MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2025-04-05 09:06:59+00:00
You can do absolutely anything to things you own, including cars. That's kinda the point of ownership. Cut it in half if you want. Smash it to pieces. It's all good.

I guess what you're really referring to is whether it's still legal to drive on the public highway. As far as I know you can still do anything as long as it still passes the MOT test for roadworthiness. People do engine swaps. You do have to consider insurance, though, which is also a legal requirement for use on the public highway. General insurers typically won't insure modified cars, but there are specialist insurers that will.

As I understand the US is far more lax in its vehicle testing than other places, but this isn't really related to ownership and being able to modify things you own.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-05 09:07:19+00:00
The US would be far better off to re-institute the original structure. Let the federal government do none of this, don't even have a federal income tax, and then California can have socialized healthcare and Texas can have low taxes and people can decide where they want to live.

Common defense is mostly relevant in wartime. The level of military adventurism the US engages in isn't anything Europe should covet.
by otterley | 2025-04-05 09:08:21+00:00
> when you import, you send your currency overseas to pay for the goods.

As a general rule, this is false. Mexican importers do not pay for U.S. goods in pesos. With few exceptions, importers have to sell their local currency on the market, exchange it for the exporter’s currency, and pay for the goods with that.

Some exporters will accept the importer’s currency as an accommodation, but they’ll just sell the currency to exchange it for their own, because they have to pay for everything at home with the local currency. If I were a U.S. exporter, I couldn’t pay for my groceries with Euros.
by brigade | 2025-04-05 09:08:24+00:00
Which big mass spammers are you thinking of? The only ones I can think of are political campaigns; scams obviously can’t be compliant at all. And even political campaigns are having to switch providers once or twice a year since they generate over 90% of spam reports and don’t actually bother with even opt-out compliance.

Any legitimate business that’s actually compliant will respect opt-outs and actually stop texting after a STOP, and I seriously doubt they would actually survive if they blasted away with unsolicited a2p texting these days.
by xnorswap | 2025-04-05 09:09:50+00:00
Sparklines are not bar graphs, they're lines, hence the name. If you have a copy of Tufte*, you can find them on page 171.

Tufte has written up a history here: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/sparklines-history-by-t...

This tool doesn't really create sparklines, but it does create small charts, although given it is delivered via custom font, it's usefulness is limited.

* And anyone interested in displaying information is doing themselves a disservice without a copy of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-05 09:09:56+00:00
I think the question and the answer conflate two very different threat models.

Back in the day, everything of interest was on the device, and to be search-resistant, it was necessary to encrypt and hide it well. And most answers still seem to assume this is the case.

Nowadays, though, almost everything of interest is stored in the cloud and what the cops/CBP/three-letter agencies want is the credentials to access those. Sure, you can make their life a bit harder by logging out of everything, so access is not completely trivial, but they can still stick you in detention (or worse) until you cough up your passwords, regardless of what is or is not on your device. And the only way around this is to never show up on their radar in the first place.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-05 09:10:16+00:00
Every web server claims to be fast, so I wonder how they define that. As someone who has written their own supposedly fast web server I only want configuration simplicity. Most web servers are unnecessarily far too complicated.

In a web server here is what I am looking for:

* Fast. That is just a matter of streams and pipes. More on this later. That said the language the web server is written in largely irrelevant to its real world performance so long as it can execute low level streams and pipes.

* HTTP and WebSocket support. Ideally a web server will support both on the same port. It’s not challenging because you just have to examine the first incoming payload on the connection.

* Security. This does not have to be complicated. Let the server administrator define their own security rules and just execute those rules on incoming connections. For everything that fails just destroy the connection. Don’t send any response.

* Proxy/reverse proxy support. This is more simple than it sounds. It’s just a pipe to another local existing stream or piping to a new stream opened to a specified location. If authentication is required it can be the same authentication that sits behind the regular 403 HTTP response. The direction of the proxy is just a matter of who pipes to who.

* TLS with and without certificate trust. I HATE certificates with extreme anger, especially for localhost connections. A good web server will account for that anger.

* File system support. Reading from the file system for a specific resource by name should be a low level stream via file descriptor piped back to the response. If this specific file system resource is something internally required by the application, like a default homepage it should be read only once and then forever fetched from memory by variable name. Displaying file system resources, like a directory listing, doesn’t have to be slow or primitive or brittle.
by monkeycantype | 2025-04-05 09:11:06+00:00
Ok, I was confused by this, I had vastly overcomplicated what I thought you had to do, confused by the word 'loop'

the only thing you can do in the puzzle is hide or reveal squares from the edges in.

your goal is to make sure the number of contiguous square in the shape formed by a given square and the squares up,down,left,right equals the number in the square,

the red number is just tally letting you know how far you are from your target
by tasuki | 2025-04-05 09:12:05+00:00
> Losing for a bit of inflation is better than losing 20-30% in a recession.

Except you can't time it like that. Inflation eats your savings all the time, while recessions are short.

I have a friend who's been saying "stocks are too risky" since about 2010. He prefers the predictable ~3% inflation...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-05 09:12:05+00:00
This is one that I slapped up, many years ago: https://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html (the site, itself, is pretty much moribund).

I took the code from some other site. Can’t remember where, exactly. Like much of Internet history, it seems to be lost in the mists of time.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-05 09:12:18+00:00
> the rhytm of the typeface

That's what the parent commenter means by 'They just matched the outer dimensions of Whitney'.

In other words, metrically compatible. To the untrained eye, metrically compatible typefaces all look the same, because they're meant to be swapped between each other. In my view Whitney and Source Sans couldn't be more different. The stroke cuts in Whitney are angled, they're perpendicular in Source Sans. The lowercase 'b', 'e', and 'g' are very different in both fonts.
by makingstuffs | 2025-04-05 09:12:18+00:00
From my experience booking.com is the most guest hostile platform I’ve experienced to the point I try to actively avoid it. I travel A LOT and can book anything from 20 - 40 stays per jaunt. Whenever I have encountered a problem on booking it has always been met with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ tough shit energy.

I remember one specific incident when a hotel had purposefully put me in a noisy room (I saw a sheet on the reception desk labelling it as ‘ruidosas’ which means noisy in Spanish). I took a video of it against the receptionists will and ensured I got the logo of the hotel in as well. When I reported to booking they essentially told me to jog on.

On the contrary, anytime I’ve had an issue with Airbnb they have sided with me and provided a refund/assisted me with finding better accommodation.

This isn’t a ‘you book more with us thing’, either. I have substantially more bookings on booking due to the prevalence in Asia but they literally could not care less
by ulfw | 2025-04-05 09:12:48+00:00
Location: Sydney, Australia

Remote: Preferred, Yes worldwide possible (as either part time, fractional, consulting, board, advisory, freelance or similar arrangement)

Willing to relocate: Yes. Preferably Australia, Hong Kong, APAC. Not USA.

Results-oriented Product Management and People Leader with 15+ years of experience in the Mobile and Internet industries, known for driving innovation, high-impact growth, and strategic product direction. Stanford MBA with a proven track record in scaling multi-million dollar products across global markets, leveraging expertise in AI/ML, UX/UI, and e-commerce to deliver user-centric solutions. Accomplished executive in leading organizations like Google, Myspace, Booking Holdings (Agoda), Skyscanner, and multiple startups through growth and transformation.

EU national, permanent resident of Australia and Hong Kong.

Résumé/CV: http://www.ulfw.com/docs/CVulfw.pdf

LinkedIn Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waschbusch/

eMail: calstanford at gmail dot com
by nakedneuron | 2025-04-05 09:16:36+00:00
It's incredible how deeply ingrained in memory some of those songs are that I immediately start to notice the slightest deviation.

Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.

As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.
by navane | 2025-04-05 09:16:44+00:00
The point of that quote is not at all that those minds are so smart, but rather that their industry is sad and detrimental.

That is: to fan the fire that is burning the world so that a select few can get more comfortable.

I'm not talking about a flyer here or a store face there, but there is definitely a point where ads don't benefit us anymore. Can I buy the sky and project ads on it? Can I buy the ocean and project ads on it?
by Findecanor | 2025-04-05 09:17:04+00:00
Oh, USB 1.1 at the transport layer and lower is not that difficult.

But there is more complexity on higher layers. USB HID (mice and keyboards) is often the first you'd want but it is special in that it allows a device to describe its own packet format in a tokenised data description language. The device only has to send an additional blob when asked, but the host has to parse the contents of that blob and use the result to parse the device's packets.

And of course, every time there is complexity in a protocol and there are multiple implementations of it, there is more opportunity for them to be incompatible in very subtle ways. This phenomenon has caused for example that some gaming keyboards with N-key rollover that work perfectly on MS-Windows without any special drivers have been rejected outright by Apple or Linux hosts. (I hope these issues have been fixed now, but I'm not sure).
by rapjr9 | 2025-04-05 09:17:15+00:00
I think price uncertainty is already hitting eBay. A few days ago I looked at the price of cheap musical instruments (a student violin and a trumpet that each cost $25 several years ago) and the low price is now $129. Some things seem to have disappeared almost entirely from eBay (most small portable ozone generators). Maybe this is temporary until sellers figure it all out.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-05 09:17:28+00:00
> There is very little actually wanted SMS comms between users and businesses.

In total SMS sure. And those corps that send the 90% pay TCR so they can keep sending that unwanted SMS. TCR is a good fit for the biggest spammers.

Conversely, 100% of the SMS I send to my customers are wanted; they pay to support them and SMS is how they want that to happen.

My customers have their own customers - who also want to comm using SMS.

For us, TCR has mostly killed off our SMS access to ur customers. None of my MNVO lines carry SMS any longer, because of the onerous TCR compliance burdens.

Likewise my clients can no longer SMS their customers - even though it has long been an expected part of their relationship.

To recap:

1) TCR harms small biz who send wanted, necessary and consensual SMS.

2) TCR also protect bulk senders of unwanted SMS senders, because they have paid for that protection.

Vigorously throwing shade at 1 while voicing no meaningful objection to 2 seems like an unfortunate position.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-05 09:17:49+00:00
> Without landlords we wouldn’t have a chunk of the housing supply held captive as investment, driving costs out of reach for most of the non-HN-reading audience.

That isn't caused by landlords, it's caused by zoning boards.

Suppose you have a city with a growing population. Then you need someone to pay construction companies to build more housing. When the new residents can afford a down payment, they pay the construction company themselves by taking out a mortgage. When they can't, a landlord does it, or else who? The tenant doesn't have a down payment and needs somewhere to live. The somewhere to live doesn't exist unless someone pays the construction company.

The problem only comes when the zoning board stops the construction company from increasing the housing supply. Then a landlord who wants to invest in property has to buy existing property instead of causing more to be created. This is the actual problem.

It doesn't matter if landlords want to fund the creation of lots of new housing by supplying capital to pay for it. That's even good. It's only when the creation of new housing is inhibited that things go sour.
by ncruces | 2025-04-05 09:18:25+00:00
Yeah, this is what I do for my Go SQLite driver: reserve a large amount of memory through a protected, private, anonymous mapping, then grow it as needed, hoping that's “free”: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/v0.25.0/internal/...

The default was to reserve 4GB per connection, because each Wasm sandbox can allocate at most that, and each connection is its own sandbox.

It works fine, until it doesn't and I get users complaining this messes up almost everything slightly more complicated than Linux on bare metal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057378

Now I do mostly the same, but reserve 256MB (or even less) per connection. It works, but it's not free.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-05 09:19:56+00:00
I think re-evaluation of biases regarding what a single computer/cpu/thread can do would go a long way for a lot of developers.

Having hundreds or thousands of cores to work with is meaningless if the state between those threads is constantly in another castle. Having to go to DRAM or another CCX is a very expensive operation compared to staying within L1/L2 on a single core.

Put differently, if the problem generally has a serialized narrative of events that must be followed (e.g., how we action the current event depends on all prior events being resolved), then spreading the problem across many threads will only slow us down. Contention will immediately dominate. This is where we get things like single writer principle from.

There aren't very many problems that a business would pay you to write software for that are not of the serialized narrative variety. Most ordinary people aren't thinking in terms of mutexes and semaphores. They are thinking in terms of what is effectively a gigantic interpreter lock over their enterprise.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-04-05 09:20:46+00:00
I was raised by two Quakers with Quaker ancestry going back hundreds of years. On one hand the religion frowns upon evangelism. But on the other hand I think the world would be a better place with more Quakers in it. I just try to share my values with others and hope to make at least a tiny positive influence on the world.
by koliber | 2025-04-05 09:20:52+00:00
I’m surprised that “Add caching” is not on that list. Maybe he bundled it under one of the first four. Caching is used so extensively as an optimization method that we don’t even notice it. L1 cache, edge computing, memoization, web browser cache, and file system caches are examples of how pervasive caching is.
by parodysbird | 2025-04-05 09:21:11+00:00
America didn't lose the Iraq War to Saddam, it lost to disparate groups of Islamic jihadis who read some Mao.

Losing a war is not body counts, it's a military withdrawal after a failure to achieve objectives. It doesn't mean there are winners.

America went into Afghanistan to destroy Al-qaeda and remove the Taliban from power. At the end of the war, the Taliban were back in power and global jihadism is even stronger and more pervasive than before. That is losing a war.

Pax Americana shows that big militarized states like the US and Russia (before that USSR) do not wield the operational war power they imagine. They lose every war they start (which, again, is not to say there is a triumphant winner).
by inejge | 2025-04-05 09:21:37+00:00
> I was just blown away they send you all that material for free by simply applying.

It was a hangover from their days a quasi-socialist, monopolistic enterprise ("We're the Phone Company"), when they could afford to be "inefficient" in that way -- scare quotes because it's difficult to calculate the cost of preparation and dissemination against all the high-value careers the material may have inspired. These days, an accountant would glance at the cost and cut it out without thinking twice.
by thephyber | 2025-04-05 09:23:19+00:00
Did you miss the year of press cycles where this guy took El Salvador from one of the worst crime rates in the Western Hemisphere to one of the best by liberally arresting anyone he thought might be related to crime gangs?

From Wikipedia:

> During his presidency, Bukele enacted tough-on-crime policies that scholars have characterized as successfully reducing gang activity and violent crime at the cost of arbitrary arrest and alleged widespread human rights abuses.
by thih9 | 2025-04-05 09:23:51+00:00
> Your pet will gain XP as you code in either mode.

Feature request: the pet gets extra experience in certain situations, e.g.:

* when a failing build gets fixed

* when a previously red test gets green

* when the typing speed is sufficiently high

* when a commit is made that removes a lot of code

* when a commit is made that increases code coverage

* etc…
by ein0p | 2025-04-05 09:25:28+00:00
What do you mean? We can't afford to finance their security anymore. Nor can we afford their protective tariffs against our goods. Why can't we afford it? Because we're running $1.8T budget deficit, and paying $1T+ in interest on our debt next year. Because each man, woman and child in the US already owes $100K+ straight from birth. Do you just want to keep adding to that number hoping that we'll never turn into Zimbabwe?
by belter | 2025-04-05 09:26:02+00:00
The best suggestion to get a core review of the basic concepts as starter, and that Dave from the EEVblog [1] recommended several times, is the section Fundamentals of Radio Electronics from [2] - "The Arrl Handbook for Radio Communications" . Plus you get all the other stuff around Radio.

It will cover all the basics. Old ones can be found on the intertubes. It is now a classical. Even used 2015 versions go for $300 dollars or more.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@EEVblog/playlists

{2] https://www.arrl.org/arrl-handbook-2023
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-05 09:28:08+00:00
> 2. There's a frak ton of small businesses out there. I'm not going to call 15 local restaurants, 5 clinics, 12 PV solar peddlers, 20 MLM representatives and a sex shop, to tell them all to "knock it off".

Good because none of them are bulk sending sms spam. Or likely sending any biz SMS thanks to TCR.

Meanwhile the actual bulk senders of SMS are happily firehosing it to millions of phones, thanks to the protections they purchase - also thanks to TCR.
by yorwba | 2025-04-05 09:29:54+00:00
This is exactly what's happening here. But note that UTF-8 is self-synchronizing, so no encoding of one character contains the encoding of another as a subsequence. Instead, both tag characters and the Byzantine music notation in the article look like "<some prefix bytes> <byte pattern of the corresponding ASCII character + 96>"

They share this property with the Fullwidth Latin block, which does occur in the wild interspersed with Japanese or Chinese text.
by roenxi | 2025-04-05 09:30:17+00:00
You meet people who are terrified by mice and spiders. Doesn't mean that they are threatened by them. I've yet to see a protest that was the decisive part of a political movement; they don't do anything. It is easier to get a message out there with a stopthewar.tld website than a protest. Websites are articulate, protests are just a mess.
by ohgr | 2025-04-05 09:30:29+00:00
No. This book won’t teach you that because based on the author’s previous work he doesn’t either. He knows how to sell books.

If you really want to know how transistors work and how to use them properly it’s going to be difficult as they sit on a fairly large pile of algebra and theory. If you don’t know this you might be able to get simple circuits working by cutting and pasting bits but you won’t be able to get past that ever.

The best references on this are actually The Art of Electronics. Not necessarily the main book but the associated student manual. Also the book Experimental Methods in RF Design by Wes Hayward actually has the most useful functional description and modelling approach of transistors.
by xorcist | 2025-04-05 09:30:36+00:00
Most of these things are much harder to get right that you make it sound. Perhaps proxying most so. It is a legitimately hard problem. Look at something like Varnish, which is likely one of the better proxies out there. It took many years to get good.

I never had to write a proxy and am grateful for it. You have to really understand the whole network stack, window sizes and the effects of buffering, what to do about in flight requests, and so on. Just sending stuff from the file system is comparatively easier where you have things such as sendfile, provided you get the security implications of file paths right.
by orwin | 2025-04-05 09:30:55+00:00
The issue is that what we often think as our 'reason' is often rather post-hoc rationalisation, which then becomes our beliefs, as our brain hate being wrong. People who can easily and often say 'i was wrong, it's my bad' without throwing shade at other people are nice. People who, during an argument, can say 'you're right, sorry'? Keep them close, or better, marry them.
by 1rvinn | 2025-04-05 09:31:22+00:00
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