles older Windows desktops before Microsoft began "improving" things. No ads, no AI.

I'm by no means an end user, but in Linux I see incremental progress toward meeting the needs of that audience. And just in time too, now that Microsoft is more aggressively enshittifying Windows.

What's really missing are online fora able to help end users adjust to Linux -- helpful without being superior or condescending. Certainly true for Windows, not yet true for Linux.
by Nzen | 2025-10-30 17:39:41+00:00
If you want to see examples of this in practice, I recommend reading Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer [0] or some simple wikipedia articles [1].

[0] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit (versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit)
by lchoquel | 2025-10-30 17:39:42+00:00
Hi cranberryturkey, currently, we offer an open-source API server that you can run on your infrastructure, directly or through our docker image: https://github.com/Pipelex/pipelex-api If what you're after is a hosted API where you just need to get an API key and run workflows on our infrastructure, we are working on it. It will open soon and you can join the waitlist to get early access: https://go.pipelex.com/waitlist
by saltcured | 2025-10-30 17:40:20+00:00
This is one of those pedant vs cocktail chatterer distinctions. It's an interesting dive and gives a nice, triggering, headline.

But, to the vast majority who don't really know or care about the math, "Fourier Transform" is, at best, a totem for the entire concept space of "frequency domain", "spectral decomposition", etc.

They are not making fine distinctions of tradeoffs among different methods. I'm not sure I'd even call it disinformation to tell this hand-wavy story and pique someone's interest in a topic they otherwise never thought about...
by 12_throw_away | 2025-10-30 17:40:27+00:00
I believe the actual packaging technology is no different from pip - so if these packages don't install cleanly with `pip`, they won't install cleanly with `uv pip` either. If you need conda packages, uv isn't planning on supporting them [1].

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/1703
by gertlex | 2025-10-30 17:40:46+00:00
I assume that the extra regular (daily?) cycling of the battery in your car would have a notable effect on your vehicle battery's longevity. (But I'm very fuzzy on how battery improvements in the past ~decade have applied to "cycle life", or really even what the cycle life means, e.g. is end of life when it's something like 70% of total original capacity?)
by garbageman | 2025-10-30 17:40:50+00:00
It's an absolutely brilliant bit of maths that breaks a complex waveform into the individual components. Kind of like taking an orchestral song and then working out each individual instrument's contribution. Learning about this left me honestly aghast and in shock that it's not only possible but that someone (Joseph Fourier) figured it out and then shared it with the world.

This video does a great job explaining what it is and how it works to the layman. 3blue1brown - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
by neilv | 2025-10-30 17:41:03+00:00
Initially, I suspected the cloud contracts were for general government operations, to have geo-distributed backups and continuity, in event of regional disaster (natural or human-made).

But could it instead/also be for international spy operations, like surveillance, propaganda, and cyber attacks? A major cloud provider has fast access at scale in multiple regions, is less likely to be blocked than certain countries, and can hide which customer the traffic is for.

If it were for international operations, two questions:

1. How complicit would the cloud providers be?

2. For US-based providers, how likely that US spy agencies would be consulted before signing the contracts, and consciously allow it to proceed (i.e., let US cloud providers facilitate the foreign spy activity), so that US can monitor the activity?
by dmschulman | 2025-10-30 17:41:18+00:00
The business model for pharma and drug discovery is unfortunately one that requires a lot of upfront investment for research and trials that may or may not pay off as revenue one day.

The technology they invented is incredibly promising for new vaccines and they should be attracting enough investment (through contracts or other deals) to continue innovating and saving lives. Maybe they can license it as a last ditch effort to build revenue, but unfortunately the public perceptions about vaccine efficacy is on the wane and government contracts are no longer there to support this vital work both in the present and as a hedge against future pandemics.
by 65 | 2025-10-30 17:41:44+00:00
We are probably devastated because free commercial products have to extract revenue from the user somehow. Maybe not today, but most likely tomorrow. And this will always be a subscription, which was what Affinity was trying to stay away from.

I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.

Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.
by ttamslam | 2025-10-30 17:42:00+00:00
This is interesting, I think we've shied away a bit from security-ish use cases since it's outside of our personal core competencies, do you have examples of what tools exist today for catching things like that? Or is it totally adhoc?

> can the agents check their email? other notification methods?

Yes to email (for paying customers agents spin up with unique addresses), no to other notifications, but as soon as a paying customer has a use case for SMS, etc. we'll build it.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-30 17:42:09+00:00
I don't think I've run into a Linux ISO that hasn't worked. I've done many versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Proxmox, Debian, Gparted, and others without issue across dozens of different machine builds. Same with various versions of Windows or ESXi.

That said, I'm not very sure what you could be doing wrong. Make sure the drive is GPT (not MBR) and isn't starting to fail perhaps. If you've been running into this on a specific machine only it could just be that machine's UEFI is buggy.
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-30 17:42:11+00:00
> Musk is a nogo poisoned brand in Europe... that damage his needless psychotic attacks have done won't be forgotten anytime soon. I'd happily buy chinese car instead of tesla just because of above, if prices were same. But they are far from same, and seeing their progress they may soon be better products overall.

This more-or-less summarizes American geopolitical and economic attitudes towards China from 1970 until 2016.

"Sure, they're problematic, but so are we, and their product is cheaper, so..."
by williamdclt | 2025-10-30 17:42:27+00:00
I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Do you mean different consumers within the same consumer group? There's no technology out there that will guarantee exactly-once delivery, it's simply impossible in a world where networks aren't magically 100% reliable. SQS, RedPanda, RabbitMQ, NATS... you call it, your client will always need idempotency.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-30 17:42:28+00:00
I do not understand your position. I think it's a bit confused.

>The Pareto principle is not some guarantee applicable to everything and anything

Yes, obviously. The author doesn't say otherwise. There are obviously many ways of distributing things.

>One can see how irrelevant its invocation is if we reverse: does Kafka also handle 80% of what Postgres does with 20% the effort?

No

>If not, what makes Postgres especially the "Pareto 80%" one in this comparison?

Because its simpler.

What implies everything can handle 80% of use cases with 20% of effort? It's like saying:

If normal distributions are real, and human height is normally distributed, then why isnt personal wealth? They are just different distributions.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-30 17:42:45+00:00
In the 60s the black population was rapidly increasing and groups like the NAACP were working to politically organize them into a cohesive force. There's endless quotations from the time about LBJ being concerned about them and fearing that they could become a major political force. From his exact quotes he was worried about losing the filibuster, so I assume that translates to him thinking they might be able to start winning Senate seats in states with high black populations.

So then he passes the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, then the Food Stamps Act on August 31st 1964, and then there's the election. The black turnout for the election ended up being 58% with something like 94% of their vote going to him, giving him a landslide of an election victory. So what he was saying wasn't just trying to convince people, as it's often been reframed - he was simply being a realist and was 100% correct.

The guy was a massive racist and segregationist for most of his entire political career. But more than anything he was a professional politician who wanted power. And he did what he thought could get that power. This [1] Snopes article includes many of his 'greatest hits' and tries to conclude with an argument claiming that he wasn't mostly fixated on claiming the black vote, but it makes no sense. Apparently in reading the headlines about the Civil Rights Act he was found in a melancholy state and when asked why he said, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come." That was obviously him being worried that his calculations might been wrong, but they weren't - he won 44 states in the election.

[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/
by jaggederest | 2025-10-30 17:42:55+00:00
I've always been confused by the insistence on storage. Saturate 100% of the daytime loads with solar, curtail at peak, it's still cheaper than just about any other source. Save all the hydro power, gas, and other standby sources for before and after sunset.

Once you're curtailing a bunch of power during the daytime, then you can add storage as a no brainer bonus and stop curtailing.
by BinaryIgor | 2025-10-30 17:43:11+00:00
That's golden:

"2. The other camp chases common sense

This camp is far more pragmatic. They strip away unnecessary complexity and steer clear of overengineered solutions. They reason from first principles before making technology choices. They resist marketing hype and approach vendor claims with healthy skepticism."

We should definitely apply Occam's razor as the industry far more often; simple tech stacks are better to manage and especially master (which you must do, once it's no longer a toy app). Introduce a new component into your system only if it provides functionality you cannot get with reasonable effort, using what you already have.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-30 17:43:20+00:00
The cobalt goes in the NCM lithium batteries.

It also goes in lots of other stuff, and is basically a byproduct of Congolese copper production.

The kids are doing artisinal mining because when capitalism doesn't need you to make money, you are pretty fucked. The big mines can make plenty of money with very few workers, leaving no need to build a decent civil society. Something to bear in mind for when our glorious AI future arrives.

Every chance that some countries become the Norway of AI and everyone is rich while others become the resource cursed Congo of AI and a tiny minority become rich and others are left to rot.
by t-writescode | 2025-10-30 17:43:39+00:00
I admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner.

And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part.

And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo
by wturner | 2025-10-30 17:44:02+00:00
You can't have a functioning democracy without consequences for the bad behavior of wealthy people that mask their sociopathy in mounds of legalese, financial abstraction, bought off politicians and media PR. If the law doesn't do it, then the burden fall on the shoulders of private citizens. We've demonized people for this view but I think it's heathier that we culturally normalize it and stop pretending.
by reenorap | 2025-10-30 17:44:04+00:00
PG&E's most transparent fraud is by forcing people to move everything to electricity and then forcing them to use less electricity, and then complaining they aren't making enough money so that they raise electricity rates. Last year, PG&E raised rates 6 times. I'm now paying double the per kWh rates from only 4 years ago.

PG&E now wants to charge solar panel owners $100+/month just for the privilege of being connected to the grid. This is on top of their $0.41-54/kWh they already charge, the highest in the nation.

PG&E is a government-supported scam that is charging people whatever prices they want with no protection from our politicians because they are all on the take.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-10-30 17:44:24+00:00
It's a Copy>Paste Special>Transpose on a waveform, converting Rows/Columns that are time/amplitude (with wavelength embedded) into Rows/Columns that are frequency/amplitude (for a snapshot in time).

People love to go on about how brilliant it is and they're probably right but that's how I understand it.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-30 17:44:49+00:00
> The cloud LLM just processes the document on the fly

That... doesn't sound local, dude. "Locally" would mean that the LLM is actively running in my browser, and in my browser only, which is not what you're describing.

I understand that you're claiming that the documents aren't being stored permanently, but they're still being transferred to your servers, and their full contents are being read there by something.