MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stahtops | 2025-10-27 21:12:39+00:00
I think it really depends on your use case, your commute, and lifestyle.

For me an EV has been great, but it’s not my only car. I can charge at work for free, or at home with solar. Even if I’m paying 30-60 cents/kWh, it’s way cheaper per mile than my gas cars.

Maintenance… there’s none. Just consumables like washer fluid, tires, wipers.

But that said you need to be able to charge at home, and your range needs to be right sized to your commute/lifestyle. When correct it’s better than a gas cars- it’s always full and ready to go. If the range is wrong or you can’t conveniently charge it, it is a chore.

Personally an automatic transmission does nothing for me, I’ll take the unrelenting acceleration of the EV over that any day. But a 6spd is more fun!
by impossiblefork | 2025-10-27 21:13:35+00:00
I think, a lot of people imagine these people as very capable, and they think of things like those pagers etc., but when I think of them I think of the Lillehammer affair and a bunch of other similarly silly business, so I'm much less impressed with them, feeling that they're basically silly people.

There's so many cock-ups etc. that you can read about Wikipedia that I don't understand why people hold these people highly and imagine them to be so able. They simply aren't.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-27 21:13:40+00:00
> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.

If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.

Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
by danw1979 | 2025-10-27 21:14:26+00:00
For sure, your average quick-off-the-mark, around-town EV is way more fun to drive than your average four banger.

But, I've been in a Model 3 Performance and a Taycan 4S and experienced the ~3s electric 0-60, and... it's just ghostly, linear motion, nothing like the feeling of the non-linear jerk and jolt-punctuated ride you get with a powerful ICE and manual transmission.

The M3P in particular was so shockingly video game-like it almost felt dangerous, as though I didn't really realise just how fast I was going until it was too fast.
by hackthemack | 2025-10-27 21:14:59+00:00
It has been so long since I worked on the code that had chaining functions and caused problems that I am not sure I can do justice to describing the problems.

I vaguely remember the problem was one function returned a very structured array dealing with regex matches. But there was something wrong with the regex where once in a blue moon, it returned something odd.

So, the chained functions did not error. It just did something weird.

Whenever weird problems would pop up, it was always passed to me. And when I looked at it, I said, well...

I am going to rewrite this chain into steps and debug each return. Then run through many different scenarios and that was how I figured out the regex was not quite correct.
by HiPhish | 2025-10-27 21:15:10+00:00
DST was a mistake and it needs to die. It solves no problems and only creates them. And not even the type of problem that someone could profit from, just plain old complete waste of time for everyone problems.

Just stick to winter time (because that's the correct one) and adjust all working hours once and for all to be like summer time, for e.g. instead of business opening at 7AM and closing at 10PM they can open at 6AM and close a 9PM. There will be a period of adjustment, but we have a period of adjustment twice a year already, so nothing is lost.

Why match working hours to summer time? Because I want to have more sunlight by the time I'm done with work. Especially during winter. We have it completely backwards, if we are going to adjust our clocks we should adjust them in a way that gives us more sunlight during winter, not less. I don't care if it's dawning by the time I'm going to work where I will be stuck indoors for nine hours, I want sunlight when I'm free again.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-27 21:15:10+00:00
I mean even in the simple stuff like denying payment for healthcare that should have been covered. CMS will come by and out a handful of cases, out of millions, every few years.

So obviously the company that prioritizes accuracy of coverage decisions by spending money on extra labor to audit itself is wasting money. Which means insureds have to waste more time getting the payment for healthcare they need.
by lytfyre | 2025-10-27 21:15:26+00:00
The Canadian Mint in Ottawa has a rather impressive large gold bar on display in the gift shop for people to lift and take photos with. It's not in a case or anything. It's chained down with a Protec padlock - and there's a cop a few feet away to deal with you trying something un-subtle.

I think it's a pretty good endorsement for Abloy.
by motorest | 2025-10-27 21:15:38+00:00
> Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money.

I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.

Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?

> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.

Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.
by tptacek | 2025-10-27 21:15:56+00:00
Ok, again: this isn't a cluster of load balancers in front of a discrete collection of app servers in a data center. It's thousands of load balancers handling millions of applications scattered all over the world, with instances going up and down constantly.

The interesting part of this problem isn't noticing that an instance is down. Any load balancer can do that. The interesting problem is noticing than and then informing every proxy in the world.

I feel like a lot of what's happening in these threads is people using a mental model that they'd use for hosting one application globally, or, if not one, then a collection of applications they manage. These are customer applications. We can't assume anything about their request semantics.
by sethammons | 2025-10-27 21:16:03+00:00
> We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a ...

I posit that we should start with a default "this animal experiences the world the same as I do" until proven differently. Doctors used to think human babies could not feel pain. The assumption has always been "this animal is a rock and doesn't experience anything like me, God's divine creation." It was stupid when applied to babies. It is stupid when applied to animals.

Did you know that jumping spiders can spot prey, move out of line of sight, approach said pray outside that specific prey's ability to detect, and then attack? How could anything do that without a model of the world? MRIs on mice have shown that they plan and experience actions ahead of doing them. Just like when you plan to throw a ball or lift something heavy where you think through it first. Polar bears will spot walrus, go for a long ass swim (again, out of sight) and approach from behind the colony to attack. A spider and the apex bear have models of the world and their prey.

Show that the animal doesn't have a rich inner world before defaulting to "it doesn't."
by ian-g | 2025-10-27 21:16:44+00:00
Assuming you aren't looking for an exact millimeter-for-millimeter version of the spiral condenser, I bet you could find someone to make it in the US quite easily.

It's still one of the major glassblowing countries. In fact, if you remember when folks were worried about those two quartz mines in Spruce Pine, NC that are the only place with pure enough quartz for chips? That's also the home of Spruce Pine Batch, one of the big glass suppliers in America.
by seec | 2025-10-27 21:17:50+00:00
I am pretty sure that the whole pitch was that it would make people upgrade because they aren't selling enough iPhones anymore. Realistically the vast majority of people can use an iPhone made after 2020 and not care about "upgrading" almost forever. The incremental upgrades are largely irrelevant for most people, it's just good enough and it's just a phone.

So, they have to make the older phones feel bad to use to give a reason for upgrading because otherwise most won't care to do it.

It's not the first time Apple has done that and it has been their strategy for a while now. The "free" updates are the most bullshit marketing success I have ever seen.
Ask HN: Chess variant where queen moves according to your secret Python program?
by amichail | 2025-10-27 21:18:11+00:00
I’ve been thinking about a chess variant with a twist:

* The queen is programmable. Before the game starts, you submit a very short Python program that determines how your queen moves.

* No in-game changes. Once the game begins, the program cannot be modified.

* Secret program. Your program remains hidden from your opponent until the game ends.

* Program decides the move. Whenever you choose to move your queen, your program determines how the queen would move based on the current state of the board.

All other chess pieces would be moved manually and the rules of chess would all apply to this variant.

The idea is to combine chess strategy with programming and prediction. You have to think ahead, not just about tactics, but also about how your program behaves in different situations. The secrecy adds a guessing element: part of the game is predicting what your opponent’s queen program will do.

Potential fun aspects:

* You could experiment with different strategies each game.

* The programs might behave unpredictably, leading to surprising or hilarious outcomes.

* Watching queen programs “battle” could be entertaining in itself.

Would you play this chess variant?
by airstrike | 2025-10-27 21:18:13+00:00
I used the `iced` framework and I can't link to it because it's not available to the general public yet.

Pain points were learning to think in The Elm Architecture early on and creating very complex custom widgets of my own (think a spreadsheet editor, for example)

I made some tiny apps available on my github as I was learning Rust and the library. None really meet the enterprise grade hurdle but show some of what's possible with little code. If you spend a little while longer you can make them much more polished, obviously. I kept them "unpolished" so they would be even easier for beginners to follow

https://github.com/airstrike/iced_receipts

https://github.com/airstrike/pathfinder
by fasbiner | 2025-10-27 21:18:15+00:00
Using SSE was far too inconvenient in theory despite that being how nearly all of the MCP that gained traction was working, so instead the spec was switched to being better in theory but very inconvenient in practice:

https://blog.fka.dev/blog/2025-06-06-why-mcp-deprecated-sse-...

There are a million "why don't you _just_ X?" hypothetical responses to all the real issues people have with streamable http as implemented in the spec, but you can't argue your way into a level of ecosystem support that doesn't exist. The exact same screwup with oAuth too, so we can see who is running the show and how they think.

It's hard to tell if there is some material business plan Anthropic has with these changes or if the people in charge of defining the spec are just kind of out of touch, have non-technical bosses, and have managed to politically disincentivize other engineers from pointing out basic realities.
by nsagent | 2025-10-27 21:18:44+00:00
I read the report and it actually made me realize how much of a propaganda campaign HRW was engaging in. It reminded me of PETA campaigns and how offputting many of them were (this is coming from someone who was vegan for 7 years in spite of them).

I know that organizations like HRW and SPLC have to draw attention to topics, but I found the bias and lack of nuance in the report very troubling. The report suffers from the same sort of bias that is so prevalent in most reporting these days, which has gotten to be tiresome.

If HRW reviewed over a thousand cases of censorship, why don't they provide the raw, unedited examples? Instead they include categories of examples, like stating the slogan "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" was frequently censored. For many that is seen as a call for a different type of genocide, one which HRW gives no indication of whatsoever, simply stating:

For instance, the words in each of these statements on their face do not constitute incitement to violence, discrimination, or hostility.

It's true that other slogans that were censored are neutral, such as "Ceasefire now" and "Stop the genocide." But lumping the first phrase in as if there were no legimate concerns with it is disingenuous at best.

That said, I'll still support HRW in much of its work, but I hate the tactics that mirror the broad cultural shift to inject more and more biased viewpoints. I really want to go back to the time where bias in the media and nonprofit organizations was much less pronounced in general.
by flumpcakes | 2025-10-27 21:19:03+00:00
I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.

What's happening guys?
by MattGaiser | 2025-10-27 21:19:11+00:00
HN has an obsession with quality too, which has merit, but is often economically irrelevant.

When US-East-1 failed, lots of people talked about how the lesson was cloud agnosticism and multi cloud architecture. The practical economic lesson for most is that if US-East-1 fails, nobody will get mad at you. Cloud failure is viewed as an act of god.
by Pxtl | 2025-10-27 21:19:17+00:00
I'm sorry I don't see this adding value over various other formats. I don't really want a new object serialization format, I just want the existing ones to have the features I need. YAML but with static typing and schema. XML but without crazy internet features. TOML but with an object format that doesn't hurt my brain. JSON but with decent multiline strings and comments. NestedText but with a sub-standard that provides static-typing and schema and whatnot.
by spauldo | 2025-10-27 21:19:20+00:00
Yeah, I was there too.

The three companies you list are horrible examples. IBM is kind of a UNIX vendor, sort of, but not like Sun or DEC. They sell solutions, and the solutions that use AIX don't overlap with what Linux was capable of in 1998. I'd argue that, given their complete disregard for Tru-64 and pretty much all things DEC, Compaq was never a UNIX vendor - they just inherited a bunch of legacy systems they needed to support. They certainly didn't push for new Tru-64 based systems. Oracle wasn't a UNIX vendor at all and wouldn't become one for quite some time.

BSD sockets are also a bad example. They were the reference implementation, paid for by DARPA. The entire purpose of BSD sockets was to be copied into other operating systems. You'll notice that Linux copied them as well.

IBM and Compaq invested in Linux because they wanted something that ran on their lower-end server hardware and could handle web traffic. Oracle invested in Linux because they wanted to be the backend to all these new websites that were cropping up.

IBM, Oracle, and Compaq didn't give a rat's ass about the operating system code - they wanted the platform. If Linux had never happened and FreeBSD became the new hot thing all the online hackers were talking about, the result would have been exactly the same. They'd have poured money into the projects rather than trying to make their own thing because that's the financially sensible thing to do. The UNIX wars were over, and proprietary software lost.

Meanwhile, the last major UNIX vendor - Sun Microsystems - was giving away its own source code under the CDDL. FreeBSD ended up adopting a lot of it. That's the complete opposite effect from what you're talking about.

Sun got involved in the GNOME project and even deprecated their own CDE desktop in favor of it. Was it because it was GPL? No. It was because they saw that all the new desktop software was coming out of the Linux community, who didn't have access to CDE. Even if GNOME had been BSD licensed they would still have switched to it, because they were still trying to keep the workstation market alive at that point and CDE was quickly becoming irrelevant.

As far as I can see, the only companies interested in taking operating system code were the network appliance vendors and Apple. It only worked for them because they didn't care about compatibility.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-10-27 21:19:49+00:00
It is surprisingly difficult to get really crisp dithering on modern displays, you have to do it on the client to match 1-1 the user’s display. Notice that the pre-rendered examples on this page actually look a little blurry if you magnify them. This is not really a problem unless you really want the crispness of the original Mac screen.

A few years ago I got annoyed with this and made a little web-component that attempts to make really sharp 1-bit dithered images by rendering the image on the client to match whatever display device the user has.

https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-27 21:19:59+00:00
So... everything I thought I knew about last week's AWS outage is right?

Aside from a few tangential rants, this seems to match the coverage I had read.

>Widespread issues trend toward DNS because it is just that important to how the entirety of modern computing works today.

This one would be a correction of my understanding though. So problems conferred on DNS because everything uses DNS? I was under the impression it was a bit of an opaque rats nest that is prone to have propagation issues that can seem non-deterministic if the wrong bits are flipped. It has some notoriety. If that's entirely heresy then I suppose that's a slight update to understanding.
by nxobject | 2025-10-27 21:20:32+00:00
> While U.S. system is most extreme or evolved, it is not unique, it is what you get when you end up privatize insurance any country with private insurance has some lighter version of this and is on the same journey .

I disagree with the statement that healthcare insurance is predominantly privatized in the US: Medicare and Medicaid, at least in 2023, outspent private plans for healthcare spending by about ~10% [1]; this is before accounting for government subsidies for private plans. And boy, does America have a very unique relationship with these programs.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
by skinnymuch | 2025-10-27 21:20:47+00:00
Interesting enough to me though I only skimmed.

I switched back to Rails for my side project a month ago and ai coding when doing not too complex stuff has been great. While the old NextJS code base was in shambles.

Before I was still doing a good chunk of the NextJS coding. I’m probably going to be directly coding less than 10% of the code base from here on out. I’m now spending time trying to automate things as much as possible, make my workflow better, and see what things can be coded without me in the loop. The stuff I’m talking about is basic CRUD and scraping/crawling.

For serious coding, I’d think coding yourself and having ai as your pair programmer is still the way to go.
by JPKab | 2025-10-27 21:21:15+00:00
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-27 21:21:26+00:00
No, I don't think it's 1. The weirdness of infinity can go both ways. A classic example being that a random walk on a line or a two-dimensional grid takes you back to your starting point an infinite number of times, but for a three dimensional grid you only return to the start a finite number of times, quite possibly zero.

This problem is equivalent to a one-dimensional random walk where the terminating condition is reaching a value equal to the number of steps you've taken divided by 3. I'm not quite sure how to calculate the probability of that.

Intuitively, I'd expect this to have a finite probability. The variance grows with sqrt(n), which gets arbitrarily far away from n/3.

Looking at it another way, this should be very similar to the gambler's ruin problem where the gambler is playing against an infinitely rich house and their probability of winning a dollar is 2/3. If the gambler starts with $1 then the probability of ever reaching zero is 1 - (1/3)/(2/3) = 50%. Reference for that formula: https://www.columbia.edu/~ks20/FE-Notes/4700-07-Notes-GR.pdf
by jmcodes | 2025-10-27 21:21:35+00:00
I don't agree entirely with this. I know why the LLM wrote the code that way. Because I told it to and _I_ know why I want the code that way.

If people are letting the LLM decide how the code will be written then I think they're using them wrong and yes 100% they won't understand the code as well as if they had written it by hand.

LLMs are just good pattern matchers and can spit out text faster than humans, so that's what I use them for mostly.

Anything that requires actual brainpower and thinking is still my domain. I just type a lot less than I used to.
by Cognitia_AI | 2025-10-27 21:21:47+00:00
AI is transforming education faster than ever. From lesson planning and grading to boosting student engagement, teachers are now using AI tools to work smarter — not harder. Here’s a curated list of the top 7 free AI tools every teacher and online educator should know in 2025. Each one simplifies work, enhances creativity, and saves time.
by chemotaxis | 2025-10-27 21:21:48+00:00
The thing about winter driving is that it's just inherently a crapshoot. Sometimes, on a nice morning commute, you hit black ice going downhill and that's that. It doesn't matter that you were going slow, you're still gonna slide and hit something.

I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
by elicash | 2025-10-27 21:22:08+00:00
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
by pasteldream | 2025-10-27 21:22:46+00:00
Agreed - blue noise dithering is very commonly used in computer graphics because it’s cheap and great, but it might be worth mentioning that it’s a kind of ordered dithering, which is mentioned in the article.

Christoph Peters’s free blue noise textures are the most commonly used, for people who can’t be bothered running void and cluster themselves: https://momentsingraphics.de/BlueNoise.html