MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tw1984 | 2025-11-26 01:58:45+00:00
there are good deals on ebay atm. e.g. brand new ublox zed-f9p dev board pin compatible with the M8T receiver you are using. it also comes with dual frequency antenna. it is not a second hand chip, but a brand new module ready to be plugged into your system.

www.ebay.com/itm/277500530946

I usually buy my second hand electronics stuff from www.goofish.com, the home base of all those "From China" ebay vendors.
by gerdesj | 2025-11-26 01:58:59+00:00
Erdős rhymes with Kurdish.

EDIT: Oh and Erdős was the great collaborator. There is an Erdős number (Bacon and Ozzie too) which defines how close you are to him. eg if you co-authored a paper with Erdős you have a Erdős number of one. If you co-auth a paper with someone with an Erdős number of one, then you have an Erdős number of two etc.

I think that the Bacon (Kevin Bacon) number was the original and there is also a Black Sabbath number which is related to Ozzie (MHRiP).

I also gather that a very few people have managed a minimum measure of all three numbers. Feynman might be one of them (its too late to check).
by ggm | 2025-11-26 01:59:48+00:00
why is gcc used by people when llvm is obviously better? why is OpenBSD used when FreeBSD gets more eyeballs? Why do people still use Oracle rather than postgres.

Why isn't justice equal everywhere, and all mankind strives to equalise for the pain and suffering?

Why does god let the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 happen?

Look: what a company uses, is what the initial tech staff bring to the table, or what future tech staff convert to, or what a C-suite enacts as a KPI before walking. It has almost nothing to do with "x is a better tool" and a hell of a lot more to do with "y cost me my job at fooco, I'm never recommending it again" or with "we get an SLA with z" or even "we can hire more juniors with competency if we continue to code in this dead language java because thats what the local college teaches in"
by tehjoker | 2025-11-26 01:59:54+00:00
That's interesting b/c I see it very obviously in mine with the partial exception of myself. The more professional and private sector their job or spouse, the more conservative they are. E.g a real estate lawyer is conservative, a lawyer for the state is liberal, a software engineer is a communist, and the musicians are libertarians or socialist-lite.

Professional or artisanal work are petit bourgeois positions, so are flexible in their outlook regardless of income.
by mindwok | 2025-11-26 01:59:59+00:00
That article is more about feasibility rather than desirability. There's even a section where they say:

> Settling the question of whether companies or governments will be ready to invest upwards of tens of billions of dollars in large scale training runs is ultimately outside the scope of this article.

Ilya is saying it's unlikely to be desirable, not that it isn't feasible.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-26 02:01:01+00:00
From both an architectural and learning algorithm perspective, there is zero reason to expect an LLM to perform remotely like a brain, nor for it to generalize beyond what was necessary for it to minimize training errors. There is nothing in the loss function of an LLM to incentivize it to generalize.

However, for humans/animals the evolutionary/survival benefit of intelligence, learning from experience, is to correctly predict future action outcomes and the unfolding of external events, in a never-same-twice world. Generalization is key, as is sample efficiency. You may not get more than one or two chances to learn that life-saving lesson.

So, what evolution has given us is a learning architecture and learning algorithms that generalize well from extremely few samples.
by stephen_g | 2025-11-26 02:01:09+00:00
That Mac Pro is such an amazing design, truly a classic! I have a few retro Macs but that is one I would like to add one from that era my collection - it's just a matter of space because they are pretty big!

Thinking of the Pro though, I really do find it very odd what Apple are doing with the current Mac Pro at the moment. Literally all people want is basically a Mac Studio in a bigger chassis with just two extra things - replaceable drives, and two to four PCIe slots for professional audio interface cards, SDI video capture/playout cards, etc... Ideally rack-mountable too.

The Mac Pro is just so overkill in some ways but limited in others, and way too expensive - it just misses what people want and need on every axis...
by eaksa | 2025-11-26 02:01:11+00:00
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
by venturecruelty | 2025-11-26 02:01:13+00:00
>but here's the thing: people come from different backgrounds. what's obvious to me after building the thing isn't obvious to someone installing it for the first time.

Sure, but you're also not obligated to do... well, anything. And people are also allowed to read documentation and code and put in the effort to build and install things themselves. What happened to the oldschool hacker spirit that rewarded learning and helping yourself? If you show up to a group of people and say "how do I make this work?" while showing zero evidence that you've actually done anything, you'll be politely told to fuck off. I promise it's okay to say no to people, especially people who haven't demonstrated that they've put in their own time to understand something.

But this is immaterial anyway. I don't know how to better explain that you don't owe your time to strangers on the internet, some portion of whom are probably not even human. Alternatively, you could get them to pay you, especially the organizations "behind corporate proxies". If they can afford a corporate proxy, they can certainly afford your time, as long as you value it appropriately.

So yeah. Stop working for free, and stop treating every last internet stranger as relevant.
by danbolt | 2025-11-26 02:01:22+00:00
The Nintendo 64 has a z-buffer, but the slow fillrate means that depth-checking can hamper your frame time. World Driver Championship sorted their polygons PS1-style with unique microcode, and got a very nice framerate.

I sometimes wonder what the Nintendo 64’s library would have been like if they had sorted polygons on the CPU like other consoles of the era.
by eru | 2025-11-26 02:01:40+00:00
Well, Google got good at large scale rollouts, because they are doing large scale rollouts all the time. _And_ most of the time, the system they are rolling out is a small iteration from the last system they rolled out: the new GMail servers look almost exactly like the last GMail servers, but they have on extra feature flag you can turn on (and which is disabled by default) or have one bug fixed.

That's a very different challenge from rolling out a brand new system once.
by mring33621 | 2025-11-26 02:01:42+00:00
Its effectiveness is going to depend on the domain and tech stack used.

You also need to know what chunks of AI output to keep and what to throw away.

For example, Gemini 'Fast' quickly identified a problem for me the other day, based on the stacktrace. But its proposed solution was crappy. So, I was happy with the quick diagnosis, but I fixed the code manually.
by krbaccord94f | 2025-11-26 02:03:20+00:00
Symmetrical or vertical knitting layers in the development of textile manufacturing was prototyped using the loom in Lowell, MA. There was labour movement amongst the girls attending lectures by Emerson/Adams.

In addition to directly creating volumes of knitting, rather than sheets or surfaces, this also reduces constraints on stitch connection, since it can depart from the strict structure of alternating row passes.

The Lowell Offering may be in line with the work presented in this paper.

[1]: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000549503
by alwillis | 2025-11-26 02:03:58+00:00
> Then again, writing stylesheets is still one of those things where, if you're not careful, everything spirals out of control. Often I'll make changes and wonder why nothing's happening and realize something was overridden by another rule somewhere…

It doesn't have to be this way; just write your CSS using Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS) [1] and these issues go away.

[1]: https://matthiasott.com/notes/how-i-structure-my-css
Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery
by cr1st1an | 2025-11-26 02:05:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a WordPress plugin called Bandwidth Saver. It takes the images your site already has and serves them through Cloudflare R2 and Workers, which means zero egress fees and extremely low storage cost. The goal is to make image delivery fast and cheap without adding any of the complexity of traditional optimization plugins.

The idea is simple. WordPress keeps generating images normally. The plugin rewrites the URLs on the frontend so images are served from a Cloudflare Worker. On the first request, the Worker fetches the original image and stores it in R2. After that, Cloudflare’s edge serves the image from its global cache with no egress charges. There’s no need to preload or sync anything, and if something fails, the original image loads. That’s the entire system.

I built this because most image CDN plugins try to do everything: compression, resizing, AI transforms, asset management, custom dashboards, and monthly fees. That’s useful for some users, but it’s unnecessary for most sites that just want their existing media to load faster without breaking the bank. Bandwidth Saver focuses only on delivery, not transformations. It’s intentionally minimal.

There are two ways to use it. The plugin is completely free if you want to run your own Cloudflare Worker. I included the Worker code and the steps needed to deploy it. If you don’t want to deal with any Cloudflare setup, there’s a managed option for $2.99 per month that uses my Worker and my R2 bucket. I’m trying to keep it accessible while also covering operational costs.

The plugin works with any theme or builder and doesn’t modify the database. It only rewrites URLs on output. WordPress remains the system of record for all media. R2 simply becomes a cheap, durable cache layer backed by Cloudflare’s edge.

I’m especially interested in feedback about the approach. Does the fetch-on-first-request model make sense? Is the pricing fair for a plugin of this scope? Should I prioritize allowing users to connect their own R2 buckets or the managed service? And for those with experience in edge compute or CDNs, I would love thoughts on how to improve the Worker or the rewrite strategy.

Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions.
by GenerWork | 2025-11-26 02:06:12+00:00
This is what I'm seeing in the design market. With Figma Make, you can write a prompt, tell it to use your design library, generate a flow, and then hand it off to developers and say "Hey, look at this, can you implement this?". Alternatively, you can use Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to pull in Figma design system elements via MCP, and generate flows that way. You can push features so much faster with the same or fewer people, and lets be honest, pushing more features in less time is the #1 metric at a lot of companies even if they claim otherwise.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-26 02:06:19+00:00
Biggest argument against AI meaningfully replacing software engineers is software not getting better/faster/cheaper. You'd think if it managed to cut down the cost of producing it we'd see more software, or better/faster software, or it would be cheaper. Same in open-source.

Yet good software is still as scarce as ever, and if anything it's getting worse. So it seems like the effects of AI on software development are either too minimal, or are just short-term effects that translate to technical debt down the line which ends up erasing all the gains.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-26 02:07:46+00:00
I mean you might have to negotiate a bit but yeah, a simple professional statement like “My rate for custom enhancements is $X/hr” is not going to ruffle any feathers. They might not bat an eye.

The thing is if you agree, now you have to deliver. Be sure it’s something you want to do. If the project is open source because you don’t want to be a business, then be careful about letting a little quick cash change your mind.
by zrn900 | 2025-11-26 02:07:49+00:00
AI plays !some! role, but the real culprit conists of two things:

- Zirp policy ended as countries started using currencies other than the dollar for international trade. Now the Fed and private banks cant print money and distribute zero-interest loans. This stopped the 'free cash' that used to go into Silicon Valley. A lot of money has either moved to interest vehicles or foreign investments/currencies. So Silicon Valley doesnt have cash to burn as it did before. As a result, they are having to back the valuations/stock prices with their profitability instead of the infinite cash that kept coming into the market doing it for them. Hence, the layoffs and focus on profitability.

- Trump did something to reclassify something legally and that stopped allowing tech companies to show their software engineering work as research to reduce their taxes or something. And Biden did not reverse it. (surprise). Or Biden may have done it, not certain at this point. Whatever it was, it went into effect 2-2.5 years ago and made headcount more costly.
by parpfish | 2025-11-26 02:08:33+00:00
i've noticed an uptick in the last couple years of new outlets doings stories about the slang -- "kids are saying {skibidi, rizz, 67} now, here's what it means."

kids have always had slang, but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past.

and i think the difference now is that parents get freaked out when some new slang takes over seemingly out of nowhere.

in the past, adults were aware of the media their kids were consuming. they overheard them talking on the phone with their friends. they saw kids hanging out together in real world physical spaces.

but now? kids an entire social life and media ecosystem is private and inside their phone. parents don't have visibility into "kid world" the way they used and it freaks them out.

they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.
by jemmyw | 2025-11-26 02:08:38+00:00
It's not piracy. You might have a problem with it ethically. But you're not breaking copyright laws by blocking ads.

Another way to look at it is additive rather than subtractive. If I visit a site with a text only browser that cannot display ads, what is your position then? And if I then implement the ability for my browser to play only the main video on any page, what then?

When it comes down to it, we have no obligation to view the content on a webpage the way the publisher of said webpage wants us to. You can think of plenty of other examples that make "adblocking is piracy" ridiculous - I invert the colors but the publisher doesn't want me to see it with inverted colors. I wear sunglasses while looking at it, which changes the way it looks. Maybe the site I use always puts an ad in the same place so I stick a bit of tape on my monitor in that location, is that bad?
by wolrah | 2025-11-26 02:08:41+00:00
I have always hated "m." domains for exactly this reason. They almost exclusively go one-way, mobile users get redirected to the mobile domain but desktop users never get redirected back, and all too often not only was the mobile version of the site objectively worse from the perspective of a desktop user but even the link to go back manually was either hard to find or nonexistent.

Wikipedia was one of the worst offenders, but lots of sites screwed this up in exactly the same way, and I feel it was a predecessor to modern "mobile first" web platforms that either treat desktop as second-class users or actively don't want desktop users.
by ksec | 2025-11-26 02:09:23+00:00
A lot of people switched away from Firefox / IE to Chrome when it launched.

Orion is faster than Safari on the same Mac. And it isn't rendering speed, but basic UI interface, multi-tabs usage. It is annoying because you see what Webkit is capable of and somehow Apple is not doing such as great job for Mac Safari. The difference is especially true on x86 Mac.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-26 02:09:31+00:00
Managers need to keep finding efficiencies or else the company will eventually find the efficiency of making them not part of the company anymore.

The hiring bar is going up partly because it’s become possible to spend the effort that would’ve gone into hiring to instead vibecode tools to do the easy bits of the required job - and delegate the rest, while finding new efficiencies in other team members’ roles to make room for what’s newly delegated. The net result is the same work getting done with fewer headcount.

The broad effect is the economy becomes more efficient and new jobs get created just as old jobs get divvied up according to the “replaceability” of each of the many roles that make up a particular job.
by danpalmer | 2025-11-26 02:10:22+00:00
You're trying to nit-pick where the line is drawn. The point is not where the line is drawn, it's that there is a line.

Installing an ad-blocker in your browser and never seeing an ad while consuming hours of content for free, depriving those creators of revenue, depriving the platform of revenue to support your usage of it, is in no way comparable to these at-the-margin contrived examples.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-26 02:10:46+00:00
> the error I made

Aw…don’t be so hard on yourself.

It was a deliberate troll. It’s kind of flattering, actually, because you’ve taken the time to get to know me, and you figured it would goad me (it didn’t, but nice try). The throwaway was a nice touch. Shows class (and intent).

> one of the most prolific cult members here.

Now that’s flattering. Thanks so much!
by toast0 | 2025-11-26 02:11:04+00:00
> Is it economically worthwhile to attempt to repair them?

In a developed economy, maybe barely. Depends on the monitor, and what's wrong with it. If you're good enough at soldering, and it's just a capacitor in the power supply issue, and the case isn't going to fall apart when you open it, sure. But if you have to hire help, or replace a module, probably not.

In places where skilled labor isn't going to billed at $100/hr or more, then there's more you can do ... I don't think it's worth replacing a panel if the panel (or its wiring) go, but you can replacing modules likely makes sense, if you can source them; maybe some light module repair too if it's just cold solder joints need rewetting.
by tavavex | 2025-11-26 02:12:03+00:00
I honestly think that at some point, there will be no recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made even more useless than they already are.
by baumy | 2025-11-26 02:12:30+00:00
No, I'm going to state the truth that I never agreed to be shown ads, and you are extremely weird for lying and claiming that I did.

Google wants to show me ads. I don't want to see them. I demonstrated this by blocking them. Google continues to show me videos anyway. Clearly they're ok with the arrangement. They are free to present me with written terms, or gate all their videos behind a login, but they choose not to do so.

You are either very confused or playing stupid for some reason that I don't understand, but it isn't amusing or cute. This will probably earn me a dang warning but I don't really care - you are full of shit. You're making claims all over this thread that you've literally just made up.
by Rohansi | 2025-11-26 02:13:28+00:00
It actually is built in as WebView2. It's like that so apps can use web views without shipping their own browser (Electron) and then it is kept up to date with the system.

Internet Explorer (MSHTML) also still lives on in Windows 11 because older software depends on it to embed browsers in their UI. It'll probably stay there for a long time to preserve backwards compatibility.
by gregmac | 2025-11-26 02:13:31+00:00
> if your source code is based on newer .NET you have to update to a new version each year

.NET has a really refreshingly sane release life cycle, similar to nodejs:

- There's a new major release every year (in November)

- Even numbers are LTS releases, and get 3 years of support/patches

- Odd numbers get 18 months of support/patches

This means if you target LTS, you have 2 years of support before the next LTS, and a full year overlap where both are supported. If you upgrade every release, you have at least 6 months of overlap

There's very few breaking changes between releases anyway, and it's often in infrastructure stuff (config, startup, project structure) as opposed to actual application code.
by dnlh_lvg | 2025-11-26 02:13:54+00:00
Yeah, I agree most tooling decisions come down to inertia, org history, and who was in the room early on. What I’m trying to tease out is whether there’s something specific to hard/deep tech that makes this even stickier.

In my experience, the moment you’re dealing with hardware-defined timelines, shifting configs, shared facilities, or multi-org ops, Jira/Confluence fall over pretty fast and people end up juggling a pile of side spreadsheets and slides just to keep things aligned.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 02:13:54+00:00
They could have done what Lightricks did with LTX-1 - build almost embarrassingly small models in the open and iteratively improve from learning.

LTX's first model felt two years behind SOTA when it launched, but they viewed it as a success and kept going.

The investment initially is low and can scale with confidence.

BFL goes radio silent and then drops stuff. Now they're dropping stuff that is clearly middle of the pack.