MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antasvara | 2025-04-23 02:39:46+00:00
A loan at an 11% interest rate pays for itself in around six and a half years. The general concept is that even if the PE firm runs the company into the ground, it only needs to exist (and make loan payments) for 6.5 years to get your money back.

For a company like Toys R Us, there is still value in that brand name. You can reduce the quality of the store and coast on that recognition for a little while before people change their shopping habits. Put another way, how many bad meals would you have to have at your favorite restaurant before you stopped going? I bet it's more than one or two, as long as the experience isn't super terrible.

So for a lender, the questions you ask yourself are:

1. With cost cutting and other measures, how long do I think this business can last?

2. Once this business reaches bankruptcy, how much am I likely to recover on my loan? This involves figuring out how much in assets the company has.

3. What are the chances this business is able to be turned around?

There are situations where even if the company goes bankrupt, the lenders still made money.

Lenders aren't dumb. They know the reputation of the PE performing the buyout. If that particular firm has a terrible track record money to lenders, the lender will want to be compensated for that risk.

Ultimately, the people that "pay" for this are shareholders (who get zeroed out in bankruptcy) and consumers (who get degraded product/service quality for the same price; that's how the company stays afloat in the short term).
by phospine | 2025-04-23 02:40:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie hacker and just launched the Android version of my app, AirDisk Pro. It’s a private, offline-first file manager that includes: • Wireless file & photo transfers over Wi-Fi • Media playback for video, music, and images • Full local storage access (like a USB drive for your phone) • No cloud sync required unless configured

The iOS version has been downloaded by over 1 million users – and now Android users can enjoy the same experience.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app2pro.ai... Site: airdisk.app

Would love your thoughts, ideas, or brutal feedback. Always learning!
by alexjplant | 2025-04-23 02:41:14+00:00
> You have to be quite heavily into needing different performance characteristics to outperform the built ins with custom code or a library. All parts of Go's simplicity push that seems to assume people don't need anything else other than Array Lists and hash maps.

Every 2000s-era Enterprise Java project I worked on was written by people that used ArrayList<T> for everything. My classmates' programs were much the same way in college. I wonder if the Golang authors observed similarly and came to this conclusion.
by hedgehog-ai | 2025-04-23 02:41:18+00:00
We promote fallback systems to establish civic cohesion in the event of the unexpected

...

... ... ...

Our first idea is a hardware pendant in a shielded case

It is a computer containing radio, wifi and data in an emergency

It works with multiple communication protocols and can work offline with p2p interactions

... ...

It will have a knowledge bank of essential human knowledge and can be used as a computer

P

Build one yourself or buy one.

This is an open idea so feel free to contribute and help. It isnt nice but if we establish fallback systems we can still communicate if an unexpected event occurs.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-23 02:42:47+00:00
As best I can tell, that's partially due to the size of the community, but also because Homebrew went out of their way to teach the system to fish via the 3(?) different kinds of "check for updates" built into the Formulae:

- GitHub release sniffing https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b331b99b9f24f...

- page scraping https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b331b99b9f24f... (and also per-content-type flavors json and presumably xml)

- links to other formulae (IOW cascading updates): https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b331b99b9f24f...

and then the $(brew livecheck) invocation which will do a subset, a curated list, or hypothetically all of them

I can't imagine why MacPorts or our new Sapphire friend couldn't adopt a similar strategy
by thomassmith65 | 2025-04-23 02:44:22+00:00
It's the tone, not the content.

a) Slang signifies group membership, and can be irritating to a reader who does not identify with the group

b) In tech, there are too many knowledge domains for anyone to keep up. I personally find it frustrating when people expect everyone else to know about their area of expertise.

c) People have an urge to smack down someone who too loudly toots their own horn.

The final paragraph makes the tone problem worse; if we're being objective, it comes off as quite pissy, no? The same comment likely would have been upvoted if the tone had been gentler.
by josephg | 2025-04-23 02:44:57+00:00
I've been using solidjs (via solidstart) for awhile on a medium sized project.

> Portions of the react community are excited about how it's starting to feel more like PHP with the movement towards server actions in "client" code etc

Solidstart definitely pushes you to use their magic server functions. I used them at first - but increasingly I've been moving back to writing a normal, real REST interface on the server side. It still works fine, its just a few more lines of code to do it yourself. The biggest benefit is that I can control my HTTP verbs and headers. This lets me set up caching correctly, both in the browser and any intermediate caches.

> Things like Vue/Svelte where they mash together css and js in the same file if you want kind of turns me off.

Solidjs doesn't mash css and JS together. You usually use normal, real CSS or CSS modules. Eg:

import styles from './style.module.css' function BannerComponent { return <div style={styles.bannerBar}>Banner</div> }
by mdaniel | 2025-04-23 02:45:51+00:00
Merely for your consideration, Ruby is great if you live in that codebase all the time, but Ruby -- in general, not just Homebrew -- has indescribably bad discoverability. I mean that both in terms of "what can I write where my cursor is?" and its friend "where the hell did this symbol under my cursor come from?"

I'm acutely aware someone's going to say LSP something or Rubymine something else but as for drive-by contributions, ... anyway, like I said, just for your consideration
by hyperjeff | 2025-04-23 02:45:53+00:00
If anyone is interested in old Mac software and open source projects, I have an archived version of my old OS X listings. While most links are broken these days, it can be a handy for finding things for old Macs. I think the list ended when the App Store finally went online, around the time of Lion. http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/
by defrost | 2025-04-23 02:47:36+00:00
I note the comment by mppm and accept that exact risk levels and associations are problematic while also noting medical students can and have demonstrated increased cancer and tumours in lab animals when exposed to radon.

I once measured broad area environmental levels of background radiation as part of geophysical exploration, I'm not in the medical field (although I did some post grad epidemiology work as part of a mathematics degree).

Medical papers of interest on radon include:

Indoor radon was declared a human carcinogen in 1987 by the WHO and in 1988 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

* WHO Handbook on Indoor Radon: A Public Health Perspective (2009) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23762967/

* Radon and Lung Cancer: Current Trends and Future Perspectives (2022) - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9264880/

^^ Broad overview handbooks and trends

-------------------

Example studies

* Radon in homes and risk of lung cancer: collaborative analysis of individual data from 13 European case-control studies (2005) - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC546066/

* A 10-year follow-up study of yearly indoor radon measurements in homes, review of other studies and implications on lung cancer risk estimates (2021) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-23 02:49:58+00:00
That is what online reviews are for.

And oftentimes, download the user manual. If at all possible, I download the manual before making any purchase decision. It can answer questions such as: What’s included in the box? What cables/accessories will I need? Will the specs be fit for purpose?

User manuals are unbiased and usually a very accurate way to figure out lots of things about a product, especially something complicated and/or expensive, before purchase.

Unfortunately I have seen companies who are paywalling or purchase-walling manual downloads.
by wildzzz | 2025-04-23 02:50:07+00:00
The dynamo wouldn't necessarily need to provide full power. Say your commute is 1 hour. The dynamo can provide 3W and the light draws 5W. Your morning commute would provide 3Wh to the battery. You don't use the light so all power charges the battery. During the evening, you now have at least 3Wh of battery alongside 3Wh of pedal power so you'd have 1Wh of battery left by the time you get home. A large enough battery could store hours of surplus light just based on your normal daily commute. If not battery power is available and it's night time, the light could be dimmed or you could charge the battery from USB. If the light is off, then load on your muscles from the dynamo would decrease as the battery charges to full.
by dkh | 2025-04-23 02:50:12+00:00
> Having used Solid on a largish web product for over a year

I am curious about your experience in this regard. I've been aware of Solid for quite a while (and plenty of other non-React alternatives that on paper seem "nicer") but the problem I usually quickly run into after exceeding the complexity of a contrived demo app is the ecosystem not yet having a number of components, library wrappers, integrations, etc. that I use all the time.

Have you found the Solid ecosystem sufficient for whatever your needs are, is it fundamentally easier with Solid to integrate things that don't exist yet, or did you go into it less spoiled/tainted as I by reliance on React's ecosystem?
by jkrejcha | 2025-04-23 02:51:09+00:00
There's nothing about that that requires JWTs/signed cookies.

You may need JWTs or their moral equivalents for 3rd party services but, especially for 1st party services, session identifiers are a fine enough scheme that are oftentimes implemented more securely and have the same amount of statelessness (at least from a REST perspective) as a JWT.

Not that cookies are allowable within the constraints of REST anyway due to violation of the uniform interface/stateless constraints, but pragmatically cookies have the most user agent support, and when used as just an session identifier, are relatively close to following the constraints and are much better supported than using the Authorization header or whatever[1].

Statelessness (the lack of "sessions") refers generally to the fact that the client and the server don't need to share state, i.e. the client has all it needs to make a request rather than, like, an "authorization context" or something (which is what a "user session" colloquially is). Unfortunately, the difference in the way the terms were used kinda led to this confusion which made people think that they weren't doing REST unless they were using JWTs or signed cookies.

It's the difference between storing the shopping cart in a cookie or what have you vs. creating a shopping cart resource. In the former scenario, the server has to track where in the (often implicit) state machine the current client is[2], whereas in the latter, the client has all it needs (a URI, authz token, etc) to make the request and all the state is stored server-side.

[1]: If browsers had better support for setting the Authorization header somehow, this would almost certainly just be a "best practice" that we take for granted. Automated clients with API keys tend to be better in this regard.

[2]: And there are significant disadvantages to doing it this way, if you've ever lost your cart or got those weird "session expired" errors after hitting the back button, you've ran into the pitfalls of doing it this way.
Show HN: JotSense – AI note-taking agent that extracts notes from any source
by cabrel_douanla | 2025-04-23 02:51:18+00:00
I built JotSense, an AI note-taking agent that automatically captures insights from videos, meetings, documents, web pages, emails, databases, and more.

I was frustrated with switching between tools just to organize my thoughts and save content. So I created JotSense to automate it all — for myself and now for others too. The key features are: - Cross-platform automated note-taking: Works with videos, meetings, docs, emails, databases, and more

- AI assistant for chat, search, and organization

- Integrations: Zoom, Google Meet, Gmail, Notion, Google Drive, etc.

- Real-time transcription of meetings and calls

- Reminders to revisit notes when it matters

The goal is simple: Stop taking notes. Start taking action.
by pests | 2025-04-23 02:52:41+00:00
Never did I ever once think React would one day be compared to PHP.

Reading that post the other day and seeing modern terminology being applied to old backend rendering was quite the experience. "Imagine on initial page load it returns the complete screen UI with all props and components already hydrated".

I remember those days but I remember some of the bad as well. I really started to hate that every UI change in the template/HTML meant changing the page controller to handle the new data. I specifically remember wanting some technology that allowed the UI to dictate what data it needed.

The pendulum swings though and it seems we are reversing course lately. Perhaps we land on a solid middle ground finally.
by fastball | 2025-04-23 02:52:52+00:00
If you want to compare Solid to Vue, I think it is easier to just compare React to Vue. If you like React better, then you can compare React to Solid and see which you prefer. SolidJs is 90% similar to React in terms of DX, with only a coupler major differences.

Things the same as React in Solid: function-based components with hooks, JSX, overall "JS-first" (vs Vue which I'd describe as "HTML first")

Things different from React in Solid: "signals" instead of state (observer pattern), built-in components for rendering control flow (<Show />, <For />, etc), direct manipulation of the DOM. All these differences combine to the overall main difference, which is that React kinda revolves around an immutable re-render cycle where a function is re-run in its entirety to create a new vDOM representation each time, while Solid renders a component once then only selectively re-reruns parts of the component / mutates the DOM.

So I'd say pretty much the only similarity between Vue and Solid (contrasted with React) is the built-in components for control flow. Everything else is the same differences or similarities that Vue has with React.
by jordanb | 2025-04-23 02:53:56+00:00
Banks want to keep working with PE because banks have a lot of M&A business, and PE firms are the high-dealflow clients of their M&A arm. If Elliot (to pick a vulture at random) hires you to do mergers they're going to expect you to also help with the financing.

The banks don't end up being the bag-holders in any case, because they securitize the loans.

PE firms mostly make money on the management fees they charge the company, and by stripping assets, so they're often OK if they lose money on the ownership stake. In any case, the PE principals make money from their LPs with fat fees on assets under management so even if the entire investment goes south, it's the LPs who ultimately take the hit (5-10 years later) and not the principals.
by kevinventullo | 2025-04-23 02:56:30+00:00
With non-mutable “streaming” input, there is an O(n) algorithm to obtain the unsorted top k with only O(k) extra memory.

The basic idea is to maintain a buffer of size 2k, run mutable unsorted top k on that, drop the smaller half (i.e the lowest k elements), then stream in the next k elements from the main list. Each iteration takes O(k), but you’re processing k elements at a time, so overall runtime is O(n).

When you’re done, you can of course sort for an additional k*log(k) cost.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-23 02:56:35+00:00
>> Lenders aren't dumb. They know the reputation of the PE performing the buyout. If that particular firm has a terrible track record money to lenders, the lender will want to be compensated for that risk.

That's not a bust out then. If the lenders get compensated for their risk it's just a business decision.

The accusation was "The company has a bunch of loans it will never be able to pay off (sucks for the lenders)".

The accusation was that the lenders were in fact dumb.

So which is it?
by cabrel_douanla | 2025-04-23 02:57:22+00:00
I’m a developer who was constantly switching between tabs, trying to take notes during meetings, bookmarking articles, and manually summarizing YouTube videos just to stay on top of things. It was exhausting.

So I built JotSense AI — an automated note-taking agent that captures and organizes information from anywhere: videos, articles, documents, meetings, audio, and even web pages.

How it works: -It uses speech-to-text and LLMs to transcribe and summarize meetings or podcasts in real-time. -You can paste a YouTube link, blog post, or webpage, and it instantly gives you a clean, structured summary. -It integrates with tools like Zoom, Notion, and Gmail (in progress). - Notes are auto-organized, synced across devices, and you can chat with them later to find what you need.

Why it’s different: - It’s not just a note app — it’s an autonomous AI assistant that captures and organizes what matters for you. - I designed it to be 95% automated so I could focus on thinking and doing, not writing things down.

Still early, but I’m iterating based on feedback and real use cases. Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback. Happy to answer questions here!
by sophiebits | 2025-04-23 02:57:53+00:00
It’s fair, the docs could be better! And there are certainly subtleties with hooking up the router and bundler and everything. However I will say that really there is no funny business going on.

Basically the entire elaborate RSC apparatus just ultimately outputs a tree of plain React elements with promises and <Suspense> to make it streamy. Sounds like groundbreaking simplicity to me! I kid a bit but really I’m not sure that the RSC wire format is any easier as an output target than the existing public React client API.

Maybe I should make a little demo to show that.

But anyway the point is that the wire format is an implementation detail because the two sides of the wire are actually the same program. Even if they’re running on two different computers.
by fastball | 2025-04-23 03:00:26+00:00
When Homebrew started (and when I switched) the community was significantly smaller than MacPorts. It is due to the system you mention (and the community that this MX in turn cultivated) that allowed brew to dominate the mac packaging market.

Absolutely MacPorts and Sapphire can adopt the same strategy, but the point is that brew already has, so what exactly would the benefit be? e.g. if the language of choice is effectively meaningless, re-writing homebrew in Rust serves effectively no purpose. This is contrasted with systems and software where the performance or correctness is the most important feature, and therefore RIIR can be a big win.

Said another way: Brew was not "re-write MacPorts in Ruby", it had much loftier goals which it then executed on effectively. Sapphire mostly seems to be "re-write Brew in Rust", without much beyond that. So the only real gain is a bit more performance out of the CLI.
by Reason077 | 2025-04-23 03:00:30+00:00
I wish Apple would bring back the Dashboard for modern macOS versions, using the modern widget technology. I like the modern widgets but it's awkward that you can only use them on the desktop or notification centre. It's been gone for years now, but I still really miss Dashboard!

What I'd like is:

* Dashboard is a special desktop that appears to the left of the main desktop

* Can be accessed with a single F-key press, or by swiping with the trackpad/Magic Mouse

* Widgets can be organised/laid out any way you like, anywhere on the screen
by blindprogrammer | 2025-04-23 03:01:06+00:00
>I'm not sure what it means. It's a PDF reader? It's another format that is similar PDF but more screen reader friendly?

Yes, a PDF alternative optimized for screen readers. For some reason, PDFs have clunky functionality when it comes to working with my screen reader. PDF URLs are especially egregious—VoiceOver really struggles to read them. So, I started writing a new file format that allows screen reader compatibility from the start.

>The data is open, so it may be useful to build an easier to use client, so you don't have to collect all the info.

Yes, I know that website—I’ll use it if I need it. So far, I’ve been preoccupied with some other data that neither Open Maps nor Google provides. I’m about 30–35% done. I also have to think about whether to go open or closed source before using their data. Even though what they provide is mostly public domain, nonetheless, I want to stick to my own principles: credit/donate where it’s due, or go without.

>There is no obligation as a maintainer to merge all PR. But remember to be nice.

Good advice.
by alexSimpson96 | 2025-04-23 03:01:12+00:00
If you ever get a chance to go into a book store in China and see the books printed, I think this might help with motivation. To me, going in these stores and holding a physical Chinese book with all the characters printed is so cool. The first book I read in Chinese was 卖血记 by 许三观。It's a good book by itself, but the main motivation that got me to finish it was the feeling that I was able to understand this classic Chinese literature and read it exactly as the author intended, rather than reading a translation.

After a few books, just the excitement of being able to read novels in Chinese is probably not enough though. At that point, it needs to be a book you genuinely like. I'm lucky that the 三体 books are interesting to me, they will keep me busy for a while.

Connecting people to media they like in other languages is a good idea though. Maybe I'll try sharing more about the best novels to read in Chinese as some point.
by ivape | 2025-04-23 03:02:31+00:00
Would you consider that OPS or DevOps? It's DevOps that's insane with all that bullshit, but I always felt like regular OPS teams just kinda keep it pretty classic/standard. The under-reported story on HN is that devops has been just as bad as other more popular punching bags for churn. We went wrong somewhere in the mid 2010s with everything, that's just my feeling.
by scythe | 2025-04-23 03:02:51+00:00
You can probably calculate the value of P_n(x) using the equation:

P_n(x) = (2 - 1/n) x P_{n-1}(x) - (1 - 1/n) P_{n-2}(x)

This is numerically stable if x is in [0,1], but I haven't validated that you can get to very high n using floating point.