MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-11-12 23:33:12+00:00
People have lived in multi-story buildings without indoor flush toilets for much longer than there have been elevators or cars. Indoor flush toilets only became widespread less than 200 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot

You might not be eager to carry the chamber pot down to the cesspool every day to empty it (or to walk underneath the windows where people were emptying theirs onto the street, which was the actual historical practice) but there are better alternatives; a properly designed composting toilet doesn't stink and can easily hold 10 kg or more of poop before you need to empty it. If you empty it into a compost pile instead of a cesspool, it can continue to not stink. Chemical toilets (in their simplest form, throwing a double handful of wood ash onto the poop when you're done) are another option, but perhaps ultimately a more expensive one.

Most of the things you describe (handwashing, dishwashing, bathing, washing food, preparing food, drinking water) can be handled adequately with water you carry in. Flush toilets are the only exception. That is what we all do at Burning Man, and it's what virtually everyone did (outside of small enclaves like Harappa and Rome) for 2 million years until 200 years ago, including people who lived in cities. The Zen proverb, "chop wood, carry water," mentions carrying water because that was an everyday task for basically everyone throughout recorded history (and before), including everyone who lived in cities.

Running water is certainly very helpful to hygiene, but most of the time it's just a cheaper and less stinky alternative to alcohol for that purpose.

I don't agree that the internet is "inessential stuff", except in the sense that flush toilets are "inessential stuff". Almost anything you want to buy or know is available on the internet immediately, and that knowledge is immensely valuable. Similarly, you can contact almost anyone you know immediately. Knowledge, commerce, and social connection are very far from being "inessential stuff", although certainly people waste lots of their irreplaceable time on social-media sites that provide the illusion of social connection without the reality.
by PeaceTed | 2025-11-12 23:33:22+00:00
Very similar to the Australian system. We eliminated the 1 and 2 cent coins in 1992 without issue.

Also has the polymer based colouful bank notes. Far easier to tell what you are handing over. Also given us some good names.

$5 (Pink) = Prawn/Piglet

$10 (Blue) = Bluey

$20 (Red) = Lobster/Red back

$50 (Yellow) = Pineapple/Banana

$100 (Green) = Avacado

So you get sentences like "They needed cash so I threw a pineapple at them".
by SparkBomb | 2025-11-12 23:34:14+00:00
> I went with the former, because somewhere above, you told somebody off for their innocent little left-pad sticker.

I didn't tell anyone off. I honestly don't see what amusing about it. You stick it on the back of your laptop and do what? I used to forget the stickers were even there when I did it and found it very annoying to peel off later.

> And if people like you and me show up and do nothing but complain about them, and I tell them they're stupid for thinking they "are" a "libra", and you tell them how their sticker isn't even funny, then at that point, we have not only not accomplished anything (I wouldn't even feel better myself), and it's entirely fitting to call us grumpy.and maybe even make a little fun of us.

I've long accepted I am an arsehole. The opinion I originally said was pretty mild and as per usual people made it more of a controversy than it originally was.
by naasking | 2025-11-12 23:35:07+00:00
> The can, but there's not an obvious reason why they should.

Of course there are obvious reasons: corporations have the resources and incentives to fix them promptly once threatened with disclosure. Corporations don't respond well otherwise. None of these apply to volunteer projects.

> They literally higher the ffmpeg maintainers via the maintainer's consulting business (fflabs.eu) and they routinely contribute code to the ffmpeg project.

Great, then they should loop in the people they're paying on any notification of a vulnerability.

Of course, if this has truly been the case then nobody would have heard of this debacle.
by georgefrowny | 2025-11-12 23:35:12+00:00
There is no such decipence division in the UK, but fuel is still sold with a vestigial .9 pence on the end. In fact, since the denomination is per litre, not gallon, the .9 is about 4 times more significant.

When the final calculation of XX.YYY litres * AAA.9 pence/litre is done, it's then rounded off to 1 pence.

Currency conversions are also frequently done with readers that aren't a round multiple of pence, even in official government tables: https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/exchange_rates/view/...
by jcheng | 2025-11-12 23:35:45+00:00
AFAIK, every tool out there that lets you do oauth with your Claude Max plan is doing so with the same copy-pasted client id/secret that are extracted from Claude Code. It's not clear at all that this is above board, and when I asked our Anthropic rep, they encouraged us not to do this.

If there's an official way for 3rd party devs to piggyback on Anthropic plans, someone please tell me how!
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-11-12 23:35:51+00:00
From a Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1bbvvxb/comme...

You will often hear historians talk about working hours. They explain how Trade Unions and Socialist campaigners brought about a much reduced work day. That happened mostly over the 19th century and the 20th century. This is true, but I think the presentations of it tend to be myopic.

In the early 19th century across the whole world people were very poor by modern standards. Due to the Industrial Revolution that changed and in Europe wages increased significantly. In the UK wages in 1900 were more than twice what they had been in 1800. That's in real terms, adjusted for inflation.

Some workers campaigned for shorter working hours because they could afford it. Of course, if working hours are lower then total wages are too. Everyone knew this. By the end of the 19th century wages had risen enough that many workers were prepared to sacrifice lower total wages for more leisure time. The labour organizations would never have successfully talked their members into these campaigns unless those members were in this situation. As growth continued in the 20th century and spread to other countries there were more and more people willing to sacrifice some wage for more free time.

Suppose that there had been a law in, say, 1770 which forced people to work less than 35 hours per day. In that case many people would probably have flouted the law because their incomes were so low that they considered more work necessary to buy things. Similarly, if people find the standard working week too long then they can search out employers who offer part-time work which covers a shorter part of the week.

It's worth mentioning that in a sense, employers never control the amount of time worked. Employment contracts may specify an amount of working time, but people can leave employment. It has always been possible to work for a few years, then quit your job and enjoy some leisure time. Then take up another job. Economists call changes to the number of hours worked over the short-run changes to the intensive margin. The changes to the number of hours worked over the long-run are changes to the extensive margin - changes that come about from the decision to work or not. Of course, this doesn't mean that changes to the intensive margin are irrelevant. When the labour campaigners succeeded in bringing down weekly working hours they really did change things for many workers. Quitting jobs and restarting is inconvenient and risky in times of high unemployment. Of course, some people don't have the willpower to save up for long periods of time either. However, it's also true that changes to the length of the full-time working week probably have much less effect on total working hours than people think. For example, people will tell you that the standard working week in the US is 40 hours. In a sense this is true for full-time employees. Despite that though, working hours have continued to fall from the 1950s to the present day. This is partially because of part-time work, but also because of people taking time off by quitting.
by jodrellblank | 2025-11-12 23:36:29+00:00
> Also, that you push Python and JavaScript

I didn't push them.

> Those are terrible languages to try to graft to anything.

Web browsers, Blender, LibreOffice and Excel all use those languages for embedded scripting. They're fine.

> Just because you only know those 2 languages doesn't make them good choices for something like this.

You misunderstood my claim and are refuting something different. I said there is more training data for LLMs to use to generate Python and JavaScript, than Prolog.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-11-12 23:36:46+00:00
Maybe, but I also think it was just a dangerous situation for them to be in for no benefit. Teenangers dumping all their money in to skins because tiktok "investors" told them to, and then trading them on sketchy 3rd party marketplaces both exposes them to risk of regulators cracking down, and doesn't make them much profit.
by danudey | 2025-11-12 23:38:47+00:00
Not to mention that a lot of these public 'debates' about topics unfairly give time and energy to perspectives which do not deserve them.

For example, 99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused, but - oh! - we need to be fair and balanced so we'll give time to the other side that has tons of untested and unproven crackpot theories about maybe that's just what climates do and we just shouldn't bother trying to do better.

Likewise with 'vaccines cause autism'. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever to show any link whatsoever, but we need to be balanced so we have to give time to both sides.

The headline example on their site is 'are seed oils healthy?' Assuming an agreed-upon definition of 'healthy', this shouldn't be a debate. Are they good for you in moderation or not? Let's look at the science. Oh, they're fine? Great, debate over.

They also have "AGI in 5 years?" What's to debate there? Sure, it's possible, who knows? What's the point in debating whether or not something might happen?

If it were 'will AGI be beneficial for humanity?' then okay, that could be a debate, but none of these topics I'm seeing are good fodder for debate; just arguments or baseless assertions.
by acdha | 2025-11-12 23:39:19+00:00
Beyond the questions about human braking, this seems worse than the dedicated AEB systems many vehicles are using now. Do they really use the full stack for this case instead of a faster collision avoidance path? I remember some of their people talking about concurrency back in the DARPA Grand Challenge days and it seems like this would be a high priority for anyone working on a system like this.
by TomatoCo | 2025-11-12 23:39:43+00:00
Half Life 2 recently got a dev commentary track where Valve reflected on their decisions from 20 years ago. One of the things that stuck out to me was that, apparently, Valve called up Microsoft and said "Hey, what percentage of desktops have DirectX 8 compatible graphics cards?" and Microsoft had no idea.

And thus the Steam Hardware Survey was born. The specs automatically sounded a bit anemic to me, too, but seeing them placed on the hardware survey I don't think they're making an outright mistake, per se.
Show HN: Invisitris a Tetris-like game, where the placed pieces become invisible
by eddguzzo | 2025-11-12 23:39:57+00:00
Hi Hackernews, I built a little Tetris-like game called Invisitris, where all but the last placed piece becomes invisible. The board becomes fully visible for a few seconds when you clear rows. And it also becomes visible when your stack becomes dangerously high.

Try it and let me know what you think :)
by janalsncm | 2025-11-12 23:40:04+00:00
Rounding seems to be a non issue to me. We already round: a 5% tax on something that costs $5.99 is technically $0.2995 which will be rounded to $0.30.

If there are no pennies you round to the nearest 5 cents. If there were no coins, you would round to the nearest dollar.
by bigiain | 2025-11-12 23:40:33+00:00
> Foveated streaming! That's a great idea.

Back when I was in Uni, so late 80s or early 90s, my dad was Project Manager on an Air Force project for a new F-111 flight simulator, when Australia upgraded the avionics on their F-111 fighter/bombers.

The sim cockpit had a spherical dome screen and a pair of Silicon Graphics Reality Engines. One of them projected an image across the entire screen at a relatively low resolution. The other projector was on a turret that pan/tilted with the pilot's helmet, and projected a high resolution image but only in a perhaps 1.5m circle directly in from of where the helmet was aimed.

It was super fun being the project manager's kid, and getting to "play with it" on weekends sometimes. You could see what was happening while wearing the helmet and sitting in the seat if you tried - mostly ny intentionally pointing your eyes in a different direction to your head - but when you were "flying around" it was totally believable, and it _looked_ like everything was high resolution. It was also fun watching other people fly it, and being able to see where they were looking, and where they weren't looking and the enemy was speaking up on them.
by hathawsh | 2025-11-12 23:41:45+00:00
I usually want to cut pies into 14 pieces. Some might want 11 or 13. (17 is just too many.) I demand that we implement a system where a circle is 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 * 3 * 11 * 13 = 360360 degrees, so that we can cut pies evenly at anywhere from 2 to 15 slices. If my baker cuts a slice at 25739 degrees, I want a refund! (I'll keep the pie, because the pie is obviously useless.)

(720720 might be OK too so we can cut 16 pieces, but honestly, if you're cutting 16 pieces, you're not going to measure. You're just going to divide pieces in half until you have 16. 360360 is the future.)
by bigyabai | 2025-11-12 23:43:14+00:00
But why is it overdue? It's easy to put the performance profile of a console on an SOC, it's impossible to integrate many desktop GPUs into the same form factor. Pull up a unified benchmark like the OpenCL Geekbench, it makes this obvious. The most powerful SOCs, like the M3 Ultra, pull over 250w to get worse scores than a 4080 laptop dGPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

How are SOCs going to replace full-fat ATX cards when they can't even beat the thermally-throttled version? The SOC isn't even more energy-efficient, here.
by ricardobeat | 2025-11-12 23:43:40+00:00
Not even an RTX5090 can run Cyberpunk at a consistent 4K/60fps without upscaling or frame generation, so it's not a realistic bar.

The AI-upscaled image is technically 4K though, looks pretty sharp with FSR/DLSS, and also significantly better than 1080p or even QHD.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-12 23:43:53+00:00
I have only had to manage this in a startup context with relatively low stakes and it was hard and messy. I don't know what best practice is at the scale that openai operates, but from my limited experience I have an intuition that the challenge is not trivial.

Also I suspect there is a big gap between best practice and common practice. My guess is common practice is dysfunctional. I would also suspect there is no standard way, but there are established practices within different technology stacks that vary between performative, barely compliant and effective at scale.

In one case I saw there was a substantial manual effort to load snapshots into instances run the delete and then save new snapshots. This was over 10 years ago though and it was more of a "we just need to get this done" than a "what's the most elegant way to do this at scale"
by falcor84 | 2025-11-12 23:44:18+00:00
As a counterpoint, I've been using my own PC since I was 6 and know reasonably well about the innards of LLMs and agentic AI, and absolutely love this ability to hold a conversation with an AI.

Earlier today, procrastinating from work, I spent an hour and a half talking with it about the philosophy of religion and had a great time, learning a ton. Sometimes I do just want a quick response to get things done, but I find living in a world where I'm able to just dive into a deep conversation with a machine that has read the entirety of the internet is incredible.
by tim333 | 2025-11-12 23:44:29+00:00
It may have mutated to deal with radiation but radiation friendly organisms have been around for millions of years. Desulforudis audaxviator lives miles underground living on radioactive decay products.

>As the environment at that depth is so much like the early Earth, it may indicate what types of organisms existed before there was an oxygen atmosphere. Billions of years ago, some of the planet's first bacteria may have thrived in similar conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desulforudis_audaxviator
by SparkBomb | 2025-11-12 23:44:35+00:00
You are asking for something unreasonable i.e. I go through possibly several months of YouTube history in a comment section argument to "prove" that there people in the Linux community that do weird and cringey things, which is something that they are known for.

This is after you insinuated that I lied less than two comments ago. You put remembering in scare quotes and some other dude told me I was a "clown" because I can't remember username I saw months ago.

So no. I won't be doing that for you or anyone else now.
by o11c | 2025-11-12 23:44:44+00:00
> The mistake they made was buying not from Amazon, but from "Maestro Technology" listing on Amazon. If you understand that Amazon is a marketplace and you take 10 seconds to read who you're buying from, it's not a problem.

If a marketplace is prone to scammers, and is unable or unwilling to get rid of and assist in the prosecution of the scammers, then it is 100% the scammers' fault.

No, "force the seller to create yet another account" doesn't count as doing anything.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-11-12 23:45:12+00:00
My experience, AI has shown me that a lot of stuff I do online. Watching videos, reading random articles, is mostly vapid pointless nonsense.

AI slop has finally woken me up and I am prioritizing IRL activities with friends and family, or activities more in the real world like miniature painting, piano, etc. It's made me much more selective with what activities I engage in, because getting sucked in to the endless AI miasma isn't what I want for my life.
by nayuki | 2025-11-12 23:45:17+00:00
> Very similar to the Australian system

Yes, and in fact:

> Once the design and substrate were chosen, the Bank of Canada negotiated a contract with Note Printing Australia (NPA) for the supply of the substrate polymer and the security features implemented in the design. The substrate is supplied to NPA by Securency International (now known as Innovia Films Ltd). The Bank also negotiated for the rights to the use of intellectual property associated with the material and security features owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(banknotes)

And the material is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene#Biaxially_orient...
by btilly | 2025-11-12 23:45:38+00:00
The main reasoning challenge here is that doctors are slow to accept evidence that what they've always done is not what they should do.

See the prolonged acceptance of bloodletting, resistance to handwashing, and on and on to the slow adoption in the present day of evidence based medicine.

If you don't know about the latter, see https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-dont-medical-treatmen....
by lilyball | 2025-11-12 23:45:46+00:00
I haven't used Homebrew in a long time, but if I ever did it would be in the way that you describe (so far I've always found reasonable alternatives for the software I want). What I'm wondering is if this is entirely to support unsigned casks, why does Homebrew not simply resign the software itself at install time with an adhoc signature as though it had just built it?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-12 23:45:52+00:00
Using RePair for compression I can also search inside compressed tarballs full of logs

To do this, I first insert a blank line at the top of each log file before adding to the tarball

IME, RePair is faster than compressing with zstd and the size reduction is almost the same

The only "catch" is that RePair requires more memory during compression
by Plasmoid2000ad | 2025-11-12 23:45:55+00:00
I'm thinking they considered this strongly, since that's what they did with the steam deck.

We don't know price yet, but if it's like the deck they'll be trying to keep it as cheap as possible. The deck supposedly was so off-the-shelf that it re-used a design for another AMD customer, leftover elements and all - https://boilingsteam.com/an-in-depth-look-at-the-steam-deck-...

Unless Valve took a big risky bet, the Steam deck is going to be again re-using existing hardware and excess hardware. I'm presuming there are leftover unsold Zen 4 and RDNA 3 dies - and nothing competitive that AMD could offer from Valves perspective, at least when they locked the design some months ago.
by ricardobeat | 2025-11-12 23:45:58+00:00
I was making commentary about the niche/independent nature of these online retailers (another example: graszaaddirect.nl, specialized in grass seeds), not that e-commerce itself survived the bubble.

Having a dense country where you reach any opposite end in <3 hours is probably a major factor. You don't really care where it's coming from (sometimes it's Germany) as delivery time is the same. That would not be the case for the US, you'd require a web of distributors.
by zbentley | 2025-11-12 23:47:05+00:00
> If I have to give my consent anew for each app update, I might as well install the apps manually and live in the usual auto-update pop-up hell.

Really? That's a whole lot of UI actions/clicks (and a variable number per .app) versus ... I think two always-the-same UI actions at most. Not like, a huge hassle either way, but I have trouble seeing how Homebrew's not still the winner here even without quarantine bypassing.
by _bernd | 2025-11-12 23:47:10+00:00
Now I see...

Down down down you find

> (April 1, 2024): After over 2 3 years (and 2 Steam Deck model releases - LCD and OLED) Valve still hasn't publicized their private GitLab repositories nor fully complied with the GPL. I decided to (finally) release the relevant portion of my automated "bot" project, aptly titled srcpkg2git. This/These software/tools haven't been updated/modified much since 2022, but should allow users to easily access and even mirror Valve's SteamOS private repositories (as I've demonstrated with these public mirrors (@gitlab.com/evlaV) the past over 2 3 years).

Yes indeed. That's hardly public what we can get...
by shermantanktop | 2025-11-12 23:47:22+00:00
I was a tube amp tech for several years, have built multiple guitar amps from scratch, and still dabble in it.

What may not be obvious is that modern tube amp designs are an evolutionary branch from 1930's technology, with only a little coming across from the transistor->digital tech tree. The amps of the 40s and 50s were pretty closely based on reference designs that came from RCA and other tube manufacturers.

Modern passive components (resistors, diodes and caps) are made to a far higher tolerance and are better understood, but tubes and transformers are a mixed bag. The older designs were somewhat overbuilt and can be more reliable or have tonal characteristics that are not available in modern parts.