MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ruralfam | 2025-11-30 19:28:17+00:00
Appreciate any thoughts you all have re: this post. For years I have been using Noctua NF-P14 fans to circulate air in house to distribute heat in the winter from our wood stove. E.g. cut holes in the walls, and circulate remote rooms using the fans. Has worked great, and the Noctuas have been rock solid.

Recently a daughter moved into a really nice apartment close to a major university/freeway where she will live for the number of years it takes to get a Phd. I got concerned about tire dust. So I am about to start building a really nice air DIY air filter using eight Noctua NF-P14s (about 1000 cfm). XMas present.

I really wanted to use merv-13, but got quite worried about air flow restrictions, plus cost to replace (assume monthly). Instead I went with two 12x24 Carter reusable electrostatic merv-8 filters. I use Carter filters on my house blower, and really like them (just washed them... scary how much junk is in household air). Also, I got the 12x24 direct from Carter for a very low price as they were returns. Note: This is NOT a low cost project, but I just got scared re: merv-13 so went with what I know.

Anyway, the final product will NOT be like this guy's DIY. I will use my somewhat decent woodworking skills to fashion a good looking standing "lamp like" appliance that should look good in most living rooms. I am thinking of going with knotless cedar as I really like working with cedar, and there are some mills here in NW WA where one can go to get such wood (not a HomeDepot specialty).

My question is whether an electrostatic merv-8 filter would do well with tire dust. I am not looking to create "clean room" conditions in the apartment. Just get rid of some of the bad stuff. I am very weak re: understanding filters, mervs, etc. APPRECIATE any insights. Thx, RF
by walterbell | 2025-11-30 19:29:05+00:00
It took about 25 years for the cycle from Napster -> MP3 players -> flash memory -> smartphones -> big data -> big GPUs -> LLMs and generative AI -> OpenAI buying 100% of remaining memory wafer capacity from SK Hynix and Samsung = little left for the edge, with 100% price hikes for consumer DIMMs.

https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate/

> Samsung Electronics and SK hynix plan to scale up production of advanced memory chips, targeting 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month at an accelerated capacity rollout, critical for powering OpenAI’s advanced AI models.

We need a new "Napster moment" to restart supply chain investment and business models at the edge. Humanoid robotics might qualify, since robots will need low-latency responses to local sensor input.

Another factor in edge vs. mainframe economics is the cost of energy in each location.
by mercutio2 | 2025-11-30 19:29:17+00:00
Yes, so?

Everyone keeps talking past each other on this, it seems.

“Generating power in space is easy, but ejecting heat is hard!”

Yes.

“That means you’d need huge radiators!”

Yes.

OK, we’re back to “how expensive/reliable is your giant radiator with a data center attached?”

We don’t know yet, but with low launch costs, it isn’t obviously crazy.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-30 19:29:22+00:00
I remember the first time I heard about this, but it's been such a long time that I don't remember the details.

IIRC, someone drowned, and someone else filmed it on camera instead of helping, and ended up on trial for "non assistance".

I can't seem to dig up the actual story, but I think it was in the mid 90s.

Edit: I think it was the story of Marie-Noëlle Guillerné's drowning.
by Izkata | 2025-11-30 19:29:54+00:00
No, their concern was specifically over mRNA and how it might screw with the body.

Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73

Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-11-30 19:30:46+00:00
SUV are easier to get in, you do not need to be a contortionist to get to your seat.

My brother has an Audi sedan and I find it difficult to get in. This is practically impossible for our father. OTOH he is fine with climbing into my SUV

I have Toyota RAV4, a not so big car, but hugh enough for my butt to basically slide in without effort.
by Kwpolska | 2025-11-30 19:31:09+00:00
Depends on your setup. These days, I have a D drive for sharing data with the Linux install I never use. I used to have a D drive for user data (to keep them safe when reinstalling Windows) back in the 9x/XP days (and my CD drive was E).

I also use the drive letter assignment feature, so my external USB drive is always drive X.
by T-A | 2025-11-30 19:31:24+00:00
> If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/in-cnas-led-taiwan-wargame...

https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...
by trashface | 2025-11-30 19:31:37+00:00
The ACA would need to be changed too, it isn't as generous tax-wise as employer based care. The portion of the premium paid by the subscriber is not automatically tax deductible - they have to itemize or meet certain self-employment restrictions. Many don't, so they are paying effectively with after tax dollars. Its one reason why the ACA rate hikes next year are so brutal.

It matters for early retirees (or these days, people forced out of job some years before they wanted to officially retire). Without self-employment income they can't deduct it, and often for similar reasons they can't itemize. They still get the standard deduction of course, but an person on an employer plan gets that + their cost of premiums, automatically.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-30 19:31:41+00:00
> this sort of response is baffling to me

I'm struggling to understand the negative tone in your reply to the parent comment. They simply offered an additional resource on the topic. Rather than welcoming it, you seem to have taken issue with it. One of the strengths of HN threads is that people often contribute further material that others may find helpful.

The video is useful but so is the Wiki article. Some readers will prefer the video, some the article, and some both. Why object to someone sharing another link?
by Animats | 2025-11-30 19:32:02+00:00
From the rebuttal: "We are at the start of an upward curve of technology development that if allowed to continue for another 50 years, will make it as easy to reach space as to fly to Australia."

People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001". And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.
by stanfordkid | 2025-11-30 19:32:27+00:00
IMO This is a dangerous way of thinking. This is the Timothy Leary adage that you are stating. It is not just a "set and setting" issue. Whether or not you have a good or bad trip, or whether you are alongside kind empathetic people or whether what you see is positive or negative does not matter. It has a lot to do with the person individual makeup, sensitivity, ego-centricity, and pre-ingrained beliefs. They do not automatically go away after the trip and the realization. The realizations come into conflict with them. This can very easily be a catastrophic event for some.

I personally think Ayahuasca gives an amazing capacity to see the potential within the universe and within ourselves... it is nearly infinite. However if you deeply understand the world and how mis-aligned it and yourself are from that potential it can create tragedy. If you believe you are responsible for this tragedy it can create catastrophe. I don't mean to over-extend my own experiences too far.

What if there is a book that when you read it you would know for 100% certainty when you die there is no hell, and only infinite peace, unless you wanted to go back into hell. Should everybody read that book?

That's what taking Ayahuasca felt like for me. I don't think it is great to do for everyone. I'm curious to hear your thoughts as you have much more experience than me. I had a lot of challenges after taking it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-30 19:32:48+00:00
TLDR Europe is relying too heavily on Norway for dispatachable hydro, pushing up power prices for domestic electricity users in Norway due to their exposure to Europe wide electricity prices. Potential short term solution is to increase electricity prices for exported power to reduce power prices domestically, while the long term solution is more battery storage across all of Europe. Broadly speaking, Europe has not prioritized energy storage economically (for both energy arbitrage and grid services), leading to teething pains as renewables carry more of the generation burden (Spain's recent national blackout caused by lack of non thermal grid services and battery storage available, for example).
by jorvi | 2025-11-30 19:32:59+00:00
Well, for the two examples I named:

vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.

Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop because you only lose about 10% performance and only with specific workloads, but your idle and light load energy consumption improves. Most laptops spend like 95%+ in light or idle load scenarios. Conversely, on a desktop you don't care (much) about idle and light load energy consumption, you only care about keeping max load consumption low enough so that your fans stay quiet. And on a workstation you don't care about a system being whisper quiet so you can go nuts with the energy consumption.
by godelski | 2025-11-30 19:33:59+00:00
I think you're thinking about this a bit naively, concentrating on the utility without considering the detriments.

Look at social media. WE are the ones who surveil ourselves. Yes, the big social media companies process all that data and use it against us, but we are the ones who give the pictures, videos, and words to them. There's really no good way around this either. I put those same things on my blog and they still get scrapped.

So what ends up being the difference? It's not synced to the cloud, but we put it there anyways. Do you really think most people are just going to take the videos and not share them? Do you think most people are just going to run a NAS at home? In an ideal world, yes. But I don't think we're anywhere near that happening. So a good portion of those videos just get put online somewhere and bad actors have access.

Non-volatile recording doesn't really exist. We're on HN and I'd expect most people here to be familiar with how easy it is to download a streamed video. yt-dlp will do that for a lot more than youtube.
by tstrimple | 2025-11-30 19:34:06+00:00
I've only barely used Nix on OSX to manage packages and I thought it felt awkward at the time. But I had also barely used NixOS at that time. Today I'm happily running NixOS on my NAS and my "gaming" desktop. My son is running it for his desktop as well. What feels awkward and fragile on OSX is far more stable on NixOS. But you do have to learn some of the Nix syntax and ways of doing things which it sounds like you're already getting some of on OSX. The reason I'm going to use it on OSX again is mostly to get consistent HOME configuration and tooling across all of my devices. I'll manage my OSX home dir and tools with the exact same file across multiple computers.
by president_zippy | 2025-11-30 19:34:21+00:00
I freely admit I am out of my depth and have nothing educational to add on the subject. I have but four things to add on this subject:

1. Oh! It's "d.i.l.l.o."! I misread that as something else.

2. After reading many comments in this thread, I must admit I am stupefied at the sheer amount of stuff that can go into merely setting up and maintaining a version control system for a project.

3. I have cited every one of the same problems OP enumerates as my argument for switching new projects over to self-hosted fossil. It also helps a good bit with #2 above when you're a small organization and you're the sole software engineer, sysadmin, and tier >1 support. It's a much simpler VCS that's closer to using perforce in my experience. YMMV, but it's the kind of VCS that doesn't qualify as a skill on a resume.

4. I also find GH deploy keys frustrating because I can't use the same key for multiple repositories. I have 3 separate applications that each run on 4 machines in my cluster, and I have to configure 12 separate deploy keys on GitHub and in my ~/.ssh/config file.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-30 19:34:22+00:00
How do you write an article about this and not mention the GDPR or EU privacy laws?

>"It’s hard to figure out exactly how much data a modern car is collecting on you"

You are a globally operating news agency. You can absolutely get some GDPR requests in and look at it. What kind of reporting is this? "We don"t know, but we also have not tried the one way which forces companies to answer this question".

BMW is a German company, just ask them for the information they have on you and they are forced to give it to you.
by lillecarl | 2025-11-30 19:34:22+00:00
I reported it to Github, supplied links to the edits and to this HN thread. The canned response was:

"Our review of the account(s) and/or content named in your report has concluded. We have determined that one or more violations of GitHub’s Terms of Service have occurred and have taken appropriate action in response."

It took 2h40m, genuinely impressed how quick the turnaround was :)
by Duanemclemore | 2025-11-30 19:34:31+00:00
The Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the software / hardware gap.

A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."

If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-30 19:35:29+00:00
Sure, if we ignore the Assembly buddy code used alongside C.

IBM's OS/400 made use of Modula-2 for some parts, for example.

Back to Niklaus Wirth, as mentioned initially, I think his ideas were great, until he went into minimalism, the first Oberon edition was the turning point, that other researchers luckily improved upon.

Ironically to his point of view, some of them, like Hanspeter Mössenböck, changed his focus into Java and .NET, and has contributions to MaximeVM and GraalVM, via his students thesis.
by hbarka | 2025-11-30 19:36:29+00:00
I have an electric car and if I want to remotely turn on charging, it won’t allow me unless the full data sharing option is enabled. Full data as in your driving data like a black box logger. I then have to go in the car, enable it, then I can remotely turn on charging. I have to remember to opt-out again later. Ironic I know because I can turn on charging from within the cabin without having to enable any of the data collection. What an inconvenient experience.
by nine_k | 2025-11-30 19:36:48+00:00
What kind of job training should an engineer have? An engineer's job is to understand very complex systems, and to evolve them, to design, to invent. It's very different from a carpenter's job training, because it requires a much larger width of base knowledge, and much less of what can be acquired by just watching others do their thing, and imitating.

Maybe the study tracks of those going to the industry and those pursuing a scientific career could split earlier. OTOH I personally must say that what I've studied for my master's degree, and even what I researched during my further postgrad studies (even though I did not ultimately go for a PhD) ended up being rather useful for my work in the industry.

It wasn't a sufficient job training though; I sometimes think that nothing is, nothing short of an actual job.
by ifwinterco | 2025-11-30 19:37:33+00:00
Interestingly in the UK the industrial revolution actually started with water power, not steam engines. It just so happens that the UK, especially England is actually fairly bad for hydropower potential (too flat).

We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
by notatoad | 2025-11-30 19:37:39+00:00
yeah, i get why people were doing the DIY air purifier thing during covid when air purifiers were hard to come by, and the box fan version at least has cost-effectiveness going for it.

but 5x arctic cooling PC fans is ~$100. the commercial versions are easily available, more effective, no more expensive, and don't look like a box of furnace filters taped together.
by pengaru | 2025-11-30 19:37:39+00:00
Leaving such devices plugged in 24x7 unattended creates opportunities for such ambient conditions to develop unnoticed.

These mobile LiPo-using rechargeable devices simply aren't ideal for being left powered while unattended, day after day, year after year. All it takes are some sunny days with normally closed blinds left open and you may slowly be cooking that device you forgot about that Just Works but is a ticking time bomb after the 10th day it spent an hour in direct sunlight while charging.

AIUI the high temperatures are particularly damaging to the SEI (Solid Electrolyte Interface) layer, which is the layer preventing dendrite growth. If that layer breaks down enough for dendrites to grow, you're in internal short / fire-risk land.
by godelski | 2025-11-30 19:37:41+00:00
You're right that it is the whole structure, but the whole structure is made of people, individuals. Collective action can't happen without individual action. You don't just magically go from no people doing something to everybody doing something. You start with one person doing something, then more, and more, and it spreads like a virus. Both good and bad behavior spread this way, not instantly.

Look, our literal job is to take hard problems and break them down into small and more manageable problems, right? Addressing the whole company is too big of a problem, you have to break it down. You, you are an addressable problem that you can change. The people close to you? Harder, but easier than those far away. They're also easier to convince when you make the change yourself.

Or you can just give up and rot in the soup. Would you rather try to remove the rot from the soup or bathe in it?
by fragmede | 2025-11-30 19:38:46+00:00
If by "traditional solution" you mean a bunch of data is fed into creating an ML model and then your individual transaction is fed into that, and it spits out a fraud score, then no, they'd not using LLMs, but at this high a level, what's the difference? If their ML model uses a transformers-based architecture vs not, what difference does it make?
by addaon | 2025-11-30 19:39:35+00:00
> This is one of those situations where the video is just an insane value-add above and beyond the Wikipedia article that this sort of response is baffling to me. The well thought out presentation and progression of the concepts.

This is good to know, for this video. Unfortunately, HN doesn't have a way to indicate this other than linking to a YouTube video; and in my experience very few YouTube videos are a superior way to absorb information than reading. To find that out, I'd have to either watch the video (negative expected value), or wait for a comment from someone like you -- and now that the latter has happened, perhaps I'll actually try to watch it. In the meantime, I do think there's value in providing information without a (sometimes literal) song and dance around it for those interested in learning over entertainment, on average.
by epistasis | 2025-11-30 19:39:39+00:00
The voting in this thread is far more variable and intense and random than in other threads. I have never had so many comments go up a few votes, then down suddenly into negative territory, and then have a slow recovery.

It says that the audience and/or audience behavior for this post is far different from most! It's very interesting and says a lot about the topic and HN, and is worthy of noting, IMHO.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-30 19:40:20+00:00
False.

While there are indeed parts of the workloads that must be executed in vector units, those parts are limited by the memory interface throughput, not by the computational throughput.

Only the matrix-matrix operations are limited by the computational throughput, not by the memory throughput, and all matrix-matrix operations (this includes the solving of dense systems of equations, which is the most frequent kind of non-AI workload) are better done with dedicated matrix units, because the matrix units reduce the number of memory transfers that are required for performing matrix operations.
by monerozcash | 2025-11-30 19:40:33+00:00
Prosecuting someone for deliberately injecting garbage data into another persons system hardly seems totalitarian.

> You own the device, so anything you do within that device is authorized

You're very clearly describing a situation where at least some of the things you're doing aren't happening on your own device.

>I do know that the CFAA essentially gets interpreted to mean whatever the corpos want it to mean - it's basically an anti-witch law

FWIW this is simply not true. The essence of the CFAA is "do not deliberately do anything bad to computers that belong to other people".

The supreme court even recently tightened the definition of "unauthorized access" to ensure that you can't play silly games with terms of service and the CFAA. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf
by munificent | 2025-11-30 19:41:53+00:00
I maintain the formatter for Dart, so a lot of my job involves maintaining the issue tracker for the formatter.

I use this feature all the time. Users get Markdown wrong, give titles to issues that don't make any sense, have typos, etc. Being able to edit issues helps me keep the issue tracker easier to understand and navigate for maintainers and users.

Every feature can be used. That doesn't mean every feature should not exist. The fact that the edit history is still visible means it's next to impossible to abuse the feature. It works fine.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-11-30 19:41:59+00:00
Growing up I thought that my family was rich because my parents were still together, we owned a home with a foundation with help from the bank, and my family was clean. It turns out the bar was real low in my hometown.

"...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population?

These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around?

I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).