MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cornholio | 2025-12-26 21:46:24+00:00
The industrial version is produced in an autoclave, this allows precise control over density and final mechanical resistance/insulation values. Hence, the name the material is best known by - AAC.

On the other hand, the video linked attributes too much credit and complexity to the foam manufacturing method, it can certainly be done with very primitive technology. Here are some dudes doing it in a developing country, it's very very basic, the foam generator is basically a steel wool sponge where pressurized air combine with water containing the foaming agent. They give out the complete recipe and details of their tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h6zBbVkuQI
by dyukqu | 2025-12-26 21:47:11+00:00
# Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller) - had been seeing it mentioned on HN (and other sites) for years, I finally read it and it was one the best novels I've ever read.

# The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories.

# What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book from H. M. and I really liked it. It's kind of a memoir and made me like Murakami and now I plan to read his novels too.

# How to Build a Car (by Adrian Newey) - that famous F1 car designer... Great read. Gives readers a chance to glimpse into both (technical) thought process behind designing a race car and human side of it.

# Basic Mathematics (by Serge Lang) - not *reading* exactly, working through it (to brush the rust off of my math fundamentals).
by ofek | 2025-12-26 21:47:25+00:00
> pip could implement parallel downloads, global caching, and metadata-only resolution tomorrow. It doesn’t, largely because backwards compatibility with fifteen years of edge cases takes precedence.

pip is simply difficult to maintain. Backward compatibility concerns surely contribute to that but also there are other factors, like an older project having to satisfy the needs of modern times.

For example, my employer (Datadog) allowed me and two other engineers to improve various aspects of Python packaging for nearly an entire quarter. One of the items was to satisfy a few long-standing pip feature requests. I discovered that the cross-platform resolution feature I considered most important is basically incompatible [1] with the current code base. Maintainers would have to decide which path they prefer.

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/13111
by Youden | 2025-12-26 21:47:58+00:00
Is it really important that people be educated in the reading of analog clocks?

I think it's clear to most people that digital clocks are easier to read - they're numbers that you read the same as any other numbers; they can be read at a glance without special training.

Analog clocks can also be read at a glance but require the reader to acquire a non-transferable skill.

When I was growing up (90's, 00's), digital clocks weren't yet ubiquitous the way they are now so I can understand why they were taught to me as a child but in 2025, I suspect the average adult finds a digital clock within their line of sight ~20x more frequently than any kind of analog clock.

If you read this and still think it's important that children learn how to read analog clocks, I'd like to know: assuming digital clocks continue their growth and analog clocks become less and less common, when exactly can we stop teaching analog clocks?

In a similar vein, if there's anyone around here who learned the abacus in school, I'm curious what you think of this. Is the analog clock the abacus, waiting to be phased out in favour of the calculator, or is there another way to look at it?
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-26 21:48:26+00:00
That was my point, although I might've written it poorly. You can't go and learn everything. We're surrounded and bombarded by so much information, so many different things every day. Even very intelligent and curious people who read and learn all the time don't know everything. Just sitting at my desk I can probably think of 1000 things that pique my interest, but I don't try to learn about them because I know I have a very limited life on this planet. It's impossible to know everything, even to read all of Wikipedia.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-26 21:48:44+00:00
Well, that's obviously an exaggeration, but in any case, there's a choice here. Historically interface designers expected users to read a manual, and later to at least go through some basic onboarding and then read the occasional "tip of the day", before finally arriving at the current "don't make me think" approach. It's not too late to expect people to think again.
by eithed | 2025-12-26 21:48:44+00:00
I don't understand how any of this is a surprise. Traditional media have their own agenda - sure, maybe the pushed image is spoken through many voices, rather than one, as is case of LLMs, but why should there be any difference. Same to everything we consume socially.

There is, nor there will be some absolute or objective truth an LLM can clinically outline
by kbutler | 2025-12-26 21:48:57+00:00
We had tried video in the car for our teens, but found that audio books worked a lot better - shared experience, nobody has a bad angle/line of sight, can still see the scenery and engage in the travel, less looking down prompting motion sickness, etc.

Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-12-26 21:49:15+00:00
> Thinking of Kubernetes as a runtime for declarative infrastructure instead of a mere orchestrator results in very practical approaches to operate your cluster.

Unpopular opinion, but the source of most of the problems I've seen with infrastructures using Kubernetes came from exactly this kind of approach.

Problems usually come when we use tools to solve things that they weren't made for. That is why - in my opinion - it is super important to treat a container orchestrator a container orchestrator.
by positron26 | 2025-12-26 21:49:54+00:00
> everything you claim that needs to be done

A single early-stage company is not ecosystem-scale organization. It is instead the legacy benchmark to beat. This is what we do today because the best tools in our toolbox are a corporation or a foundation.

Whether AMD stands to benefit from doing more or less, we are likely in agreement that Tinygrad is a small fraction of the exposed interest and that if AMD were in conversation with a more organized, larger fraction of that interest, that AMD would do more.

I'm not defending AMD doing less. I am insisting that ecosystems can do more and that the only reason they don't is because we didn't properly analyze the problems or develop the tools.
by 3n4n | 2025-12-26 21:50:29+00:00
I already forgot what I read for my work (MS in CS), so I'll stick with fiction.

This year was slow for me reading-wise. Not a whole lot:

- The Blind Owl / Sadegh Hedayat
- Prince of Annwn (Mabinogion Tetralogy #1)
- Norse Mythology / Gaiman: read it before accusations came out
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David F Wallace
- A Connecticut Yankee ... / Mark Twain (not yet finished)
by btown | 2025-12-26 21:50:40+00:00
One approach if "dang it, someone/I needed to use kubectl during the outage, how do we get gitops/poor-mans-gitops back in place to match reality" is, either agentically-looping or artisanally-looping, to try simple gitops configurations (or diffs to current gitops configurations) until a dry-run diff with your live configuration results in no changes.

For instance, with Helm, I've had success using Helmfile's diffs (which in turn use https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff) to do this.

There's more of a spectrum between these than you think, in a way that can be agile for small teams without dedicated investment in gitops. Even with the messes that can occur, I'd take it over the Heroku CLI any day.
by adamors | 2025-12-26 21:50:56+00:00
If you are looking for some modern stuff that would go nicely with Dostoyevsky/Kafka, I can warmly recommend Krasznahorkai, especially his first book, Satantango.

Really well written and well structured novel, and although he uses long sentences and no paragraph breaks, the writing is surprisingly accessible and incredibly immersive.

It was my first fiction book in a long time and it made me love fiction again.
by teddyh | 2025-12-26 21:51:02+00:00
As far as I understand it, Richard Stallman has gotten his view about linking from FSF’s lawyers, who has advised the FSF about what does and does not count as a “derived work”, in the sense of US copyright law.

If you want to argue that the FSF’s lawyers are wrong, please provide more detailed, and hopefully referenced, arguments (as opposed to plain assertions).
by auggierose | 2025-12-26 21:51:13+00:00
Dude. You take money from Google. Really? All the people ranting about AI, but taking pay checks from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ... Hypocrisy much?

I for once enjoy that so much money is pumped into the automation of interactive theorem proving. Didn't think that anyone would build whole data centers for this! ;-)
by cornholio | 2025-12-26 21:51:31+00:00
The UK crisis involved steel reinforced AAC beams that were used (of all places) to support roofs of schools. UK turned out to be a rainy place, the rain infused into the cellular structure and corroded the steel, with disastrous consequences.

It's a very particular use case of a very particular product, not relevant to the wide majority of AAC uses around the world, which is largely non-structural and not reinforced, or subjected to moderate compression loads, such 1-2 stories buildings in non-seismic areas.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-26 21:51:36+00:00
Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.

The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.

The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).
by Gibbon1 | 2025-12-26 21:52:05+00:00
In the latter 1800 there wasn't enough gold to accommodate the vast increases in industrial production. Which was deflationary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

You can imagine every year the price per bushel of the wheat you grow drops and your mortgage stays the same. When your whole economy is like that no one wants to borrow or lend money and investment slows.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-26 21:52:26+00:00
IMO this is what keeps people from building systems that might challenge kubernetes. Everyone wants to say Kuberentes is too simple, so we built something that does much less.

> That’s why I like to think of Kubernetes as a runtime for declarative infrastructure with a type system.

You can go build a simple way to deploy containers or ship apps: but you are missing what I think allows Kubernetes to be such a big tent, thats a core useful platform for so many. Kubernetes works the same for all types, for everything you want to manage. It's the same desired state management + autonomic systems patterns, whatever you are doing. An extensible platform with a very simple common core.

There are other takes and other tries, but managing desired state for any kind of type is a huge win that allows many people to find their own uses for kube, that is absolutely the cornerstone to it's popularity.

If you do want less, the one project I'd point to that is kubernetes without the kubernetes complexity is KCP. It's just the control plane. It doesn't do anything at all. This to me is much simpler. It's not finding a narrowly defined use case to focus on, it's distilling out the general system into it's simplest parts. Rebuilding a good simple bespoke app container launching platform around KCP would be doable, and maintain the overarching principles that make Kube actually interesting.

I seriously think there is something deeply rotten with our striving for simplicity. I know we've all been burned, and there's so often we want to throw up our hands, and I get it. But the way out is through. I'd rather dance the dance & try to scout for better further futures, than reject & try to walk back.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-12-26 21:53:02+00:00
The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han

The Disappearance of Rituals - Byung-Chul Han

Outlive - Peter Attia (This felt like a complete waste of attention)

An Emotional Education - School of Life/Alain de Botton

The Story of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki

Plants from Test Tubes - Lydiane Kyte; John Kleyn; Holly Scoggins; Mark Bridgen

Some biography I've forgotten
by kashyapc | 2025-12-26 21:53:37+00:00
I'll share my top book of the year:

Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, Alan Walker

A riveting read by a legendary musicologist and biographer. Walker spent about ten years researching this. It is 700 pages, which seems daunting but he makes this authoritative bio absolutely enjoyable. It's also a "corrective biography", it dispels a lot of myths. This book is one of the best examples of accessible writing with flair. What a writer!

Throughout the book, Walker tastefully quotes musical phrases (in notation) from Chopin's works to situate them in context. I often paused reading and put on the track on a given page (nocturnes, mazurkas, preludes, etc). It made the reading experience incredibly rich and fun. Other things I enjoyed: Chopin's letters to his friends and family, life in aristocratic salons of Paris, London, Warsaw, and more—Chopin had unparalleled access. Of course, there's also a lot of gut-wrenching stuff. As the book's blurb says, it really is for both the casual music lover and the professional pianist.

If you haven't discovered them yet, give a listen to Chopin's nocturnes. But please, give them an attentive listen and play them on a high-quality audio system. Here[1] is one of his finest nocturnes (it is less famous than the "happier" nocturne that follows it, Op. 9 No. 2).

[1] Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThMGf07UBHQ
by AdamMade4321 | 2025-12-26 21:53:49+00:00
I built this because I was tired of guitar tuners packed with ads, popups, fake buttons, and forced app installs — plus constant attempts to sell lessons or courses.

This is a simple, free online guitar tuner for standard tuning (E A D G B E).

It runs entirely in your browser using your microphone.
No downloads. No accounts. No setup. No nonsense.

Your audio never leaves your device.
There are no ads, no tracking scripts, and no paywalls.

If you play guitar and just want to tune quickly without being sold to, this might be useful.
by baobun | 2025-12-26 21:54:16+00:00
In US, washing machines have "cold", "warm", "hot" settings. In Europe, you have a temperature knob "30C", "40C", "60C".

Like you, I don't buy the argument that people are actually too dumb to deal with the latter or are allergic to numbers. People get used to and make use of numbers in context naturally if you expose them.
by eviks | 2025-12-26 21:54:28+00:00
> Every code path you don’t have is a code path you don’t wait for.

No, every code path you don't execute is that. Like

> No .egg support.

How does that explain anything if the egg format is obsolete and not used?

Similar with spec strictness fallback logic - it's only slow if the packages you're installing are malformed, otherwise the logic will not run and not slow you down.

And in general, instead of a list of irrelevant and potentially relevant things would be great to understand some actual time savings per item (at least those that deliver the most speedup)!

But otherwise great and seemingly comprehensive list!
by supertrope | 2025-12-26 21:54:57+00:00
Educating and socializing kids takes more than 180 days a year. It takes a village to raise a kid. Think of all the things you learned from your parents, your extended family, your sports coach, your neighbor, or the manager of the corner store you frequented. Did you ever have a lesson at school about tying your shoe laces? How did you learn that advertisements don't have tell the truth?

Teaching to the test is about pulling low achieving students up to standard, not so much about supporting high performing students. Even though a lot of difference between a good school district and bad school district comes down to out of classroom factors like socioeconomic class and parental involvement, the district gets praise or blame. The district can't fix food insecurity, absent parents, abuse, and anti-intellectual attitudes. But it can focus those 180 days on reading and math and specifically what's on the test.
by hulitu | 2025-12-26 21:55:17+00:00
> Google joins attacks on Britain over free speech online

"We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight in France
We shall fight over the seas and oceans.
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be
we shall fight on beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight on the hills.
We shall never surrender."
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-26 21:55:29+00:00
I like the idea of a lightweight concrete like material that can be used to make houses more durable. Is there a way to replace drywall interiors with this or something else? I really hate how susceptible drywall is to things like moisture and mold, but also how repairing it requires a dusty and messy process of cutting, sanding, mud, tape, and all that. It would be so much easier to have waterproof durable panels that can be opened to access the interior wall spaces (for electrical or plumbing stuff). Is there a solution?
by ValentineC | 2025-12-26 21:55:31+00:00
> There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster?

As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.

If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.
by LastTrain | 2025-12-26 21:56:03+00:00
> They sent thoughtless, form-letter thank you emails to 157 people. That makes me less sympathetic to the vitriol these guys are getting not more ...
> Heck Rob Pike did this himself back in the day on Usenet with Mark V. Shaney ...
> And yes this is annoying to get this kind of email no matter who it's from ...

Pretty sure Rob Pike doesn't react this way to every article of spam he receives, so maybe the issue isn't really about spam, huh? More of an existential crisis: I helped build this thing that doesn't seem to be an agent of good. It's an extreme & emotional reaction but it isn't very hard to understand.
by VanshPatel99 | 2025-12-26 21:56:09+00:00
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-26 21:56:11+00:00
> When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.

Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.

A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.

To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-12-26 21:57:26+00:00
Everything in infrastructure is a set of trade-offs that work in both directions.

If you want better monitoring, metrics, availability, orchestration, logging, and so on, you pay for it with time, money, and complexity.

If you can't justify that cost, you're free to use simpler tools.

Just because everyone sets up a Kubernetes / Prometheus / ELK stack to host a web app that would happily run on a single VPS doesn't mean you need to do the same, or that nowadays this is the baseline for running something.
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-26 21:57:46+00:00
Of course things can be simpler.

Remove abstractions like CNI, CRI, just make these things built-in.

Remove unnecessary things like Ingress, etc, you can always just deploy nginx or whatever reverse proxy directly. Also probably remove persistent volumes, they add a lot of complexity.

Use some automatically working database, not separate etcd installation.

Get rid of control plane. Every node should be both control plane and worker node. Or may be 3 worker nodes should be control plane, whatever, deployer should not think about it.

Add stuff that everyone needs. Centralised log storage, centralised metric scrapping and storage, some simple web UI, central authentication. It's reimplemented in every Kubernetes cluster.

The problem is that it won't be serious enough and people will choose Kubernetes over simpler solutions.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-26 21:57:59+00:00
While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.

Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
New PHP SAPI in Safe Rust
by jhavenz | 2025-12-26 21:58:42+00:00
I recently published the initial ripht-php-sapi RC.

It’s safe Rust bindings for PHP's embed SAPI. Lets you execute PHP scripts from Rust without touching unsafe code.

GitHub:
https://github.com/jhavenz/ripht-php-sapi

Crate:
https://crates.io/crates/ripht-php-sapi

I'd plan to build some higher level Rust-based PHP tooling but need the proverbial clean slate. I also didn’t see any existing SAPI implementations for Rust, so ~3 months later, here it is. A good chunk of that was research. It’s surprising how scarce and archaic the educational material is out there. So, good thing there was 20+ years of battle-tested source code to learn from! Thank you to Nginx unit, php/php-fpm, apache, and Frankenphp. Being able to compare and contrast implementations was extremely helpful. Also gauging interest in content about PHP SAPI internals and Rust FFI if anyone's curious about that rabbit hole: https://www.patreon.com/posts/gauging-php-sapi-146489023

I’m open to feedback