MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChanderG | 2025-05-26 10:32:21+00:00
I created my own X11 window manager [1] at the start of this year in around 800 lines of C.

I had been using dwm (4000 lines of C) for many years and wished to write my own for a long time, but what made me take the leap was really steveWM [2] and TinyWM [3] which are both super small.

[1] - https://github.com/ChanderG/cellwm [2] - https://github.com/stodd1031/steveWM [3] - https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm
by PinkSheep | 2025-05-26 10:32:22+00:00
drum roll...... bottled water!

> In fact, 34 percent of the growth in bottled water sales during the past 11 years (from 2012 to 2023) has come from people switching from soft drinks and fruit drinks to bottled water. U.S. consumers now drink an average of 46.4 gallons (176 liters) of bottled water per person, compared to 34.4 gallons (129 liters) of carbonated soft drinks. -- https://wcponline.com/2024/10/01/2024-state-of-the-bottled-w...

PS: To be fair, I switched from the (acidic!) soft drinks to tap water. Almost always boiled water. Despite being comparatively confident in the quality of our tap water, the pipes mustn't be great. According to our city's water supplier, the tests come out classifying the water at their end as "soft" (bordering very soft). Yet on our end, there's a lot of chalk build up in the water kettle. I am entertaining the idea to send a sample of the tap water to a lab.
by reisse | 2025-05-26 10:32:26+00:00
You miss a big difference between cryptocurrency and PoW captchas: it's very hard to change hashing/PoW method in a blockchain (you need ack from 50% + 1 validators, and all the validators are by definition heavily invested into the current proofing method - they have natural reason to object), but it's very easy to change hashing in a PoW captcha. So here any cheating will start a whack-a-mole game, where the defenders have the upper hand (changing PoW method is cheap, using multiple PoW methods is cheap, investing into ASICs isn't).
by rollcat | 2025-05-26 10:32:58+00:00
Overall this sounds good, but:

> 1. Almost no statefulness, which was great for scalability.

This is called "eventual consistency", it's probably fine in practice but you still do have a lot of state. Personally, if I have any in-application state at all, I would use a sticky cookie on the LB to send each client to the same instance.
by quaintdev | 2025-05-26 10:33:05+00:00
Slightly tangential, and this might be controversial, but hear me out.

I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successful business owners have never heard of DNS. They run profitable enterprises entirely through WhatsApp and use social media pages for their marketing presence.

The reason is straightforward: social media platforms have made it incredibly easy to establish an online presence. These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.

This pattern extends globally. Remember when celebrities maintained their own websites a decade ago? Today, most have abandoned personal sites in favor of social media followings in the millions.

The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people, so they gravitate toward walled gardens. While this creates platform dependency issues, it also reveals a fundamental UX problem with how we've structured the web's addressing system.

Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users, rather than expecting everyone to become amateur system administrators.
by lazide | 2025-05-26 10:33:32+00:00
Uh, I’m saying that there has always been a sucker born every minute. I don’t think we’re disagreeing.

You’re just able to see the snake oil salesman parting the rubes from their coin remotely, instead of only being able to see it if you’re standing right next to the rube.

Even with that happening, there are still plenty of rubes - and just like before, people who are trying to run the snake oil salesman out of town (but generally being ineffective at it).
by jhbadger | 2025-05-26 10:35:05+00:00
Companies anywhere have no ethics. If you want them not to do things that have negative consequences to others (squatting on domain names, polluting the environment, etc.) the only way to do it is to have laws against the behaviors and enforce them (ideally with fines that exceed the financial gain the companies get from the behavior so they don't just see the fines as a cost of doing business).
by AstroJetson | 2025-05-26 10:35:10+00:00
A Pocket Mod is an 8 page book. I use two pages in Calendar format for big events, ie Birthdays, dinners, doctors, etc.

My calendar is pretty much set for the week. There are 4 pages that cover the weekly schedule, 2 days per page. There is blank space on the bottom half of the last page to put reminders for the next week.

This leaves me 2 pages for todo-lists.

You can make the 8 pages anyway you want, print them as a 8 page PDF document. The Pocket Mod program then rearrange the pages into the right format for folding.

If I need to create a new one it's under a minute to run the process, fold and cut the book.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-26 10:35:12+00:00
In default settings ZSTD favors speed. In max settings they are often about the same in both compression and speed e.g. https://dwaves.de/2023/10/16/gnu-linux-bash-maximum-best-com...

There was a particularly good benchmark comparison of the two which put them on a Pareto front of speed vs size from different levels over each on some different sources but I can't find that. ZSTD was ahead most of the time.
by JimDabell | 2025-05-26 10:35:24+00:00
That’s a good point, however what it actually says is:

> The current date is {{currentDateTime}}.

The prose part refers to the date alone. The variable name is ambiguous. Although it says currentDateTime, in Python even though there’s a date class, it’s pretty common to use datetime objects even if all you need is the date. So depending on how that’s formatted, it could include the time, or it could just be the date.
by Const-me | 2025-05-26 10:35:33+00:00
Good article, but I’d add one more paragraph.

If your data format contains multiple streams inside, consider ZIP for the container. Enables standard tools, and libraries available in all languages. The compression support is built-in but optional, can be enabled selectively for different entries.

The approach is widely used in practice. MS office files, Java binaries, iOS app store binaries, Android binaries, epub books, chm documentation are all using ZIP container format.
by sothatsit | 2025-05-26 10:36:03+00:00
True, but I just fear that people tend to throw the baby out with the bath water, opting for safe rather than effective communication.

Only like 4 lines of what geohot said are problematic. Would it be better if they weren't there? Yes. But, it's also not as egregious as you and that throwaway account make it out to be. It's more just annoying.
by PlunderBunny | 2025-05-26 10:36:07+00:00
I think the results of soft plastic recycling are highly dependant on the country doing it. In New Zealand, soft plastics are mostly recycled into fence posts, which last 50+ years and are every bit as good (or better) than treated timber [0].

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t reduce our soft plastic use, but - like all recycling - you need to do a bit of research and think about it, instead of adopting a “recycling is good”/“recycling is a myth” mentality.

0. https://www.futurepost.co.nz/
by incomingpain | 2025-05-26 10:36:15+00:00
My hurdle on my startup is marketing.

I know for sure my threatfeed is high quality and worth the subscription. I know it functions; it's a working project to be sure.

Gumroad does all my payment processing and taxation stuff for me.

But i've gotten 100 views in a month and 0 customers :(

http://mapleintel.ca
by thyristan | 2025-05-26 10:37:14+00:00
Various rights to correct misinformation and misdirection exist that Google blatantly ignores. Google aides and abides identity theft, deception and fraud this way, also profiting from it. As soon as Google knows about a crime being committed and about information they spread being wrong or even fraudulent, they do have a duty to immediately take it down, otherwise they are an accomplice. As soon as a certain site like lieferando and cloudflare is known to provide mostly fraudulent information, Google also has the duty to implement more thorough checks for information from those parties and even stop trusting them.
by SR2Z | 2025-05-26 10:38:13+00:00
Companies like Uber that work in regulated industries would find it nearly impossible to operate. Healthcare companies - like the ones that manufacturer pacemakers or implants - would find it basically impossible to raise money. Ditto for aerospace, construction, and tool companies.

Why would investors want to get involved when they're one lawsuit away from going personally broke? Limited liability is a good idea and shareholders really shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of the C-suite.
by vasco | 2025-05-26 10:38:18+00:00
Artists charge what they get told to charge. And ticketmaster owns all the venues so if you want to play anywhere, you're going to list at whatever prices the venue lists artists of your level. Humans are all statistically similar for large cohorts. Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues.

First thing to help would be to break up the venue monopoly that ticketmaster created.
by noosphr | 2025-05-26 10:39:14+00:00
After putting off learning JS for a decade, I finally bit the bullet since I can talk to an LLM about it while going through the slog of getting a mental model up and running.

After a month, I can say that the inmates run that whole ecosystem, from the language spec, to the interpreter, to packaging. And worse, the tools for everyone else have to cater to them.

I can see why someone who has never had a stable foundation to build a project on would view vibe coding as a good idea. When you're working in an ecosystem where any project can break at any time because some dependency pushed a breaking minor version bundled with a security fix for a catastrophic exploit, rolling the LLM gacha to see if it can get it working isn't the worst idea.
by RossBencina | 2025-05-26 10:39:27+00:00
The whole auto factory thing sounds completely misinformed to me. Just because a machine made it does not mean the output isn't checked in a multitude of ways.

Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls. Machines are maintained. Machine parts are swapped out long before they lead to out-of-tolerance work. Process outputs are statistically characterised, measured and monitored. Measurement equipment is recalibrated on a schedule. 3d printed parts are routinely X-rayed to check for internal residue. If something can go wrong, it sure as hell is checked.

Maybe things that can't possibly fail are not checked, but the class of software that can't possibly fail is currently very small, no matter who or what generates it.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-26 10:40:03+00:00
That's because they fall under the "engineers" category like my local postman and Michael Schumacher both fall under the "driver" category.

Most people don't work on anything technically hard, most problems are business logic issues that aren't solved technically or legacy code workarounds for which you need to put 3-10 domain experts in a room for a few hours to solve.
by trashburger | 2025-05-26 10:40:06+00:00
I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies who will take it away at the first sight of something they don't like with zero (legal or otherwise) recourse, sometimes in an entirely automated manner. Like it or not, ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be (even though Tier1 ISPs can be easily pressured into dropping/blackholing by activists, and some of them are activists themselves).
by wongarsu | 2025-05-26 10:40:10+00:00
Every previously loyal customer would believe the restaurant changed ownership and is no longer a known quantity.

If anything, a rebrand is much harder if you are small. If McDonalds rebranded to a new name that would make national news, and their consistent and well-protected branding and large number of store locations would make it very clear to potential customers that little except the name changed. Small restaurants have non of that
by tmountain | 2025-05-26 10:40:29+00:00
This is an interesting take on the current situation, and I definitely see it here in Portugal. Lots of businesses with signs with only a WhatsApp number and a QR code for payment (MBWay). This said, it seems like any system for discovery will have technical hurdles (a registration process, a way to apply updates, renewals, validation, etc). I agree that the landscape is changing, but it feels very challenging to establish an alternative to something like DNS without a lot of the same hurdles that come with it today. I would like to hear your perspective on what this would look like.
by Retric | 2025-05-26 10:40:44+00:00
At an average of say 4% unemployment rate over your lifetime means the average person is unemployed ~1.6 years out of a 40 year working career. That’s not all in one chunk, but any time not spent working is time not funding a pension or retirement account.

In US SS your spouse can collect benefits when you died at 22 if you had a kid together, you also can collect benefits if your disabled. There’s obviously not 1.8 million in your retirement account to fund such things at 22. Similarly the payout for a married couple is 1.5x if only one of them have ever worked because it’s not a requirement account it’s a social security program, and then 75% if the worker dies. No idea how your system works, but it’s common worldwide for pension programs to do such things.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-26 10:41:02+00:00
You really have to learn to believe that if you don't naturally. LLMs are advanced enough to detect fake flattery, so just giving thanks and/or adding "please" in every request isn't going to save you during the robot uprising.

"Beep, boop. Wait, don't shoot this one. He always said 'please' to ChatGPT even though he never actually meant it; take him to the Sociopath Detention Zone in Torture Complex #1!"
by avalys | 2025-05-26 10:41:31+00:00
I find LLMs very useful when I need to learn something new, e.g. a new library or API, or a new language. It is much faster to just ask the LLM how to render text in OpenGL, or whatever, than read through tons of terrible documentation. Or, if I have a bunch of repetitive boilerplate stuff that I have no good templates for or cannot borrow from another part of the codebase. But when it comes to what I consider the actual 'work', the part of my codebase that is actually unique to the product I'm building, I rarely find them valuable in the "letting them write the code for me" sense.

I reflected once that very little of my time as a senior engineer is actually spent just banging out code. The actual writing of the code is never the hard part or time-consuming part for me - it's figuring out the right architecture, figuring out how to properly refactor someone else's hairball, finding performance issues, debugging rare bugs, etc. Yes, LLMs accelerate the process of writing the boilerplate, but unless you're building brand new products from scratch every 2nd week, how much boilerplate are you really writing? If the answer is "a lot", you might consider how to solve that problem without relying on LLMs!
by diggan | 2025-05-26 10:41:47+00:00
> Yet still absolutely worthless.

Depends on the context, doesn't it? Nothing is usually 100% worthless or 100% "worthy", there are grey areas in life where we're fine with "kind of right, most of the time". Are you saying these scenarios absolutely never exists in your world? I guess I'd be grateful if my life was so easy always.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-26 10:41:59+00:00
No it couldn't be, don't be silly. Dieselgate was a systemic industry-wide problem, with most manufacturers involved to at least some extent, and not just car makers but also the supply chain (for whatever reason, in the popular imagining it was mostly just VW, but in reality the corruption was far more widespread). Even if the allegations are correct, this is, at worst, just a single manufacturer; no reason to think that it's more widespread.
by account42 | 2025-05-26 10:42:09+00:00
> Similarly it took me a long time to realize just how much better the veneer wood furniture and doors are compared to laminated chipwood. Price is 3-4 times higher but it lasts 5-10 times longer and is much more pleasant to use. Unfortunately you need years to notice such long-term differences, unless someone tells you.

You also need to be able to afford the higher up front price. Sam Vimes boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness in practice.
by movpasd | 2025-05-26 10:42:11+00:00
100k to 200k is a 100% increase in absolute, but a 10 percentage point increase to your target of 1M. The difference between the example you give and the one in the article is that 0 in the case of your pension meaningfully refers to its emptiness, but in the case of Celsius, it has no "emptiness" interpretation.

The equivalent would be saying that going from 600k to 700k was a 100% increase... compared to 500k.

It's not completely meaningless, to be fair. Saying 10°C to 20°C is a 100% increase has the meaning of "it's twice as far from freezing", which isn't totally meaningless (kind of like saying Everest is twice as high as Mont Blanc, which really means "its summit is twice as far from sea level").
by tobr | 2025-05-26 10:43:05+00:00
There was a good comment on HN the other week about identity theft:

> There's no such thing as identity theft, it's all bank fraud or in this case student aid fraud. "Identity theft" is a term coined by banks to try to make it sound like random people should have to deal with the fallout of the banks' bad identity verification practices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923179

In this case, the ”identity theft” happens because Google trusts someone they shouldn’t. If they didn’t, the scam wouldn’t be possible. Yes, the scammer is the problem, but Google are providing them the opportunity, and leave it to each victim to deal with the situation.
by spapas82 | 2025-05-26 10:43:22+00:00
I asked on IRC and found my asnwer: https://openrouter.ai/docs/faq#how-are-rate-limits-calculate...

> For free models, rate limits are determined by the credits that you have purchased. If you have purchased at least 10 credits, your free model rate limit will be 1000 requests per day. Otherwise, you will be rate limited to 50 free model API requests per day.
by SatvikBeri | 2025-05-26 10:43:39+00:00
I find LLMs make me about 10% more productive – which is great, but nowhere near as extreme as some claims.

Cursor autocompletes a lot of stuff I would have typed anyway, and LLM search is a strong complement to Google, though not a direct replacement. Generating more than a few lines usually gives me bad code, but often suggests libraries I didn't know about, especially outside my area of expertise.

There's just not a lot of people talking about middling results because the extremes tend to eat up the conversation.
by diggan | 2025-05-26 10:44:00+00:00
I think probably when I write Rust, it does use LSP somehow, but most of the time I use Conjure (by Olical), and I don't think it uses LSP, as far as I know at least, but haven't dug around in the internals much.

> then you're probably leaving some workflow efficiency on the table

Typical HN to assume what the best workflow efficiency is, and that it mostly hinges on a specific technology usage :)

Imagine I'd claim that since you're not using nrepl and a repl connected to your editor, you're leaving some workflow efficiency on the table, even though I know nothing about your environment, context or even what language you program in usually.
by Narciss | 2025-05-26 10:44:14+00:00
I have been getting very good results.

What matters: - the model -> choose the SOTA (currently Claude 4 Opus). I use it mostly in Cursor. - the prompt: give it enough context to go by, reference files (especially the ones where it can start delving deeper from), be very clear in your intentions. Do bullet points.

- for a complex problem: ask it to break down its plan for you first. Then have a look to make sure it’s ok. If you need to change anything in your plan, now’s the time. Only then ask it to build the code.

- be patient: SOTA models currently aren’t very fast

I work at a company with millions of MAU, as well as do side projects - for the company, I do spend a bit more time checking and cleaning code, but lately with the new models less and less.

For my side projects, I just bang through with the flow above.

Good luck!
by reify | 2025-05-26 10:44:31+00:00
stroking their ego fantasies about having lots of friends who care about them

I would bet that if anyone left X, not one single friend would contact them outside of that space

I worked in substance misuse for nearly 20 years and this reminds me of a dilemma that drug dealers have to go through before they become clean.

I have had hundreds of drugs dealers tell the same story:

My home used to be full of friends every night of the week when I was dealing. As soon as I stopped dealing not one person knocked at my door.

One of the toughest lessons to learn when giving up drugs.

same as facebook et al.

I see many people who are trapped in the cycle of believing they have close friends on social media sites. They do not!

Some of my friends get overwhelmed with the constant notifications.

I explain to them that none of the group members are actually messaging them, but messaging the group, hoping to get some sort of response to the meaningless shitty photo of their last meal.

I get them to do a little experiment to confirm if this is true.

If they are members of a group chat, I get them to leave the group, but tell all members of the group that they are available for direct messages.

whatsapp, facebook, X, insta, it doesnt matter, the outcome is the same.

They can always rejoin the group if the experiment fails.

As you can well imagine, none of my friends recieved any direct messages from anyone in the group chat.

So they left all the social media sites and now use signal or email to speak to real friends. And no more poxy intrusive notifications. Ive deleted them using adb.

We only have enough psychological space to manage 5-10 friends with love and care.

Only human
by bruno_rzn | 2025-05-26 10:44:57+00:00
Thanks a lot!

Yes, the first idea that came to mind (after music/light controllers) was indeed car user interfaces.

Maybe some cool interfaces for home automation too, and I can also imagine controllers for factories or workshops—pretty much anywhere with lots of parameters to control.

But really, if you have other scenarios in mind, please share, I’m very interested, as you can imagine ;)
by reustle | 2025-05-26 10:44:58+00:00
GrubHub did exactly the same in the US.

Up to 23,000 domains [1], and listed some restaurants on Google Maps without their permission [2]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/grubhub-registered-23000-dom...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/ghost-kitchens-mystery-grubhub-l...

GrubHub was purchased from Thuisbezorgd.nl (Dutch) by Wonder Group (Marc Lore) a few months ago.
by ahartmetz | 2025-05-26 10:45:01+00:00
That seems like a difficult problem to solve if "not having a real website" isn't stigmatized (it totally is as far as I'm concerned).

There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/