MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by addaon | 2025-11-17 03:58:48+00:00
The Middle Ages, for all of the holes in our documentation, is the best understood extended period where people looked back on a well-remembered past that was more organized, in many ways more advanced, and more “civilized” than the age in which they found themselves. It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress, and has been for centuries — this difference, and its impact on society, is absolutely fascinating to me and is part of the draw of learning about the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, reading about Middle Earth).
by oehpr | 2025-11-17 03:59:23+00:00
If there has anything I have learned in my life it is this: "the world is just. solutions are easy. and if people are suffering, then they deserve it. if they would just try to solve their problems then their problems would be solved." Is deep in the thoughts of most people, and it leaks out in all kinds of ways.

you DESERVE misery. If you are suffering, then you are the cause.

I feel I should hate this line of thinking... But it's too common. I can't hate all of humanity. Instead, I know to fear others. I know to never ask for help. This belief is so common that to do otherwise is self destructive.

If you had gone to the police they would have blamed you.

Your husband resolved it because it wasn't "his" problem. He didn't "cause" it so could not be blamed. Because as far as everyone else is concerned, the reason you had that problem was because "you weren't trying"

it's not true.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-17 04:01:50+00:00
For me the iOS HN icon changes between the reddit and github, depending on which one I've been using the most on my phone recently. This happens on both iOS Safari and Kagi's Orion.

I thought that this was just a bug in iOS but based on the comments in this thread, it seems to be common not only across OSes but browser vendors too (I assume iOS Orion uses the same engine as Safari)
by tanin | 2025-11-17 04:03:19+00:00
Right now I tend to not use an external library unless the code would be large e.g. http server and/or the library is extremely popular.

Otherwise, writing it myself is much better. It's more customizable and often much smaller in size. This is because the library has to generalize, and it comes with bloats.

Using AI to help write is great because I should understand that anyway whether AI writes it or not or whether it's in an external library.

One example recently is that I built a virtual list myself. The code is much smaller and simpler compared to other popular libraries. But of course it's not as generalizable.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-17 04:03:25+00:00
> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.

This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.

> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.

This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.

Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.
by cookiengineer | 2025-11-17 04:04:44+00:00
> That is a factual statement,

I think most people, even most devs, don't actually know how crappy an MCP client is built, and that it's essentially an MITM approach and that the client sends the LLM on the other end a crappy pretext of what tools are mounted and how to call their methods in a JSON, and then tries to intelligently guess what response was a tool call.

And that intelligent guess is where it gets interesting for pentesting, because you cannot guess anything failsafe.
by mightyham | 2025-11-17 04:05:22+00:00
I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.
by majormajor | 2025-11-17 04:05:33+00:00
> Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress

I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.

I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.
by Animats | 2025-11-17 04:05:48+00:00
Solid state batteries seem to work, but the price of prototypes is very high. Samsung says they will soon be shipping earbuds and watches with solid state batteries, but the cost is too high even for phones. Xaomi showed an $800 phone battery. Mercedes has one prototype car with solid state batteries. Honda has one motorcycle. EHang has one flying car. Nobody seems to be past one-off demos.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-11-17 04:06:12+00:00
If you like this kind of thing and might ever possibly make something even remotely or partly similar of your own (because you like this kind of thing remember, meaning, a lot of the same people as the ones who would be interested in reading the blog in the first place, such as yourself and myself), technically you have to be careful that you never even looked at this without a license that declares explicitly what the terms are.

Without any declared license the default is full restrictive rights to the author/artist/creator.

That is how literally true it is to say "can't do anything with this" they can't even view it.

Let alone actually download a copy, let alone build it, let alone modify it, let alone redistribute their modified version...

I don't know what this "transactional" accusation is supposed to even mean, but the need for a license is completely reasonable and not asking for anything.

My own "jesus" question: Jesus do you do any sort of work in either software or hardware without knowing this?
by epakai | 2025-11-17 04:06:28+00:00
There is a Gotek floppy emulator hardware, about $50 USD.

A USB floppy drive will be cheaper, maybe $20.

I think the T1100 has standard 34-pin IDC connector, but Plus variant uses 26-pin so the Gotek will need an adapter (and probably doesn't fit cleanly).

https://archive.is/gFVNm (medium post, shows the adapter)

https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/issues/549 (somebody had issue with high 5V rail causing Gotek to not work)
by nearbuy | 2025-11-17 04:07:20+00:00
> The premise of censorship is that you're trying to prevent someone from telling other people something...

So you're not against individuals self-censoring for public safety, but you're against companies censoring their AIs for public safety. Are you only against AIs censoring information that's already publicly available, or are you against AIs censoring themselves when they know dangerous non-public information? Say the AI was the only thing to know the secret recipe for this WMD. Would this be like the scientist choosing not to tell everyone, or should the AI be designed to tell anyone who asks how to make a WMD?

> There are some principles that should always be upheld because the exceptions are so rare or ridiculous or purely hypothetical...

We're using hypotheticals to clarify the view you're trying to express, not because we think they will happen. And it seems you're expressing an that prohibiting AI censorship should be an absolute rule, even in the hypothetical case where not censoring AI has a 95% chance of wiping out humanity.

This argument seems confused, because you're trying to assert that prohibiting censorship is okay because these dangerous scenarios will never happen, but also that censorship should still be prohibited if such a scenario did happen. If you truly believe the latter, the first assertion is not actually a factor, since you're against censorship even if a dangerous scenario like the one above did happen. And if you truly believe the former, you should be able to say you're against censorship in what you consider to be plausible scenarios, but would be in favor if, hypothetically, there were a great enough danger. Then the discussion would be about whether there are realistic scenarios where lack of censorship is dangerous.
by instagraham | 2025-11-17 04:07:38+00:00
Sad but necessary headline (if you don't get attention, no one clicks) that kinda obscures what the report marks as a solution - and no, it's NOT refusing to cure patients.

I'm not even close to being a libertarian, but I find that people expect biotech companies to swallow billions of $ of loss as some sort of public good. Reports like these are an attempt to better harmonise their survival model. Companies need to make money to offset their losses, if not to profit. And while biotech companies can profit, these can very quickly be offset by the cost of a single clinical trial - IIRC it costs $1 billion to take any new drug from trial to completion now. Imagine discovering the next penicillin in your garage and then needing to raise $1 billion to cure people with it?

The analysts recommendations are fairly tame - companies should target cures for diseases with a lot of sufferers (a social good) + note that there are a LOT of genetic diseases that could benefit from a single-shot cure.

Again, not a sympathiser for "big pharma" if that even exists, but I wonder how sustainable a model this can be if companies can get their stock wiped out by a single bad trial. Pharma is notorious as a risky investment - which for some, might sound like a problem for rich people. But really, it then becomes a problem to fund experimental research, the kind that pays off.

I'm not looking to defend pharma companies here, only to frame a slightly more reasonable set of terms for this debate. I'm sure such reports have their harms - rare, incurable diseases will get less attention. But we need a solution that acknowledges the constraints, not one that merely wishes away the limits of capital and sustained long-term research.
by kamaal | 2025-11-17 04:09:02+00:00
This keeps coming up in the context of India as well. The Urban centers are so people dense you yearn to escape this life and live somewhere you can enjoy Mountain perspectives, lakes and tall trees. But here is the catch, I go motorcycling often. While you do feel nice riding out in the Sun, see stunning things. You begin to realise why it might not work.

There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?

I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.
by OneMorePerson | 2025-11-17 04:09:15+00:00
I think you and the person you are responding to are saying the same thing?

I don't think they literally meant public transit can't be profitable in any scenario, they meant that it takes a conscious choice to put money into transit with the intention of reaching some second benefit, which is a pretty good comparison to this topic too.

The public transit by itself is a money loser compared to alternatives, but by having it in place you get other benefits that make it worth it overall.
by jodrellblank | 2025-11-17 04:12:28+00:00
> "how should I feel if you just "agree" with me as a way to get me to stop arguing?"

Triumphant? Victorious? magnificent, successful, proud, powerful, insert any adjective which applies to a situation where someone wanted something, and then got it.

> "And it is very hard to see how carrying out a proof automatically is "not reasoning. The same clearly does not apply to Python, because its interpreter is not an automated theorem prover; it doesn't apply to javascript because its interpreter is not an automated theorem prover"

And that does not stop Python or Javascript from being used to find solutions to e.g. an Einstein Puzzle, something a human might call "a reasoning problem". This means Prolog 'doing reasoning' must not be the thing which solves the 'reasoning problem', something else must be doing that because non-reasoning systems can do it too.

If Prolog 'doing reasoning' meant it could solve 'reasoning problems' that no other programming language could, that would be a strong reason to use Prolog, but that is not something you or the other 'reasoning' commenters have claimed or offered examples of. Clearly the word 'reasoning' has different definitions in the different sentences and that is important here because I am responding to one and youall on the other.

If 'doing reasoning' is not the thing which makes it useful for 'solving reasoning problems' - if that neither compels one to use Prolog when working to 'solve a reasoning problem', nor convinces one to avoid other languages - if the definition does not influence one's decision in any way - it's very hard to see how it is the relevant version of 'reasoning' to focus on, and what point is trying to be made by this insistence on focusing on it, except academic one-upping.
by smingo | 2025-11-17 04:14:08+00:00
I got on very well with Van der Linden's Deep C Secrets. It's from 1994, so misses out on the newer versions, but aside from that it's aged well, IMHO.

And good news: it's been open sourced: https://freecomputerbooks.com/Expert-C-Programming-Deep-C-Se... and its well regarded on Hacker News https://hackernewsbooks.com/book/expert-c-programming-deep-c... .
by jcelerier | 2025-11-17 04:18:06+00:00
> LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP.

but the major user interfaces for operating LLMs do and that's what matters

> Not only do you not need MCP, but you should actively avoid using it.

> Stick with tried and proven API standards that are actually observable and secure and let your models/agents directly interact with those API endpoints.

so what's the proven and standard API I can use to interact with ableton live? blender? unity3d? photoshop?
by shalmanese | 2025-11-17 04:19:17+00:00
> And on the electricity side, forcing the US to actually build more power generating capacity and infrastructure is a good thing in my book.

Electricity use is fungible. Every extra TW-hr of marginal demand is one coal plant that is delayed an extra year from being mothballed, spewing one extra quantum of CO2 into the atmosphere, adding one increment to the greenhouse effect.
by s0rce | 2025-11-17 04:21:40+00:00
I don't know too much about the bacteria stuff. Regarding enamel, the native structure is very intricate and contributes to the properties. Most of the acellular chemical reminalization just deposits disorganized minerals on the teeth. It might be improved vs. doing nothing (I'm not sure but I do use fluoride reminalization from the dentist) but its not regenerating your enamel. Imagine just slapping some concrete or mortar all over a slowly decaying intricate brick wall vs. rebuilding the brick structure; you may mitigate complete collapse but you didn't fix the decaying brick wall.
by retrodaredevil | 2025-11-17 04:23:50+00:00
I agree with you, however convincing an entire team of devs to explicitly separate the interface of impure parts of code is very difficult.

If you introduce a mocking library to the test portion of the codebase, most developers will start to use it as a way to shortcut any refactoring they don't want to do. I think articles like this that try to explain how to better use mocks in tests are useful, although I wish they weren't necessary.
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-17 04:24:40+00:00
It was technically not my first. Really my first was around age 6 or 7 and it was a companion to my grandfather’s Pravetz 8D which had a listing of BASIC commands and I think like 20 or so listings of programs. His students had also programmed a few games that he had copies of which were cool. I ended up trying to modify them and writing some of my own but that’s how I got into this whole thing.

But K&R was the first book that I read that made me feel like I fully understood what was happening. Of course I was missing a lot of nuance a a bunch of abstraction layers that I learned about later but that book felt very self-contained. I read the first time it when I think I was 25 or 26 and at 39 I might want to do a refresher.
by don-bright | 2025-11-17 04:25:05+00:00
well the fact that you can wire the Rotary Switch to power and the thing physically rotates --- that's definitely Haptic Feedback that i dont ever recall seeing in a computer. lol.

that manual is wild too. entire section on games.

reminds me a lot of those old radioshack "build your own circuit" boards. the wires to components especially but also the manual, the way it just builds up dozens of examples from simple to complex, so if you really wanted to, a child could work their way through it slowly and understand everything.

looks like the inflation adjusted cost would be around 900 bucks today.
by fy20 | 2025-11-17 04:26:01+00:00
In Northern Europe they are already there. For the past few years my country (-25c during winter) has required all new houses to be heated by a green energy source - which rules out natural gas.

The price of a heat pump vs a gas boiler + gas network connection are basically the same, and running costs (for prices here) the heat pump is cheaper, especially if you combine it with solar PV.

However heat pumps only really work well when the house is already efficient. New homes here are wrapped with 30cm of foam insulation - you don't need much more than a hair dryer to heat them. If you have radiators that need 70c water flowing through them to barely reach a 18c room temperature, a heat pump won't work - which excludes 90% of UK houses.
by mattmaroon | 2025-11-17 04:26:08+00:00
The basic premise is kind of dumb because it’s irrelevant.

For one thing, the pharmaceutical industry isn’t one company, it’s hundreds. The example given (Gilead) is of one company that ate a market. They made $70 billion (and continuing) curing Hep C. They probably don’t lose sleep at night about the hundreds of billions in future revenue that will have prevented the other pharmaceutical companies from making when that disease is gone. This is one case where profit incentives align with human welfare.

Look at fisheries. They’re collapsing everywhere due to overfishing, the very definition of unsustainable business, because each individual fishermen’s incentive is to catch as much as they can.

For another, not all diseases are eliminated by the invention of a cure. Cures for cancer would lead to us living longer and getting more cancer. Cures for emphysema might cause more people to smoke and induce demand.
by llbbdd | 2025-11-17 04:26:37+00:00
Java writes to a bytecode spec that has failed to keep up with reality, to its detriment. Web development keeps up with an evolving spec pushed forward by compatibility with what users are actually using. This is "culture" only in the most distant, useless sense of the word. It is instead context, which welcomes it back into the world of just fucking developing software, no matter how grey-haired HN gets with rage while the world moves on.

EDIT: Obvious from the rest of your responses in this thread that this is trolling, leaving this up for posterity only
by happosai | 2025-11-17 04:26:54+00:00
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures

LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.

> (Sodium-ion) prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).

Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
by hnthrowaway0315 | 2025-11-17 04:28:19+00:00
Yeah something like this, would be nice if it actually feeds bad data that requires human to double confirm, too. Not something seriously wrong but something subtle, like changing a couple of letters in a name of a country, or randomize the National day. Once a lot of websites start to use it AI might actually get confused, I think? But humans never read these pages so should be largely fine -- unless they are reading AI summaries.
by daxfohl | 2025-11-17 04:29:05+00:00
Yeah if anything I'd say people imagine things to be worse than they were. At least in the American education system, there's Rome, then 1000 years of plagues and misery, then the Renaissance. I was shocked the first time I went to a preserved middle ages village in Europe, and it was a moment of realization that the middle ages weren't just dead people carted around on wheelbarrows.
by jmward01 | 2025-11-17 04:29:27+00:00
At some point we need actual consequences for sites that intentionally hide their tracking. It should be criminal. It is stalking and has real world consequences. Just because an exploit exists doesn't mean it should be used. That logic is like saying it is OK to break into a house because the lock on the door was weak. If we don't get real protections, at what point does it become justified to go offensive against sites that exploit things like this? If I found someone putting trackers on me with the intent to sell that information (harm me) I would defend myself. When am I allowed to do that in the digital world?

Quick side note here. I appreciate the research calling this out. We need to know the dangers out there to figure out how to protect ourselves, especially since governments don't seem to take this seriously.
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-11-17 04:30:00+00:00
Detailed perspective from someone with insight into Thiel's thinking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6LakOrqDL4&t=1s

That watched, imho Thiel is interested in the post-Straussian tension between "thinking in the open" (ideal science) and "focussed value creation" (which is best done behind closed doors)

AI as driven by premium mediocre Millennials combines the worst of both: lazy group-think promoted by stochastic parrots, expensive hardware weaponized by people who didn't earn that privilege

Capitalism or communism is a false dichotomy. You'd want any given pre-Jedi to access the Force, build their own lightsabers (in a cave), but not turn to the dark side.

GitHub serves Midichlorians. NVDA serves the Federation (and is one of the deadly sins to boot)