MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Isamu | 2025-11-30 21:17:40+00:00
Objection: first observe that much of morality is about “doing the right thing”, where the right thing is hard because it is opposed to selfishness.

Selfishness is the default and the natural impulse. You rarely have to convince people to take the selfish option, unless they are long indoctrinated to be selfless.

The objective reason to act morally is to live in a society where you have a chance to receive civility in return. Common morality, for example “don’t murder”, is about avoiding a continuous escalation of bad actions that are likely to come back to you.

It’s about having a functioning society, rather than a prison where you are constantly looking over your shoulder to avoid being shived by the brother of the guy you murdered.
by blackjack_ | 2025-11-30 21:17:55+00:00
I ripped the wifi / onstar and gps antennas out of my 2020 Chevy Bolt the day after I bought it. Took me a couple of hours since the access was awful, but that's one time pain. No issues since, and I have a phone I use to drive the head unit so there was no need for those antennas to even exist.
Tell HN: Taking a Time Capsule Through HN
by chistev | 2025-11-30 21:18:35+00:00
So I decided to use the HN “past” feature to go back to February 19, 2007, when the website was launched. My plan is to go through the front page of each day until I arrive at the present.

It’s a lot of work, and hopefully I don’t get bored, but I’m only checking out the front page of each day and reading the comments on interesting posts. It’s like taking a time capsule and seeing how technology and the forum have evolved since then.

I also have a ravenous appetite and just want to learn new things.

Wish me luck combing through all that content. Haha.
by tomhow | 2025-11-30 21:18:42+00:00
It's understandable to feel aggrieved about your career, but this comment seems like a broad-ranging speech about a whole lot of different things that have annoyed you over the years, only loosely relevant to the content of the article, and with multiple instances of flamebait woven through. Please avoid commenting like this on HN. We need comments to be on-topic and to avoid inflammatory rhetoric. We've asked you before to follow the guidelines. Please remind yourself of them and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here. We have to ban accounts that break the guidelines repeatedly. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by GeekyBear | 2025-11-30 21:18:55+00:00
Apple has not released a version of the SwiftUI framework for Android.

There are third party attempts to create something that lets SwiftUI code run on Android, just as Wine is third party software that allows you to run Win32 apps on Linux.

For example:

> Bringing Swift and SwiftUI to Android

https://skip.tools/blog/bringing-swift-to-android/
by evil-olive | 2025-11-30 21:19:06+00:00
> The nix language is also really unpalatable to me.

yeah, I wish I could give you some "it gets better" good news, but...

I've used NixOS as my daily driver for ~10 years, including the laptop I'm typing this on.

I love NixOS-the-OS, I love nixpkgs-the-ecosystem. but I still hate Nix-the-language.

it's like Perl and Haskell had a drunken hookup that produced a child. and then abandoned that child in the forest where it was raised by wolves and didn't have contact with another human until it was fully grown.

(to answer the inevitable replies, yes I understand functional programming in general, and yes I am aware that Guix exists)

for simple NixOS administration, you can get pretty far with treating configuration.nix as "just" a config file, rather than a program written in a Turing-complete functional language.

writing your own modules or flakes, or re-using flakes published by other people, is strictly optional. make friends with The Big Options Page [0] - anything you find there can be dropped into your configuration.nix without really needing to understand Nix-the-language.

0: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=25.11
by tanin | 2025-11-30 21:19:11+00:00
The fact that the student debt crisis is going on shows that colleges are not worth it. If it was, most would have been able to pay it back.

My impression is, unless you can get into a top X college, it isn't worth it.

This also depends on the cost of course. My university in Thailand back then was 1,000 USD per year, so that seems worth it, even tho it isn't in the top 20.
by burningChrome | 2025-11-30 21:19:45+00:00
>> the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources

And massive amounts of energy to run these new fangled AI data centers. Not sure if you lumped that in with "resources", but yes we're already seeing it:

A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-...
by ghaff | 2025-11-30 21:19:55+00:00
And even in most of those metros (OK. Leave aside Manhattan), not having a car tends to imply a lot of lifestyle choices in terms of activities, visiting friends outside of the metro, etc.

There are certainly people who are OK with living like they did in their urban school for a few years after graduation. But that's not a long-term solution for most people.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-11-30 21:20:18+00:00
BTW, the context is that one thing I teach is 3d modeling software, so the students are following my instructions to enter keyboard commands. It's usually Rhino3d where using the spacebar to repeat the last command is common.

> ... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?)

Just as a generalization, the dozen or so times this has happened this semester the pop-up is accompanied by an "ugh" then after the window pops up from the taskbar the student immediately clicks back into the program we're using. It seems like they're used to dealing with it already. I haven't seen any voice interaction.

I mean, the statistics say the students use AI plenty - they just seem annoyed by the interruption. Which I can agree with.

> They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.

Exactly.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-30 21:21:36+00:00
Probably you're not cynical enough. Israel is led by the same guy as last century, Saudi Arabia has been run by the same rich assholes since before my mother was born. The "ideology" involved is the same in both cases: wealthy, powerful old men are assholes. Microsoft is willing to turn a blind eye to them being assholes, to get $$$
by qcnguy | 2025-11-30 21:21:42+00:00
> My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private. I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies

Nobody claimed it isn't, but governments trying to pick winners by subsidizing startups is still the same old left wing politics. You don't see the USA spray grants around at the scale the EU does, do you? I'm pretty sure they don't directly subsidize startups at all.

BTW companies are routinely created in the EU specifically to access the 'free money' of grants. The act of offering subsidies creates companies. The profits - if any - will be taxed heavily. They are only partly private. We agree, though, that this is not as extreme as the 100% profit tax that occurs under nationalization.

> I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist.

The EU leadership class all demanded a female EU Commission president before Ursula vdL mysteriously failed upwards into the role without explanation:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/23/eu-leaders-cal...
by avhon1 | 2025-11-30 21:21:43+00:00
No doubt this is desirable. However, adding all the CSS features required to support cgit may have been a lot more work than editing cgit's CSS. It's an attempt at avoiding yak shaving; adding recursive sub-projects that balloon a project's scope of work far beyond the original plan.

Dillo is actively developed, and the project of "migrate away from github" is complete, so now other work can be started and completed (like adding the CSS features required to support mainline cgit).
by lmc | 2025-11-30 21:22:19+00:00
What you can get in a single image are 5.5cm wavelength microwave backscatter - this means surface materials can be differentiated by looking at texture differences at that scale. So - tarmac vs a ploughed field, for example. There's 2 polarizations as well, so you can identify e.g. vegetated areas also, which scatter the signal in a different way.

A single image from Sentinel-1 won't give a height map directly, but a pair can using interferometry (InSAR), as the phase of the backscattered signal is also measured. With that you can derive something about the terrain. It's not super accurate though for absolute height maps.

And yes the signals pass through cloud and it works at night.
by machomaster | 2025-11-30 21:22:22+00:00
Would have been better if instead of "that used to be their stance for a very long time" you would have written "that used to be their stance a very long time ago, not sure about currently". Additionally, it would have been nice for you to spend a couple of minutes and check the current official stance.

Like I said, I have been using Mint since 2014 and the upgrade was an official stance at least since then.

I think 3-5 years (let alone 10 years) is a long enough time to pass after which one should check before posting old information. Imagine someone talking about how few games Linux has (pre-Steam) or how impossible installation of Linux is (because one needs to order physical CDs).
by PantaloonFlames | 2025-11-30 21:22:45+00:00
If TOOL_X needs $DATA and that data is not available in context, nor from other tools, then the LLM will determine that it cannot use or invoke TOOL_X. It won't try.

About the TOOL_Z and TOOL_W scenario. It sounds like you're asking about the concept of a distributed unit-of-work which is not considered by MCP.
by shoo | 2025-11-30 21:23:27+00:00
Probably works OK for a small project with a close knit team of skilled contributors where there's some well defined structure and everyone has sufficient high level understanding of that structure to know what kinds of dependencies are or are not healthy to have.

But, unless you have some way of enforcing that access between different components happens through some kind of well defined interfaces, the codebase may end up very tightly coupled and expensive or impractical to evolve and change, if shared memory makes it easy for folks to add direct dependencies between data structures of different components that shouldn't be coupled.
by hypeatei | 2025-11-30 21:23:36+00:00
How is Hunter Biden writing a letter to an embassy the same as untraceable investments into Trump's meme coin? No deals or payments ever materialized from the Burisma letter or "the big guy" email... while Trump and his family have literally amassed billions (with a B) in profits and net worth from crypto grifting.

To compare these things to what is happening now is disingenuous. I believe you know that, but you choose loyalty to MAGA over any principles or ethics.
by firefoxd | 2025-11-30 21:23:47+00:00
AI reminds me of the time Google+ was being shoved down our throats. If you randomly clicked on more that 7 hyperlinks on the internet, you'd magically sign up for google plus.

Around that time, one of my employer's website had added google plus share buttons to all the links on the homepage. It wasn't a blog, but imagine a blog homepage with previews of the last 30 articles. Now each article had a google plus tag on it. I was called to help because the load time for the page had grown from seconds to a few minutes. For each article, they were adding a new script tag and a google plus dynamic tag.

It was fixed, but so much resources were wasted for something that eventually disappeared. Ai will probably not disappear, but I'm tired of the busy work around it.
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-30 21:23:59+00:00
> Not because I can’t do it, but because it’s a terrible idea.

To be clear, I'm not advocating it as a solution either. I'm just saying all the arguments being made for why this wouldn't work are solvable. Just like you've said there that it's doable.

> Some big corps install a root CA on everyone’s laptop and MITM all HTTP/S traffic.

I did actually consider this problem too but I've not seen this practice in a number of years now. Though that might be more luck on my part than a change in industry trends.

> this is likely to become incredibly limiting at some point and require a bunch of work to re-validate or re-implement.

I would imagine if you were forced into a position where you'd need to do this, you'd be able to address those underlying limitations when you come to the stage that you're re-implementing parts of the wider application.

> If you move to AWS, do ELBs support this?

Yes they do. I've actually had to solve similar problems quite a few times in AWS over the years when working on broadcast systems, and later, medical systems: UDP protocols, non-standard HTTP traffic, client certificates, etc. Usually, the answer is an NLB rather than ALB.

> You would need very good answers to why this is the only solution and is a mandatory feature.

Indeed
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-30 21:24:03+00:00
Theirs is certainly an impressive environment and I don’t mean to do Cloudflare’s achievements a disservice, but I strongly encourage engineers building these kinds of systems to treat their infrastructure as actual code, and avoid the temptation to dip in and out of wire text formats like JSON or YAML as much as possible.

The worst case scenario, in terms of engineering, is one piece of Python using Jinja templated YAML only for another piece of Python also written by you! to parse that output. Every time this happens it proves to be — as the article points out — a seized opportunity to get caught out by syntax errors, and a missed opportunity to have static analysis find errors (mypy et al., basically) before they happen at runtime, should all the logic had been done in pure Python without dipping in and out of structured text.

In the Cloudflare system the fundamental unit of action is configuration driving Python functions through gitops. My preferred version of these systems is pure python at the top emitting execve() calls, sh-scripts, and file writing over ssh or local transports, or in Dockerfiles, possibly with very small sh functions on the far side, but kept minimal in size and scope and with everything being purely declarative.

(It’s certainly an anti-pattern to return data back from the host to decide what to do next. The Python end is only allowed to declare that a package be installed, and the rest of the system ensures that is the case. People think this is limiting but the majority of these configuration systems, in my experience, hinge on 90% data structures to declare how the system out to be — IPAM arithmetic, building config files from lists of domains and accounts, processing key material etc. — and only 10% is the logic to install things much of which is very simple given a good base OS like Debian where many packages split their config into .d directories with helper scripts to enable things.)

PS: I wonder if the authors have had experience with Ansible? It was my own experience with that tool’s slowness and inflexibility that prompted a lot of my opinion forming in this area. Lots of good ideas have been borne of having first been exposed to Ansible and, alas, coming up against its limits.
by KronisLV | 2025-11-30 21:24:25+00:00
Depends on the 9-5 and the country you work in.

If you'd work for decades in the Baltics, let's not even assume just software development, in absolute terms you wouldn't make that much: the median salary is below 2k EUR per month, the taxes also make a dent, as do the expenses.

You can look at the mean disposable income figures for Latvia here, for example: https://data.stat.gov.lv/pxweb/en/OSP_PUB/START__POP__MI__MI...

Effectively, the savings rate for most of the households is pretty bad: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/economy/23.11.2023-latvia...

So with living relatively frugally and having 1000 EUR of disposable income per month, and a similarly optimistic savings rate of 5%, each month you'd be able to put away about 50 EUR, or 600 EUR per year. You can calculate how that might compound with investments but you're putting away 6k per decade.

Obviously it's better for software developers, but there might also be unexpected expenses along the way, and so on but the overall trajectory is clear - depending on the life circumstances, working a 9-5 will ensure you live pretty poorly and that might lead to higher risk tolerance for entrepreneurship (or crime, go figure).

As for those born (or living) in a prosperous country, good for you! The equation shifts there a whole bunch, as well as depending on class or other opportunities.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-30 21:24:31+00:00
There are nuances to the examples.

For example, I'm not a big fan of blockchain. In fact, I think crypto is just 99% scam.

But big data led to machine learning and LLMS right? Cloud led to cheaper software with faster deploy times right? In fact, cloud also means many browser based apps replacing old Windows apps.

None of these were fads. They are still tremendously useful today.
by buu700 | 2025-11-30 21:24:44+00:00
You're attacking a straw man. I didn't say I supported Harvey Weinstein, and I don't have any strong opinions on J.K. Rowling.

Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture. You can't really doxx a celebrity, and trying to have them censored or financially ruined is a much larger hurdle than for ordinary people.

I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise. I welcome all constructive criticism. You're just inventing a motive and arbitrarily assigning it to a phrase you don't like.

On a meta level, this whole subthread proves my original point. Whether or not you actually support cancel culture, what you're attacking right now is vocabulary. It sounds a lot like how certain people online react to the term "cisgender". Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.
by tzs | 2025-11-30 21:24:54+00:00
For it to be entrapment typically the defendant has to show that law enforcement induced them to commit a crime they were not otherwise predisposed to commit.

Inducement generally means more than merely providing an opportunity. The officers have to try to persuade you to commit a crime.

Purposefully leaving valuables in an unlocked car and prosecuting anyone who took them would probably not be entrapment because normal law abiding people would not take those valuables. The police gave them an opportunity, but the criminal intent originated with the people who took the items.
by MinimalAction | 2025-11-30 21:25:52+00:00
This might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies. Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from parasitic enterprises.

For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-30 21:25:52+00:00
I'm extremely grateful for this. My most deeply held secret is that I wish I could do this for a living - digitally modeling weird/beautiful objects/instruments and work on that forever haha. (And maybe make pedals out of them, I don't know)

If you don't mind humoring me (I'm quite the novice in this field), if I automated the recording of "all" possible positions for a spring (say I had a motor positioned in a way that would let me pull the spring in any polar direction), would that make modeling potentially easier?

There might be a "train an AI, here's 1000 recordings" angle, but I'm not necessarily interested in/asking about that.

Just strictly for modeling, would it help the R&D phase to have a lot of high sample rate recordings? Thanks a lot!

P.S. Also, if you have a good intro to DSP class/book, I'd love to hear it. I know about a few, but a recc is always appreciated
by Animats | 2025-11-30 21:26:18+00:00
Yes. For example, this story about Ukraine [1] is credited to WNYT as first, but the story itself credits the Associated Press. This problem is worth solving, because it's something search engines should be doing.

[1] https://wnyt.com/ap-top-news/rubio-says-us-ukraine-talks-on-...
by simondotau | 2025-11-30 21:27:09+00:00
I don’t like running games from the early 2000s outside of a sandbox of some description. If you disagree, it's because we don't have sandboxes which don't suck. Ideally, running old software in a sandbox on a modern OS should be borderline transparent — not like installing XP in a virtual machine.

While I understand the appeal of software longevity, and I think it's a noble and worthy pursuit, I also think there is an under-appreciated benefit in having unmaintained software less likely to function on modern operating systems. Especially right now, where the concept of serious personal computer security for normal consumers is arguably less than two decades old.
by shmerl | 2025-11-30 21:27:40+00:00
Approach of using all kind of non upstream or unfinished stuff to sell it as better performance is actually counter productive. It makes new users who are unaware of it, being unable to report bugs upstream which basically creates an isolation from the wider Linux community.

It appears to be done for the sake of hyping themselves as superior, but it's causing problems. I totally wouldn't recommend anything with such approach to new users especially.
by leoedin | 2025-11-30 21:28:05+00:00
Synthetic aperture radar is basically building a bitmap of radar reflectivity. So what you get looks a lot like a photo. You can end up with very non-photo artifacts though - blown out pixels caused by corner reflectors, bright things can result in ghost copies in multiple places and if there’s other radar operating in the same frequency bands it can end up on the picture.

The core idea is that you send out pulses as you pass over the ground and then record the echoes. You can create an image by - for each pixel in the image - working out the response you would expect to receive back and correlating that with the actual responses you saw. That gives you a reflectivity value. You can do it in multiple polarisation to better distinguish things.
by m463 | 2025-11-30 21:28:12+00:00
I tried this once.

I got a tesla home charger and it had a unnecessary wifi AP that kept showing up in my house. So I figured, I would stop this.

Opened it up, and disconnected the wifi antenna mmcx connector.

Nope, seemed when unplugged, it would switch to an onboard antenna for the wifi module.

so I reconnected a dummy load antenna to the wifi module.

and it still used the onboard antenna.

at that point, I gave up.

I think there might have been a possibility of downgrading the firmware to an older version that could disable wifi, but I didn't try to find it.

I believe this kind of thing happens with onboard cellular, wifi and bt. They are more resilient to degraded or disconnected antennas than you think.