MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by addaon | 2025-11-30 20:41:54+00:00
As the OP, I agree with everything you said, but I suggest an alternate characterization: Some subset of people, including me, prefer written communication to video (regardless of whether the video is on YouTube or elsewhere). Since my favorite HN threads delve into a topic, rather than into the details of a particular presentation of a topic, and since on seeing this topic raised I hopped over to Wikipedia to refresh my memory on this topic, I thought I would provide a breadcrumb for others of similar mindset to help jumpstart the topical discussion. Which, clearly, I was not quite successful in doing -- so, lesson learned.
by ruralfam | 2025-11-30 20:42:09+00:00
Thanks. However note that the site dropped electrostatic filters to simplify things. My understanding is that for non-static-affected particles merv-13 would obviously out perform merv-8 for smaller particles. However the promise of electrostatics is that the materials in the filters create a e-stat field that makes them more efficient re: particles like dust. Certainly the two electrostatic merv-8 filters on my hvac blower capture A LOT of dust (fine particles). Since you clean them in a bathtub by filling the tub and washing the filters thru them, I can attest that there is A LOT of really fine particulates being captured.

The lead line for this article pretty much reflects the reason for my post: "The air purifier marketplace is an apt metaphor for how a particle must feel while being trapped in a filter - at every turn there's a new acronym or regulatory agency or purifier type."
by cogman10 | 2025-11-30 20:42:09+00:00
Once upon a time, that's what a microservice was. A monolith was the company's software all in one software package.

I think what changed things is FAAS came along and people started describing nanoservices as microservices which created really dumb decisions.

I've worked on a true monolith and it wasn't fun. Having your change rolled back because another team made a mistake and it was hard to isolate the two changes was really rough.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-30 20:42:27+00:00
Tire pressure management was one of the striking differences between my experiences in France and in the US.

In France, we'd check tire pressure at gas stations on nice machines that had built in dial gauges and were free.

In the US, I had to use one of those hand gauges and the air pumps needed quarters (in most cases, especially if you weren't also buying gas).

In Portugal now, the gas stations also have free air and pretty good pumps.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-11-30 20:42:46+00:00
Hooke's law only accounts for the force the spring applies, not the mass of the spring itself. Once you have to account for the mass of the spring, how that mass distribution changes as the string stretches & compresses, and how that alters the momentum it quickly loses its simplicity. That's far too difficult to do by hand, but it's what the real world does so I'd rather say that Hooke's law is a first-order approximation of spring force, not a perfect law for describing linear spring behavior.
by sprash | 2025-11-30 20:42:47+00:00
Always the same lies. People "stepped up" in the and as a result were outright banned from the gitlab (instead of e.g. just rejecting pull requests). Current maintainers refuse to do any release management and instead treat every merge into master as a new release. This kind of sabotage makes development or contributing very difficult. Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.

Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
by dangus | 2025-11-30 20:42:55+00:00
Really isn’t going to be an interesting watch.

People in the military saying this stuff doesn’t really change anything. People in the military are just a cross-section of the other morons that make up this country.

Over 40% of Americans believe that some UFOs have been alien spacecraft according to Gallup.

In other words, 40% of Americans are fucking morons. [1]

How many people believe that the virgin Mary magically got pregnant without having sex? And that’s something we know is scientifically impossible, even more so than the wildly improbable phenomenon of an alien spacecraft visiting us.

A whole bunch of people in the military believe the Virgin Mary was a virgin, too.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/350096/americans-believe-ufos.a...

[1] This 30-40% number seems to also line up with a host of dumbass political opinions like being pro-authoritarianism. At any given point, around 30% of people in the world seem to be dumb as fuck.
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-30 20:43:16+00:00
> nobody would choose to be like that, right?

I can't say I'm obese, but I am proudly lazy, and I am firmly convinced our entire models of character, personality, mental illness, etc is rooted in culturally relative values. There's no particular reason we should look to productivity (or the west at all, really) for a source of values or reference of health.
by analogpixel | 2025-11-30 20:43:32+00:00
I've found that all "systems" are worthless. Don't look for ways to lock yourself out, don't curate which apps are on your phone, and don't make your phone black and white so you use it less. Just stop carrying your phone with you, it's actually that easy.

If SMS/IMessage worked without a phone, I probably wouldn't need a phone at all.

Also, I have a computer, which is superior to a phone in every way so I just use that.
by aeternum | 2025-11-30 20:43:44+00:00
IMO it's not different, I've been at multiple companies shaken down by these kinds of groups. It goes like this:

1) A) Shareholder proposal bullied through via questionable means like buying votes from index-fund vote providers (or endowment/pension/wealth funds) that put other interests ahead of fiduciary interests. (and/or) B) Weak but expensive-to-fight lawsuit

2) But don't worry, we have a consulting arm that will do the reports for you. If you pay them, we can guarantee it satisfies the shareholder proposal, and we will drop the lawsuit.

Sometimes human rights, sometimes ADA, sometimes environmental, the playbook is basically the same.
by gouggoug | 2025-11-30 20:43:46+00:00
This past month, I have spent a decent amount of hours (7+) trying to setup nix on my mac with nix-darwin, and failed.

Most tutorial out there encourage you to download someone else's configuration to get going. I don't want to do that. I want to understand at its core how this thing works.

I've read the official nix language documentation, watched YouTube tutorials, read 3rd party tutorials, and still couldn't get going with a simple configuration that would install a few packages.

The nix language is also really unpalatable to me. But I could deal with that if the examples out there showed a consistent way of doing things – that's not the case. It seems one same thing can be done many different ways – but I want to know and do it the right way. I would generally turn myself to the official best practices documentation, except nix' is very short and doesn't help much.

I really want to use nix. There's no question about its advantages. But nix just won't let me (or maybe I'm too old to learn new things).

That being said, I'll probably give it another try this month...
by rklaehn | 2025-11-30 20:43:56+00:00
This article is written as if SpaceX does not exist. Every single comparison is against 30, 35 year old obsolete technology.

Power:

It uses the ISS solar arrays as reference. They are obsolete for decades. A much better reference for the purpose of cost estimation would be Starlink sats.

The total installed power of all Starlink sats is tens of megawatts, and will reach gigawatts once larger Starlink sats will be launched by Starship.

Starlink PV panels are simple silicon panels built by a taiwanese company, and are not much more expensive than terrestrial panels.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211102134305/https://techtaiwa...

Cooling:

Again, ISS. The ISS design is overly complicated because it is in low LEO and needs to be articulated. Also, it needs to use ammonia since the working temperature of humans is lower than that of GPUs.

A datacenter in space would be in a sun synchronous orbit and need no articulated radiators. Also, it could use a higher radiator temperature, which helps a lot due to Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation law.

Cosmic radiation:

The state of the art is to use current generation silicon and do error correction at software level. This isn't some fantasy or research project, but how each SpaceX Dragon flight computer and Starlink sat electronics works.

Communications:

Starlink sats have way more than 1 GiB/s bandwidth, and space based laser communication is state of the art and even commercially available.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-opens-up-its-starlink-lase...

This article is not a base for a realistic discussion about data centers in space. It just dismisses the concept without doing a honest discussion.
by dpark | 2025-11-30 20:44:11+00:00
If these 5 little fans do the job as well as a full size box fan, I have to wonder:

1. Are box fans just really terrible? I would expect the amount of airflow from a box fan to absolutely demolish these little case fans.

2. Does airflow not actually matter that much? Assuming the box fan really does move far more air, that would imply that air filtration is somehow not driven by air flow. Or else the testing methodology is flawed.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-30 20:44:19+00:00
> the pricing is tough

Ford certainly didn't do themselves any favors, that's for sure. Even today, the street price is not commonly known -- I talk to people all the time who think it's a 70K+ truck even though it's been continuously available for 15-20K less for a year or more. I'm guilty of that myself, I was going to settle for a used hybrid powerboost F-150 for about 55K before someone casually mentioned that the Lightning could be had for just over 50K brand new (and not the base model!). Dodged a bullet on that one I think, the powerboost has an awful reputation for reliability.

> ended up with a hybrid Maverick instead

That's a very solid choice. When my kids move on with their own lives in a few years, I'll be very open to a smaller truck. Maybe not Maverick small, but it's still very appealing (and doubly so if Ford makes an electric version). I am hoping Ford has plans for an electric Ranger.
by sestep | 2025-11-30 20:44:34+00:00
(disclaimer: self-plug)

I similarly found `nix flake update` frustrating for a while, especially when using unstable Nixpkgs. I wrote a tool called `npc` that basically solved the problem for me by letting me bisect whatever Nixpkgs channel(s) I have in my flake inputs: https://github.com/samestep/npc
by dhorthy | 2025-11-30 20:45:21+00:00
For the record I do think the AI community tries to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel on crap all the time.

sure, readme.md is a great place to put content. But there's things I'd put in a readme that I'd never put in a claude.md if we want to squeeze the most out of these models.

Further, claude/agents.md have special quality-of-life mechanics with the coding agent harnesses like e.g. `injecting this file into the context window whenever an agent touches this directory, no matter whether the model wants to read it or not`

> What people often forget about LLMs is that they are largely trained on public information which means that nothing new needs to be invented.

I don't think this is relevant at all - when you're working with coding agents, the more you can finesse and manage every token that goes into your model and how its presented, the better results you can get. And the public data that goes into the models is near useless if you're working in a complex codebase, compared to the results you can get if you invest time into how context is collected and presented to your agent.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-30 20:45:27+00:00
I have never wanted to flag a comment on hacker news more. Do you also recommend that people smoke based on... nothing but feelz?

I am 50. I had to have skin cancer removed from my face. I have never seen a more busy doctors office than this dermatologist's office. They were printing money. The waiting room was always full, half filled with men in their 50s up (so probably not getting cosmetic dermatology surgery). Some had noses/ears missing. Granted I grew up surfing in Santa Cruz. But don't think 'skin cancer isn't a thing'.

And the follow up discussion here. Do people here not have parents? Do you not talk to ANYONE over 50 about their lives? Skin cancer is actually real and common and scary AF.
by josephg | 2025-11-30 20:45:42+00:00
What shared frameworks are multiple gigabytes in size?? If that’s the case I don’t think the problem is dynamic linking. A hoarder shouldn’t solve their problem by renting more houses.

Honestly I’ve been thinking of making my own toy OS and I’m still a bit on the fence about dynamic linking. As I understand it, macOS puts a lot of their UI components into dynamic libraries. That lets them update the look and feel of the OS between versions by swapping out the implementation of the controls for all apps. I think that’s a good design. I like that they have some way to do that. And for what it’s worth, I agree with your earlier point about scripting languages and whatnot using dynamic linking in Linux for extensibility.

In general I want more programs to be able to do what Pam does and be programmatically extensible. Dynamic linking is a very efficient way to do that. I think it’s really cool that Fil-C can transparently provide safety across those API boundaries. That’s something rust can’t really do until it has a stable ABI. In practice it doesn’t usually take much code to wrap / expose a C api from rust. But it’s inconvenient and definitely unsafe.

> Are you ok with me making thay same argument in favor of Fil-C’s current weak sauce optimization story?

No of course not. Static linking is a mixed bag optimisation wise because - while code is duplicated in ram, doing so also allows inlining and dead code elimination. So it’s usually not that bad in practice. And binaries are usually tiny. It’s an application’s data where I want efficiency.

I think Fil-C’s optimisation story is fine for many use cases. It should be able to be as efficient as C#, Go and other similar languages - which are pretty fast languages. More than fast enough for most applications. But there’s a lot of software I’d like to keep in fast native code, like databases and browsers. So I wouldn’t use Fil-C there. And in the places I don’t mind slower code, I’d rather use a C# or go or typescript. So for me that leaves Fil-C as an interesting tool primarily for sandboxing old C code.

If that was how Fil-C was talked about and positioned, that would be fine. But that’s not the narrative. I’m frustrated with some of the hypocrisy I’ve seen online from “influencers” like Casey M. Last week C and systems code was good because of how fast bare metal C runs. But now C is still great because it’s memory safe through Fil-C, so why even bother with rust? What liars! They just like C and don’t want to admit it. If they really cared about performance and systems code, they wouldn’t find Fil-C exciting. And if they actually cared about safety they wouldn’t have been so dismissive of memory safe languages before Fil-C came out. Liking C is fine. Hating rust is fine. There’s a lot to dislike. I just don’t like being lied to.

“I like Fil-C because it lets the Linux ecosystem have safety without needing to change to another language. I like C and want us to use it forever” is - I think - what a lot of people actually believe. If that’s the case, I wish people would come out and say it.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-11-30 20:45:57+00:00
> LLMs, and especially coding focused models, have come a very long way in the past year.

I see people assert this all over the place, but personally I have decreased my usage of LLMs in the last year. During this change I’ve also increasingly developed the reputation of “the guy who can get things shipped” in my company.

I still use LLMs, and likely always will, but I no longer let them do the bulk of the work and have benefited from it.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-30 20:46:08+00:00
“Lane keep” yanks the wheel dangerously because it incorrectly detects the lane, or because you don’t indicate to pass a pothole on an empty road (which itself would be confusing to other road users)

Forward collision warning has misfired on 2 occasions on me in the last 3 years

The main issue is that so many cars have broken “auto dipping” headlights which don’t dip, or matrix headlights which don’t pick out other cars.

This automation shit should stop, but it won’t.

parking beepers are reasonable, they simply come on occasionally and don’t actually interfere when they go wrong. The rest of it just makes things far worse at scale.
by hunglee2 | 2025-11-30 20:46:26+00:00
to be fair to VW, they have long known that their only way back is actually (and counterintuitively) go further and integrate into the China manufacturing supply chain, then export back to the Germany from China, where lower production cost can be achieved. They were on course until 2022, when Ukraine War + end of ZIRP spiked inflation unexpectedly, whilst also placing economics firmly after politics in order of priorities. Probably too late now
by lurk2 | 2025-11-30 20:46:51+00:00
> I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out.

What about an explicit roadmap?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming

> is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?

I’m not sure I understand your question. I would presume if people are self-selecting out of any organization it’s because they believe it isn’t a suitable place for them, and if this division is along party lines then politics is likely to be the cause of that belief. In either case, if the FBI skews conservative, I would guess that this was due to internal gatekeeping, not self-selection, and I think the history of the organization supports that assertion.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-30 20:46:59+00:00
True but I usually give all fake info. Except my pronouns because I want to support the LGBTIQ movement in this day of so much hate against us.

But even when I sign to too a web shop or whatever I don't give them my real DOB because they have no legit reason to want to have it. I just randomise it and store it in my password manager.
by alexfoo | 2025-11-30 20:48:13+00:00
It depends on the individual problem, some have a smaller problem space than others so unique inputs would be tricky for everyone.

But there are enough possible inputs that most people shouldn't come across anyone else with exactly the same input.

Part of the reason why AoC is so time consuming for Eric is that not only does he design the puzzles, he also generates the inputs programmatically, which he then feeds through his own solver(s) to ensure correctness. There is a team of beta testers that work for months ahead of the contest to ensure things go smoothly.

(The adventofcode subreddit has a lot more info on this.)
by serial_dev | 2025-11-30 20:48:34+00:00
I’m sure I’m just working like a caveman, but I simply highlight the relevant code, add it to the chat, and talk to these tools as if they were my colleagues and I’m getting pretty good results.

About 12 to 6 months ago this was not the case (with or without .md files), I was getting mainly subpar result, so I’m assuming that the models have improved a lot.

Basically, I found that they not make that much of a difference, the model is either good enough or not…

I know (or at least I suppose) that these markdown files could bring some marginal improvements, but at this point, I don’t really care.

I assume this is an unpopular take because I see so many people treat these files as if they were black magic or silver bullet that 100x their already 1000x productivity.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-30 20:48:44+00:00
Back then people online weren't really sexist or racist. They were really nice and helpful people. No extreme right. The internet was a really friendly place.

Although back then it was also kinda taboo so they were usually banned everywhere (not just online). Which was great IMO.

Not very much later of course came the masses and the emergence of awful platforms.
by ruralfam | 2025-11-30 20:48:49+00:00
I use a bank of eight Noctuas to vent from the rooom with our wood stove to the main hall. Then use more units with two sets of Noctuas ganged to move from the hall to various remote rooms. Been using them for more years than I can remember. Silent, never failed yet. It has been great vs. using house fans (my initial approach). BTW: Our local thrift store has a huge amount of various DC power supplies from donations. I sift thru them to find the right volts/amp combo needed for the ganged units, and generally spend about a dollar per supply. HTH, RF.
by Chance-Device | 2025-11-30 20:49:58+00:00
I think we’re mixing our metaphors here, what I mean is at the end of the day you write code to get some result you actually care about, or that matters for some material reason. Work is labor at the end of the day. If you don’t care about that outcome or optimizing for it, then you may as well play a video game or code golf or something. What you now want is a hobby.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-30 20:50:13+00:00
> And instead of saying we need microservices, let's start with just a service oriented architecture.

I think the main reason microservices were called “microservices” and not “service-oriented architecture” is that they were an attempt to revive the original SOA concept when “service-oriented architecture” as a name was still tainted by association to a perceived association with XML and the WS-* series of standard (and, ironically, often systems that supported some subset of those standards for interaction despite not really applying the concepts of the architectural style.)