MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-03 13:43:44+00:00
It says "of the other gender".

And yes, I get it. If it gets to a poitn where it feels more like a female-only space, I'll be less inclined to go next time. I don't want to feel like I'm invading.

I'm perfectly fine with a sausage fest, though. That's the default in tech circles, after all.
Show HN: a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser
by tchauffi | 2025-11-03 13:45:15+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with Rust lately and wanted a project that would help me explore some of its lower-level and performance-oriented features. Inspired by Sebastian Lague’s videos, I decided to implement my own ray tracer from scratch.

The initial goal was just to render a simple 3D scene in the browser at a reasonable frame rate. It evolved into a small renderer that can: • Run locally or on the web using wgpu and WebAssembly • Perform mesh rendering with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for acceleration • Simulate both direct and indirect illumination for photorealistic results • Be deployed easily as a free web demo using GitHub Pages

The project is far from perfect, but it’s been a fun way to dig deeper into graphics programming and learn more about Rust’s ecosystem. I’m also planning to experiment with Rust for some ML projects next.

GitHub: https://github.com/tchauffi/rust-rasterizer Web demo (desktop browsers): https://tchauffi.github.io/rust-rasterizer/

Would love feedback from anyone who’s built similar projects or has experience with wgpu or ray tracing in Rust.
by huhtenberg | 2025-11-03 13:45:18+00:00
Canada is even weirder.

After switching to the metric system ('70-80s) some things are still measures in imperial units. If you slice some ham at a counter in a grocery store, it's in grams. You then turn around and get a pound of apples and a gallon of milk. Nuts are in grams, and soda is in liters. Also the body weight tends to be in pounds. Tools are both metric and imperial. Speeds and distances though, thank god, are metric.

All this is just kinda there and everyone's OK with it, but it is an epic mess if you think about it.
by int_19h | 2025-11-03 13:45:20+00:00
Try Vivaldi. It's a "kitchen sink" browser in the same vein as Opera used to be back in its days of glory, so it comes with an email and calendar client that can be optionally turned off:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-calendar-feed-reader-a...

But you can also just use it as an email client and ignore the browser part.
by kibwen | 2025-11-03 13:45:21+00:00
> weighed 28.8 pounds, and achieved a peak power of 550 kilowatts

How well does this scale down? Can I have a 550 watt motor that's 1/1000th the size and that weighs 0.0288 pounds? Would be nifty to have an e-bike without any visible motor.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-11-03 13:45:54+00:00
Very cool! Love to see old but still useful GPL licensed FSF projects. I had Maxima on my old Lisp Machine, and 24 years ago when I first interviewed at Google, one of the developers of Maxima was also interviewing and we had a while to talk in the sign in area before going off for our interviews. We were amused that two old Common Lispers were at the same place at the same time.

When you try the linked browser web app, start with the documentation link, fairly easy to use.
by anthk | 2025-11-03 13:46:11+00:00
All of NIXen.

~/.profile

~/.env

~/.xprofile

Exploiting TMPDIR, /tmp race conditions, ~/.mailcap and mutt (I used that to get access to 'premium' binaries under restricted accounts).

If you have Emacs you can do tons of stuff from a single account.

And so on.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-03 13:46:45+00:00
Don't over-focus on one specific event in time like "launch", but instead launch it silently, purchase targeted ads or similar, share in relevant subreddits/reddit submissions (only where it's relevant) and ask the people who try it out for feedback. Basically, you want a small increase in users over days rather than huge increase of temporary users in few hours. Main point is to gather feedback early and be able to adjust quickly, without loosing momentum.

The whole "Launch Day" spectacle is over-hyped and only gets you low-engagement activity for a short period of time, while what you need to be looking for are users who like your value proposition, but they're getting stuck/thrown off somewhere, and you need to figure out where, before opening the flood gates.
by avhception | 2025-11-03 13:47:01+00:00
Sounds interesting, but it sounds like that would mean installing the service software and it's dependencies into the root filesystem. I'm relatively sure I don't want that, as it would create a big mess on the host. I have stuff like Nextcloud in my jails, and wouldn't want to install PHP and all of it's deps outside the dedicated filesystem of the jail.

But it's very cool to see continued development, jails are such an awesome feature!
by ModernMech | 2025-11-03 13:47:04+00:00
I teach freshmen through seniors in college. Let me just say good luck with that -- last week I had to explain to a freshman what a "colon" was and where to find it on the keyboard. This person graduated near the top of their HS class. I also had to explain to a Master's student who graduated with an "IT" degree what a "compiler" was. So yeah, Palantir isn't ready for what they're suggesting.

The consequence of "everyone" getting a bachelor's degree is that high schools outsource their work to colleges. Especially since COVID have things gotten worse; the students I'm teaching now were middle schoolers 5 years ago. I will say that the kids are great, but they are severely lacking in fundamentals in a way students even 5 years ago were not.
by tomatocracy | 2025-11-03 13:48:52+00:00
Not sure but I think I read a while ago that they were removed due to unreliability (it's a while since I've been there myself).

It was very clever how they did the acceleration/deceleration - the "tiles" of the walkway fit together in such a way that each could slide on top of the next one, and at the two ends the tiles would gradually slide closer together (decelerating) or further apart (accelerating).
by gdulli | 2025-11-03 13:49:16+00:00
I worked for others in a corporate environment and it was often a joy, but the problem is you don't always get that lucky and even if you do, the environment can change around you from year to year and a perfect job can turn into hell. And corporate engineering jobs have become so filled with stupid bullshit that the career I had and thrived in may not even be possible anymore.

I'm not set up to work for myself, my ideal is for others to worry about the business, and give me projects I can work on with freedom.
by talkingtab | 2025-11-03 13:49:22+00:00
A proprietary project. I was surprised to realize how little interest I have in these things anymore. I mean genuinely surprised. I suppose I have just seen so many large-corporation-does-something in isolation projects that I make two possibly wrong assumptions.

1) It will never work 2) The article is just advertising. Jobs, products whatever.

There is a third conclusion which is worrisome. That the leadership of the organization just doesn't get it.

I'm not advocating these as correct, just wondering if other readers share my instantaneous reaction of been-there, seen-that, know-how-it-ends.
by throwaway7486 | 2025-11-03 13:49:29+00:00
> It's like if Wayland is not just a graphical system, but a full business plan. Control upstream, then companies wanting solutions will go to you first.

Wayland is open source with a fixed core protocol that's extremely stable, which anyone can build on. New protocols are constantly proposed. The core is minimal and defines how applications interact with the compositor to render and produce the final output. Control by a single entity is virtually impossible. Wayland ensures everyone has a voice because it's an open protocol which means discussion and development are done in the public.
by int_19h | 2025-11-03 13:49:55+00:00
There was also the whole "web apps are coming and they run everywhere" thing. Which actually did work out exactly as people expected it to, although it took longer than most predicted - but your average casual PC user spends most of their time in the browser these days.

However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.
by bluGill | 2025-11-03 13:50:15+00:00
A large portions of "Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs" are an abstraction on wealth. At the bottom: enough food, shelter and clothing - all form of wealth. At Safety - all of forms that wealth can buy. Love And Belonging - this is the least affected, but it is common for couples to break up if wealth is lacking enough (and romantic when they don't) - still I'm not going to count it since if you pass the lower two you have enough wealth. Esteem - wealth is one measure of status, and everything is is a measure of things that lead to wealth in society (though sometimes in obsolete society - hunting is no longer needed to live but being a good hunter is still status). Self-actualization - the more wealth you have the more options you have - and as already established, wealth is required to even get this high.

Not everything is about wealth in the above, I skipped them in the discussion but if you are not familiar with the whole you should find and read the whole list because it is insightful what I skipped.

Remember money is an abstraction of wealth. It is easy to say I have X dollars (euros), it is harder to say what the picture on my wall is worth but there are a group of people into that type of art that will give that a high value (while others not into it will consider it worthless) as such wealth isn't an exact measure, but it is at the root of a large part of the good life. It is never the important thing itself, but it is behind a lot of important things and so a useful measure.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-11-03 13:50:22+00:00
I live in NYC. Less than 1% of our population works on supporting transit (when you add in tourists and commuters, it's ~0.7%). And it's very often faster to get somewhere by subway than it is by car.

Plus, parking is simultaneously way too cheap (~3 million free parking spaces on some of the most valuable real estate in the world) and way too expensive for most people (garages by me start at $350/mo). So in order to keep a car, I'd either need to waste thousands of dollars on a garage or hundreds of hours driving around trying to find free parking.
by iso1631 | 2025-11-03 13:50:34+00:00
A typical regional aircraft needs about 3MW of power to keep in cruise, and has about 50 square metre area, so 60kW per square metre. Even with 50% efficiency you're talking over 100kW/m^2

A laser over 10W has safety implications. This is 50,000 lasers all shining on the same plane.

Given your collectors are only going to be say 50% efficient, you're likely going to dumping enough wasted energy into the wings to melt the aircraft - not sure what dumping 3MW of heat energy into a plane would do over an hour, but I suspect it would stat to melt in a few seconds if you're lucky (otherwise your passengers would start getting very toasty)

At 3MW for an hour that's not a great amount of electricity that's needed - at 10c/kWh it's $300 an hour. You don't need fancy things like fusion to generate that. In the UK alone Solar is currently (in November) generating 600 times that - plus domestic installations.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-11-03 13:50:44+00:00
You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.

In an ICE, the same load is less visible because most energy gets wasted as heat. This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-11-03 13:51:49+00:00
>grab a slice of processed cheese (looked like a standard individual plastic packaged slice to me)

Kraft makes a plastic wrapped slice that is "cheese food", however they also make an American cheese slice that is actual cheese. I suspect you saw the latter.

https://www.kraftheinz.com/kraft-deli-deluxe/products/000210...
by devchix | 2025-11-03 13:52:03+00:00
Cumin is an olfactory note in perfumery. When well-paired it adds a lovely and unusual note of spice. Example: The Different Company Rose Poivrée was created by Jean-Claude Ellena, the in-house perfumer for Hermes before the current one. It has notes of coriander and cumin, subtle but distinctively there. If you like it, you like it. Unfortunately for me, after a while it starts smelling like a stinking armpit. Indole is another compound use in perfumery, at intense concentration it smells like poop.
by npteljes | 2025-11-03 13:52:19+00:00
I don't see why this is newsworthy. The guy has a 26,000-word Wikipedia article just about his lies only. I don't see why every one of his insane utterances must dominate the front page of every English-speaking news site. His detractors, and his supporters all agree that this is the way he is. Did any trend change, compared to his past? If not, then let's move on.
by which | 2025-11-03 13:52:43+00:00
Relatedly about another member of the same group:

> Penchukov’s political connections helped him evade prosecution by Ukrainian cybercrime investigators for many years. The late son of former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych (Victor Yanukovych Jr.) would serve as godfather to Tank’s daughter Miloslava... Sources briefed on the investigation into Penchukov said that in 2010 — at a time when the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was preparing to serve search warrants on Tank and his crew — Tank received a tip that the SBU was coming to raid his home.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/11/top-zeus-botnet-suspect-...
by gs17 | 2025-11-03 13:53:08+00:00
> [A] An agent can process untrustworthy inputs

> [B] An agent can have access to sensitive systems or private data

> [C] An agent can change state or communicate externally

Somewhat reminds me of the CAP theorem, where you can pick two of three, but one is effectively required for something useful. It seems more like the choice is really between "untrustworthy inputs" and "sensitive systems", which makes sense.
by stared | 2025-11-03 13:53:30+00:00
As a very much work-in-progress, yesterday, I started working on interactive equations https://p.migdal.pl/equations-explained-colorfully/ (it uses KaTeX under the hood).

The idea is similar to https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math-equation..., but with mouseover interaction (both for further description, but also for accessibility). For a deeper dive in the topic of explorable explanations, I wrote https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2024/05/science-games-explorable-ex... (was here on the HN as well).
by whattheheckheck | 2025-11-03 13:54:09+00:00
Yes governance power can take many forms but when it changes, it's no longer democracy.

If anything a better analysis comes from the book Logic of Political Survival. The selectorate and the winning coalition are much smaller than previous generations because of the massive accumulation and consolidation of wealth. So they dont have to do jack shit for the majority of people because theyre irrelevant in gaining or holding power. The majority of Americans hold and wield absolutely no political power in placing anyone in power. And then are surprised when they get wrecked. Or maybe theyre not surprised because they simple dont know how much theyre country is getting looted
by stsffap | 2025-11-03 13:55:31+00:00
We built this to explore what it takes to move a coding agent from "works on my laptop" to "handles millions of users in production."

The core insight: durability matters more than you'd think for agents. When an agent takes 5-10 minutes on a task, crashes become inevitable. Rate limits hit. Sandboxes timeout. Users interrupt mid-task. Traditional retry logic gets messy fast.

Our approach uses Restate for durable execution (workflows continue from the last completed step) and Modal for ephemeral sandboxes. We get automatic failure recovery, interruptions for new input, great scalability, and scale-to-zero without any custom retry code. The tradeoffs: coupling to Restate's execution model and requiring discipline around deterministic replay.

How are you handling long-running agent workflows to make them run reliably at scale?
by hnbad | 2025-11-03 13:55:42+00:00
The boneheaded decision to "privatize" rail by creating a state-owned corporation competing with itself, a network of regional corporations with extremely inconsistent funding and separate corporations for various services like literally maintaining infrastructure definitely has resulted in "too much DB". Although I sincerely doubt attempting to actually open up those "markets" by introducing foreign corporations like National Express really does anything other than cannibalize rail services even further.

I still can't get over the justification for abandoning the €9/month universal ticket experiment (and replacing it with a €49/month offering which has since been bumped to €58/month and will soon be raised to €63/month) officially being in part that "rail will be worse when more people use it" (the other mostly being "not enough people used it to demonstrate its value" and "people used the ticket for trips they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to make").

We should just nationalize it all properly and make it free at point of service. Let tourists use it for free too, obviously. Infrastructure exists so the economy can happen, its ROI is a functioning industry and society so stop trying to pretend we can reasonably measure its success in profit.
by bluGill | 2025-11-03 13:57:46+00:00
I started the thread with '"5 iq points dumber" (whatever that means)'. I intended that to be read something like "as if there was an objective measure of intelligence that scaled like iq'.

I cannot say what other intended, but at least some people are reading this whole thread in that context and I would expect you to as well even if others didn't intend that. (that is "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." - hopefully this helps you see context better)
by Someone | 2025-11-03 13:58:45+00:00
They don’t need this motor, but if it can be scaled down… at over 10kW/kg sustained, one could wish/hope to get 200W at 50g (disclaimer: I have no idea how this scales with size). Combine that with 1kg of a 600Wh/kg battery (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797452. Again, I have no idea how realistic that is), and you have a bicycle that’s only a little heavier than a non-electric one, but gives you a boost for 3 hours (more if you use it sparingly. If you’re cycling at leisure, 100W already is a lot of power)
by pietz | 2025-11-03 13:59:08+00:00
Cannot confirm this. Both sound like prompting issues.

- Depends on your use case to let the model understand when and when not to use tools - gpt-5 s VERY persistent and often searches more than 10 times in a single run depending on the results.

We're using pydantic AI where the entire Agent loop is taken care of by the framework. Highly recommend.
by flatiron | 2025-11-03 13:59:31+00:00
I got a speeding ticket in Colorado on a business trip and later moved clients and thought to myself “meh I just won’t pay it I won’t be back to Colorado any time soon” and I was stopping entering the country on a trip from the Caribbean for “outstanding warrants”. If I can get stopped for that they should know if they have real criminal charges to not play around.
by kibwen | 2025-11-03 13:59:43+00:00
Let's start simple and say that the average person isn't bisexual, so we need to exclude half of people from the get-go. But maybe you're taking that as a given. So then we also need to consider that less than half the population is within your optimal age range. Maybe you're also taking that as a given. (But note that at this point we're already excluding 85% of humans.) Now consider that you also probably want them to speak your language. Again, maybe another gimme, but you're still down to less than 2% of humans. Of that, pick any ordinary dealbreaker; opinions on having children, political opinions, religious preferences, personal habits, and so on. Find the intersection of these. And don't forget to consider that a not-insignificant proportion of the population are simply high-functioning maniacs who you're better off never coming into contact with. And now consider mutual attractiveness.
by codingrightnow | 2025-11-03 13:59:50+00:00
I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.
by falcor84 | 2025-11-03 14:00:45+00:00
As mentioned in the comments there, the actual sum according to the official calculator is that a gross salary of €60,000 would cost the employer €84,982 and net the employee €40,504 [0] (still really high though).

[0] https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
by hnbad | 2025-11-03 14:01:53+00:00
Germany is a developing country when it comes to broadband let alone wireless internet.

The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).
by jfoster | 2025-11-03 14:02:09+00:00
A major downside of any service once it becomes too large is that the overall complexity introduces lower reliability. From Google's perspective perhaps each rule and feature makes sense, but from a customer perspective, there might be too much risk of who-knows-what issues coming up. I don't think this is limited to Google. I miss the older, less complicated versions of most bigtech services; Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc. Even looking at Vercel's project settings the other day I found myself thinking "hmm this is getting a bit unwieldy."
by orwin | 2025-11-03 14:02:37+00:00
The new TGV-M already have batteries inside. When you have an issue with the catenary for any reason, the batteries can help keep the train momentum without risks, or if the train had to stop, allow you to start from 0kmh to 80kmh and keep the speed for 5 hours, with air conditioning and all. Your 2 hour trip now last 5 hours, but still. And since in my country every 10 km on major lines you have a "different" catenary circuit, the 80km/h speed will probably last 15 minutes and you can go back to 280 fast enough. I think the first was deployed this year, it it will be be available to export in 2-3 years.