MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-05 21:39:06+00:00
There are a few US Solar wholesaler companies that will draft and sign engineering drawings for a roof-top permit application in most states. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call.

The problem with Home Solar is the same as with Heat exchanger installs... some installers price gouge, and simply don't care about the quality of the work.

Best of luck, if you plan to stay someplace 8+ years a 10kW Solar+battery install and heat exchanger are fine investments. We've also donated a few of those cheap FlexSolar 40W Foldable Solar panels + power-bank kits to people in remote areas, and they reported phone/VHF-Handy charging was reliable. =3
by hagbard_c | 2025-11-05 21:39:23+00:00
There are plenty of examples in the world to turn to to learn what happens when you get a critical Mamdani-Sanders mass. They tend to be rather unpleasant examples which are usually done away with using a variety on the "true socialism has never been tried" claim. No, Mamdani will not be able to turn New York into Caracas just yet. Let's all hope that nobody will be able to accomplish this.
by mmooss | 2025-11-05 21:39:48+00:00
> Taking performative actions you are certain will fail unnoticed is a waste of energy.

It's true, but usually in the opposite way you intend. If you go into ventures thinking they will "fail unnoticed", you certainly will fail. For example, who would hire someone or invest in someone with this attitude?

If you go in determined to succeed no matter what, there are no guarantees but you have a good chance.

Comments certainly contribute - the only risk to their power is people like you mocking them. And have you ever seen a successful team where some people mock others doing work?
by 1659447091 | 2025-11-05 21:40:14+00:00
> This is a classic example of legislation which is passed just to make people feel like their government is actually doing something.

How familiar are you with Texas?

Texas does not pass much of anything that could be grouped with "just to make people feel like their government is actually doing something". They don't need that. They have been doing Trump style governing since before Trump. They do things that keep them in office and throw bones to their base that allow their voters to bask in the glow of a short lived "owning the libs" high. Which gets votes more than anything policy related; see Ken Paxton popularity for the Senate seat. Especially when it comes to schools, they pass things like displaying of donated "In God we Trust" posters, The Ten Commandments in classrooms and allowing the state curriculum to get hijacked by the christian bible. Not things restricting non-religion based freedoms. That doesn't fly here.

The fact this was passed with bi-partisanship after New York and CA being in the news for similar says a lot to this being something people actually wanted.

---[Added from the article]

> Did they allocate another 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars a year PER SCHOOL to hire extra security staff to pat down/strip search/cavity search a few thousand students every day?

>> Each day, students are filtered through a few entrances where their devices are locked inside the pouch with a magnetic key. They keep the pouch on them until it gets unlocked once the day’s classes are over. The district, which enrolls more than 14,000 students at 20 schools, spent about $120,000 implementing the measure, Khun said. He added that much of that cost was covered by security grants offered by the state.

Texas has a lot of money.
by bpt3 | 2025-11-05 21:40:58+00:00
How do you confirm that a train controller or any other piece of hardware does not contain a backdoor using industry standard software tools?

You can write whatever you want into a contract, but if you have no way to validate it, it's meaningless.

Also, the state-owned (and subsidized) Chinese company that doesn't have to play by the West's antitrust rules doesn't need to worry about your "contagion" concerns.
by AaronAPU | 2025-11-05 21:41:01+00:00
I had chronic digestive issues which almost completely disappeared after taking Metamucil.

Then, about a year later changed my diet and started tracking macros. Was able to stop taking Metamucil after balancing them properly.

I’d consider Metamucil a bandaid, it is easier to supplement than rehaul your entire diet. But the latter is better in the long run for sure.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-05 21:41:24+00:00
> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.

not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
by AngryData | 2025-11-05 21:41:28+00:00
I don't know if I would go that far without qualifiers. They definitely didn't do the same work load as many modern humans from pretty much all accounts, but that doesn't mean they always did things faster because they didn't need to.

Just for a modern example like painting a room, if im working as a painter as a job, paint is flying off my roller as fast as it can. But if im painting a room for myself, im likely working significantly slower and sedately and not wearing myself out over it. The same for doing other self-sufficient tasks like chopping wood, or washing or mending clothes, maintaining your home and property, or cooking a meal. As a modern job its super fast paced, for someone doing it for themselves without a clock or boss standing over their back they are going to go at a more leisured pace, and likely also enjoying the task far more which could partially count as leisure time. And even if you aren't a farmer and have a boss in those times, if your job was that much harder than a farmer you would likely just leave and find a farm to work on instead.

And of course some tasks are highly seasonal and can't be done at a real leisured pace, certain harvest and planting tasks. Of course those are only for short spurts, and we also have to consider the physical limitations of humans with poorer nutrition who literally could not do the same workload as a modern person. So even the rush at harvest time might be considered a slower pace than many modern jobs. Like a not very healthy by modern standards construction worker today likely has 8 inches height and significantly more muscle mass than the average farmer laborer from 1000 AD, just thanks to the diversity of their diet.
by uniqueuid | 2025-11-05 21:41:54+00:00
Profiles have always been great, but it's kind of unfortunate that this feature seems to be locked behind a sign-in (the link in the article describes the UI as being in the profile menu).

I mean, I've been using about:profiles for ages, but it would definitely be nice to have a bit more polish (e.g. every now and again I forget that a newly created profile is automatically promoted to default)

[edit] well seems I have to eat my words - there's a switch in about:config named "browser.profiles.enabled" that toggles a profiles menu item with some UI that apparently has existed for years. Nice!
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-05 21:42:14+00:00
I think many smart people tend to be pretty good at building models of the world, and then sort of move into the models and fail to verify that they are accurate.

This can lead to unhappiness because things can feel a lot more hopeless than they are, also makes it incredibly easy to fall into conspiracy theories, and get drawn into red- and blackpill stuff.

Someone who is less smart may just ask a friend or family member, and get an outside perspective on the problems instead. This is not just comforting, but often helpful.
by westurner | 2025-11-05 21:42:17+00:00
From https://www.sigops.org/2025/wafer-scale-ai-compute-a-system-... :

> When designing efficient software for wafer-scale compute, PLMR can serve as a checklist: performance-critical AI kernel and parallelism strategy should be PLMR-compliant. Importantly, PLMR is not limited to wafer-scale chips; it reflects a broader architectural shift from unified memory to large-scale NUMA designs. Unified memory, typically implemented with crossbars or all-to-all interconnects, scales poorly because networking cost grows exponentially with the number of cores and memory units. By contrast, emerging interconnects such as 2D mesh, ND mesh, 2D torus, and 3D torus scale with linear networking cost, but shift the complexity of maintaining efficient parallel computation onto software.
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-05 21:42:22+00:00
> the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys

What?

https://insights.issgovernance.com/posts/forced-labor-in-the...

Yes there is a bunch of automation in there, and still a ton of manual work and re-work. And it is done by the lowest cost labor, with a hefty government subsidy (by china) and a purchasing program.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-05 21:42:23+00:00
Depending on the location, state of the bone and other parameters, anything from mild discomfort to catastrophic failure of the implant and a jaw fracture.

I have four implants, two in my lower jaw, two in my upper jaw. My lower jaw is basically stone, an extremely hard bone even by usual lower jaw standards; the dentists (plural, as one was unable to finish the job) drilling into it destroyed a few drilling bits doing so. I have never had any problems with the lower jaw implants. That bone can take almost anything in stride.

My upper jaw, on the other hand ... very delicate, just enough bone left for the implants to work, and I learnt to be careful about biting into anything harder with them.
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-05 21:42:53+00:00
besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."
by monocasa | 2025-11-05 21:43:33+00:00
> Right? So Republicans did not support it, or want it. It was just part of the Clinton Plan politics and negotiation. When Clinton failed, HEART totally disappeared.

The ideal Republican plan was to have no healthcare reform. When faced with the proposition that no reform would cease to be tolerated, this was absolutely the Republican plan for health care reform, broadly supported by Republican leadership.

> Of the 18 Republicans who co-sponsored it, none are still in politics, 14 of the 18 are now dead. Republicans today have literally nothing to do with it. It is getting silly to say a Republican today has any connection or responsibility for this proposal that never even came close to a vote, and not one current Republican has any connection to.

They still mostly existed in politics at the passing of the ACA and the initial push back from the Republicans. Both the HEART Act and the ACA existed within the US's Sixth Political System.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-11-05 21:43:36+00:00
Location: Ohio, USA Remote: Yes Willing to Relocate: No Technologies: Pretty much anything DevOpsy/Platformy/Infra-y, Backend-y Résumé/CV: https://bitterbridge.github.io/resume/resume.pdf Email: strong.dot4349@tenesm.us GitHub: https://github.com/ndouglas One of my innumerable projects: https://clog.goldentooth.net/

Hi, I'm Nate. I'm a generalist backend/infra/system kinda guy with ~14 years of experience, mostly into improving workflows and debugging thorny problems but spending a lot of time outside of work tuning up my math skills to get a PhD in Complexity Science, CS, or pure math.

I'd love to get into HPC or AI/ML research (not Gen AI). If you're seeking a stable guy who'll grow and develop with your organization (I've never been employed less than four years), I might be the guy.
by smj-edison | 2025-11-05 21:43:55+00:00
That talk is fantastic! Just a note for anyone who's interested in Newspeak, it's more of a spiritual successor than a direct descendant of smalltalk (in a good way imo). It has some really slick features like:

* No global import/export namespace (all imports are dependency injected, meaning capability based security is already baked in)

* Nested classes instead of modules

* No variable assignment (everything is a method call)

* Mixins instead of inheritance

* Synchronization and code updates as near primitives

* Support for foreign objects through aliens and proxies, and foreign code can call newspeak objects through expats

* A native serialization to file format

* support for multiple overlapping type systems
by cosmicgadget | 2025-11-05 21:44:28+00:00
I wish you had something more substantive than "don't justify it".

The system is behaving correctly in the face of political dysfunction. Republicans don't want to fund healthcare subsidies and they don't want to negotiate appropriations in the house because Epstein. Democrats want healthcare subsidies. They have failed to compromise.

It is good that the system is gradually grinding to a halt. It forces a resolution and provides valuable data for voters. It would be worse if the government could carry on indefinitely using pretend money. I especially don't trust this administration with the power of pretend money. It is also good that the government didn't fully deadlock on day 1. Many critical services remain functional.

This isn't a great situation but I would be interested to hear about systems that handle deadlocks more gracefully. For sure I am cautiously on board with the idea of holding new elections in the event of legislative dysfunction.
by wahern | 2025-11-05 21:44:49+00:00
> mindfulness meditation

I doubt mindfulness meditation started with Buddhism. For one thing, it also figures heavily into Christian practice, especially of Christian religious--priests, nuns, monks, etc. Though, curiously, Christian asceticism arose adjacent to a community of diaspora Jain or Buddhist Indians near Alexandria, Egypt.

Institutional religion provides structure to help people pursue these practices. Which is why Buddhism has its very strong institutions, at least in Asia. Unfortunately, modern Western culture disdains institutional religion, understanding it only in caricature.
by AaronAPU | 2025-11-05 21:45:09+00:00
There is often a “middle of the bellcurve” effect where being exactly average means you have the highest possible number of people who think like you do.

That has obvious advantages with things like marketing and identifying what people want.

Then of course you have a million other traits like work ethic and being a sociopath which can grease the wheels of success.
by svat | 2025-11-05 21:45:09+00:00
I don't know what “investing over” means, but all I can say is (repeating myself): try it with a friend, without giving them the benefit of hindsight.

(Very few visitors to a Wikipedia page read its talk page, very few of them will further look at the archives of the talk page, let alone read every single comment and its corresponding commenter's name, and in this case as soon as the author knew the spelling to look for, the rest was straightforward for them.)
by titzer | 2025-11-05 21:45:17+00:00
This times 1000x. I dream of an alternate path we could have taken where TUI and keyboard input was the default and all the fancy GUI stuff was put to good use where it's needed. In retrospect it's ludicrous that we have to use a pixel-perfect pointing device to amble slowly over to whereever the designers put their menus/toolbars/icons, context menus. Select from a list? I have like 50 keys that could do the job!
by simonw | 2025-11-05 21:45:25+00:00
I noticed the original commit to Git was October 2007 - but if you look at that commit it include this Changelog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6... which has the earliest entry of:

dillo-0.0.0.tar.gz [Dec, 1999]

Legendary project.
by doubled112 | 2025-11-05 21:45:53+00:00
Not a dentist but I definitely couldn't see it going away. Also curious to hear a more knowledgeable opinion.

There will always be accidents and need of non-cavity repairs. As a kid I broke a healthy tooth eating Doritos. It didn't make sense to my dentist either. I've broken a less healthy (but repaired) tooth on a candy coated peanut, and one a Twizzler Nib.

I grind my teeth, so everything is being worn and torn at a higher rate. The mouth guard won't generate itself.

Hate to say it, but if I thought my teeth would stick around longer, I'd probably be more likely to seek cosmetic fixes. I'm apparently really hard on them or something.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-05 21:46:05+00:00
In most kitchens I've seen, the dishwasher is pretty close to the sink. In fact the sink and the dishwasher often share a shut-off valve. So if you run the water at the sink until it's hot, then start the dishwasher, it will get hot water.

Problem is, that most dishwashers have a prewash and a main wash. By the time the prewash is finished and the main wash starts, the water in the supply line will have cooled off quite a bit.
by tptacek | 2025-11-05 21:46:26+00:00
How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.
by RyanHamilton | 2025-11-05 21:46:31+00:00
Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part? My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
by b112 | 2025-11-05 21:46:51+00:00
It's not boredom.

Says someone who didn't listen to an old timers 70th rendition of the same old story.

There are stories, and then there are stories. I grew up pre-Internet with limited books, no way to get more, 3 fuzzy TV channels on a good day, and nothing else.

People today don't even know what boredom is. You don't know what boredom is, until you've watched the same episode of The Andy Griffith Show 15 times, and still think it is entertaining.

Now go to pre-literate times. No TV. Yes, stories are fun.

But hearing the same story over and over 1000 times is only fun if you're so bored, any external stimulus is a blessing.
by claytongulick | 2025-11-05 21:47:14+00:00
It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right? In this case, it seems like an actual climate scientist that has moderated his opinion over time, at least that was my takeaway.

That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions.

I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way.

Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us.

My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.
by dleary | 2025-11-05 21:47:23+00:00
This sounds like it should be true, but from life experience, I don't really think it is.

It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational.

There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel.

Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists.

I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.
by arp242 | 2025-11-05 21:47:32+00:00
I agree with what you're saying; in the most extreme scenario you end up with the McNamara fallacy, and it's bizarrely common on e.g. HN. But I also think the platitude is appropriate in this case – I probably eat a decent amount of fibre, but is it enough? I don't really know. I'd need to measure it (and it's very possible I could be vastly under- or overestimating some things about my diet).
by MostlyStable | 2025-11-05 21:48:19+00:00
There is a significantly easier option (although still more work than just buying a vacuum and using it as the manufacturer intended): get one of the Valetudo supported vacuums[0]. This firmware replacement blocks telemetry and allows for near complete feature parity with the original firmware, and flashing is (usually) relatively simple. Certainly much simpler than the process described here.

[0] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
by erulabs | 2025-11-05 21:48:34+00:00
Thankful for people like this - with kids and family and work I’d probably have had this sit bricked for a year in my garage before finding time to tinker with it. Now I can just never buy any iLife product ever.

We should probably update this story to link directly to the hackers blog, they deserve the credit! https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-tur...
by jmclnx | 2025-11-05 21:48:43+00:00
And how will these engineered workarounds be paid for ? It is known workarounds will cost trillions today, NYC alone could cost $1T+. And these workarounds should have been started 5 years ago when it became very clear we will never get off fossil fuels.

I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.

We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.

All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-11-05 21:49:13+00:00
> tearing apart feedback from surveys

That's amateur behavior. Real pros design the feedback forms in a way that only allows you to give them the answers they want to hear.

"Which three company benefits are most important for you?" Frankly, all of them are meaningless, but there are ten checkboxes, and unless you mark three of them, the form won't allow you to proceed.

"Do you understand how $buzzword can make you more productive? (on a scale from 0 to 10)" Answering "yes" implies that $buzzword is great. Answering "no" also implies that $buzzword is great, but you are too stupid to understand it, so you may be given some mandatory training on $buzzword. (There is no way to indicate that $buzzword actually makes you less productive.)
by chis | 2025-11-05 21:49:26+00:00
It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??

I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-11-05 21:49:30+00:00
I remember installing Debian on my OLPC XO-1. Dillo and Netsurf were the only browsers that I even tried running on that thing (w. 512MB RAM). Netsurf had better compatibility, but Dillo was noticeably faster and more responsive. Truly a pleasure to use when it supported the site I was on.