MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-11-09 20:38:20+00:00
Designers of marble fountains who don't use computing to design the paths run into reliability issues: sometimes balls derailing out of their track. They have to observe the contraption, identify problems (balls getting jammed up or jumping out) and then guess at the root causes and make manual adjustments.

That's the thing here: he has it running for hours presumably without any ball jumping out.

Most of the tracks consist of two rails, so the ball has two contact points. I'm no physicist but it seems like the goal would be to have ideally nearly equal forces at the two contact points at all times during the ball's descent. In other words, the track has to be perfectly banked so that the gravity and centripetal acceleration vector are balanced by a normal vector perpendicular to the rails. During a derailment, the ball has to lift away from one of the two contact points, so the normal force must have dropped to zero.
Ask HN: Why doesn't USPS act as a payment processor?
by piratesAndSons | 2025-11-09 20:38:22+00:00
As their revenue dwindles due to new technology—such as email reducing the number of letters sent—and increased competition from other shipping companies, I think the USPS needs to enter the payment processing business. Instead of relying on thousands of middlemen like PayPal, Stripe, and similar services, USPS would be a far more reliable and trustworthy option for legal businesses. The fees generated could not only finance the entire agency but also generate profit for the U.S. Treasury.

The rule would be simple: as long as you are not violating a federal law, USPS payment processors would handle your transactions. Do you know how many legitimate businesses currently struggle or cannot operate because of these parasitic middlemen? USPS could operate similarly to the Bank of North Dakota, legally unable to deny banking services to someone without strong legal grounds. This move could save the agency, eliminate parasitic middlemen who siphon money and favor certain clients, and provide a viable path for many businesses to remain operational. I know that in the 1990s, USPS wanted to offer email services, but the DOJ blocked it. So, my idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds—people smarter than me in the agency were already thinking about expanding USPS’s services thirty years ago.
by throw0101d | 2025-11-09 20:38:59+00:00
> If you're in Canada you almost certainly want to diversify from Canadian indices. US markets have tended to outperform.

If you buy "all-in-one" VEQT/XEQT (100% equities) you are buying an index funds of index funds: all Canadian equities, all US equities, EU, etc:

* https://canadianportfoliomanagerblog.com/model-etf-portfolio...

* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/model-portfolios/

If you don't want 100% equities, there are VGRO/XGRO (80/20), VBAL/XBAL (60/40), VCNS/XCNS (40/60), etc.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-11-09 20:39:19+00:00
That's really disappointing; I have zero interest in allowing a device like that on my network, or in spending that much on hardware for a single proprietary service that could go away or change its terms, or in having a service that only works with one device rather than many services that all work on the same device (e.g. Android TV).

Sigh. Where's the video equivalent of music stores for "just let me buy a high-quality DRM-free download I actually own" already?
by jancsika | 2025-11-09 20:39:44+00:00
I don't understand the implication of your first sentence.

The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.

Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?

Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.

Edit: clarifications
by epolanski | 2025-11-09 20:40:15+00:00
Coding isn't the only use case.

Neither is being bleeding edge.

I use Mistral's models, I've built an entire internal-knowledge-pipeline of sort using Mistral's products (which involved anything from OCR, to summarization, to linking stuff across different services like Jira or Teams, etc) and I've been very happy with it.

We did consider alternatives and truth to be told none was as cost-effective, fast and satisfying (and also our company does not trust US AI companies to not do stuff with our data).
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-09 20:40:22+00:00
Current building regulations in the UK are moving towards outside storage of batteries now because of NMC's having a high tendency to combust. The battery management systems do detect a lot of issues, thermal and shorts but at some point I think government is going to force these to be on the outside of houses.

The right answer is LifePO4 for home storage, does not combust and has good enough density.
by xvector | 2025-11-09 20:40:23+00:00
> I would assume you don’t want to take the risk when it’s comes to your own life/offspring or am I wrong?

I would, but that's mainly because of congenital psychosis that runs in my partner's family. Would gladly take the chance at editing that out of any embryo if there were targeted therapies.

If you know of any, please let me know - my understanding is that psychosis has not been isolated as well as Down's and blindness has, so you cannot genetically screen an embryo for it.
by geophph | 2025-11-09 20:41:33+00:00
A refurbished Dell XPS 9315. Had it a bit over a year, just out of warranty and the screen hinge sensor broke. Can’t open the laptop more than like, 20 degrees or so before screen shuts off. So it can really only be used as a “desktop”. New screen to replace would not be cost effective, plus I don’t have much faith in Dell products anymore.
by torginus | 2025-11-09 20:42:23+00:00
Tbh AI and layoffs aren't direct consequences of each other imo. Just think back to the 19th century where automation started taking factory worker's jobs. Eventually society learned to deal with automation and even though by pre-industrial standards, 95% of the work that was done by humans to make goods is done by robots and machines, yet there are orders of magnitude more factory workers at least today than were back then.
by ghaff | 2025-11-09 20:42:35+00:00
There are a ton of costs even if you own and have paid off. Aside from my $5K/year property taxes, I've spent probably $50K (likely more) in the past year for costs related to a fire. Also some significant costs for deferred maintenance that had to happen. Some routine plowing and lawn/field maintenance that I could do myself but that would take capital costs (and time). So not a typical couple of years but I've spent well over $100K on my house even though it's paid-off. It's far from free once you've written that last check to a bank.

Of course, modern condos will likely be cheaper but now you're paying HOA fees each month.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-09 20:42:57+00:00
>Whether it was generated by human or AI is irrelevant.

No. These systems are still so mindboggingly bad at anything that involves manual memory management and pointers that even entertaining the idea of using them for something as critical as a non-trivial large c++ codebase, for a password manager no less, is nuts. It displays a lack of concern for security and propensity for shortcuts that I don't want to touch anything by people who even remotely consider this appropriate.
by moominpapa | 2025-11-09 20:43:02+00:00
Lost my previous job not to AI but to a pincer movement of Indians taking up positions here in the UK effectively forming a bridgehead to subsequently have the non-management roles outsourced to India. From purely my own anecdotal experience, I found my Indian coworkers very friendly when I could provide something, but once they had the whip hand their attitude was markedly different.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-09 20:43:07+00:00
> If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible

Not really.

No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.

On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.

> other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale

Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.

On top of that, the bulk of layoffs during COVID were workers on work visas who were given the option to return to their home countries and open an office there.

This is what Google did in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Warsaw, Databricks in Bangalore, Amazon in Canada and India, and Nvidia in Bangalore.

Furthermore, we as employers don't really sponsor VPs, Engineering Managers/Directors, Product Managers, and Staff/Principal Engineers on O-1 visas. Most are stuck on some form of EB1/2 or L1/2, and those who apply to O1s who aren't founders or extremely critical to the business are being sponsored but filing out-of-pocket.

It just isn't attractive to immigrate to America long term anymore as a white collar employee in most cases now aside from unicorn roles which employees then use to boomerang back to executive roles or demand US salaries in their home country.

Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.

For example, in cybersecurity, I can hire someone in Israel who has done offensive security work for a couple years in a military, police, internal security capacity or someone in India who participated in one of the dozens of Police Force, Army, or Home Affairs cybersecurity internship programs. Similar programs like Cyberpatriots and the Cyber Incentive Program (approx $100M) were mismanaged as was found in a 2023-25 investigation by the DHS OIG [0][1] and an entire generation of students of cybersecurity scholarships quit in 2016 when the Trump 1 admin cut funding for cybersecurity scholarship programs.

[0] - https://fedscoop.com/cisa-cyber-incentive-program-dhs-inspec...

[1] - https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-09/O...
by api | 2025-11-09 20:43:10+00:00
I was on it before then and it was overflowing with far right content then too. Not saying Musk hasn’t amplified that, but it’s always been full of it.

IMHO the format is intrinsically biased toward shallow ideas that elicit an emotional reaction, and far right content is well suited. Like I said in another reply when I see lefty content it’s the same style. You almost never see deep ideas of substance on there because they don’t fit the medium.

The Twitter style medium is inherently toxic, at least when used for anything but a human pub-sub bus to notify people of things. For discourse it selects only for the lowest most inflammatory kind.

The same is true of Twitter’s imitators. The format is irredeemable.
by pimeys | 2025-11-09 20:43:13+00:00
That is an expensive fridge too. We just bought a new Miele fridge. Very high quality materials, an awesome fridge in every way. It was an expensive one, 1400 euros.

So in US you pay a thousand more for a fridge that shows advertisement?

We had a Samsung dishwasher before. It was about 500 euros and started leaking water after five years. Now we have an expensive Miele which was about thousand euros. Seems that they don't share the same issue.
YouTube A/B testing removing playback speed controls
by dotancohen | 2025-11-09 20:43:34+00:00
I've been able to deal with most of the enshitification of Youtube, but now playback speed controls are no longer available in some of my Youtube playbacks. Refreshing the page sometimes makes them available. And there's a button to enable them by subscribing to Youtube Premium.

I'm going to write to the channels that I subscribe to, to let them know why I'm leaving Youtube. Time to settle on an alternative service.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-09 20:44:00+00:00
No narrative is accurate, it's subjective cause and effect. We've known this since Aristotle, and neuropsychologists (Merlin Donald), neuroscientists (OKeefe, Kandel, Mosers), and evolutionary thinkers (Rosenberg) deal storytelling fatal blows.

No one trusts narratives in general now. They're illusions entirely. Retire them as communication.
by sgt101 | 2025-11-09 20:44:46+00:00
It's important to consider the potential long run impact of this work.

It may be 30 years or more before the impact of genetic manipulation in humans becomes apparent.

This could cause very signifcant suffering to those effected. The manipulation techniques are not entirely understood, in the past organisms that have been manipulated have not had the outcomes that were hoped for or expected.

In addition during this work it is possible that suffering and death may be inflicted on human infants.

These dangers surely must weigh heavily on anyone considering this sort of work be undertaken.
by neom | 2025-11-09 20:45:02+00:00
How do you turn a $50 rat into a $600 rat? Get a rat. I don't even what to know how much I've spent on rats over the years, a lot. We do so much in rats for medical research you'd think we could produce some super rats! But as you mentioned, they're so in bread, and even from really good breeders, they're still gonna die shitty deaths from some cancer or respiratory infection. You're right, I'd pay up for a GMO rat that lived a super healthy life, even if it was shorter than other pets. Rats are so awesome!
by torginus | 2025-11-09 20:45:13+00:00
Out of the cheap phones I bought over the years, Xiaomi was the only manufacturer that didn't load up their phones with crapware backdoors. Samsung and Oppo was shiped with one of those crapware backdoors that installed apps beyond your back.

Eventually I got fed up, and started using hand-me-down iPhones for second phones.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-09 20:45:42+00:00
I'm far too lazy to be able to responsibly use a machine that can give me semi-sensible answers.

I saw the danger of it as a form of learned helplessness down the line and swore off using LLM's for that reason, that and I feel no need to delegate my thinking to a machine that can't think and I like thinking.

Same reason snacks are upstairs in the kitchen and not in my office on the ground floor - I'm too lazy and if they are easily available I'll eat them.
by borntyping | 2025-11-09 20:45:44+00:00
The PSF withdrew their application for the grant from the US government after being presented with terms that included "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", which conflicts with their mission statement: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."

[1]: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
by shayway | 2025-11-09 20:45:56+00:00
Would everyone agree with that definition, though? It seems like discussions around DEI tend to go in circles, because proponents see bad implementations as not really DEI, and opponents see good implementations as not really DEI either.

I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
by acadapter | 2025-11-09 20:46:29+00:00
What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?

The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.
by iwanttocomment | 2025-11-09 20:46:30+00:00
Sure, postal banking [0] has been around forever. Could it be updated to the modern day and in the US? Of course! Why not? Because we apparently just can't have nice things.

It's a perfectly good idea that just doesn't have political traction in this era.

We could also have, you know, universal health care. Like any other normal country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
by bdangubic | 2025-11-09 20:47:04+00:00
tech titans are spineless scum of the earth. zuck was ready to marry a black transgender inner city ‘women’ while Joe was President and now is suddenly all ‘masculine’ while Donny is at the helm. they would all get train F’ed before standing up for their beliefs, regardless of what those are… Tim I won’t even mention, the levels he has to stoop to I wouldn’t do for a trillion dollars…
Show HN: We built an AI note app because voice memos are chaos
by mariyan250 | 2025-11-09 20:47:17+00:00
Voice memos are great until you try to find something later.

I built NoteFLW to fix that — it listens, summarizes, and organizes everything you say, automatically.

No more scrolling through 200 recordings of “meeting notes” and “idea from last night.”

It’s early, still rough around the edges, but surprisingly effective.
by cronin101 | 2025-11-09 20:47:44+00:00
Depending on the application, I think “without preprocessing” is a huge assumption here. LLMs typically do a terrible job of weighting poor quality context vs high quality context and filling an XL context with unstructured junk and expecting it to solve this for you is unlikely to end well.

In my own experience you quickly run into jarring tangents or “ghosts” of unrelated ideas that start to shape the main thread of consciousness and resist steering attempts.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-09 20:48:14+00:00
> Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).

“debasement” proper is also something else.

> An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.

Yes. And an economy with a growing money supply can experience inflation and having a strong currency at the same time (see what happened to the US and the US Dollar in the first half of 2022).
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-09 20:48:54+00:00
I don’t disagree at all (I have no individual stocks, only indexes). The average retail investor doesn’t beat the market.

However, the top 10% of retail traders actually can generate consistent returns.[1]

Consider that MSFT has gone up 10x over the last ten years while the S&P has risen 4x. Ethereum has risen 2500x in that period. TSLA has risen 270x.

Not saying these returns are typical, but I can imagine that a highly aggressive retail investor could, with a few good trades and a lot of confidence, do incredibly well and end up with a life-altering amount of money. Obviously, the chances of both entering AND exiting the trades to capture all of that is low.

Again, not my style, but I respect those who want to place their bets.

[1] https://www.bus.umich.edu/pdf/mitsui/nttdocs/coval-shumway2....
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-09 20:49:04+00:00
Hold on... For starters, LLMs made Chinese, Spanish, French websites comprehensible to me. Even the best models like Claude still make some mistakes and miss some nuance, but they largely have genuine understanding of the cultural context and can adapt it. They're qualitatively better than classic machine translation models, and the mistakes will eventually be fixed. I can finally communicate in person's native language and be reasonably sure that most subtlety is preserved. This is something that actually breaks language barriers, defies the Babylon, connects people! If that is nothing to you, I don't know what else is.

Deep search is also extremely useful, it saves me actual days and finds things and cool people I wouldn't be able to find in reasonable time otherwise, a lot of that in isolated communities like discord servers normal search has no insight into. Sure, you have to be aware about things left in the dark, but you also have to be attentive to this with normal search as well.

Video summarization lets me extract the actual message from the pile of clickbait, marketing, and three-hour long interviews - all while pointing at the timecodes for me to verify.

Now, the pressure of bullshit will inevitably shift to LLM training. It's only a matter of time. But that's another question, the tech itself works amazingly well, what the hell are you even talking about?
by WillMorr | 2025-11-09 20:49:05+00:00
It's specifically using SolidPython2 to generate the models. I originally wanted to do a quick code cleanup and have the specific math be much clearer but by the time it was working that was an absolutely massive undertaking. If I touch the code again I'm probably going to refactor the entire codebase and use a different 3D engine.
by delichon | 2025-11-09 20:49:17+00:00
> This creates a sea of noise and misinformation that people unknowingly consume at scale.

The same objections apply to the written word. A culture that succeeded in not succumbing to writing and reading may indeed have been better off in the short term, depending on the quality of the memes. But it would have been at a competitive disadvantage to cultures that were permissive with knowledge transfer.

The main advantage of AI so far has been as a distiller of the knowledge embedded in the written word. It's another leap in knowledge transfer. That's still a competitive advantage to any culture that doesn't abjure it. This particular consciousness intends to leverage the opportunity.
by simonw | 2025-11-09 20:49:21+00:00
I don't understand the argument that post is making.

I agree that people using LLMs in a lazy way that has negative consequences - like posting slop on social media - is bad.

What's not clearly to me is the scale of the problem. Is it 1/100 people who do this, or is it more like 1/4?

Just a few people behaving badly on social media can be viewed by thousands or even millions more.

Does that mean we should discard the entire technology, or should we focus on teaching people how to use it more positively, or should we regulate its use?