MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Alasater | 2026-01-25 00:18:05+00:00
From my perspective, the number one reason we had a well functioning satellite out of the gate is my philosophy of testing "safe mode first". What that means is in a graduated fashion, test that the hardware and software together can always get you into a safe mode - which is usually power positive, attitude stable, and communicative. So our software integration flows hit this mission thread over and over and over with each update. If we shipped a new software feature, make sure you got to safe mode. If we found a bug that prevented it, it's the first thing to triage. We build out our pipelines to simulate this as much as we could and then ran it again on the development hardware and eventually would load a release onto flight once we were confident this was always solid. If you're going to develop for space, start here.
by cjbarber | 2026-01-25 00:18:27+00:00
> The direct line across would get run over by cars. Indirect routes would still have to cross pavement and look ugly.

Search for "cable protector ramps"

> And then there are still those six feet of stone that needs drilling through to get the cable outside and back in.

Thin cables designed to run under doors or windowsills are an option. Search for "flat ethernet cable"

It seems like you prefer your setup for good reasons, and these solutions above are both ugly, but I still wanted to note to others reading this that workarounds exist.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-25 00:18:28+00:00
The author's chart is incorrect. He has the idle power at "1" for the Pi 2, "2" for the Pi 1/3/4, and "3" for the Pi 5. No other published power draw numbers are whole numbers like this, they are floating points, like 1.2, 1.9, etc. Google around and you'll find several different power testing comparisons with more detail.

Most reports show the Pi 4 drawing ~2.8 W in idle headless mode, and the Pi 3B+ drawing ~1.9-2.0 W in idle headless mode. With full load the Pi 4 draws more (6.4W, to the Pi 3B+'s 5.1W) with the same test procedure.

But you do have to check the testing method; enabling/disabling hardware features changes the figure, and each additional USB peripheral draws more power. Otoh, to get a "max power draw" reading you have to enable everything and stress all CPUs at once, and then it will dip under thermal load.
by bjt | 2026-01-25 00:18:37+00:00
> Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that AI can eventually serve to level the playing field for everything. It outputs novels, paintings, screenplays - whatever you ask it for - of such high quality that they can't be discerned from the best human-created works. In this world, the only way an individual human matters in the equation is if they can encode some unique insight or perspective into how they orchestrate their AI

It's an insightful point, but I think there's more going on. It seems that quite a lot of the people consuming media and art do actually care how much it's the product of a human mind vs generated by a machine. They want connection with the artist. Maybe it's a bit like organic produce. If you give me a juicy white peach, I probably can't tell whether it's an organic one, lovingly raised and harvested by a farmer with a generations-in-the-family orchard, or one that's been fertilized, pesticide-sprayed, and genetically-engineered by a billion dollar corporation. But there's a very good chance I care about the difference. I'm increasingly getting the impression that a big swathe of consumers prefer human-made art. Probably bigger than the percentage that insist on organic produce. There will be a market for human-created works because that's something that consumers want. Yes, some authors will cheat. Some will get away with it. It'll start to look a lot like how we think of plagiarism.

Maybe the strength of that preference varies in different parts of the industry. Maybe consumers of porn or erotica or formulaic romance or guilty pleasure pop songs don't care as much about it being human-produced. Probably no one cares about the human authenticity of the author of a technical manual. But I suspect the voters at the Oscars and Grammys and Pulitzers will always care. The closer we are to calling something "art", the more it seems we care about the authenticity and intention of the person behind it.

The other thing I think is missing from the debate is the shift from mass-market works to personalized ones. Why would I buy someone else's ChatGPT-generated novel for twenty bucks when I could spend a few cents to have it generate one to my exact preferences? I'd point to the market for romance novels as one where you can already see the seeds of this. It's already common for them to be tagged by trope: "why choose", "enemies to lovers", "forced proximity", etc. Readers use those tags to find books that scratch their very specific itch. It's not a big jump from there to telling the AI to write you a book that even more closely matches your preferences. It might look even less like a traditional "book" and more like a companion or roleplay world that's created by the AI as you interact with it. You can see seeds of that out there too, in things like SillyTavern and AI companion apps.
by rainsford | 2026-01-25 00:18:43+00:00
That idea seems like a pretty common one around this issue. While it's not entirely unreasonable on the surface, I'm skeptical of a political argument where only one side is expected to be fully paid up adult members of society with agency and responsibility not only for their behavior for the behavior of others.

For one thing, it feels just as temptingly righteous and insulting to treat your opponents as overgrown toddlers with oppositional defiant disorder as it does to call them stupid. Arguably it's worse, since the implication in calling them stupid is that you would like them to be less stupid and fully expect they are capable of doing so, but the implication in treating them like toddlers is that you expect them to continue to act like toddlers and will adjust your behavior accordingly to get them to eat their vegetables.

Maybe more importantly though, it feels like a huge trap. Far from defusing an effective political strategy, accepting that you are responsible for choices and behavior of others gives them endless license to do bad things free from any feeling of personal responsibility that should come with those actions in a civilized society. Even if you can win on vaccines, the precedent set with that approach is less than ideal.
by usui | 2026-01-25 00:19:44+00:00
The only reason healthcare professionals in the US can demand salaries this high and even higher is because supply is artificially constrained. There are many qualified prospective students adept, intelligent, studious, and diligent enough that they would join the healthcare field were it not for the financial barriers, hazing-like process, and unnecessary performative work you have to get through to even be admitted to a school. Because of the undergraduate/professional school tiering system, many pre-health students choose majors that don't help them at all in the event that they decide to give up their professional degree midway or change directions, making it particularly ruinous financially and career-wise.
by slg | 2026-01-25 00:20:01+00:00
>There's another argument too, although I quake a bit at bringing it up. Suppose the truly extreme, end-of-world scenario really is coming to pass. What contribution do we make by jettisoning HN's mandate, going to war and turning the site into a battlefield, sooner rather than later? How do more posts of angry denunciations and screaming at each other move the needle on the end of the world?

This is spoken like a mere observer. The benefit of "jettisoning HN's mandate" is to prevent the worst case scenario that you depict. You and HN have power. Some of the richest and most powerful people in this country and on this planet look at this website. These stories being on the front page and people reading the comments can actually lead to change which could decrease the odds of true disaster.

People need to stop pretending that the internet isn't real. This ordeal in Minnesota is in large part because a Youtuber showed up at preschools demanding to see children because he believed some conspiracy he saw on the internet. The stuff said on the internet does have real world ramifications and I'm frankly shocked how someone in your position that has seen the world change to the degree that is has in your time as the moderator here is still falling back to the "profoundly pointless triviality of the internet message board".
by umanwizard | 2026-01-25 00:20:05+00:00
The least restrictive for the caller is Fn (you can call it whenever), then FnMut (you can call it only if you have exclusive access to it, as many times as you want), then FnOnce (you can call it only if you have exclusive owned access, and calling it once destroys it).

The least restrictive for the function itself is the opposite order: FnOnce (it can do anything to its environment, including possibly consuming things without putting them back into a consistent state), followed by FnMut (it has exclusive access to its environment, and so is allowed to mutate it, but not destroy it), followed by Fn (it has only shared access to its environment and therefore is not allowed to mutate it).

Since these orders are inverses of each other, functions that are easier to write are harder to call and vice versa. That’s why they implement the trait with the minimum amount of power possible, so that they can be called in more places.
by Ylpertnodi | 2026-01-25 00:20:40+00:00
> Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it.

Have you thanked the French for getting involved in US wars?

And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-25 00:21:44+00:00
Apparently my account "violated TOS" (though I don't see how). The other account was used to interact with a Google Workspace in 2016, and hasn't been used since. I don't particularly care to waste mental energy trying to figure out the methodology behind Google's decision here.

This happening seemed kinda sketchy to me (because I've heard of people having several Google accounts) but, like I said, I didn't really care too much.

Anyway, here's how it went down:

In 2016 I was working w/ a Customer who was using some Google product (I believe Workspace) and I have to have a Google account to interact w/ it. Because I didn't care for them to see my "personal" Google account I make this one-off account.

This account is a Google account w/o Gmail (i.e. the username is not "@gmail.com"). That may be a factor.

Over the years I'd receive notifications that Google was going to delete the account for inactivity. I'd logon again to keep it active.

On 2026-01-12 I got a notification that my old "role" Google account was going to be deleted for being inactive for two years. I decided I wanted to keep it so I attempted to logon. The password in my vault didn't work. I found that perplexing, so I did a "Forgot password" workflow. As part of that I was offered an SMS option. I used the telephone number I use for my main Google account. For sure they "know" I'm the same operator of both accounts.

I don't believe somebody guessed the password on this account and was using it because (a) I was notified it was inactive, and (b) the password was a random 16 character alphanumeric string used only for this account. Something was clearly sketchy about the password being "wrong", though.

I completed the "Forgot password" workflow on the "role" account and got access. I decided to enable TOTP and my "real" Gmail account as the recovery contact. Everything seemed fine.

On 2026-01-13 I received a message as-follows:

> From: Google <no-reply@accounts.google.com>

> To: MyUsername@NotGmail.example.com

> Subject: Your Google Account has been disabled

> It looks like this account was created or used with multiple other accounts to violate Google's policies. The account might have been created by a computer program or bot.

> If you think your account was disabled by mistake, submit an appeal as soon as possible.

> Disabled accounts are eventually deleted. You’ll need to submit an appeal soon to keep your emails, contacts, photos, and other data saved in your Google Account.

> If you live in the European Union (EU) or are an EU citizen, there may be additional resolution options available to you.
by Smaug123 | 2026-01-25 00:24:05+00:00
SBF was really unusual in that he claimed to be a pure expected-utility maximiser. He admitted that he would take 51% coin-flips forever on Conversations with Tyler in March 2022, long before everything blew up:

> COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what's the chance we're left with anything? Don't I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

> BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That's the other option.

I'm not saying the pressures are absent, but they are hopefully vastly less compelling for any normal person with a more standard view of risk and utility. ("Sure, I'll just cover up this little bit of fraud, because that's got a better than 50% chance of success" is a course of action SBF all but said he would take, months in advance!)
by hackingonempty | 2026-01-25 00:24:57+00:00
> Abortion was legal until it became a political issue in the 1800s.

Not according to Dobbs, which goes into this extensively.

"At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow."
by yalogin | 2026-01-25 00:25:21+00:00
As they should. It’s an incredible opportunity to develop technology natively and by extension wealth. The US has proven in this one year that it’s not to be trusted let alone relied upon. Unfortunately the tide once set in motion cannot be u done and the damage done in this one year is irreparable, may be now the tech billionaires will speak up and to use a phrase from Carney - take the sign down from their windows
by jjmarr | 2026-01-25 00:26:05+00:00
I am a GPU programmer (on the compute side), and the biggest challenge is lack of tooling.

For host-side code the agent can throw in a bunch of logging statements and usually printf its way to success. For device-side code there isn't a good way to output debugging info into a textual format understandable by the agent. Graphical trace viewers are great for humans, not so great for AI right now.

On the other hand, Cline's harness can interact with my website and click on stuff until the bugs are gone.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-25 00:26:14+00:00
When you say "fixed this" which "this" do you think they fixed? Are you imagining this is a hash table? It's not

It's an adaptor which will use two other containers (typically std::vector) to manage the sorted keys and their associated values. The keys are sorted and their values are stored in the corresponding position in their own separate std::vector. If you already have sorted data or close enough then this type can be created almost for free yet it has similar affordances to std::map - if you don't it's likely you will find the performance unacceptable.
by yoshuaw | 2026-01-25 00:26:38+00:00
> I always forget the order of precedence for FnOnce/Fn/FnMut

The way I remember the ordering is by thinking about the restrictions the various Fn traits provide from a caller's perspective:

1. FnOnce can only ever be called once and cannot be called concurrently. This is the most restrictive.

2. FnMut can be called multiple times but cannot be called concurrently. This is less restrictive than FnOnce.

3. Fn can be called multiple times and can even be called concurrently. This is the least restrictive.

So going from most to least restrictive gives you `FnMut: FnOnce` and `Fn: FnMut`.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-25 00:26:40+00:00
> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience.

And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does, to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in the magic word wasting hours of my time, a failure that is not my fault but a failure for which I bear the negative consequences of, is infuriating enough that I am always compelled to have more understanding and eventually more control of everything I write.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-25 00:27:00+00:00
1. Principle of least privilege is very important if you are interacting with a large-ish number of third party APIs. It's not just about data ownership (ie one service per db) or even limiting blast radius (most likely you won't get hacked either way), it's eliminating a single point of failure that makes you a more attractive/risky target in case of a hack either directly on your infrastructure, or through a member of your team, or improperly wielding automation.

2. Having at least some level of ability ro run heterogenous workloads in your production environment (ie being able to flip a switch and do microservices if you decide to) is very useful if you need to do more complicated migrations or integrate OSS/vendor software/whip up a demo on short notice. Because oftentimes you may not want to "do microservices" ideologically or as a focal point for development, but you can easily end up in a situation where you want "a microservice", and there can be an unnecessarily large number of obstacles to doing that if you've built all your tooling and ops around the assumption of "never microservices"

3. If you're working with open source software products and infra a lot it's just way easier to eg launch a stalwart container to do email hosting than to figure out how to implement email hosting in your existing db and monolith. Also see above, if you find a good OSS project to help you do something much faster or more effectively, it's good for it to be easy to put it in prod.

4. Claude Code and less experienced or skilled developers don't understand separation of concerns. Now that agentic development is picking up, even orgs that didn't need the organizational convenience before may find themselves needing it now. Personally, this has been a major consideration in how I structure new projects once I became aware of the problem.
by 9rx | 2026-01-25 00:27:42+00:00
> "when it's done" is somehow acceptable for the rest of the business to function.

Well, it is the truth. It won't be done before it is done. It is understandable that there is a business that needs to function, but the issue here is the question of asking for an estimate like you've already solved the problem, instead of actually sitting down with the engineer to discuss the business problems that need to be solved. That's what engineers are there for: To solve business problems. Estimates are irrelevant as the solution will be designed with the business constraints in mind.

> it's quite doable to break a large project down into a series of sprints

This too comes across like the problem is already solved. You don't need to break problems down into sprints. That is a ridiculous way to operate. This kind of thing only shows up where there is some weird effort to separate engineers from their jobs.

In fact, "sprint" comes from Scrum, which was designed to be a transitionary exercise to get engineers more comfortable with Agile, which is all about removal of managers. It is intended to teach engineers to think and act more like managers so that when you get rid of the managers completely that they don't flounder. If you are doing it as more than a temporary thing, you've entirely missed the point.
by bnjemian | 2026-01-25 00:28:37+00:00
This completely ignores that: 1. Russia was the aggressor in Ukraine, 2. Putin has made clear his desire to pursue expansionist goals through military action targeting prior members of the Soviet Union, 3. Putin regular threatens nuclear war with Ukraine, 4. Russia has shown outward hostility towards Western democracies and sought to manipulate elections with information warfare to reach their goals (most notably, 2016 US Election and Brexit), 5. Russian regularly cuts cables connecting countries, and 6. Though completely unrelated, Putin has a history of assassinating political opponents. That's wolfish behavior if I've ever seen it.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-25 00:28:56+00:00
Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

For everybody else, Libreoffice is fine as far as functionality is concerned. UI might be another story, but that's worth getting over anyway, especially since a lot of people for whom this is a problem, would also have problems with getting away from Windows as a whole, just from buttons moving and things being different in general.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-25 00:29:04+00:00
> Mayybe for some things you could set it up so that the screen output is livestreamed back into the agent, but I highly doubt that anyone is doing that for agents like this yet

What do you mean by streaming? LLMs aren’t that advanced yet where they can consume a live video feed but people have been feeding them screenshots from Playwright and desktop apps for years (Anthropic even released the Computer Use feature based on this).

Gemini has the best visual intelligence but all three of the major models have supported this for a while. I don’t think it’d help with fixing subtle problems in shadows but it can fix other gui bugs using visual feedback.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-25 00:29:26+00:00
What I meant by not being sure about the point was not that he was not clear in what platitudes he was trying to convey, just that I was not sure about what he was trying to say which includes what questions he was trying to raise. It provides the reader with something to think about primarily through the messiness that you noticed instead of raising questions and ideas which work off of each other; the ending simply undercuts any nuance of the AI failing to get their frustration instead building on it or changing our perspective on it.

For example, if it had ended a few sentences earlier and used that potential bit of metafiction it would be suggesting that the story we just read was or at least could be the story written by the AI for the novelist and now the AI does understand their frustration but represented itself as not understanding it. That gives us a great deal to think about and builds in a second perspective on the entire piece, the perspective of the AI. But as written that only works well with the conversation part of the story and those last few lines make it really not work at all.