MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jampekka | 2025-11-26 08:41:22+00:00
> Have you tried Polars? It really discourages the inefficient creation of intermediate boolean arrays such as in the code that you are showing.

The problem is not usually inefficiency, but syntactic noise. Polars does remove that in some cases, but in general gets even more verbose (apparently by design), which gets annoying fast when doing explorative data analysis.
by Snidow | 2025-11-26 08:41:47+00:00
Kastor is a visual workspace for people who want to analyze data but don’t feel comfortable with spreadsheets or code. Instead of formulas or scripts, you connect small blocks like “Filter,” “Clean,” “Summarize,” or “Line Chart.” Kastor builds the pipeline for you and previews the results instantly.

You can upload a file, fix missing values, sort or filter rows, and generate charts—all in a few clicks. Kastor also includes an AI assistant that explains your data, suggests the next step, or builds a full pipeline for you. The goal is to make data exploration accessible, clear, and fun for beginners, students, and non-technical teams.
by KurSix | 2025-11-26 08:41:56+00:00
The problem with "screen-free" isn't the chassis design, it's information bandwidth. Eyes intake information orders of magnitude faster than ears. Reading a list of 5 restaurants takes 3 seconds, whereas listening to it via a voice assistant is 30 seconds.

Unless Ive has invented a fundamentally new interface (neither voice nor screen), this device is doomed to be another beautiful but useless accessory, like the Humane Pin. Design can't beat the physiology of perception
by jmaker | 2025-11-26 08:43:09+00:00
I was hesitant to submit for a while since it’s on YouTube, but I’ve got to the point of frustration with the iOS keyboard mangling my typed words to the point I couldn’t even comprehend and had to edit a lot.

The video is worth sharing and watching, the author carefully captures the behavior of iOS keyboard, highlighting its quirks. I searched on HN, it didn’t pop up for “iOS keyboard” as a search query.

I experimented with turning off swipe mode, not much better. I switched to swiping but it got tedious and very context specific.

So I’m sharing this just out of frustration. In fact, it’s similar on macOS where it “corrects” your words that it’s unfamiliar with or that are simply rare. Sometimes a minor typo flips the entire meaning even though the distance to the right word is minimal.

Interestingly, right now it’s better than usual.

I hope to learn what can be done do to improve typing on iOS and maybe get rid of the autocorrect in Apple apps on macOS.
by 3ds | 2025-11-26 08:44:20+00:00
Why is this a video? I'm not going to watch it. I will read the AI summary of the transcript though:

The video argues that AWS is dramatically overpriced and underpowered compared to cheap VPS or dedicated servers. Using Sysbench benchmarks, the creator shows that a low-cost VPS outperforms AWS EC2 and ECS by large margins (EC2 has ~20% of the VPS’s CPU performance while costing 3× more; ECS costs 6× more with only modest improvements). ECS setup is also complicated and inconsistent. Dedicated servers offer about 10× the performance of similarly priced AWS options. The conclusion: most apps don’t need cloud-scale architecture, and cloud dominance comes from marketing—not superior value or performance.
by p3rspective | 2025-11-26 08:45:00+00:00
generally yes, although hijacking can and has happened on Central with expired maintainer domains reclaimed by threat actor who can then republish malicious versions of a previously legit group/artifact ID. there's also the problem of mirrors or copies of hijacked npm being replicated on Central -https://x.com/SocketSecurity/status/1993389518247149907
by ElFitz | 2025-11-26 08:45:02+00:00
> such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office”

I remember the day I discovered some companies, and not just tech ones (Walmart, UPS, Toyota,…) actually own, operate, and use their own datacenters.

And there companies out there specialized in planning and building datacenters for them.

I mean, it’s kind of obvious. But it made me realize at how small a scale I both thought and operated.
by yawpitch | 2025-11-26 08:45:15+00:00
Hands down the funniest thing I ever saw, live and in person, was Anthony Bourdain staring with naked, enraptured joy at the woman doing the American Sign Language translation of what he’d just said, then stopping just after she did to let us all know that “I just had to know what it looks like to sign ‘felching Mrs. Butterworth.’”

Thank you, Tony, wherever you are… if for nothing else, then for the Pho Chay I the Lunch Lady made just for my newly vegetarian self in Saigon.
by triclops200 | 2025-11-26 08:45:21+00:00
I'm not the person you replied to, and I doubt I'm going to convince you out of your very obviously strong opinions, but, to make it clear, you can't even define a continuum without a finite set to, as you non-standardly put it, cut it. It turns out, when you define any such system that behaves like natural numbers, objects like the rationals and the continuum pop out; explicitly because of situations like the one Cantor describes (thank you, Yoneda). The point of transfinite cardinalities is not that they necessarily physically exist on their own as objects; rather, they are a convenient shorthand for a pattern that emerges when you can formally say "and so on" (infinite limits). When you do so, it turns out, there's a consistent way to treat some of these "and so ons" that behave consistently under comparison, and that's the transfinite cardinalities such as aleph_0 and whatnot.

Further, all math is idealist bullshit; but it's useful idealist bullshit because, when you can map representations of physical systems into it in a way that the objects act like the mathematical objects that represent them, then you can achieve useful predictive results in the real world. This holds true for results that require a concept of infinities in some way to fully operationalize: they still make useful predictions when the axiomatic conditions are met.

For the record, I'm not fully against what you're saying, I personally hate the idea of the axiom of choice being commonly accepted; I think it was a poorly founded axiom that leads to more paradoxes than it helps things. I also wish the axiom of the excluded middle was actually tossed out more often, for similar reasons, however, when the systems you're analyzing do behave well under either axiom, the math works out to be so much easier with both of them, so in they stay (until you hit things like Banac-Tarsky and you just kinda go "neat, this is completely unphysical abstract delusioneering" but, you kinda learn to treat results like that like you do when you renormalize poles in analytical functions: carefully and with a healthy dose of "don't accidentally misuse this theorem to make unrealistic predictions when the conditions aren't met")
by pjmlp | 2025-11-26 08:46:07+00:00
Not really, because as usual people misunderstand what CUDA is.

CUDA is hardware designed according to the C++ memory model, with first tier support for C, C++, Fortran and Python GPGPU DSLs, with several languages also having a compiler backend for PTX.

Followed by IDE integration, a graphical debugger and profiler for GPU workloads, and an ecosystem of libraries and frameworks.

Saying just use DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL instead, misses the tree from the forest that is CUDA, and why researchers rather use CUDA, than deal with yet another shading language or C99 dialect, without anything else.
by cm2187 | 2025-11-26 08:46:10+00:00
I am not sure what the stats are but I am certain they left behind a huge number of projects. Probably a population that won't be very vocal on HN but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Even for new projects there are problems I run into that force me to use 4.8. Like if you build an Excel formula, the mandatory async/await approach just doesn't work. It's not an asynchronous operation and runs into a UI context where you deadlock if you wait. They also broke a lot of the windows integration, where in a corporate environment the same network calls with the same syntax authenticate successfully with 4.8 but fail with core.

And because they broke backward compatibility on so many libraries, it's a non trivial effort to convert a complex code base to core.

It's great that they focus on performance, but the .net framework fossilised in term of functionality. It took like 15 years before they added a json serializer to the standard library, and don't even think about support for any new major image format (webp, heic). Everything has become complicated, there isn't a day where I don't see a crash message in visual studio. I used to be a big .net fan but I miss Anders' leadership.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-26 08:46:54+00:00
Didn't even mention the difference in data costs, or S3 plus transfer, because then we'll be going into 2-orders-of-magnitude differences ...

Not to mention what happens when you pay per megabyte and someone ddos-es you. Cloud brought back almost all hosting antipatterns, and means denial-of-service attacks really should be renamed denial-of-wallet attacks. And leaving a single S3 bucket, a single Serverless function, a single ... available (not even open) makes you vulnerable if someone knows of figures out the URL.
by instamatch | 2025-11-26 08:47:06+00:00
Instamatch builds an environment that feels like stepping into a well-curated studio—bold visuals, warm tones, and smooth movement pulling everything together. What stands out immediately is how thoughtfully everything is arranged. The journey doesn’t feel mechanical; instead, there’s a sense of flow that keeps you engaged without effort. Instamatch carries the charm of something designed with heart, where each corner feels like it has been shaped to spark excitement in a refined way. Whether it’s the way colors guide your attention or the subtle cues helping you navigate, everything works in harmony. You never feel overwhelmed. You simply feel drawn in. Instamatch makes premium feel personal, not distant. It delivers moments that feel energetic, stylish, and memorable in a way that keeps you returning just to experience the atmosphere again.
by balamatom | 2025-11-26 08:47:15+00:00
Are those our only points of reference?

Methinks one ought to start by figuring out sets like:

- computational processes able to be communicated at all

- computational processes able to be bootstrapped using no more theory of mind than is required for effective operant conditioning

- computational processes that can be bootstrapped outside the purview of pre-existing mental habits

- computational processes that should never be launched in the mind of a living being

- pseudo-computational processes that are inherently misperceivable as computable

>The phirst philosophical lesson of phreaking is that sanity is proprietary. These days it comes in "precarious proletarian", "bourgeois bohemian" and "billionaire psychopath" editions (named after the D&D alignments). Which one did you pick when you created your account in the latest version? Did you know you could just nope?
by scuff3d | 2025-11-26 08:47:19+00:00
These seem to be mostly related to difficulties around adapting to a new programming model. Which is understandable, but do you have examples of more concrete tradeoffs?

For example, I don't think many would argue that for all the upsides a functional language with immutable state offers, performance can take a significant hit. And if can make certain classes of problems trickier, while simplifying others.

Surely with a model this unique, with the payoffs come costs.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-11-26 08:48:24+00:00
I wish people used Julia more. Few years ago I reimplemented some MATLAB code for a novel algorithm [1] I wanted to use in my dissertation about psychometrics and Julia was great language to work with - and also the code ran for 20 minutes instead of 60.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11336-017-9581-x
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-26 08:48:50+00:00
I agree with you on UX but disagree with everything else. If you use native elisp compilation, I find its speed to rival an average editor. Completions can be slow in lsp-mode but still faster than VSCode (and emacs itself ships with eglot, a less full featured alternative to lsp-mode, but may be faster. I haven't used it enough to judge.) This is due to shelling out to LSPs and the fact that not all LSPs are particularly well built.

If you find your emacs to feel jank I highly recommend declaring "emacs bankruptcy" and starting anew with a fresh config. Defaults emacs ships with today are really good.

That said I haven't used emacs on Android yet so I don't know how well, if it all, it works. I also think the UX of emacs tends to bend toward the user's own preferences rather than good UX, and the default UX of emacs is a bit bad.
by csomar | 2025-11-26 08:48:55+00:00
> Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.

I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.

> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.

I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
by ralfd | 2025-11-26 08:49:11+00:00
Maybe because Anglos sometimes pronounce e like i and ei is more common in english spelling for a long vocal?

To be fair, German "ie" and "ei" is one of the few special rules which make no sense (or lost their sense in time). The 'e' in 'ie' is Dehnungs-e for elongation, just a notation that the i is longer pronounced (like Wiese, Biene). (Special rule: if ie is at the end of a word like familie (latin familia) often it is a diphtong and both vocals are pronounced).

"ei" is a bit stupid, because it is not pronounced "ei" but like "ai" or "ay" (eg Mayer).
by oersted | 2025-11-26 08:49:24+00:00
As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup.

And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively.

In my experience, in terms of availability and security there’s not much difference in practice. There are tons of good tools nowadays to treat a physical server or a cluster of them as a cloud or a PaaS, it’s not really more work or responsibility, often it is actually simpler depending on the setup you choose. Most workloads do not require flexible compute capability and it’s also easy and fast to get it from these cheaper providers when you need to.

I feel like the industry has collectively accepted that Cloud prices are a cost of doing business and unquestionable, “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”. Thinking about costs from first principles is an important part of being an engineer.
by woolion | 2025-11-26 08:49:26+00:00
I'm migrating my last AWS services to dedicated servers with Gitops. In principle, AWS give you a few benefits that are worth paying for. In practice, I have seen all of them to be massive issues. Price and performance are obviously bad. More annoying than that, their systems have arbitrary limitations that you may not be aware of because they're considered 'corner cases' -- e.g. my small use-case bumped against DNS limitation and the streaming of replies was not supported. Then, you have a fairly steep learning curve with their products and their configuration DSLs.

There are Gitops solution that give you all the benefits that are promised by it, without any of the downsides or compromises. You just have to bite the bullet and learn kubernetes. It may be a bit more of a learning curve, but in my experience I would say not by much. And you have much more flexibility in the precise tech stack that you choose, so you can reduce it by using stuff you're already know well.
by mgaunard | 2025-11-26 08:49:38+00:00
Pricing in AWS is heavily dependent on whether you reserve the instance and for how long.

In my experience, if you reserve a bare metal instance for 3 years (which is the biggest discount), it costs 2 times the price of buying it outright.

I'm surprised to hear about the numbers from the video being way different, but then, it's a video, so I didn't watch it and can't tell if he did use the correct pricing.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-26 08:50:20+00:00
Flywheels can have much higher power density than any kind of battery.

There is no competition between batteries (low power density, high energy density, low storage cycle efficiency) and flywheels (high power density, low energy density, high storage cycle efficiency).

Flywheels (preferably levitated in vacuum) compete only with supercapacitors and superconducting rings (SMES = Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage).

Supercapacitors/flywheels/SMES have their high-power applications, for which batteries are not appropriate.

Using them where batteries are the right solution is of course not a good choice.
by 47282847 | 2025-11-26 08:50:32+00:00
> I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country

As better public transport infrastructure vastly reduces the number of cars, and centralizes the requirement for both material and energy, I doubt that is the case. Buses and trains need far less of both than the population-equivalent number of cars/motorcycles.
by d_e_solomon | 2025-11-26 08:50:35+00:00
We talk a lot about interest rates, inflation, and consumer sentiment but none of these explain why certain firms can raise prices into falling demand.

Pricing power is the real differentiator. It tells you which industries are structurally concentrated, which ones are functionally dependent on a few players, and where value actually accrues.

Curious how HN thinks about this, especially in sectors like semiconductors, cloud, healthcare, or logistics where concentration drives everything.
by dacryn | 2025-11-26 08:50:45+00:00
it's not interesting as a standalone question indeed. The question is, what do you enable by having a private chef?

Is it the fact that you don't want to spend the time cooking? or is it cooking plus shopping plus cleaning up after?

Or is it counting the time to take cooking lessons? and including the cost of taking the bus to those cooking lessons?

Does the private chef even use your house, or their own kitchen? Or can you get a smaller house without a kitchen alltogether? Especially at the rate of kitchen improvement, where kitchens don't last 20 years anymore, you're gonna need a new kitchen every 5 years. (granted the analogy is starting to fail here, but you get my point)

Big companies have been terrible at managing costs and attributing value. At least with cloud the costs are somewhat clear. Also, finding staff that is skilled is a considerable expense for businesses with a more than a few pieces of code, and takes time, you can't just get them on a whim and get rid of them.
by jmaker | 2025-11-26 08:51:26+00:00
More often than not, I’d rather avoid the self-focused staff who rarely give it to you with hygiene in mind and at this time of the year in the northern hemisphere are likely to be sick, the mediocre coffee (price surge in coffee beans), and the dirty tables at a café, and the uncomfortable seating. And it’s rather 5€ for the croissant alone, in many places these days. Lidl’s croissants aren’t very good but they’re only marginally less good than what you can hope for at a café. McDonald’s croissants in Italy are quite ok by the way.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-11-26 08:51:41+00:00
That is actually with the caviat that the internal pressure help structurally a bit. But that is still plenty for a gentle rotation in otbit and 1 bar of pressure.

And if the plan is to do this; you want to prepare the rocket for this purpose anyway so nothing stops you from making a thicker wall and sacrificing payload capacity since the hull is the payload.
by jwr | 2025-11-26 08:52:11+00:00
> invoice to be a payment request — which makes issuing them after payment nonsensical

Most EU countries use an accrual-based VAT system, where taxes are owed on any invoice issued, paid or unpaid.

This makes issuing them before payment nonsensical, because you will end up paying taxes on invoices that will never be paid, thus ruining your business.

A proforma invoice exists specifically for the purposes of quoting and requesting payment.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-26 08:53:17+00:00
When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it.

Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work.

And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $300k on two dev ops admins alone and the cost savings of using cheaper dedicated servers are completely gone.
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-11-26 08:54:39+00:00
Hi there, Katie from Hetzner here. We are extra careful about new accounts because we find that it helps us to prevent abuse, and in situations where a new account is somewhere in the grey zone of possibly real or fake, we may ask for additional information, or a PayPal payment, like in this situation. If you choose PayPal, the €20 will go on your account in the form of credit and will automatically be used towards your future invoices. If you decide to cancel your account, and there is credit left on your account, we will refund you for that amount. For the passport (or other documents) -- We have very strict data protection laws here in Germany and the EU. We only use this data to confirm your identity, and after that, it is automatically deleted from our systems after a short time. We have a data protection team who customers can contact if they have any questions at data-protection@hetzner.com. --Katie
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-26 08:55:22+00:00
I'm a bit skeptical about how well it's 5G would work globally, as well as VoLTE (which they don't mention at all). We've all seen what happened in Australia last year after the 3G shutdown...

https://medium.com/@jamesdwho/australias-3g-shutdown-why-you...
by paranoidrobot | 2025-11-26 08:55:43+00:00
I'm struggling to find a way to express my opinion about this video without seeming like a complete ass.

If the author's point was to make a low effort "ha ha AWS sucks" video, well sure: success, I guess.

Nobody outside of AWS sales is going to say AWS is cheaper.

But comparing the lowest end instances, and apparently, using ECS without seeming to understand how they're configuring or using it just makes their points about it being slower kind of useless. Yes you got some instances that were 5-10x slower than Hetzner. On it's own that's not particularly useful.

I thought, going in, that this was going to be along the lines of others I have seen, previously: you can generally get a reasonably beefy machine with a bunch of memory and local SSDs that will come in half or less the cost of a similar spec EC2 instance. That would've been a reasonable path to go. Add on that you don't have issues with noisy neighbors when running a dedicated box, and yeah - something people can learn from.

But this... Yeah. Nah. Sorry

Maybe try again but get some help speccing out the comparison configuration from folks who do have experience in this.

Unfortunately it will cost more to do a proper comparison with mid-range hardware.