MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fortran77 | 2025-11-02 15:09:40+00:00
I remember how badly these radios would drift off-time when running on the battery backup! He explains in the article about how the back-up oscillator is a simple R-C circuit because the power line reference is absent.

It would also kill the backup battery in a couple of hours. If you're in an area with prolonged, frequent backups it wasn't worth installing the battery. It was only good for occasional, short blackouts of a few seconds or less.
by azangru | 2025-11-02 15:09:51+00:00
> - The homepage right now is extremely lightweight and uses next to no javascript. The new design just looks like the same generic Starlight template I'm not sure we want to use a javascript framework. While it provides a lot of features, bitrot in the javascript ecosystem happens at a very fast pace (and pulls in thousands of dependencies). I have sites written both in gatsby and vuepress and between major version breaking changes and deprecations as frameworks cycle, it's a ton of work to keep up (e.g. vuepress -> vitepress/vuepress v2). Even mdbook upgrades have been a pain since we need to merge down theme updates. I'd prefer to see something simple, e.g. (https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/). What do we do in five years when Starlight is deprecated by another framework, and Astro is several major releases ahead, with breaking changes?

This is a very valid point, and a mark of a mature developer who has been bitten by frontend churn, and wants something stable, simple, reliable, and predictable.
by bernds74 | 2025-11-02 15:10:13+00:00
"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-02 15:11:33+00:00
> I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.

Did you ever try to push back? Example: Tell her very directly that you want to focus on the experience of a great dinner, not her taking photos for social media. Another idea: Ask her to leave her mobile phone at home when you go to dinner.
by barbazoo | 2025-11-02 15:11:49+00:00
I wonder how the environment impacts how well these crossings work. The road in the photo looks very narrow, an environment where drivers probably have to pay attention, maybe even slow down in general.

In my neighborhood there’s one at a two lane road but the street itself is very wide so people generally drive very fast to begin with and are often distracted.

Lots of conflict at that crossing even with LED flashers. I don’t know what to do to make drivers pay attention to the strip of road right in front of them.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-02 15:12:31+00:00
> just lots of detail.

"Just" is understating it.

It's the kind of project that takes 20 years to accomplish on your own, and everything seems doable from moment to moment because you have to work very slowly, and the stepwise changes aren't hard.

Just get the thing to boot. Just boot into extended mode. Just get graphics running. Just get a userspace. Just implement cooperative multitasking. Every step is "just", but when you take a step back the complexity is enormous, and it becomes hard to explain to anyone how it works in its entirety.

Although it seems easy to the author because that's just how his brain works now -- by then end of it, you and the OS are one and the same, where your brain is essentially a map of the codebase and nothing more, because nothing else can fit.
Show HN: I built GitHub activity widget for your everyday habits
by supertoub | 2025-11-02 15:12:38+00:00
Turns out I'm motivated by little green squares. I code every day just to keep my GitHub streak alive, so I thought: why not use this power for good? Now I have a heatmap widget on my home screen for going to the gym. Watching those green squares pile up hits different than any fitness app I've tried. It's shallow, but it works. I got fed up with existing habit trackers—too many had subscriptions for what's basically a calendar with colors. So I built this in a month while learning Swift. It's my first native iOS app (I usually work on boring B2B apps), and I'm honestly impressed with how smooth SwiftUI made everything. Features: * GitHub-style heatmap widgets * iCloud sync * Everything stored locally, no accounts * One-time purchase (because I refuse to add another subscription to my life) The green squares now guilt me into working out. Mission accomplished. My goal: keep building apps until I can afford an Apple Vision Pro. If you want to support me, check it out! App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/habit-heatmap/6747598515
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-02 15:13:30+00:00
Hey, how dare you besmirch my favorite variety of slime mold by implying it's like HP and IBM products!

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

Harvesting, cooking and eating Dog Vomit Slime Mold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbLSl_4o78
by yodon | 2025-11-02 15:13:59+00:00
I love the article, and love the genuinely appropriate intellectual outrage, but isn't this just the market telling AutoDesk that it was paying too much for its enterprise sales function, and that it should be able to run sales more efficiently ($375/seat cost of sales rather than $500/seat cost of sales), when the sale is happening at the enterprise scale where lots of seats are involved?

Given that your largest customers are generally your most profitable, the market was simply telling AutoDesk at the time that it was spending more than its peers selling to large enterprises and matching per-seat SMB sales costs shouldn't be their benchmark for enterprise sales costs.

By shifting the target from $500 to $375/seat cost of sales, AutoDesk would have kept their margins but doubled their returns. Alternatively, AutoDesk could keep the cost of sales unchanged ($500) and bump up the enterprise price from $1,000 to a little over $1,125, and achieve the same goal. The market doesn't care which approach AutoDesk takes, but it knows the company was giving away too much margin on enterprise sales. Most modern SaaS companies today take the later approach, except they would charge enterprises $2,500/seat instead of a little over $1,125/seat.

AutoDesk has had some very forward thinking senior leadership at different points in its history, but it's also made some missteps. Writing a wonderful assault on the accounting industry instead of realizing that enterprises will pay $2,500 for the same thing SMB's are buying for $1,000 is an example of one of those missteps (and yes, AutoDesk eventually figured how to screw over customers with pricing, but that's another misstep, explaining why I no longer own any AutoDesk products).
by surajrmal | 2025-11-02 15:14:46+00:00
To be fair, this information is hard to come by in companies as well, unless it's being tracked and reported by program managers. I wonder if it would be sensible for the rust foundation to use some funds to pay folks to help track and organize efforts which the wider community is deeply interested in better. I care about a lot of the things mentioned in this thread, but the cost of paying attention or needing to bother folks on chatrooms to get status prevents me from really staying abreast of the latest.
by aliljet | 2025-11-02 15:14:56+00:00
Sunday morning, and I find myself wondering how the engineering tinkerer is supposed to best self-host these models? I'd love to load this up on the old 2080ti with 128gb of vram and play, even slowly. I'm curious what the current recommendation on that path looks like.

Constraints are the fun part here. I know this isn't the 8x Blackwell Lamborghini, that's the point. :)
by stackskipton | 2025-11-02 15:15:03+00:00
So they don't set reasonable expectations with the customers and accept any and all garbage. As Ops person, this is a path to Ops hell as customers throw more and more garbage at you and toil dealing with customer problems becomes unbearable.

This is a case of Product Team not working with customers, finding out what is reasonable and allowing system to set reasonable limits.
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-02 15:15:20+00:00
> Surely if you do this, you just end up expressing your C design in different syntax?

Using different syntax is not pointless: the syntax allows you to express limited invariants that are expected to be comprehensively upheld by the surrounding C code. These invariants will initially be extremely broad (e.g. "this function must always get a $VALID pointer as input", for whatever values of $VALID), since they cannot be automatically checked; but they can gradually become stricter as more and more of the codebase is rewritten to be memory safe. Does this sometimes involve " cascading changes"? Yes, but much smaller than a from-scratch 100% rewrite into Safe Rust.
by narrator | 2025-11-02 15:15:31+00:00
>Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)

When you suddenly realize walking down the street that the very high fentanyl zombie is having a better day than you are.

Yeah, you can push the button in your brain that says "You won the game." However, all those buttons were there so you would self-replicate energy efficient compute. Your brain runs on 10 watts after all. It's going to take a while for AI to get there, especially without the capability for efficient self-repair.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-02 15:16:05+00:00
Don't comply in advance. HN is pretty tolerant for just speaking your mind, as long as you do so fairly, do not exaggerate and resort to personal attacks.

You can say 'that's a stupid idea' but not 'you're stupid', even if most people would draw that conclusion after evaluating the stupid idea.

As for Musk, fuck him and the horse he rode in on and I'm really sorry that YC chose to give him a platform. Musk and his colleague billionaires are the biggest risk to society that we have, and I don't care what they currently vote for or whose pockets they are lining. The lot of them are negating our whole system of governance because money = power and they are abusing that power, both to get more power and to diminish the powers that we have historically relied upon to keep us safe.

Concentrating that much wealth is problematic when it is old men in Rome and their churches, it is a much bigger problem when it is tech savvy single individuals who collude openly with politicians and autocrats/dictators/wannabe dictators.

At least that guy in Rome pretends to have some morals (though, as we know now the Holy Roman Catholic Church is a hotbed of crime and most likely has been so since a really long time).
by heavyset_go | 2025-11-02 15:16:06+00:00
It's a local media library manager in the same vein as media servers that came before it that were intended to run on desktops and serve up content to consoles and whatever on your LAN back when that was the thing to do.

My point is to treat it like software from that lineage and you won't have a problem, trying to treat it like something it's not, like a distributed web app, will lead to issues.
by dpflan | 2025-11-02 15:16:20+00:00
Agree, better title for this post; the fact that back prop is a leaky abstraction is a reason one should understand it and know how to do the mechanics by hand to truly experience it and develop understanding and intuition. Software / code abstracting away even more of the process leaves it open to magical thinking. I had to do hand calculations and convolutions in my Deep Learning graduate school course.
by rererereferred | 2025-11-02 15:16:23+00:00
Yes, height of the language aside, why add a dependency to leftpad when the LLM can build the code for you every time? Extrapolate this to ORMs, why use the ORM when the LLM can build a custom query and map it to objects? And this will probably be more performant. Then extrapolate to the whole web framework? Where should we draw the line?
by tags2k | 2025-11-02 15:16:46+00:00
Indeed - stick me in my pod and inject those experience chemicals into me, what's the difference? But also, what would be the point? What's the point anyway?

In one scenario every atom's trajectory was destined from the creation of time and we're just sitting in the passenger seat watching. In another, if we do have free will then we control the "real world" underneath - the quantum and particle realms - as if through a UI. In the pod scenario, we are just blobs experiencing chemical reactions through some kind of translation device - but aren't we the same in the other scenarios too?
by clanky | 2025-11-02 15:16:56+00:00
Thanks, I've mostly used fastutil lately because it seems to be best maintained. I'll have to look at carrotsearch labs though, I like the approach of a clean break with java.util.collections.*.

The Agrona Java library from the Aeron people has some primitive optimized collections too: https://github.com/aeron-io/agrona
by reify | 2025-11-02 15:17:16+00:00
This didnt need proving. waste of money

How can we prove that the psychologists doing the proving were not suffering mental illness.

Is there such a thing as a Colorado Psychologist, are they different somehow to your normal run of the mill psychologist.

what is proving you may ask, it is the process whereby a bread dough develops, through a chemical reaction and rises to a state where you can chuck it in the oven.
by ghaff | 2025-11-02 15:17:16+00:00
Seems like a very niche market for a company at HP's scale. I don't really see them as a consumer printer company any longer. And Roomba-type things are very dependent on floor plans. My brother has a near-ideal layout (single level with no transitions) and it just works so-so for them. Wouldn't work for me pretty much at all even with some changes that eliminate level transitions.
by Bender | 2025-11-02 15:17:16+00:00
Vehicle Telemetry. Make the vehicle store all telemetry and diagnostics to non obfuscated plain text on a thumb drive. Give me incentive to drop it off at a dealership in exchange for a new thumb drive that may include firmware/OS updates that I could optionally install while they observe the output. That would open up the option for me to buy a vehicle newer than 2008.

Incentives for me could be: Extending warranty as a baseline feature, free basic vehicle maintenance and cleaning service, free low glucose donuts and good coffee.

Incentives to them could be: The option to try to up-sell things to me. If EV, option to upgrade battery pack, electric motors, infotainment system, etc... If ICE, upgraded intake manifold, better injectors, coils and plugs, options for differential gear ratios, law enforcement transmission shift kit, computer mods for performance and fuel efficiency options, etc... Their lobbyists could allow their customers to skirt or bend the line of legality.
by superkuh | 2025-11-02 15:17:20+00:00
>Scott Hanselman famously said “URLs are UI”

I actually implemented a comment system where users just pick any arbitrary URL on the domain, ie, http://exampledomain.com/, and append /@say/ to the URL along with their comment so the URL is the UI. An example comment would be typed in the URL bar like,

http://exampledomain.com/somefolder/somepage.html/@say/Hey! Cool somepage. - Me

And then my perl script tailing the webserver log file sees the line and and adds the comment "Hey! Cool somepage. - Me" to the .html file on disk for comments.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-02 15:18:10+00:00
The problem isn't with backprop itself or the optimizer - it's potentially in (the dervatives of) the functions you are building the neural net out of, such as the Sigmoid and ReLU examples that Karpathy gave.

Just because the framework you are using provides things like ReLU doesn't mean you can assume someone else has done all the work and you can just use these and expect them to work all the time. When things go wrong training a neural net you need to know where to look, and what to look for - things like exploding and vanishing gradients.
by martinald | 2025-11-02 15:18:14+00:00
Mac? https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/23/apple_airdrop_awdl_la...

It's been a problem for _years_. Basically the wifi card switches to another channel to see if anyone wants to do airdrop every so often. It's a bit of a joke to be honest that Apple still haven't fixed this.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-02 15:18:26+00:00
If there is one thing I've learned in the last 18 years since founding TMC then it is that investors are not usually very rational. There are exceptions, but for the most part it is just gambling with other people's money, externalize the bad takes and pocket the difference on the wins. It is only rational in the sense that those that partake in it know that they are doing this and that as long as they're the house they don't mind you coming in to place a bet or two. See also: stock market.
by plasticsoprano | 2025-11-02 15:19:10+00:00
I would say, instead of "ideally an Asian woman", a millennial woman. Was recently in a tourist spot for a work outing, we asked a random person to take our photo in front of the big monument and the photos were awful, including a finger of the photographer in each photo. This woman was in easily 50+. Gave the phone to a passing millennial aged woman and got 10 well compositioned photos in both landscape and portrait mode.
by dan_linder | 2025-11-02 15:19:21+00:00
Upvoted because that’s about the only way to get the message away.

But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).

I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.

We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.

With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.

Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.

Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.

By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.

So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 15:19:37+00:00
Still doesn't make sense to claim that "PM2.5" is a neurotoxin, depends entirely on what the specific particles are, not the size of them.

What is more dangerous, PM2.5 or PM10? Well, naturally, smaller particles are more harmful to humans usually, but without knowing what the particles are, it's impossible to tell. Just like "5ML is/isn't more dangerous than 10ML", it doesn't really tell us anything.
by crote | 2025-11-02 15:19:38+00:00
> Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.

You roll a persuasion check: it's a 1 - it failed. Your argument of "you can't do this, the Constitution says nu-uh" failed.

"Fuck the constitution", the masked ICE officer yells at you. "civil rights are for real American citizens, not for your kind." He spits in your face.

The two masked goons holding you start to drag you towards their unmarked van. You struggle a bit. The officer stashes away his Scanning Smartphone and puts his hand on his sidearm.

What is your next move?
by hoistbypetard | 2025-11-02 15:21:41+00:00
I used to work with people who would reply, editing the subject line to end with something like " ACK. <eom>"

These "reaction" message seem about the same as that, and are no more or less annoying. If it became disruptive, I'd rather ask people to stop than fiddle with my server configuration to try to make it stop.
by zurfer | 2025-11-02 15:22:52+00:00
It makes me wonder if we'll see an explosion of purpose trained LLMs because we hit diminishing returns on invest with pre training or if it takes a couple of months to fold these advantages back into the frontier models.

Given the size of frontier models I would assume that they can incorporate many specializations and the most lasting thing here is the training environment.

But there is probably already some tradeoff, as GPT 3.5 was awesome at chess and current models don't seem trained extensively on chess anymore.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-02 15:24:52+00:00
In my experience, the problem is two-fold. First product managers/owners don't consider the URIs, so it ends up not being specified. They say "We should have a page when user clicks X, and then on that page, user can open up modal Y", but none of it is specified in terms of what happens with the URIs and history.

Then a developer gets the task to create this, and they too don't push back on what exact URIs are being used, nor how the history is being treated. Either they don't have time, don't have the power to send back tasks to product, simply don't care or just don't think of it. They happily carry along creating whatever URIs make sense to them.

No one is responsible for URLs, no one considers that part of UX and design, so no one ends up thinking about it, people implement things as they feel is right, without having a full overview over how things are supposed to fit together.

Anyways, that's just based on my experience, I'm sure there are other holes in the process that also exacerbates the issue.
by lm28469 | 2025-11-02 15:25:51+00:00
imho the biggest risk isn't some hypothetical world in which 0 jobs exist or in which skynet kills us all, it's the very real and very present world in which people delegate more and more mental tasks to machines, to the point of being mere interfaces between LLMs and other computer systems. Choosing your kids name with an LLM, choosing your next vacation destination with an LLM, writing your grandma's birthday car with an LLM, it's just so pathetic and sad

And yes you'll tell me books, calculators, computers, the web, were already enabling this to some extent, and I agree, but I see no reason to cheer for even more of that shit spreading into every nook and crannies of our daily lives.
by sitzkrieg | 2025-11-02 15:26:27+00:00
as others have pointed out "just" is doin big overtime here. but also x86_64 saps the fun out by forcing you into archaic irrelevant details IMMEDIATELY. but really, it's a good filter

making toy os for a nice small board on a nice architecture like riscv is night and day more enjoyable. not that modern boards that have more device tree overlays than senses are a good starting point either.

a more modern mmix that builds further up, or nand2tetris, xv6 or any other riscv project going all the way to a user mode ui would be really cool