MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by triceratops | 2025-11-21 19:10:29+00:00
> in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets

Japan had dispersed industrial production widely by that point, including into workshops in people's homes. The Allies were already doing regular bombing.

Japan outright refused to surrender. They had a faction that tried a coup to prevent the surrender even after the nuclear bombings. Regular bombs would surely not have been enough. Strategic bombing doesn't work.[1]

What's your next idea?

I read the article you posted with alternatives. Delaying the second bomb - good idea, but it still means one was dropped. Allowing the Soviets to invade - it's hard to say having Japan divided for 40-odd years like Germany ended up would've been a better outcome, but idk perhaps.

1. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
by exasperaited | 2025-11-21 19:11:10+00:00
Full-size RPi isn't Arduino's competition, surely (except for the newest Uno Q, which is a novel take on a Pi-type SBC).

There are meaningful disadvantages to replacing an Arduino with even the Pi Zero.

Yeah, makers will move to Raspberry Pi products for the ecosystem and documentation, but it will be to the RP2040/2350 products.

But also the ESP32 series, particularly Adafruit's kit.
by jawilson2 | 2025-11-21 19:11:37+00:00
> C++ exceptions have huge overhead when actually thrown

Which is why exceptions should never really be used for control flow. In our code, an exception basically means "the program is closing imminently, you should probably clean up and leave things in a sensible state if needed."

Agree with everything else mostly. C/C++ being a "thin layer on top of hardware" was sort of true 20? 30? years ago.
by immibis | 2025-11-21 19:11:47+00:00
Okay? There's a lot of chips you can make that aren't the cutting edge. You don't need a 4090 to do AI, as evidenced by all the AI we did before the 4090. You definitely don't need a (random Intel chip) 14900HX to do general-purpose computing, as evidenced by all the general-purpose computing we did before the 14900HX.
by ksdnjweusdnkl21 | 2025-11-21 19:11:55+00:00
I think the main problem is getting a market leading position and then enshittification. It takes time for the competition to eat the lunch, and while that is happening users are getting screwed over. And the competition is going to do the exact same since they are burning VC money to grow with undercutting, so any legitimate business with no intention to rugpull cannot compete since they have neither the users nor the cheapest prices.
by deltarholamda | 2025-11-21 19:12:12+00:00
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.

For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.

Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
by ht-syseng | 2025-11-21 19:12:53+00:00
I just looked at the code, the

ast: https://github.com/Janiczek/fawk/pull/2/files#diff-b531ba932...

module has 167 lines and the

interpreter module: https://github.com/Janiczek/fawk/pull/2/files#diff-a96536fc3...

has 691 lines. I expect it would work, as FAWK seems to be a very simple language. I'm currently working on a similar project with a different language, and the equivalent AST module is around 20,000 lines and only partially implemented according to the standard. I have tried to use LLMs without any luck. I think in addition to the language size, something they currently fail at seems to be, for lack of a better description, "understanding the propagation of changes across a complex codebase where the combinatoric space of behavioral effects of any given change is massive". When I ask Claude to help in the codebase I'm working in, it starts making edits and going down paths I know are dead ends, and I end up having to spend way more time explaining why things wouldn't work to it, than if I had just implemented it myself...

We seem to be moving in the right direction, but I think absent a fundamental change in model architecture we're going to end up with models that consume gigawatts to do what a brain can do for 20 watts. Maybe a metaphorical pointer to the underlying issue, whatever it is, is that if a human sits down and works on a problem for 10 hours, they will be fundamentally closer to having solved the problem (deeper understanding of the problem space), whereas if you throw 10 hours worth of human or LLM generated context into an LLM and ask it to work on the problem, it will perform significantly worse than if it had no context, as context rot (sparse training data for the "area" of the latent space associated with the prior sequence of tokens) will degrade its performance. The exception would be like, when the prior context is documentation for how to solve the problem, in which case the LLM would perform better, but also the problem was already solved. I mention that case because I imagine it would be easy to game a benchmark that intends to test this, without actually solving the underlying problem of building a system that can dynamically create arbitrary novel representations of the world around it and use those to make predictions and solve problems.
by QuercusMax | 2025-11-21 19:12:55+00:00
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.

This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.

Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-11-21 19:12:56+00:00
> I'm now on a team that uses Rust, where knowing that the program compiles and passes all tests gives us a lot of confidence in the update.

That's been my experience as well. In addition, the ecosystem largely holds to semver, which means a non-major upgrade tends to be painless, and conversely, if there's a major upgrade, you know not to put it off for too long because it'll involve some degree of migration.
by fidotron | 2025-11-21 19:13:03+00:00
> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.

Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.

Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
by logical_proof | 2025-11-21 19:13:12+00:00
Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.
by yannyu | 2025-11-21 19:13:35+00:00
I don't think it's brief at all. Animals do this experimentation as well, but clearly in different ways. The scientific method is a formalized version of this idea, but even the first human who cooked meat or used a stick as a weapon had a falsifiable hypothesis, even if it wasn't something they could express or explain. And the consequences of testing the hypothesis were something that affected the way they acted from there on out.
by pugworthy | 2025-11-21 19:13:49+00:00
In exploring my state (Oregon), I'm seeing an interesting pattern to where they are frequently located. Specifically, at home improvement store parking lots.

And in most cases, the ones at home improvement stores are the only ones in the city. Salem (the state capital) only has them at Lowes. Eugene is an exception with many cameras (including Home Depot and Lowe's).

I'd be interested in when these cameras were placed. If recent, I'd wonder about an ICE/immigration response.

Just zooming around the map, here's a handful of citys I've seen...

Lowe's: Albany, Salem, McMinville, Vancouver WA, Fairview, Eugene, Bend, Redmond, Medford

Home Depot: Sherwood, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Cedar Mill (Beaverton), Tigard, Vancouver WA, Portland (multiple), Gresham, Oregon City

* Edit * Ah here's an article about this: https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from...
Show HN: ScrollPods – Scroll hands-free on your Mac with AirPods
by tippa123 | 2025-11-21 19:14:27+00:00
I’ve been trying to read PDFs and articles while rocking my baby boy to sleep in front of our iMac. Not the easiest combination, and yes, you could argue I shouldn’t multitask, but you know how it is. I couldn’t help myself and ended up building an app to make it easier. It’s called ScrollPods. You tilt your head gently up or down while wearing AirPods, and your Mac scrolls intuitively. It works in web browsers, PDFs, documents, social media, spreadsheets, basically anywhere you normally scroll up and down. I am still surprised at how intuitive it feels.

Key Points:

- App size is 3 MB - Uses minimal CPU (<5 percent) and battery when active - Low RAM usage (around 50–70 MB) - Works offline, fully on device - System-wide scrolling in any app - Supports AirPods 3rd gen+, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and Beats Fit Pro† - Settings page for fine-tuning to your personal needs - Supports English, French and German - Automatic 7 day free trial with no sign-up, no login, no email - If you like it you buy it for $ 4.99

* When running in the background with just the menu bar icon, this was for a M1 iMac. † I think more Beats models might work, but Apple doesn’t publish a full compatibility list. If you’re unsure, just try it out during the 7 day trial. The app will tell you right away if your headphones are unsupported.
by sansseriff | 2025-11-21 19:14:29+00:00
I remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.

Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?

Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-11-21 19:15:17+00:00
I mean its too big to fail. There are armies of lobbyist psyopping every congress person into thinking those data centers are the only thing preventing China from taking over the world. And the hyperscalers are racing to a moral hazard where they are "too big to fail"

The governments of the world know they can hijack all original thoughts, control education and destroy the power of a lot of labour. They won't ever let llms fail. They want society completely reliant on them. Just like they wouldn't let a tool like social media fail, despite it being terrible for society. It has too many benefits for government to control their populations.
by InexSquirrel | 2025-11-21 19:16:14+00:00
So I don't want to be rude, and am saying this purely as feedback since you asked and I detect a bit frustation - the wealthfolio site linked in the post presents a lot better than your one linked in your github.

Nominally they appear to be very similar like you say (open source, locally hosted etc), but the presentation does make a big difference for at-a-glance engagement. The wealthfolio is just... very pleasant to look at. The site largely focuses on what the value to the reader is, versus 'how do I get it running'.

Just my thoughts. I know it's incredibly frustrating when you see a copy/version of something you've made, but it gets more attention. But honestly could also just be the mood of the day. There may just be nothing to read into here.
by lapcat | 2025-11-21 19:16:25+00:00
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.

One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.

I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.

Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
by kakacik | 2025-11-21 19:16:38+00:00
Not really, went through the last post and its an utter pile of shit to be very polite. Basically russian propaganda, seen 1000 times.

It ignores that people should have their right to self-determination, don't want to live under russian oppression. As somebody whose family lives were ruined by exactly same oppression of exactly same russia (err soviet union but we all know who set the absolute tone of that 'union' and once possible everybody else run the fuck away as quickly as possible) I can fully understand anybody who wants to have basic freedom and some prospect of future for their children - russia takes that away, they subjugate, oppress, erase whole ethnicities, whoever sticks out and their close ones is dealt with brutally.

Not worth the electrical energy used to display that text. Unless you enjoy russian propaganda, then all is good.
by rossdavidh | 2025-11-21 19:16:41+00:00
My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.

If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
by basisword | 2025-11-21 19:16:55+00:00
The anti-immigration parties have made immigration the cause of all our problems when it's the cause of practically none of them. Now the government are wasting time appeasing idiots who believe everything they read on X instead of actually focussing the real problems in the country. Anyone that believes Nigel Farage can come up with a functional plan to solve a single fucking problem is in for a surprise if he's ever in power. Unfortunately it shouldn't be a surprise because the last time they backed him it was a disaster too.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-21 19:17:22+00:00
What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?

With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).
by susam | 2025-11-21 19:17:39+00:00
> There are several mentions of "closed-form expression" without precisely defining what that means, only "finite combinations of basic operations".

There is no universal definition of 'closed-form expression'. But there are some basic operations and functions that are broadly accepted, and they are spelled out directly after the 'finite combinations' phrase you quoted from the post. Quoting the remainder of that sentence here:

'[...] finite combinations of basic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, integer exponents and roots with integer index as well as functions such as exponentials, logarithms and trigonometric functions.'
by shagie | 2025-11-21 19:18:26+00:00
Perfect correctness is what you'd expect from a computer. I could write a program that solved it - and that would be an indication of my creativity as a human solving something that I haven't encountered before. Incidentally, that's also how it approached solving the block problem (by writing a program).

If you ask me the goat, wolf, cabbage problem I'd be able to recite (as an xkcd fan https://xkcd.com/1134/ and https://xkcd.com/2348/ and the exploration of what else it could do). However, if someone hasn't seen the problem before it could be a useful tool at seeing how they approach solving it.

The question of how does it tackle a new problem is one of creativity and exploration of thought in a new (untrained) domain.

A possible claim of "well, it's been trained on the meta-problem of how to solve problems that weren't in its training set" would get a side eye.

For the "ball" being the answer... consider the second response to https://chatgpt.com/share/6920b9e2-764c-8011-a14a-012e97573f... (make sure you click on the "Thought for 1m 5s" to get the internal process)
by phoehne | 2025-11-21 19:18:31+00:00
From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful. That hero-loop programming is not what anyone should ever do. And experienced developers can get better results from something like FreeRTOS (or if you're a masochist Zephyr). And ESP32s are cheaper, as are RP2040s. ...

But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.

For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.
by wtallis | 2025-11-21 19:18:37+00:00
Ok, so having clarified the naming, it still looks like you're wrong about which chips are getting driver support upstreamed, because the Snapdragon X Plus parts are (with maybe one exception, IIRC) literally the same chip as the Snapdragon X Elite parts. Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
by oddish-tv | 2025-11-21 19:18:42+00:00
A deep dive into what it really takes to build dependable software on top of inherently unpredictable LLMs. Covers architectural patterns, failure modes, evaluation pitfalls, hallucination-resistant design, guardrails, system decomposition, and how to treat LLMs as probabilistic components rather than “smart APIs.” Focused on engineering practices rather than hype, with practical frameworks for building stable, observable, testable LLM-based systems.
by billy99k | 2025-11-21 19:18:43+00:00
"In an ideal world, we should be challenging both"

Not really. Calling food poison and then complaining that poor people can't afford it implies that you support poor people eating poison and or eating the food.

The first complaint implies that they shouldn't be eating it at all and result is that I just can't take the second complaint seriously.

It's just a way to shit on big corporations without having to take responsibility.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-21 19:18:51+00:00
>Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.

And when "encrypted radio beacons" are placed everywhere that Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) exist, that changes things exactly how -- instead of identifying cars (and, by extension, their owners) by their license plates, you do so with these hypothetical "beacons."

How is that any different than what folks are doing today and why would that be less invasive for governments and corporations to collect en masse to track folks wherever they go?
by missedthecue | 2025-11-21 19:18:58+00:00
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-21 19:19:20+00:00
My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality.

Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing anything it's not already. Or, you can believe everything and everyone else has no consciousness, and you won't mis-predict anything (unless you assume people don't react to being called unconscious...).

Is AI conscious? I believe "yes", but in a different way than humans, and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong. Is AI smart? Yes in some ways: chess algorithms are smart in some ways, AI is smarter in more, and in many ways AI is still dumber than most humans. How does that relate to morality? Morality is a feeling, so when an AI makes me feel bad for it I'll try to help it, and when an AI makes a significant amount of people feel bad for it there will be significant support for it.