MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exasperaited | 2025-12-22 16:07:55+00:00
Indeed. Also very nearly always true with "fake" skeleton leaves used for crafting.

A small percentage (usually enlarged designs of particular shapes) are made with sophisticated latex presses, but most are chemically-stripped and treated real leaves (Ficus and suchlike) because it's simply easier to make them in bulk.

I was amazed by this at first — I bought some for a photography project simply assuming that their flexible, slightly springy nature meant they were artifically-made latex. But no: ficus leaves automatically processed in baking soda, essentially. The latex ones aren't even cheaper.
by em-bee | 2025-12-22 16:08:28+00:00
2 million? how do you even come up with that number? you are proving my point.

food, clothes, school materials, a bike. maybe a computer. also a bed and a few square meters of space in your home. everything else is optional. that doesn't cost 100,000 per year. not even 10,000.

sure, with less money you have less to offer or your kids. no or only cheap vacations, no expensive toys. no fancy brand name clothes. no expensive extra curricular activities. and certainly no money for college. but none of these things are necessary to have and raise kids. and it is not irresponsible to have kids and raise them that way either.
by krish678 | 2025-12-22 16:08:43+00:00
I’m excited to share my latest research on the Dynamic Hierarchical Cooperative Swarm (DHCS) algorithm, recently published on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/7e20cab6-09bf-4fb2...

DHCS is a bio-inspired metaheuristic designed for high-dimensional and complex optimization problems, addressing limitations of conventional approaches like PSO or Genetic Algorithms.

Key features:

Dynamic clustering & adaptive roles: Each agent autonomously decides its behavior while maintaining swarm coherence.

Periodic synchronization: Ensures global coordination without sacrificing exploration.

Scalability: Tested on a 5000-dimensional Ackley function with superior convergence and robustness.

Efficiency: Reduces computational overhead while outperforming standard methods.

Versatility: Applicable to engineering design, supply chain optimization, ML hyperparameter tuning, and financial modeling.

This paper not only formalizes the DHCS framework but also presents a comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrating its effectiveness in high-dimensional and dynamic environments.

I’d love feedback from the community, especially from those working in metaheuristics, swarm intelligence, and large-scale optimization problems.
by gzalo | 2025-12-22 16:08:47+00:00
The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.

I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
by gregw2 | 2025-12-22 16:09:07+00:00
I applaud the author for thinking afresh on this topic.

I am also comfortable with the closing comments that you can't always dumb down your code or you stagnate and never learn new tricks/techniques. It is a good thing to keep in mind.

But I have also seen people waste a lot of their (and others') time trying to be clever in ways which as an outsider from additional context I have I can anticipate won't pan out. And I've let it slide and watched it end "not-well", leading to long unnecessary debugging cycles, missing deadlines, and creating boilerplates of YAGNI abstraction and complexity that didn't "make the easy things easy and the hard things possible" but instead made the easy things complicated.

I myself have been accused of that when trying to design optimal "scalable" architectures up front. And I myself have patched over inherited "clever" things with flaws that I handled by adding yet more incremental "cleverness" when, N years later I wish I had just cut the knot of Gordian complexity on day 1.

I think Kernighan's Law is perhaps best applied as a cautionary question to ask yourselves or others in the journey: are you getting too clever, and can you
(and others around you) really debug the cleverness you are pursuing?

Complexity and cleverness may be needed, but have you considered re-approaching the problem from a standpoint that minimizes the need for cleverness?

Put another way, there is cleverness that brings "simplicity of code" that does not bring "simplicity of debugging or maintenance" by yourself or others. It's wise to be aware of that.

I view cleverness as somewhat like "innovation tokens"... you should "pick a small handful" of them strategically but not overuse them. I don't see that caution in a pure statement of "Kernighan's lever".

Also seemingly tacitly ignored in the poster's perspective is any acknowledgement that software is, or can be in a huge chunk of scenarios, a "team sport". It's all fine for you to get more clever by pushing yourself, but if you don't transfer your knowledge/cleverness to the broader development+support group, it isn't good for the organization, and perhaps not even you if you consider your code's value proposition will itself harden and stagnate and get refactored out.

(Of course, for some programmers, that's a virtue; write your code in an obscure language/style so that nobody else will take credit or touch it and mess it up. I literally had an acquaintance who, sensing in me a similar competence (or elitism?), boasted to me about his cleverness in doing this at his workplace. I was intrigued, but silently not impressed.)
by dns_snek | 2025-12-22 16:09:09+00:00
But that's not the story here. I hate ads as much as anyone, but this action is a matter of market competition, not privacy. They're completely different fights and intelligent people ought to be able to distinguish between the two. Anti-competitive behavior by Google, Apple, Meta, etc. is what got us into this mess with tracking and privacy violations in the first place.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-22 16:10:19+00:00
Thing is you can pay basically fractions of cents a query to e.g. DeepSeek Platform or DeepInfra or Z.Ai or whatever and have them run the same open models for far cheaper and faster than you could ever build out at home.

It's neat to play with, but not practical.

The only story that I can see that makes sense for running at home is if you're going to fine tune a model by taking an open weight model and <hand waving> doing things to it and running that. Even then I believe there's places (hugging face?) that will host and run your updated model for cheaper than you could run it yourself.
by phil21 | 2025-12-22 16:10:40+00:00
Vibes? I jest a little bit.

For my car it’s been message boards with enthusiasts and mechanics who work on my vehicle. Luckily (or not…) mine is a somewhat niche performance car so people tend to nerd out over them.

A lot of it though is ignoring the vendor recommendations for outsourced parts like transmissions - go direct to manufacture and see what they say. This does seem to involve having an “insider” with manuals intended for service techs.

I also imagine fleet vehicle schedules might be informative as well.

Unfortunately I don’t have a very clean direct answer on it - it was a lot of feeling around and when in doubt erring on the side of over maintaining vs under.

Some is simply basic common sense though. We have not developed lubricants that can last over a decade and 120,000 miles in temperature ranges from below zero to hundreds of degrees.
by bluGill | 2025-12-22 16:10:53+00:00
Also because today we have accurate clocks and most of us don't depend on seasons for anything. Farmers care about when to plant, and a few gardeners pay attention, but for most of us nothing changes in life. (I'm carefully not counting the traditional vacations that most of us have around this time - though that is important to us and historically related, we could move the date and it wouldn't affect anything else).
by whalesalad | 2025-12-22 16:11:00+00:00
Personally, I do not think there is a language in the ALGOL family tree with better syntax than Python. It removes just about all the BS: ceremony, boilerplate, curly braces, etc. Oftentimes as programmers we write out ideas as pseudocode... and that pseudocode is oftentimes coincidentally valid Python! I think this is a critical reason why Python has been so successful. It's simple and powerful at the same time.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-22 16:11:04+00:00
Huh?

Way to interpolate. Kudos to your reach! I just was pointing out that it's likely that the employee responsible was here. The diving is highly unlikely to be triggered by a single employee (unless it was that "employee").

No, but if it was flagged, it's possible that it was by Meta employees. I can't see why it would be flagged, otherwise. I'll bet there's enough for a good flash mob, like the Elon stans that always flag down stories critical of him.

I'll bet they will also be flagging my comment.

It's nice to be loved...
by franch | 2025-12-22 16:11:33+00:00
Italy's unconsolidated budget for 2025 is projected to be around 700 billion euros in revenue and 900 billion in expenditures:

https://www.rgs.mef.gov.it/VERSIONE-I/attivita_istituzionali...

So yeah, whoever talks about these fines as a strategy for fixing the budget knows nothing about the actual budget of a G7 state, these fines are completely immaterial to Italian fiscal policy.

For perspective, that's roughly equivalent to someone with a €50,000 annual income finding €7 on the street and someone claiming they're doing it "to survive."
by adev_ | 2025-12-22 16:11:45+00:00
> Is it? You just add "restrict" where needed?

Yes. That is the main solution and it is not a good one.

1- `restrict` need to be used carefully. Putting it everywhere in large codebase can lead to pretty tricky bugs if aliasing does occurs under the hood.

1- Restrict is not an official keyword in C++. C++ always has refused to standardize it because it plays terribly with almost any object model.
by cyanmagenta | 2025-12-22 16:11:47+00:00
There is a network effect with programming languages. Once you get popular, more people write libraries and guides for that language, which in turn makes it even more popular.

If you were czar of the universe and could start from scratch, could a better scripting language be created? Sure. But that’s not the fact pattern, and Python isn’t bad enough at what it does to warrant starting over.
by biasafe_belm | 2025-12-22 16:12:03+00:00
You can't only look at it from the perspective of a software engineer. Ordinary people can read and write Python much more easily than a ton of other languages. It's very easy to get started, with basically no ceremony. Highly tolerant of user errors yet still allows one to grow with the language (nobody writes ABCs on their first day).

Python has issues, but those issues don't matter equally to everyone and every use case. Low barrier to entry, coupled with Metcalfe's law, explains a lot IMO.

I love Scheme, but not everybody does, and I can see why.
by kelnos | 2025-12-22 16:12:05+00:00
Oof. Of course Patrick is right that paying by gift card isn't always a scam, but I think less-technically-savvy people are better off just believing that it is. And hell, as a technically-savvy person, I will just believe that it is as well, because it's less effort to do so, and won't hurt me to believe that. If someone wants you to pay for something by gift card, find the same or a similar product somewhere else, where they'll take credit/debit cards, checks, cash, whatever is actually legal tender and is appropriate for the situation.

But from Patrick's description, it feels like the situations where it's (usually) not a scam are instances where paying by gift card is an option, not something the "seller" is pushing you hard to do, or even requiring you to do. That seems... okay? I personally would still pay with a credit card, but mayyyybe it's ok for someone who can't get a credit card to go the gift card route. But I would still be wary.

If you're dealing with an unbanked business that cannot take credit/debit cards or checks due to the legal climate around their business or product, then you probably already know what you're getting yourself into. (But still, bit of a red flag if they don't accept cash or even cryptocurrencies, as much as I find those scammy as well.)

> The people of the United States, through their elected representatives and the civil servants who labor on their behalf, intentionally exempt gift cards from the Reg E regime in the interest of facilitating commerce.

This sort of phrasing about things kinda annoys me. Yes, "through their elected representatives...", technically true, but "the people of the United States", no, not really so much. I'm sure most people don't even know about these sorts of differences, and I'm sure the majority of people who are in favor of these sorts of protections on credit/debit cards would want them to apply to gift cards as well.

The problem with this sort of phrasing implies that the American people actively chose this, or even had any choice in the matter. We are limited in the political options that are put before us; we don't get a big menu of policy positions, check off the ones we like, and then a politician appears that matches all our preferences. Some people might -- very reasonably! -- prioritize other policy positions over gift card protection regulation, even if they want the latter as well.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-22 16:12:07+00:00
I mean, I think you're right that confabulation is probably a more correct technical term, but we all use hallucinate now, so it doesn't really matter. It might have been useful to argue about it 4 or 5 years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. [1]

And I think we already distinguish between types of errors -- LLM's effectively don't lie, AFAIK, unless you're asking them to engage in role-play or something. They mostly either hallucinate/confabulate in terms of inventing knowledge they don't have, or they just make "mistakes" e.g. in arithmetic, or in attempting to copy large amounts of code verbatim.

And when you're interested in mistakes, you're generally interested in a specific category of mistakes, like arithmetic, or logic, or copying mistakes, and we refer to them as such -- arithmetic errors, logic errors, etc.

So I don't think hallucination is taking away from any kind of specificity. To the contrary, it is providing specificity, because we don't call arithmetic errors hallucinations. And we use the word hallucination precisely to distinguish it from these run-of-the-mill mistakes.

[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=hallucination&date=all&g...
by vunderba | 2025-12-22 16:12:59+00:00
When I find myself in a situation where I’ve been hammering an LLM and it keeps veering down unproductive paths - trying poor solutions or applying fixes that make no difference but eventually we do arrive at the correct answer, the result is often a massive 100+ KB running context.

To help mitigate this in the future I'll often prompt:

“Why did it take so long to arrive at the solution? What did you do wrong?”

Then I follow up with:

“In a single paragraph, describe the category of problem and a recommended approach for diagnosing and solving it in the future.”

I then add this summary to either the relevant MD file (CHANGING_CSS_LAYOUTS.md, DATA_PERSISTENCE.md, etc) or more generally to the DISCOVERIES.md file, which is linked from my CLAUDE.md under:

- When resolving challenging directives, refresh yourself with: docs/DISCOVERIES.md - it contains useful lessons learned and discoveries made during development.

I don't think linking to an entire commit full of errors/failures is necessarily a good idea - feels like it would quickly lead to the proverbial poisoning of the well.
by dijit | 2025-12-22 16:13:15+00:00
I think he backed his citations, and just because migration from MENA regions (a historically entirely different culture) are “brown people” doesn’t make it invalid. Mexicans are also brown people and so are Spanish people in some definitions. Yet somehow he’s not talking about them. If you look closely he’s criticising the kids gloves that the authorities are handling the newcomers that leads to a worsening narrative for everyone- lets not forget that there are victims in both camps here.

We should be able to criticise migration without everyone saying it’s racism otherwise you loosen the definition of racism so much that everybody becomes a “racist” eventually and it stops having a sting
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 16:13:23+00:00
> Even the small Devstral-2 model (24b) seems to easily beat Sonnet 3.5 [2].

I've played with Devstral 2 a lot since it came out. I've seen the benchmarks. I just don't believe it's actually better for coding.

It's amazing that it can do some light coding locally. I think it's great that we have that. But if I had to choose between a 2024-era model and Devstral 2 I'd pick the older Sonnet or GPTs any day.
by vips7L | 2025-12-22 16:13:23+00:00
I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.

Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.

This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.
by networked | 2025-12-22 16:13:25+00:00
Previously:

- Perl's decline was cultural - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175112 - Dec 2025 (460 comments)

- (!) Ask HN: Why did Python win? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308747 - Aug 2023 (839 comments)

- Ask HN: Why is Python so popular for ML/DS? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16207834 - Jan 2018 (19 comments)

- Ask HN: Is Python dying? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11100251 - Feb 2016 (352 comments)

- Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8001337 - July 2014 (362 comments)

- Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682101 - July 2009 (196 comments)

- Ask HN: What does Ruby have that Python doesn't? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283639 - Aug 2008 (223 comments)
by madduci | 2025-12-22 16:13:26+00:00
I don't believe the "syntax win" scenario. Python is also ugly, due to the required indentation, like yaml.

I believe more in the ecosystem, specifically how the computer vision and machine learning movements have adopted python extensively as frontend language (the heavy weightlifting is still doing in C++).
The exploit of numpy has brought many many use cases into the language as well.
by observationist | 2025-12-22 16:13:54+00:00
We should require adherence to US regulatory policy at a minimum for any country that wants to connect to the US internet, and any attempt to circumvent, restrict, or infringe on that will result in a hard disconnect with that state for some period, like a weeklong blackout after each instance of overreach.

Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
by thanedar | 2025-12-22 16:13:57+00:00
Politics can be so much more than elections!

Focus on one issue and one bill, like you would with a startup MVP.

You can solve some of these problems in weeks!

Raising my family and building lasting things for the world are my positive sources of energy too!

I'm just saying that after 15 years founding three startups, I've found my building instinct works incredibly well in politics!
by rootnod3 | 2025-12-22 16:14:22+00:00
I am not contesting that stackoverflow isn't bad in many regards, but to equate that to massive PRs or code changes done via AI slop is a different level. At worst, you might get a page or two out of stack overflow but still need to stitch it together yourself.

With LLMs you can literally ask it to generate entire libraries without activating a single neuron in your nogging. Those two do NOT compare in the slightest.
by lucideng | 2025-12-22 16:14:29+00:00
I worked as an Engine Machinist for a time, and I was told that lead in the fuel aided in sealing the valves, kept valves cooler by helping seal the valve, possibly acting as an impact damper, prevented valves from sticking to the seat and slowed corrosion. When lead was removed from fuel, common practice is to use a valve seat insert made from a different material, usually a high nickel alloy.

Lead fuel was during a time when the cylinder heads were mostly cast-iron, and the valve seat was cut directly into the head. Cast iron is an interesting material, it's reasonably durable, but it corrodes/rusts very easily, especially when exposed to moisture. Gasoline and ethanol both have water as combustion byproducts, so when the engine is off and cools, some of that moisture condenses inside the engine.

Running straight ethanol in an engine without corrosion resistant materials causes much more wear over time because it tends to strip the protective/lubricative oil barriers away, causing iron to corrode when the engine isn't running. Modern engines are aluminum heads with valve seat inserts, stainless steel valves, better piston ring materials (high chromium I think? these were cast iron in the past).

Ethanol has a significant detergent/cleaning effect, even when at 5-10% concentration in gasoline. The valve stems also get some of their lubrication from the fuel, and gasoline is basically a thin oil, and provides protection to mechanical components, better yet with additives. Ethanol is also a difficult fuel in a cold start situation and requires good compression and a strong ignition system to kick it off.

I suspect the whole reason to want to keep lead was motivated by the bean counters involved. They saw a cost savings with lead in the fuel. Cheaper materials and no tooling changes. This means more profits.
by psunavy03 | 2025-12-22 16:14:31+00:00
I had a classmate in the military whose old car got t-boned and so he went and bought a used white Ford Crown Victoria (for the non-US folks, used to be the most common US police car ~10-15 years ago).

He had funny stories about people slowing down to the speed limit and pulling over to the right lane on the freeway.
by ogoffart | 2025-12-22 16:14:37+00:00
slintpad.com uses the wasm port to run on a browser and is not the same as when using Slint to build a "native" app, especially on mobile.

Slint does support decent text input and IME. Including text selection with the native handle. As a demo for android you can try the demo from https://material.slint.dev/ ("Download APK")
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-22 16:14:51+00:00
Industrially, it's very nearly a completely lost tech.

Last I heard the only new-production of electron guns for CRTs was one singular source in Russia, but that was before the war started.

Even preservation of already-manufactured CRTs is difficult.

The last CRT rebuilder in France closed years ago. Some folks purchased some of the equipment and tried to get it set up at the Vintage Television Museum in Columbus, Ohio, but ultimately failed. It's in the care of a dude in Maryland now but is not in production status.

AFAICT, the singular remaining entity presently capable of working on existing picture tubes is Colorvac, in Germany: https://colorvac.de/service/

---

In the unlikely event that new CRT production ever ramps up again, it will be a lot like the reboot of Polaroid film was: So much institutional knowledge will have simply evaporated that even though the new product works, it will never work exactly the same as it once did.
by sowbug | 2025-12-22 16:15:02+00:00
The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.

I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.