MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michaelt | 2025-11-19 23:19:29+00:00
My university didn't take attendance either, but some in my country do. As I understand it, the reasons are:

1. Some students think they can skip class and catch up through self-study, but actually they can't. The same I'd-rather-be-partying attitude that stops them attending lectures also stops them finding time to self-study. College is the first time students' time management is put to the test, and some students can't handle it. Giving them some external motivation to get out of bed does them a favour, in the long term.

2. Some courses are discussion-and-debate oriented. Less so in engineering, moreso in arts subjects. If Socratic debate is a key part of the class, students who don't show up will of course lose grades - and accurate record keeping makes sure that's done fairly.

3. Some governments require certain reporting to ensure people getting student visas are, in fact, students. Taking attendance for foreign students is one way to satisfy this.

4. When someone fails a course they'll often lodge an appeal. Perhaps they'll say the course was badly taught, or the exam covered material that wasn't in the lectures. Knowing whether the student attended the lectures helps adjudicate such complaints fairly.

A highly ranked university that attracts smart, self-motivated students has less reason to take attendance - whereas a university with lots of students skipping class, failing and complaining has more reason.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-19 23:19:48+00:00
By being a paying subscriber, you've indicated:

* that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you

* that you have disposable income

* that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things

* that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits with you, compared to people they know nothing about

By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.

So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.

In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.
by vkou | 2025-11-19 23:20:00+00:00
There was nothing particularly suspicious about Maxwell's death. The music was up, the noose was tightening around him, and he was about to start eating shit for the consequences of his fraud.

The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.

Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
by chickensong | 2025-11-19 23:20:00+00:00
I hear what you're saying, but YT shorts are literally short-form videos. I guess if your scale of short/long all fits within 3 minutes, then a 2 min video could be considered "long", but we're talking about 3 mins or less vs much longer.

Kudos to your training of the algorithm if scrolling shorts gives you nothing but interesting informational bits, but you're still supporting the short-form format, which leads to more short-form videos. Like you said, YT is pushing and creators are incentivized, so our clicks make the graphs go up and accelerate our march into ADHD doom scrolling dystopia.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-19 23:20:20+00:00
> Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile?

The alternative is to hand all your communications to carriers, who have a consistent history of being incompetent, extortionate and bending over to authorities to disclose everything you've ever said at the drop of a hat. Exhibit A is SMS, which is totally unencrypted, plagued by bad actors, and a cesspool of spam and fraud.

In an ideal world you could choose who does your RCS, in the same way that you can pick your email provider, but the way it's baked into the telco ecosystem makes this basically impossible.
by DannyBee | 2025-11-19 23:21:21+00:00
While the US is still very manual at panel building, Europe is not.

So outside of waiting time, I can go from eplan to "send me precrimped and labeled wires that were cut, crimped, and labeled by machine and automatically tested to spec" because this now exists as a service accessible even to random folks.

It is not even expensive.
by montroser | 2025-11-19 23:21:38+00:00
One time I worked at a zoom competitor, and our team got to prototype a "detect if these people are in the same room as each other" feature for dealing with echo cancellation etc, where everyone's laptop would emit a unique high frequency, and everyone's laptop would listen for other frequencies. Of course it worked in pristine conditions and fell down in the real world. But it was a fun experiment...
by lproven | 2025-11-19 23:21:45+00:00
Eudora had its own very distinct take on mail client UI. Many loved it. I never really got on with it, although I could use it.

While the native codebase is probably too old to salvage now, there was a project to write a Eudora-style UI for Thunderbird as an add-on. That might be easier to revive for 21st century email.

http://www.staroceans.org/wiki/A/Eudora_OSE

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/eudora_ose.html
by tamimio | 2025-11-19 23:21:49+00:00
Interests should be banned, it should be illegal to benefit or have a profit from lending money, they are the only thing banks are after with their infinite money creation trick (aka loans), and also they are the cancer that eats the economy from within and inflate everything up. This should be followed by abandoning the perpetual rent (aka property taxes) that if you don’t pay you lose your “own” house.
by tombert | 2025-11-19 23:22:00+00:00
I think MS Office is also singularly keeping people on Windows. That’s the only argument I don’t have a response to for getting my parents to switch.

I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.

To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.
by prachi1615 | 2025-11-19 23:23:33+00:00
BrainPack is the first system that gives robots real world intelligence. It is a compact hardware add-on that brings together mapping, object recognition, remote control, and self charging, giving humanoids and quadrupeds what they need to navigate, remember, and act with purpose. Just as companies like Waymo attach sensors and AI software to cars, OpenMind is working to power full autonomy in thinking machines.

We just launched BrainPack and are now open for preorders. It’s open source, so you’ll soon be able to build one yourself.
by david-gpu | 2025-11-19 23:23:47+00:00
I have my own war stories from working at Qualcomm. Gather together, children.

Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.

Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.

Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.

"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.

No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.

The feature was canned unceremoniously. Fin.
by ubergeek42 | 2025-11-19 23:24:39+00:00
It's not so much about the environment itself, but the data in it. If the data you use for your tests is all hand crafted/manually created by someone who has left the company then you don't have any way to scale it (e.g. if you want to run a bunch of your tests in parallel and they may modify that data), or to make changes to address new functionality in your application, then your qa process will suffer immensely.

I wish people would think about the data they use for the tests a bit more, and how they can create it from scratch in a consistent and scalable way, that way they can always be testing against a clean environment with a known setup and avoid doing a bunch of bad things (like creating data on the fly as part of a test)
by DannyBee | 2025-11-19 23:24:46+00:00
No. Lots more : It's because they were abusing a non-redundant pump to supply fuel to the generators. Which then failed, which ....

From the report:

> The low-voltage bus powered the low-voltage switchboard, which supplied power to vessel lighting and other equipment, including steering gear pumps, the fuel oil flushing pump and the main engine cooling water pumps. We found that the loss of power to the low-voltage bus led to a loss of lighting and machinery (the initial underway blackout), including the main engine cooling water pump and the steering gear pumps, resulting in a loss of propulsion and steering.

...

> The second safety concern was the operation of the flushing pump as a service pump for supplying fuel to online diesel generators. The online diesel generators running before the initial underway blackout (diesel generators 3 and 4) depended on the vessel’s flushing pump for pressurized fuel to keep running. The flushing pump, which relied on the low-voltage switchboard for power, was a pump designed for flushing fuel out of fuel piping for maintenance purposes; however, the pump was being utilized as the pump to supply pressurized fuel to diesel generators 3 and 4\. Unlike the supply and booster pumps, which were designed for the purpose of supplying fuel to diesel generators, the flushing pump lacked redundancy. Essentially, there was no secondary pump to take over if the flushing pump turned off or failed. Furthermore, unlike the supply and booster pumps, the flushing pump was not designed to restart automatically after a loss of power. As a result, the flushing pump did not restart after the initial underway blackout and stopped supplying pressurized fuel to the diesel generators 3 and 4, thus causing the second underway blackout (lowvoltage and high-voltage).
by paxys | 2025-11-19 23:24:47+00:00
As the article mentions this tech has been in widespread use for over two decades now. You have likely used it on your phone today without knowing it. GPS is accurate but also very fickle (takes time to get a lock, battery hog, doesn't work great when surrounded by buildings, doesn't work great when inside a building, doesn't work in bad weather). Wifi data is plentiful today in every urban setting, and you can get an exact location in under a second.
by bsder | 2025-11-19 23:24:59+00:00
> Python only just barely survived the jump from 2 to 3.

In the timeframe we're talking here (late 1990s), that transition was Python1 to Python2! A couple Linux distributions were on Python 1.5.2 for a very, very long time. All y'all forget that what Guido, et al. did for the Python 2 to Python 3 transition was informed by the grief they hit in the Python 1 to Python 2 transition!

I would argue that really "What killed Perl" was that people started writing bigger scripts than one-liners. Perl has a well-deserved reputation for being a "Write Only(tm)" language. Python (and really just about every scripting language of the time) was simply better for containing complexity and easier for a newbie to understand.

I remember taking printouts of Perl and Python scripts for the same task to job interviews. The Perl one always had some surprise for the interviewer no matter how hard I tried to remove them. The Python one ... was simply straightforward.
by smcleod | 2025-11-19 23:25:23+00:00
I've deployed LiteLLM proxy in a number of locations and we're looking to swap it out (probably to Bifrost), we've seen many bugs with it that never should have made it to a release. Most stem from poor code quality or what I'd classify as poor development practises. It's also slow, it doesn't scale well and adds a lot of latency.

Bugs include but are not limited to multiple ways budget limits aren't enforced, parameter handling issues, configuration / state mismatches etc...

What makes this worse is if you come to the devs with the problem, a solution and even a PR it's very difficult to get them to understand or action it - let alone see critical things like major budget blowouts as a priority.
by gehsty | 2025-11-19 23:25:25+00:00
I guess what I mean is that if the likes of huge defence contractors / automotive industry etc put weight into developing a open kernel and tooling at a volume similar to that of paying for licenses to Autodesk, then they could build their own hyper focussed CAD solution, and the rest of us could be "off to the races" without the upfront cost ACIS or Parasolid.
by tptacek | 2025-11-19 23:25:44+00:00
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
by theodric | 2025-11-19 23:25:44+00:00
I'm behind Starlink, which is NAT'd to a shared public IP address, and I refuse to pay for hosting, so Cloudflare is how https://potateaux.com is on the Web. Of course nobody looks at it because there's very little there besides a cool landing page and a couple of JavaScript gags, so one outage per lifetime is a perfectly acceptable cadence in exchange for $0 in Cloudflare service costs :)
by nicce | 2025-11-19 23:25:51+00:00
WhatsApp has avoided the pressure of E2EE backdoors and whatever politics because they were never needed.

1. They collect all the metadata in unencrypted format and link it to phone numbers, making a huge social graph.

2. Backups are not encrypted by default and enabling of them is pushed. So the messages were never actually encrypted for most people and police can get messages without the actual phone.

3. iCloud E2EE backup fight in UK was mostly because of 2. as people started to opt-in for encryption.
by epolanski | 2025-11-19 23:25:57+00:00
It's not that easy to fall to unsafe code if you know what you're doing, do not have typescript skill issues and use the right libraries, such as fp-ts or effect-ts (an evolution of Scala's ZIO on TypeScript).

Those ecosystems are huge by the way, effect is still very niche-y due to its usage of functional programming and effect systems, niche in a sense, it gets more downloads than Angular.

[1] https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/modules/

[2] https://effect.website/

I have my beefs with TypeScript's complexity, verbosity and limits, don't get me wrong but I don't see any realistic alternative for who wants to write type safe code.

I loved Elm or Reason, but they are not realistic nor productive choices unless your IT team has North American startup budget.

In my real world, we don't have the budgets to lure the kind of brilliant engineers that know when to pick Ocaml and when to go with Rust (or have ever used any of them).
by actionfromafar | 2025-11-19 23:26:39+00:00
And killing Perl 5 in the process. If Perl would have kept going in its own pace and Perl 6 would have been named Rapture or Raku from day one, Perl would have been fine.

Nowadays when everyone and their dog (vcpkg) have a package system, it’s easy to overlook how magical CPAN was. A solution to the weirdest problem, just a package away.
by DannyBee | 2025-11-19 23:28:10+00:00
They didn't.

If you read the report they were misusing this pump to do fuel supply when it wasn't for that. And it was non redundant when fuel supply pumps are.

Its like someone repurposing a husky air compressor to power a pneumatic fire suppression system and then saying the issue is someone tripping over the cord and knocking it out.
by epolanski | 2025-11-19 23:28:16+00:00
Yeah, I'm quite sure inverting trees is more relevant to real world programming than knowing the fundamentals of a type system people say they are expert in. /s

In any case, I am against technical interviews and never ask any technical questions beyond just general talk of how people like to work, and their previous projects.

But I know for a fact the overwhelming majority of people that say they know TypeScript don't know a tenth of what's written in the docs, and mapped types were just a very basic example.
by MoonWalk | 2025-11-19 23:28:56+00:00
"A lot of phones worked with 4G still but did not support using 4G for emergency calls."

Now that should be illegal. It's absurd to think that everyone whose phone works just fine for regular calls is going to receive, understand, and heed upgrade messages. That's hugely irresponsible.

Furthermore, it looks like these customers may NOT have received any such messages: If the phone company could identify a user's phone as being out of date and send it an update warning, then that company could have banished it from its network. I see no excuse for what happened here.
by HumanOstrich | 2025-11-19 23:29:00+00:00
They don't keep separate packages for fun. Many of the changes would not be accepted to an upstream.[1] That's usually why the derived distro exists in the first place. Imagine arguing that Ubuntu should just be upstreamed into Debian.

[1]: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/
by EarlKing | 2025-11-19 23:29:05+00:00
Facebook is filled with billions of people I have no reason to speak to, ergo its network effects for me are zero, and its value to me is zero. Other services have similar zero or negative value, and hence I don't use them either. As much as some around here would like to believe that network effects are a moat that effectively allow social media to be immortal, experience has shown that not to be the case. Facebook is dying a slow, lingering death. It is not the place you go to find trendsetters and people of import, but, at best, to go check up on grandma. Facebook will die when grandma finally kicks the bucket and there isn't anyone to replace her because they're all on Discord.
by crote | 2025-11-19 23:29:35+00:00
It wasn't. They were feeding generators 1 & 2 with the pump intended for flushing the lines while switching between different fuel types.

The regular fuel pumps were set up to automatically restart, which is why a set of them came online to feed generator 3 (which automatically spinned up after 1 & 2 failed, and wasn't tied to the fuel-line-flushing pump) after the second blackout.
by tptacek | 2025-11-19 23:29:43+00:00
It is possible that any number of things people on this thread have called out are, in fact, the right move for the system Cloudflare built (it's hard to know without knowing more about the system, and my intuition for their system is also faulty because I irrationally hate periodic batch systems like these).

Most of what I'm saying is:

(1) Looking at individual point failures and saying "if you'd just fixed that you wouldn't have had an incident" is counterproductive; like Mr. Oogie-Boogie, every big distributed system is made of bugs. In fact, that's true of literally every complex system, which is part of the subtext behind Cook[1].

(2) I think people are much too quick to key in on the word "config" and just assume that it's morally indifferentiable from source code, which is rarely true in large systems like this (might it have been here? I don't know.) So my eyes twitch like Louise Belcher's when people say "config? you should have had a staged rollout process!" Depends on what you're calling "config"!

[1] https://howcomplexsystems.fail/
by w_for_wumbo | 2025-11-19 23:29:49+00:00
I see, Fly was perhaps the wrong word to use here. Phase-Shift to new galaxies is probably the right term. Where you change your entire system's resonant frequency, to match what exists in the distant galaxy. Less of transportation, and more of a change of focus.

Like the way we can daydream about a galaxy, then snap-back to work. It's the same mechanism, but with enhanced focus you go from not just visualising > feeling > embodying > grounding in the new location.

We do it all the time, however because we require belief that it's possible in order to maintain our location, whenever we question where we are - we're pulled back into the reality that questions things (it's a very Earth centric way of seeing reality)
by vladms | 2025-11-19 23:29:50+00:00
Many people want to do many things, problem is do we agree as society it is ok, considering all the implications.

I personally find the commercial targeting extremely poor. I look for things to buy and I get stupid ads which don't fit, or I bought the things and still bombarded with the ad for the same thing.

But data collection can be used by far more nefarious purposes, like political manipulation (already happening). So yes, I am willing to give up some percentage points in optimizing the commercial and advertisement process (for your example, wait for 2 weeks and check for the actual sales volume difference) to prevent other issues.
Show HN: NPO English Subtitles – Watch Dutch Public TV with Translated Subs
by baqiwaqi | 2025-11-19 23:29:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this tool because I found it difficult to access content on NPO Start (the Dutch public broadcaster) as a non-native speaker. While there is a lot of good local content, very little of it has English subtitles.

This is a command-line tool that fetches the Dutch subtitles from the NPO stream and translates them into English (SRT/VTT format) so you can use them with your media player. It helps bridge the gap for expats living in the Netherlands or people trying to learn the language who need English context.

It's open source and runs locally on your machine. I'd love to hear any feedback on the translation quality or suggestions for feature improvements.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-11-19 23:30:24+00:00
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.

"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.

It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.