MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-19 05:27:48+00:00
I think trying to divide social media into "incentivized" and "non-incentivized" places either takes a lot more rigor than anyone here is doing or is just futile altogether. Even Mastodon is filled with ragebait. I also don't think trying to build an identity around the style of social media you use, the way you're trying to do in your posting, is conducive to good social habits. Do you think creating an us vs them even if it's your your own sense of self is helpful?
by meta-level | 2025-11-19 05:28:57+00:00
The reason why I pre-ordered a Time 2 for a money you can easily get better hardware and software for was the naive implication there is hardware meant to be hacked and community around that hardware with freedom in mind I want to be part of.

The reason why I cancel my pre-order now is I a clear (to me) sign that we have a "it's only software, I'm building the the important part here" situation -the same reason why I won't by a boox product until they change their mind.

The moment I'll come back will be the one when a significant part of the money you spend on a Pebble will automatically go into the software ecosystem (which makes Pebble for $200+ interesting in the first place) and it's easy to see how this money is spent.

I'm also 'scraping' content for my personal projects when I just need the data, but Eric is building a business here, and there had been a valid and clearly communicated suspicion about Eric acting like "goodbye fools, and thanks for the fish". And he agreed not to do so and he lied. How can I know I'm not buying $225 brick supported only by a single person who ditched the community?
by diath | 2025-11-19 05:29:39+00:00
> You misunderstand what Rust’s guarantees are.

Well, no, most Rust programmers misunderstand what the guarantees are because they keep parroting this quote. Obviously the language does not protect you from logic errors, so saying "if it compiles, it works" is disingenuous, when really what they mean is "if it compiles, it's probably free of memory errors".
by andriamanitra | 2025-11-19 05:31:13+00:00
I gave it a go in C (I wanted to do assembly but couldn't be arsed to write string to int and int to string conversions). [1] The trickiest part was figuring out how to terminate the program. My first attempt invoked nasal demons through dividing by zero, but I then realized I could intentionally cause a segfault with high probability (which is much better, right?). One could argue that my `fizz` and `buzz` variables are still "disguised booleans", but at least the generated assembly contains no branching or cmov instructions (aside from the ones inside libc functions like atoi and sprintf).

[1] https://gist.github.com/Andriamanitra/5c20f367dc4570dd5c8068...
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-19 05:31:46+00:00
I had to buy a new low-beam a couple of weeks ago at O'Reilly. There were four different brands/models of the same bulb, three next to each other with packages advertising "bright", "brighter", "brightest", or somesuch. To the side past a little divider was the fourth "basic" model. I took that to the counter and the guy warned me that it wasn't bright. I told him I don't like them bright. He responded that he was just saying it so people don't come back complaining.
by john_minsk | 2025-11-19 05:32:22+00:00
Really nice. Thanks for self promo! Will definitely keep an eye on your project.

What is the ideal final state you want to achieve? Do you agree that data capture is the main issue here?

My latest experiments:

2 days ago I started to capture screenshots of my mac every 5 seconds and later use it to approximately tell me what I'm doing. - a lot of issues with this approach.

Yesterday I setup ActivityWatch. It captures a lot of stuff from the get go. TBD if it can capture background YouTube video playing in addition to the active tab.

The main value I want to extract is to be able to see what was the plan vs what actually happened. And if I can make what actually happens closer to the plan - this is WIN.

But capturing what you are thinking of, what you are working on etc. - quite challenging and often happens offline, on the phone, another computer, messenger, email etc.

My quick take: companies were closing their data for decades and now it will bite them in their back - AI needs as full of a context as possible across devices, services and programs, to make AI as powerful as it can be and current architecture works against it. May be one day AI is so powerful that it will ETL all this data for itself, but for now it is painful to try to build something like this.
by bawolff | 2025-11-19 05:32:48+00:00
Do you have a source for that, when i googled it came up closer to $200/MWh for new york, but that was from older sources. The only thing i saw approaching this price point was if you were somewhere like las vegas.

I also think you would need more than 24 hours battery. You have to prepare for freak weather events that reduce system capacity.

I also wonder what time horizon we are talking. solar and batteries presumably have to be replaced more often than nuclear.
by asa400 | 2025-11-19 05:33:14+00:00
> It seems like it was caught too deep in the system.

Agreed, that's also my takeaway.

I don't see the problem being "lazy programmers shouldn't have called .unwrap()". That's reductive. This is a complex system and complex system failures aren't monocausal.

The function in question could have returned a smarter error rather than panicking, but what then? An invariant was violated, and maybe this system, at this layer, isn't equipped to take any reasonable action in response to that invariant violation and dying _is_ the correct thing to do.

But maybe it could take smarter action. Maybe it could be restarted into a known good state. Maybe this service could be supervised by another system that would have propagated its failure back to the source of the problem, alerting operators that a file was being generated in such a way that violated consumer invariants. Basically, I'm describing a more Erlang model of failure.

Regardless, a system like this should be able to tolerate (or at least correctly propagate) a panic in response to an invariant violation.
by thatoneengineer | 2025-11-19 05:35:29+00:00
The unwrap: not great, but understandable. Better to silently run with a partial config while paging oncall on some other channel, but that's a lot of engineering for a case that apparently is supposed to be "can't happen".

The lack of canary: cause for concern, but I more or less believe Cloudflare when they say this is unavoidable given the use case. Good reason to be extra careful though, which in some ways they weren't.

The slowness to root cause: sheer bad luck, with the status page down and Azure's DDoS yesterday all over the news.

The broken SQL: this is the one that I'd be up in arms about if I worked for Cloudflare. For a system with the power to roll out config to ~all of prod at once while bypassing a lot of the usual change tracking, having this escape testing and review is a major miss.
by ArcHound | 2025-11-19 05:36:16+00:00
Well, I have one well-documented exception to this rule: Secret detection. You really don't want to push secrets to your repository, especially if it's hosted as public on GitHub. Those damned attackers can find the secrets in minutes after you've pushed them so you really don't have the time to catch and rotate this (unless you're able to properly attribute and rotate them from the CI... in which case, I'd love to see it).
by tomhow | 2025-11-19 05:36:48+00:00
> Mention Tesla and completely inaccurate thread will be started. I suspect this is to train LLMs into believing this is true

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines specifically ask us not to allege or insinuate shilling or brigading, and speculating that people are deliberately making things up on HN to train LLMs is a real leap. Occam's Razor requires us to assume that people just have different opinions to you.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969535 and marked it off topic.
by lutusp | 2025-11-19 05:37:19+00:00
> However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.

That's not misleading. Real three-body orbital systems show this same behavior. Consider that such a system must obey energy conservation, so only a few extreme edge cases lose one of its members permanently (not impossible, just unlikely).

Ironically, because computer simulators are based on numerical DE solvers, they sometimes show outcomes that a real orbital system wouldn't/couldn't.
by ssivark | 2025-11-19 05:37:37+00:00
Just a thought... would it make sense to maintain a govt/central registry of copyright owners, and have an "official" means of contacting them, on which they have an SLA to respond (say 3 months) which might be part of the ground rules for maintaining rights.

From a macro societal perspective, would this evolve "copyright" into a more balanced (value generating) deal for all of society?
by Nevermark | 2025-11-19 05:37:54+00:00
> I don’t see where I reference neurons, care to quote me rather than adding misleading citation looking (1) strings to your text?

A brain operates at the level of neurons, not individual atoms.

The vast majority of atoms in the brain are there to do non-cognitive things.

The tiny fraction actually doing neural things are insanely redundant.

You can simulate a 1 kg ball dropping from 100 meters, to time its collision with the Earth, by simulating all its atoms. But the net mass of the ball is what matters. Not the individual atom masses and movements.

Likewise, you can simulate a brain by simulating all its atoms. But the net movements of transmitters are what matter, not all those individual atomic movements.

Neurons and transistors both operate on net signals precisely so they can be insensitive to individual atomic behaviors. If they were sensitive to individual atoms, they would be noise generators instead of reliable information processors.

And because they are designed to be insensitive to individual atomic behaviors, we don't have to model them at the atomic level.

(Which is impossible anyway. The quantum field equations for even two interacting atoms are complex. There is no visible future in which the atoms of a single neuron could all be simulated accurately, much less a brain. Even then, because of quantum noise, the atomic model wouldn't be any more accurate.)

--

My apologies on being so blunt at the beginning of this conversation. That was unnecessary.
by Flamehaven | 2025-11-19 05:40:20+00:00
We just released Flamehaven FileSearch v1.2.0, and this update focuses heavily on security, scalability, and multi-worker production deployments. The main change is that FileSearch is no longer a “public API”—it now includes a complete authentication and permissions system suitable for enterprise environments.

Key changes:

API Authentication & Authorization All protected endpoints now require Bearer tokens. API keys support fine-grained permissions (upload/search/stores/delete), per-key rate limits, auditing, and SHA256 hashing (plain keys are never stored).

Admin Dashboard A self-contained HTML/JS dashboard for managing API keys, inspecting request statistics, and viewing usage distribution. No external dependencies.

Batch Search API Added a high-throughput endpoint that processes 1–100 queries in either sequential or parallel mode. Includes per-query isolation, priority ordering, and detailed timing metrics.

Redis Cache Backend Optional distributed cache for multi-worker setups. Provides <10ms lookup latency, automatic fallback to local LRU, and ~40–60% reduction in LLM calls.

Deployment Support Includes working examples for Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes (ConfigMap, Secret, Deployment). Meant to be runnable out of the box.

Performance highlights:

Cache hit: <10ms

Cache miss (LLM call): ~0.5–3s

Batch Search (10 queries): ~2–5s

GitHub: https://github.com/flamehaven01/Flamehaven-Filesearch

If anyone has feedback on security design, API ergonomics, or deployment structure, I’d really appreciate it. We’re planning v1.2.1 (admin auth improvements, Redis UI) and v1.3.0 (key rotation + OAuth2/OIDC), so suggestions are welcome.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-19 05:41:53+00:00
This tweet thread invokes genuine despair in me. Do we really have to outsource even our tweets to LLMs? Really? I mean, I get spambots and the like tweeting mass-produced slop. But what compels a former engineer of the company in question to offer LLM-generated "insight" to the outage? Why? For what purpose?

* For clarity, I am aware that the original tweets are written in Chinese, and they still have the stench of LLM writing all over them; it's not just the translation provided in the above comment.
by Agentlien | 2025-11-19 05:42:16+00:00
The more I hear about other developers' work, the more varied it seems. I've had a few different roles, from one programmer in a huge org to lead programmer in a small team, with a few stints of technical expert in-between. For each the kind of work I do most has varied a lot, but it's never been mostly about "clarifying requirements". As a grunt worker I mostly just wrote and tested code. As a lead I spent most time mentoring, reviewing code, or in meetings. These days I spend most of my time debugging issues and staring at graphics debugger captures.
by Animats | 2025-11-19 05:42:53+00:00
When the Bell System broke up, the old guys wrote a 3-volume technical history of the Bell System.[1] So all that is well documented.

The history of automatic telephony in the Bell System is roughly:

- Step by step switches. 1920s Very reliable in terms of failure, but about 1% misdirected or failed calls. Totally distributed. You could remove any switch, and all it would do is reduce the capacity of the system slightly. Too much hardware per line.

- Panel. 1930s. Scaled better, to large-city central offices. Less hardware per line. Beginnings of common control. Too complex mechanically. Lots of driveshafts, motors, and clutches.

- Crossbar. 1940s. #5 crossbar was a big dumb switch fabric controlled by a distributed set of microservices, all built from relays. Most elegant architecture. All reliable wire relays, no more motors and gears. If you have to design high-reliability systems, is worth knowing how #5 crossbar worked.

- 1ESS - first US electronic switching. 1960s Two mainframe computers (one spare) controlling a big dumb switch fabric. Worked, but clunky.

- 5ESS - good US electronic switching. Two or more minicomputers controlling a big dumb switch fabric. Very good.

The Museum of Communications in Seattle has step by step, panel, and crossbar systems all working and interconnected.

In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever fully down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster, and in one case a fire in the cable plant. That record has not been maintained in the computer era. It is worth understanding why.

[1] https://archive.org/details/bellsystem_HistoryOfEngineeringA...
by wrs | 2025-11-19 05:43:33+00:00
I was in a working RCS chat with two Android users. One of them switched to iOS and it’s been sheer chaos ever since. The conversation splits and rejoins, messages randomly choose which copy to appear in, my view is full of little daily notes that I added and removed the switcher from the conversation (of course I didn’t), old titles for the group are resurrected and then disappear…and the Mac client has a few of its own quirky ways of destroying the same chat.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-11-19 05:45:49+00:00
To this day I still think Shakespeare is the most overrated buffoon ever to put words on paper, probably because I was forced to read so much of his work in school.

I realize I'm probably wrong about my assessment, but I've tried to watch performances of his plays as an adult and the outcome is always the same: His words just sound like random noise to my brain. They bounce off.

And yet I love Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian is one of my favorite novels. Go figure.
by verbify | 2025-11-19 05:49:44+00:00
I've done a brief Google, and the UK does have one of the hardest driving tests in the world. This matches with anecdotal comparisons with international friends. https://www.zuto.com/blog/driving-tests-around-the-world/

In the UK, driving is on the left, while in much of the world people drive on the right. Arguably it's not so much that the UK is better, but that people should take a test to validate that they can handle the switch. But this would also mean UK drivers should do the same in other countries where they drive on the right.
by gblargg | 2025-11-19 05:50:07+00:00
> One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.

On this topic, I got a CO₂ meter fairly recently and was shocked how quickly it spikes with a couple of people in a car with the windows up and on recirculate. Easily over 2000 after a few minutes. I have to remind myself regularly when it's really hot or cold outside to keep the vent setting on fresh air.
by nocoiner | 2025-11-19 05:50:10+00:00
I very much doubt it would be more expensive, even for whatever the going rate is for a spray-and-pray license scheme. In a half hour phone call, a decent lawyer can learn the facts and assess this fact pattern and say “this is a fishing expedition, don’t respond, call me back when they send a demand letter (they won’t) or file a lawsuit (they won’t do that either).”
by Klaster_1 | 2025-11-19 05:50:40+00:00
Not OP, but I've been using FreeCAD for hobby projects for 8 years and even though I usually do achieve the results I want, the "monitor punching UX issues" are absolutely real. I'd love for FreeCAD to succeed the way Blender did, but the project either lacks people with UX expertise or funds to sponsor such people.
by levocardia | 2025-11-19 05:51:29+00:00
A log scale is actually appropriate in this context from a first-principles perspective. Per scaling laws (and also general behavior of epsilon-probability of failure multiplied N times), you would generally expect more vs. less effective techniques to have multiplicatively greater or fewer steps until failure, not additively greater/fewer. Figure 1 is comical, but the appendix figure is the more scientifically appropriate one.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-19 05:53:23+00:00
I have sympathy with the technical and debugging plight but genuinely why are people still dealing with this, SMS/RCS is to the US what fax machines are to Japan. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Any bog standard IP based messenger has had none of these issues and all of the features that RCS is supposed to fix for a decade.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-11-19 05:53:57+00:00
1. Coding with LLMs seems to be all about context management. Getting the LLM to deal with the minimum amount of code needed to fix the problem or build the feature, carefully managing token limits and artificially resetting the session when needed so the context handover is managed, all that. Just pointing an LLM at a large code base and expecting good things doesn't work.

2. I've found the same with Gemini; I can rarely get it to actually do useful things. I have tried many times, but it just underperforms compared to the other mainstream LLMs. Other people have different experiences, though, so I suspect I'm holding it wrong.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-19 05:55:00+00:00
Sure, I could see that. I just wanted to clarify that mastodon.social is an instance, not the instance. It’s not a special blessed server. If you turn on your own new server tomorrow, other servers will treat it identically to that one.

Also, moderation policies vary wildly. The instance I run moderates much differently than mastodon.social, which tends to get a lot of criticism for being seen as chronically under-moderated, if anything.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-11-19 05:56:19+00:00
Yes, there is a lack of people with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a mass manufacturing business of parts everyone can get in China for a tenth of the cost.

There is not a lack of mechanics who can assemble Fords on a factory line from pre-built components with instructions. FFS.

Yes, America has a serious problem. No, the Ford CEO is not actually pointing it out. He's fucking lying so he can justify using what amounts to slave labor in other countries while also touting "patriotism" branding while also refusing to do even the tiniest possible to alleviate the problem via training.
by webworker | 2025-11-19 05:56:19+00:00
I truly do wonder about the amount of tech debt that must be inside of the Messages app on MacOS and iOS. It's got to be massive.

I also wonder what they're using (protocol) under the hood that lags behind other chat clients like Telegram and Signal and WhatsApp. It works, but I wonder how/if it'll continue to scale and stay competitive.
by Stevvo | 2025-11-19 05:56:30+00:00
"Analyses of soil from the holes found ancient pollens of maize (corn), one of the most important staple crops in the Andes, and reeds that have traditionally been used over millennia for making baskets. These unexpected findings importantly indicate that people deposited plants in the holes, using woven baskets and/or bundles for transport."

That's a stretch. All it indicates to me is that these people ate and they had woven baskets.
by kcplate | 2025-11-19 05:56:37+00:00
> They're still our immigration laws, we should fight to change them

It’s good advice, but a big hill to climb. The Dem politicians walk a fine line here. The influx of illegal immigrants is truly unpopular, not just with folks on the right, but also many in the moderate left and independents. They dems realize it’s a hot potato which is why you get a lot of immigration rhetoric to try and satisfy the anger, but don’t really get any effort to change any laws even when they held both branches and the presidency through 2021-2022.

Prior to 2016, both parties were pretty aligned on it, only when Trump made it a core issue did the parties start to diverge on the topic.
by mindslight | 2025-11-19 05:57:11+00:00
> we could pretty much end all this escalation between blue states and the feds by just agreeing to enforce the laws on the books

This is incredibly naive. You've got an academic point in the context of rewinding the clock back twenty years, sure. But as to the current situation?

Federal law-breaking forces are attacking citizens for simply exercising their first amendment rights to protest. Federal law-breaking forces are abducting people based on skin color and the declaration of a shoddy facial-recognition "app". Federal law-breaking forces are terrorizing entire apartment buildings by ransacking them in the middle of the night. Federal law-breaking forces are aggressively attacking people to seize control of situations that would otherwise be closer to even-party civil disputes (eg the woman who was violently kidnapped out of her own car because the jackboots crashed into her). Federal law-breaking forces are hiding their faces to avoid having their crimes documented and possibly facing justice.

This is all a much stronger form of wanton illegality - anti-Constitutional, organized, criminal, and aggressively violent transgressions - than people being here illegally. This is not terribly surprising, because all signs point to the immigration issue being nothing more than a pretext for unleashing fascist paramilitary gangs on American civil society - specifically fundamentalist red state militias hopped up on social media delusions and pathetic revenge fantasies, ultimately serving nothing beyond naked autocratic power.

So if you are earnestly concerned about the rule of law (and I agree we should be!), you should be focusing your current ire on those federal law-breaking forces. And no amount of "perhaps we did something to deserve this" navel gazing changes this.