MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-29 16:48:27+00:00
I just asked o3 how to fill out a form 8949 for a sale with an incorrect 1099-B basis not reported to the IRS. It said (with no caveats or hedging, and explicit acknowledgement that it understood the basis was not reported) that you should put the incorrect basis in column (e) with adjustments in (f) and (g), while the IRS instructions are clear (as much as IRS instructions can be...) that in this scenario you should put the correct basis directly in column (e).
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-29 16:48:29+00:00
Have a friend, who is on his 7th or 8th year of every day using DuoLingo (DL) "learning" German. His German is still terrible. Phrase structure goes all overboard, verbs are not adapted to time, person and whatever else. It is a bit painful to see. People also say that some languages just have terrible lessons on DL. Maybe German is one of those.

I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads. It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic Chinese is better learned elsewhere.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-29 16:48:41+00:00
I have almost always found that simple code runs faster than complex code. I think this is because optimization is likely an NP problem and like all NP problems, the best algorithm we have for solving it is divide and conquer. The core thing about D&C is that you divide until you reach a level that you can actually find the optimum answer within the resources given but accept that by dividing the problem you will likely have some high level inefficiencies. This means simple code, code you understand all pieces of, can actually be locally optimum. When I see people try to optimize code I often see them fall into that trap of optimizing too large/complex a problem which leads to them not actually being able to find a true local optimum and, often, making far slower code than had they just tried for much simpler code. This likely NP behavior runs rampant in software development where we often think we can design some elaborate process to design things and when things fail it was because people failed to follow the process and not because the problem was NP. We all love building machines which is why we likely do this, but unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't then D&C, and admitting you are only looking for a local optimum, is the only algorithm we have for attacking NP problems. (Shameless plug here for smaller, far more autonomous teams instead of monolithic dev shops with one big shared feature list)
by Zambyte | 2025-04-29 16:48:48+00:00
I think it's worth comparing search traffic to language model traffic. There isn't an easy 1:1 comparison (searches vs user messages? searches vs threads / conversations? single LLM queries often compose aspects of multiple searches in a single query) but site / app visits would still be interesting to compare. Google may not be falling in favor of other search engines.

It seems likely that people using special or small search engines are less inclined to leave for LLMs than people who use Google, and that's why their percentage is falling.
by yencabulator | 2025-04-29 16:48:58+00:00
You could pick an ecosystem with more power to control the finer details if and when that's needed. Typst is a LaTeX replacement with a syntax sort of in the markdown family of syntaxes (https://typst.app/docs/tutorial/writing-in-typst/), but fully programmable and with nice visualization options.

https://typst.app/universe/search/?category=presentation

e.g. https://typst.app/universe/package/touying

Gets you powerful "frame by frame animated" slides when you need it, like this tracking program execution: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/typst/packages/main/packag...

Gets you decent diagramming e.g. https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher/
by tonymet | 2025-04-29 16:49:08+00:00
i just got pinged with this being archived. It was regarding abuse of USERTALKSTOP to block any criticism on user talk pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3A...

There's no such policy , but it's abused as a way to censor criticism over behavior, which itself is a policy (RUCD)

There were a couple instances where user conduct concerns were raised on their talk page (in accordance with RUCD), and that user used USERTALKSTOP to censor the concerns. The outcome is that me and the other users who were raising concerns received a temporary ban (one permanent), instead of the concerns themselves being attended to and addressed.

Worse than the ban was the hours and hours of inane dialog on admin pages, defending your edit history, account history, intentions, etc. And the UI is clumsier and noisier than the worst 1990s web BBs

You can see how a seemingly benign non-policy can be abused to censor even well-intended volunteers.
by bananapub | 2025-04-29 16:49:16+00:00
the cry-baby-ness of the US Far Right is really something to behold. they seized control of the federal government and are now looting it and pushing all their deeply stupid hobby horses, but still they can't stop whinging about people merely noting what stupid stuff they're doing.

wah wah wah. if you don't won't people calculating the costs of your tariffs, perhaps don't introduce the world's worst tariff regime?
by Etheryte | 2025-04-29 16:49:23+00:00
This is not what the crisis is about. The housing crisis is not a lack of space to build nor a lack of materials. It's a lack of housing that's both desirable and affordable. Most people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere with nothing around, even if it costs very little. Look at Italy for example, they're giving houses in rural areas away for free, granted you agree to permanently live there, and they still don't have much in the way of takers.
by mandevil | 2025-04-29 16:49:33+00:00
Is there such thing as proper plastic recycling today? My understanding is that all current generation plastic recycling is basically a scam, minor pilot projects because it is so energy inefficient that you can't possibly do it at small scale, leave alone at the scale of world-wide plastic use.

Even the Petroleum Institute has admitted that previous generations of "recycling" was a scam, but swears that this time it's real, is my understanding of the situation. In fact, I seem to recall speculation that most of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was "recycled" plastic that had been shipped from the US and Europe to China, then dumped into rivers there and ended up in the Pacific Ocean, because plastic recycling wasn't just a scam, it was actively negative for the environment.

Just to be clear, recycling is good (paper mostly works out, aluminum for sure), but plastic recycling in particular is largely a scam designed to assuage people's guilt at how much plastic they use.
by windows_hater_7 | 2025-04-29 16:49:34+00:00
I was expecting this to just be another AI API wrapper, but I really like Neuro Tools. I’ve been given a whole alphabet to describe my brain, and I think I could actually benefit from using these tools. The most success I’ve had so far in changing my behavior has come through reflection, and I like that reflection is a key aspect of these tools. One idea for an additional tool would be to have a “reality check” tool. I often believe that I can accomplish an impossible amount of work in one day. It would be great to have a tool that helps schedule work in a more feasible way. So if I say, “I’m going to work on this paper for six hours today and eight hours tomorrow,” it would challenge that and say something like “Let’s start with accomplishing two paragraphs today and see what else you’re up to.”
by dogleash | 2025-04-29 16:49:39+00:00
> However, please do not let the absolute state of things cause you to give up on security.

I'm the security guy on our team and I'm pretty much over it. Once you get a project's security up to baseline status quo, then the security community only produces tiny scraps of actionable input for improving something they're vocally unhappy with.

How did specialized QA from people who like breaking security controls for fun turn into acting like the business owner for security requirements? And also somehow getting away with a level of haranguing that we wouldn't accept from our actual stakeholders?
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-29 16:49:54+00:00
No, and not even close. The bottle neck is the network, so unless he is running a database in the background, it is not going to improve speed in the least. 14TB drives are not that fast. Video 4gb, or 8gb, and as little ram as possible. Not much processing is needed either. That is why NASs are built in celerons. In 6 years, when he knows something, he will see the extreme error of his ways.

My NAS has 2x2Tn striped and a video 1Tb. It streams 4k to multiple sources. If I needed faster, I'd throw it on the install server. 4x1TB striped, and 8Gb of ram. 2xGbit net. Did it tell you this cost all of $60?
by hs86 | 2025-04-29 16:50:16+00:00
(Not OP) Sidebery is half tab manager, half session manager. It stays in the sidebar, and if I collapse parts of my tree, I have set it to unload those folded tabs after 60 minutes. There is also an option to hide those folded tabs from the native tab bar.

Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome) all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-29 16:50:35+00:00
> is it now natural to mix borrow checking and garbage collection?

D is as memory safe as Rust is, when you use the garbage collector to allocate/free memory. If you don't use the GC in D, then there's a risk from:

* double frees * memory leaks * not pairing the allocation with free'ing

Those last 3 is what the borrow checker handles.

In other words, with D, there is no point to using the borrow checker if one is using D's GC for memory management.

You can mix and match using the GC or manual memory allocation however it makes sense for your program. It is normal for D programmers to use both.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-29 16:50:40+00:00
Profiling doesn't mean you don't do the math. Profiling is simply there to show you that "hey, this is where the problems actually are".

You do profiling because it's WAY too easy to get obsessed about theoretical problems when a simple measurement will show you the actual problems.

You do the math on the actual problem location, not a method with O(n!) which only gets called with n=3.

You still have to look at the entire call stack when profiling (which means thinking about the overarching algorithm).
by orangecat | 2025-04-29 16:50:43+00:00
the GDPR refrained -rightfully so, IMO- from any implementation details

I would disagree with this. If you're going to force bad actors to take actions that they don't want to, and you give them wide latitude to decide how to comply, then of course they're going to try to find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while avoiding the law's underlying goal.

surveilance industry adopted a "dark pattern" that annoys people to no end (the popups) so as to paint the GDPR in a bad light

We should in fact blame lawmakers when they fail to anticipate the obvious consequences of their laws.

This industry could've easily said "If we see a DNT header with level:x and domainmask:*, we'll assume NO to every tracking cookie and won't collect them".

If they were the type of people to do that, then they wouldn't have been doing the invasive tracking in the first place.

The GDPR would be far better if it simply banned individualized tracking. It would be somewhat better if it explicitly specified that sites must honor browser headers and specified the exact UI to use when requesting permissions.
by Yasuraka | 2025-04-29 16:50:57+00:00
More like, an attempt in the field from 2 years ago

> [Warning] This project is currently not actively maintained.

But there is a library by them to build containerd shims with which is maintained: https://github.com/containerd/runwasi

Let's just entertain the idea and pretend that this is a notable project and that one would count it as DevOps tooling. Here are the top 10 across the CNCF in terms of size, courtesy of GitHub's API:

C++: 3195829832 Java: 2908175049 Go: 2005598094 C: 1225503783 Python: 931070259 LLVM: 594277917 C#: 484071185 Rust: 460427159 TypeScript: 428904119 JavaScript: 273074800

This is the best-case scenario, including irrelevant categories like databases and VMMs that ought to be written in Rust (or C++).

As far as Microsoft itself goes, they have a new push to ~~lock-in~~ embrace and extend cloud customers:

https://blog.radapp.io/posts/2024/04/16/radius-accepted-as-c...

As far as recent projects that gained traction with the CNCF go, I found some nice write-ups:

https://blog.palark.com/cncf-sandbox-2023-h1/

https://blog.palark.com/cncf-sandbox-2023-h2/

https://blog.palark.com/cncf-sandbox-2024-h1/

Go: 30 Rust: 4 (once to implement another lang) Python: 2 Java: 1 and 2 that are mixed (Go+{C,Rust})

Fun fact, one of the 30 is Eraser - by Deis Labs.
by Derbasti | 2025-04-29 16:51:00+00:00
I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.

Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.
Show HN: Waterbucket – A dynamic design tool for product data catalogs
by irontony1 | 2025-04-29 16:51:04+00:00
Hi HN, I'm excited to share what I think is the best interface for designing dynamic product data feed catalogs. We've been working for the last 4 years to build this tool.

Problem: Every ecommerce platform outputs a product data feed for automated advertising on platforms like Meta, Klaviyo, TikTok, Google, etc. The images are usually bare product shots on white backgrounds that don't grab attention.

Solution: Waterbucket is middleware between the ecommerce platform and the ad platform. Our platform ingests the feed, provides the tools to creatively transform the feed, and outputs a new feed to the ad platform.

At the heart of the platform is a rules engine. You can design a template and use rules to apply it to different attributes/products from your data feed. For example, say you have a sale 20% off men's shoes. You can design a template for that sale that works like a frame/overlay on the images. Then you can map that template to all the men's shoes in your feed.

Waterbucket differs from something like Canva because the feed is dynamic and updates daily to reflect price or other attribute changes automatically.

One of the best use cases is calling out prices. Sale price, percent off, dollars off, or BNPL prices.

Price is what we all use to decide if we're interested in something. Modern advertising algorithms optimize for attention and price grabs attention.

Please have a go with the demo environment and let me know what you think.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 16:51:12+00:00
> But what do you mean by “warranted”?

In this case, I believe many companies raised pricing more than they needed to, because people misattributed the source of those increases. If, say, ice cream doubled in price in normal times, people would cry foul. COVID gave an ironclad excuse.

> unless you’re saying that there is actual and widespread price-fixing (which is illegal and enforced as such)

I see very little evidence of this. We're great at innovating new ways to price fix without attracting (or successfully fighting off) regulatory attention.

Like outsourcing the price decisions to a third party…

https://www.propublica.org/article/senators-introduce-legisl...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/data-company-agri-s...
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-29 16:51:15+00:00
Cookie banners are a bad/wrong solution to the underlying problem, but it's the dark patterns within that really piss me off. I shouldn't have to invest deep cognitive attention to "only accept mandatory" but if you're not careful many dialogs will trick you into clicking accept all after you go to the trouble to untoggle all the optional shit. The answer is to use isolation containers, aggressively reset them and not to worry about any of this.
by Torwald | 2025-04-29 16:51:23+00:00
Every Firefox upgrade involving tabs makes me hope they finally debug the tab closing button on macOS. Disappointed again. On macOS the tab close button belongs to the left side, not on the right side. Firefox still gets it wrong.

This is a usability flaw that renders it basically unusable to me. I suspect this oversight stems from too many programmers not having enough understanding about proper application design and development on the Mac. It's a cultural issue then.

But I keep hoping, mainly because other browser vendors get it right. Namely Vivaldi and Opera amongst others.
by thibran | 2025-04-29 16:51:27+00:00
It's not uncommon to work on multiple things over a certain period of time. So I have a bunch of tabs with all the information needed open for every topic. From time to time I close a 'group' of tabs when I'm done. This workflow seems very natural to me.

Using bookmarks would not fit here, because I have no intention to access the tabs in future (e.g. a year from now) again.
by toast0 | 2025-04-29 16:53:28+00:00
> "AEMO identified software settings in the wind farms that prevented repeated restarts once voltage or frequency events occurred too often. "

> Grid operators are currently mostly against renewable and so they impose "blunt" disconnect rules on inverters behind renewable sources, and this comes to bite the grid when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

As a distributed systems person, this seems like a coordination/communication problem. If a single node is having repeated events, it may likely be broken and staying offline could be a better choice. If multiple nodes are having repeated events, maybe it's better for them to stay connection and do their best.
by formerly_proven | 2025-04-29 16:53:29+00:00
I think the contrary is true. Frequency and phase matching is a feature, not a bug. Because AC gives you frequency, and frequency is not just easy to measure but also easy to have accurate references and very immune to noise, it is also not influenced by step-up/step-down transformers. This makes balancing an AC grid possible. Frequency below the set point? Increase power output. Frequency above? Reduce. As an added bonus, this happens to exactly match up with how synchronous generators work. So you get a fairly robust way for many distributed power plants to collectively coordinate power output without additional communication just by agreeing on the physical quantity which we can measure with the highest precision of any quantity very cheaply.

That is not possible with DC.
by dns_snek | 2025-04-29 16:53:43+00:00
> In 2023, Godwin published an opinion in The Washington Post stating "Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you." In the article, Godwin says "But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy."
by kemotep | 2025-04-29 16:54:08+00:00
With NIST finally updating their standards to recommend 15 character password minimums last, I like to use their recommendations and compare them to these charts show how effective such a password would be.

Using E = L x log2(R), where E is entropy, L is number of characters in the password (15), and R is the total number of possible characters used (26 for all lowercase letters), you can get ~70 bits of entropy. Using a password manager like Bitwarden for a 15 character password using the full character set minus the ambiguous characters (65 characters total) leads to ~90 bits of entropy.

Using these charts and figures from the article, a well configured bcrypt setup means even the fastest computer systems still in 2025 cap out at 1 billion hashes per second for offline cracking (without getting into Nation States spending billions on just cracking your passwords, or dedicating all the world’s supercomputers or some other speculations). So to calculate how long it would take with a “realistic” password cracker in 2025, would use this formula:

((((((2^(70-1))/ 1 billion hashes per second)/ 60 seconds)/ 60 minutes)/ 24 hours)/ 365 days) to get ~18,700 years. (Nearly 20 billion years for the Bitwarden generated one)

But without a password filter checking for known bad passwords somewhere like Have I Been Pwned, even a 30 character password that has been leaked is useless. Would be instantly “cracked”. So I personally would have the password policy be:

1. 15 character minimum, no composition rules.

2. All passwords filtered for known bad passwords against HIBP.

3. Accounts protected by MFA.

4. Combination of network controls, best practices security configurations, and alerts and monitoring to help detect and limit/eliminate password guessing attacks, password database dumps.
by mvieira38 | 2025-04-29 16:54:19+00:00
Did the same here on my Android phone.

Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.

Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.

Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-04-29 16:54:24+00:00
I just use my microwave to boil and drink a couple tablespoons of ground barley with a sweetener, beta glucan is amazing and hulled barley is awesome, cheap and higher in beta glucan than oats.

Solved every gastro issue I've ever had, humans co-evolved with barley and it's awesome. No modifications needed.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-29 16:55:16+00:00
> Is there a public list of blacklisted domains?

I don't know.

Personally, I don't object to this behavior with regards to 404 because most of their articles aren't good and/or on-topic enough to be useful. The ones that are often get vouched for and appear anyway. From where I sit, this seems like the least-worst result.
by Technetium | 2025-04-29 16:55:51+00:00
News sure moves fast... "Amazon denies it planned to disclose cost of US tariffs on its website" - April 29, 2025 12:01 PM EDT: [1]

"Trump complained to Bezos before Amazon said it scrapped idea to display tariff cost" - April 29 2025 9:01 AM EDT: [2]

"Amazon denies tariff pricing plan after White House calls it "hostile and political"" - April 29, 2025 12:01 PM EDT: [3]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/white-house... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/white-house-blasts-amazon-ov... [3] https://www.axios.com/2025/04/29/tariffs-amazon-prime-day-se...