MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-30 20:27:37+00:00
Good question(s).

When I got started in electronics, the programmable kind of electronics would not fit on a workbench, and had traditionally required more than one person to operate. Way too expensive for one person to afford by a long shot anyway.

So I stuck with the analog stuff.

Eventually when programmable electronics came within reach, I was more fortunate than almost anybody around, but it was still a mainframe which was highly immobile so I had to go to within reach of it.

That was before my father got the first modem in our town. Bell-approved acoustic-coupled analog RS-232B it was. I could have tried to get more speed out of it, they didn't have RS-232C yet, but even by that time you were only allowed to communicate at 300 baud max on the phone lines. Plus there were long-distance fees by the minute for non-local land-line calls because they were expensive.

With a 20 kilo portable paper terminal to go with it, that was a real "teletype disrupting" combination :)

I can assure you no teletypes were impacted significantly, we were lucky to get the prototype terminals :\

By the time I finally got an industrial computer that would fit on a bench, Apples were already out (they weren't powerful enough) but not Ataris or PCs yet. Which weren't powerful enough either when they came along.

I guess I have looked at programming as a specialized function of electronics for quite a number of decades by now.

>which skills do you think are inherent

Mastery is a tough one and who am I to judge whether it matters if it's considered inherently natural or finely tuned talent. I think of it a lot when I develop instrument theory, and interestingly electronic instruments have a number of approaches in common with musical instruments.

There's even a "Stradivarius Effect" which is not altogether rare.

Then it's not too much of a stretch to think of a well-assembled PC, including of course functionally complete software, as a recognized finished product that you can individually rehearse and perform on in an analogous way to an instrument of some kind. Get more out of the electronics than otherwise in the pursuit of the objective. Like most people just can't do without great practice themselves. Maybe even some secret sauce.

I think after an ultimate degree of mastery has been achieved, you could expect for a new system once assembled to behave exactly as designed.

>When has someone reached a level of mastery in software?

When?

I wondered that for a long time too.

That would be when it always works the first time you plug it in.

Just like any other electronics.

After that it should be able to run whenever you want, as long as the hardware holds out, without any further attention.
by observationist | 2026-01-30 20:28:17+00:00
I don't think it's odd at all- having taken a deep look at the potential impact and problems surrounding AI, including training and datacenters, I've come to the conclusion that they're about as trivial and low ranking a problem as deciding what color seatbelts should be in order to optimize driving safety. There are so many more important things to attend to - by all means, do the calculus yourself, and be honest about consumed resources and environmental impacts, but also include benefits and honest economics, and assess the cost/benefit ratio for yourself. Then look at the potential negatives, and even in a worst case scenario, these aren't problems that overwhelm nearly any other important thing to spend your time worrying about, or even better, attempting to fix.
by nine_k | 2026-01-30 20:28:41+00:00
This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.

The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.

Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.

Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.
Show HN: A Postgres-first platform (opening public beta)
by antoniodipinto | 2026-01-30 20:28:58+00:00
I’m opening a public beta for a Postgres-first platform I’ve been building.

The goal is not to compete on features with AWS,
but to make Postgres provisioning, backups, access, and billing explicit and predictable.

Beta means:
- Core functionality is stable
- Things will change quickly based on feedback
- Early users help shape pricing and limits

Would love feedback from people who actually run Postgres at work.

https://noctaploy.io
by ranger_danger | 2026-01-30 20:29:29+00:00
There are very specific rules for proving destruction of evidence. For a criminal case the burden proof in the US at least is "beyond a reasonable doubt", so someone would likely have to prove that you knowingly destroyed valuable evidence before you'd get in big trouble. And if you haven't already been served with something saying you need to preserve evidence, they might not have any claim to information they had no idea existed beforehand, especially if you don't talk.
by mancerayder | 2026-01-30 20:29:54+00:00
Hold on - your link also says

Fair market value is different from market value and appraised value.

FMV makes a lot of sense in things like insurance payouts and private equity, cuz the assets aren't liquid and have to be assessed. If the thing is already being bought and sold on public markets, like Tesla, FMV is less useful to talk about. Now you enter the realm of financial analysis (like some analyst's report about a publicly traded stock) and even financial audits and such, it's orthogonal.
by spookie | 2026-01-30 20:30:56+00:00
Still, the market reaction seems hasty and hype driven. A bit wild their stocks got impacted this much. But I guess the market has short term memory.

But, I do agree a lot of things could be sped up. Animation and photogrammetry based modelling (widely used for character's clothing) come to mind. And, it should be used in cases such as these, where it is just a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.
by Veserv | 2026-01-30 20:31:11+00:00
It was not workable. They have a loss ratio of >100% [1], as in they paid out more in claims than received in premiums before even accounting for literally any other costs. Industry average is ~60-80% to stay profitable when including other costs.

They released the Tesla Insurance product because their cars were excessively expensive to insure, increasing ownership costs, which was impacting sales. By releasing the unprofitable Tesla Insurance product, they could subsidize ownership costs making the cars more attractive to buy right now which pumped revenues immediately in return for a "accidental" write-down in the future.

[1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-30 20:31:27+00:00
> The moment that he first gets shot, he's not laying flat against the ground under full control of the agents.

Well, they certainly felt they were under control, otherwise the four other agents wouldn't just stand around and watch.

The problem is that they send badly trained agents with guns to patrol cities where they meet people who are (rightfully) angry at what ICE is doing. That's a recipe for desaster.

It's no secret that ICE has significantly lowered the barrier to entry and shortened the training duration. In fact, there are reports of agents being deployed before they completed their training. Apparently, they don't do proper background checks either since some agents have been found to have a criminal record. Finally, ICE is intentionally recruiting in rightwing circles, using white nationalist language.

> I don't even know who Stephen Miller is.

I have a hard time believing this. How is this even possible for anyone with even a passing interest in US politics? If that is really true, that's quite an embarrassing admission.

> that's what court cases try to sort out.

Who says the case will go to court? What if they just close the investigation?

> They might have said something which has some support, but which is more political language than accurate legal language

Why speak in the subjunctive? Why don't you look up what they said? How can you assess the credibility of an agency when you don't seem to know much about it?

> or would you say in reflection that your statements erode trust in society?

I see no reason for saying that. But if there's someone who is eroding trust then it's the Trump administration with their egregrious lies, their contempt for the rule of law and their staggering corruption.
by close04 | 2026-01-30 20:31:45+00:00
The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.

Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.

A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.
by tim333 | 2026-01-30 20:33:29+00:00
Some of the statements are a bit oh my god. Like

> "Epstein would bring the children in and Trump would auction them off. He measured the children's vulva and vaginas by entering a finger and rated the children on tightness." https://justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01660679....

I don't know how true/proveable it is but that's got to be go to prison type stuff.
by intrasight | 2026-01-30 20:33:33+00:00
If you are an engineer and you haven't watched this video please do yourself a favor and do so. I watch very little TV or YouTube, but I ended up taking off the afternoon after this video unexpectedly drew me in. It was impossible to not finish it - so if you do start watching it make sure you have two hours to spare. This is easily the best and most enjoyable thing that I've watched in the last several years!
by fragmede | 2026-01-30 20:34:02+00:00
> From a determined government and court system? Nothing is going to keep you private from that

While there's always https://xkcd.com/538/ there are not currently quantum computers that can factor 4k RSA keys, so the court can order whatever it wants, unless they have a way past that (which may involve variations of xkcd 538), they ain't getting shit out of a properly configured digital safe. (construction of said safe is left as an exercise to the reader.)
by OGEnthusiast | 2026-01-30 20:34:04+00:00
IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).
by ragBagger | 2026-01-30 20:34:51+00:00
I feel like you have missed the point of this. It isn't to completely absolve the user of liability, it's to prove malice instead of incompetence.

If the user claims that they only authorized the bot to review files, but they've warranted the bot to both scan every file and also send emails to outside sources, the competitors in this case, then you now have proof that the user was planning on committing corporate espionage.

To use a more sane version of an example below, if your dog runs outside the house and mauls a child, you are obviously guilty of negligence, but if there's proof of you unleashing the dog and ordering the attack, you're guilty of murder.
by jtbayly | 2026-01-30 20:35:02+00:00
> sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.

Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.

Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.

Hertz will hurts you.
by haunter | 2026-01-30 20:35:16+00:00
Used it on some Fortnite screenshots, I'd play that depressing version!

https://files.catbox.moe/i8tfkl.jpg

https://files.catbox.moe/mw8vbc.jpg

Then I thought what would it make from an already dark and grim scene, like HL2 Ravenholm

https://files.catbox.moe/d7z77h.jpg

but nothing really? Just made the whole thing a different color scheme + changed some architecture
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-30 20:35:38+00:00
A better strategy would be to configure multiple profiles and when they ask you to unlock your phone you use the pin that unlocks the boring one.

We just need a UX which makes it impossible to know how many profiles a phone has configured. Not some kind of sneaky hidden mode that you can be labeled a terrorist for having enabled, just that's how it works--you have to know a profile exists in order to log into it.

Of course it's not going to stand up to forensic scrutiny, but that's not what the feature is about anyhow.
by k310 | 2026-01-30 20:36:03+00:00
When I was the I.T. guy, my users would ask me to "fix the internet", so I checked everything on our end, up to the ISP, and if that was OK, just waited it out.

Two things accounted for all the outages we experienced. Routers and bulldozers.

Now we have Cloudflare as well.
by manIliketea | 2026-01-30 20:36:36+00:00
> Power is metered.

Yes, a portion of power is metered costs. Often times (though I am not certain about this case), there are fixed costs that everyone pays a chunk of. If these sorts of projects aren't handled well, the fixed cost that a massive data-center pays may be disproportionate to he cost they incur on the system.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-30 20:37:11+00:00
The form factor I'd like to see standardized would be a flat pack like the Nokia phone battery.

Not saying the cylinder doesn't have it's place, but so many of my devices would like a flat pack.

If that happened, it'd have the added benefit of being able to standardized a bms protocol for the packs. Hard to have control pins with a cylinder.

And if you were super clever, you'd make those packs stackable so they could be charged and discharged together.
by observationist | 2026-01-30 20:37:31+00:00
I land here: it's probably not the best, most useful thing to spend electricity and compute on, but in order to compel people to spend it on what I consider to be optimal, you'd have to make me dictator, and there are a million other people who have equally strong and well reasoned opinions about where those resources should be spent, and if you're going to be fair about resource allocation, you inevitably end up with something that looks and works like a marketplace. None of them can ever be perfect, so you aim for reasonable and fair, and push for incremental improvements to the fairness over time. You gotta be realistic about least and lesser evils, and have gratitude and appreciation for the genuine good, and be extremely pragmatic about the measure and rate of progress. Things are pretty damn good - not utopian or optimal, but pretty damn good. And getting better, 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, consistently, decade over decade.
by red_admiral | 2026-01-30 20:37:52+00:00
Here's another trick someone should build in: email using emoji in the subject line is probably advertising. Sometimes from lists you like being subscribed on, but if the subject uses U+2757 (big red exclamation mark) then it's more likely "SALE ENDS TOMORROW" and less "Your order shipped!"

EDIT: HN apparently filters out that code point. Good on you.
by eesmith | 2026-01-30 20:37:53+00:00
Zond 5, Zond 6, and Artemis I were lunar flybys. They were not in lunar orbit but rather were on a free return back to Earth, where at least part of the craft were recovered on the Earth with usable mission data.

By your definition, they did not travel to the Moon, correct?

Yet they are on the list of missions to the Moon at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_5 has "In September 1968 Zond 5 travelled to the Moon in a circumlunar trajectory and became the first Moon mission to include animals and the first to return safely to Earth."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_I has "Orion then separated from the expended stage and fired its auxiliary thrusters to move safely away as it started its journey to the Moon."

For a non-Wikipedia example, "Zond 6 was an unmanned Soviet mission to the Moon that launched in November 1968." at https://physicsworld.com/a/zond-6-recording-translated-by-gr...

Or, "Between the time of Pioneer 4 and the beginning of Apollo (Apollo 8, launched on 21 December 1968), a total of 37 missions were launched to the Moon: 16 from the Soviet Union (Luna 2–14; Zond 3, 5, and 6) and 21 from the USA (Ranger 1–9; Surveyor 1–7; Lunar Orbiter 1–5; see Table 1)." at https://web.archive.org/web/20090625175521/http://www.nd.edu...

Now, look, I understand there is a difference between a circumlunar orbit, a lunar orbit, and a lunar landing. But "to the Moon" demonstrably includes all three of them.

As for your thought experiment ...

I went to the Grand Canyon. That is, I drove to the visitor center on the South Rim, got out of the care, and looked out into canyon. It was very impressive. I did not actually go into the canyon but stayed a dozen or so feet from the edge.

I believe you want me to say I went by the Grand Canyon, but I didn't actually go to it, right? I think a lot of people would disagree with your assessment.

I also say I went to Devil's Tower. I didn't actually climb it. In fact, I don't think I got out of the car. Do I need to actually go onto the butte to say I've been there?

Most people do not go onto Mount Rushmore (more correctly referred to as "Six Grandfathers") but instead look at it from a nearby terrace. When they say they went to Mount Rushmore, do you correct them and say they only went by Mount Rushmore?
by henning | 2026-01-30 20:38:29+00:00
This is one of those instances where bullshit takes more effort to debunk than it does to dispute.

We already went over how Stack Overflow was in decline before LLMs.

SaaS is not about build vs. buy, it's about having someone else babysit it for you. Before LLMs, if you wanted shitty software for cheap, you could try hiring a cheap freelancer on Fiverr or something. Paying for LLM tokens instead of giving it to someone in a developing country doesn't really change anything. PagerDuty's value isn't that it has an API that will call someone if there's an error, you could write a proof of concept of that by hand in any web framework in a day. The point is that PagerDuty is up even if your service isn't. You're paying for maintenance and whatever SLA you negotiate.

Steve Yegge's detachment from reality is sad to watch.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-30 20:38:36+00:00
Well if you have, then you can point out where I am wrong about scaling.

(You have no knowledge of how effectively I spend my time.

If you have a valid point, make it, instead of - whatever you are doing. Hinting you know something instead of explaining your reasoning, and aspersive language are for the posers. Just communicate why you think what you think.)
by benrutter | 2026-01-30 20:38:51+00:00
> The question is there is no other place for money to go.

Whenever I've heard people speculate on the US bond market losing its footing, the suggestion isn't that "Japan will be the new US" (eg) - it's that investor will spread assets across multiple places (US, Japan, EU, etc) to hedge against risk, rather than just the US.
by keiferski | 2026-01-30 20:38:55+00:00
Yeah maybe I’ve spent way too much time reading Internet forums over the last twenty years, but this stuff just looks like the most boring forum you’ve ever read.

It’s a cute idea, but too bad they couldn’t communicate the concept without having to actually waste the time and resources.

Reminds me a bit of Borges and the various Internet projects people have made implementing his ideas. The stories themselves are brilliant, minimal and eternal, whereas the actual implementation is just meh, interesting for 30 seconds then forgotten.
by NetMageSCW | 2026-01-30 20:39:29+00:00
I had an Atari 400 as the first computer I bought myself, which I upgraded to a “real” (if small) keyboard that replaced the membrane keyboard. I took it to college and used it with a printer and the Action! cartridge editor to write papers. (My printer was a carbon electrode arc printer that burned marks into regular paper, producing a soft brownish print.)
by kittikitti | 2026-01-30 20:39:39+00:00
Being in and around the NYC area, while also knowing plenty of small businesses, I'm glad Mamdani killed this bot. Telling bosses to steal tips from their employees is run-of-the-mill corruption and common over here. The vibe for businesses is that everyone has to be exploiting someone else or have a schtick. If you were to talk about morals, you would be ridiculed. Most lawyers wouldn't even prosecute small businesses for this. It's probably why the agent was put into production, the level of business ethics in NYC is cartoonishly evil.
by timc3 | 2026-01-30 20:39:42+00:00
If it makes you feel any better I’ve had to buy back cables that I have thrown away because I hadn’t used them for 15 years - and then found a project where I need DB9, SCSI, FireWire 800, Component to VGA converter or some relic.

Another reason they call me the cable guy at home ( though mainly because I probably have at least 800 cables in my studio )