MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2026-01-28 14:31:37+00:00
Are you saying that you don't us McMaster because they don't ship to where you live? That seems silly - you can still download their drawings and then find an alternate source. They are a great listing of everything you might ever want to buy, but you can almost always find an alternative source.

There is also the possibility you think because McMaster is in the US they don't have metric parts. This is wrong, a lot of engineering in the US is done in metric - nearly all big manufacturing companies went metric 40 years ago, so they have plenty of metric parts that you should work with. Of course most manufacturing is small companies that still haven't gone metric, but they also deal with metric once in a while, and in any case you wouldn't be ordering from them anyway.
by just6979 | 2026-01-28 14:32:03+00:00
Yeah, it's called git: make your own branch from the PR branch, commit and push the nitpick change, tell the author, and they can cherry-pick it if they approve.

Gitlab has this functionality right in the web UI. Reviewers can suggest changes, and if the PR author approves, a commit is created with the suggested change. One issue with this flow it that's it doesn't run any tests on the change before it's actually in the PR branch, so... Really best for typos and other tiny changes.

Alternatively you actually, you know, _collaborate_ with the PR author, work it out, run tests locally and/or on another pushed branch, and someone then pushes a change directly to the PR.

The complaints about nitpicks slowing things down too much or breaking things sound like solo-hero devs who assume their god-like PRs should be effectively auto-approved because how could their code even contain problems... No wonder they love working with "Dr Flattery the Always Wrong Bot".

*(Hilarious name borrowed from Angela Collier)
by echelon | 2026-01-28 14:32:20+00:00
I'm a filmmaker. While what OP said is 100% true, your instincts are right.

Not only is perfect is the enemy of good enough, you're only looking for PMF signal at this point. If you chase quality right now, you'll miss validation and growth.

The early "Will Smith eating spaghetti" companies didn't need perfect visuals. They needed excited early adopter customers. Now look where we're at.

In the fullness of time, all of these are just engineering problems and they'll all be sorted out. Focus on your customer.
by temp8830 | 2026-01-28 14:32:29+00:00
You know the truth full well, but insist on perpetuating the myth of genius Ukrainians and dumb Russian orcs.

The USSR had a policy of distributing economic development over its entire area instead of concentrating it in one place. Once a high-tech facility was built, it would be staffed by specialists recruited from all over the Soviet Union. They would be offered generous relocation assistance.

Now, I am not saying that Ukrainians are dumb or anything like that. What I am saying is that in a centrally planned economy the location of a project is chosen according to different criteria.
by Someone | 2026-01-28 14:32:34+00:00
> the game is a draw if there exists no sequence of moves that could lead to checkmate. Interestingly, although this has almost no strategic implications, it means that... it's almost impossible to write a program to detect draws that's technically correct.

I don’t see what makes that technically difficult. The number of possible positions is finite, so just enumerate the game tree and check whether it contains a checkmate situation.

I also don’t see why it would be almost impossible in practice. Aren’t the only weird situations ones where there are pawns that could be promoted to queens if they weren’t blocked by other pawns, and those pawns prevent all other pieces on the board from taking pawns and from checkmating the king?
by hellojesus | 2026-01-28 14:32:47+00:00
The thought being it's okay to steal from married households because they intentionally set themselves up for lower per partner overhead? Why don't we charge single taxpayers with roommates on the same schedule?

By living in a single house, a married couple demands less housing, which reduces the cost of housing against a fixed supply. Why are we taxing the people making housing cheaper under the guise of "affordable housing"? Shouldn't we treat affordable housing taxes like the carpool lane and reduce the burden of those that are reducing the burden on the constrained supply?
by y_oh_y | 2026-01-28 14:33:01+00:00
No. Subsection 2b gives an allowance for this:

[Regulations under subsection (1)] must apply the child VPN prohibition to the provider of any relevant VPN service which is, or is likely to be—

(i) offered or marketed to persons in the United Kingdom;
(ii) provided to a significant number of persons;
by chrisfinazzo | 2026-01-28 14:33:08+00:00
No argument here.

For some reason, people feel like this should be a replacement for traditional luggage tags.

I do not understand this mindset.

I’d prefer to have a dedicated loop for my bag and the inside attachment points just aren’t big enough. I’d feel more secure if it wasn’t loose in a pocket and could easily fall out or be removed by an unscrupulous (or inattentive) airline or TSA employee.
by codyb | 2026-01-28 14:34:09+00:00
Yea, when I'm on the move I rarely use more than texting and the camera. So I got a Nokia flip phone, and I'll see how it is. Worst comes to worst it'll be 90 bucks lost and I'll move back to something a bit more full featured. But really I chose for size, and to be able to text and make calls. It's possible I'll end up sticking with my mini for a while.

I also got a really nice pocket camera which I'm much more excited about. It's called a Ricoh, so the camera and the phone should fit in my pockets without any real trouble or bulge. Plus keys, and wallet, and I feel like I'm set.
by Havoc | 2026-01-28 14:34:29+00:00
I see. I’d call that fragility/reliability rather than deterministic but semantics I suppose.

To me that isn’t a show stopper. Much of the real world works like that. We put very unreliable humans behind the wheel of 2 ton cars. So in a way this is perhaps just programmers aligning with the messy real world?

Perhaps a bit like architects can only model things so far eventually you need to build the thing and deal with the surprises and imperfection of dirt
by metalman | 2026-01-28 14:34:36+00:00
there is an antena farm on the way from the city to my place that I use as a reference land mark for new visitors, which I call "area 52", which also serves as a kind of personality test, where most will laugh and say they know where it is, but some few who are uncomfortable as it's a long wave sigint base, marked on all the flight maps, that they are clearly wishing not to have seen or looked at, be in a conversation referencing, and now marked for life grimly waiting for a knock on the door.
by nfgrep | 2026-01-28 14:34:36+00:00
I’ve heard something similar: “there are people who enjoy the process, and people who enjoy the outcome”. I think this saying comes moreso from artistic circles.

I’ve always considered myself a “process” person, I would even get hung-up on certain projects because I enjoyed crafting them so much.

LLM’s have taken a bit of that “process” enjoyment from me, but I think have also forced some more “outcome” thinking into my head, which I’m taking as a positive.
by calhoun137 | 2026-01-28 14:34:46+00:00
OP here. this has been a valuable learning experience for me. i was so excited to share what i was working on and i blew it. i will rewrite the blog post and readme later. let me at least briefly explain what i did as a reply to your comment

starting with 3=1+2 we have (1+x)P(x)=3P(x) when x=2. so we lift the problem from n to P(2)=n. this is a known technique of lifting the problem to a polynomial setting. after each itteration of the Collatz map i make sure all coeffients are either 0 or 1 by applying carry operations when a coefficient overflows. since the coefficients are unary strings, this makes it like a fluid dynamics problem (each character in a unary string is analogous to one unit of mass in a list of buckets where the buckets can overflow and spill unary characters over into their left neihgbor)

when x=2, multiplying x by P(x) is a left shift, whereas dividing by x, P(x)/x, is a right shift. (when P(2)=n is even the constant term in P(x) is zero)

the +1 term in 3n+1 effectively induces a non linear carry propoagation.

the new technique i used is based on a realization that the polynomial representation of the Collatz map behaves like an LFSR implementation of a finite field with a missing modulus. in LFSR a finite field is implemented where each element is an array of bits of fixed size corresponding to a polynomial and multiplication of elements is polynomial multiplication taken mod Q(x) where Q(x) is an irreducible polynomial. unlike the finite field LFSR the Collatz map in polynomial form as i have described allows the degree of the polynomial (size of the array of bits) to grow unbounded.

the surprise is when i subtract these two objects the sierpinski gasket appears and this fractal is not destroyed by itterations of the collatz map

this document[1] is a prior result showing a connection between fractals and collatz that i found after posting the OP

[1] https://upcommons.upc.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/9bad675...

lesson learned! i will never post an ai slop blog post on here ever again. thanks for the feedback i needed to hear it.
by netcraft | 2026-01-28 14:35:26+00:00
> Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day.

This is true to an extent for sure and they will go much longer than most engineers without getting "tired", but I've def seen both sonnet and opus give up multiple times. They've updated code to skip tests they couldn't get to pass, given up on bugs they couldn't track down, etc. I literally had it ask "could we work on something else and come back to this"
by jorvi | 2026-01-28 14:35:36+00:00
Seems like you have an axe to grind with systemd because it replaced your familiar (but extremely cruddy) init system and now you refuse to debug the problem because you prefer being able to blame systemd.

There is so much granularity and flexibility in what you can do it seems rather unlikely you cannot make it happen correctly. And if it is truly a bug... open an issue? They're rather responsive to it. And it isn't like the legacy init systems were bug free from inception (well, lord knows they were still chock full of bugs even when they were replaced).
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-28 14:35:46+00:00
It probably takes less time to read those laws than it does to follow the hyperbole pushed by the media. Read them, discuss them with others - like-minded as well as those with a different view - and try to form your own opinions. If you rely on the media to curate your opinions you're just being groomed by one party or the other. In that case at least follow both the media which you most often agree with as well as those which you disagree and try to find out the truth behind the half-truths and lies pushed by them.
by gwbas1c | 2026-01-28 14:36:53+00:00
Why is everyone suddenly getting so excited about the Virtual Boy? (Other than that the games are now showing up on the Switch)

I picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.

The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.

(I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)

Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore, because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped for a very good reason?
by codyb | 2026-01-28 14:36:56+00:00
Yea, I know, but smart phones are getting bigger and bigger. I'd rather a much nicer camera, and a small dumb phone which texts and calls. As opposed to a smart phone with a much worse camera, that also texts and calls and does maps.

I can just ask people if I need directions. I'm already don't use location services on maps, and usually look things up before I leave anyways.

Just leaving the phone at home is really the nicest thing, and I'll probably continue doing that a fair amount as well.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-28 14:37:12+00:00
> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880

I'm not a systemd hater or anything, but I continue to read stuff from Poettering which to me is deeply disturbing given the programs he works on.

Saying it's not a bug that service is launched despite a stated required prerequisite dependency failed... WTF?

Sure, I agree with him that most computers should probably boot despite NTP being unable to sync. But proposing that the solution to that is breaking Requires is just wild to me.
by aswegs8 | 2026-01-28 14:37:17+00:00
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
- Socrates on Writing and Reading, Phaedrus 370 BC
by rurban | 2026-01-28 14:37:47+00:00
This comes up every ten years or so, and is a solved problem. Any decent distro has tools to scan the dependencies of each binary via ldd, to check if its deps are correct.

His example numpy shipping its own libblas.so, has the speciality that it's runtime loaded, so ldd will not find it, but the runtime dep is in the MANIFEST.
And seeing that is not in a standard path concludes that is a private copy, that needs to be updated seperately if broken.

No other hole than in his thinking and worrying.
by mns | 2026-01-28 14:37:51+00:00
He still had a decent player career, and anyhow, this is a completely different field. The issue is that good engineers are not promoted to management positions because their skills are needed or they don't want to get promoted because of politics. But one of the things that I noticed a lot is people "specifically trained" to be managers. Our company is full of project managers and POs that never built anything their entire life, they never led a team, they never did anything except start with something like an assistant or QA and then all of the sudden they want to manage people. This is what I find frustrating, people that never in their life did something productive or build or contribute to something, but their expectation is to be a manager, just because they were "specifically trained in that discipline"
by Mirgova8 | 2026-01-28 14:37:56+00:00
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by joenot443 | 2026-01-28 14:38:05+00:00
> What did America get out of the Iraq War? Was Libyan intervention a net win for France ? Or Europe? My question is after 20 years, how much of those theories still hold up. Don't get me wrong, many of those things mentioned were indeed motivations and played a part in many of the cases. But ultimately most of these theories crumble in the face of 20 years of evidence. Except the Israel Theory

This is pretty poor reasoning, just FYI.

We don't need a centralized "theory" for why western powers have interfered in the Middle East for so long. There's no conspiracy or orchestration, what you're referring to are a handful of related but ultimately separate sagas involving a litany of countries, ethnic groups, and geopolitical motivations. To suggest there's a singular theory or plan is just silly.

This is Qanon level thinking, I'll be honest.
by Bender | 2026-01-28 14:38:06+00:00
Those that love it will fight for it. Those that hate it will simply avoid using it. There may be some commercial incentives for IBM/Redhat to push for it. Either way it will always be divisive. Some sysadmins will begrudgingly support it at work and some absolutely love to support it. I have supported it in the enterprise and I use it on gaming machines at home. (CachyOS / Bazzite). My daily drivers, servers both physical and VM will always be without it. (MX Linux / Void Linux / Alpine Linux).

I only use mini-PC's these days and all the games I play work great on CachyOS. All the other daily stuff works great on MX/Void and of course running firewalls, NAS and servers on Alpine is about as simple as it gets.

- Some discussion on the matter [1a][1b][1c].

- Operating systems without systemd [2]

[1a] - https://unixdigest.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-s...

[1b] - https://nosystemd.org/

[1c] - https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Arguments_against...

[2] - https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page/
Show HN: So many models, which to pick?
by navpatel | 2026-01-28 14:38:22+00:00
Got tired of digging through pricing pages and benchmark tables every time a new model dropped. So I made a chart that plots them all: intelligence (from Artificial Analysis benchmarks) vs. price (live from OpenRouter).

The models with the yellow ring are Pareto-optimal + a few others that are close.

Mostly made this for myself, but thought I'd share!

Let me know if you can think of any obvious improvements
by dh2022 | 2026-01-28 14:38:32+00:00
The biggest item on SALT is the real estate taxes and mortgage interest expense. A household has only one address - and thus it makes sense to have tax deduction for just one real estate/ mortgage interest expense. As such it makes sense to share the SALT cap - just like sharing the home.

(also the fact that biggest beneficiaries of SALT are states either high housing costs and these states tend to be Democrat leaning states made it easy for Trump to cap the SALT deduction in his 2018 tax cuts)
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-28 14:38:40+00:00
This is what I see, you need more of an active, accomplished helper at the keyboard.

If I can't have that, the next best thing is a helper while I'm at the keyboard my damn self.

>Why LaTeX is the bottleneck: scientists spend hours aligning diagrams, formatting equations, and managing references—time that should go to actual science, not typesetting

This is supposed to be only a temporary situation until people recover from the cutbacks of the 1970's, and a more comprehensive number of scientists once again have their own secretary.

Looks like the engineers at Crixet were tired of waiting.
by bluGill | 2026-01-28 14:39:07+00:00
If you are a programmer OpenSCAD is easier to learn. However you will quickly run into limits. Just a few hours of a FreeCAD tutorial and I was already seeing how I could do things I'd never attempt in OpenSCAD. FreeCAD has a reputation of not being great, but I'm not far enough into it to learn the limits - things I can't figure out feel like things I could learn, in OpenSCAD the things I couldn't figure out where because they were too complex - I could but the code wouldn't be readable so there was no point (not to mention math errors).

FreeCAD is designed for the things real designers really do. OpenSCAD is designed for the things mathematicians do.
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-28 14:39:07+00:00
It depends. I use Solidworks all the time but I think OpenSCAD was a great choice to make this part:

https://github.com/settinger/selectric_typeballs

A bit like how you can edit images in MS Paint, Python, or Photoshop. None of these is or should be a one size fits all solution.
by netcraft | 2026-01-28 14:39:10+00:00
agree completely. I used to be (and still would love to be) a process person, enjoying hand writing bulletproof artisanal code. Switching to startups many years ago gave me a whole new perspective, and its been interesting the struggle between writing code and shipping. Especially when you dont know how long the code you are writing will actually live. LLMs are fantastic in that space.
by kace91 | 2026-01-28 14:39:15+00:00
>but philosophically it's pretty easy to see why it's worse for the government to do a Bad Thing than for any individual or private enterprise to do the exact same Bad Thing.

This was not the claim though, the claim is that it’s not scary to be surveilled until that information reaches state actors.

States acting against citizens can be worse in a moral/political sense, but a victim is not more or less harmed depending on the aggressor.

(I didn’t downvote, if it matters, I just saw the message).
by mynameisash | 2026-01-28 14:39:38+00:00
Not GP, but as a data engineer who has worked with data scientists for 20 years, I think the assessment is unfortunately true.

I used to work on teams where DS would put a ton of time into building quality models, gating production with defensible metrics. Now, my DS counterparts are writing prompts and calling it a day. I'm not at all convinced that the results are better, but I guess if you don't spend time (=money) on the work, it's hard to argue with the ROI?
by sejje | 2026-01-28 14:41:20+00:00
You mean "you're right, saying the victim was cruelly and unusually punished isn't a good argument here."

You've just presented a new argument.

Many, many people are killed by LEO each year; how many are considered 6th amendment violations? (None. LEO is not out there "administering judgement", they are responding to deadly-force encounters, guns, etc)
by Someone | 2026-01-28 14:41:38+00:00
I do not see how that’s a good estimate. For example, take a game length of, on average, 4 and a branching factor of 10. That gives an estimate of 10,000.

Chances are there are games of lengths 3 and 5, too. With that branching factor, there are 1,000, respectively 100,000 of those, for a total of 111,000. That’s over ten times as many games as estimated.

The larger the spread in game length towards games that are larger than average, the more the proposed estimate underestimates the actual number.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-28 14:41:52+00:00
All those kinds of Casio models were cherished in Portuguese engineering universities, they were the models to own.

We did not had any big TI or HP followers, back when I was doing my degree.

I still have my Casio FX-880 P in working condition, and the little cousin I used on high school as well, the FX-4500 P.