MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brian_K_White | 2025-12-22 00:34:14+00:00
A few years ago I made a little module rounded_cube that generates a cube by drawing 1/8 spheres wrapped in hull, andnsince then I've been using that for everything, making inside fillets by using a rounded cube as a cut shape. Since it can generate a hollow box with a desired wall thickness, you have the shell of an enclosure box in a single call.

Over time I added other things like a single linear fillet, a single radial fillet, both interior and exterior, convenience things built out of those like a screw post with a fillet base etc. But really I always end up just using mirror_copy and rounded_cube a lot.

There is a scifi book series aboit a programmer who gets zapped into a fantasy world that has magic, and he becomes the most powerful wizard in the world because he applies the coding concept of reusable components and building big things out of smaller things and automation, which none of the other wizards ever thought of.

openscad is like that. To get anywhere you first have to build a library of useful higher level things out of the low level things. Like forth or assembly, or really all programming I guess.
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-22 00:36:18+00:00
> The aerospace manufacturer...now wants to move key on-premises applications...to the cloud.

most of the discourse here is missing the point. it is not to migrate a cloud resource away from (assumed) US-based services, but rather moving to the cloud for core services.

now "sovereign" is the hot word in these parts, and of course it would be a priority. but if it ends up running American HW/SW, is it really being independent? regardless, the article also mentions Google workspace, which is not in the scope of migration.

regardless of which part of the fence one is in, things are easier said than done especially when IT services is a cost to the company rather than revenue stream.
by scoofy | 2025-12-22 00:36:40+00:00
The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.
by rlue | 2025-12-22 00:37:12+00:00
Very curious what other tripods you’ve found suitable for this purpose. At my own workstation, I use a pair of adhesive dashboard mounts, which allows me to achieve some pretty extreme tenting (see https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/comments/1p1q5xz/), but while out and about, I worry that such light boards would get jostled around on a desk/table if tented as hard as I usually do.
by _phnd_ | 2025-12-22 00:37:14+00:00
This piece started from a simple observation: every generation has the same panic about new media, but we never ask why the panic is so predictable. The Australia ban is just the latest iteration. Before TikTok it was video games, before that MTV, before that TV. We keep regulating the technology without examining the incentive structure underneath. What interested me was the recursive problem—the very capacities you'd need to see this pattern (sustained attention, ability to connect dots over time) are what get degraded by the pattern itself. I'm not arguing for or against the ban. I'm arguing we're having the wrong conversation. And that might not be an accident. Curious what patterns others are seeing that I missed.
by pjjpo | 2025-12-22 00:37:15+00:00
I had the same reading, it sounded like Windows is worse now than Windows 95, which would be a hot take indeed. But it seems the intent was purely on these nagging aspects which have definitely gotten worse.

It might be easier to swallow the message focusing on Windows 8+ when it really jumped the shark. Windows 7 was a pretty good OS holistically I think even if there are aspects lost compared to the pure simplicity of those really old ones.
by mmooss | 2025-12-22 00:37:19+00:00
The world's financial systems run on Excel, to a great extent.

I'm more surprised that a single person, apparently without seniority, could delete a block. IME deleting user data is usually a significant event; an IP block would especially be a big deal, especially for the IP block issuers. From the OP:

> RSD has implemented additional process controls that require a dual review for all ticketing type workflows that include a network delete.

> Only a limited set of experienced analysts are permitted to perform this function.

Great that they didn't blame the person who deleted it. ARIN seems to have put them in position where a failure was likely, eventually. Without any inside knowledge, I'd hope the culture would have any engineer leary about pressing that button without a second set of eyes reviewing it carefully and without clear authorization; I don't imagine they delete many blocks each day so it shouldn't interfere with productivity.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-12-22 00:37:30+00:00
I also pay for the $100 plan as a researcher in biology dealing with a fair amount of data analysis in addition to bench work.

Incidentally, wondering if anyone has seen this approach of asking Claude to manage Codex:

https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1pbqt0v/using_codex_...
by birdgoose | 2025-12-22 00:38:59+00:00
This is essentially how I work on hobby projects these days. My bus commute is about 45 minutes each way and I find this to be just enough time to get work done. I also try not to work on these projects outside of my commuting hours; this gives me time to mull problems over rather than jumping headlong into writing code.

The lack of internet on the bus has not really been a problem since I plan ahead and make sure any dependencies I need are already downloaded.

I use an old (2010 era) Toshiba netbook which is small enough that I'm not causing problems for my seat neighbours. It's also only got a dual-core 1GHz processor which kind of forces me to find performant solutions to problems.

Much like the author I've also been thinking about how I can make my setup more portable. I've been considering purchasing AR glasses and using my Charachorder2 so I don't even need to get the netbook out of my bag. At this stage I can't justify the cost of a pair of AR glasses though.

Some recent projects my commute has given me the time to work on:

- a text editor (OCaml, SDL)

- a 3D game (C, OpenGL)

- an x86 operating system (Zig)
by gnabgib | 2025-12-22 00:40:06+00:00
Germany: Arrested 5 for suspected Christmas market plot (7 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262618

Driver plows into German Christmas market at least 2 killed, dozens injured (1 year ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42476073
by JDye | 2025-12-22 00:40:27+00:00
Surprised TCP/IP Illustrated (Volume 1) has only been mentioned 6 times. It's been so helpful for me, so many times. Perhaps it's because most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job, but it's such a fundamental technology I would have thought learning about it in depth would be suggested far more frequently.

Also, a proper first edition copy is really high quality with lovely thick paper. My copy of Volume 2 on the other hand is not of the same quality, both in content and physical properties.
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-22 00:40:34+00:00
I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.
by addaon | 2025-12-22 00:40:35+00:00
> Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe.

Yes.

> And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.

No. Fail-operational is not the only allowable fail-safe condition for automobiles. For example, it is acceptable for loss of propulsion to cause stop-in-lane — the alternative would be to require high-availability propulsion systems, or to require drivers to always have enough kinetic energy to coast to side. This just isn’t the case.

One can argue that when operating a fleet with correlated failure modes the rules should change a bit, but that’s a separate topic.
by scoofy | 2025-12-22 00:40:58+00:00
I live in the affected neighborhood. There were hundreds of drivers that did not know how to handle a power outage... it was a minority of drivers, but it was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury, whereas the humans who failed, all fail in a way that would create potential injury.

I wish the Waymos handled it better, yes, but I think that the failure state they took is preferable to the alternative.
by scottbez1 | 2025-12-22 00:40:59+00:00
Yeah, the correlated risk with AVs is a pretty serious concern. And not just in emergencies where they can easily DDOS the roads, but even things like widespread weaknesses or edge cases in their perception models can cause really weird and disturbing outcomes.

Imagine a model that works real well for detecting cars and adults but routinely misses children; you could end up with cars that are 1/10th as deadly to adults but 2x as deadly to children. Yes, in this hypothetical it saves lives overall, but is it actually a societal good? In some ways yes, in some ways it should never be allowed on any roads at all. It’s one of the reasons aggregated metrics on safety are so important to scrutinize.
by johng | 2025-12-22 00:42:23+00:00
From the article, this is the only reason I can see for the order to keep it going...

Quote: "That analysis, commissioned by Puget Sound Energy, Tacoma Power, Avista, Seattle City Light, and others, argues that Washington could get hit with an electricity crisis."

The above is if they have an extended downtime. So, the only argument can be that as the power companies shut down, it might create an emergency in Washington, or a crisis if power is needed and it's not there.

Edit, added: It seems the above power companies are in Washington and concluded themselves that it might be dangerous and create an energy crisis?
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-22 00:43:13+00:00
The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to.

yea I get a few companies have too much power. That doesn't really change the point except to argue that they too should be more restricted
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-22 00:47:07+00:00
It's not so much about power, but about the ad-hoc nature of attaching a debugger. If you're not there to catch and treat the error as it happens, a debugger is not useful in the slightest: by the time you can attach it, the error, or the context where it happened, are long gone. Not to mention, even if you can attach a debugger, it's most often not acceptable to pause the execution of the entire process for you to debug the error.

Especially since a lot of the time an exception being raised is not the actual bug: the bug happened many functions before. By logging key aspects of the state of the program, even in non-error cases, when an error happens, you have a much better chance of piecing together how you got to the error state in the first place.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-22 00:47:07+00:00
> How did the US get this so wrong for so long? [..] For the next four decades, all studies of the use of tetraethyl lead were conducted by laboratories and scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors

The BBC is British - what about the UK? The rest of Europe? China? Japan? Russia? Australia? Did the entire rest of the world also use leaded petrol? And stopped using it at the same time as the US?
by milch | 2025-12-22 00:48:26+00:00
I find for me that doesn't work. I have to actively count calories to lose or maintain a healthy BMI range. If I don't, no matter what I eat, I end up stabilizing in the overweight category. I'm lucky enough that my wife has a very flexible work schedule where she is able to cook most meals for us, but she hates weighing everything out so I can track... we've tried to stop the tracking multiple times but it never works. I'll think I'm eating to the same satiety level as before, but I end up slowly creeping back up in weight. My wife is fine either with or without tracking for maintaining her weight, though she does also seem to have an easier time losing when she's counting her calories. I think this is why it's so hard to have discussions about it, people's experiences literally don't match even when they try the same things. I suspect I'd be one of those people that if they tried Ozempic would be able to lose tons of weight, and who would shoot back up as soon as they stopped, unless I track the whole time... at which point I wouldn't need the Ozempic in the first place
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-22 00:48:36+00:00
It would be very very hard to actually accomplish something like that on mainstream x86/arm compilers. And hide it from every debugger in the world. If it diminishes the value of reproducible builds, it's by something like 1%.

> Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them.

Which is so so so much better than "as good as nothing".
by charcircuit | 2025-12-22 00:49:12+00:00
>From the way he moves to the way he looks, every gesture and detail is crafted to reflect the Olaf audiences have seen in the film

He looks nothing like a snowman. Snow doesn't look fuzzy. This project appears to focus more on trying to get it moving around in an animated way than getting the character to look right, at least when viewed from photographs.
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-22 00:49:22+00:00
You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists.

Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
by scottbez1 | 2025-12-22 00:49:44+00:00
Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.

And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous.

And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-22 00:50:40+00:00
the reflections felt like a mixed bag between someone who seems to know about the technical aspects deeper than an average person, while simultaneously being like an astrologist.

personally, as someone building on top of gen AI for a living, i finally bit the bullet on building using LLMs. it did reduce friction in things i don't like doing and did not explore as much. by acting as a catalyst when i needed to finally address them, it helped me get going and eventually become proficient in the core tech itself.

outside of work, however, i find people around me use the services much more than i do. sometimes it felt like the "big data is like teenage sex"[1], but some aspects were quite genuine. got better appreciation after trying them to better understand other people's perspective and to design better.

with "slop" as word of the year and people wondering if a random clip is AI, now more than ever the effects in general life seems apparent. it is not as sexy as "i will lose my job soon", but the effects are here and now. while the next year will be even more interesting, i can't wait for the bubble to burst.

[1] https://hewlett.org/is-big-data-like-teenage-sex/
by tomnipotent | 2025-12-22 00:52:05+00:00
Except honorary doctorates are awards, not academic qualifications. Influence or not he didn't do the work at those institutions, defending a dissertation, that would earn him the title, regardless of his contributions. That many of these awards are from non-US universities doesn't change that they're a form of marketing - these awards were not given out of the goodness of someones heart, but because these businesses wanted something out of the relationship by associating with his name.
by robby_w_g | 2025-12-22 00:54:54+00:00
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough.

I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.

There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
by timbit42 | 2025-12-22 00:55:02+00:00
Ubuntu broke new ground when it came out but around the time they switched to the Gnome desktop, they stopped focusing on a great desktop experience and it was surpassed by other, better distributions. I'd recommend trying Linux Mint instead as it has all the greatness of Linux without the crap from Canonical (eg. SNAPs).

I haven't recommended Ubuntu to anyone for years but there are still people recommending it because it was great years ago and they don't seem to know it's now lagging other distributions.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-22 00:55:56+00:00
The mundane activity of voting on rules to outline a formal legal process isn't what I'm talking about.

What I'm rejecting is the idea in the parent comment that democracies can vote directly on expelling entire classes of people. There's a long history of such political expulsions and none of them are periods to look back on fondly. The expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland killed tens of thousands, and the expulsions of native americans speak for themselves, as does the legacy of operation wetback.

And for what it's worth, I've had the distinct pleasure of being interrogated by the Mexican military at gunpoint while hiking because they thought I was a coyote. I've also been held in the small rooms on the US side. I'm extremely familiar with both sides of that particular border.
by throw1235435 | 2025-12-22 00:56:19+00:00
> No: people that care to understand the whole stack, and be able to provide that value, will still exist and shine.

I hope so. But I don't believe so. I think us SWE's will find a way to disrupt that too as we all rush for the exits before this industry sinks.

The biggest barrier previously to anything (not just SWE) was the fact that like everything worth it in life; it takes work to see results. Generally people are time/resource poor and have to spend their own time or outsource the effort to get something - which limits the things they can do.

AI takes that away for SWE relative to other fields. People can get instant gratification now and "do it themselves" and given cost/benefit will prefer other fields now and want to spend their time elsewhere. At scale there will still be jobs for things people don't want to manage themselves but they will be more routine and busy work - not high salary skills based.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-22 00:57:25+00:00
Rarely does it look like a clear "debank X" system; it's more like "you look suspiciously like someone who might use our systems in a crime, in a way that will cost us money and get in trouble with the law, so we're not going to touch you". Which is much harder for an innocent person to deal with.

I do think there ought to be some sort of fallback banking and account denial review process, if we're going to make it that critical to society.
by GrilledChips | 2025-12-22 00:57:28+00:00
More recently it's turned out that quantum computers are less useful for molecular simulation than previously thought. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDj1QhPOVBo

The video is essentially an argument from the software side (ironically she thinks the hardware side is going pretty well). Even if the hardware wasn't so hard to build or scale, there are surprisingly few problems where quantum algorithms have turned out to be useful.
by flir | 2025-12-22 00:58:10+00:00
I like it. I've worked with the occasional programmer artist (at least one has an HN account). Not in the "elegant and austere like a suspension bridge" sense, but in the "what the fuck? no! stop reorienting my brain!" sense. They're rare and precious like a delicate orchid, and annoying as hell like a delicate orchid that gives you a rash.

That magenta PR? Fetch.
by amarant | 2025-12-22 00:59:14+00:00
Heh, so I oversimplified that part of the story in my original post, for the sake of brevity.

You're right, one shouldn't DIY the foundation of ones house, unless you really know what you're doing(and honestly, not even then: it's too much work!)

I'm not sure it was clear in my original comment, but the 1840 I wrote in there is the original construction year of the house. The technique my foundation was built with hasn't been used for a little over a century: Not a lot of construction firms around with experience in it! And it's not easy to replace a foundation, because, well, it's under the house! Luckily repairing turned out to be possible(simplifying again, sorry!), and not particularly difficult in technical terms. It just wasn't easy either, but in physical terms.

I did have a professional "building conservationist"(rough translation) over for consultation. Basically he looked over what was, I told him my plan, and then he told me what to do instead. (I actually wasn't far off - I had spent a lot of time reading up on it before he came - he just added a few (possibly vital) details I hadn't thought of)

The conservationist did have a construction firm and offered their services, but we had budgeted for a kitchen upgrade, and while we had some margins in the original plan, with the extra work we got surprised with, we were strained to afford the materials. Just the ground insulation material cost almost as much as the new IKEA kitchen furniture!

The good thing in all this is that the new construction should, in theory, according to the conservationist who actually does know these things, probably last a couple of centuries!
Show HN: Real-time SF 911 dispatch feed (open source)
by 1zael | 2025-12-22 00:59:18+00:00
I built an open-source alternative to Citizen App's paid 911 feed for San Francisco.

It streams live dispatch data from SF's official open data portal, uses an LLM to translate police codes into readable summaries, and auto-redacts sensitive locations (shelters, hospitals, etc.).

Built it at a hack night after getting annoyed that Citizen is the only real-time option and they paywall it.

Repo: https://github.com/midaz/sf-police-blotter Discord: https://discord.gg/KCkKeKRm

Happy to discuss the technical approach or take feedback.
by zzrrt | 2025-12-22 00:59:34+00:00
It does seem like the most significant schism he’s had, with Massie, MTG, and some podcasters etc defecting over this. I may be out-of-date. But I don’t think it’s gone very far though, considering some of these defections are considered to be career suicides, and that he got away with reneging on one of the party’s big bogeymen that just happened to be his former best friend. If this was a big weakness, there would be screams for impeachment and ditching him.

Agreed on the general principle of building your movement on conspiracy theories of the elite and then becoming elite. The situation is even worse for him; he was already friends with the subject of the conspiracy theory long before the public at large even knew about it, and then by some combination of bad luck and hubris he let the party chase the conspiracy. We’ll see if there’s anything bad for him in there that sees the light of day, and what his opposition makes of it.