MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eternityforest | 2025-11-04 05:22:38+00:00
Can't you do it inductorlessly if the load is a heater, and you can freely choose the resistance, just by PWMing the element from a capacitor?

If so that's probably like a $3 board in quantity, which could also give you the option to use a USB-C solar panel, which is probably the most versatile and convenient for a lot of people, with LEDs to indicate power and help you aim.

It would go against the low tech concept, but if I was going to build something like this I would probably go for MPPT
by Nevermark | 2025-11-04 05:23:24+00:00
Not exactly the topic - but I went through a strange consciousness bottleneck during a near death experience (in risk terms, not in the medical death sense), in which I was extremely lucky.

A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a country highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.

I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.

As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.

The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.

Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.

I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.

Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.

Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted at all.

Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-04 05:23:50+00:00
Thanks for the explanation!

> I think people would agree with (b) because when you're talking about populations people implicitly assume we're talking about a country.

Yeah, that makes sense, but the confusing part for me is that, at least if my understanding is correct, the South Korean government doesn’t legally recognize the partition of Korea. So they think all those 80 million people are rightfully citizens of their country (that is, the Republic of Korea), even though 30 million are temporarily subject to an illegitimate regime. But I’m not sure if people actually think like this in practice.
by mikeytown2 | 2025-11-04 05:24:03+00:00
You'd need two radios, one antenna stacked on top of each other. Z offset of a minimum height of 1m/3'. In the X,Y offset of 0,0. You want high gain 8-10db antennas in this arrangement; you'd need more space between if you use lower gain antennas.

If you're looking for parts the Diamond BC920 is the best antenna. Station G2 with a $100 3-4mhz cavity filter for each frequency as well.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-11-04 05:24:44+00:00
> Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?

Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?

> Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes).

What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
by jackblemming | 2025-11-04 05:25:59+00:00
Why would you work your ass off trying to do this for a likely meager raise and a pat on the back? No thanks, I’ll take my sanity instead. Keep this energy for your own projects. Do NOT use it to make someone else rich.

I know I’ll get some whataboutisms of people who work for places that give good raises for good work. Great for you but you’re in the minority.
Ask HN: How do you satisfy your intellectual curiosity?
by nanfinitum | 2025-11-04 05:26:40+00:00
For example, let's say I want to learn about Singapore: It's history, the history of it's leader (LKY), their education system and generally just what it's like to live there. Should I just start with Wikipedia? Sometimes I find the articles to have too many links and/or distracting details. I could supplement with Youtube videos or documentaries but there are too many of those and I can't watch all of them. I usually just go with the most popular, but I'm not sure this a good proxy for quality. The same goes for books: there's simply too many of them on any one given topic, and sometimes it is not clear which one is the most important/seminal.

I would love to hear the process/framework you follow when you're learning about a new topic of interest, and how you go from "curious" to "well informed"
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-04 05:27:35+00:00
> I know I’d rather pay for a Direct Primary Care membership, have catastrophic insurance that covers medical spending above a certain dollar value, and contribute to an HSA every year in the meantime while I’m healthy.

"Bronze" level insurance is essentially catastrophic insurance. The deductible is so high that you're paying out of pocket for regular care. So the author's desirable scenario already exists. The problem is that even these catastrophic plans cost a significant amount. So much so that it's not really worth it. If you do go to the doctor often you're better off with a higher level of insurance where your premium at least also covers some of your routine care.

So it's not that the structure doesn't exist, it's that it's too expensive.
by srini_lyf_89 | 2025-11-04 05:28:09+00:00
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by rablackburn | 2025-11-04 05:28:32+00:00
> It would be willfully ignorant to pretend that there's not an explosion of a novel and specific kind of stupidity

I 100% know what you mean, and largely agree, but you should check out the guidelines, specifically:

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

And like, the problem _is_ *bad*. A fun, on-going issue at work is trying to coordinate with a QA team who believe chatgpt can write css selectors for HTML elements that are not yet written.

That same QA team deeply care about the spirit of their work, and are motivated by, the _very_ relatable sentiment of, you DONT FUCKING BREAK USER SPACE.

Yeah, in the unbridled, chaotic, raging plasma that is our zeitgeist at the moment, I'm lucky enough to have people dedicating a significant portion of their life to trying to do quality assurance in the idiomatic, industry best-standard way. Blame the FUD, not my team.

I would put to you that the observation that they do not (yet) grok what, for lack of a more specific universally understood term we are calling, "AI" (or LLMs if you are Fancy. But of course none of these labels are quite right). People need time to observe, and learn. And people are busy with /* gestures around vaguely at everything /*.

So yes, we should acknowledge that long-winded trash PRs from AI are a new emergent problem, and yes, if we study the specific problem more closely we will almost certainly find ever more optimal approaches.

Writing off the issue as "stupidity" is mean. In both senses.
by arjie | 2025-11-04 05:30:05+00:00
One interesting consequence of this is that your opportunity cost is now highest it's ever been. By choosing to post on Hacker News instead of spending my time better (perhaps even as simply as watching my daughter sleep) I am wasting more value than ever before. In days past, you were substituting something mindless for this. Today, by not spending your time with your family, or reading, or on your hobby or relaxing you are paying an ever more valuable slice of time on addictive social media like this.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-11-04 05:30:27+00:00
Everyone talking about having them break it down into smaller chunk. Vibe coding there is a near guarantee the person doesn't know what the code does either.

That alone should be the reason to block it. But LLM generated code is not protected by law, and by extension you can damage your code base.

My company does not allow LLM generated code into anything that is their IP. Generic stuff outside of IP is fine, but every piece has to flagged that it is created by an LLM.

In short, these are just the next evolution of low quality PRs.
by harikb | 2025-11-04 05:30:51+00:00
There is a simpler explanation - HVAC jobs are directly influenced by the push to covert everything to heat-pumps. And good heat-pumps are expensive. So when you install a $15K to $25K, installation fee also goes up. I am surprised Solar isn't up there. Panels are cheap, install is what we pay for 10 years+
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-04 05:30:53+00:00
No, $13.4K before the insurance company starts chipping in. Also that would be total deductible for the family; there's a lower deductible per individual. (I.e., the deductible might be $2.5K per individual, and $6K for the family.) So if one person needs more medical care, the insurance company kicks in once you've paid $2.5K (or whatever amount) for that person's care.
by BHSPitMonkey | 2025-11-04 05:31:12+00:00
> Note that unless your start-up is matching, you can set up your own HSA anywhere you like.

Even if your employer provides an HSA, you can still open a separate HSA anywhere you like (or multiple, if you really wanted to). You just have to make certain that all contributions (from you, your employer(s), and your payroll) sum up under your annual limit at the end of the year (keeping in mind that changing jobs or benefits mid-year can impact your limit for that year).
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-11-04 05:32:09+00:00
I feel like a lot of people have this mistaken impression that they don't need to invest in engineering processes because there's a "downtime" during which they can make a deployment. However, large companies don't have this luxury because their application is being used all the time, so they'd usually do some sort of blue/green, canary or cellular deployment where the alarm/metric thresholds can be utilized towards stopping further traffic propagation and/or a rollback.

I also see that people are just generally unwilling to invest in an integration test suite, which can be run on a staging environment before the deployment, which would also catch lots of these issues. At a smaller scale, you can also run a lightweight integration test with test data on accounts that you control that runs just before you release the new version, similar to a canary, which is something I wanted to pursue there, but by that time I had decided to leave.

Note that "inconvenience" is not a concern for me, all organizations maintaining external applications have the concept of oncall. And any large organization, at scale, will have failures, it's just that Facebook has gotten good at mitigating them.
by dahart | 2025-11-04 05:34:11+00:00
> It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model.

What do you mean? And what is screwed up? We use 3 dimensions because most of us are trichromats, and because (un-coincidentally) most digital display devices have 3 primaries. The three-value models definitely are sufficient for many color tasks & goals. Three-value models work so well that outside of science and graphics research it’s hard to find good reasons to need more, especially for art & design work. It’d be more interesting to identify cases where a 3d color model or color space doesn’t work… what cases are you thinking of? 3D cone response is neither physical (spectral) color nor perceptual (“brain”) color, and it lands much closer to the physically-based side of things, but completely physically justifies using 3D models without needing to understand the brain or perception, does it not?
by userbinator | 2025-11-04 05:36:30+00:00
If you try to inspect and question such code, you will usually quickly run into that realisation that the "author" has basically no idea what the code even does.

"review it like it wasn't AI generated" only applies if you can't tell, which wouldn't be relevant to the original question that assumes it was instantly recognisable as AI slop.

If you use AI and I can't tell you did, then you're using it effectively.
by kevinfiol | 2025-11-04 05:36:53+00:00
Was not expecting to read about Xiao Xiao today! I loved Xiao Xiao as a preteen, and spent many hours playing Xiao Xiao 4 [1], or re-watching the other Xiao Xiaos over and over again.

[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/25718
by amacneil | 2025-11-04 05:37:01+00:00
Debian is a terrible dependency management solution for adding development dependencies to a workspace (e.g. the same sort of thing npm, cargo, and uv are used for).

As far as I can tell, pixi brings the benefits of these types of dependencies, with native support for multiple languages (python and c++ being the big ones).

ROS uses debian packages today (inside a convoluted wrapper), imo it would be much better if it went all in on pixi instead.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-04 05:37:14+00:00
I am not advocating for the stopping or even slowing down our usage of AI. I think that the accelerating progress is providing more value to more sentient beings (people and machines), and that this is fundamentally a good thing.

I am also not vegetarian -- I eat meat. I also think factory farming is evil. This is not cognitive dissonance -- I just believe that if forced to make a binary choice, the benefits of eating meat outweigh my moral qualms. But in real life we aren't forced to make a binary choice. We should be pursuing lab-grown meat, as well as developing ways to treat farm animals ethically at scale. I am disgusted by the cruelty shown towards animals under industrial farming conditions, but I still make the tradeoff of eating meat.

So it is with AI. The benefit that we and society as a whole gets from advancing AI technologies is absolutely worth it. I'm not a luddite. But we should be aware of the potential that we are doing harm to and/or enslaving sentient beings, and try to make things better where we can. I do not have a concrete proposal to share here, but we should remain aware of the issue at least, and react accordingly to the most egregious violations of our duty to protect sentient beings, even machine intelligences.
by viccis | 2025-11-04 05:37:50+00:00
It's not extrajudicial if it's done by the governing body of that state.

As far as being a terrorist group, there's not a single definition of "terrorism" that includes them but not the US and Israel.

I'm not a fan of Hamas, most due to how they treat their people rather than how their military behaves, but you seem to be operating under the impression that they're similar to Al Qaeda when in reality that's just the name of the party that governs the Gaza Strip.

>acts of genocides against civilian population

Also not true and something you just made up.

Again, really weak propaganda. This stuff doesn't work on people anymore now. It's not 2022, people don't just assume "Hamas" and "ISIS" and "Al Qaeda" are all just the same scary Muslim groups anymore.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-11-04 05:39:00+00:00
I'd like to see a vote here, what percentage of HN readers believe animals have sentience or no sentience?

Clearly most animals are less educated, and most are less intelligent, but non-sentient? That sounds like 200-year old claims that "when one steps on the tail of a cat, it does indeed protest loudly, but not because it feels anything or because it would be sentient, no, no, it protests merely due to selective pressure, programming reflex circuits, since other creatures would show compassion, or back off due to a potential reaction by the cat."

Anyone who has had a pet like a cat or a dog knows they are sentient... if we consider ourselves sentient.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-11-04 05:39:17+00:00
Calling things "slop" is just begging the question. The real differentiating factor is that, in the past, "human-generated slop" at least took effort to produce. Perhaps, in the process of producing it, the human notices what's happening and reconsiders (or even better, improves it such that it's no longer "slop".) Claude has no such inhibitions. So, when you look at a big bunch of code that you haven't read yet, are you more or less confident when you find out an LLM wrote it?
by MHM5000 | 2025-11-04 05:39:29+00:00
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by AngryData | 2025-11-04 05:39:53+00:00
I like having more choices for units. Sometimes the "correct" unit is extremely inconvient to deal with, either because the unit sizes are oddly out of proportion with the things being measured, or the things being measured have odd ratios with the units. Sometimes even making your own unit system or going with pure ratio relationships between objects is the most useful and effective way to measure things. And I feel that people who only ever use a single system of measurement often fail to see it and put themselves at a large disadvantage.

To me using only a single system of measurement is the same as only ever using a single number base. Yeah it helps to have a standard number base everyone can use like base 10, but that doesn't mean we should try to eliminate other number bases from our vocabulary or understanding because they obviously have situational advantages.

Also from my personal bias I much prefer fractional measurements and people go apeshit if you use fractional metric units but don't blink an eye at fractional imperial or other 'non-standard' measurements.
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-11-04 05:39:59+00:00
Looks great! Would you have a recommendation for intro materials to help me learn the basics of electronics using CircuitLab? I have a working understanding of signal processing but building an actual circuit without electrocuting myself, not setting my Raspberry Pi on fire, or selecting the right set of components for the simplest DIY project based on spec sheets are a mystery to me.
by yanhangyhy | 2025-11-04 05:40:19+00:00
I actually forgot to mention something related to my travels. When I was in the UAE, I suddenly realized I had lost my keys. I called several hotels, but they all said they hadn’t found them. It was a difficult situation because I had to figure out a way to get a spare key from my company or have a new one made. The company has strict access control, so I couldn’t be 100% sure I’d be able to get in. In the end, after quite a bit of hassle, I managed to get the spare key from the company. When I finally got home, I found that my original keys had been hanging on my door—for eight full days. Countless delivery drivers, couriers, and possibly other people had passed through the building and seen it, but no one stole anything.

What you said is absolutely right. We’ve gotten used to this kind of society, so our expectations for safety when traveling are much higher than those of people from other countries. Credit cards are, of course, convenient, but in China we’re used to going out with just a phone—no wallet, no cards. No risk of fraud, no risk of robbery, convenient, fast, and safe.
by viccis | 2025-11-04 05:40:58+00:00
Can you provide a concrete piece of evidence that the USSR government set out to accomplish this? For example, I can easily pull up correspondence that shows the intent of top brass in the regimes responsible for other 20th century genocides. For example, you can easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.
by nyargh | 2025-11-04 05:41:25+00:00
This has been a moral panic in Sweden recently too. It came out of nowhere and seeing the news now in the UK, it sure feels coordinated.

The Liberal Party (what's in a name, anyway?) are campaigning to make it illegal in Sweden, go figure.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/liberalerna-kriminalisera...
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-11-04 05:42:52+00:00
Obamacare is basically based on the Swiss system, so not every other developed country has Medicare for all (even the German system is “it’s complicated”). The main difference between the Swiss system and Obamacare though is the Swiss outlaw health insurance being provided as a benefit at work (so basically no group plans, almost everyone is in the same risk pools). Foreigners living in Switzerland need to document their purchase of Swiss health insurance.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-04 05:43:40+00:00
That's a lot of economic theorizing, but to me, it doesn't seem to be substantiated all that well.

You can just as well argue that labor is getting more expensive in the West because of two non-market pressures. First, we have a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty, so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money. Second, you have consumer protection policies that make it genuinely expensive to, say, be a HVAC repairman. Educational requirements, permits, licensing, business insurance, waste disposal, etc.

On my neighborhood Facebook group, every time someone asks for recommendations for menial, minimally-skilled backyard labor, they always insist the person needs to be licensed, bonded, and insured. And then, they're surprised that it costs $10,000 to paint a fence.