MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-11-04 05:44:16+00:00
Often when people talk about bias, they assume it must be bias against their interests. They don't realize that, if there is room for bias, it's just as easily bias in their favor. The article could overstate either side - or both at different times.

> When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda.

That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-04 05:45:57+00:00
Very nice project. Playing with FPGAs can be difficult, but also a lot of fun.

Must say the code was nicely organized and easy to follow. My own code is a bit of a mess in comparison.

Did you try out plain Verilog before going with System Verilog? My plan was to move on to generators like nMigen, now called Amaranth[1], and they spit out Verilog IIRC so decided to learn that for debugging.

Then life happened and got sidetracked, but been wanting to pick it up again.

How was it to program for the Analogue Pocket? I was recently looking at it as just a portable retro gaming device, but if it's easy to double as a fun FPGA platform then that would be great.

[1]: https://github.com/amaranth-lang/amaranth
by aspenmayer | 2025-11-04 05:46:31+00:00
I believe Robert Hooke is mentioned in James Burke’s Connections, a fantastic program that just got a new season on Curiosity Stream; I haven’t seen the new episodes yet but I have thoroughly enjoyed everything else Burke has ever done, so I expect the new series to be great also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...

The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it’s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I’m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0

[1] https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
by korhojoa | 2025-11-04 05:46:40+00:00
I don't know what the deal is about people saying heat pumps are expensive. They used to be a little pricier than AC units, but it's just a 4-way valve in addition to one.

I just looked it up, and I can buy a heat pump for 200-400 euros (depending on desired output), installation is ~400 euros. Why are you paying 20-30x for something identical? This sounds like a price difference created by government behavior, like with solar panels and related hardware which seem to be significantly overpriced in north america.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-11-04 05:46:47+00:00
I was under that impression as well, but it was added as an implementation in 3.6 (https://bugs.python.org/issue27350), so I don't know that too many people would have become dependent on it before it was official in 3.7: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html

I think the "how/why" thing is just the automatic title de-clickbait-ifer going a little haywire?
by Ray20 | 2025-11-04 05:46:49+00:00
> usually characterized by the opposite outcome

No. Look at the median salary of a full-time worker in Europe and compare it to the US. They are drowning in poverty.

> top 10% is much closer to the average Joe

No. In the US top 10% full-time workers get you what? About 300k? It is way closer to the average US Joe than Europe has it's top 10% to their average poor workers. There is more inequality in Europe than in the US.

> If you seriously compare NK to any country in Europe, you have no clue, sorry.

Why? Because you chose to trust European propaganda and not North Korean propaganda? Ask those who chose to trust North Korean propaganda what they'd tell you.
by bradlys | 2025-11-04 05:47:15+00:00
It's not even that. It's that rich people are the only thing the trades are catering to now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT_uSJVCYds

Example of a solar install that was under $20k via DIY - maybe took this guy 1-2 weeks of full-time work. But he was quoted $90k and he did most of it himself - only hiring a backhoe operator to move some dirt around.

We're at the point where the trades are only going to cater to rich/desperate people because the margin they'd make on a job that is DIY-able (and charged a fair price) is not worth it to them. Why do 5-6 low margin jobs when you can do 1 high margin (rip-off) job? Your only competition out there is someone with the will to do it. Builders in CA are massive ripoffs as well.

I think the only way you bring costs from trades down is by having all your workers in-house - which is only doable for corporations. Your average homeowner is just fucked and is gonna have to youtube everything.
by almosthere | 2025-11-04 05:48:20+00:00
> The federal government is spruiking a new scheme that will give millions of Australians up to three hours of free electricity each day.

(“Spruiking” is Australian/New Zealand slang for promoting something enthusiastically, often loudly.)

> Right now, huge amounts of midday solar power go to waste—most people aren’t home to use it, and we lack enough batteries to store it.

So... incentivise batteries. You'll get far more mileage in the long run.

> The idea is to encourage people to run air conditioners, washing machines, or dishwashers during this “free” window when the grid is awash with solar.

A handy way to pick up a new hobby: BTC mining, I guess.
by AngryData | 2025-11-04 05:49:47+00:00
People only stopped caring about horsepower recently because it became so cheap that everyone has more than they can utilize. HP use to be an important metric in a car because it was the main limiting factor in speed and capacity. Today engine power is rarely the top limiting factor, the tires, suspension, transmission, and driver ability are far more important, but far harder to quantify for marketting bulletpoints.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-04 05:49:51+00:00
This is the "Voice" option of the Exit/Voice/Loyalty model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

These days it seems to be deeply unpopular though: the normal pattern is superficial Loyalty, followed by a quick dash to Exit as soon as something slightly better pops up. Anybody even attempting to Voice and actually change the organization is laughed off as hopelessly naive, especially if they're junior.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-04 05:51:17+00:00
Just had our minisplit develop a leak after 7 years.

The shop recommended replacing it, as just the refrigerant is half the price of a new one if most has to be replaced, due to environmental taxes.

Basically a repair is guaranteed to be at least 50% of new price of NOK 23k ($2.3k) installed and can quickly approach 80+% if the guy has to spend time on it.

That made me wonder how on earth they make money on selling these things. And how effective that tax was, given it's pushing us to replace a unit that's probably fine for many more years with just a bit of TLC.

edit: fixed pricing brain fart
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-04 05:51:20+00:00
>Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

If one could write a quadrillion-line python script of nothing but if/elif/else statements nested 1 million blocks deep that seemingly parsed your questions and produced seemingly coherent, sensible, valid "chains of reasoning"... would that software be thinking?

And if you don't like the answer, how is the LLM fundamentally different from the software I describe?

>Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because

There is no evidence here. On the very remote possibility that LLMs are at some level doing what humans are doing, I would then feel really pathetic that humans are as non-sapient as the LLMs. The same way that there is a hole in your vision because of a defective retina, there is a hole in your cognition that blinds you to how cognition works. Because of this, you and all the other humans are stumbling around in the dark, trying to invent intelligence by accident, rather than just introspecting and writing it out from scratch. While our species might someday eventually brute force AGI, it would be many thousands of years before we get there.
by eskibars | 2025-11-04 05:52:09+00:00
SPREAD | https://www.spread.ai/ | Technical writer & support | Germany (Berlin, ideally) | Full-time

SPREAD builds B2B software for mechatronics customers like cars and defense systems. We help them design, build and diagnose problems with their systems faster. We do it with a combination of a well-designed ontology we've spent years working on as well as AI-based systems. Right now, we're looking for a technical writer and also someone to start our support organization.

Candidates must be in Germany already, though specific location within the country doesn't matter that much
by felix-h | 2025-11-04 05:52:47+00:00
eventfirst | Senior Full-Stack Engineer | Berlin, Germany | REMOTE (CET) | Full-time

We are applying AI to organize corporate events.

We are looking for a senior engineer with at least ten years of full stack experience, a strong focus on product and UX, and optionally some experience building LLM based products. Currently we are focussed on building tooling that enables us to capture domain knowledge from experts to streamline prompt creation and evaluation. Our tech stack is Typescript, React, Next.js and Tailwind. On the backend we use Drizzle with Neon, deployed and monitored via Vercel. We have pre-seed funding from a major US VC and are experienced founders. You’ll be working alongside the founders (ex-Apple, ex-Airbnb, ex-Tulip, ex-Tourlane) and will have a chance to shape the company, product and of course the engineering culture.

Apply here: https://taskwise.jobs.personio.com/job/1646275
Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
by stillatit | 2025-11-04 05:53:02+00:00
Just saw the CEO of Substack celebrating traffic from X/Twitter shooting up thinking they stopped suppressing tweets with links[0]. Actually, this traffic is because now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background, and displays when you press the link.

I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation.

Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They suppressed all links shortly after.

[0] https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092

[1] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
by uncorkthe | 2025-11-04 05:53:19+00:00
I had an old coworker who had a fox body Mustang. He liked to say "Horsepower doesn't win [drag] races, torque does."

One day we were out servicing a conveyor drive with a 5hp motor attached to a gear reducer. I pointed out the spec plate on the reducer, it claimed an output of more than a thousand foot-pounds of torque.

"So this thing should be able to beat your Mustang in a race, eh?"

Horsepower is just torque * RPM.
by altairprime | 2025-11-04 05:53:55+00:00
I think of it every time I see 'ansible' come up, because the ability to create and run what everyone calls 'playbooks' now should have beeen integrated into the terminal like it was back in the 80s over dialup. I'm all for being able to git commit the resulting script (they’re just text files!) but being able to launch a playbook and halt it and repair it and resume was, like.

Sigh.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-04 05:54:21+00:00
But you'll get to learn about part D medication plans and Medigap part F*, G, N, and the other 7 gotcha plans that are run mostly by for-profit megacorps that get to change their prices every year. Oh and Medicare Advantage (part C, not to be confused with Medigap parts) is a total scam with lifetime limits that has already fooled 54% of recipients. Traditional Medicare is way too complicated and should be thrown away and replaced with a universal single-payer system without any for-profit corporate bullshit. Also not covered: dental, vision, hearing aids, long-term care, skilled nursing... you and your family need to be be completely broke to receive Medicaid for long-term care.

* So sorry, you can't have this one anymore because part B deductibles are no longer covered due to the neoliberal MACRA 2015 that doesn't care about costs borne by the poorest Medicare recipients.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-04 05:54:26+00:00
"... trying to find where things happen becomes an exercise in search."

It seems like developers actually prefer large codebases and having to use recursive search through multiple layers of sub directories

I prefer no sub directories and being able to just grep against *.[ch] with no recursion

I think projects in Java languages are the worst when it comes to having to search through numerous small verbose files having barely any substance to them. IDEs probably make this easier but I don't use one

Years ago I read that Whitney's "IDE" is something like the Windows console and Notepad. He has said in interviews that he wants all the code to fit on a single page
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-04 05:55:18+00:00
> First, we have a multitude of government programs that seek to eliminate extreme poverty,

Clarification: In some places we absolutely do. In others we absolutely do not.

> so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money.

I think is is better reflective: There is huge surplus of employers have that set up systems that insure they do not hire qualified people. Job portals that auto-trash applications from unwanted applicants (1st time, most minimal of crim rec, wrong zip codes) are one massive example.

source: me+kids spent a decade in red state, hunger-level poverty. kids who got zero replies during months/years of entry level job apps.
MongoDB cloud accepted an email with .con for 7 years before locking my account
by colus001 | 2025-11-04 05:56:01+00:00
I’ve been using MongoDB Cloud for over 7 years with an account registered under an email ending in .con — just a simple typo for .com.

Everything worked perfectly for years: sign-up, billing, access, all fine.

Then recently, I was suddenly locked out because “you can not verify your e-mail.”

Of course, .con isn’t even a valid gTLD. Which means MongoDB’s system not only accepted it during registration, but let it function for 7 years without issue.

Now I can’t access my data or account, and support says they can not make changes to the account due to security policy that requires verification with wrong gLTD e-mail.

I understand human errors happen — but allowing an impossible domain for nearly a decade feels like a validation issue worth flagging.

Anyone else seen something similar in production systems?
by mlsu | 2025-11-04 05:56:32+00:00
Lots of people do all kinds of things that are not explicitly written down at their jobs. Those things cannot be tokenized, they cannot be taken in by AI no matter how intelligent and sophisticated it gets. They are judgement calls, made by real people, who think harder and bring more to the table than any machine, no matter how many FLOPS.

But, nonetheless, those jobs will probably disappear, and the machine will reorganize itself to maximize its self-legibility, making tons more money but becoming yet more shitty and inhumane in the process. Discarding the whole reason the jobs exist in the first place (stuff like Value and Service — oh excuse me, sorry, meaningless cost centers to be optimized).

Sort of like how Radiologists do all kinds of important shit, that gets entirely hand waved away in this think-piece as 99% automatable. Yeah, sure guys, the radiologist — actual doctors for fucks sake — I’m sure he is nothing but a warm body between the patient and the computer, signing paperwork and collecting cheques.
by aeonfox | 2025-11-04 05:57:01+00:00
> eliminate extreme poverty, so there are fewer people who are desperate to take any job for any money

One way to eliminate extreme poverty and increase skilled labour, is to ensure children have enough nutrition, health, schooling, and funds to pursue skilled worked in adult life, which usually involves making time outside of work, adequate health, some prerequisite education, and a sufficient financial buffer to actually upskill.

A second thing is Baumol's Cost Disease. If there are other industries that are more rewarding that require less effort, no-one is going to pursue those options. Why be a clever guy who makes a product (or becomes a HVAC repairer, electrician, etc.) when you can get a comfy job at a FAANG (or whatever the acronym is today). You could sub in benefits here, but I don't think people are thriving on benefits in the US. But I'm an outsider, so I wouldn't know.

But there's also a secret third thing that people don't often consider, which is the culture. If there's a culture that doesn't privilege working hard, or educational attainment, etc., people won't seek those things.
by aragonite | 2025-11-04 05:57:38+00:00
>In other words, I believe the reason this code is hard to read for many who are used to more "normal" C styles is because of its density; in just a few dozen lines, it creates many abstractions and uses them immediately, something which would otherwise be many many pages long in a more normal style.

I also spent some time with the Incunabulum and came away with a slightly different conclusion. I only really grokked it after going through and renaming the variables to colorful emojis (https://imgur.com/F27ZNfk). That made me think that, in addition to informational density, a big part of the initial difficulty is orthographic. IMO two features of our current programming culture make this coding style hard to read: (1) Most modern languages discourage or forbid symbol/emoji characters in identifiers, even though their highly distinctive shapes would make this kind of code much more readable, just as they do in mathematical notation (there's a reason APL looked the way it did!). (2) When it comes to color, most editors default to "syntax highlighting" (each different syntactic category gets a different color), whereas what's often most helpful (esp. here) is token-based highlighting, where each distinct identifier (generally) gets its own color (This was pioneered afaik by Sublime Text which calls it "hashed syntax highlighting" and is sometimes called "semantic highlighting" though that term was later co-opted by VSCode to mean something quite different.) Once I renamed the identifiers so it becomes easier to recognize them at a glance by shape and/or color the whole thing became much easier to follow.
by Panzerschrek | 2025-11-04 05:57:48+00:00
When I say safety I mean inability of the programmer to trigger UB using normal language features, like it's impossible in Rust and several other (less known) languages. Does Doo support it? Or I just can shoot the leg and compiler lets me do this?

About references: am I correct, that any value is reference-counted and one can pass it to a function and mutate it (the original, not a copy).
by dboreham | 2025-11-04 05:57:57+00:00
For the curious: most locomotive desiel engine designs have marine origins. That's because ships transitioned to desiel power (from steam) before trains did. At least in the UK. The general design constraints are similar and so when folks began looking into making diesel locomotives they generally selected existing marine designs and adapted them. Often de-rating the maximum power to improve reliability.

When the UK converted from steam to diesel it was easier to switch the locomotives while leaving the coach stock as-is. Modern trains aren't like this: they're "multiple units" with more than one drive car. Anyway, a steam engine can generate much more power than a 1950s diesel engine can, particularly factoring in the UK loading gauge which restricts engine height. So in order to make a diesel locomotive capable of taking over from A4 Pacific steam engines on the east coast main line, it was necessary to design a locomotive that had two desiel engines, with a high power to weight ratio. Hence the class 55 cited in the article. The deltic engines were very complex and costly to maintain but solved a problem arising from the transition away from steam. In the 1970s they were in turn replaced by trains with a DMU configuration (HST), featuring a permanently coupled power/van car at each end, removing the need for a single very high power locomotive.
by robocat | 2025-11-04 05:58:32+00:00
> healthcare MUST be decoupled from capitalistic incentives

Capitalism pays for our healthcare.

The problem is that Healthcare has an infinite hunger for resources - there is always more that could be spent - and it is always morally correct to spend more (people's lives have high priority).

There needs to be some manner of allocating limited resources between different people with different needs.

Every country seems to find different ways to deal with the fundamental friction of healthcare (unlimited demand and limited resources).

Unfortunately voters don't like the reality of limitations.
Skiddly Voice AI for Shopify Stores – Abandoned Cart Recovery
by gravitybrain | 2025-11-04 05:59:14+00:00
We just launched a small tool called SkiddlyAI — a Voice AI platform for Shopify store owners to recover abandoned checkouts.

It automatically calls customers who left items in their cart, talks to them just like a real person, answers their questions, and helps them finish the purchase.
by arachnid92 | 2025-11-04 06:00:14+00:00
The way we do it where I work (large company in the cloud/cybersecurity/cdn space):

- Chains of manageable, self-contained PRs each implementing a limited scope of functionality. “Manageable” in this context means at most a handful of commits, and probably no more than a few hundred lines of code (probably less than a hundred tbh).

- The main branch holds the latest version of the code, but that doesn’t mean it’s deployed to production as-is. Releases are regularly cut from stable points of this branch.

- The full “product” or feature is disabled by a false-by-default flag until it’s ready for production.

- Enablement in production is performed in small batches, rolling back to disabled if anything breaks.
by cespare | 2025-11-04 06:01:11+00:00
It is 1995. You get an unsolicited email with a dubious business offer. Upon reflection, you decide it's not worth consideration and delete it. No need to wonder how it was sent to you; that doesn't need to influence the way you handle it.

No. We need spam filters for this stuff. If it isn't obvious to you yet, it will be soon. (Or else you're one of the spammers.)
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-04 06:01:27+00:00
In that usage / slang context (six-seven), is it really a word? I suppose these annuals are often more like concept phrases but c'mon. This is like a populist choice for clicks. I look forward to a superior pick from Oxford. Why's this out in early November anyway.

As with a number of things these days the problem with these memes besides their basic brainrottedness is the scale at which they spread. Sigh.