MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by missedthecue | 2025-10-25 14:48:45+00:00
"My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable."

Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

- Operating systems have become MUCH more stable. I restart my computer every 3 months, it used to be every 2 days.

- I remember when I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it, and then repeating. I remember constant Skype issues around 2010. Facetime is practically flawless. Encoding has quietly gotten a lot better.

- Adaptability is amazing. I remember when software was only available on extremely specific devices, and now I can access almost everything I have from literally every device.

- Encryption by default is practically universal now.

- Seamless syncing. From version recovery to web browsing. We multitask a lot more.

- Universal file formats and APIs
by readthenotes1 | 2025-10-25 14:49:24+00:00
"one that would see his army decimated by cold, hunger and disease."

2 things: A)decimated means 1 in 10, not 9 in 10. B) according to the wiki article, Napoleon had already lost 75% of his initial fighting force by the time he got to Moscow, before the withdrawal.

I am not sure an article on biology should include much history--I would certainly hope it did a better job on the biology...
by forgetfulness | 2025-10-25 14:50:01+00:00
Apparently the whole deal with Liquid Water is that it's so people don't give you crap for not drinking alcohol at parties or festivals.

If they see you drinking water or soda off a normal can, people will feel self conscious and get pissy about them drinking but not you, with a flaming skull on the can, nobody bats an eye.

The target audience is actually recovering alcoholics from party crowds, and the product is pure signaling.
by qianjin1979 | 2025-10-25 14:50:23+00:00
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by the_af | 2025-10-25 14:50:35+00:00
I would rather land in the latter too.

I actually don't mind that some people are good at influencing others, through well earned respect, good communication skills and technical chops.

I resent it when it becomes a mandate and some official "badge" in the career ladder. I'm suspicious of these principal/architect types who "parachute" out of nowhere into teams and projects, because it's "their mandate", ask lots of questions, mess with stuff, and then leave and don't take responsibility because "the team owns the project, not them". I've seldom seen this work well. A lot of teams end up politely ignoring what these types say, because they know if you're not a true stakeholder, what you're saying doesn't matter.
by webdevver | 2025-10-25 14:50:45+00:00
i once sat down to go through this as a challenge, but started to get bored quickly. skipping ahead, i built bash, configured grub to init=/bin/bash, threw in coreutils, and was very thrilled to see my very own "distro" boot in under a second (not counting bios init ofcourse) on an ancient p3 box.

i think i disabled everything i could think of in the kernel (including filesystem support, which was quickly rectified) for a truly 'minimalist' experience.

it ofcourse didnt do much but it was very responsive.
by 18272837023 | 2025-10-25 14:50:51+00:00
Hi HN — I made DeepOCR (https://deepocr.cc ), a permanently free OCR tool focused on real-world documents — receipts, invoices, handwritten notes, forms, and ID cards.

Most “free” OCR tools limit usage or store uploaded data. DeepOCR doesn’t. It’s free forever, has no quotas, and deletes uploads right after processing.

Under the hood:

Multiple recognition models optimized for printed, handwritten, and mixed text

Preprocessing pipeline to improve noisy image quality

Lightweight architecture for quick responses (usually under a few seconds)

It’s not meant to compete with commercial APIs — just a solid, privacy-first OCR that anyone can use for daily tasks. Feedback welcome.
by TexanFeller | 2025-10-25 14:51:14+00:00
I listened to an interview with a researcher a while back who hypothesized that human reasoning probably evolved not mostly for the abstract logical reasoning we associate with intelligence, but to “give reasons” to motivate other humans or to explain our previous actions in a way that would make them seem acceptable…social utility basically. My experience with next token predicting LLMs aligns with human communication. We humans rarely complete a thought before we start speaking, so I think our brains are often just predicting the next 1-5 words that will be accepted by who we’re talking to based on previous knowledge of them and evaluation of their (often nonverbal) emotional reactions to what we’re saying. Our typical thought patterns may not be as different from LLMs’ as we think.

IIRC the researcher was Hugo Mercier, probably on Sean Carroll’s fantastic Mindscape podcast, but it might have been Lex Fridman before he strayed from science/tech.
by Spivak | 2025-10-25 14:51:15+00:00
> On asynchronous protocols like ASGI, despite the fact the concurrency model doesn't change that much – we shift from one event loop per process, to one event loop per thread – just the fact we no longer need to scale memory allocations just to use more CPU is a massive improvement.

It's nice that someone else recognizes that event loop per thread is the way. I swear if you said this online any time in the past few years people looked at you like you insulted their mother. It's so much easier to manage even before the performance improvements.
by constantius | 2025-10-25 14:52:03+00:00
We seem to be exposed to different information on the EU.

> notorious for rich people to lobby

I don't know about rich people, but companies seem to have a lot of success in doing so.

> Murdoch backer of Brexit

This is not evidence that the EU is hard to lobby. People across the political spectrum can be anti-EU: Corbyn, who's as left and as anti-corruption as they come, was a Leaver (and a UK with Corbyn as PM would have arguably been better off outside the EU, but I digress).

> Ursula, scandal only about transparency and not personal enrichment

I don't know how awarding billions of public funds in contracts and then deleting all messages, something she's done before while working for the German gov, is "not that bad" and not about personal enrichment, but about her great care for efficiency and the European pop...

> Those involved in the Qatar scandal went to prison, how many local politicians you have who go to prison for anything other than political reasons?

You're cherry-picking, powerful EU officials are as immune to justice as anywhere else, and plenty of examples exist in Member States of people going to prison for corruption. The former president of France just started his prison sentence, you might have heard. Those cases are the exceptions that prove the rule.

> Have you noticed what has been happening in US since February for example?

Few countries would look good on corruption if you compare them to "What has been happening in the US", FULL STOP. That the EU is not as far gone as the US has been for decades (thank fuck) is, again, no evidence of anything.

I invite you to peruse ftm.eu, as I'm on my phone: look at the criticism of OLAF's selective investigations, the watchdogs lacking any independence and finding that everything's just dandy with EU officials, the revolving doors across so many industries, the bribes and gifts, the insider trading, employment of family members, mismanagement of funds, etc. etc. etc.

One article that I enjoyed is this:

https://archive.is/YieBg

Edited to address more of your points.
by mpyne | 2025-10-25 14:52:06+00:00
> But no blueprints; we just started on an idea we had and worked until it was good enough to ship.

Yes, exactly. A lot of UNIX and other very good software for computers back then came about this way too. No or minimal blueprints and a lot of iterative implementation & testing and reacting to what you see.

It's hard convincing people today that agile methods have been in use long before sprints were a thing.
by golly_ned | 2025-10-25 14:52:31+00:00
Yes, I am disappointed with my manager, especially given the number of times and the insistence with which I've raised this. It's clear to me both that he's afraid how this will reflect on him to his manager, and he's afraid of how the other engineer will react. He wants to keep the peace, which means me just sucking this up.

I don't want to leave this job unless I've exhausted all other possibilities. With this exception, it's great.
by steppi | 2025-10-25 14:53:04+00:00
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate

Decimate is a word that often raises hackles, at least those belonging to a small but committed group of logophiles who feel that it is commonly misused. The issue that they have with the decline and fall of the word decimate is that once upon a time in ancient Rome it had a very singular meaning: “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of a military unit.” However, many words in English descended from Latin have changed and/or expanded their meanings in their travels. For example, we no longer think of sinister as meaning “on the left side,” and delicious can describe things both tasty and delightful. Was the “to kill every tenth man” meaning the original use of decimate in English? Yes, but not by much. It took only a few decades for decimate to acquire its broader, familiar meaning of “to severely damage or destroy,” which has been employed steadily since the 17th century.
by yojo | 2025-10-25 14:53:16+00:00
The equipment is actually a lot cheaper if you’re a pro - the DIY pre-charged line-set adds about $500 over an equivalent unit. Pulling a vacuum and adding coolant is not hard, just requires specialized tools that still aren’t that expensive.

I mentioned warranty and insurance.

You don’t need to “schedule workers” if you are owner operating. Maybe you want a (non-skilled) helper to speed up the install, but you absolutely could install solo. That said, you will need a licensed electrician to run the circuit.

In my metro, hvac contractors can get ten-packs of permits for mini-split installs, and at most one out of ten is inspected. It’s a rubber stamp if you’re a pro, and the individual permit is maybe $50.

And that $5k I mentioned is the low bid, which you’ll only see if you know how to find contractors who aren’t private equity fronts. These guys are not advertising, but they stay busy by having the best price. There are shops that will happily charge you double for the same work.

I never said it’s a get rich quick scheme. It is just highly compensated for owners without requiring the level of expertise of something like a plumber or electrician. I’m curious what is happening in the market to support these margins.
by brookst | 2025-10-25 14:54:35+00:00
> I think he/she was being ironic. You either own it or Apple owns it.

That’s really reductive thinking. I guess the idea is to blur all the different connotations of “own” into one thing and assert they are all the same?

I “own” a car, but am not allowed to drive it in some situations (if I’m drunk, on the wrong side of the freeway, …). Does that mean the state actually owns it?

Disregarding context in favor of reductive binaries is the #1 sign of zealotry. You see it everywhere: either a movie is original or it’s not, so Avatar is / isn’t (pick one) because it follows familiar tropes / innovated in visual arts (pick one).

The world is actually contextual. The moment you throw that out, no meaningful statement can be made.
by eviks | 2025-10-25 14:55:48+00:00
That's fine, you don't need to understand the > character, it clearly says there is some log file located at some folder.

> because you'd say that sentence to the typical computer user and most of them wouldn't understand most of it.

Yeah, do try that, just not your cut version focusing on the irrelevance of a specific path and the meaning of >, but the whole paragraph. Do see how many people fail to understand that there was some file at some folder. You could even ask extra SAT questions "what do you thing a "shutdown log" is, does it record activities during device shutdown?")
by epmaybe | 2025-10-25 14:55:54+00:00
It’s not often that an ophthalmology study makes it into the New England journal of medicine. This is pretty neat technology, but subretinal surgery is a skill mostly forgotten by retina surgeons. It will be interesting to see who will end up offering this kind of surgery.

They didn’t really demonstrate that patients without the implant had worse vision. You could argue that with the magnifying glasses themselves that patients could improve their vision without surgery. So it will be up to a future study to determine this.
by Izkata | 2025-10-25 14:56:02+00:00
Yeah, it's a lot more complicated than that and has to do with a mix of typing speed and other things (like moving the cursor and focusing in/out of the input). But single character is also always wrong because then it doesn't act like a normal input - characters are grouped together and multiple undone at once. You can try it yourself here in the HN reply box.
by a-dub | 2025-10-25 14:56:13+00:00
ahh man you just reminded me. the cd-roms on those machines didn't have the silly audio cable that pcs of the time did, rather they were just connected via scsi. playing audio cds would rip the redbook cd audio stream in real-time and transfer it over the scsi bus where the host would reconstruct the pcm and write it to the dac.

i liked the aesthetics of those machines and the tactile feel of the keyboard.
by moffkalast | 2025-10-25 14:56:32+00:00
> I was told it would resolve, it never did.

Ha, yeah, doctors say that about just about everything that's a bit abnormal just to get you out of their office. Was told similarly for two conditions I still have. It sounds better than "Uhh I have no idea what that's about, there's 68 patients waiting in line, good luck".

The way I see it, medicine is about trying to fix a black box with absurd levels of complexity that does not follow any sensible design, where every body is not even arranged in the same way. All that without a manual and only rudimentary tools. They mostly just guess based on statistics and hope for the best, they have no idea what they're doing and if at all possible they try to let your body resolve the issue on its own because it'll do less damage.

Still usually beats the alternative though (i.e. nothing).
by olieidel | 2025-10-25 14:57:11+00:00
Interesting to see this on HN. I was part of the research group which published this back in 2015 [1], I think we were the second group worldwide to publish this.

So, first off, this is not new. The linked publication here mainly seems to be explaining a potential mechanism of how it might happen.

Some quick notes to aid in a constructive discussion - bear with me, it's been a while and I've left research and since worked as a software developer, chuckle:

- Different gadolinium agents have vastly different "buildup" characteristics - some are better, some are worse. Biochemically, the ones where the gadolinium was trapped in harder "complexes", those were more stable (less accumulation). I suck at biochemistry, so all of those words may be wrong.

- If you'd want to over-engineer this, you could indeed select your MRI hospital / practice based on which gadolinium agent they use.

- Unless you're getting a ton of MRIs (think multiple sclerosis monitoring etc.), you probably won't be affected.

- Most MRIs are without contrast agent anyway, so you probably won't be affected.

- The last I heard was that the clinical implications were still being investigated - like, yeah, you do see a buildup of gadolinium in patients who 1) get certain gadolinium agents and 2) have a ton of MRIs, but what does that mean they'll suffer any clinical consequences from this? Not sure. I heard that there was a paper (.. somewhere) which at least showed a correlation with worse MS outcomes of people who had a high buildup, but then again, cause-effect here is not clear as people with worse MS tend to have more MRIs, too (correlation != causation).

[1] https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.2015150337
by SigmundA | 2025-10-25 14:57:35+00:00
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.

Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.

So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.

There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_a_EPG0_PRS_DMcf_m.htm

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
by brookst | 2025-10-25 14:57:43+00:00
Free software is a value prop, not a law. And it is counter to the value prop that one entity is entirely responsible for all of the software (even if Apple doesn’t write every line of code, they are responsible for every bit that ships).

Not everyone cares about the bits. It’s true that the vast majority of consumers prefer having a single supplier to having freedom to run their own bits.
by yboris | 2025-10-25 14:58:15+00:00
Hugo Mercier is the originator of this: https://philpapers.org/rec/MERTSO-7

"reasoning evolved not to complement individual cognition but as an argumentative device" -- and it has more positive effects at social level than at individual level

https://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Mercie...

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory
by talkingtab | 2025-10-25 14:58:25+00:00
I think many people fail to understand how many people choose to do things.

1. Most people are followers. We really don't want to choose, and don't care. So unless we meet some pain point we will choose the most common choice that requires no thinking.

2. People stick with what they know. Unless they meet some pain point. Windows anyone?

3. Sapir-Whorf modified to: "the language determines how easily you can think."

ANY language is an abstraction - with all that means. If one language enables you to think faster or with less effort it wins. Period. Elegance be damned. An interesting experiment: take a complex JSON file and convert it to JSX. Take a different JSX file and convert it to JSON. It is just much easier (for me) to JSX something. My point is how one way of expressing things can make a difference. Nothing about JSX or JSON as I love them both dearly, but about the difference between how easy/hard/effective they are to use.

Perhaps because (ahem) I am used to React, I can look at the code and reduce it to these things:

* a hook * an array * a return * the return has a nested return

And yes, I was forced to learn useSyncExternalStore, so not a fanboy.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-25 14:58:36+00:00
To be able to lock a phone without having access to the iCloud account. If I have devices on my account that was provided to someone to use with their own iCloud account but they refuse to turn them over to me, there is no way I can shut that account down. I can report the IMEI as stolen, but they are free to continue using it as a wifi only device. If they attempt to move the device to a new provider, they are supposed to say no since the IMEI is reported stolen. Not sure how well the lower tier providers pay attention to that though.

TL;DR if the device is stolen from you by a stranger, this is possible. If the device is stolen from you by someone you permitted to use the device, this is not possible
by the_af | 2025-10-25 14:58:52+00:00
Being balanced about political/soft skills makes me nervous, especially when it becomes a mandate and your main role. Some people are good at it, some are bad -- but it's completely irrational to expect this to be the logical next step for ICs and senior engineers.

I've seen it backfire spectacularly when a very senior engineer who worked in a critical part of the product was forced into this "because of promotions", then because he was an introvert did it poorly and got a really bad performance review ("underperformer"), got upset and quit. Aftermath: his manager ended up getting fired because of this screwup, but truly that was scapegoating. What's worse is he was happy in his previous role, doing groundbreaking work, didn't want the promotion and wasn't planning on leaving.

I'm not disputing what you say, but in my experience the middle technical roles are the safest. Too junior and you'll be the first to be axed for mediocre performance, too senior and you'll be blamed for failures and fired (sometimes for playing the political game and losing). Meanwhile, the mid/senior programmers doing the work will keep on.

Unless there's another round of layoffs, those upset everything.
by shagie | 2025-10-25 15:00:09+00:00
This is part of why I'm completely ok with Jetbrains subscriptions - they have a perpetual fallback license. When they transitioned from the "buy a version, use it forever" licensing approach to a subscription model they added the perpetual fallback license (likely after some spicy feedback from customers).

You can use whatever version you've had for a year forever.

So if you cancel your subscription, the old version still works (and is probably fairly functional).

---

The problem that Jetbrains had before the subscription model change is that major upgrade versions (that you paid for) were driven by accounting needs rather than engineering. "Need more money?" - release the version that is currently getting built, even if it doesn't offer compelling value. "Got some neat things for the next version?" - hold off on releasing it to customers until the company needs more money.

The subscription model made it so that accounting had a stable and predictable revenue stream and engineering could release things as features were developed.