MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-11-19 16:04:11+00:00
"All people are the same" argument basically negates thousands of years of history, basic human knowledge, etc. Biology impacts quite a bit. For example, if your family comes from Asia, chances are your more prone to lactose intolerance than European-based areas. It's also why most Asian dishes don't have any sort of cheese or dairy - there was no real history of that type of agriculture compared to Europe. To ignore all this and throw it out so that people can pretend to be the exact same is to throw all of history out the window, and to pretend that we're not standing on shoulders of giants that helped craft modern civilization as we know it.

Men are Men, and Women are Women. But Women wanted to be like Men, so they did, but Men don't like Women as Men, and Women are shocked to learn this.

Now people don't even know what a Woman is.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-19 16:04:31+00:00
> This is terrible.

No it's not. Read my other comments.

ToMAYto, ToMAHto.

I have learned that it's a bad idea to trash other folks' methodologies without taking the time to understand why they do things, the way they do.

I have found dogma to be an impediment, in my own work. As I've gotten older, the sharp edges have been sanded off.

Have a great day!
by ewoodrich | 2025-11-19 16:04:36+00:00
I can sympathize with being mistakingly accused of using LLM output, but as a reader the above format of "Its not x - it's y" repeated multiple times for artificial dramatic emphasis to make a pretty mundane point that could use 1/3 the length grates on me like reading LinkedIn or marketing voice whether it's AI or not (and it's almost always AI anyway).

I've seen fairly niche subreddits go from enjoyable and interesting to ruined by being clogged with LLM spam that sounds exactly like this so my tolerance for reading it is incredibly low, especially on HN, and I'll just dismiss it.

I probably lose the occasionally legitimate original observation now and then but in a world where our attention is being hijacked by zero effort spam everywhere you look I just don't have the time or energy to avoid that heuristic.
by starkparker | 2025-11-19 16:05:04+00:00
I've used PXE (not even iPXE, just DHCP/TFTP without HTTP) mainly in environments where a LAN client-server game would need to be launched on many systems at once. Nothing quite like rolling out a hand-tailored distro for a single game to 16 computers and seeing them all boot and load straight into the game, one after the other, entirely unattended, from one broadcast boot-over-Ethernet trigger.

I think at one point we were even using distcc to use the clients to speed up rebuilds while iterating on the game. I should revisit that with iPXE and icecream.
by bwfan123 | 2025-11-19 16:05:20+00:00
from the article.

> The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed

If you measure returns by others' approval, then you are doomed as the world is fickle. Unfortunately, as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others.

The alternative is to sculpt a framework or scorecard largely independent of what others think - but this is hard, as we are social creatures.
by ecshafer | 2025-11-19 16:05:51+00:00
Communists take over a country and millions of people die. Fascists take over and millions of people die.

Wordpress is some legal issues that is going to result in a law suit and some word press developer having to work overtime. Ruby Bundler has some people losing maintainer access and some hurt feelings.

Lets not compare apples and oranges here.
by mikewarot | 2025-11-19 16:07:14+00:00
The actual discovery of the wiring problem is pretty interesting. It starts on page 17 of the Engineering Factual Report[1], which is one of many released[2].

The wire in question was carrying unknown current (likely 20-50 mA), but 110 volts DC signaling.

Comparing the photos on page 22 (Dali) and 25 (Cezanne), you can clearly see the blue ferrules in the correctly wired panel on the Cezanne.

[1] https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19228257&Fi...

[2] https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=DCA24MM031
by mindslight | 2025-11-19 16:07:19+00:00
The issues with emojis go much deeper than this. Even if we agree on how exactly they displayed, their social meaning is highly dependent on the context of a conversation. Instead of allowing outside investigators to divine their own meanings and introduce them as evidence, courts should insist on testimony from the person or people those communications were meant for. If said people give wildly differing testimony to what investigators think is truthful, then they can go down the rabbit hole of how the codepoints were displayed and whatnot.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-19 16:07:22+00:00
Yeah one choice for me, the local cable company.

But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]

They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.

I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-pick-a-mastodon-server
by talkingtab | 2025-11-19 16:07:41+00:00
When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.

One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.

But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.

This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...
by mikece | 2025-11-19 16:08:24+00:00
How about this as a privacy law: if you collect data about people without their EXPLICIT permission[1] you can be charged with digital stalking. Same principle as stalking; escalating penalties for repeat offenses and for doing so in bulk or en masse.

EDIT: And you cannot share information gained by permitted collection unless EXPLICIT permission to share is granted.

[1] Eg: it's not sufficient to disclose this in equivocal text buried in 25k lines of EULA text.
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-19 16:08:26+00:00
10,000 cores is an insane amount of compute (even 100 cores should already be able to easily deal with millions of events/requests per second), and I have a hard time believing a 100x diurnal difference in needs exists at that level, but yeah, actually I was suggesting that they should have their cap high enough to cover 10,000 cores for the remainder of the billing cycle. If they need that 10,000 for 4 hours a day, that's still only a factor of 6 of extra quota, and the quota itself 1. doesn't cost them anything and 2. is currently infinity.

I also expect that in reality, if you regularly try to provision 10,000 cores of capacity at once, you'll likely run into provisioning failures. Trying to cost optimize your business at that level at the risk of not being able to handle your daily needs is insane, and if you needed to take that kind of risk to cut your compute costs by 6x, you should instead go on-prem with full provisioning.

Having your servers idle 85% of the day does not matter if it's cheaper and less risky than doing burst provisioning. The only one benefiting from you trying to play utilization optimization tricks is Amazon, who will happily charge you more than those idle servers would've cost and sell the unused time to someone else.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-19 16:08:39+00:00
Hollywood is in the entertainment biz, not education. Is there any subject that they don't lie about?

(Not saying they're malicious, usually. Just that looks-cool pretend will almost always rake in more revenue than reality. Without the hassles or expense of researching what the truth actually is, or changing their script/casting/costumes/whatever to bear a passable resemblance to it.)
by JimDabell | 2025-11-19 16:08:43+00:00
> > While an error rate of 1-in-1,000 seems low, [...], on a task that requires successful execution of thousands of steps in a row, such a system results in inevitable failure.

> This is also why (edit: non-LIDAR) FSD cars are an illusion.

In this scenario, Waymo’s AI is executing thousands of steps in a row. The fact that it uses LIDAR for sensing doesn’t change that. It’s still AI driving you around no matter what its eyes are made of.

Waymo is a counterexample to the point you were making and their use of LIDAR doesn’t change that.
by mock-possum | 2025-11-19 16:08:48+00:00
> The writer who says "this issue has nuance and I can see valid concerns on multiple sides" gets a pat on the head and zero retweets.

Because I think at this point ‘both sides ism’ Is easily recognizable as a dead end rhetorical strategy. At best it’s an ignorant position, at worst it’s low effort engagement bait / concern trolling that actively sabotages progress.
by nradov | 2025-11-19 16:08:49+00:00
The uneven demographic curve shows that many elderly current homeowners will have to sell over the next couple decades due to death or moving into assisted living facilities. That will increase supply and reduce demand, although the impact will vary widely by region. Don't expect any major price reductions in popular areas but there may be further collapses in certain rural and economically stagnant areas. You can look at Japan for a preview of how that plays out.
by ljosifov | 2025-11-19 16:09:05+00:00
So far so good - and I say this as one voting remain. The only gripe I have is that our domestic doomers were even more stupid than the EU ones. Ours were the progenitors of many of EU dumb ideas. So even outside EU, we in the UK not only did not repeal the utterly imbecilic laws we inherited. No - we added even more stupid laws. Consequence being people are put in jail for writing stuff on the Internet. I hope someone puts in jail the lawmakers that voted for these laws. To the cheering of and with public support, it must be said. It was not without consent, it was not only bi-party, but omni-party consent.
by yardie | 2025-11-19 16:09:12+00:00
> due in part to burdensome privacy regulations.

A large part is due to their approach to startup investing and chronic undercapitalization. GDPR is coming up 10 years now and the worries about it were overblown. What hasn't budged is Europe is very fiscally conservative on technology. Unless it's coming from their big corporations it's very hard to get funding. Everyone wants the same thing, a sure bet.
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-11-19 16:09:34+00:00
I'm not telling them how to live their lives. I'm just predicting the path that is made based on the choices made.

Everyone is on a journey, and the path their journey takes is partially the choices made. People are allowed to think hard about their choices, and the choices of others.

If they want their path to go their, so be it, and but it's cruel to not discuss the ramifications of choices made.
by jjice | 2025-11-19 16:09:36+00:00
There's (obviously) a lot of discussion around the use of `unwrap` in production code. I feel like I'm watching comments speak past each other right now.

I'd agree that the use of `unwrap` could possibly make sense in a place where you do want the system to fail hard. There's lot of good reasons to make the system fail hard. I'd lean towards an `expect` here, but whatever.

That said, the function already returns a `Result` and we don't know what the calling code looks like. Maybe it does do an `unwrap` there too, or maybe there is a save way for this to log and continue that we're not aware of because we don't have enough info.

Should a system as critical as the CF proxy fail hard? I don't know. I'd say yes if it was the kind of situation that could revert itself (like an incremental rollout), but this is such an interesting situation since it's a config being rolled out. Hindsight is 20:20 obviously, but it feels like there should've been better logging, deployment, rollback, and parsing/validation capabilities, no matter what the `unwrap`/`Result` option is.

Also, it seems like the initial Clickhouse changes could've been testing much better, but I'm sure the CF team realizes that.

On the bright side, this is a very solid write up so quickly after the outage. Much better than those times we get it two weeks later.
by Groxx | 2025-11-19 16:10:16+00:00
As a follow-up, since I can't edit any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980788

^ They are correct, the MLS / E2EE part of RCS is quite new and not yet implemented ~anywhere. So it gets no points until widespread, and this is now a decade after RCS's introduction. I think we can expect it to take a long time yet, if at all.
by mojoe | 2025-11-19 16:10:46+00:00
Thanks for pointing that out, I need to remove that submissions page altogether, the magazine has been shut down for five years and you found your way to a vestigial part of the site that almost nobody visits anymore.

I wrote a post about the ralan closure in 2023: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/ralan.com-closes-...

If you're looking for places to submit, https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ is now the place I recommend to check.
by QuiEgo | 2025-11-19 16:11:16+00:00
I guess I don’t have a huge association with calling someone a CRIMINAL as a big deal. Like I speed on the highway every day, I’m a criminal too. I don’t really feel like I’m doing anything wrong if I drive safe and there’s no traffic near me. If I got a ticket though I did the deed and so be it. It’s not some black and white, “you’re a criminal so you’re evil” thing for me at all. The punishment should fit the crime.
by kcplate | 2025-11-19 16:11:24+00:00
> Does it apply to rich immigrants?

I think if they are illegally here, it doesn't really matter. A rich illegal immigrant may not have the same social services strain as the poor do, but it’s still someone willfully breaking a law to gain an advantage. I am not sure how a society stays orderly if its laws are meaningless.

Plus my guess is if you are rich, chances are you are here on a legal path, because you can afford to do so and you have more to lose if you dont follow the law.

> big corporations and the rich want immigration

But I don’t think they necessarily want illegal immigration. They can certainly get around I-9 employee requirements by hiring contractors, but unless on site work is needed, why not just offshore and get it even cheaper and not have to deal with gray areas of legality by as a company trying to bypass immigration laws?
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-11-19 16:11:53+00:00
About time. Startups and innovative business simply cannot get investment when there's the constant risk of a new AI Act massively increasing compliance and legal costs.

But it's not enough - they need to completely repeal the DSA, AI Act, ePrivacy Directive, and Cybersecurity Act at least. And also focus on unifying the environment throughout the EU - no more exit taxes, no need for notaries and in-person verbal agreements, etc.

There's just so much red tape and bureaucracy it's incredible. You can't hire or pay payroll taxes across the EU (without the hire relocating) - that's a huge disadvantage compared to the USA before you even get into the different language requirements.
by sandworm101 | 2025-11-19 16:11:58+00:00
2 liters is hardly econobox, even without a turbo. A new honda civic sedan is 1.3 liters (NA). 2.0 is more typical for sedans imho. The 2.0 turbo in this biuld originally turned 250+ hp (wrx) which is well beyond econo anything.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-19 16:12:22+00:00
>The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

The author has to say this because the consumers of the author's content would stop being right if the author was constantly dropping truth bombs like "being articulate doesn't make you right" they wouldn't get liked, retweeted, shared, and circle jerked about in the comment section on the front page of HN.

Literally every content creating person or company with an established fan base is in this quandary. If Alex Jones said "hey guys the government is right about this one" or Regular Car Reviews said "this Toyota product is not the second coming of christ" they'd hemorrhage viewers and money so they cant say those things no matter how much they personally want to. Someone peddling platitudes to people who fancy themselves intellectuals can't stop any more than a guy who's family business is concrete plants can't just decide one day to do roofing.
Ask HN: What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?
by jacobwilliamroy | 2025-11-19 16:12:30+00:00
I'm talking about greater than 5 TB in size. Rclone looks really good because I can just give it a bandwidth limit, point it at google drive and fire and forget. But I'm curious if that is the best way to do this? What does HN think?
Show HN: ChunkBack – A Fake LLM API server for testing apps without paying
by forthwall | 2025-11-19 16:12:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working with LLMs in production for a while both as a solo dev building apps for clients and working at an AI startup. The one thing that always was a pain was to pay OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic a few dollars a month just for me to say "test" or have a CI runner validate some UI code. So I built this server called ChunkBack, that mocks the popular llm provider's functionality but allows you to type in a deterministic language:

`SAY "cheese"` or `TOOLCALL "tool_name" {} "tool response"`

I've had to work in some test environments and give good results for experimenting with CI, but it's still an early project so would love feedback and more testers on.
by jjice | 2025-11-19 16:13:09+00:00
Completely agreed. There has always been bits of entitlement to open source projects by users, but I feel like increase in package managers and ecosystems (which I think is generally a good thing) has lead to a _huge_ increase in people being entitled assholes to maintainers.

Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package with a single maintainer. The demanding attitude from someone who wants a feature that doesn't even make sense for the package to an individual who has a separate full time job and a family who does this for the love of the game is very upsetting.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-19 16:13:47+00:00
The article cited a report which said new build solar and storage could cost from $50 to $131. And new build wind and storage could cost $44 to $123.[1]

Civilian nuclear reactors replace fuel gradually over 3 to 6 years typically. 20 year old solar panels work now. New solar panels are expected to work over 30 years. Utility scale lithium ion batteries are expected to last 10 to 15 years.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
by Itoldmyselfso | 2025-11-19 16:13:47+00:00
If you ignore the massively easier learning curve, better usability and presentation, purely in terms of raw outcome and capabilities (to an extent), Dark table actually comes ahead of Lightroom. Not saying it will replace it at all though, it's software for power users, while Lightroom is for both novices and pro's who prefer UX over features.
by recitedropper | 2025-11-19 16:13:52+00:00
OK yes, you are right that we might be talking about employing AI toolings in different modes, and that the paper I am referring to is absolutely about agentic tooling executing code changes on your behalf.

That said, the first comment of the person I replied to contained: "You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft", which is pretty explicitly speaking to agent mode. He was also responding to a comment that was talking about how humans spend "hours talking about architectural decisions", which as an action mapped to AI would be more plan mode than ask mode.

Overall I definitely agree that using LLM tools to just tell you things about the structure of a codebase are a great way to use them, and that they are generally better at those one-off tasks than things that involve substantial multi-step communications in the ways humans often do.

I appreciate being the weeds here haha--hopefully we all got a little better talking abou the nuances of these things :)
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-19 16:14:03+00:00
A decade would be very quick. The amount of specialist knowledge that went into every part of this project is crazy.. After a decade's worth of projects I doubt I'd be confident to tackle the steering and suspension design on something like this, let alone all the aero.

I've been working on cars for 20yr, I weld, I have done CAD/CAM/CAE stuff, rebuilt and modified engines, done custom suspension work... there are so many aspects of a project like this that are just completely unknown to me, like I wouldn't even know where to start. Many aspects of this build are not things you can really learn or research on your own.
by westurner | 2025-11-19 16:14:16+00:00
Will this simulate the sun and planets of the solar system?

Do these models of n-body gravity predict the perihelion in the orbit of Mercury?

Newton's does not predict perihelion, GR General Relativity does, Fedi's SQG Superfluid Quantum Gravity with Gross-Pitaevskii does, and this model of gravity fully-derived from the Standard Model also predicts perihelion in the orbit of planet Mercury.

Lagrange points like L1 and L2 are calculated without consideration for the mass of the moon.

Additional notes on n-body mechanics: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-45928486 Ctrl-f n-body, perihelion
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-11-19 16:14:32+00:00
> without taking the time to understand why they do things, the way they do.

Oh I am aware. They do it because

A) they don’t have a mental model of correct execution. Events just happen to them with a feeling of powerlessness. So rather than trying to form one they just litter the code with cases things that might happen

> As I've gotten older, the sharp edges have been sanded off.

B) they have grown in bad organizations with bad incentives that penalize the appearance of making mistakes. So they learn to hide them.

For example there might be an initiative that rewards removing crashes in favor of silent error.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-19 16:15:42+00:00
It’s not about seams in 2d but 3d curved surfaces.

OpenCascade’s kernel forces you to deal with periodicity in topology (the shape structure), while Parasolid handles it in geometry (the math). A cylinder is mathematically continuous because there's no actual "seam" where it starts and ends. But in OpenCascade there’s a seam from 0 to 2π and this seam edge becomes a real topological entity that every algorithm has to deal with.

In Parasolid the cylinder is periodic so when you query a point at U=2.1π, the kernel just knows that's equivalent to U=0.1π. The periodicity is a property of the surface math, not the shape structure. It’s not using polygons/edges/vertexes but a system of equations to calculate the surfaces.

This is why boolean ops fail so often in FreeCAD: it’s asking the kernel to intersect with an artificial edge that shouldn't exist. The seam creates edge cases in intersection calculations, makes filleting near seams a nightmare, and complicates things. Parasolid's implicit handling requires smarter surface evaluation code upfront, but then everything else just works.