MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kbolino | 2025-10-19 18:25:51+00:00
Mirrors.

Lots of small, volunteer-run, low/zero-budget open-source projects cannot afford to pay for the server/CDN bandwidth they would need to host all their binary artifacts (ISOs, packages, etc.). They end up relying on mirrors provided for free by third parties instead. By publishing the checksums, they allow you to verify that the ISO image you downloaded from some mirror is the same one that they originally published.
by pydry | 2025-10-19 18:26:17+00:00
Exactly, the luddites werent especially anti technology. Smashing stocking frames for them was a tactic to drive up their wages.

Just as the fallout of the napoleonic war was used as a means of driving down their wages. The only difference is that tactic didnt get employers executed.

It's always been in the interests of capital to nudge the pitchforks away from their hides in the direction of the machines, and to always try and recharacterize anti capitalist movements as anti technology.

In 2010 I remember a particularly stupid example where Forbes declared anti Uber protestors were "anti smartphone".

Sadly most people dont seem to be smart enough to not fall for this.
by brandensilva | 2025-10-19 18:26:23+00:00
And that comes down to the moral and social contract we have and the power we give to digital money and who owns it.

We either let the peoples creativity and knowledge be controlled and owned by a select few OR we ensure all people benefit from humanities creativity and own it. And the fruits that it bears advance all of humanity. Where their are safety nets in place to ensure we are not enslaved by it but elevated to advance it.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-10-19 18:26:25+00:00
Correct. If we don’t do anything, it effectively is about as immutable as a law of nature. But if enough people respond, the system will change in some way.

Note that the stench of inevitability likes to sneak into these discussions of systemic problems. Nothing is set in stone. Anyone telling you otherwise has given up themselves. The comment section attracts all kinds of life outlooks, after all. The utility of belief in some sort of agency (however small) shouldn’t be surrendered to someone else’s nihilistic disengagement.
by bombela | 2025-10-19 18:27:02+00:00
> variable-speed fridges exist, and they're kind of nice in that they try to run continuously and quietly instead of alternating between full-power (and loud) and all the way off.

Modern continuous variable speed compressor fridges drive me absolutely crazy. They sound like two ceramic plate rubbing together with some maddening flutter.

Some also add incredibly annoying high pitch whines. That seemingly nobody seems to notice but me. In the same vein as coils whine from power supplies and other modern electronic.

Old bang bang fridges are loud, on lower frequency, and with a sound that is more consistent and stable. Not varying one second to the next, which I find easier to ignore.

I have started looking at how reasonable it is to move the compressor of my expensive and low quality 2025 fridge across the wall into the garage (refrigerant capture and refill, brazing new lines etc).
by jrmg | 2025-10-19 18:27:28+00:00
Personal pet level is that it’s so hard to get information on the noise level of appliances.

We’ve recently moved, and our new house’s crawl space has a Santa Fe dehumidifier in it that seems SO LOUD at night. I don’t think it’s broken - it’s just a compressor and fan with no engineering put into keeping them quiet. If I could get one that was as efficient and well built, but I knew would be quiet, I’d replace it in a heartbeat - but manufacturers don’t advertise noise levels.

Surely I can’t be the only one who’d pay substantially more for an appliance that was guaranteed to be quiet?
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-10-19 18:27:42+00:00
Are people actually doing this for any serious production systems?

> ... there is always a chance that you may experience problems rebooting your system after the upgrade

This doesn't give me confidence in the process. Don't get me wrong, Debian (and derivatives) are great systems, but the lack of any real rollback option and notes like this right at the beginning of upgrade docs just scream "don't do that, just do a fresh install". Which is probably a good advice.
by anonym29 | 2025-10-19 18:28:15+00:00
Any idea why a bipedal fleshlight makes them insecure? My head jumps to "could it because they fear that without sex, they have no value?" but that sounds so ridiculous to me. All human life matters, has value, and should be treated with kindness, respect, and dignity. I've met plenty of women who add value to the world in a bajillion other ways.

Can someone help me understand this one?
by StevePerkins | 2025-10-19 18:28:18+00:00
Of course it does. Do you think the elites actually WANT massive tariffs putting a brake on GDP growth? Why are tech companies suddenly reversing course on content moderation and/or DEI, after years of pushing in the opposite directions?

Private enterprise will always have some level of corrupting influence over government. And perhaps it sees current leadership as the lesser of two evils in the grand scheme. But make no mistake, government DOES ultimately have the power, when it chooses to assert itself and use it. It's just a matter of political will, which waxes and wanes.

Going back a century, did the British aristocracy WANT to be virtually taxed out of existence, and confined to the historical dustbin of "Downton Abbey"?
by HPsquared | 2025-10-19 18:28:38+00:00
Variable-compressor fridges will be more thermodynamically efficient, as the heat transfer happens more gradually, so temperature differences across the heat pump will be lower (e.g. because the condenser will have more time to gradually transfer heat to the room, it won't get as hot). And coefficient of performance for a heat pump is higher if the temperature difference is smaller. Another way to achieve this might be with a variable-displacement compressor (which is how modern car AC systems work, rather than cycling on/off).
by ofrzeta | 2025-10-19 18:28:52+00:00
Red Hat is offering OpenShift virtualization, which is Kubernetes with Kubevirt. So some people might just use Kubernetes with Kubevirt.

There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/

Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/

Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.
by chrchr | 2025-10-19 18:29:17+00:00
Anyone interested in zippers, or, more significantly for this website, how new technologies are invented, adopted, and mature, should read "Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty" by Robert D. Friedel [1]

YKK is kind of one of the heroes of the story. The zipper was pioneered by the U.S. company Talon Fastener, which was acquired and parted out in the 1970s. YKK bought the legacy machining for manufacturing zippers and went on to dominate the global market.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zipper-Exploration-Robert-D-Friedel/d...
by iamnothere | 2025-10-19 18:29:24+00:00
If a few states work together to make interstate relocation easier, then this should be a self-correcting problem over time. As you mentioned, there is no universal agreement on human rights—the constitution enumerates some basic ones, but there is wide disagreement in interpretation even within these. If we want to avoid a constantly escalating national tug-of-war (inevitably leading IMHO to armed conflict) then local laws should be devolved to the states, with the federal government acting as referee between states and as a neutral anti-corruption enforcer.

I don’t see how we get there, though. I think we may already be too far down the road of centralized power, which is likely to have very bad results for everyone in the end.
by hinkley | 2025-10-19 18:29:28+00:00
The lower voltage helps reduce leakage and capacitance in the chip as the wires get closer together.

But it does argue against more states due to the benefits of just making 1 smaller if you can and packing things closer. Though maybe we are hitting the bottom with Dennard scaling being dead. Maybe we increase pitch and double state on parts of the chip, and then generations are measured by bits per angstrom.
by seanhunter | 2025-10-19 18:29:29+00:00
The spherical cow joke generally goes that a farmer has some problems with his cows (maybe it’s how much milk they’re producing I don’t remember) and so his daughter says “you should ask my boyfriend to help - he’s a physicist and really clever”. So the farmer asks the boyfriend and he says “Well, assume the cows are spherical…”

The joke being because when you do mechanics you generally start modelling any problem with a lot of simplifying assumptions. In particular, that certain things are particles- spherical and uniform.
by ben_w | 2025-10-19 18:29:34+00:00
> Without advanced robotics, AI is just impotent.

Yeeeeess, but the inverse is also true.

Thing is, we've had sufficiently advanced robotics for ages already — decades, I think — the limiting factor is the robots are brainless without some intelligence telling them what to do. Right now, the guiding intelligence for a lot of robots is a human, and there are literal guard-rails on many of those robots to keep them from causing injuries or damage by going outside their programmed parameters.
by jhbadger | 2025-10-19 18:29:42+00:00
This is valid only so far as "human benefit" is localized to the human doing the job. I'm a cancer researcher. Obviously. my job is of value to me because it pays my bills (and yes, I do get satisfaction from it in other ways). But if an AI can do cancer research better than me, then the human benefit (to every human except perhaps me) favors the AI over me.

But a lot of jobs aren't like that. I doubt many people who work in, say, public relations, really think their job has value other than paying their bills. They can't take solace in the fact that the AI can write press releases deflecting the blame for the massive oil spill that their former employer caused.
by anon7725 | 2025-10-19 18:29:56+00:00
Also, presumably if you have AGI you can have it address a physical problem at a higher level of abstraction. "Design a device to make any water heater installable by a single person in 20 minutes" would result in a complex system that would make a lot of blue collar labor redundant (the last water heater I had installed took 3 guys over an hour to complete).

It would not even necessarily result in a human-like robot - just some device that can move the water heater around and assist with the process of disconnecting the old one and installing the new one.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-19 18:29:58+00:00
I haven't tried yet, but YoLink specifically markets their LoRaWAN sensors as working in fridges: https://shop.yosmart.com/collections/smart-fridge

For the readings, I only really care about catching compressor failure within hours, as opposed to say, days, so for a freezer that's normally set to -18, I figure I'll just do something like "alert if temperature remains above -14 for >2 hours." Of my 4 fridges/freezers, only one has auto-defrost, so I guess I'll have to take that into account there.
by sph | 2025-10-19 18:30:00+00:00
For a nation built and made immensely great by immigrants, I truly fear the type of propaganda that is able to turn all of their social and economic problems on immigrants.

I know Europe has been consumed by this rhetoric, but I feel Americans should know better, knowing their history. Incredible how the powerful can shift the blame on the guy making minimum wage, and the entire populace laps it up like complete morons. It is frightening to see the how mass media can easily brainwash a whole country in the span of a few years.

Deceiving people at global scale is by now a solved problem; despite believing we are the smartest and most well-read and rational in history, humanity as a whole is on aggregate really, really dumb.
by john01dav | 2025-10-19 18:30:54+00:00
I find it easier to read code that uses Rust generics with trait bounds, since then I have a clear answer about what types it is generic over. Recently I was using a Thrust (CUDA library) function for the first time and I wanted to know what types, exactly, could be accepted as a parameter type to a callable. The docs¹ were not useful, since they only addressed the output type of the callable. I had to ask an LLM and then fact check its sources. This is a much less convenient experience than the information being mandatory in the function signature like in Rust.

1: https://wmaxey.github.io/cccl/thrust/api/function_group__tra...
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-19 18:31:24+00:00
In a pervasively object oriented system/language, anything that can be represented in the system is an object (=noun =potential agent of action).

Ruby is almost a pervasive OO system (falling short because blocks are not objects, though they can be reified into objects with some efficiency overhead.) As such, unreified blocks are the only thing in Ruby that cannot be the agent of action.

For an iteration of a block a fixed number of times, the potential agents are the block and the number of times. But blocks aren't objects, so they can't be the agent, leaving only the number.

Hence, Integer#times
by Ancapistani | 2025-10-19 18:31:53+00:00
> On the other hand, seniors who think they know it all are dangerous.

What’s working well for me is to open conversations by being explicit that I’m trying to make sure my knowledge is accurate, and that I’m phrasing things as statements of fact not because I know them to be true but because they are the premises that the weight of my position depend on. I want you to speak up if I’m wrong because I want us to succeed and I want to be right the next time it comes up!

I’ve also found that this bleeds over into other conversations, even where I’m not involved. If my team is used to working in an environment where premises should be challenged, they tend to do the same thing in other contexts. As long as the organization as a whole is accepting of this - and I can’t overstate how important that part is - the whole thing establishes and constantly reinforces a culture of collaborative skepticism.

I want to work somewhere that bringing an idea or a project plan to a group isn’t saying “this is what we’re going to do”, it’s saying “this is what I think we should do; if you disagree please try to convince me otherwise - because I want what’s best for us and I want to expand my own abilities”

I’m blessed to have a place like that today. I’ve had three in my career thus far, and I’ve stayed at each of those until I was forced to leave in order to grow as an engineer.

I interview with this in mind, and it’s very hard to tell from the outside. It seems that about 1/3 of the companies I’ve thought were suitable for me turned out to be.
by thisisit | 2025-10-19 18:32:03+00:00
> Fight back against _what_?

Its funny to see that you ask this question while being fully vague yourself.

> I don't see anyone else trying.

No one has tried "reforms" because people understand that in a free democracy every idea has its place. Even the most disliked ones. People who want to push an agenda simply fund studies - biased one at that. They never try this kind of authoritianism. Just leave to this government to try and bulldoze people into submission.

I partially agree with you. Yes institutions have issues. But this is approaching affirmative action for conservatives.

Requiring universities to bring in more conservatives and stop discrimination against them. If that is not enough even asking to give up the control in admissions.

Despite all the issues you pointed out would you also say that conservatives are so underrepresented and discriminated that it requires government mandated affirmative action?
by neilv | 2025-10-19 18:32:27+00:00
C-like syntax:

foo(1, 2, 3); if (x) { aaa(); } else { bbb(); }

Lisp-like syntax:

(foo 1 2 3) (if x (aaa) (bbb))

Syntax is easy. Practical semantics is a little bit harder, but it's not hard.

Editor-wise, you want an editor that does automatic indenting and some kind of matching parentheses highlighting. Emacs is one. (Once you've learned the language, you can use a fancy structural editor, but maybe don't confuse yourself with too many new things at once.)
by jibal | 2025-10-19 18:32:39+00:00
Note this in his WP article:

"Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today's DNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote. In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 20 RFCs.[12]"

And from the RFC article:

"From 1969 until 1998, Jon Postel served as the RFC editor. On his death in 1998, his obituary was published as RFC 2468.[12]" (written by Vint Cerf)

"Beginning with the ARPANET, an endless stream of networks evolved, and ultimately were interlinked to become the Internet. Someone had to keep track of all the protocols, the identifiers, networks and addresses and ultimately the names of all the things in the networked universe. And someone had to keep track of all the information that erupted with volcanic force from the intensity of the debates and discussions and endless invention that has continued unabated for 30 years. That someone was Jonathan B. Postel, our Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, friend, engineer, confidant, leader, icon, and now, first of the giants to depart from our midst."

"Bearded and sandaled, Jon was our resident hippie-patriarch at UCLA. "

Actually, Jon often padded around the CompSci department at Boelter Hall barefoot.

"He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our collective Internet story, including not only the technical but also the poetic and whimsical as well."
by ardit33 | 2025-10-19 18:32:40+00:00
not a productive comment. The web is made and run by myriad of frameworks, that were developed open source by startups, or folks that worked in tech that wanted to improve things bit by bit and wanted to share to the community.

Tech in general is the much more open industry compared to any other (cars, biotech, etc), and it is uniquely where closed sourced frameworks have a har time to succeed.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-19 18:33:03+00:00
> Blocks are actually instances of the Proc class.

No, they aren't.

Blocks can be reified into instances of the Proc class, but they are not objects and reifying them into objects has overhead.

Using a & argument asks for a block passed to the method to be reified into a proc accessible in the body of the method, which is useful if you are going to do something with it that you can't do with a bare block.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-19 18:33:22+00:00
> New York’s climate is pretty harsh: you have annual freeze/thaw cycles, lots of rain and ice, plus high winds and an annual hurricane season.

In terms of freeze/thaw cycles, it's not really about having annual cycles that makes a climate harsh, but rather having persistent daily cycles. A climate where the winter daily high sits comfortably above freezing and the winter daily low sits comfortably below freezing is going to be much harsher on buildings than one where the weather goes below freezing in fall and stays below freezing all winter--you're seeing like 10× the freeze/thaw cycles per year.

Between climate change and urban heat island effect, Manhattan is probably moving into the winter-daily-freeze/thaw-cycle climate zone.
by r0ze-at-hn | 2025-10-19 18:33:50+00:00
There are papers showing the common variants associated with intelligence. For example myelin sheath variants linked to intelligence as it increases fatty insulation around nerve fibers which speeds up transmission. But ones like that are surface level. This matters, but it isn't the only thing and for me the more interesting is the meta of what these have in common (besides often related to the brain).

The real problem is that most historical papers look for single SNPs. But a gene could have dozens of variants that do the same thing or you could have a genetic path where a major variant in any gene on that path results in the same outcome. These papers overlook this.

So you have to step back and asking: What are the principles of intelligence? and how would I expect to see them in human biological or other biological systems? (And related, why does humans have intelligence "now"?)

For this crowd, if I take an LLM and make it bigger is it intelligent? Obviously a key component of intelligence is raw stuff. Someone with fattier myelin sheath's straight up has more/faster "brain stuff". You might say ChatGPT 4.5 is "smarter" than 3.5, but not intelligent. There are two other key attributes missing. For those following along with the arc-agi you might already have a hint what those are simply based on what is moving the needle forward. Now even with all three and you are close and simply need to provide an environment for self-replicating with a selection pressure and energy constraint. For one definition (others will have a different definition) I have had a primitive AGI for 13 months now and regularly put it to work on sub problems of mine.

This really took off when I was reading genetics files like books and noticed I was reading files that are very similar, but some were Mensa level folks and others were more just "smart". Didn't take too much longer to piece together the key paths and differences and even went tracing back through Neanderthals DNA (How cool is it these days that we can simply poke around Neanderthals DNA!).

So it isn't forbidden, but more like I know what to look for and people are super sensitive around saying someone is probably smarter or not from a genetic file so I usually don't comment because of the Gattaca problem.

P.S. If you have a bio/genetic background and are playing around with AI I would love to chat. There are so very few of us. DeepMind is thinking of some of this, but they are in the UK. (It would be fun to give a meta talk to them explaining why their smartest engineers are smart.)
by ryandrake | 2025-10-19 18:33:56+00:00
Both 1+2 are partially fixed by hitting my browser's "zoom in" function 3 to 4 times. But still there's too much whitespace.

I don't know why so many sites default to tiny fonts and using fixed margins to restrict content to a tiny column down my screen. Fortunately, most browsers allow you to set a minimum font size, which fixes a lot of these sites.
by benrutter | 2025-10-19 18:34:15+00:00
Not OP, but depending on your use case, client side operations could be a big deal.

Something like a dashboard app for instance, might have callbacks where it needs to run a new SQL query based on input, but be small enough to make loading all data onto menory and querying locally a mich faster option.

Obviously ymmv and if you have a dashboard with a heavy data set under the hood, your gonna make a lot of users unhappy fast by doing that.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-19 18:34:24+00:00
> I don't know about the United States of America, but in my country it's very common to do volunteer work.

Your business plan for America:

1. Live in an unknown country Z that's not the US, about which you don't know much.

2. Do volunteer work in Z, consisting of doing highly unknown stuff X for a secret number of minutes per year Y.

3. ...

4. Imply unknown profits for Z

5. The US implements a copy of the unknown volunteering in unknown country Z

6. ...

7. Imply enough unknown profits for the US to fix all of its unspecified problems.

Am I missing something, like known or unknown unknown?