MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-12-15 19:34:49+00:00
Solutions for producing 185 nm Vacuum UV light?

From Gemini 3:

> The "28-W source" mentioned in that research is almost certainly a Low-Pressure Mercury Amalgam Lamp (which naturally emits at 185 nm and 254 nm) or a Xenon Excimer Lamp (172 nm). These gas-discharge lamps are currently 100x more efficient than any experimental 185 nm LED. [...] To generate a 185 nm photon, an LED needs a semiconductor bandgap of ~6.7 eV. [...] VUV reactor [...] VACNTs inside a glass tube filled with a noble gas (like Argon [126 nm] or Xenon [172 nm])
by jfindper | 2025-12-15 19:34:54+00:00
>If you want evidence, look to the Teachers' Unions own efforts to oppose phonics education:

This does not read like an "effort to oppose phonics education". In fact, I did not see one mention of one single teacher who is opposed to phonics.

The complaints are about implementation timelines, continuing education requirements, potential over-stepping of policy-makers re: teacher autonomy in the classroom, etc.

>“To the extent that these laws remove teacher choice from certain decisions about curriculum and pedagogy and instructional style, it’s not at all a surprise that you’d see unions be in opposition to those, even if they support the arguments behind the science of reading,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University at Albany.

>"“That’s establishing a precedent that is really dangerous and really could open up schools and teachers to all kinds of litigation, and all kinds of conflict and problems,” said Scott DiMauro, the president of the Ohio Education Association. “You’ve got to always be cautious about micromanaging decisions that ought to be made at the local level.”"

>“That raises a lot of academic freedom questions for us, that raises a lot of questions about being able to differentiate based on student need,” said Justin Killian, an education issues specialist at Education Minnesota."

>District leaders need time to create new instructional plans, money for new curriculum materials, and systems in place for coaching and supporting teachers—provisions these laws don’t always include, Woulfin said.

You are confusing "against the legislation as it is written" with "against teaching phonics".
by n_u | 2025-12-15 19:35:21+00:00
> I think they do need to ensure that page doesn't get flushed before the log entry in some manner.

Yes I agree. I meant like they synchronously write the log entries, then return success to the caller, and then deal with dirty data pages. As I recall the buffer pool manager has to do something special with dirty pages for transactions that are not committed yet.
by 0127 | 2025-12-15 19:35:26+00:00
This is what we do for development containers/hosts - put them behind *.dev.example.com, allows us to hide most testing instances using a shared load balancer. And with a single wildcard CNAME, No info is leaked in CT logs or DNS. Said LB is firewalled, but why pay for extra traffic that's just going to be blocked?
by kakacik | 2025-12-15 19:35:30+00:00
Incredibly rare X maybe a trillion planets(oids) in our galaxy X maybe a trillion galaxies in whole universe may change the outcome a bit.

Of course if speed of light is the hard unavoidable limit it doesnt matter now or for next few trillions of years. Eventually though, if it will keep expanding, the only important thing in universe will be energy. Species that will grok that first may decide to not share and take it all for themselves. Although sustainability of some empire over 10^10^10^10 years and further... its something even my otherwide vivid imagination can't concieve.
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-15 19:35:46+00:00
I am describing a system where the government can take anything you have over a certain amount. (Or more precisely perhaps can take a proportion of what you have that asymptotically approaches 100% as your total wealth increases.) In my conception this money would then immediately be redistributed (as direct cash payments) to people with less. Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties. The purpose is to entirely eliminate massive wealth concentration.

As for why would anyone start a business? There's no disincentive to start a business in this scheme. I'd say the current system has greater obstacles to starting a business in many cases, due to high barriers to entry and regulatory capture by large players. The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small. You can grow your business up until its value is around that taxation threshold and then just kick back. We don't want people taking big businesses and making them bigger.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-15 19:36:33+00:00
If the batteries don't work anymore, I buy a new vaccum. My Dyson was last updated in 2020, it is 2025 now, so I think it is working out? The charging dock works great for not forgetting to replace it.

I guess this is how people felt when they moved from wired phones to wireless phones?

> Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.

And dragging the cord around, and having to plug out and re-plug the cord in again because you want to do a different part of the room.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-15 19:36:40+00:00
> Nobody is a "slave" when they apply for and accept a job offer where they're paid wages and can leave for another job at any time.

https://www.google.com/search?q=low+hire+low+fire

This idea that "you can just leave for another job at anytime" is fiction in the context of the US and the current position in the credit and macro cycle. Is it a job with the same wages and security? Is it within commuting distance? How long and how many interviews does it take to get "another job"? The Fed is cutting rates to preserve the labor market [1], that does not strike me as a "healthy economy" with the opportunity you believe exists to switch jobs. Let the JOLTS report be your guide in this regard [2].

You do not have to take what I write seriously, it is immaterial to the situation. I'm confident demographics will do the work necessary to constrain the labor supply for workers to improve their power position. ~400k US workers leave the labor force every month, through retirement or death. There are not enough younger workers to replace them, and immigration will be constrained for at least another three years under this administration [3] [4]. Deaths outnumber births in twenty one states as of this comment. Young workers simply need to work on unionizing and organizing as old workers age out of the working age population. Support for unions in the US is at record highs [5].

[1] Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement - https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone... - December 10th, 2025

[2] https://x.com/lisaabramowicz1/status/1998409877274726422 ("The quits rate in October's JOLTS report came in at 1.8%, the lowest since May 2020. While the number of job openings increased, it seems that workers don't have much confidence to leave behind steady employment." -- Lisa Abramowicz, Bloomberg Surveillance) - December 9th, 2025

[3] CBO Slashes Immigration Estimates as a Result of Trump Policies - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-10/us-will-n... | https://archive.today/RnFBo - September 10th, 2025

[4] Texas Firms Hit by Immigration Crackdown Add Hours, Raise Wages - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-28/texas-fir... | https://archive.today/Z3lvp - July 28th, 2025

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)

(think in systems, citations for assertions as always)
by thevillagechief | 2025-12-15 19:36:41+00:00
Yes they are, or rather, we were when I was in primary school. My essays (we called them composition) were filled with these these red check marks for every esoteric word, proverb, metaphor or simile you used. The more you had the higher you'd score. So I did my homework with a dictionary open. I remember writing some document at work in the US and everyone commenting on how Queen's English it was. This was before ChatGPT. I know know it was all silly, and I've spent a bunch of time learning to write simply. But then I've listen to too many tech podcasts, and now I find silicon valley tech-speak creeping in, and I hate it. The one that I hear everywhere now that I swear not to ever use is let's double-click on that point. Just why?
by qzervaas | 2025-12-15 19:36:51+00:00
For some context: there was a Government politician (Peta Murphy) who had broad support for a ban/restrictions on gambling ads, who passed away while in office in December 2023.

Since then all that talk went away and there’s been 2 years of this social media ban.

Surely a coincidence.

[edit: not a senator, a member of the House of Reps]
by isr | 2025-12-15 19:37:03+00:00
There are many which could fit your description. Tiny core, puppy linux varients (voidpup, with the void pkg manager, is pretty nice), etc.

However, I think the nicest put together ones are fatdog64 & porteus.

fatdog64 is built from scratch (basically, "Beyond Linux From Scratch"), but uses a lot of slackware tooling & ethos, so its quite compatible with slack pkgs & slackbuilds. If you dive deeper, its actually got a lovely cohesive design, behind the minimalistic gui which IMHO does it a huge disservice.

Eg: it has scripts to run containerised or UML'ised versions of itself, from within itself. Down to optionally having a nested X session with full gui.

Porteus (or the more bleeding edge Porteux variant) has more conventional look & feel out of the box.

Both Fatdog & Porteus(x) have much more flexible initrd systems than tiny core/puppy, where you can copy configs in from a static location (rather like alpine's overlay tarball), or bind mount stuff in. Critically, this is all before the main rootfs goes live, so you can affect how various disks & services are handled on a machine-by-machine basis, if needed.

(plus they're not restricted to the root-only approach which puppy needlessly adheres to religiously)

Plus, these were the original IMMUTABLE distro's, long before that was adopted by some distro-giants.

In other words, with a little thought, you have TONS of flexibility. Including the scenario you mentioned.

To get a flavour, have a quick look over

- [the fatdog faq](https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/faq.html)

- [this old blog post] (https://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/FatdogIsVersatile)

PS: to install either, it can be as simple as setting up a bootloader (which IMHO ought to be a distro agnostic task anyway), and copying over ... 2 files (by default, fatdog shoves its main rootfs squashfs module INSIDE the initrd). With porteus, you will have a fully setup xfce, cinnamon or gnome (yes) setup with ... 4 files.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 19:37:07+00:00
> The biggest problem is that it would be a breaking change at least in C++.

Exactly, I believe that to be the case in C as well. In C23 the rules for types to be considered compatible were actually relaxed, so this proposal wouldn't make any sense. It would be a useless breaking change for no gain, other than a bit less typing and maybe feeding some language layers, so there is really no reason to do that. It actually makes the code less clear, since you now need to always lookup the type definition, which would be against C's philosophy.
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-15 19:37:15+00:00
I've been on a bit of a retro bender and have intentionally limited myself to nothing but the manuals and games and it's been so fun to rediscover how much thought people used to put into the manuals including the presentation and art. Extreme shame half of the time now even if you go and grab a physical copy you basically just get a key in a box.
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-15 19:37:15+00:00
We currently live under the misapprehension that a company growing from a value of $100 million to a value of $1 billion is a "productive use of capital". My contention is that in general that is not true, and that kind of growth from big to bigger is harmful. We want to disincentivize the concentration of growth and capital in already-large companies, and incentivize the diffusion of wealth in many small enterprises that never grow huge.
by ngokevin | 2025-12-15 19:37:32+00:00
As someone who spent 2+ years building one, I would turn away now if you're looking for traction or sustainability (https://couplingcafe.com). Though I don't regret it and learned enough to speak to my in-laws. My retention numbers are decent, but I just haven't done the marketing bit yet, and am currently taking a break.

Language learning apps are the ultimate sand-pit for solo developers thinking they can offer some random unique feature that Duolingo (or "Anki but better") doesn't offer. Without realizing, they don't do it for a reason. Language learning has extremely low activation and retention. And it's super easy to find one or two early adopters that like your app for some reason to keep going.

And solo developers that get into language learning often are only strong in software development and lack in UX, design, product, or marketing.

You may start with a calm, "not Duolingo gamification" style app, but every language learning app starts with pure intentions until you're many months or years in, your numbers are low, you need to make money, and you need to move the needle.

My two cents, you don't have to heed it obviously.
by gdask11 | 2025-12-15 19:37:49+00:00
Hi Michael,

Really cool of you to be willing to engage with people on this stuff, thanks. I would ask if there would be pathways or initiatives for smaller biotech research teams or med startups to collaborate with DARPA GO for their various goals? Seems like the possibilities are endless. In your mind, could GO one day be used to change traits in an organism that aren’t fixed at birth, but can be influenced by genes? Where do you see the impact or practical use cases for GO in 10-15 years?

Thanks again and looking forward to learning about whatever other crazy things you guys are working on!
by zjp | 2025-12-15 19:38:00+00:00
LLMs don't even write as well as people do. If you talk to them long enough, you'll notice they produce the same errors careless people do. Sometimes they wrongly elide the article 'a'. They occasionally mess up 'a/an' vowel agreement. The most grating thing of all is that the fully-elided 'because' (as in 'because traffic') lives on in LLM output, even though you rarely see it anymore because people rightly got the sense it was unfair for a writer to offload semantic reconstruction to the reader.

I have a confession to make: I didn't think lulcat speak was funny, even at the time.

It's pretty annoying and once you catch them doing it, you can't stop.
by StoneAndSky | 2025-12-15 19:38:02+00:00
I love Squoosh. I have used it since it launched.

However, IIRC, Squoosh was built largely by Surma and Jake; or maybe they were just the "face" of the project. Either way, at one point it even had a CLI.

Since their departure from Google, the CLI project was abandoned and it feels like the web app is as well.

As is usual Google things, I think it's a matter of time until some PM discovers squoosh.app, and asks "What's this?" and then the thing gets killed.

Perhaps this HN post will be the thing that does it.
by nitwit005 | 2025-12-15 19:38:03+00:00
It's fine if you focus your app on highly motivated language learners, or people bothered by gamification. The issue is going to be how to market to those people. They need to hear of your product somehow.

Having an app oriented toward being used by anyone has the advantage that you can slap an ad up anywhere, and you'll reach a potential customer.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-15 19:38:09+00:00
Yeah, this is the unspoken part about HTTPS: you enable it, you also announce to the entire world you're serving stuff from specific DNS names :).

(Which is why I hate it that it's so hard to test things locally without having to get a domain and a certificate. I don't want to buy domain names and announce them publicly for the sake of some random script that needs to offer a HTTP endpoint.)

Modern security is introducing a lot of unexpected couplings into software systems, including coupling to political, social and physical reality, which is surprising if you think in terms of programs you write, which most likely shouldn't have any such relationships.

My favorite example of such unexpected coupling, whose failures are still regularly experienced by users, is wall clock time. If your program touches anything related to certificates, even indirectly, suddenly it's coupled to actual real clock and your users better make sure their system time is in synch with the rest of the world, or else things will stop working.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-15 19:38:13+00:00
I was making a point about trust, not what to do about it. If you are American, you should worry about Americans spying on you, as that actually could have consequences for your life and there is well know evidence and a legal foundation to justify such worries.

As non-car owner, I also dislike the Tesla cameras around me. Maybe one solution would be to not have fucking cameras everywhere, if the owner's exclusive access can't be guaranteed, abuse can't be prevented and legal consequences are not enforced. Maybe there should be standards and certification.
by neilv | 2025-12-15 19:38:23+00:00
> Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.

Also, many people took pride in the service they provided to their country (or to the people, or as part of a team that did good, however they thought of it).

I don't have high hopes for this new thing.

After recent treatment of federal employees, and other things going on in the US this year, including how USDS as DOGE was weaponized against the US... I'd expect this new thing to only be able to recruit from these categories:

1. Outright bad people, with anti-US, looter/saboteur intent, as we've seen from other facets recently. They will focus on their own bad-person individual interests.

2. People who aren't bad, but who are so cognitively impaired, that they still don't realize that they're probably going to get screwed personally and/or directed to be the baddies. They will be bad at everything they do.

3. People who are intelligent and pro-US, and have no illusions about what they're signing up for, but who desperately need the income, after being screwed earlier this year. They won't be inspired to execute well on whatever anti-US directives they're given.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-15 19:38:24+00:00
If you are ok with it, I think that's fine. Cordless to me is a huge productivity boost since I can just pick it up and vacuum whenever. I think most people see it as a huge win, but I haven't conducted a formal poll or anything.

Having a robot do everything is just another step in the convenience direction. It is great if you have expensive floors that you want to maintain on a daily or bi-daily basis.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-15 19:38:38+00:00
The UK's having a hard enough time trying to preserve freedom in the UK.

Hold up... So you're saying that they're actually not trying to preserve freedom in the UK and have arrested hundreds of people over twitter memes?!

In all seriousness, you're approximately as free in HK as you are in the UK. In HK, don't promote democracy or insult the government in Beijing. In the UK, don't suggest that diversity isn't Our Greatest Strength.

Every society these days has an untouchable third rail. None are without beams in their own eyes.
by charcircuit | 2025-12-15 19:38:42+00:00
>I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I am writing a new bus.

Why not reuse Binder which has been to deployed to billions of devices, being a core part of a serious OS, with many many more developers who understand it compared to dbus.

You would probably want to write your own service manager, but you can reuse hardened stuff that already exist.
by slowturtle | 2025-12-15 19:38:43+00:00
The West Bank is administered by the Israeli Civil Administration which is a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Even the Israeli High Court of Justice (Supreme Court) says that "Israel holds the Area in belligerent occupation" and that "a military administration... continues to apply". [0]

Not to mention how the Israeli government allows over 700,000 illegal settlers to flood the West Bank and does absolutely nothing to stop them from stealing land or attacking Palestinians. The Israeli military has ultimate authority there. Like the other commenter said, it's a fantasy to claim otherwise.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=B1ZIIDeEc5AC&pg=PA511#v=on...
by volk45 | 2025-12-15 19:38:58+00:00
One anecdote I can provide - the department I volunteer for swapped to software based (see: mobile app) personnel calling because the county swapped to the system.

The software can quickly load box data (PDFs of hydrant locations and building details), as well as provide route mapping for individual at their location compared to call.

Additionally, every volunteer has a somewhat modern smartphone in my rural/suburban area. Pagers are not in huge demand anymore.
by _flux | 2025-12-15 19:39:05+00:00
From the style of this article I expected that https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprwire and https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprtavern would have documentation, specification and perhaps a bunch of tests, but they're not really there (other than smoke tests).

Those would have been a great starting point as well! But maybe we'll see them later.
by ang_cire | 2025-12-15 19:39:05+00:00
This isn't unique to China, it's just the nature of modern manufacturing. The only reason China stands out is because we offshored our manu there, so it's where we see it happen.

I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.

The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.

But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
by old8man | 2025-12-15 19:39:14+00:00
While the reduction of a compiler to a deterministic function is theoretically sound, modern engineering practice necessitates addressing "Compiler-as-a-Service" architectures (LSP, incrementalism), where persistent state management complicates the purported simplicity of debugging. Furthermore, the article overlooks the non-deterministic nature of JIT compilation and parallel builds, which fundamentally challenges the comparison to stateless CLI utilities like grep.