MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fellowniusmonk | 2026-02-11 22:50:03+00:00
A lot of introverts are best served by parallel proximal work and the only stratification should be around noise levels of the activity.

But frankly it's best for everyone, the isolated computer age has made in person get togethers have friction when they historically have had zero friction and were just things we did along the way.

This is part of why I love going to NYC, as long as you understand and respect the local rules it's an incredibly positive, effortless social area, so much pleasant casual interaction.
by Faelon | 2026-02-11 22:50:24+00:00
The moral justification comes from the understanding that the brain is an organ which integrates information to form this profound feeling of presence that you and I share. There is zero evidence to suggest that we don't share this feeling with animals. This is a scientific argument. I'm a professional neuroscientist working in brain simulation, and even the complexity of a ringworm is out of the grasp of the field. The complexity of the brain is unrivaled anywhere else in nature, and it has this wonderful emergent property that I feel like something. Animals feel like something. It feels like something to be a cow, a chicken, and a pig. They understand and relate to the world. That is why it is wrong to kill them unless you have to.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-11 22:50:41+00:00
as per [1], software is a knowledge medium. Much more flexible, and (kind-a self-) executable, than plain tools (knife, screwdriver, car, house), but yes - it's the same kind of thing - the means to do something.
But it's people who cause anything...

[1] The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software, 2003, Phillip Armour:

http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Software-Process-Production-Manag...

[2] some part: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-five-orders-of-ignorance/
by tristor | 2026-02-11 22:50:45+00:00
It actually still is true. I drive on all-season touring tires on my current vehicle because I drive across varied climates, but never in real winter conditions, that said true summer tires have much better stopping distance, better rain/wet handling, and massively better dry handling characteristics than all-season tires, and true winter tires have much better everything than all-seasons in snow and especially in ice.

All-season tires have massively improved, but /so have summer and winter tires/. So sure, your all-seasons today may be superior to very old standards for prior generations of tires, but you are still the absolute safest when you have appropriate tires on your vehicle. Tires are fundamentally all that holds your vehicle to the ground.

Also as much as I love AWD, it does basically fuck-all to help in winter conditions. The thing you need to worry about is /stopping/ not necessarily getting going again, and in both cases a FWD car with winter tires is worlds better than any AWD car on all-seasons. I swap to winter tires on my AWD cars when I spend significant time in areas where it snows (e.g. when I lived for several years in Colorado). It doesn't matter how many wheels are used to drive, all vehicles use all 4 wheels to stop, but if you have no traction you are fucked. Anyone telling you otherwise is ill-informed.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-11 22:52:04+00:00
I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.

For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.

There are places with even less safety and more “freedom” than the US so people who take an absolutist view towards freedom also need to justify why the freedoms that the US does not grant are not valuable.
by tech_ken | 2026-02-11 22:52:15+00:00
This is basically what I think of as the "fundamental problem of conservation ecology", ie. that 'conserving' an ecosystem inherently changes it. The pre-human state definitionally could never be recreated (or maintained) by human hands, it will always reflect the contributions of its human stewards. So if conservation is fundamentally impossible, what's the real goal of conservation ecology? Is it doomed to simply create "theme parks"? Or can we be said to meaningfully preserve something (even if it's a changed or debased form of the original). Conservation ecology is what happens when these stupid philosophical musings bump into actual engineers willing to try to do it.

Human communities (even digital ones) ultimately have the character of an ecological system IMO (albeit in a more allegorical sense). What the author calls fungibility I might call conservation; weird Twitter accounts "migrating" to Bluesky is sort of like pandas surviving primarily in zoos. Some element of the original system is kept, but ultimately the "conservation" is more like "recreation" or "homage". Does that mean that it's futile to try? Or is there some sense in which we can have meaningful translation of the relationship web from one medium to the next? Maybe we don't even care about maintaining the system; if it's just the biodiversity we prize then maybe pandas in zoos forever is enough.

I don't think this is adding anything new to what the author is saying per se, but I find the parallels interesting to muse about.
by epistasis | 2026-02-11 22:53:20+00:00
It's about 60% as usable. Weird and distracting jiggling makes it hard to target where the button will be.

Also the placement of buttons and functionality is completely scattered around the UIs, which severely reduces usability. What do all the mystery meat buttons do now? One has to relearn all the UX. There's a ton of improvement needed, it's about first-draft level quality.

Dark mode UI elements are almost invisible too, frequently.

It has a "my first redesign project" feel everywhere. On macOS I upgraded right away and it was a huge downgrade on performance. On iPhone I waited until 26.2, and merely had to suffer far lower usability.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-11 22:53:24+00:00
That is very factually wrong. The reliability will be worse. That $75 keyboard is going to be used be hundreds of thousands of people, not millions. There is no safety involved. No one is testing to see how sunscreen and 50 other liquids interact with it. Dump a sugary drink on your car buttons, they will still work. Do that on your keyboard and it wont.
by d3Xt3r | 2026-02-11 22:53:51+00:00
I don't know if it's an option for you, but my workplace provides me with a Citrix VDI that I remote into from my BYOD Linux laptop. So I use the VDI for all the windows-only stuff, and everything else is web-based/has a PWA (like Teams, Outlook, Office etc), which works fine in Linux.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-11 22:54:08+00:00
You're the one looking at it in a vacuum. Engineering is all about looking at it in context and the main context where density of energy is important is in vehicles of all shapes and sizes. That's where the rubber quite literally meets the road. You can then theorize about what the 'weight' of the electrical energy is but it is pointless: the weight of container dwarfs the weight of the energy carriers (effectively the electrons) themselves. In the case of fossil fuels the ratio is more balanced, the container will weigh a couple of kilos and the fuel will way a bit more (say 10:1 or 20:1). So to compare the one with the other we weigh the batteries and ignore the electrons and we then compare that with the fuel because that is the dominant factor.

Solar + electricity are not directly suitable for powering electric vehicles, that's where the batteries come in.

Comparing apples (transport of electricity via wires) with oranges (transport of energy via liquid or gas) misses the elephant in the room: you are not going to be able to use those electrons without a suitable temporary storage medium unless you plan on carrying a very long and impractical extension cord behind your now very light EV.
by duped | 2026-02-11 22:54:13+00:00
I mean, prohibition works while legalization just makes more people use whatever you legalize and increases the negative externalities of its use. You see that almost universally (alcohol, drugs, sex work). The exception is it gets rid of the black markets and some (but not all) of the violence associated with them.

So if the goal is to put cartels out of business then yea, full legalization would help. If the goal is to stop overdoses and addiction then absolutely not.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-11 22:54:19+00:00
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation?

A better answer is "refuse to do it without resigning". To begin with it gives you a better chance of preventing it, because maybe they back down, whereas if you do it or leave, someone does it. Then if they fire you, well, that's not really that much worse for you than resigning, but it's worse for them because now they're retaliating against someone for having ethical objections. How does that look in the media or in front of a jury? Which is all the more incentive for them to back down.

The problem with "well just do it a little bit" is that you can travel arbitrarily far in the wrong direction by taking one step at a time.
by marwamc | 2026-02-11 22:54:34+00:00
hahaha love the spec comparison.

Also, can't wait to try this. I use a markdown-based notes/workplans/context workflow that works for the happy path but falls on its head for some edge-cases. Sometimes I have to abruptly stop a piece of work, and I might not get a chance to perform the post-work-item markdown notes ritual. If I'm resuming the same piece of work within 24hrs, it's relatively straightforward to remember what I was working on before the abrupt stop. However, sometimes it might be several days before I resume a work-item that was abruptly stopped, and in those cases, the context switchback feels like hair-pulling. This promises to reduce that pain somewhat. The last commit (usually a few steps ahead of the work-plan persistence ritual) becomes a recoverable checkpoint.
by dragontamer | 2026-02-11 22:55:58+00:00
She does that 'Captain Kirk' rhyme in the English version too though.

The real treat for German listeners is the first verse: ich, mich, dich, and neun-und-neunZIG (zig is pronounced like ich in the main German dialect).

With all of the 'neunundneunzig' (aka 99) repeated throughout the song, the ich/dich/mich/vielleicht rhymes is really a superior start over the English version.

It's a rhyming scheme that cannot be replicated in English at all.
by qwery | 2026-02-11 22:56:39+00:00
"box with a hole in it" resulted in a number of boxes and most of these did obviously have holes in them. some did not appear to, but being that they were largely enclosures for some sort of device (as opposed to storage or transport) I'll assume there was some hidden fastener clearance holes or something.

I really only wanted one hole in my box though, so I adjusted the query to "box with a single hole in it". the results looked indentical. except for one that stood out. I would link to the particular model, but there was no way to do that. this model appears to be a rectangular bathroom basin, on its side. I'd describe it as perhaps a ~currently fashionable porcelain design, but it could be a concrete 'getting shit done' sink, or a model from The Sims (the first one). so box-like perhaps, but not many people would describe it as a box. I guess my search continues (elsewhere)...

(actually interesting bit about natural language: I know that a box with two (or more) holes in it has a single hole in it, but most English natural language parsers (humans) will notice that specifying 'single' would be redundant if I wanted any number more than zero, so it's extremely unlikely that I was looking for a multi-hole box.)

where did you steal the models from, by the way? just curious. the original context in which they were found would actually be helpful if someone was for some reason trying to actually use this as a tool.

also if you don't have the 3D model spinning incessantly, having the page open won't be obnoxious and it won't (have to) waste power
by scoofy | 2026-02-11 22:56:43+00:00
From 1994: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764

From 2024: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659

Consistent results indicate that, yes, money tends to matter, but it's the source of that money that tends to be doing the heavy lifting.
by zdp7 | 2026-02-11 22:56:56+00:00
I suspect that it really might have been 'buried deep'. If you are capturing the data short term, to allow a small scroll back, then you wrote the data to some storage system. At three hours or whatever the short term storage limit is, you delete the file. Usually deleting a file leaves the data intact on the storage device. Only the file entry and a list of what low level storage blocks actually contained data. It could take awhile before the data is actually overwritten. Up until the point it is, you could scan the contents of unallocated blocks looking for the data. It could theoretically take awhile to find a customer id or something else that helps you identify the deleted data.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-11 22:57:07+00:00
Alcohol is legal. We don't have gun battles between gangs of smugglers, or between them and the cops. We also don't have people dying or going blind from trying to drink wood alcohol.

But we still have a depressingly large number of alcoholics. The campaign against drunk driving has helped reduce one set of negative side effects, but not others.
by sitharus | 2026-02-11 22:57:38+00:00
In almost every system with failsafes there will be conditions that can bypass them. The goal is not to make it impossible for the unsafe condition to happen, but to make it so that in the expected uses the failure will not happen.

In this case it's a domestic microwave and the mainboard is housed inside the electronics enclosure, so covering the whole mainboard in salt water is not an expected occurrence in a domestic kitchen.
by jongjong | 2026-02-11 22:57:40+00:00
TBH, I would prefer to pay for software licenses. I think the large $100k inflation adjusted price tag of the C compiler reflected the relatively small market at the time. Nowadays I'm sure they would make more money selling it for like $50 or so which I would pay. And maybe there would be competing C compilers for lower prices.

Well until we have UBI, I'm out of open source. I've done my share of open source. Excruciatingly painful experience, not doing that again in the current system. I'd have to be an idiot to do it again.

I mean generosity is good to a point, but beyond a certain point, it turns into stupidity.
by tern | 2026-02-11 22:58:01+00:00
This take is overly cynical. Every major corporation has people with influence who care and fight for good outcomes. They win some fights, they lose others. The only evidence you need is to notice the needlessly good decisions that were made in the past.

Some greatest hits:

- CoreAudio, Mac OS memory management, kernel in general, and many other decisions

- Google's internal dev tooling, Go, and Chrome (at least, in its day)

- C#, .NET, and Typescript (even Microsoft does good work)

One of the hallmarks of heroic engineering work is that everyone takes it for granted afterward. Open source browsers that work, audio that just works, successors to C/C++ with actual support and adoption, operating systems that respond gracefully under load, etc. ... none of these things were guaranteed, or directly aligned with short-term financial incentives. Now, we just assume they're a requirement and complain about them.

Part of the "sensibility" I'm talking about is seeking to build things that are so boring and reliable that nobody notices them anymore.
by Grimblewald | 2026-02-11 22:58:20+00:00
Termux development is fully functional. I do the same happily, even for the joy of it to pass time in transit. There isn't much to be gained by a rig you could get on that budget. A better keyboard and a usb monitor for phone can go miles tho.

That said, i see no proof of anything other tham a few file names. i can do that too, see?

guys! I made an sovreign analysis app that helps you collate and analyse crowd sourced data in fun social competitions that then produces awards for teams based on statistifal identities (means, outliers, maxs, highest varience over categories etc) buy me a laptop so i can make the cocktail olympics a reality for everyone!

```

awards.py
fix_score_fuckery.py

category_correlations.png

pairwise.py

competition_boxplot_dashboard.png

pairwise_plot.png

competition_dashboard.png

plotter.py

competition_data.json

power_score.py

competition_data_backup.json

bring_it_home_baby.py

correlation_heatmap.png

statistical_significance_heatmap.png

```
by scoofy | 2026-02-11 22:58:28+00:00
Obviously campaigns need money to operate. The question is whether a random firehose of money will win an election, or if the reason we see that money is because the campaign already has a lot of supporters who want to contribute.

The underlying effects of where the money comes from seems to matter a lot more that that the money exists. If a campaign does not have money, they likely that that campaign does not have supporters. However the opposite is not true. If a campaign has money, it is not certain whether or not that campaign has any supporters.
by gyomu | 2026-02-11 22:58:57+00:00
Yeah, digital is just a game changer for wildlife photography,
especially when considering the extremely fast smart autofocus / high shooting frame rates / top tier stabilization modern systems have.

“It was night and day. Six minutes instead of six years tells the story,” McFadyen says. “Instead of 12 frames per second, I can now shoot at 30 frames per second, so when a bird dives at 30 miles per hour, it makes it so much more likely you’ll capture it at the right moment.

McFadyen says that the focusing system is also “incredibly fast” on mirrorless cameras. “It can lock on the kingfisher’s tiny eye at these super-fast speeds,” he adds.”

https://petapixel.com/2025/11/27/photographer-recreates-king...

This is a bit of a marketing puff piece, but the core insights are correct - the kind of shots the photographer is talking about here were insanely hard to pull off on film, still very tricky to achieve with digital bodies in the 2010s - but modern tech makes them almost trivial.
by yibg | 2026-02-11 22:58:59+00:00
How about just general privacy? I mean do you really want someone / the government to be able to track everywhere you go?

- Going to your girlfriends place while the wife is at work

- Visiting a naughty shop

- Going into various companies for interviews while employed

With mass surveillance there is the risk of mass data leak. Would you be comfortable with a camera following you around at all times when you're in public? I wouldn't be.
by dwedge | 2026-02-11 22:59:03+00:00
To say I'm the only one is an exaggeration, it's probably more around 50/50 with the 50% in the pro camp being very vocal to the point where it's almost insulting. Being given basic tasks (like, find the last modified file) with "use Claude to get the command" said straight after.

I perfectly accept that it might be a me problem, and this is why I keep exposing myself to these tools, I try to find how they can help me, and I do see it, I just feel like a lot of people ignore the ways these tools harm productivity (and here I mean directly, not some vague "you'll get worse at learning").

I accept your point, and I do take it to heart, and I do keep wondering if I'm missing something
by addaon | 2026-02-11 22:59:18+00:00
> End soldering of components to motherboard.

What do you see as the alternative here? Conductive epoxy is way less repairable than solder. Sockets are… components; and tend to be more expensive and higher failure rate than what’s socketed in them, except for extreme cases of very large ICs. Press fit requires special tooling, so repairability is much worse… what’s left?
by ahmednefzaoui | 2026-02-11 22:59:55+00:00
Someone asked on reddit

> Help finding an app to record daily sales for car wash
> I'm looking for a simple app where each day I can record how many cars washed, which wash did they buy, cash, credit sales and possibly show if im up or down each month compared to previous year. All the accounting apps im finding are setup for invoices or more complicated record keeping. Does anyone know a simple app that I could use to keep track of my small business?

So CarDesk.net was born!

The pitch: Dead simple car wash management, built around car wash inventory and cleaning records, and invoicing is around it, it also has AI features to help you scan your product and it is automatically added to your inventory. And it's online so you can access it from anywhere and see what everyone is doing (how the business is going) in your car wash even while traveling!
by Faelon | 2026-02-11 23:00:00+00:00
The focus is on killing because we understand that the brain is the organ which generates sensation and presence. Plants completely lack the machinery to integrate information on the level of even a ringworm. Once you get to the size of the animals we commonly eat for food, there is an immense amount of complexity, much more similar to ourselves than different. The ethics of veganism if very coherent. The brain generates subjective experience, the feeling of being something. To deprive one of that experience is wrong- most people would report preferring to be than not. Of course, to your point about subordinates, vegans should also treat humans with respect. Actually, veganism provides a framework that tells us WHY we should treat other humans with respect- because they feel, just like I do. So, if we can practically avoid causing suffering to those with brains, as most people on this website can easily do, it is best to do so.
Most plants worldwide are grown to feed to animals, by the way, so even if plants suffered, we should prefer a plant-based world which minimizes this suffering. this would also minimize the human exploitation in the food industry and reduce our reliance on the monoculture which broadly produces the bevy of animal feed grown to feed the insatiable global appetite for animal flesh.
One more comment on your alpine animals comment- those animals were slaughtered for their flesh. Could you "humanely" kill a human selectively bred to grow to the size of an adult in two years? How would you do it? Would the average person be ok if you painlessly killed them after two years of roaming through the mountains? I don't think so.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-11 23:00:55+00:00
Honestly, I just want to be able to control precisely what I see via config.json. It will probably differ depending on the project. This is a developer tool, I don't see why you'd shy away from providing granular configuration (alongside reasonable defaults).

I actually miss being able to see all of the thinking, for example, because I could tell more quickly when the model was making a wrong assumption and intervene.