MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-02 10:44:07+00:00
When I read the "I had no prior experience in hardware; I was counting on being able to pick it up quickly with the help of a couple of mechanical/electrical/firmware engineers" I was ready to curl up into a foetal position... the fact that the author actually got something like this manufactured and shipped is nothing short of miraculous, it's not just a board off JLPCB and a plastic case, this involves custom manufacturing of metal parts and whatnot, and I take my hat off to him for managing it.

This is also why so many crowdfunded projects fail, people go into it with no idea of how hard it is to get something to market and waaaay underestimate the time and cost. Years ago for the first project we did we took an absolute worst-case estimate, then doubled the time and cost on that. We came in on time and under budget, but only just.
by deng | 2026-02-02 10:44:21+00:00
This is just half of what Time Machine does. What people are constantly missing is that Apple Time Machine is fast, as it does not need to walk through the whole filesystem to find changed files. Thanks to FSEvents, introduced in Mac OS X Leopard, it knows which directories actually contain changed files and hence usually only needs to check a small fraction of the filesystem. (Not sure if it still works that way after the switch to APFS).

This would of course also be possible on Linux (using *notify), and there are some projects who try to do this, but it's really hard to do it reliably. You might argue that this feature is less important nowadays because NVME SSDs are so fast, but still, I remember very well how astonished I was that creating a new time machine snapshot on OS X Leopard took mere seconds.
by mikodin | 2026-02-02 10:44:41+00:00
Seconding this—I had to wait a little bit to download it and play around and have some fun with it. I didn't mind.

What I appreciate the most about this string of comments (from OP) is that digging into "doing it for fun", hosting on your own machine, wanting simplicity for you as the maintainer and builder. This has been a big focus for me over a number of years, and it leads to things being not efficient, or scalable or even usable by others—but they bring me joy and that is more than enough for most things.

The reality is that there are of course ways to make this more efficient AND it simply doesn't need to be.

Good job on making something that people are clearly interested in, it brought me some joy clicking around and learning some things.

If you want it to be more than just this, of course you'll have to make it faster or have it be a different interface—installable offline typa thing so we can expect a bundle download and be fine with waiting. For example I can see this as a native app being kinda nice.

If you don't want it to be more than this, that's okay too.

Regardless, well done
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-02 10:46:36+00:00
An épée is one of three types of sword used in the three styles of Western fencing. As such, it's about as technical as, say, the words "touchdown" or "mitt".

It's also just the regular French word that means "sword". But although crossword puzzles frequently ask you to know common French words, I've never seen one clue the answer EPEE that way.
by lapcat | 2026-02-02 10:48:07+00:00
> They are talking about "storage devices" in that context, which is a total misread

What misread are you talking about? I'm talking about storage devices because the documentation says you can't update macOS on an external storage device while it's connected to the DFU port.

> their interpretation of DFU seems to be something close to "default boot device."

No, that's not my interpretation. I have no idea where you're getting that from the blog post.
by easyThrowaway | 2026-02-02 10:48:13+00:00
It's... a bit more complicated than that.

That episode, the Falcone Judge murder, was a bit of a last straw in the way most of italian political parties had dealt with mafia till that point. They realized the issue couldn't be contained to the sicilian cultural and political environment and they couldn't be... that much complacent (they still are, but at least they try to save face when they're found).

Long story short, every political authority at the time was pretty much aware the murder was going to happen, they just didn't expect a terrorist-like approach.

Once we got to that point, a newish department, the DIA[1] was given full authority to handle the issue... again, for a time. Then it went swallowed up too in the neverending whirpool of shit that is the Italian politics.

In the meanwhile, the Mafia got smarter, and rather than going in a full frontal attack with the authorities, they became much more... diplomatic, offering indirect support trough some proxies to some newly political figures that emerged shortly after. You probably heard about that Berlusconi guy.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antima...
by gorgoiler | 2026-02-02 10:48:16+00:00
Love it! …but of course I’d worry about a diff that added one offense while removing another, leaving the net sum the same. Perhaps the author handles this? You want to alert on the former and praise on the latter, not have them cancel out through a simple sum. Admittedly it’s a rare sounding edge case.

The more trad technique for this would be to mark the offending line with # noqa or # ignore: foo. Another way is to have a .fooignore file but those are usually for paths or path globs to ignore.

I like the author’s idea[1] of having the “ignore” mechanism next to the linter codebase itself, rather than mixed in with the production codebase. Adding the files and line numbers for known-offenders to that code could be a useful alternative to a simple sum?

Perhaps more robustly, some kind of XPath like AST syntax to indicate which parts of the codebase have the known problem? It feels just as fragile and could quickly get over complicated.

At the end of the day an online comment has always done it for me. With Python, Meta’s libcst is an excellent and fast way to get an AST that includes comments. It’s the most robust tool I’ve found but you can just use built-in ast.py and ad-hoc file:line parsing too.

https://github.com/Instagram/LibCST

[1] Sorry to be a fanboi but Antimemetics is amazing!

https://qntm.org/fiction
by bmacho | 2026-02-02 10:49:15+00:00
Does not work nice with code blocks. But here's how you can add Javascript Snippets to every webpage via Tampermonkey:

// ==UserScript==
// @name JS Snippets
// @match *://*/*
// @grant GM_registerMenuCommand
// ==/UserScript==

GM_registerMenuCommand("Set font to default", () => {
document.querySelectorAll("body *:not(pre *)").forEach(el => {
el.style.fontFamily = "nonExistentFont";
});
});

you can run them by clicking the Tampermonkey icon and picking the action you want. You can add website dependent snippets by checking the location before you register the menu items, it's dynamic.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-02 10:50:31+00:00
All this "sovereignty push" tends to be a misleading term. It seems to actually often mean increased EU involvement and control at the expense of national sovereignty.

In this case:

"GOVSATCOM is conceived as a “system of systems,” merging existing national and commercial satellite capacities into a common EU pool. The program is structured in multiple phases, and is pooling capacity from eight existing, already-in-orbit GEO satellites from five member states — France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Luxembourg."

What does this mean? Does it mean that these satellites were fully sovereign, i.e. under the full control of their respective countries but now the EU will be involved via this program?
by tianqi | 2026-02-02 10:50:32+00:00
It is definitely not legal tender. As a Chinese, I've only ever seen such things in tourist souvenir shops for foreigners. If your argument is that a €4000 souvenir is questionable, please allow me to remind you that a €4000 currency coin makes no more sense. If your source is this webpage: https://www.kjc-gold-silver-bullion.com.au/PD/30-g-2023-chin..., I can be almost certain it's a scam because its description is ridiculous.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-02 10:50:39+00:00
As someone around 50y, and that much rather stay an IC than anything management, although it is unavoidable up to a point, due to mentoring and having a senior role, so far the only way to avoid being dragged into full management has been either leave the company, or being honest regardless of the possible outcome, that is what I plan to do if forced into it.

Apparently it is quite hard to pass the message that not everyone has a lifetime goal to land in management, which is a quite hard thing to fight against because in many countries, as computing is seen as yet another office job unlike the SV glamour of FAANGs, where you only succeed in life by becoming a manager.
Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email
by pipnonsense | 2026-02-02 10:52:41+00:00
In 2020 I posted this, "Show HN: Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752

It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other 100 books to be read the same way (not all of them originally serialized).

I never posted about it anywhere else (maybe flopped on Reddit, I don't remember), but it got a lot of engaged subscribers. It never grew over that initial HN burst (I never advertised it again), but it got about 1,000 subscribers and, years later, a few dozens of those were still reading some book through Serial Literature.

That was until... a startup failed and my web app wouldn't work anymore.

At the time, I wanted to build something serverless and learn some new tech. I chose FaunaDB, learned their proprietary query language (FQL), actually enjoyed it a lot, and built the site with it. It was pretty neat and worked fine. But then, 5 years later, around June last year, their service stopped working (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414742). As it was serverless, the DB was also on their cloud, hosted by the failed startup, in a proprietary format. One day, Serial Literature stopped working overnight. I downloaded the data, but in their weird format, it was not very helpful.

I got a bunch of emails in the last months asking about it, people wanting to continue reading more through their email, where I explained what happened and promised it would come back in some form. This site I am showing now, Confabulists, is the come back.

I am a writer myself, indie, self-published, science fiction writer, and I missed a newsletter/blog platform more adequate for fiction writers, so I built one myself. And, yesterday, I finally completed bringing all those public domain books in English to Confabulists and now I am able to offer that same service of Serial Literature, again, still for free.

I hope this reaches everyone that loved Serial Literature, but just accepted it was gone and never contacted me (the ones who contacted me I am replying back telling them about Confabulists).

Thanks HN!
by RulerOf | 2026-02-02 10:52:46+00:00
There was a magical period. I suspect it ended with the introduction of the Secure Enclave. But maybe it was a little later.

An encrypted iTunes backup of a device was a perfect image. Take the backup, pull the SIM card, restore the backup to a new phone with the sim card installed, and it was like nothing had happened.

No reauthentication. No missing notifications. No lost data. Ever.

It was nice.
by kykeonaut | 2026-02-02 10:52:58+00:00
I think what is interesting is that it is not necessarily the content of the brainrot that makes us underperform, but the act of swiping [0] and the context switching [1].

These attempts to make educational short form content still suffer from the same drawbacks, so I wonder how effective they truly are.

[0] https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...
by IAmBroom | 2026-02-02 10:53:33+00:00
Perhaps not, but there are very objective, erm, pathways.

Want to avoid dissolving the more bitter flavor components? Steep at a lower temperature. Solubility curves are quasi-exponential with temperature, and a reduction from 95 to 85 C can spread out the time before tannins are strongly dissolved. You could get the exact same flavor at 95, perhaps, if you used a stopwatch. But objectively, the tea will get much more bitter a few seconds later. Objective lesson: to allow for ease in steeping timing, use a lower temperature. It's especially true for green teas, which (objectively) have more bittering compounds than fermented teas.

But: many Chinese people enjoy their green teas at a saturation (color) that I would call barely-not-water. Many Brits enjoy black breakfast teas brewed to levels I would only use to dye cloth. Plenty of subjectivity.
by tim333 | 2026-02-02 10:53:47+00:00
I guess people talk about AGI as in human abilities or better AI because it'll have a big effect when it gets here.

I think a lot of confusion with skeptics is they think - oh someone's invented the LLM algorithm but it's not that good - what's the big deal?

The people who think it's coming eg. Musk, Altman, Kurzweil, the Wait Not Why guy and myself tend to think of it more coming down to hardware - the brain's a biological computer and as computer hardware get's faster each year it'll overtake at some stage. The current backprop algo was invented around 1982. It works now because hardware.

(Wait But Why thing from ten years ago. Has cartoons. Predicted human level aboy 2025 https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

Moravec's 1997 paper When will computer hardware match the human brain? Quite science based - predicted "required hardware will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s" https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.pdf)
)
by capevace | 2026-02-02 10:53:47+00:00
I've been giving my OpenClaw instance access to their own GitHub Pages setup and told it to fly free with it.

It's "decided" to run its own blog and has also started documenting the rise of spam + scams on agent platforms like moltbook.

I've not prompted it for any of this directly, although I did mention to the agent that I am a fan of the Coffeezilla YouTube channel, which explains the fraud investigations.
by veltas | 2026-02-02 10:54:00+00:00
The main concern I've got here is the gap between a human's intuition to prevent this kind of situation vs an algorithm. I'm interested to learn more about Waymo's logic here too and I'm hoping my concerns are addressed in their algorithm, it wouldn't be impossible and it would make their vehicles safer. I can believe in a scenario where these vehicles are safer than 99% of humans, and I don't think we're there yet, but I'm open to being proved wrong. The main point I'm making with my speculation and hypotheticals is that the safety of the kid that walked out doesn't start with them walking out, the safety starts before that, and it's worth comparing with experienced drivers with good track records and asking them what sort of things are going through their head as they drive. They're more perceptive than some people might expect, and I would guess more perceptive than the algorithm currently is.
by lapcat | 2026-02-02 10:55:21+00:00
> I would simply say: "Always use the same port for booting and installation." Which usually simplifies the process.

That would be even worse than not being able to update macOS on the DFU port. I'm supposed to remember which of 3 ports I originally used, forever??

> Maybe on another Mac/machine. When they change the machine

No, I did not use another machine.

The entire purpose of this install on an external disk was to take screenshots from my MacBook Pro. My other machine, a Mac mini, has a non-retina display, which is not good for that purpose, not to mention that the Mac mini already has multiple boot volumes, so I wouldn't need an external disk with that machine.
by treetalker | 2026-02-02 10:55:49+00:00
On the one hand, these are e-mails that apparently Epstein sent to himself as drafts of messages written on behalf of a "Boris" at Gates's foundation; and there are some indications that Epstein may have been a Russian and/or Mossad honeypot.

On the other hand, photos show pretty clearly that Gates was hanging out with Epstein and the Artist Formerly Known As Prince Andrew, and there are photos of Gates quite next to young women in relation to those hang outs.
by tomashubelbauer | 2026-02-02 10:56:16+00:00
> It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content.

Yeah, it got really sticky real fast. From the random (?) selection it starts off where I couldn't recognize anything but popular TV shows, it immediately over-indexed on that content and I had to fight for my life to see anything else in the feed that I would recognize and consider a good algorithmic pick for my interests.

Which is brilliant, because Instagram has the same issue for me - absolute metric tons of garbage and whenever there is a gem in that landfill of a feed that I interact with positively, it's nothing but more of that on my feed for weeks until I grow sick of that given thing. In conclusion, Instagram could have used this 30 line algorithm and I'd have the same exact experience when using it.

Algorithmic feeds are obviously problematic for turning several generations into lobotomized zombies, but they are also just not very good at nuance, so it is not even a case of something that's bad for you but it just feels so good. It's just something that's bad, but is able to penetrate the very low defenses in human psychology for resisting addiction and short-term gratification and there is no incentive to improve them for the sake of the user as long as they work for the advertisers.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-02 10:58:22+00:00
> your managers have heard about it too

Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.

I'm sure most managers and executives on HN though doesn't think like that, surely are the exception. But out in the wild world, people truly get promoted mostly on whims and personal relationships without thinking "are they better with machines than people perhaps?", because that's the easy way. People also feel excluded if they aren't considered for promotions, even if the promotion in question wouldn't make sense.
by MarekKnapek | 2026-02-02 10:59:00+00:00
On division: There is a paper about a division algorithm. If you split your 128bit integer into four 32bit integers, you can use a 64bit CPU built-in instruction to do the 128bit division. If you are on 32bit CPU that doesn't have the 32bit division operation, then split your 128bit number into 8 16bit integers and leverage the 32bit CPU built-in operation. https://surface.syr.edu/eecs_techreports/166/
by patrick4urcloud | 2026-02-02 10:59:29+00:00
v0.7.1 !
all new features:
- Token economics dashboard — track savings per command, cost analysis, execution time
- Session scanner — analyzes your Claude Code history, finds commands that could have used rtk, and tells you how many tokens you wasted
- Auto-rewrite hook — intercepts Claude Code calls in real-time and rewrites them to rtk equivalents, no manual setup needed
- Rust toolchain support — compact output for cargo build, test, clippy
- Git power user commands — branch, fetch, stash, worktree, show, full flag forwarding
- Full JavaScript/TypeScript stack — npm/npx routing, pnpm build/typecheck, curl with auto JSON detection
- GitHub CLI proxy — PR create, merge, diff, comment, edit, gh api passthrough
- Three-tier parser infrastructure — JSON, regex, raw fallback system for reliable output compression across all tools
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-02 10:59:44+00:00
> many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy

Yeah, I never understood this. As a manager I've always strived to earn less than those I help do their job (meaning pushing their salary up whenever I could), they're doing all the heavy lifting and I'm just along for the ride trying to unblock them and coordinate stuff. Not sure why there are managers who think they should earn more than the people doing the grunt-work, but then again, the world is filled with people who think they're more important than they are.
by throw20251220 | 2026-02-02 10:59:47+00:00
> I don’t know, I’m not the one smoking. That’s their problem to solve.

It’s your problem not theirs. It bothers you, not them. They probably don’t even know it bothers you. Are you really surrounded by smokers and cannot open a window all day and night? Dude, let me tell you… you’re making your own life difficult. There are full buildings where smoking is forbidden. Make your own life easy, don’t harass others with your truths. If you don’t care why do you expect others to care.

> I don’t think they’d like it if I left a bucket of rotting fish on my balcony.

Are you comparing a cigarette smoke to full infestation?
by bdauvergne | 2026-02-02 11:00:20+00:00
It means some countries had already advanced hardened satcom capacities (like France which had it for a long time, lookup Syracuse satellites, it exists since 1984) in geostationary orbit, mostly for military use. It organizes the sharing of these capacities between countries immediately, before the arrival of the IRIS² constellation in low earth orbit/medium earth orbit.