skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Building a Non-AI tool feels surprisingly refreshing for me
Lately, I’ve been working on a small side project: a web tool for creating radial and circular layouts using CSS only. What I’ve enjoyed the most is that it’s completely non-AI—just code, logic, and design decisions made by hand.

I have nothing against AI, but I found that building something without it has been almost therapeutic. Of course I know it is just a side project. I mean I'm not depend on its success for living.

It also made me wonder: in a world where AI is taking over so many creative and technical tasks, is there still a place for the joy of purely handcrafted software? Have others here felt something similar when working on non-AI projects?

Side project url
https://github.com/zumerlab/orbit/
Doors and locks are purely social construct. For majority of people it's much easier to justify stealing from a porch compared to breaking in.

No more, no less.

For spammers on other hand it's just a business, there will be no reprecussions like ever and we know quite a few big and legitemate companies who started their path with marketing spam sometimes using leaked email databases.
no bullshit. powered by the blockchain

Oxymoron detected.

Adding blockchain to any traditional service means 10x the cost, 10x the complexity, and 10x slower performance.
> Today gold have some advantage over bitcoin in that it has some intrinsic value.

For humans, the only things that have 'intrinsic' value are air/oxygen, shelter, water, food. (Notwithstanding things like joy/happiness and being loved by others.)

Anything else is an arbitrary / psychological trick, or sociological agreement, that we do amongst ourselves. Rocks are just part of this latter mechanism, regardless of whether they are shiny or not:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

> The maximum supply is capped at some number.

A fixed money supply is a bug, not a feature. The historical record shows this:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...

* https://www.moneyandbanking.com/commentary/2016/12/14/why-a-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
That's a really weird thing. In the EU, not only is Eco mode mandatory, and must be the default mode, and you can't label any other mode "default" or "normal" to sway the consumer to use that instead... but it's also how the appliance's energy rating is calculated, and it's displayed prominently on every device sold. It would be madness for a company not to put their most efficient settings on Eco mode.

https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...

You can also see there that they're tracking the effects of their regulations and measuring how much less electricity and water is used. The regulations also set minimum standards for cleaning, drying and energy usage so you can't sell products that look efficient but require everything washed twice, nor can you even include a resource hog mod.

And it mandates the availability of spare parts for a certain number of years, and access to repair information, so you don't just junk the whole object.

I can only imagine "Eco" mode being worse than other modes in some place where there's not good market regulation.

I just checked my own dishwasher, and its Eco mode uses 9L of water and 0.83kWh per cycle. Other washing modes use 9-17L water and 0.9-1.5kWh per cycle... so it does conform to the regulations.
I have ignored and dismissed the pseudosciences of horoscopes and psychology all my happy life.

People who need and look for this sort of advice would be well-served if it was backed up with anything factual, and are badly served when it is not.
My favorite is my Bosh wall oven that uses 85C rated capacitors with practically no voltage derating for the control board that sits directly at the top of the oven. After 4 years, they gave out causing the display to dim to the point of invisibility.

We’re talking about 50 cents of part savings on a $3000+ appliance here.

Replaced them myself easily, but most people will end up having to call for service and end up replacing the entire board for hundreds of dollars minimum.
That's exactly what they are dong though, they just also each have partial ownership of that manufacturer.
Actually no - I forgot about my Bosch dishwasher that uses capacitive touch buttons. Great idea for something that is often touched with wet fingers…
I've had to figure out a problem with reaching university Outlook servers where the Outlook server didn't like the (spec compliant) way my email server was writing the From address and rewrote it halfway through the spam filtering chain.

Then it checked the DKIM signature on the message it REWROTE ON ITS OWN and decided that the signature didn't match, and rejected my email.

Corporate email stacks are hell.
Spammers are worse at something no one tried to use AFAIK: require a fee to deliver email.
I don't disagree with any of that.

What I am saying is that Objects are not rows. And we sometimes try to force the Object model onto a data-schema that ultimately is more rich than a chain of objects.

Which is not using the most appropriate tool for the job, per your example.

An ORM is _fine_ for stuff that has a fairly standard shape, like blob posts, user accounts, things like that. Lots of relation questions against persisted data end up not being those exact shapes and patterns yet folks generally reach for the ORM.
https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/

This is a good place to get that kind of information
Math Kid Identity Considered Harmful
> the readme continues to use the term STL to refer to the C++ standard library.

Would not be the first time Microsoft were wrong about a standard.
yet another reason to avoid their products! as if i needed more ha
Scientists Observe CO2 on Planets Outside the Solar System
The maintainers of Microsoft's C++ standard library use the term interchangeably, both "STL" and "C++ standard library" refer to the same thing. https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blame/main/README.md#L3
How would a European government accept any service from a company that has Peter Thiel as a major investor, the guy who funded JD Vance, the current USA VP set to push the propaganda to promote hate and the destruction of the European Institutions, and Russian propaganda?
In the linked article, it lists the 6 modes that will not work without the WiFi connection, including Eco mode, Rinse, Self clean, Delayed start, and Half mode.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure the issue is distribution, so as long as they don't sell their dishwasher in China it isn't their problem. If someone buys and resells it in China then the reseller is in trouble. (Obviously it is a bit more complicated if they should know about this reselling but it shouldn't require online activation.)
If every single person paid to work on AWS leaves the company overnight, what happens to the value of AWS? Sure, Amazon could eventually hire enough people to replace those who left and maybe even keep AWS running and develop new features but it would be a catrastrophic loss of value and take a long time (and a huge investment) to recover.

You don't create value by having capital either. Labor converts capital into value. Labor can also transform capital (e.g. produce code which can then be used to provide a service for money). Plenty of people have "ideas" but ideas are worthless in a vacuum. If you pay someone to turn your ideas into capital you can use to generate value with cheap labor, your idea didn't become valuable by itself, you literally paid for labor to refine your capital to become better at generating value - you may legally own that refined capital the same way you owned the initial capital but the transformation had nothing to do with you other than your means to pay someone to perform it for you. Your money didn't create value, it merely facilitated the transformation of your capital and the creation of value. Your individual ownership of that capital is entirely unnecessary in this.

The tech, knowledge, software, etc of a company is a multiplier for the value labor can produce. It still requires labor to produce that value. It also requires labor to maintain that multiplier, much like literal machines require maintenance. The industrial era analogy still holds true (and arguably even more so given how specialized individual jobs can become).

The total cost of employment is generally not an order of magnitude more than salaries. Wages are the biggest cost factor in most companies, especially in companies built on knowledge work (e.g. software). The biggest employee expenses (though usually defined in terms of easily obtainable bonuses and often with severance packages other employees don't have access to) are CEO and other CxO-level positions. This isn't because of a natural value of these positions to the company, this is almost entirely the result of years of advocacy to investors and boards promoting the idea that these positions should be paid several orders of magnitude more than everyone else with very little factual evidence to support that idea - it's pure ideology and it's fairly recent.

The overheads are irrelevant for the general point, too. Corporations need to make a profit to function. Corporations don't need to siphon that profit almost exclusively into CxO-level benefits and shareholder dividends. You're right to argue that if a company makes $1,000,000 per $100,000 employee, that doesn't mean it makes $900,000 in profit per employee. But even if the operating costs are so high it only makes $100,000 profit per employee - that's still money left on the table (which the individual employee has no leverage to demand a fair share of).
Even better, if you follow no-one, your feed will be completely empty.
Now is it actually a state machine or is it just well logged?
14 days no-question returns are only for online orders. In-store pickups have different (local) rules.
What country are you from? Is there a link to the agency that maintains the portal? I worked in local government in a unit that was arguing for in-housing developers rather than hiring contractors. That team could maybe learn from your country's experience.
It's not the number of trusts that's the problem - it's the massive trust-based pushback against centralisation. Remember NHS Digital? NHS England? Things keep being established to try and centralise for efficiency, and it's not working. My observation (caveat emptor) is that trusts push back so hard, and aren't necessarily staffed with technical top performers in the first place, and have such misaligned incentives to centralisation from IT to doctors to everything else, that it can't happen.
Ask HN: can Wireless-CarPlay dongles steal your data?
So I recently ordered one of the many wireless Carplay dongles from Aliexpress that work via USB in your car connecting your iPhone to the car's Carplay via Bluetooth (and/or Wifi) to the USB dongle.

The instruction manual mentioned a firmware upgrade which had an interesting way of connecting to the internet. So when the dongle is connected to a power source you can connect to it via Wifi and an IP address in your browser. Now in the dongle's web UI, there is a button to upgrade your firmware. But how does this work when the dongle is not connected to the internet at all?

Well as I learned, the dongle simply uses the iPhone's mobile connection to send/receive data from the internet. I wasn't aware this is even possible and there doesn't appear to be a way to stop this or be notified of an active connection (aside from the wifi connection obv).

Now my concern is: when the dongle is connected to the iPhone in the car, is there a way for the dongle to use the same mechanism and send Carplay data (messages, contacts, etc) to a remote server using the iPhone's mobile connection?
Volunteering is the answer to this! Work directly with people in need and give something back to your community.
Entropy Attacks
Don't pull up with clips on the bike. No need to. I recall (but will not look up) a study showing the most efficient pro riders don't pull either.
Pretty sure it's optimisations.

Even small things like converting multiplications followed by additions to FMA will reduce the operation count.

Add to that constant folding etc. and a speedup factor of ~3 is not so hard to imagine.
yep. From reading Bret Devereaux's Acoup.blog, I've learned that especially with arrows, height is an advantage - if you're firing down on someone from a position above them, you can aim easier, and your arrow is accelerated by gravity. Conversely, if you're firing up at someone from a position below them, gravity is working against you, and it's harder to aim.

This is why they build seige towers back in the day - to give the attackers a position higher than the beseiged city's walls from which to fire down on the defenders.
> During the latest years, TC became a bit bitter around the industry

If that's true, it accurately reflects what I see as societies changing attitudes to the industry, driven the enshiffication of tech, privacy scandals, degrading of work conditions and political actions by certain tech leaders.
I feel that if “you’re the marketing arm” of a company you should not also try to be the oversight agency as well.

That’s someone else’s job. Injecting politics might sound like it “complements” the product but I don’t think it does in this case and rather distracts from the “core mission”.
> Who gets to determine if music is in decline

It is odd you ask that when most of the article is about it, but

"a cybernetic entity with developed proprioception and taste buds capable of evaluating the emotional (as per the article) direction the sample can cause".
> through the overuse of ‘mate’

The whole thing seems Oz-influenced (example, "in the bush with the roos"), which implies to me that he's prompted it to speak that way. So, you assumed an error when it probably wasn't... Framing is a thing.

Which leads to my point about your Frogger experience. Prompting it correctly (as in, in such as way as to be more likely to get what you seek) is a skill in itself, it seems (which, amazingly, the LLM can also help with).

I've had good success with Codeium Windsurf, but with criticisms similar to what you hint at (some of which were made better when I rewrote prompts): On long contexts, it will "lose the plot"; on revisions, it will often introduce bugs on later revisions (which is why I also insist on it writing tests for everything... via correct prompting, of course... and is also why you MUST vet EVERY LINE it touches), it will often forget rules we've already established within the session (such as that, in a Nix development context, you have to prefix every shell invocation with "nix develop" etc.)...

The thing is, I've watched it slowly get better at all these things... Claude Code for example is so confident in itself (a confidence that is, in fact, still somewhat misplaced) that its default mode doesn't even give you direct access to edit the code :O And yet I was able to make an original game with it (a console-based maze game AND action-RPG... it's still in the simple early stages though...)
I think sometimes companies will ask for passports for the purpose of visa checking, but hopefully that doesn't get as far as the hiring manager once the paperwork is all confirmed.
A corollary here is that maximum pressure is being put on DoD to find “leakers”. It now appears that to the normal people in DoD, what looks like evidence of regular leaking to the press might be incompetence at the appointee level.
It started with neocons and their open declaration in mid 90s that US was not going to actually do what Bush the elder claimed with his "New World Order" speech. So that trashed any notion of "international rule of law based in UN"

the promise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc7i0wCFf8g

the reneg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...

the alarm:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161205215516/https://www.nytim...

then 911 happened. Who done it? Don't ask, cause we won't tell.

Then, US moral authority (in whatever sense) flushed down the toilets of Abu Gharaib and Guantanemo.

Then, the basis for US monetary hegemony was trashed - politicized international finance infrastructure.

Now, the trashing of alliances, and internally the very foundations of the republic.

United States the power was an impediment to a world government. It is being dismantled, a "bipartisan" project, and atm we are in the midst of an assets sale. Next is total bankruptcy.

When the dust is settled, certain "ally" of ours will be the superpower of our making lording it over the most critical energy and global trade corridor in the world (which will keep China in line).

Now you may go back to your "red vs blue" entertainment.
Do you have a write-up of this, anywhere? I'd appreciate the details (what format did it reject? what did it change it to? what version of Exchange?).
Back in the day, it was considered prudent to repaint your pirate satellite TV to make it look less obvious. Knowing about the dazzle idea, I did bright white and dark black in rectangular blocks to break up the shape of the dish. After I was done and the dish was on the roof I realized I had reinvented a fairly conventional urban camo scheme. It was the same as used on the pictured tanks.

Afterwards I realized the weaknesses of such a scheme. Against an actual urban background it was quite effective in preventing perception of the oval shape of a satellite dish. Backlit by a bright sky, not so much. The oval shadow cast by the dish in sunlight was also quite easy to detect.
> That implies that we have some work to do on the problem of identity. As it is, there is not even a way for a known email sender to securely introduce an unknown email sender.

There is: gpg/pgp signature, but many people find it complicated, primarily because they are reluctant to read the documentation. And it’s popular to criticize it, especially here on HN, in favor of various half-baked alternatives.
I encourage all to look up what a gene drive is - find replace all mentions of 'mosquito' with 'human'. This makes a nuclear bomb look positively provincial - all it would take is one disgruntled post-doc. Only by the grace of god...
>even the holiest of people would wear shoes when going on rough terrain, thats just a question of sanity.

https://medium.com/mr-plan-publication/natures-footprints-ex...
As someone who gets little to no benefit from human therapy this genre of "please talk to a therapist- it cures what ails ya!" internet post always leaves me with unanswered questions about where the poster is coming from.
Good on Troy for talking about this so publicly. It underlines the truth that everyone, including everyone reading this comment, can be tricked. It doesn't matter how smart or savvy you are, all that matters is that the right pitch hits you at the right moment.

It's also a good reminder to never, ever, click on any links that come in communications like this no matter how legitimate they may seem (or be!). If an email comes reporting something that needs your attention, log into your account using your normal methods, not the provided link. Every time.
"Grundgesetz MVP commit"
> Unfortunately, that means that attempts by those larger providers to combat spam using such reputation will naturally hurt smaller providers

Tin-foil hat time, but I've always thought there was nothing unintentional or "unfortunate" (from Google's perspective) about this.
I am neither left nor right just a pragmatic minimalist. The minimalist in me does like some of the things they are doing given the tech industry make me very used to it and I can see the long term benefits. Every leader in the last few decades has pinky-promised to downsize the government. bigger topic obviously, given the careless and reckless way it is being done.

The logical part of me can not fathom why governments are getting into unregistered unlicensed securities. [1] I can understand some of us plebs getting sucked up into it from desperation but the federal government of all entities should know better given they made laws about it in the 1930's due to fraud. The conspiracy theorist in me has a gut feeling this might be a way to circumvent FDIC backing so when they induce a collapse everyone just loses everything.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][8 mins][cnn]
I'm no specialist in horoscope pseudoscience but it has helped me with dating a few times tho
My understanding is that this was intentional. They thought instability was needed for their desired maneuverability. Today we see this as the wrong answer to the question of whether an airplane should be stable or unstable, but it shows how far ahead they were that nobody else even knew enough to ask that question.
> Personally, I can’t deny that seeing someone doing work with their own two hands feels more authentic and true to me. I find the idea of others in my field who have never experienced physical labor very strange to consider.

I fully agree. I also have close relatives who do work with their hands (one is a fine woodworker, amusingly enough – he makes some jaw-droppingly beautiful things), and they’ve all assured me that they view the work I do as also being demanding, just mentally instead of physically.

I do personally believe that some amount of physical labor, even if it’s pure grunt work, is beneficial for your overall well-being and societal views. I’ve built retaining walls, a large deck, some fences, and various (non-fine) woodworking projects around the house. You come away from those with a sense of pride and accomplishment (TM EA) that is difficult to find with anything else.

> If you center your value entirely in how appreciative others are of the contributions you make, and in what you can provide, you ignore the actual concept of community, and you potentially build a worldview that denigrates those who you view as not contributing “enough” in your manner.

I can accept that, though I will gently push back in that I don’t think many people in tech – myself certainly included – are producing much that’s objectively valuable to society. Economically, yes, but from a communal / societal standpoint? Meh.

> If you have the capability to contribute work in some way – physical strength, knowledge, or mental acuity, then you have a moral responsibility to do so – yet not having as much capability as some other person is not something that should negate your self-worth. Instead, the act of doing what you can is what should be seen as virtuous, rather than the absolute economic output of your personal capability. Do what you can, build a community through simple acts of socialization and giving to others, and improve the lives of everyone around you. That is how we find fulfillment in a world such as this one.

Well-said! Or, as someone else once put it, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”