MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djoldman | 2025-11-10 17:47:24+00:00
The reasonably best examples of commuter trains are far superior to those of commuter airplanes as long as we are not talking about travel over or around significant bodies of water or long distances.

Trains carry much more weight, are more fuel efficient, are safer, generally experience fewer delays and cancelations, and door-to-door are faster for shorter trips (<450 miles).

Safety: since 1964, the Shinkansen has carried over 10 billion passengers without a single passenger fatality from a crash or derailment.

Speed: for trips < 450 miles, trains win because of security, ATC, taxiing, etc.

The majority of travel is not over water. It may be that trains' other advantages are preferable even for longer trips where a train would be slower.
by aseipp | 2025-11-10 17:47:32+00:00
It's just Ubuntu with precanned Nvidia software, otherwise it's a "normal" UEFI + ACPI booting machine, just like any x86 desktop. People have already installed NixOS and Fedora 43, and you can even go ahead and then install CUDA and it will work, too. (You might be able to forgo the nvidia modules and run upstream Mesa+NVK, even.) It's very different from Jetson and much more like a normal x86 desktop.

The kernel is patched (and maintained by Canonical, not Nvidia) but the patches hanging off their 6.17-next branch didn't look outrageous to me. The main hitch right now is that upstream doesn't have a Realtek r8127 driver for the ethernet controller. There were also some mediatek-related patches that were probably relevant as they designed the CPU die.

Overall it feels close to full upstream support (to be clear: you CAN boot this system with a fully upstream kernel, today). And booting with UEFI means you can just use the nvidia patches on $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO and reboot, no need to fiddle with or inject the proper device trees or whatever.
by rgblambda | 2025-11-10 17:47:59+00:00
Here's every vote on the Online Safety Bill: https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons?SearchText=Online+...

Labour & Lib Dems may have voted against the exact text presented to the house on a number of occasions, but it's well documented that they not only supported the general principle of the bill but wanted it to go further.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-09-12/debates/818...

>I agree with the Minister that this is a groundbreaking Bill, but we must be clear that there are still gaps.

- Debbie Abrahams (Labour)
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-10 17:48:34+00:00
I asked Lee about that great photo and he wrote:

Prototype for the Automatic Photoelectric Keratometer, (US 4,345,437 - 1966, to Westheimer and Felsenstein). Taken by myself in the lab of Gerald Westheimer in 1965.

Vacuum tube electronics of my design controlling an oscilloscope pattern focused on a sumulated eyeball with two photomultiplier tubes catching the glint (specular) reflection and reversing the sweep direction.

A poor idea which went nowhere but it got a patent for the professor who generously included me as co-inventor and coauthor of a paper.

UC Berkeley School of Optometry — I was a Lab Helper at $2.03/hour. Prof. Westheimer later moved to Physiology. He was 99 in 2023 when we last met.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-10 17:48:56+00:00
In the not-too-distant past I was handling many thousands of DB-backed requests per hour in a Python app running plain PostgreSQL.

You can get really, really far with a decent machine if you mind the bottlenecks. Getting into swap? Add RAM. Blocked by IO? Throw in some more NVMe. Any reasonable CPU can process a lot more data than it's popular to think.
by matt-p | 2025-11-10 17:49:09+00:00
"Mobile doesn't scale in cities" is the exact reason they need 6Ghz (because higher frequencies enable much higher density of cells, reducing terminals per cell). 6Ghz will penetrate buildings terribly, I agree, but it's honestly just not that simple, for example it's now becoming really common for carriers to be doing in building deployments; shopping centres, sports stadiums, the transit network (e.g 4g in the subway) hospitals, the list goes on. Secondly by lifting terminals off of say 800Mhz or 1.8Ghz band and into 6Ghz outside where you can, you free up capacity on those lower frequency bands that do penetrate buildings or reach weird areas like the middle of a park that has tree cover (or whatever).
by eichin | 2025-11-10 17:49:10+00:00
Yeah, HP's cc was "not technically a C compiler" - the only supported use of it was to compile a couple of stub files and link the kernel, on kernel configuration changes. (This led to a bunch of work in making gcc bootstrap from cc, even on top of HP/UX weird ABI, something involving function pointers being longer than other pointers IIRC?)
by sai18 | 2025-11-10 17:49:11+00:00
Given how far back these systems go, the real challenge isn’t just the code or the lack of documentation, but the tribal knowledge baked into them. A lot of the critical logic lives in conventions, naming patterns, and unwritten rules that only long-time SMEs understand.

Using AI and a few different modalities of information that exist about these systems (existing code, docs, AI-driven interviews, and workflow capture), we can triangulate and extract that tribal knowledge out.
by jandrese | 2025-11-10 17:49:33+00:00
It depends on the details. Last time I flew I used the airline's app to get the ticket which were then immediately loaded into wallet and read via NFC at the gate.

But this is Ryanair so it's probably going to do some stupid QR thing that will be super touchy and be a struggle to work on at least half of the devices. Bonus points if the app refuses to start if it can't make a live internet connection back to some cursed cloud service so the people waiting in line who accidentally let their phone go to sleep find they can't get it to show the ticket in the dead zone at the gate.
by jdsully | 2025-11-10 17:49:50+00:00
AWS is degrading on all fronts. If your a large scale business you almost certainly hit stock-outs during peak periods - the elasticity is a lie. If you are a mid scale its high prices and complexity, and finally if your just a beginner good friggin luck getting anything done now that they gutted free support and put near useless quotas on anything usable for modern AI development.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-11-10 17:49:53+00:00
1. I think the fact that you refer to "some external window manager tool", whereas you know the name tmux off the top of your head illustrates that first point.

2. Again, it's not about the possible capabilities. Objectively, GUI programs contain a superset of possible TUI programs (since your GUI program could be a terminal emulator). It's about it being a shibboleth: I can be pretty confident that the TUI application will have a keyboard-based workflow, and I can be pretty confident that the TUI application will be targeting a technical user base, because those are the only people building and using TUI tools. The "lowest common denominator" in that sentence was referring to the users not the systems.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-10 17:50:07+00:00
To quote Lee: "To change the rules - change the tools!"

http://www.FelsenSigns.com

He's reissued the classic Homebrew Computer Club t-shirts he sold at the final meeting, and also posters!

https://felsensigns.com/engineers-and-programmers-with-attit...

>The cartoon shows a caricature of Chares Proteus Steinmetz – a hero of mine, posing for a photograph at the inauguration of one of his big generators (he taught American engineers how to calculate with alternating current starting around 1890). He was a German immigrant hunchback dwarf and was never admitted to “polite society” of the day, but he changed to world.

>The front of the shirt shows him in front of the massive, throbbing machine – hand on the switch, dressed in formal wear. The rear of the shirt shows the rear view, with Steinmetz’ fingers crossed as the photographer takes his shot.
by drob518 | 2025-11-10 17:50:28+00:00
Without knowing what the cause of those scaling problems were (CPU, memory, IOPS, etc.), I’ll have to take your word for it. But having worked at several startups, I can say that it’s a common disease that engineers start to optimize for the “we’re going to have a jillion customers” case long before they even have one customer, and that adds a whole bunch of complexity, cost, and schedule to the development, which increases burn and stands between the company and its cash-flow positive date. In fact, if it forces another round of funding, it can wash out the original employees or even kill the company. On the other hand, it’s easy to raise money when you have customers and are near cash flow positive. You can do a HUGE amount with a modern server with 100+ cores, TB of RAM, etc. IOPS are the one thing which hasn’t scaled quite as well. So yea, I’m being a bit hyperbolic in saying you need to be a FANG to consider it, but I think the main point still stands: most applications, if well-written, can be run well on today’s hardware and scaled up if they need it while eliminating most of the complexity associated with scaling out. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule of thumb.
by cmsj | 2025-11-10 17:50:49+00:00
FYI, this is not about a law, this is about a Technical Capability Notice. This is a thing the UK government is able to issue to a specific company or companies, that require them to implement technical measures to enable data collection. This applies only to the company/ies that the notice is issued to.

That could be one of them, some of them or all of them, but it's not really a law that automatically applies to all of them.
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-10 17:51:41+00:00
>The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations

This makes absolutely no sense when you spend two seconds to think about the supply and demand.

Case in point, college is free in Europe and that has led to the exact problem you fear: oversupply of college grads and devaluation of degrees "pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations".

In my European college town it's easier to find a ML developer than a skilled HVAC tech or EV mechanic.
by photonicDog | 2025-11-10 17:51:43+00:00
Location: East Sussex, United Kingdom Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: C# (.NET Core and Framework, ASP.NET, MVC, xUnit + Moq (+ SpecFlow)), Python (numpy, scipy, networkx), C++, Azure DevOps, Git, SVN, SQL, Linux, and a quick learner for everything else Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UfD_7O3ugJTeSrrj0pfmLhs1Agy5ZEDJ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=118022576785156601180&rtpof=true&sd=true Email: (check CV; trying to avoid web crawlers) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-ww/

Hi, I'm Jackie, I'm a professional software engineer with over 5 years' experience in industry. I mainly specialise in C# .NET (usually on back-end and testing but can work across the stack), but also have experience in Python and C++. I've worked extensively with legacy code and on new solutions, on every stage of development from design to development to testing to CI/CD and everything in-between. I've worked both in-house and for clients, alone and with a team, on small customisations and large production-scale solutions. I also have a BSc in Computer Science with Software Engineering as my academic experience. I like learning new things and being challenged, so don't hold out.

If you want a reliable, no nonsense software engineer who can handle whatever you throw at them, I'm who you're looking for.
by hulitu | 2025-11-10 17:51:54+00:00
> As one MS Director put it out of frustration: "We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers. That's it."

This is true since at least Win 95. One usually needed to wait until SP2 to get a resemblance of quality from Microsoft.

Now, since Vista, they got rid of ServicePacks. This says a lot about their quality culture.
by tyre | 2025-11-10 17:52:42+00:00
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum filed an amicus brief supporting Happy the elephant’s rights as a legal person. She has a wonderful essay about this and personhood more broadly[0]

It seems like there are judges in the US who are sympathetic to the argument that elephants are clearly persons with consciousness, desires, suffering, etc. but that the ramifications of declaring them as such would be too chaotic.

One day.

[0]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/what-we-owe-our-...
by vablings | 2025-11-10 17:53:12+00:00
Giving someone a sequence of keypresses as instructions rather than a series of obscure buttons and submenus to navigate is so much better. The VI/VIM cultists have been wise to this for over 30 years yet we insist on creating terrible mini-pc's running bloated windows to hark up a hodge-podge of WinForms or whatever proprietary corpo-slop is most friendly for the non-software engineer engineering manager and project lead
by api | 2025-11-10 17:53:14+00:00
IMHO Apple is actually being honest here. They cannot legally operate in the UK without providing a back door, so they are dropping the claim of ADP in the UK. This is letting the user know what's up, and might also help inspire a backlash against these laws. Apple needs to make it clear that they are being forced by UK law to degrade service.

Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.

I'm sure there's services out there that will secretly comply and still claim to be secure.

There's also a lot of companies that will simply abandon security features like ADP or never develop them. Apple is going to the trouble of disabling it only for UK people not everyone, instead of just deprecating it. The latter would be less expensive and expose them to less legal risk.

If you really want security in the UK now you have to roll your own and do the encryption yourself. Honestly that's always the best security, since you can never be 100% sure a closed cloud or software vendor isn't messing with you.
by jimbokun | 2025-11-10 17:53:15+00:00
> Breaking off pieces of the code into microservices that can run on a new Spring boot

I was with you until this part.

The correct answer is:

> Breaking off pieces of the code into microservices that no longer have Spring Boot as a dependency so you are not pulling in unknown numbers of unneeded dependencies that could have an unexpected impact on your application at surprising times, and forced version upgrades for security patches that also make major semantic breaking changes.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-11-10 17:53:20+00:00
This is an organizational/tech leadership problem. Good technical leadership will put a kibosh on working on hypotheticals, because what you don't do is as important as what you do.

Good programmers pride themselves on striking compromises and shipping a smaller thing sooner and they love iterating. The ones that are working on hypotheticals unchecked are not bad--just nobody has educated them.
by dang | 2025-11-10 17:53:22+00:00
One past related thread. Any others?

The Asus Ascent GX10 a Nvidia GB10 Mini PC with 128GB of Memory and 200GbE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425935 - March 2025 (50 comments)

Edit: added via wmf's comment below:

"DGX Spark has only half the advertised performance" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45739844 - Oct 2025 (24 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark: When benchmark numbers meet production reality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - Oct 2025 (117 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark and Apple Mac Studio = 4x Faster LLM Inference with EXO 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611912 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586776 - Oct 2025 (111 comments)

NVIDIA DGX Spark In-Depth Review: A New Standard for Local AI Inference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575127 - Oct 2025 (93 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008434 - Aug 2025 (207 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43409281 - March 2025 (10 comments)
by Theodores | 2025-11-10 17:53:30+00:00
In my opinion, shipbuilding is different to other industries that the UK was known for.

The UK was once an 'island of coal in a sea of fish'. But we used up the easy-to-reach coal and ate all of the fish. Not only that, we also used up all of the easy to access iron ore.

I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, however, how would shipbuilding make sense in the UK once the raw materials have to be shipped in from the lowest wage mines on the planet?

It would make more sense to build the ships nearer to the raw materials. Yes I know the Koreans, Japanese, Germans and Chinese have the same resource allocation problems, but the workers were cheaper, offsetting the material and energy costs.

Regarding the UK being 'particularly good at finance, insurance, etc.', London is the portal to tax havens, as in the islands that were the former British empire. The U.S. has some financial regulation that London lacks, hence the arrangement and relevance of London.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-11-10 17:53:37+00:00
> Zig's comptime is a very large and all-encompassing feature that ultimately brings very little to the table that smaller features cannot.

> I am personally a proponent of a good macro system.

Comptime is much more constraint than any macro system: no code generation (including AST rewrite), no arbitrary tokens. Thus it's much harder to "go overboard" with Zig's comptime. This constraints of cource have their drawbacks, but code generation is still a thing.

> Much of Zig seems to me like "wishful thinking"; if every programmer was 150% smarter and more capable, perhaps it would work.

Nice way to put it! But I oppositely believe the world needs more tech that treats professionals as experts, not kids.
by paradox460 | 2025-11-10 17:54:05+00:00
I discovered the same. I found that I actually preferred mornings where I just missed the BART train, and had a few minutes to sit down, relax, do some SSR flashcards on my phone, read a bit of a book, or just center myself.

Some of the older BART stations are hauntingly beautiful. South San Francisco has a near cathedral like atmosphere, with extremely high ceilings, and if you sit there quietly you can hear the pigeons softly cooing to each other
by 9rx | 2025-11-10 17:54:15+00:00
> microservices where you treat each service itself as a module.

Microservices is where you treat each team of people as their own independent business unit. It models services found in the macro economy and applies the same patterns in the micro economy of a single organization. Hence the name.

The clearest and probably simplest technical road to achieving that is to have each team limit exposure to their work to what can be provided over a network, which is I guess how that connotation was established. But theoretically you could offer microservices with, for example, a shared library or even a source repository instead.
by Vermin2000 | 2025-11-10 17:54:41+00:00
I'm working on an app to display charts, analysis, and data on English football league games.

The real goal is to figure out how to use code gen AI (Cursor) effectively for data science projects and to figure out rapid deployment. I'm pushing things a bit harder than you typically see in demo apps (e.g. different chart types (e.g. violin plots, heatmaps, line charts), interactive charts, JavaScript widgets interacting with Bokeh charts, etc).

I'm trying to figure out all the skills, processes, and training you need to build a technical app very quickly. I'm at the deployment stage now.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-10 17:54:50+00:00
This weird disconnect can happen in real life, too. During the pandemic, I needed to get physical therapy. For almost the entirety of that, we all needed to be masked so I never saw my PT's complete face.

The masking requirement was lifted a couple of weeks before my PT completed, and I saw her full face for the first time. I found it incredibly disconcerting because my mind had imagined what her full face looked like (without me being aware), and her actual appearance was very different from what I imagined.
by machomaster | 2025-11-10 17:55:04+00:00
It means that you were not really looking, because you could easily find examples that caused the chilling effect (even if it did not cause the firing, but a simple HR talk).

How about you check the content of DEI indoctrination classes, what constitutes offense? Like 2 people talking and the 3rd overhearing is a violation. Like not playing with the fantasies and embracing reality is a violation. Being against (the "wrong one") discrimination is a violation. Like communicating too much with a woman is a violation as is talking too little. Don't let me started on a microaggression BS. In general, it is a violation if any delusional person decides to be offended, no matter the reality.

Did you know that liking progress, efficiency, technology, as well as simply being on time is a core of white suppremacy culture that is improperly and racially being imposed on the Black population? Now that you know (like we estsblished, the opinion of only one minority person like myself is enough to make it a fact) that you are a racist, you must repent.

Your clear dishonesty and bad-faith acting is what causes people to not engage you, not the lack of examples.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-10 17:55:10+00:00
True, and some org-level discipline is important here. I'm all for polyglot architectures, but only for reasonably small values of poly. Like if you wrote the frontend in Python, but really some performance critical Rust, fine. Or maybe you merged with another shop that already had a bunch of Go, far out.

Resist the urge to roll out that Prolog-driven inference service that your VP Eng vibe coded after reading an article about cool and strange programming languages.
by georgehopkin | 2025-11-10 17:55:36+00:00
AI-powered “deathbots” that simulate deceased individuals are turning remembrance into a commercial product, according to new research. The study found these platforms promote a “critically over-simplified understanding of memory, connection, and personhood”.

The research, published in Memory, Mind & Media, found that services in the growing “digital afterlife industry” create interactions that are often “insincere and uncanny”, while obscuring the ethical complexities of their own business models.
by mojoe | 2025-11-10 17:55:37+00:00
Hi, I'm the editor, I chose the stories. I read 391 short science fiction stories published last year (all the stories in the big science fiction magazines and a few smaller ones), and selected these sixteen.

None of the authors I reached out to refused to sell me reprint rights, so there was no bottleneck there.

I'm a software engineer who enjoys near-future concept-driven science fiction, so if that's not your thing then you might not agree with my choices. The stories I look for are the ones where I think "wow, this contains ideas that reflect something interesting about reality".
by richard_todd | 2025-11-10 17:55:45+00:00
I think the problem with XSLT is that it's only a clear win to represent the transform in XML to the extent that it is declarative. But, as transformations get more complex, you are going to need functions/variables/types/loops, etc. These got better support in XSLT 2 and 3, but it's telling that many xslt processors stuck with 1.0 (including libxslt and the Microsoft processors). I think most people realized that once they need a complex, procedural transformation, they'd prefer using a traditional language and a good XML library to do it.

I don't like seeing any backward compatibility loss on the web though, so I do wish browsers would reconsider and use a js-based compatibility shim (as other comments have mentioned).