MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by averynicepen | 2025-12-04 22:23:09+00:00
3D printing is to mechanical engineering what vibe coding is to computer science.

With the rise of accessible 3D printers that can print engineering materials, there are a lot of people who try to create functional parts without any engineering background. Loading conditions, material properties, failure modes, and fatigue cycling are all important but invisible engineering steps that must be taken for a part to function safely.

As a consumer with a 3D printer, none of this is apparent when you look at a static, non-moving part. Even when you do start to learn more technical details like glass transition temperature, non-isotropic strength, and material creep, it's still not enough to cover everything you need to consider.

Much of this is also taught experimentally, not analytically - everyone will tell you "increasing walls increases strength more than increasing infill", but very few can actually point to the area moment of inertia equation that explains why.

3D printing has been an incredible boon for increasing accessibility for making parts in small businesses, but it has also allowed for big mistakes to be made by small players. My interpretation is the airshow vendor is probably one of these "small businesses".
by personjerry | 2025-12-04 22:23:20+00:00
Do you guys find Django includes enough batteries? Why or why not?

I find myself using Cookiecutter Django [^1] more often than not, better auth, a bunch of boilerplate configs, S3 and email setups if you want, and other stuff rather than have to jiggle with "Django infra" myself

[^1]: https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter-django
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-04 22:23:22+00:00
This doesn't play MP3s.

It just plays notes; those notes are sourced from MIDI files (though they could also be sourced from a MIDI keyboard or similar, so a human can play the machine live).

The MIDI data stream, at it's most simple basis, is just a series of "note on" and "note off" commands. (MIDI can additionally do a lot more than this, but let's not dwell on that.)

This concept actually compares particularly well with what a punched paper roll accomplishes: That, too, is just a series of "note on" and "note off" commands. For every possible note or drum or percussive (or automaton) thing the machine playing the paper roll can do, there's either a hole in the paper ("on") or there is not ("off").

One system is digital and happens in numberland with circuits and/or code, while the other is pneumatic and uses valves and pipes and pumps to get the work done.

But they're both binary systems, so it can be pretty straight-forward to convert between the two.

Relatedly: A somewhat aloof chap in England has found himself with a fondness for pipe organs. He scored a whole church organ from a lady's house, converted it to MIDI with a rather grand assortment of custom PCBs and rewiring, and put it in his museum. (That organ was designed to use electricity and solenoid valves, and meant to be played live instead of with a paper roll, but it's the same game: Binary is binary.)

The process is documented here: https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/joans-church-organ
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-04 22:23:25+00:00
Some people seem willfully ignorant of the game. When confronted with the reality of it, they turn away, complain that it exists, and act like a bullied middle schooler.

You don’t have to enthusiastically endorse the game. You can learn it, just like you learn Go or Rust or whatever. You can refuse to actively play it, but also be aware of it enough to avoid getting hurt by it.

E.g. figure out the minimal effort for convincing game players that your work is important.
by jabl | 2025-12-04 22:24:02+00:00
Well, it gets really complex. Yes, specific heat matters, but as you say so does the heat transfer coefficient. And the viscosity. And is the flow laminar or turbulent? Etc.

There are various figures of merit, such as the Mouromtseff number https://doi.org/10.1109/JRPROC.1942.234654 or https://www.electronics-cooling.com/2006/05/comparing-heat-t... for a quick overview.

Some tables of heat transfer coefficients: https://www.engineersedge.com/heat_transfer/convective_heat_...

But, turns out water is just very very good also when you take these other factors into account. Compared to oil, it has, as mentioned, much higher specific heat, it has higher heat conductivity, it has lower viscosity which means less pumping power and more likely to see turbulent flow which helps with mixing.
by bigiain | 2025-12-04 22:24:02+00:00
I, for one, would not miss a single one of the electron apps I'm forced to use.

Every single one of them makes me feel like the vendor is telling me "we can't be bothered employing half decent developers or giving the developers we have enough time and resources to write decent software, so we're just going to use cheap and inexperience web developers and burn another gigabyte or two of your memory to run what could easily be a sub 100MB native app."

At least now I'll have significant numbers to tell my boss: "Sure, we can continue to use Slack/VSCode/Teams/Figma/Postman/ - but each of those is going to require an additional GB or two of memory on every staff member's computer - which at today's pricing is over $500 in ram per laptop which are all on a 18-24 month replacement cycle. So that's maybe a million dollars a year in hardware budget to run those 5 applications across the whole team. We'll need to ensure we have signoff on that expenditure before we renew our subscriptions for those apps."
by dylan604 | 2025-12-04 22:24:15+00:00
I can't believe in 2025, nearly 2026, that anyone would seriously suggest a header as a valid way of doing anything like this. Headers can be spoofed, modified along the way, or flat out ignored. DNT header is the obvious go to example here.

An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about. I'd venture there would be plenty of YT, TikTok, Discord threads, etc that would provide a step-by-step set of instructions to do it. Probably just point to an image to download to copy to your SD and voila.
by clusterhacks | 2025-12-04 22:24:22+00:00
>whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out

I suspect that is true for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, or GRE.

I suspect in classroom environments that there isn't any intent at all on test timing other than most kids will be able to attempt most problems in the test time window. As far as I can tell, nobody cares much about spreading grades out at any level these days.
by jareds | 2025-12-04 22:24:44+00:00
I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-04 22:25:08+00:00
Economic Nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150160 - December 2025

The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025

”Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5770722 - November 19, 2025
by Aurornis | 2025-12-04 22:25:16+00:00
> Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.

This is the loophole. Universities aren't the ones diagnosing, they're the ones accommodating.

The current meta-game is for parents and students to share notes about which doctors will diagnose easily. Between word of mouth and searches on Reddit, it's not that hard to find doctors in any metro area who will provide diagnoses and accommodation request letters to anyone who makes an appointment and asks nicely.

There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters.

Once it becomes widely known that getting a diagnosis is the meta-game to getting housing priority, nicer rooms, extra time on tests, and other benefits the numbers climb rapidly. When the number is approaching 38%, the system has become broken.

It's a real problem for the students who really need these accommodations. When 38% of the students qualify for "priority" housing, you're still in competition with 1/3 of the student body for those limited resources.
by mushufasa | 2025-12-04 22:25:35+00:00
Yes the API process is very complex and then you have to have a team with proficiency in two parallel sets of web technologies -- python vs javascript. That said, the fact that you can go that route means that Django can be a good pick for early-stage projects where you don't need a frontend framework, because there's the optionality to add it later if your project really requires it.
by balamatom | 2025-12-04 22:25:50+00:00
I know, right? And very often I have the notion that that these things are obvious concerns for all sensible people. Except that lately I've been noticing how for some reason I only get that notion as long as I'm regularly consuming one information-containing product or another.

When I turn off my browser, video player, and ebook reader, outside it's a bit of a hellscape really, I really can't wait to get back online where people care about the real things, such as systemic collapse. But while I'm disconnected I do notice how the only thing that people seem to actually be enjoying right now are those self-same glass beads and plague blankets of Big Tech that we're dissing while trapped within them.
Show HN: NthLayer – Generate your complete reliability stack from one YAML file
by kyub | 2025-12-04 22:26:31+00:00
I built NthLayer because I was tired of the manual effort every time a new service onboards - copying dashboard JSON, writing alert rules, setting up PagerDuty, defining SLOs. 20 hours of work per service.

Define your service once:

name: payment-api tier: critical type: api dependencies: - postgresql - redis slos: availability: 99.95 latency_p99_ms: 200

Get automatically: - Grafana dashboards (12-28 panels based on dependencies) - Prometheus alerts (400+ battle-tested rules) - SLO definitions with error budgets - PagerDuty teams, escalation policies, services - Recording rules for performance

Plus: See reliability health across all your services:

$ nthlayer portfolio Overall Health: 78% (14/18 SLOs meeting target) Critical: 5/6 healthy ! payment-api needs reliability investment

Works with your existing tools - generates configs for Grafana, Prometheus, PagerDuty. No vendor lock-in.

Live demo: https://rsionnach.github.io/nthlayer GitHub: https://github.com/rsionnach/nthlayer Install: pipx install nthlayer

It's early alpha - looking for SRE teams to try it. What reliability toil would you automate first?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-04 22:26:53+00:00
Great hilarity, with the AT&T joke.

I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.

You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.

And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
by publicdebates | 2025-12-04 22:27:00+00:00
Good write up, I like where you're going with this. Your article reads like a recent graduate who's full of excitement and passion for the wonderful world of programming, and just coming into the real world for the first time.

For Go, I wouldn't say that the choice to avoid generics was either intentional or minimalist by nature. From what I recall, they were just struggling for a long time with a difficult decision, which trade-offs to make. And I think they were just hoping that, given enough time, the community could perhaps come up with a new, innovative solution that resolves them gracefully. And I think after a decade they just kind of settled on a solution, as the clock was ticking. I could be wrong.

For Rust, I would strongly disagree on two points. First, lifetimes are in fact what tripped me up the most, and many others, famously including Brian Kernighan, who literally wrote the book on C. Second, Rust isn't novel in combining many other ideas into the language. Lots of languages do that, like C#. But I do recall thinking that Rust had some odd name choices for some features it adopted. And, not being a C++ person myself, it has solutions to many problems I never wrestled with, known by name to C++ devs but foreign to me.

For Zig's manual memory management, you say:

> this is a design choice very much related to the choice to exclude OOP features.

Maybe, but I think it's more based on Andrew's need for Data-Oriented Design when designing high performance applications. He did a very interesting talk on DOD last year[1]. I think his idea is that, if you're going to write the highest performance code possible, while still having an ergonomic language, you need to prioritize a whole different set of features.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IroPQ150F6c
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-04 22:27:18+00:00
That goes into what my above reply warns about. Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.

If some manager's value is "I just need to phone it in and retire" and you are misson-driven, you have an obstacle. Now you're going behind the back of the obstacle trying to stand out, and essential work isn't being met. Mamager panics, has to do more work and probably chastises the other person. Each are only trying to follow what their goals "value".

We do need "values", plural. "Values" will help let out singular "value" compromise as needed. So we shift from "I just want to retire" to "okay, I'll male sure the excited one can get on bigger projects while I chill". And let's the "I want to change the world" types occasionally compromise with "okay this person needs help for a moment". It's not crushing dreams but also making sure that other collective goals are met.
by ojosilva | 2025-12-04 22:27:28+00:00
Fine, but there's a noticeable asymmetry in how the three languages get treated. Go gets dinged for hiding memory details from you. Rust gets dinged for making mutable globals hard and for conceptual density (with a maximally intimidating Pin quote to drive it home). But when Zig has the equivalent warts they're reframed as virtues or glossed over.

Mutable globals are easy in Zig (presented as freedom, not as "you can now write data races.")

Runtime checks you disable in release builds are "highly pragmatic," with no mention of what happens when illegal behavior only manifests in production.

The standard library having "almost zero documentation" is mentioned but not weighted as a cost the way Go's boilerplate or Rust's learning curve are.

The RAII critique is interesting but also somewhat unfair because Rust has arena allocators too, and nothing forces fine-grained allocation. The difference is that Rust makes the safe path easy and the unsafe path explicit whereas Zig trusts you to know what you're doing. That's a legitimate design, hacking-a!

The article frames Rust's guardrails as bureaucratic overhead while framing Zig's lack of them as liberation, which is grading on a curve. If we're cataloging trade-offs honestly

> you control the universe and nobody can tell you what to do

...that cuts both ways...
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2025-12-04 22:27:36+00:00
The difference is how you relate to the job providing accommodations. If you know certain employers are more willing and able to provide accommodations then you can consciously weigh that piece of information when considering a job/career field.

By consciously accepting who you are and how you work with the world, it lets you navigate better in it. For some people that is just feeling it out and ending up in a career that fits them. For some people, it might be getting a diagnosis. The end result might be the same.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-04 22:27:37+00:00
I agree. That's not what's happening here.

My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".

The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.
by oersted | 2025-12-04 22:27:49+00:00
I mean they have invested a ton into their kid-friendly mode and there have been quite a number of “adpocalips” where ad revenue for many content creators was dramatically slashed due to YouTube’s over-zealous moderation.

It is a serious business concern, there are occasional panics triggered by consumers complaining that a brand ad is shown next to and benefits from the attention of some distasteful content, and they start to bleed important advertisers on mass. YouTube then proceeds to get defensive and demonetizes (removes all ads from) or tags as adult-only any video that may be concerning, where avoiding false negatives takes much more precedence over avoiding false positives.

Of course this is not directly tied to protecting children, but this incentive structure is partly aligned and it is a strong one.
by skx001 | 2025-12-04 22:28:11+00:00
The industry will truly only find out how well AI adoption is going if it allows users both internal (employees, tech workers) and external (general users/consumers) to fully opt-out.

AI is being forced down peoples' throat. Millions want to but cannot disable Gemini from Gmail. Many SWEs don't want to use AI tools but managers are forcing them to do so.

How do you know if something is really liked/needed/wanted when there is no opt-out?
by mamcx | 2025-12-04 22:28:42+00:00
Because JS is bad, and JS have a MASSIVE user base, so whatever they do is the web.

And because JS is on the frontend, solutions are front end, even the ones that eventually run on the (js) back-end.

Is like how people use a RDBMS but never do foreign keys, views, etc and re-invent all, poorly.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-04 22:29:01+00:00
>In my lens the only true score is the collection perception of the score, not what you think the score is.

Am I not part of the collective? When does my perception matter or not? Is it majority rule and I'm just a pariah following my own beat?

Given the "collective view" of my country on 2025, I think I'll opt out of the score, thanks.
by Miraste | 2025-12-04 22:29:44+00:00
Even ardent protectionists generally agree that tariffs can't bring jobs and manufacturing back by themselves. To work, they have to be accompanied by programs to nurture dead or failing domestic industries and rebuild them into something functional. Without that, you get results like the current state of US shipbuilding: pathetic, dysfunctional, and benefiting no one at all. Since there are no such programs, tariffs remain a cost with no benefit.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-12-04 22:29:54+00:00
The crucial difference is that we know the etiology of COVID and so are justified in treating those two people as having the same disease. Autism is much more complicated because we don't have a thing to define it other than a bunch of disparate symptoms.

It might turn out like if we treated the cold, COVID, tuberculosis and lung cancer as the same thing because they all involve coughing.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-12-04 22:30:09+00:00
My neighbor had 1940s Joy of Cooking, which in itself was probably one of the first every recipe, for the most part, just works cookbooks. Between rationing and more important not spoiling when sending cookies from the US to soldiers fighting on the front lines, many cookie recipes were without butter.

Outside of a story like that, there is no reason to include war in your recipe. Cooking is about nurturing and sustaining homeostasis. There is something fundamentally wrong about taking other people's suffering and making it about one self -- it is narcissistic which spoils like cookies made with butter after several weeks of travel.
by retrochameleon | 2025-12-04 22:30:34+00:00
On my high performance SSD for games and other data that requires it. If I pay for 1 or 2 TB of high performance storage, I want to use that extra space for other things. Not to mention the fact that I don't want my storage to fill up too much because they affects general performance on the drive. Also, more data that is written and rewritten with game updates is more, unnecessary wear on the drive.
by Centigonal | 2025-12-04 22:30:35+00:00
General aviation (and especially experimental light aircraft) is not a particularly safe hobby. This pilot literally put his life in the hands of a 3D printed part someone sold him at an airshow. Pilots can and do "brick" their planes as a result of "innovative" approaches to repairs, upgrades, and maintenance. Luckily, much of the time these errors are caught before the plane gets off the ground.