MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Vespasian | 2025-11-30 15:48:09+00:00
I never, in all the years of participating in AoC did take a look at the global leaderboard.

Even before LLMs I knew it was filled with with results faster then you can blink.

So some of us, from gut feeling the vast majority, it was always just for fun. Usually I spent at least until March to finish as much as I did in every year.
by amiga386 | 2025-11-30 15:48:11+00:00
I've ignored the leaderboard for its entire existence, as the puzzles release at something like 4AM-5AM in my timezone; there's no point getting up 4 hours early, or staying awake 4 hours after bedtime, for some points on the internet.

Instead, getting gold stars for solving the puzzles is incentive enough, and can be done as a relaxing thing in the morning.

No matter what you do, as the puzzles get harder, you won't solve them in a day (or even a lifetime) if you don't come up with good algorithms/methods/heuristics.
by ulimn | 2025-11-30 15:48:14+00:00
Regarding the KDE aspect: my preferred DE is KDE and I installed CachyOS with that. Everything seemed to go smoothly and using it was also a good experience.

With that said, I ran into an age-old problem: sleep.

(For reference, I have an AMD Ryzen CPU, RTX 4070 super GPU and some low-end motherboard and I am using the proprietary nvidia drivers.)

I searched the web for hours and tried a lot of things, including different kernels, but nothing helped. In the end, after I couldn't find anything new on forums, reddit, blog posts, etc, I asked chatgpt for some ideas.

It had me change BIOS settings, kernel params, nvidia module params (or something like that - I'm not well versed in this topic tbh), etc, but in some way waking up from sleep still did not work.

After it suggested some undocumented kernel param with the nvidia kernel module, I said that's it, let's try something else and reinstalled with Gnome.

To my surprise, it worked without issue. I've been using it like this for weeks now.

I have no idea if the explanation is good or not but chatgpt said it's because my hardware + proprietary nvidia driver + plasma wayland was a bad combination.
by adamwong246 | 2025-11-30 15:48:14+00:00
When my phone died, I was helpless. Does anyone have even 1 phone number they can recall from memory? I couldn't, forcing me to travel home to get my laptop to access my contacts. So I make my way home but, oh wait, I can't use the Uber app without my phone. OK, I'll get a taxi! Oh wait, nothing to make a phone call with. I'll take the bus! Thank god I have a debit card on hand to pay, but how do I find a bus station and route home without my phone?! I guess I'll borrow a stranger's phone and call a friend to give me a ride? Oh crap, I can't remember a single phone number!

I am very close to giving up and buying 2 or more working phones at any time, for the same reason I keep a spare tire in the trunk. I would love to see google's Pixel program try this, where you get 2 phones, but are only charged if you activate the spare.

It's is troubling to see Steve Job's dream come to it's full realization- these phones are not a luxury, or even a commodity. Living without a smartphone today is basically impossible.
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-30 15:48:24+00:00
He puts together multiple inputs for each day, but they do repeat over users. There's a chance you and your colleagues have the same inputs.

He's also described, over the years, his process of making the inputs. Related to your comment, he tries to make sure that there are no features of some inputs that make the problem especially hard or easy compared to the other inputs. Look at some of the math ones, a few tricks work most of the time (but not every time). Let's say after some processing you get three numbers and the solution is their LCM, that will probably be true of every input, not just coincidental, even if it's not an inherent property of the problem itself.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-30 15:48:25+00:00
It's a crack, not a void or a cave. The crack doesn't actually have significant volume (it probably does but all things considered it's tiny). It's like the space between two stacked bricks. Or maybe it's some permeable material like brick then sand then brick. You pump that full of water and you're basically lifting the bricks with hydraulic pressure. Gravity is what squeezes it back out.
by gpm | 2025-11-30 15:48:53+00:00
It's not a bug, it's just a lack of an additional feature on top of dynamic linking.

In fact it prevents bugs as it provides a clear bar on the misuse of dynamic linking as is so common in C/C++/(as designed) Fil-C to replace libraries with likely-ABI-incompatible replacements. Fil-C limits the blast radius of bugs caused by this, but doesn't prevent the bugs. Just saying "you can't do that" like current rust actually prevents them. (Alternatively growing that feature properly, including checking ABI compatibility, as intended with sdylib's would also prevent them. To the best of my knowledge no C-like language does this today)

Dynmaic linking used responsibly to reduce linking times in development cycles, and to reduce memory usage when you have memory things using the same library, remains perfectly safe without this feature. The former is reasonably common in the rust ecosystem today, and I've literally never hit or heard of anyone else hitting a safety issue as a result. Minimizing memory usage is a niche use case in the modern world... but it's there if you want it. You just have to not modify the application post compilation - just like you have to not modify any application post compilation to retain memory safety guarantees.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-30 15:49:27+00:00
Honestly, this information should be a legally mandated disclosure in any MLS listing or advert for the home. “Inside a FEMA flood zone”, “Located within a known storm surge zone”, “Dwelling located below local water levels”, etc, are all critically important pieces of info for evaluating property valuation that don’t ever have to be disclosed to buyers in most places. Zillow and Redfin integrating these risk profiles and maps into listing data helped homebuyers make better decisions regarding property valuations, and I’m disappointed they removed them.
by tom_ | 2025-11-30 15:49:57+00:00
It's just whatever happens to end up there? That's why D was typically the CD-ROM: A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive, C the only hard disk, and then D was the next free letter.

On my laptop, D is the SD card slot. On my desktop, it's the 2nd SSD.
by xnyan | 2025-11-30 15:50:13+00:00
I think the mock exit door would only be interesting with the corresponding emergency slide. The only problem is that in almost all cases where the emergency slide has been deployed and used, at least some passengers have been injured beyond a minor scrape - think severe sprains and tears, a broken bone, etc.

The purpose of the slide is to 1) empty the plane _very_ quickly 2) without causing a life threatening injury. Most people are not going to be injured using it, but some will and it's not really worth the small chance your leg gets fucked up forever from being ejected the wrong way.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-30 15:50:27+00:00
There is an actually easy an effective escape hatch right here in the US:

Community college to state school path.

You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.

And that's before any scholarships or grants.

Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.

Even though the end result is exactly the same.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 15:51:05+00:00
> CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.

Based on what I saw 1-2 years ago last time I looked at it, most distributions to customize and don't use the defaults straight up. From memory, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:

- RHEL/SLES - Lots of patches to kernels

- Arch - Closer to just using defaults, some config choices and downstream adjustments (so the opposite of CachyOS almost, which is why we have CachyOS in the first place)

- Ubuntu - Probably the most patched distribution compared to upstream components, also includes a lot of Canonical-specific stuff on top of that.

- Fedora - Has some bleeding edge bits and bobs

- Debian - Bit more conservative than Ubuntu, but still has patches for stability, security and backports.

In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
by real-hacker | 2025-11-30 15:51:51+00:00
Introducing Sensei, an open-source AI-powered learning tool, developed with Antigravity. Sensei generates tutorials with voice explanations and interactive quiz questions based on text materials provided by the user (currently only supporting plain text). It also supports setting the difficulty.

To run it locally, simply follow the instructions in the README. I use Gemini as LLM (requires a Google AI API Key). The TTS service supports Minimax (requires a API Key) or a local model for inference (SuperTonic TTS). The local model needs to be downloaded beforehand from the settings panel (approximately 300MB) and currently only supports English.

When generating a course, you can choose from three difficulty levels (ELI5, General, Professional). The LLM will adapt its language style and content depth based on the selected difficulty. Generated courses can be viewed and replayed in the Library. The text and audio for tutorials are cached after the initial generation, so repeated playback doesn't require API calls. However, determining whether a user's answers to questions are correct still requires calling the LLM API.
by granzymes | 2025-11-30 15:51:52+00:00
Bezos’ mom had him at 17, his biological father owned a bike shop, and his mother remarried when Bezos was 4 to a Cuban immigrant who came to the country at 16 and ended up working as a petroleum engineer.

They wound up middle class after all that, but I certainly wouldn’t say Bezos came from a “wealthy family”.
by jMyles | 2025-11-30 15:52:04+00:00
> Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience.

For me, this comparatively benign explanation of his behavior became much less plausible when the details of the EcoHealth arrangement became public.

I'm not a big believer in the current so-called criminal justice system as a way to establish... well, justice, but I do think that a trial in open court for his crimes - even just the unambiguous perjury - was likely to be healing and perhaps restorative for our institutions of scientific research.
by mhb | 2025-11-30 15:52:08+00:00
"So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

'Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.'"[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250501225159/https://www.thest...
by benoau | 2025-11-30 15:52:22+00:00
I don't think load balancing is a good example of overengineering, whether "they have 300k+ users, and I have none" you should build your service to be horizontally scalable anyway and probably use a cloud platform that will balance the load between instances automatically. It's almost 20 years since Heroku showed us the way and today most cloud infrastructure implements something like this. There are few scenarios where a dev shouldn't be working like this by default, in my opinion.

I think overengineering would be more like, worrying about your caching, eeking out the gains from using edge servers and CDNs, message queues pushing workloads off the web servers, database mirrors or clusters, splitting stuff off into microservices, all of this you can tackle as you grow.
by shagie | 2025-11-30 15:52:27+00:00
They claim it did.

Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.

> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”

> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.

> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
by ecommerceguy | 2025-11-30 15:52:54+00:00
I'd like to see them pull all support for Bitcoin and crypto related "companies". As we all know, bitcoin's only use cases are scamming little old lady's out of thousands of dollars at atm's and speculation. It is not an investment vehicle, it is not a currency.

If someone at the NWF is reading this, please take this into consideration. Let's start to take action against the fraud and grift, and try to make humanity a little better, one step at a time.

Thank you.
by avhception | 2025-11-30 15:52:55+00:00
I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that).

I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-30 15:53:29+00:00
Between this and defunding of Univ. research plus the banning of $ for mRNA vaccine, the US just handed the future of Medical Research to China.

I have seen articles recently that states China now leads the word in mRNA research, which is the future of vaccine research.

Soon I expect the US to only allow praying over people for medical treatment, we are not far from that with the recent ACA changes.
by kasey_junk | 2025-11-30 15:53:35+00:00
“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”

What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.

There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
by softwaredoug | 2025-11-30 15:53:35+00:00
I find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good.

There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.

But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
by computerdork | 2025-11-30 15:53:50+00:00
Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).

When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.

So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).
by Xelbair | 2025-11-30 15:54:15+00:00
>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.

That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.

Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.

That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.

There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-11-30 15:54:31+00:00
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?

I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.

Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:

1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):

> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.

Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.

2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:

> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."

> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 15:54:51+00:00
> Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!

Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to me like the most basic feature a AUR helper has to have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews. Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly like that?
by treetalker | 2025-11-30 15:54:58+00:00
Follow up with a post one year from now. Tell us then how you will have acted in the world since the surgery — with regard to past, present, and future.

Apropos, I recommend Taleb's Skin in the Game to both you and all others on the thread who may not have read it. (If you haven't, perhaps during your recovery.) But, as Taleb points out, talk is cheap, and so is reading and living vicariously through texts. Actions speak louder than words, and we must do and act in the world, not merely chat about it.
by DrierCycle | 2025-11-30 15:55:24+00:00
Symbols and binary will never get us to

"I believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achievable."

And the problem is circular: as the Riley Verge piece citing Fedorenko https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072838 exhibits, words aren't related to thoughts. And do the thought experiment, neither are symbols, math, binary. They're all factorized, linear models of real events, which are manifold, nested, scale invariant, in other words, analog correlations.

AGI isn't solvable under these current technologies.

The nativist cog-sci program doesn't run in our heads or externalized. It's false.
by bergie | 2025-11-30 15:55:25+00:00
For a single hop you can expect close to similar ranges as a VHF set. We saw 30NM distances on open sea when leaving Curaçao. Could be a lot more with antenna situated high up.

Where the magic potentially kicks in is the mesh hops. With those you can reach much further by jumping from one node to another.

It's not even close to satellite comms in reach or reliability, but it also requires no infrastructure, no licensing, and no subscriptions.
by JamesSwift | 2025-11-30 15:55:38+00:00
With all due respect, claiming “AI has no learning curve” can be an effective litmus test to see who has actually dig into agentic AI enough to give it a real evaluation. Once you start to peel back the layers of how to get good output you understand just how much skill is involved. Its very similar to being a “good googler”. Yeah on its face it seems like it shouldn’t be a thing but absolutely there are levels to it, and its a skill that must be learned.