MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
"Work –> Appreciation" Cycle
by Nischalj10 | 2025-11-23 06:15:15+00:00
I am a 24yo trying to figure out what kind of work makes me happy. I am a currently a software engineer.

I love when people appreciate what I have built - and this cycle of "work -> appreciation" has been shortest in software engineering. Other fileds rarely feel the same (eg research, hardware, etc.)

With the tiktokification of software engineering with AI - this cycle has never been shorter - though I do agree making production grade software still requires meaningful amount of efforts and us as programmers have always been writing toy software just for the fun of it.

But lately, I have been deeply interested in pursuing psychiatry research and have been thinking of pursuing it full time by going for a masters degree. All things aside, I am not sure how would I get over this extremly short feedback cycle that software has made possible and if there's any advice on how should I think about this transition.
by tptacek | 2025-11-23 06:15:29+00:00
Semirelatedly: if you're in a major US metro, your library card (which, where I live, you get online and in real time) gets you the archives of a bunch of major newspapers, plus your local newspapers. The suburban Oak Park, IL take on Nazism pre-WW2 was wild to read (online, after a very brief search). If you haven't, I recommend taking the 10 minutes to figure out what you can search through your library system.
by seanhunter | 2025-11-23 06:16:24+00:00
> Worst case, just send up a shuttle and sweep them all up.

Not necessarily. All the junk could kickstart Kessler Syndrome[1] and make earth’s orbit completely impossible to traverse. Then when you want to sweep them up, your shuttle would just get shredded by debris.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
by bob1029 | 2025-11-23 06:16:49+00:00
I used to drink a few cups of coffee a day. I've been completely off caffeine for several years now. It's at a point where a single chocolate chip cookie will have me wired for an hour. I occasionally fantasize about the effects that a cup of full strength coffee would provide. This drug is very powerful when used sparingly. It's easy to forget what it used to be like when you're drinking 2+ cups every day for years on end.
by Hikikomori | 2025-11-23 06:17:35+00:00
My cable internet was down for 3 weeks after a maintenance, they sent out someone 2 times. We had an irc channel where engineers from most of the countrys isps were in, but not this isp, but then i remember that there was a guy consulting for them. Took him 5 minutes to fix it, it was a problem with my speed profile (increased upload plan) and I was the only one in my area that was on it.
by razingeden | 2025-11-23 06:17:42+00:00
the reason id suggested connecting your modem at the outside drop would also cover any and all inside wiring issues. and that could be anything. frayed end. a nail through it. moisture.

i think my inside wiring was done no earlier than 1991 , but maybe redone once since then and it looked pretty good but i found this on the back of a wallplate , just yesterday:

https://ibb.co/5XjkJ57J

- expires in 6 months

the easiest thing to do is check it at the box and then if nothing else thats ammo for dealing with customer service “look, i connected at the drop and have the same issue its NOT my inside wiring.”

everything from that point back is their problem and they owe you bill credits until its fixed, so get the proof and go back with it.

in my case my modem worked perfectly at the drop :D so i unfortunately had some digging to do

its not practical to suggest someone on the internet go ripping open all their wall plates and checking every inch of inside wire or maybe even running a new one. unless it passes the drop test, and then yeah, thats what needs to be done.

but plugging into the drop will 100% prove whose problem this is. youre california so thats also good ammo for a PUC complaint, that you did that and proved its not your inside wiring and now theyre refusing to deal with it. maybe that will get it to the right person on comcasts end faster when they review it.
by tptacek | 2025-11-23 06:18:00+00:00
Hamas was an aspiring near-peer military force with a conventional order of battle and a multilayered supply chain. It obviously was not "militants with handguns".

(It hasn't been militarily meaningful for over 18 months; you could call it that today! If what you are, principally, is angry about war crimes in Gaza, you have ample evidence to muster without telling fairy tales about what the situation was in 2023.)

You can avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding sentence structures where the subject is "Jewish people" and the verb is "should (x)".
by jjav | 2025-11-23 06:19:11+00:00
> Denser areas are cheaper per housing unit.

That's not exactly true.

Now sure, if everything else is equal then yes it is true. Building a small apartment building on the same land as a single house will result in more units than the cost multiplier of the build, so as you say, they'll be cheaper.

But everything else is never equal. It only makes sense to do such increased density in an area that is becoming more and more expensive and the delta increased density will make the area even more expensive.

NYC is the densest area in the US, and is not exactly known for the cheaper per-unit housing costs.
by mg | 2025-11-23 06:19:45+00:00
For the core of my engine, I just need to build some basic mesh tools like mesh(), combine(), intersect(), difference(). Everything else, common objects like cube(), sphere(), disk() and common operations like move() and rotate() is then simple.

SolidPython: This seems to rely on OpenScad. I think a solution without dependencies will fare better in the long run.

PythonSCAD: This also seems to be heavily interwoven with OpenScad.

CadQuery: This might be interesting. I will probably start with some code for mesh(), combine(), intersect(), difference() that I write myself and then look into libraries like this one and evaluate if it makes sense to swap out my own for one of them. But I have the feeling they will not match my preferred architecture closely enough.

What do you mean by "Due to the large size, python really isn't suitable for embedding in wasm"? In what regard is Python "big"?
by altmanaltman | 2025-11-23 06:23:22+00:00
Except they don't really "think" and they are not conscious. Expecting your toaster or car to never rise up against you is a good strategy. AI models have more in common with a toaster than with a human being. Which is why they cannot be economic agents. Even if corporations profit off them, the corporation will be the economic agent, not the AI models.
by zkmon | 2025-11-23 06:23:39+00:00
Horrific AI slop. As always, Meta is aiming to be biggest contributor to the garbage, world never needs. When crypto stuff was at peak of the hype, they came out with numerous white papers, consortiums and coins. Not sure where they have all gone.

I tried this VR headset from Meta the other day. It is so designed to throwing young people into digital realms by shutting off every single biological sense they have.
by kennywinker | 2025-11-23 06:24:28+00:00
Casting? Not really - i think you’d only need a couple type checks.

Imo this is mostly useful for situations where you want to handle input validation (and errors) in the UI code and this function lives far away from ui code.

Your point about clamping makes sense, and it’s probably worth doing that anyway, but without it being encoded in the type you have to communicate how the function is intended to be used some other way.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-23 06:24:29+00:00
Edit: disregard this if you're talking specifically about showing ID at security checkpoints (instead of at boarding).

> In Europe I don't need to show ID for flights inside the Schengen Area.

What countries are you traveling between?

I've flown at least a dozen times between Portugal and Spain or France the past few years and they've checked my ID in both directions each time.

It's also required to at least carry ID (presumably because it may be checked): https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/entry-exit/eu-c...

"As an EU national, you have the right to travel freely in the 27 EU member countries as well as in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland (non-EU countries but members of the Schengen area) carrying either a valid passport or a national identity card (ID card)."
by jjav | 2025-11-23 06:25:32+00:00
> We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.

While there is truth in that, it is also important to note that there is no such thing as a clear-cut line where we go, ok this is it, now it's a dictatorship.

Which in turn means that it becomes easy to rationalize and say that because they aren't doing this or that yet, it can't be a dictatorship yet. And those goalposts keep moving.

So perhaps one analogy is like a recession. We never really know the economy is in a recession until it's already been in one for a while but it wasn't obvious yet, only in hindsight.
by franga2000 | 2025-11-23 06:26:51+00:00
A person used their relatively large platform to tell people that they don't support a crazy lunatic millionaire running the world's most powerful country? How scandalous!

In the USA, 2016 and onwards wasn't "just an election". It was something between a mildly harmful establishment candidate or a useless new face on one side, and "holy fucking shit are we actually letting this deranged wannabe monarch run for office?!?" on the other.

Give the man a break, it was (the start of) a crazy time, I'm actually surprised more creators didn't do something like this. If anything, it was barely even a political statement, more of a "hey fellow dems, go vote!" type thing.
Show HN: AI Watermarkremover
by ocmaker | 2025-11-23 06:26:58+00:00
All the examples of non-breaking spaces that they showed were arguably places where someone nicely typesetting might well do the same thing. For example, in "FY 2025", or "$8.7 billion". (I've even done this a lot myself in the past.) I wouldn't call this a watermark, but more a sign of likely copy&paste, if students' word processors weren't currently doing that.

A "watermark" that invisibly identifies the text origin using Unicode tricks sounds possible.

And maybe you could do some things with statistical patterns.

Or you could, as some have done in the past, is to stego the identifying information in a way that's hard to spot but can't be denied later (e.g., the first letter of each word clearly spells out "john smith is a cheater who copied this from chatgpt").
by hu3 | 2025-11-23 06:27:46+00:00
I use it too but 106 "e.g."s in a single page? That's how many there are now. Not to mention it's full of inconsistencies and being edited multiple times.

I think the author might have left an LLM agent in a loop fixing it whenever HN points out an error or finds something new to add on the internet.
by mopsi | 2025-11-23 06:28:16+00:00
> First off, what I stated is a view held by reputable scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer, not just a view you (also) can find in Russian propaganda.

They are Russian propaganda, Mearsheimer most notably. His books are financed by the Russian government. If these people are your primary sources, you will end up believing that the Holocaust is a lie, the Americans never landed on the Moon, 5G is for mind control, and vaccines cause autism.

> Overall the concerns many European leaders have about Russia need to be tempered by a better understanding of Russia’s actual perspective

Who do you think has a better understanding of Russia: those who had the misfortune of being born and raised in the USSR and saw Russian imperialism from the inside (this generation currently fills the top leadership positions in Eastern Europe), or "reputable scholars" from the other side of the world who cannot speak or read a word of Russian and know nothing about the country beyond what their handlers showed them during a conference visit? Do you think that Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, whose mother was deported as a six-month-old baby to Siberian labor camp after the Soviet invasion of Estonia, and whose father later became one of the four architects of the Estonian independence movement, needs to be lectured by Mearsheimers and Chomskys?

If anything, the Anglo-American world has lived for too long in a fantasy land constructed by reputable and disreputable scholars from afar, instead of listening to those with lived experience and knowledge accumulated over a lifetime.
Show HN: Chemistry AI – A step-by-step chemistry solver for students
by wadudu | 2025-11-23 06:30:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie developer building Chemistry AI – a web-based chemistry solver for high-school and college students.

Motivation: I saw many students searching for “chemistry AI” and mostly getting generic chatbots or math tools. I wanted something focused on chemistry that actually explains the steps, not just the final answer.

What it does: - You can type a question or upload a photo of a worksheet. - The AI reads the problem and shows transparent, step-by-step reasoning. - It covers topics like equations, stoichiometry, acids/bases, equilibrium, thermodynamics, and basic organic mechanisms. - There are two modes: “Just Answer” for quick checks and “Thinking” for detailed solutions.

Tech: It’s a browser-based app using modern JS/React on top of hosted LLM + vision models via APIs.

I’d love feedback on: - Whether the explanations feel clear/useful for real homework. - What features you’d want as a student or tutor (e.g., practice mode, export to PDF, etc.). - Any concerns around misuse or ways to better encourage learning vs just copying answers.

Link: https://chemistryai.chat/

Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for taking a look!
by cryptonector | 2025-11-23 06:30:57+00:00
The reason TMSR is appealing is that U-233 is hard to use for weapons purposes because it produces a lot of gamma radiation, which makes it hard to work with. There is also the claim that TMSRs are much safer designs than is possible with Uranium. It's possible that if TMSRs were mass produced that we could see them installed in many countries where we don't want to see Uranium or Plutonium reactors for proliferation reasons.
by bluecalm | 2025-11-23 06:31:03+00:00
>>In Europe I don't need to show ID for flights inside the Schengen Area

Really? I fly between Schengen countries multiple times a year. I don't remember one where I wasn't required to show my ID at both check-in and then gates. There are even ID scanners at the gates.

Driving licence doesn't count as ID either. It's either passport or official government ID card.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-23 06:32:42+00:00
> That's capacity, not generation

Irrelevant. The question is what we're investing in. "The U.S" is "rushing to adopt...renewables."

> FF plants run most of the time

"CCGT capacity factor rose from 40% in 2008 to 57% in 2022" [1]. "In the western United States," meanwhile "the capacity value of PV plants can be in the range of 50% to 80%" [2].

> That's how they skew the numbers to make renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of actual power

This is a report from Trump's EIA.

[1] https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/average-utili...

[2] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57582.pdf
by pcthrowaway | 2025-11-23 06:32:49+00:00
The answer above actually gets the type union of all non-array elements of a multi-level array.

In other words

Flatten<[1,[2,'a',['b']]]>

will give you a union type of 1, 2, 'a', and 'b'

const foo: Flatten<[1,[2,'a',['b']]]> = 'b'; // OK const bar: Flatten<[1,[2,'a',['b']]]> = 'c'; // Error: Type '"c"' is not assignable to type '1 | 2 | "a" | "b"'

Technically the inference is unnecessary there, if that's you're goal:

type Flatten<T> = T extends Array<unknown> ? Flatten<T[number]> : T

I don't really consider this the type of flattening an array, but `Array<Flatten<ArrType>>` would be. And this would actually be comparable to the builtin Array.prototype.flat type signature with infinite depth (you can see the typedef for that here[1], but this is the highest level of typescript sorcery)

My solution was for flattening an array with a depth of 1 (most people using Array.prototype.flat are using this default depth I'd wager):

console.log(JSON.stringify([1,[2, [3]]].flat())); > [1,2,[3]]

The type I provided would match those semantics:

// 'readonly' added to the 'extends' sections to work on "as const" (readonly) arrays type FlatArr<Arg extends unknown[] | readonly unknown[]> = Arg extends readonly [infer First, ...(infer Rest)] ? First extends readonly unknown[] ? [...First, ...FlatArr<Rest>] : [First, ...FlatArr<Rest>] : []; const flatten = <Arr extends unknown[] | readonly unknown[]>(arr: Arr): FlatArr<Arr> => arr.flat() as FlatArr<Arr> const someArr = [1,[2,'a',['b', ['c']]]] as const; // const someArr: readonly [1, readonly [2, "a", readonly ["b", readonly ["c"]]]] const someArr2 = flatten(someArr); // const someArr2: [1, 2, "a", readonly ["b", readonly ["c"]]]

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/lib/es...
by aorloff | 2025-11-23 06:32:53+00:00
Here's an idea. Print out a list of charities that you think she might give to, like a big glossy page with 5 choices, and throw in a few "Limited time double your contribution" type marketing slogans. Tell her next time she is going to buy something because it is on sale, she could consider the joy of giving to those in need.
Show HN: pthui, a tiny, color-coded TUI wrapper for Python's watchdog library
by clarkfannin | 2025-11-23 06:33:13+00:00
Hello! I have been working on a project recently that requires a lot of folder monitoring and I wanted a clean way to view the events detected by watchdog.

Enter pthui - super lightweight, color-coded based on file operation, and allows HTML exports via the rich library. Thanks for checking it out! :)
by balder1991 | 2025-11-23 06:35:01+00:00
Exactly, it’s really weird to see all this people claiming these wonderful things about LLMs. Maybe it’s really just different levels of amazement, but I understand how LLMs work, I actually use ChatGPT quite a bit for certain things (searching, asking some stuff I know it can find online, discuss ideas or questions I have etc.).

But all the times I tried using LLMs to help me coding, the best it performs is when I give it a sample code (more or less isolated) and ask it for a certain modification that I want.

More often than not, it does make seemingly random mistakes and I have to be looking at the details to see if there’s something I didn’t catch, so the smallest scope there better.

If I ask for something more complex or more broad, it’s almost certain it will make many things completely wrong.

At some point, it’s such a hard work to detail exactly what you want with all context that it’s better to just do it yourself, cause you’re writing a wall of text to have a one time thing.

But anyway, I guess I remain waiting. Waiting until FreeBSD catches up with Linux, because it should be easy, right? The code is there in the Linux kernel, just tell an agent to port it to FreeBSD.

I’m waiting for the explosion of open source software that aren’t bloated and that can run optimized, because I guess agents should be able to optimize code? I’m waiting for my operating system to get better over time instead of worse.

Instead I noticed the last move from WhatsApp was to kill the desktop app to keep a single web wrapper. I guess maintaining different codebases didn’t get cheaper with the rise of LLMs? Who knows. Now Windows releases updates that break localhost. Ever since the rise of LLMs I haven’t seen software release features any faster, or any Cambrian explosion of open source software copying old commercial leaders.
by k_bx | 2025-11-23 06:37:16+00:00
I'm now deploying all my projects in Incus container (LXC). My base system is upgradeable, ZFS-based, in future will be IncusOS but now just Ubuntu. Incus is connected in cluster so I can: backup/copy projects, move between machines etc.

Containers reuse host system's new kernel, while inside I get Ubuntu 22.04. I don't see a good reason, if 22.04 will get 15-year life support, to upgrade it much. It's a perfect combination for me, keeping the project on 22.04 essentially forever, as long as my 22.04 build-container can still build the new version.
Show HN: I built Arc-like sidebar for Safari
by supasidebar | 2025-11-23 06:39:37+00:00
Hi guys! I'm very excited to launch a menubar app that fixes the problem of not having cool Arc-like features in Safari.

What it does:

- Press a shortcut to instantly save URLs to your sidebar (or copy to clipboard) - Search using the command panel - Save directly from the sidebar - Unlimited spaces, folders and pinned tabs

you can checkout demo video on website for all videos

will be looking forward to feedback
by Uptrenda | 2025-11-23 06:39:37+00:00
I have branches that I work in and fork out from in every direction before merging everything back into master. My branches are messy because they're works in progress so I don't care about the commit messages. For the final merge back into master its a high-level overview of changes. I don't try detail every change. I honestly think that devs obsess too much over this clean commit history thing and that it looks to me like pedantic OCD.
by retrac | 2025-11-23 06:39:53+00:00
VAX were relatively small computers for the time. They grew upward in the late 80s eventually rivalling the mainframes for speed (and cost). But in the early 80s IBM's high end machines were an entire order of magnitude larger.

Top of the line VAX in 1984 was the 8600 with a 12.5 MHz internal clock, doing about 2 million instructions per second.

IBM 3084 from 1984 - quad SMP (four processors) at 38 MHz internal clock, about 7 million instructions per second, per processor.

Though the VAX was about $50K and the mainframe about $3 million.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-23 06:41:44+00:00
I used to wear a mask when I was sick but still had to be around people. It was just normal life. Then after COVID it became a political statement. Now if I did that people would assume I’m trying to say something.

I’ve always liked the American flag. I have a little pin on my jacket. People assume something by its presence.

That’s life. Delve is now an LLMism.
by buu700 | 2025-11-23 06:46:48+00:00
I used to drink what was probably an unhealthy amount of caffeine on a daily basis. Not out of any discernible addiction, more as a thing to do that mildly improved my focus and tasted good. I got cut off for the day by the coffee bar at work one time after having an iced latte with 10 shots of espresso, which itself was after a few other drinks IIRC.

It's probably been a decade or so at this point since I've consumed caffeine with any regularity, but on the odd occasion that I do have a cup or two of coffee, I wouldn't say the effect is particularly remarkable. I guess it just affects everyone differently.
by hurricanepootis | 2025-11-23 06:46:57+00:00
I got a problem with my AT&T Fiber service at the house. We pay for a 500 Mbps plan, and I can get 600 Mbps up and down via ethernet on speedtest (probably due to over provisioning). However, I can only download stuff about 8 MB/s from most places. I believe this to be an internal issue as whenever I connect to any VPN service, I can get the full 600 Mbps. Furthermore, some servers are able to serve me at full speed, but this is rare. Usually GitHub git servers can upload to me at full speed, while GitHub tar balls are uploaded to me at about 8 MB/s.

Seeing as everyone in here has a lot of bad experiences with ISPs, should I straight up skip attempting to talk with them at all and go for an FCC complaint/government complaint?