MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shermantanktop | 2025-11-01 17:23:05+00:00
The directive to hire like crazy during the pandemic was a perfect example of an executive decision: should we incur long-term financial obligation (salary, cost of hiring, risk to culture leading to inefficiency) based on short-term conditions (Zirp, hot job market, fluff about AI)?

And they generally got it wrong, so they are in good company with each other. Is that because they were all equally smart? Or because they are sheep?
by abdimoalim | 2025-11-01 17:23:58+00:00
I'm planning to expand this with more features, e.g. stochastic weight averaging, distributed training support and training anomaly detection. The idea is to stay minimal and dependency-free. Looking for feedback on what features would actually be useful vs just bloat—what do you find yourself rewriting in every project? What makes you reach for (or avoid) libraries like PyTorch Lightning?

Link: github.com/abdimoallim/torchtl
Show HN: Please – local CLI that translates English –> tar
by xhjkl | 2025-11-01 17:24:07+00:00
I got tired of alt-tabbing between a terminal and a chat window, so I made `please`. It lets you type what you mean and prints the exact command, adapted to your cwd/args/stdin — without leaving the shell. It infers on-device, and has no telemetry.

It's not a fully-featured coding agent; if you want to do a large, cross-cutting refactoring, Codex/Crush are just better choices. However, `please` complements those tools when you need to quickly look up just the right syntax, or perhaps pipe your configs through an LLM.

Repo + README + demo are in the link. Feedback very welcome, especially on UX/edge cases.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-01 17:25:01+00:00
It seems clear that the founder's record has some significant failures, but thinking the other way, are there other founders who've been successful today after similarly significant past failures? "Past performance isn't indicative of future results" or however it goes.

It's easy to get stuck judging people based on their history, so you easily skip over other details that might make their current efforts different, we all think (hope?) we grow, meaning so does this founder, despite past failures. I'm not trying to say that this is a signal either way, but I wish others don't judge me in the same basic way in the future, as I too have failed in the past (although not about solving nuclear fusion) but think I'm getting better every day. Of course, people will judge me and others either way, but it seems more reasonable to not not just jump into history first, and focus on other details that actually evaluate the ideas themselves.
by ForHackernews | 2025-11-01 17:25:09+00:00
I think the issue is not about distribution in the Play Store (I don't actually have any problem with that: their playground, their rules) but the fact that they are going to break sideloading and alternative app sources like F-Droid.

I struggle to see any good-faith need to erect additional barriers to protect users from running the programs they want on devices they own, when you already have to be fairly expert to enable developer mode, install via adb, etc.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-01 17:25:20+00:00
I also am in the process of completing a solar install to get the tax breaks expiring this year. Depending on total cost (i'm DIYing and didn't predict all expenses) I can pay it off in 5-7 years. My power bill is up 50% in one year, and has been increasing for years. With more datacenters taking up more power (which we pay for), the bill's only gonna increase.

There is still time to complete a solar install yourself and get federal+state tax breaks. Call up your energy provider, get connected to their distributed generation department, and submit the forms/documentation/plans they require. Then you build your system, get it inspected, the utility approves it and completes the hookup. ChatGPT makes all this fairly easy. I can upload my forms and the process to GitHub if anyone wants to see the process for NY state.

The simplest grid-tied system is solar panels + roof-mounting equipment + microinverters + a combiner box + a disconnect switch. This is enough to send solar power direct to the grid, assuming your microinverter supports the standards your power utility requires. You can do a PV+ESS (battery) system, but it's a ton more expensive (even assuming you DIY). It should be cheaper to do grid-tied projects, but many power utilities now mandate new standards for grid-tied devices that only the expensive inverters support.

If you do off-grid (which I believe there's still some tax breaks for, depending), you can build a PV+ESS system much cheaper, as the off-grid equipment doesn't require the more expensive standards. We're talking $3.5k vs $9k for the same system.

It would also be cheaper if we supported balcony solar the way Germany does. A big concern of mine is that poor people and people in apartments (~40% of Americans live in apartments) won't have the ability to supplement their bills with solar. If all the people with money and land/houses switch to solar, and the poor can't, the poor'll be propping up a big portion of the energy sector themselves, which is unsustainable.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-11-01 17:25:52+00:00
But many users were relying on these features. Hence the bug report.

This is literally the same as helping a relative to make their computer more secure by turning it off. Problem solved I guess?

If you made a mistake by shipping insecure defaults you could fix it e.g. by including a banner to use the minimal version to users that don't use the extra features. But simply rug-pulling everybody for "security" and doubling down by insulting the affected users? I really do not understand people that act like this.
by dang | 2025-11-01 17:26:00+00:00
I understand the frustration (probably no one feels it more than we do, because it's our job to help discussion stay meaningful). But please don't respond by posting like this.

It takes time for the contrarian dynamic to work itself out (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and once that happens, the original problem subsides but and the secondary problem (shallow objection to the objection) sticks out like a sore thumb.

It's usually enough to downvote (or, in egregious cases) flag a post that shouldn't be at the top. In really egregious cases, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is also a fine idea.

From the guidelines: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by dboreham | 2025-11-01 17:26:57+00:00
How much you believe this might depend on which regional bubble you're in. I live in Montana and around here I have an expectation that while there might be the odd rogue law enforcement person roaming the state, generally things still work like America.

Meanwhile last week I was in LA for a family thing and caught some TV ads playing there. That dog-killing gnome woman was on TV saying something like "We will hunt you down and deport you, there is no hiding, leave now". Initially I thought I was watching some comedy skit, but no it was an official US government advert.

Whether I'm in Montana or in LA vastly changes my perception of what's considered ok in America today.
by jasomill | 2025-11-01 17:27:29+00:00
Microsoft officially supports Windows 10 22H2 on every CPU supported by previous versions of Windows 10; Windows "Supported Processor" lists are for OEMs building new PCs, not end users updating existing systems.

According to the current supported processor list, the oldest Intel CPU supported by Windows 7 was introduced about 5 years after Windows 7 itself [1].

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
by AvAn12 | 2025-11-01 17:27:38+00:00
Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.

Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.
by danielhep | 2025-11-01 17:27:40+00:00
I am involved with the OpenTripPlanner project, which is a Java trip planning application that also uses the RAPTOR algorithm! It’s used in cities all over the world, with the biggest deployment being ENTUR’s in Norway, which covers the entire country. I believe all trip planning apps in Norway use this deployment.

It supports many features and has a very active developer community.
by nonethewiser | 2025-11-01 17:27:46+00:00
Where do they imply the Pareto principle is the only type of distribution?

The author's claim is that postgres handles 80% of the use cases with 20% of the effort. It does not follow, as you recognize, that therefor EVERYTHING handles 80% of the uses cases with 20% of the effort. Where does the author imply that it does? Based on his characterization of Kafka I think he's say it solves a minority of use cases with a lot more effort.

I mean isnt this the explicitly made point by the author? That Kafka's use-case/effort distribution is different (worse)?
by brudgers | 2025-11-01 17:28:11+00:00
If I was going to label a fuse box, I'd do what I do when I label things. Use my Brother P-Touch. Easily one of the most useful purchases I have made in the past five years.

Of course it won't document a fusebox, but because I don't work with fuseboxes for a living and fuseboxes are not a hobby I am likely to take up, I can't see myself ever needing to do that enough times that finding a fusebox document would be easier than looking at a fusebox I already labeled.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-01 17:28:33+00:00
Wafer technology like Directed Self-Assembly does exist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_assembly_of_micro-_an... ), but did not have defect rates low enough to build complex chips.

Also, process fabs are volume driven technologies, and focus on getting as much product out the door as quickly as possible. A lot of technologies will never be compatible with that optimization in a business context.

Samsung was sort of the exception to this trend, and took huge risks that paid off =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCWDzWG1BcI
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-01 17:29:47+00:00
> But the fundamental research behind ASML’s modern tech is actually from a DARPA project if you go back far enough

Trying to trace things like this is a fools errand though. Trace things back further than that, the microscope was invented in Europe, and further back the magnifying glass somewhere in the Middle East/Mediterranean. You'll just stop wherever it's convenient for the point you're trying to make.

Ultimately, what was available + what was known was put into practice by ASML and they're the ones best at executing that thing right now today, and some things they're the only ones able to too, which isn't very too common.

But I guess only time will tell if they can use whatever they've built and make it into something even more.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-01 17:31:29+00:00
That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.

> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports

To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).
by jfil | 2025-11-01 17:31:51+00:00
We desperately need a high-tech solution to disengage from the torrent of AI slop. I have found a form of photosynthesizing plant that grows in the soil of many places where humans live. Apparently, touching this with the palm of your hand creates a kind of protective endorphin effect that coalesces conflicting versions of reality into the one you're actually experiencing. It'll take a lot of money to advertise this to the general population, but I'm fundraising as hard as I can: this approach will be called "Touch Grass" and I hope to see you all when we do it together.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-11-01 17:32:45+00:00
> The lesson I took from the second startup is that investor money makes you lazy

Marc Andreessen has made statements that align with the idea that abundant capital can lead to poor decision-making or a lack of discipline among founders. The core of his perspective emphasizes the importance of resourcefulness, persistence, and an intense focus on building the business over optimizing for fundraising.

"Too much capital breeds sloppy execution": While this specific quote might be from another source, it reflects a sentiment consistent with Andreessen's philosophy, which values the discipline forced by resource constraints (bootstrapping) in the early stages of a startup.

Wasn't there a whole movement of Lean startups? What happened to that?
by lisbbb | 2025-11-01 17:33:04+00:00
All that tech is already persecuting people in China. It's up to us to hold the line here. I kind of gave up after the L3 got those Naked Body scanners into the airports based on the "underwear bomber" that was probably a false flag operation. We can always hope for a mostly peaceful downfall of the state, like when Hungary finally shed its communist government, but most likely it will be a shooting war at some point. It is the nature of humanity--peace, freedom, and prosperity are exceptional, not the rule.

Incidentally, I was reading about the Lincoln County War recently and realized it was a microcosm for all the kinds of corruption that we see on display nationwide today. The rings controlled commerce and any upstarts were facing brutally low chances for success and would be snuffed out if they became a threat.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-01 17:33:24+00:00
> With increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5, a neurotoxin, not only damages lungs and hearts but is also associated with dementia, probably not.

PM2.5 is not a neurotoxin, that's an absurd thing to say.

It's literally any particles under a certain size. Whether it's a neurotoxin is necessarily going to depend on what the substance is made of.

Whether your PM2.5 exposure is coming from automobiles or wildfires or a factory, the potential outcomes may be different in different areas of the body. Heck, my PM2.5 meter skyrockets whenever I cook anything in a frying pan, because many of the aerosolized oil droplets are PM2.5.
by SR2Z | 2025-11-01 17:34:02+00:00
> Yes, every, because being significantly faster makes for pervasively frequent instead of convenient.

You are already subjected to a paperwork cavity search to get a passport, let alone use it.

> I also envision that this checkpoint frequency will eventually reach the level when people are required to emit constant _streams_ of authentication tokens, which will of course imply it must be done remotely and without any manual consent.

An ePassport does not increase the frequency at which it's scanned. It's still only used in the classic situations: ports, hotels, other expensive tourist stuff where they want an ID on file.

> That's a perfect use case for the proverbial implanted RFID chips or continuous and ubiquitous biometric scanning, and rejecting that is the absolute hill to die on for people who have any remaining human dignity and love for freedom.

Using an RFID chip in an identity document is not a slippery slope to implanted tracking chips and it is ridiculous to suggest that it is.
by abeppu | 2025-11-01 17:34:10+00:00
To tie this specific example to a larger framework: In scala land, Tiark Rompf's Lightweight Modular Staging system handled this class of metaprogramming elegantly, and the 'modular' part included support of multiple compilation targets. The idea was that one could incrementally define/extend DSLs that produce an IR, optimizations in that IR, and code generation for chunks of DSLs. Distinctions about stage are straight-forward type-signature changes. The worked example in this post is very similar to one of the tutorials for that system: https://scala-lms.github.io/tutorials/regex.html

Unfortunately, so far as I can tell:

- LMS has not been updated for years and never moved to scala 3. https://github.com/TiarkRompf/virtualization-lms-core

- LMS was written to also use "scala-virtualized" which is in a similar situation

There's a small project to attempt to support it with virtualization implemented in scala 3 macros, but it's missing some components: https://github.com/metareflection/scala3-lms?tab=readme-ov-f...

I'd love to see this fully working again.
by TuringNYC | 2025-11-01 17:34:46+00:00
>> I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.

We are struggling with this also -- with or without an incentive. The payback period is long. Makes sense if you think forward rates will be super-high. But people are quite aggressive with their forward rate estimates, yet super-liberal with the lifespan estimates.

I've dealt with enough appliance breakdowns to know all the tricks companies pull

- You have a 25 year warranty, but only on parts. The labor ends up costing more than an entire new system.

- You have a 25 year warranty, but only on labor. The parts ends up costing more than an entire new system, possibly because the parts are no longer made. Labor warranty is now useless and you need to buy a new system all over.

- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but the company declares bankruptcy and you have no warranty any longer.

- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but the company got acquired and the acquiring company "cant find your warranty details in their system". Regulators are powerless to actually help despite months of letters.

- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but a tree/hail falls on the house and they declare it out of bounds of warranty. You go through your home insurance, but they only cover current value, not replacement value. You buy a whole new system, only partially covered and start all over again.

- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but manufacturer blames the malfunction on improper installation, but the installation company is long-gone/retired/non-responsive/bankrupt. Possibly the Accord insurance form is fake also (how many people actually verify the insurance Accord is real?)

Been there, done that, on all the above. Eventually, your only religion is deferred maintenance because you know you get ripped off royally no matter what you do. We havent yet heard horror stories because these systems are new, but you'll hear all the above as time goes on, and people realize the actual life of their systems are far shorter than their payback periods.
by snovv_crash | 2025-11-01 17:34:56+00:00
Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical document with their name and likeness on it already makes up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.
by dpark | 2025-11-01 17:35:27+00:00
The implication of using such an app (“the best technology”) is that it somehow has more accurate information. If the sum total of the information ICE has is just the standard government documents (and it is) then what is the point of this app?

> pretending to understand things

Yes, like pretending not to understand that ICE is intentionally bypassing the due process guaranteed by the constitution.

“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-01 17:36:26+00:00
“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded,” she said. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

For an academic track, sure. Why not. For anyone looking to go into commerce or public service, these quotes are an indictment of elite education. (Consider the tradespeople we tax to subsidize these students.)
by epistasis | 2025-11-01 17:37:53+00:00
These sorts of pollution are largely caused by building massive amounts of car infrastructure and not building transit instead. The health effects extend beyond the direct pollution exposure to lifestyle things such as inactivity social isolation, and more.

And yet the US largely bans healthier, denser living by law. Density grows out of less dense areas, and those less dense areas nearly all have strict density caps preventing density, as well as road infrastructure designed to never allow density. And the dense areas of the country, which already show healthier lives for people and longer lifespans, have similarly tight caps on building more density

All this is to say that we have made a political choice as a society and are now reaping what we have sown. However we can choose something better for the future.
by skybrian | 2025-11-01 17:38:11+00:00
"Firing everyone" is greatly exaggerated.

Google is not at its all-time high, but still pretty close:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

Amazon: similar.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

Microsoft: all time high?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

It sucks if you need to find work, but these are still major employers, even after large layoffs. They can lay off thousands without much of a dent.

I'm old, I remember when Google was 20k people and I thought that was enormous.
by hinkley | 2025-11-01 17:38:56+00:00
The problem Windows had during its time of fame is the developers always had the fastest machines money could buy. That decreased the code-build-test cycle for them, but it also made it difficult for the developers to visualize how their code would run on normal hardware. Add the general lack of empathy inspired by their toxic corporate culture of “we are the best in the world” and its small wonder why windows, 95 and 98 ran more and more dogshit on older hardware.

My first job out of college, I got handed the slowest machine they had. The app was already half done and was dogshit slow even with small data sets. I was embarrassed to think my name would be associated with it. The UI painted so slowly I could watch the individual lines paint on my screen.

My friend and I in college had made homework into a game of seeing who could make their homework assignment run faster or using less memory. Such as calculating the Fibonacci of 100, or 1000. So I just started applying those skills and learning new ones.

For weeks I evaluated improvements to the code by saying “one Mississippi, two Mississippi”. Then how many syllables I got through. Then the stopwatch function on my watch. No profilers, no benchmarking tools, just code review.

And that’s how my first specialization became optimization.