MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmos0072 | 2025-06-16 14:16:46+00:00
Yep, I am well aware of the `;` vs `:` confusion in both 256 color and 24-bit color control sequences.

Short of hand-coding "which terminal supports which variant" I do not know any standard mechanism to detect that (beyond the well-known $TERM=...-256color and $COLORTERM=truecolor or $COLORTERM=24bit)

I guess I'll have to add command line options to choose among the variants 1...7 you helpfully listed above.

My main use it to render twin directly on X11, which avoids all these issues, and while rendering inside another terminal is important and is not going away, I am OK with a few minor color-related limitations (note: limitations, not bugs) in such setup, especially if the other terminal does not follow the relevant standards
by danparsonson | 2025-06-16 14:17:12+00:00
> Seems pretty intuitive to me

OK, but it's nonsense. Apart from whatever-you're-talking-about-with-C, quantum fluctuations are not Brownian motion; Brownian motion is the visible effect of a lot of invisible particles interacting kinetically with macroscopic particles like dust, making those macroscopic particles appear to vibrate of their own accord. Atoms that cannot be seen in a microscope flying around in straight lines and randomly bumping into dust particles that can be seen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion
by JohnFen | 2025-06-16 14:17:41+00:00
> If they're savvy enough to use a password manager, their email is configured on their phone too.

This is not universally true. I use a password manager, but I don't have my phone configured to access my email. Not that anyone cares, but if I have to check my email to log in to a site every time, I just won't use that site. Life is too short for that sort of high-friction nonsense.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-16 14:17:50+00:00
> I tested your file locally seems to be working correctly

Apologies if there's some unspoken nuance in this exchange, but by "working correctly" did you just mean that it ran to completion? I don't even recognize some of the unicode characters that it emitted (or maybe you're using some kind of strange font, I guess?)

Don't misunderstand me, a ginormous number of floating point numbers attempting to read that handwriting is already doing better than I can, but I was just trying to understand if you thought that outcome is what was expected
by filoleg | 2025-06-16 14:18:01+00:00
I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach.

The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.

And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.

All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.
by jihadjihad | 2025-06-16 14:18:18+00:00
Cool article, and even cooler site IMO. Brings back memories of 20 years ago, when many sites looked similar. It probably looks radically ugly to the modern eye, but I kind of miss the goofiness of pages like this, down to the poem at the bottom (in Comic Sans, no less).

Chrome probably would have kicked up some sort of fuss about it, but I was almost hoping to see .swf as the file extension for the wheel GIF at the top. Good times.
by jahnu | 2025-06-16 14:18:33+00:00
Yes it's also a problem there but WhatsApp gives you the tools to fix the problem in minutes if not seconds, or ask your tech literate relative or friend to help and it only takes them the couple of minutes to clear it and maybe show you how. With Signal it can take hours of work so what happens is the non-techy person understands "oh this app filled my phone up I shouldn't use it".
by gear54rus | 2025-06-16 14:18:46+00:00
Does anyone know what's the state of the art way for cutting crap out of android apps? In the same way adblock cuts crap out of web pages?

I assume one would need a Java disassembler at least. On desktop, something like recaf works and allows changing things in classes without the full recompilation.

Is there something like this for android?
by A_Duck | 2025-06-16 14:19:01+00:00
The trouble with charging people is you have to charge everybody the same[1], so you're leaving money on the table with wealthy users, and pricing out poorer users

Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power

Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...

[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform
by komali2 | 2025-06-16 14:19:46+00:00
I don't know the circumstances of this case, but in many states, e.g. Texas my home state, simply having above an arbitrarily defined amount of a given controlled substance automatically gets you tagged with "intent to sell." An overloaded court system combined with a pay-to-win "justice" system means a lot of people take the charge in their plea deal even if they aren't dealers.
by _wire_ | 2025-06-16 14:19:58+00:00
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S3gFaNYluBQ

This 8 part seminar by Chomsky on the "cognitive revolution" from 1990s provides context for his claims of the limits of AI through exploration of linguistics.

The point of the seminar is to offer his personal thoughts on the limits of our understanding of our own cognition through consideration of the faculty of language.

Rather than saying what can or can't be done, he discusses the limits of science with respect to our capacity to understand ourselves and other organisms, and from there generalizes towards proscribing the limits of any machinery we may build.

His thesis is know thyself.

His interest is in attempting to circumscribe the unknown under the premise that due to our biological scope and limits, we're free to traverse an edge of knowledge, but also we must face that there is always a domain of the unknown, which will forever be inaccessible to us, and that our own nature may reside within the domain of the unknowable. But rather than being a deficit or hazard, the realization leads to creative purpose as we learn to adapt to ourselves, by which we make meaningful choices in the creation of a humane world.

Before listening to this seminar, consider listening to this 1hr lecture on the history of science to see if Chomsky's style of discourse is approachable:

--Mind, language and the limits of understanding--

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWDJ2zFe4Pc
by ajkjk | 2025-06-16 14:20:11+00:00
As the other replier said, despite your dismissiveness, the knowledge about the system is in the probabilities, so it's right there in the equation.

Suppose you flip a coin. Before flipping the coin, your knowledge is "heads or tails". After flipping it, your knowledge becomes one of either heads or tails. The amount of information you gained by resolving your imperfect knowledge is the entropy of the distribution.

The same model works for physical entropy without much modification; the imperfect knowledge is the difference between knowing a macrostate versus the exact microstate.
by robertlagrant | 2025-06-16 14:20:17+00:00
> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks.

This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-16 14:20:28+00:00
Somewhat adjacent to Parkinson's law imho: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

As long as the work week is not ratcheted back as productivity increases, capital will continue to demand more within the work time established by law. It's why the efforts around a 4 day week are so important, considering the magnitude of which productivity has increased over the last half century (~4x). If you don't take the time back to be human (and not a worker), the work (like the mail) will never stop being issued.
by not-so-darkstar | 2025-06-16 14:20:47+00:00
All of the languages you listed are inside my category of boring (Java and C# ??).

I know functional programming from Haskell, OOP from C++ and for rest I use Python. These are the languages I would prefer for each paradigm but I also know Java and C.

I think that Perl is different from all the languages I listed and that's why I wanted to study it.
Show HN: I built a social task app that lets users post task progress
by newToTown | 2025-06-16 14:21:10+00:00
I'm trying to make life a bit easier for people who want motivation to actually get things done. The idea is simple. Do a task, share progress with friends (optional), stay accountable. Tasks are private & only the title will appear in a post. The app is called QuestMates and it is available on both Apple App Store & Google Play.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-16 14:21:12+00:00
Having gone through the piece, the title seems to be just clickbait, unbecoming of the NYT. There's absolutely no "rewriting" of history there; just a new set of tools and approaches that some historians are starting to use for future works.

I even disagree with their quoted “For the first time, historians can find without knowing where to look,” - We've had librarians and research assistants for centuries, so it was always possible to find things even if you aren't sure where to look. It's just that now we have another way of achieving this, which to me is not that much different from the appearance of computerized databases about 50 years ago, and the appearance of effective online search engines about 25 years ago.
by wffurr | 2025-06-16 14:21:28+00:00
0.5mm: https://www.jetpens.com/Uni-Jetstream-Lite-Touch-Ink-Ballpoi...

“Gel pens” are technically ballpoints, true, but when one says “ballpoint” it’s usually taken to refer to an oil based ballpoint like a Bic, whereas gel ink writes quite differently.
by MrDOS | 2025-06-16 14:21:38+00:00
I stopped recommending Signal to nontechnical folks due to the inability to back up messages on iOS. People are pretty protective of their message history, and having everything tied to a single device with no recourse for backups is a nonstarter.

The slightly longer version of the story is that my wife, travelling alone, had some trouble with an iPhone update (it hung for hours), and so she took it to the nearest Genius Bar; they eventually got the update to apply, but then did a factory reset “just to be safe”. Of course, everything except her Signal message history was restored from the automatic iCloud backups. She was devastated, and refuses to touch it now.

Please do not reply to say this was the fault of the Apple Store employee. It was, but at the same time, it also very much wasn't.
by abxyz | 2025-06-16 14:22:28+00:00
My assertion is that "innocent until proven guilty" is a legal standard that applies to the courts because a system needs standards. People have the luxury of being able to use their judgement. My assertion is that choosing to defer to a legal standard (not proven guilty therefore innocent) is choosing to opt-out of your wonderful human ability to form a judgement based on a lot more than just one single data point.

The person you love comes to you and tells you that they've been attacked by your shady friend. Do you defend your friend from the accusation because "they're innocent until proven guilty" or do you use your judgement and decide that the person you love is telling the truth because you have a lifetime of trust in them?
by toast0 | 2025-06-16 14:22:33+00:00
They were working on it in 2019 when I left, I thought it was tested in one country after that and then it got shelved. IIRC, it needed a ToS change and there was too much pushback.

I had been voluntold to be on the ads team, because I had sent a list of things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not terrible. Of course, none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the time, including figuring our the ToS stuff, because no use building a product you can't launch and ToS changes aren't easy.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-16 14:22:38+00:00
In my experience "drug-related" can definitely include serious violent crimes (some that can result in execution, or life without parole). Through my extracurricular work, I personally know a lot of drug offenders, and breaking their spouse's arm easily fits. I also know women that have drained their husband's retirement, people that have snorted their kids' college funds, mothers that have pimped their kids, and other stuff that would have a lot of folks horrified.

There's a reason people don't like drug addicts, and there's a pretty significant portion of the population that wants them all dead (except for my little Muffy, who was corrupted by her boyfriend, of course).

The Second Chance stuff is important. Surprisingly enough, Jaime Dimon is a big supporter of it[0].

I wish this chap well. The proof will come, when he leaves the structure of prison.

[0] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/impact/careers-and-skills/seco...
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-16 14:22:50+00:00
Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1].

That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.

The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].

[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
by chuckadams | 2025-06-16 14:22:50+00:00
You're absolutely right, I confused it with RFC3339. ISO8601 suggests that the 'T' is optional, but only in the sense of leaving it out... and fails to provide any actual examples of doing so.

The amount of handwaving in ISO8601 could turn a windmill, though in this respect RFC3339 is not much better. The ABNF clearly shows "T" (case-insensitive) as the only separator, but immediately afterward gives us this:

> NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T". Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.

Separated by (say) whatever the hell you want apparently. I'm getting bruises on my face from all the palming.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-16 14:23:04+00:00
I can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people.

Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.

I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".

In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-06-16 14:23:13+00:00
"People proven guilty are not necessarily guilty. People proven not guilty are not necessarily innocent. The legal standard exists because a system needs standards."

so you saying that court is useless because its not perfet???? its easy to complaint about something but give NOTHING to improve it

You would not do better than people in charge because EASY to say something is wrong but you dont have ANSWER that improve this current standards
by nanankcornering | 2025-06-16 14:23:28+00:00
Chinese cloud platforms (led by Alibaba & Tencent Cloud) are disrupting the APAC region by offering up to 40% reduced pricing than their western counterparts.

Indonesia's Gojek (Uber + Doordash + Paypal superapp), a heavy kubernetes company with 25 million MAU, migrates off GCP + AWS to Alibaba + Tencent.

Wonder if CCP companies are going to enter the European/US market to disturb the long dominating AWS + GCP + Azure, esp with AWS's crazy prices.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-16 14:23:41+00:00
> But it’s not a property of the microstate - it’s a property of the macrostate which makes sense only in the context of the experimental constraints and measurements.

The same can be said about the wavefunction then, right? You can't directly observe it, you can only use it to predict the statistics of a particular experimental setup. So, at worse, entropy is as real as wavefunction amplitudes.

> If we relate entropy to work that can be extracted someone with a better understanding of the state of the system and operational access to additional degrees of freedom can extract additional work.

Is this actually true? Per my understanding, if I give you three containers, two of which are filled with some kind of gas that you know nothing about, and the third with a mix of those same gases, you can measure their entropy using thermodynamic experiments and tell which of the three is a mix of the other two because it will have a higher entropy. So, you can extract more work from one of the boxes despite not knowing anything more about it.
by altacc | 2025-06-16 14:23:44+00:00
When foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered.

It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.
by jltsiren | 2025-06-16 14:23:45+00:00
A reply to a comment with a false generalization and a personal anecdote.

I'm gen X from a country where schools typically have 200-500 students. Small enough that rare things like leukemia didn't happen in most schools. They were something that happened to a kid in the news but not to a kid you kind of knew in your school. People generally didn't talk about leukemia or think about it, because it did not affect the life they experienced.

Rare things still happened, but they were different for each school. In my school, someone I knew was murdered while visiting her family in Russia.
Show HN: Pipo360 – Now a Full Dev Workspace (Was Just AI Back End Gen Before)
by the_plug | 2025-06-16 14:23:47+00:00
I launched Pipo360 — an AI tool that generated backend APIs from plain text. You type something like: "Create a task manager with MongoDB and auth" → It gives you full, exportable code in 60 seconds.

Thanks to the early HN feedback, I’ve rebuilt it into a much more powerful full-stack backend workspace, still fully in-browser:

What’s New: 16 frameworks supported (Express, Django, Spring Boot, Rails, etc.)

14 database options (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis…)

Live code editor with syntax highlighting

AI-powered code enhancement + refactoring

Project manager: save, load, export anytime

Real-time sync + 1-click exports

Auth, RBAC, and security baked in

Try it free (no signup needed): https://pipo360.xyz/try
by didntcheck | 2025-06-16 14:25:30+00:00
> the same standard of professionalism that they expect when their employees write or utter spoken language in the workplace for the same reasons.

Depends a lot on the culture. In the countries I've worked in, anyone trying to forbid profanity in the workplace would be laughed out of the room. The laughter would likely turn to anger if it turned out to be Americans trying to impose puritanism on another country's project
by sumtechguy | 2025-06-16 14:26:10+00:00
I have had my share of fun things I added to code/environment. Yet then we add 'the new guy'. They spend a long time arguing why that humor should not be there. One project it was a single line comment about new beginnings on the main procedure. That created a 2 hour rant about how unprofessional it was and months of unwarranted verbal abuse. It was literally the only piece of humor in the entire codebase. Super petty. Turned a fun functioning team into a slog of even wanting to go into work and all the rest of team reassigning themselves to other work. I use it as a litmus test these days of what I want to work with. Kind of tempted to add it to interview questions but have not found a proper way to do it.
by h2zizzle | 2025-06-16 14:26:20+00:00
GP's hypothesis is that diet/environment microbiome changes induce a protective social anxiety. However, a nomadic population - the most likely to exhibit those changes - are successful when exhibiting prosocial or confrontational characteristics, the opposite of social anxiety. Social anxiety is most protective for sedentary groups, who probably should be suspicious of outsiders.

Nothing you said contradicts this, and I'm not sure how to square the circle, even though microbiome-mediated behavior as an explanation for broad, otherwise irrational behavior patterns is attractive.