MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dosbod | 2025-11-30 09:11:28+00:00
The military have developed other ways to bring down satellites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater

Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.

Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
by mejutoco | 2025-11-30 09:11:49+00:00
I think this is one of these cases where talking in abstract terms does not help people agree.

What I am hearing is if you remove context (and timing, lets say it is part of context) then there is no good or bad. But who said to remove context? Arent we saying then there is good and bad depending on context?

Many people, including myself, would agree in the abstract, while at the same time some situations being very clear once down to a real example.

It reminds me of people claiming pain is an illusion or facts not existing (very edgy), until someone slaps them in the face to prove "I did slap you, that is a fact". I think that is reality, and specific examples are easier.

P.S. I would add values into the context.
by SpaceNugget | 2025-11-30 09:11:57+00:00
I'm amazed that so many people here completely miss the point. Clippy being annoying/horrible UX or not has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the reasoning for it being compared to modern software trends.

The point is that microsoft got _nothing_ regardless if you were using or not using clippy. So clippy being bad could only be because they sucked at making something good for their users. It was not because they chose maliciously to make the user experience bad for an ulterior motive like collecting and selling user data or pumping up telemetry numbers for a promotion. They genuinely thought clippy would be a net benefit to their users in some way even though they were clearly wrong.

The point Louis is trying to highlight is the difference in intent, not in execution so that is why clippy is being used as the moral backdrop to compare modern software against. Saying clippy itself is "user hostile UX" is besides the point, and either shows a lack of comprehension or intentional feigned ignorance so that you can complain about a badly thought out feature you didn't like that hasn't existed for over 20 years.
by charlie-83 | 2025-11-30 09:12:17+00:00
I think that this could be marketed a lot better. The website has no information at all and it's not possible to work out what the project is from it. The github readme does contain a lot more information but it's still not presented very well. The "Overview" section needs to clearly explain what the project is rather than just stating the motivation for the project. I was able to determine what the project is only by reading the whole readme and piecing it together.

The membership is unclear also: it says "try for free" which makes me suspect I will only be able to use it for limited time before needing to pay, but you only need to pay to support the project and early access. Seems like a lot of potential users will be lost because they get the impression it's a subscription service.
by simonask | 2025-11-30 09:13:04+00:00
Zig does not approach, and does not claim to approach, Rust's level of safety. These are completely different ballparks, and Zig would have to pivot monumentally for that to happen. Zig's selling point is about being a lean-and-mean C competitor, not a Rust replacement.

Golang is a different thing altogether (garbage collected), but they still somehow managed to have safety issues.
by SSLy | 2025-11-30 09:13:34+00:00
zigbook edited a 3rd party comment to say "I’m autistic and sperging out over stuff on the internet that doesn’t actually matter. Don’t mind me."

Just your run off the mill AI grifter.

EDIT: https://lobste.rs/s/pbn3zy/zigbook_learn_zig_programming_lan...

"Quick research - author's actual profile is https://github.com/zk-evm, and he's a potential scammer from crypto spaces, who also happens to be running fake GitHub Organisation of the Cursor editor, along with related BuyMeACoffee claiming it being official page of the "Cursor AI Editor"."
by anon7725 | 2025-11-30 09:13:58+00:00
> I expect actual writing of code "by hand" to be the same sort of activity as doing integrals by hand - something you may do either to advance the state of the art, or recreationally, but not something you would try to do "in anger" when faced with a looming project deadline.

This doesn’t seem like a good example. People who engineer systems that rely on integrals still know what an integral is. They might not be doing it manually, but it’s still part of the tower of knowledge that supports whatever work they are doing now. Say you are modeling some physical system in Matlab - you know what an integral is, how it connects with the higher level work that you’re doing, etc.

An example from programming: you know what process isolation is, and how memory is allocated, etc. You’re not explicitly working with that when you create a new python list that ends up on the heap, but it’s part of your tower of knowledge. If there’s a need, you can shake off the cobwebs and climb back down the tower a bit to figure something out.

So here’s my contention: LLMs make it optional to have the tower of knowledge that is required today. Some people seem to be very productive with agentic coding tools today - because they already have the tower. We are in a liminal state that allows for this, since we all came up in the before time, struggling to get things to compile, scratching our heads at core dumps, etc.

What happens when you no longer need to have a mental model of what you’re doing? The hard problems in comp sci and software engineering are no less hard after the advent of LLMs.
by ahartmetz | 2025-11-30 09:14:36+00:00
That is not what the protocol is like at all. Wayland can't do certain things not because they are difficult to do, but because Wayland was initially pathologically minimalist (I say that as somebody who generally likes minimalism) and the approval process for extensions has only improved slowly over time. It turns out that there's much more than blitting rectangles to a (single) screen and routing input events to a desktop environment.

If all the expected stuff was there, Sway (chosen because it's not tied to a desktop environmen) could be your X server equivalent.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-30 09:14:51+00:00
In 1910, Britain was the long-reigning global superpower, and ruled nearly a quarter of the world's population. Its Pound Sterling was the world's reserve currency, global finance was based in London, etc., etc.

By 1946, other countries were deciding whether they cared to bail has-been Britain out of bankruptcy. There were still plenty of Brits who remembered the "good old days", and wanted their country firmly headed back in that direction. But they seemed a minority, even before you discounted for how many of them were too old, or too exhausted, or too incompetent, or too corrupt to contribute much to such an effort.

Not all that much has changed in the 8 decades since 1946. I noticed that the article contrasts Britain's current leaders with the Conservative Margaret Thatcher - Prime Minister in the 1980's. Is that because mentioning more-recent Conservative governments would make Labour and Green look good by comparison?

Overall, recent-decades British politics strikes me as squabbling over what the band should be playing on the Titanic. Yes, as the article notes, the voters will decide. But my impression, from both right- and left-wing British news outlets, is that every substantial party is shite for Britain's future.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-30 09:16:24+00:00
There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things.

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.

2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.

3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.

5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.

In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.
by seec | 2025-11-30 09:16:35+00:00
That's not exactly true. Funnily enough, you are extremely dependent on your sociological background. If you come from a poor family and do very well, you'll get a full ride for sure. But if you do well but come from a well-off family that refuse to pay for your education, you are fucked. It's only university attendance that is (mostly) free. you still need to finance housing and life costs. Since most good universities are in expensive cities and student loans are not much of a thing, it is an extremely selective process that targets both class standing (from a money standpoint) and parental implication.

There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years. Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).
by roenxi | 2025-11-30 09:17:28+00:00
If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys. And the "various geopolitical reasons", on examination, includes possible outcomes like the US being pummelled through the stone age and out the other side, or more mild ones like New York being flattened. It isn't really much of an option in any foreseeable scenario where their goose isn't already being cooked.

So yes they are scary, but they aren't that scary relatively speaking. We've left the brief era where the US could exert military supremacy over the globe and it is ambiguous who has the "best" military among the major powers [0]. Militarys are generally a tool for self-destruction anyway so the term is a bit ambiguous, most of the big empires fall because they get too enamoured with military solutions over economic and diplomatic excellence.

[0] Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
by piaste | 2025-11-30 09:18:43+00:00
There's nothing any UniversalBlue image tweaks that you couldn't tweak yourself. It's just adding/removing packages, adding/removing drivers, a few configuration scripts, and a bunch of tweaks to fix well-known gaming-related issues.

But the point is that, if you want to game on Linux, you probably want to perform exactly or almost exactly the same tweaks that Bazzite already does. So why bother doing them yourself?

It's not even a linux-from-scratch situation where you'd do it for the sake of learning. Googling "my controller doesn't work right", finding some discussion threads, and copy-pasting a bunch of fixes isn't particularly interesting.
by lxgr | 2025-11-30 09:20:04+00:00
> "the plane will not travel because it requires a software update", which does not inspire confidence.

It actually inspires a lot of confidence to people who can at least think economically, if not technically:

Grounding thousands of planes is very expensive (passengers get cash for that in at least the EU, and sometimes more than the ticket cost!), so doing it both shows that it’s probably a serious issue and it’s being taken seriously.
by zzq1015 | 2025-11-30 09:20:27+00:00
PSA: When posting an RFC or (especially) an RFC-draft, please use the IETF Datatracker URL.

For example, this one is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-met...

The best way to view an RFC, IMHO, is to use the "htmlized" format: you can view and compare different versions, view errata for a formal RFC, and go back to Datatracker at any time.

Also, the Datatracker URL is version-insensitive, so unlike the pure HTML format, it will not be stuck on draft-14 forever.
by Underphil | 2025-11-30 09:20:49+00:00
Same feeling here. Realistically, what is this distro doing that couldn't just be done with a quick bash script on whatever the current 'new user distro' is?

The wording is weird too : "Comes with Lutris preinstalled!". Would Windows users switch to a different hypothetical "Windows Distro" that was optimised for gaming?

None of this makes any sense to me.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-11-30 09:21:13+00:00
I get mine (2000IU & K2) from Amazon where 400 tablets are between £8 and £10.

That is before any bulk discounts are considered.

VitD as a preventative would probably be distributed through the GP system rather than the hospital system, and so be procured locally and subject to the Drug Tariff system.

I think it would be great for this to be procured centrally for great discounts and dispensed locally exempt from our tariff guides and prescription charges. After all, the NHS has great clout as it employs 1.5M people and we spend > £300B on healthcare. But the NHS changes very slowly, mostly because it’s the ultimate political football and suggesting any change means the usual suspects screaming that you’re trying to destroy it. We’ll get to preventative medicine when we’ve tried everything else.
by brainless | 2025-11-30 09:21:37+00:00
Thanks for sharing.

I did not know of this and I am looking for simple ways to isolate processes for multiple reasons. I am building a coding agent, https://github.com/brainless/nocodo, that runs (headless) on a Linux instance. Generated code is immediately available for demo.

I am new to isolation and not looking for a container based approach. Isolation from a security standpoint but I do not know enough. This approach looks like a great start for me.
by schiffern | 2025-11-30 09:21:53+00:00
>"A City on Mars" (2024)

I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too.

https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...
by thot_experiment | 2025-11-30 09:22:10+00:00
anyone have a tl;dr for me on what the best way to get the video comprehension stuff going is? i use qwen-30b-vl all the time locally as my goto model because it's just so insanely fast, curious to mess with the video stuff, the vision comprehension works great and i use it for OCR and classification all the time
by imtringued | 2025-11-30 09:22:33+00:00
No it has more to do with rigid gender roles. Women expect men to be strong, independent and (sexually) dominant. Being dominated by another man is a sign of weakness. A lot of women also do not leave any room for nuance. There is zero tolerance. Anything with a penis is bad, even transwomen. You could be bisexual with a strong preference for women, but you will still be put in the "100% gay exclusively for men" box.

Homophobia arises from seeing homosexuality as a threat to your heterosexuality. The LGBT people are coming after your coveted "straight" status and try to infect you with the "gay" virus which makes it harder to attract a woman.

Basically it's the male equivalent of being "deflowered".
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-30 09:24:07+00:00
Do you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges?

I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without.

EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
by stack_framer | 2025-11-30 09:24:39+00:00
> You seriously dropped out because you didn't like one class?

No. The university added other "studies" courses to my requirements that contributed to my decision. After taking gender studies, I knew I could not tolerate the other "studies" courses the university was suddenly demanding—which were not required when I first started.

> Which university

The University of Utah

> which year was this

2014

> what was your major

Computer Science

> what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?

I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.

> And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?

One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.

In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.

My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me over these elementary facts. They made it quite clear that the only acceptable narrative was that, because he "identifies" as a woman, he is a woman.

This is just one example of the kind of "thinking" that went on in this course. I don't like it when I'm told what I must think. As I said before, that's indoctrination, not education.

> I have a hard time believing this story.

Why? It's all true.
by Vishon | 2025-11-30 09:26:24+00:00
Yeah, LeetCode interviews are their own weird universe. Even smart people get wrecked until they realize you have to treat it like an exam. Most failures aren’t about ability, it’s just pattern recall under pressure. I’ve passed some rounds I had no business passing just because I stayed calm. StealthCoder helped me a bit there since it keeps me from blanking during the actual interview.
by lgleason | 2025-11-30 09:26:39+00:00
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.

When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
by tovej | 2025-11-30 09:27:20+00:00
The middle class is something in between the capitalist class and the working class, it's badly defined.

If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working.

I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income.

Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
by timhh | 2025-11-30 09:28:23+00:00
The absolute prefix requirements (similar to Nix, and I guess for the same reason) mean this probably can't be used where it would be most useful - on machines that you don't control.

I wonder if anyone will ever make something like this but where all the software has to be relocatable (no hard-coded absolute paths).

I guess a lot of software would be excluded or need patching, but I think it would be useful and maybe it would encourage Linux developers to stop bloody hard-coding absolute paths like it's still the 90s!
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-30 09:29:07+00:00
> You could say the same thing about enterprise-oriented distributions like CentOS that actual companies relied on and had to migrate away from. Some of those arrangements are more fragile than they look. What happens if Canonical is acquired? What happens if IBM spins off Red Hat?

In 2009 the CentOS maintainers was AWOL and nobody had any idea where they went and had no access. This caused issues with releases obviously.

There been quite a number of times where people have died, just got bored, had health issues and a project just stops and sometimes people don't access to things.

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Proj...

> Bazzite is arguably even easier to migrate away from because it’s immutable. You’re not supposed to be making major changes to layered packages, you’re mostly installing things with Flatpak, Homebrew, throwing stuff in your home directory, or leveraging distrobox. In other words, my entire backup/restore strategy is to backup my entire home directory, my brewfile, and listing out all the flatpaks I’ve installed (might be handled by the home directory backup anyway? I have to do a restore exercise sometime soon)

That sounds all horribly complicated.

I have a dotfiles, 5 bash scripts and a ~/bin folder for anything outside of package manager. I migrated my laptop to Arch recently from Debian and fixing the scripts was literally copy the script, and do a find and replace (I literally put pacman instead of apt install and most of it worked).

It not that much of a big deal to move between distros.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-30 09:29:53+00:00
I would love to, but iOS support doesn't seem possible - there's a trick [0] to make a hacky haptic vibration in javascript, but it doesn't work with the kinds of events here of drag&release. And (lame excuse, but) I don't have an Android phone to test the haptics to make sure they're semi realistic.

This might have to wait for the native app versions ha.

[0] https://progressier.com/pwa-capabilities/vibration-api
by atmanactive | 2025-11-30 09:30:05+00:00
Ahh, this last video finally fully explained the whole thing. The concept is great. It is very similar to wireless presenter devices where one can disable the air mouse functionality ad-hoc leaving the mouse pointer in place for subsequent clicks. Of course, your approach takes this further for this particular use case. Beautiful. I'm sold. :-) Will be ordering one from Etsy shortly. Then, we can discuss the details. Thanks. Cheers!
by hfsdhkdshksdhk | 2025-11-30 09:30:10+00:00
Funnily enough there is a parasitic vine in Australian rain forests that kills its host and then thrives.

It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside.

Eventually you have a hollow tree.
by dandinu | 2025-11-30 09:30:55+00:00
there is a full technical write-up in the Github repo in "WINDOWS_XP.md": https://github.com/dandinu/llama.cpp/blob/master/WINDOWS_XP....

Sorry for failing to mention that.

Link to vcredist thread: https://github.com/LegacyUpdate/LegacyUpdate/issues/352