skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> implying that the trial was some external event

In many ways, it was. The political stars aligned "just so", in a way we've not really seen before or since. Many, many other companies got away with much more egregious behaviour (hello, Apple).
I’m assuming you like this idea from having read Snow Crash, but if not that’s exactly what you’re looking for

But recommending Neal Stephenson on HN feels a bit like telling people to try Dennys as a restaurant recommendation… it seems everyone on here has read him before
For politics: its bots setting a narrative. For temu dropshipping: its bots to make money.
I have a few ideas about this,

One thing I've found useful so far is that the notification sound is different from my phone/message chime, so when I hear it I know it's someone at the door.

I'm curious to hear what other people think?
Simplicity doesn't always mean stupidity. The simple but functional shell that correctly handles whitespaces without much hassle was already available since 90s, namely rc which is also found in Plan 9. Adopting rc's string concatenator `^` in POSIXy shells shouldn't be too hard.
AlphaZero/LC0 uses a very different kind of search, enough, which is not based on pruning to the same extent. (I guess you must count LC0 as a top engine?)
FOSDEM 2025 – Presentations – Call for Participation
As a layperson who does not really follow politics, it is bizarre to me that ANY organization that labels itself a journalistic institution would willingly give up any pretense of neutrality by supporting any specific political candidate or party.
iirc all the books you mentioned have action throughout and most of Stephenson is the same
That under limited OSes such as DOS. Under Unix, piping has been the philosophy.
Duende Software – The Next Chapter
A really level-headed take on what must have been a very tough experience.

I'm reminded of the Star Trek TNG quote "It's possible to commit no mistakes and still lose that's not weakness, that's life."
But they did not make old code correct. Filenames are still allowed to contain newlines. Shell scripts still need to be prepared to deal with that. Nothing really changed, they just added a feel-good half-measure.
you are making blind claims with made up unverifiable data, you're being tricked

if it were actual data you could show me tabulation, not some blog post graphic made for marketing purposes

this is a major lack of media literacy on display
The developer could use the cupertino framework for iOS releases, but usually choose not to.
Thank you for the link but I was looking for the reproducibility talk.
> Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale?

Nails was one of the examples cited by the gp, which I found funny since there is one famous example of nails being lower quality by definition as a result of centralisation. That example isn't the case for all nails (nor for all the gps examples), but it is still an excellent, if isolated, example: cut nails. Most carpentry nails you buy today are wire nails. I don't know if it's possible to buy cut nails today from any large factories, but broadly speaking, manufacture of cut nails does not scale. The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand (nor quality assurance). Cut nails are still considered superior today.

If you look at antique diagrams of nails available for purchase, you'll see 20 or 30 varieties, all with very distinctly different designs. Those designs have converged on a single design for all applications, not because it's a better design, but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture. Flaws in the design are compensated for via material choice & worker skill.

There's likely thousands of such cases in industry.
> a very whiny generation that don't seem to tolerate the 'suck it up we all went through the same shit' message.

Why would they? God forbid we improve things for the next generation. What a shameful attitude.
I hated PSS, and enjoyed Embassytown. I don't understand what's misleading about it.
Probably referring to me? I live 2 hours from the closest airport. There are no trains near me. Barely any buses. And I am not counting trains within a city just taking a train to travel between cities.

I do not live that far from an Amtrak station but there is only one train a day, it takes forever, and does not go anywhere that I am typically traveling.
How is VS Code a moat when it's platform agnostic? Plus the developer market is just a fraction of the overall market.

MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7 because that's what a huge percent of the human population using computers grew up on today, so they're most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.

The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft could literally not do anything and still make tons in revenue.
Yes obviously. But the POSIX specification for a "text file" as above is that it contains characters, which an empty file by definition does not. So an empty file cannot be a text file if you read that specification strictly, and therefore you cannot have zero lines in a text file. As soon as you have a single character there is at least one line, and the amount of lines can only stay the same or grow from there.

The definition should read "one or more lines" instead or (probably better) specify that a text file contains "zero or more characters".
The Newspapers Were Never Going to Save Us
Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already having failed under Ballmer.

I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a short period where I felt like some traction was taking place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they didn’t.

Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against contemporaries, but then the delays and issues surrounding 10 really took the wind out of those sails.

My perspective as a consumer is that Microsoft buying Nokia seemed to have made Nokia worse and delayed their phone development process. I found myself without any upgrade path, while Apple and Samsung users could get a pretty significant upgrade in capability every year at that time.

Nokia was also better at making low-end phones and had very few flagship products that were iPhone and Galaxy competitors.

On the business side Microsoft didn’t focus on having their entire lineup available on all four US carriers. They had all these weird carrier exclusives where getting a new Windows Phone would mean switching carriers.

I have to think that the break in compatibility between Windows 7 and 8 really screwed over developer relations as well. On the Apple side they were delivering an experience very familiar to Mac developers, and on the Android side the experience was an open source free-for-all playground.
GaN was already becoming popular in the early 2000's for high power RF amplifiers because they operate at higher supply voltages than GaAs. Cree (now Wolfspeed) and Nitronex were big names in GaN back then, with RFMD and TriQuint joining in soon after.
Or maybe because there is many things that are vastly misunderstood because people prefer simple explainations and theories

In general people are scared of complexity
I would find working from a stranger's house awkward. Also, if I was the one with the house, I wouldn't want a stranger using my bathroom.

I'm remote and working abroad. Cafes and coworking spaces work fine for me.
Bluesky's Alternate Approach to Feeds Is One of Its Best Features
Datomic: Changing Schema
Ask HN: Where to start with Big-3 cloud training?
There seem to be many paths to start learning GCP, Azure, and AWS towards a certification path

What is this community's opinion on the best way to start out for someone who wants to be able to support their customers better running products in cloud environments?
RAG-Powered Copilot Saves Uber 13,000 Engineering Hours
FWIW, Sweden subsidized fiber digging but we still had to pay 2000 EUR to get it connected.

Government will pay the extra fees, which can easily end up close to 10000 EUR due to large distances.

If all you need to pay is 800 EUR, then I don't understand what is your issue? Just pay it.
I thought the discussion was on context of CAN vs Ethernet.

These two are still vulnerabilities with Ethernet.
Agreed, if you're into hacking your own doorbell, there are a lot of really cool examples online of projects people have done.

I'm considering setting up an ESP to integrate my old bell's chime with the QR code.
> Bezos has written a very clear article about his reasoning just yesterday, and he states as clear as day that it has nothing to do with Trump and is part of an entire mindset shift.

My kids try this shit with “yes, I brushed my teeth”. Unfortunately for them, I can smell their breath.
That's actually a good argument for the point I was trying to make. Existing validity attributes such as "pattern" are cool, but not enough.

E.g. the "repeat password" example is actually achievable without "setCustomValidity" by using the "pattern" attribute. For that, you would have to dynamically construct a RegEx out of the value from the first input. I didn't want to make the article too long by comparing the solutions, but the point is, with the "customValidity" you see how much more eloquent and easier to read the validation is.
So a nicer API here makes all the difference

The "15 word minimum" constraint would look so much nicer as "value.split(/\s+/).length >= 15".
This sums up my experience as well. You can get an idea or just a direction from it, but itself AI stumbles upon its own legs instantly in any non-tutorial task. Sometimes I envy and at the same time feel sorry for successful AI-enabled devs, cause it feels like they do boilerplate and textbook features all day. What a release if something can write it for you.
Learning Basic for Tandy Computers
But how will they sell their cloud storage then?
The EU Joins the EV Trade War
I don’t use Slack personally, but it’s always what I hear mentioned online. It’s also what I hear friends mention (who don’t work in tech) who aren’t working at big cooperations.

I’ve also heard many people use the phrase, “it’s like Slack”, when trying to explain what MS Teams is to a non-technical friend. It was all over the news during the pandemic, so people learned what it was. Same with Zoom.
If true it seems shameful and embarrassing for the them behind Instagram.

Anybody reading this that is working at Facebook or Instagram? If so can you have someone look into this??
And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post?

I just use Pandoc for that purpose and it takes 30 seconds, including the time to install pandoc. For code generation where you'll review everything, AI makes sense; but for such conversion tasks, it doesn't because you won't review the generated HTML.
Here is one citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...

But also in most other IQ tests, Ashkenazi Jewish and East Asian people tend to score the highest.
It basically already is, at least for consumers. You can download an .iso of whatever the latest Windows version is and install it, and although it will prompt you to put in a product key, nothing stops you from continuing to use it if you don't. You can't customize certain cosmetic settings, and there's a small watermark in the bottom left corner, but it's hard to imagine that it being fully functional otherwise is an oversight rather than something they're fine with. The only people who will go through the effort to install it like that and keep using it are the ones who are least likely to pay for it.
A deep history of Halloween
> No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight?

It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.
I don’t know if it is true in an academic sense, but I think it probably is in a more general social sense. The widespread use of video-taking cell phones means there’s an underlying assumption that anything you do could go viral and be seen by millions. This makes doing “socially unacceptable” things seem less appealing, if only on a subconscious level. 20-30 years ago I think it was more acceptable for kids to do dumb time-wasting things, partially because the world was a bigger less-connected place.
OutRun: Open-source, privacy oriented, outdoor fitness tracker
Faster Reads, Same Guarantees: Linearizable Consistency in rqlite 8.32
This reminds me of mirror box therapy for phantom limb syndrome. Amputees sometimes feel intense pain in the limbs that they have lost. This is measurable activity in the brain. Unfortunately all of the feedback mechanisms for that activity have been removed with the limb. By showing people a mirrored version of their remaining limb. And then stimulating that limb in a way that would remove pain say massage or touch or unclenching a cramped clenched phantom hand, the patient gets the feedback to the part of their brain via their visual system that there's nothing wrong with that limb. This activates inhibitory circuits that would otherwise be inaccessible.

In this therapy a combination of visual and audio input as well as external control over the behavior of the Voice allows for a feedback mechanism which does not exist otherwise.
Privacy also seems to be one of those things people claim to care about, but in fact are actually reluctant to do anything about. Easy, low-tech privacy measures:

- leave your phone at home most of the time.

- don't buy a smart TV or other smart devices

- don't use social media

- etc.

None of these measures are bullet-proof, but they are relatively low-cost and don't require much expertise. These are much, much more likely to be things consumers complain about than things that consumers are actually ready to do something about. I think it's clear that consumers ALSO do not understand privacy, but I'd also suggest that they don't care very much. If they cared, there would be more a market for privacy.
I’m not understanding the negativity you’re projecting.

I personally think it’s wonderful that so many kitchen technologies are more accessible to home cooks. A machine like a Ninja CREAMi is opening up accessibility to ice cream varieties that were previously difficult or impossible to make at home.

I’m also not really understanding how improved appliances equals a lack of social family opportunity. You can still make cooking a group activity and I still do that with my family.

I’m not saying everyone needs some kind of expensive appliance. My ice cream maker is a KitchenAid ice cream bowl attachment which costs $60 brand new, and you could certainly find one used for much less. Products like that have all the modesty you’re desiring, it’s basically just an insulated bowl that attaches to an appliance that hasn’t changed in almost a century.

The top recommended ice cream maker on WireCutter is similar, it’s a $70 insulated bowl with a motor on it.

What I am saying is that the home ice cream market has become a gourmet hobby, so much so that commercial ice cream brands are really competing with home cooks who are saying “I can make better ice cream than this junk from the store.”
This is fascinating. What I note is that the therapist is collaborating with the patient to create "theatre". I think they should lean into this, new therapists should be explicitly trained in performance and theatre facilitation. There are a lot of solved problems with which they may otherwise struggle.
That was so good it convinced me that one correct way to make a good sci fi novel is to construct a world and then add one insane thing and make it fit.

FWIW, for calibrating recommendations, I tend to prefer literary sci fi and end up hating a whole lot of highly-praised-online sci fi novels. I really like that novel, and Watts’ short story that retells The Thing. That’s all I’ve read of his.

[edit] For further calibration, I'd say the book's strengths are efficiency (above-average editing and/or author's taste of what to write and what not to); action writing that is very much to my taste, being quick and terse and requiring close attention to follow it (almost like action-poetry) but not actually being unclear; and an excellent core sci-fi concept, which I usually don't rate so important an aspect as (I think) a lot of sci-fi readers, but in this case it's so good that it overcomes my usual "well that's nice, but has almost nothing to do with whether it's good" attitude toward that element. It's weak on characters, but is so busy with other things that it's hard to tell whether that's a general weakness of the author, or whether that simply didn't make it to the page in this case. World-building is sufficient, but also kind of not the focus of the story—there's plenty there to support the story, but no more.
This is true. But with a little push here and there you can usually avoid the sub-optimal high level code structure. That's why it makes so much sense to have it in the IDE.

You can see in general anything AI produces is pretty average.

But people who buy software don't care that the code behind it is average. As long as it works.

Whereas people who buy text, images and video do care.
That is a valid concern, you are not the only person to have raised this.
Right, I just remembered the main way to create those filenames: open the pdf, select and copy the title, close, rename the file and paste from clipboard.
There's a qualitative difference between the people around you knowing and some fedcop thousands of miles away being able to punch your name into a system that's integrated with another system and know your leanings going back X years.
Winning the Customer Auth Market
Something being logically consistent doesn't mean it's correct. It's possible someone could make a fully logically consistent version of string theory including future gravitational predictions.

They say "doesn't describe this universe", but that really just means it's wrong.

Edit: replying to pavel_lishin:

Yes, I'm sure Egan knows that, I'm partially replying to the statement "Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?"
In all our automated emails, we put something like "As a reminder,[name of company] is a ..."
> What are you suggesting or pointing out exactly?

Exactly what I wrote above.

You hadn't shared your setup by then tho, which you now have. So I don't know what to tell you.

Re-read what you replied to and then you might not need to formulate such empty questions.
Most businesses don't work that way – on paying for vs. being the product
That's why I wrote slight. VS Code is more of a backstop to make sure developing on Windows doesn't suck. Don't let Windows fall behind kind of thing. Every cross platform thing is biggest on Windows by default because Windows is the biggest platform.
Judging just by the title (and without noticing the source), I was hoping that this will be about standardisation of the vehicle metrics data via OEM sources. Last year I worked on a system that collects this data, and currently each OEM has a different method (sometimes several, for different message types) it can use to share it with the wider world.
Well they said that the remains were under boulders (which the sagas said they threw in after the body), the remains had battle trauma which was likely the cause of death, and radio carbon dating is spot-on.

Of course that could all just be coincidence, but I don't think they are even saying this is for sure 100% the person, it that it potentially corroborates the story.
Perhaps your nation should have more energy to protest what's going on in Germany.
Even Home Assistant have a shopping list built in by now.
Ask HN: Prompt engineering for LLMs to generate beginner friendly code
I have spent some time over the past few years learning how to code a bit, simply out of curiosity and as a hobby. In the past two years LLMs have allowed me to start actually producing code (usually python or bash scripts) to do useful tasks for work (strategy type role) or personal use but whenever I try to push a bit more towards a fuller solution I inevitably end up with code I struggle to understand (and rarely works as I iterate with the LLM to add or modify various aspects of it).

Are there things HN would recommend i add to my prompts to produce code that’s more easily readable and modifiable by a beginner tinkerer? I usually ask for heavy commenting, docstrings, and to write in a way a beginner could read the code; but are there other/better snippets to insert in my prompts to tailor the output to my needs.
Meta's AI Abundance
I still prefer using ballpoints with schmidt easyflow 9000 ink[1], but yeah rollerballs (gel) are a great midpoint between fountains and ballpoints. My Zebra G-750[2] is super smooth.

[1] https://www.jetpens.com/Schmidt-EasyFlow-9000-Hybrid-Ballpoi...

[2] https://www.jetpens.com/Zebra-G-750-Gel-Pen-0.7-mm-Black-Ink...
Seconding the Book of the New Sun - It's great as a standalone, and the series is rewarding if you keep reading. It's an excellent 'puzzle' of a story as OP stated.
Slightly OT, but perhaps someone can help me out: what's a tried & tested setup to integrate a locally running AI coding assistent into Emacs?
Show HN: Simple Synthetic Medical Data
Hey hn! Max and Matt here from Talc AI (YC S23). We help teams create data that’s traditionally hard to find - think things you’d normally need a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or engineer to write.

We’ve been struggling to demo our synthetic data product (it’s complicated to set up), so we stripped our product down to its core - an "ontologizer" that takes plain text descriptions and generates varied, detailed synthetic data. For this demo, we're focused on medical data like radiology reports and SOAP notes.

Try it here: https://demo.talcapi.com/demo/meddoc

Example use case: Instead of dealing with HIPAA compliance or hiring doctors to write fake data, just type "medical notes with billing codes" to get test data instantly.

One key limitation: unlike our real product, this isn’t grounded in reality and won’t match the distribution of real data.

For specialized use cases (rare diseases, financial regulations, etc.), we can inject domain expertise into the process. Our customers use these "golden datasets" to test clinical trial matching, train financial and engineering Q&A models, and benchmark LLMs.

To generate this data we run an unsupervised process to identify the relevant metadata and structure then use this information to seed a generation process, inspired by papers like Google's CodecLM.

We'd love feedback! Our last HN launch helped us catch several bugs.
> Isn't that pretty similar to what you just did? Reduced his entire ouvre to a snappy criticism without nuance and then used it to dismiss him.

We don't hold short HN discussion comments to the same standard as full articles.
You’ve really never seen unattended farm stands in the rural US?
Why aren't side projects worth it if they're just for the money?
That's exactly it. There were a bunch of hardcore Windows dev shops getting ready to support Windows Phone who jumped on WP7, ready to dig down, but who felt betrayed when WP8 was a clean break. You lose that hardcore bunch, then you are just evaluated on the generics and Windows Phone had no edge.
It comes preinstalled on most computers. The consumers don't pay, OEMs do. And they'll continue to pay because most people don't want an OS-less machine.
For Julia users:

https://github.com/JuliaSurv and
https://github.com/JuliaStats/Survival.jl