MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hollowonepl | 2025-07-31 10:08:00+00:00
I totally agree with you, all I can add to those who don't is that the true universal value of time as the only currency that is valuable is fully understood when you're closer to 40s and definitively there is not enough when you're after your 40s... Younger people think they are immortal and always have time for something... especially to be distracted. Then comes that other discovery.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-31 10:08:08+00:00
You're comparing apples to oranges here. Dataset of levels.fyi heavily skews towards FAANGs and big-tech, not entire SW sector of a nation.

Granted, I was also guilty of that since I was comparing the salary of a tram driver for the local state public transport company where they get great benefits and the union always negotiates top salaries since they have a monopoly and can just increase the bus fare to their customers whenever they need a raise.

But my point still stands. Why bother going to uni to become and engineer in the competitive private sector, if you're gonna net only 500 Euros more than a driver or any other government annex union job?
by CharlieDigital | 2025-07-31 10:08:51+00:00
This is the main problem with AI and vibe coding right now: it does what you ask (and sometimes does related things in the line of that ask).

It doesn't look at the big picture of multiple entry into the software. For example he had one vulnerability which required a hop through email which would create an entry into a table that ended up elevating permissions temporarily.

Hopefully platforms like Replit, Firebase Studio, et Al one day just include a security audit agent.
Show HN: Built a daily trivia challenge: Same 10 questions worldwide daily
by spacebots | 2025-07-31 10:09:04+00:00
*The Challenge:* Global synchronised daily questions with real-time leaderboards

*Technical Architecture:* - SwiftUI frontend with offline-first design - Firebase for real-time leaderboards and user sync - Custom question difficulty algorithm based on historical performance - Edge computing for global question distribution at midnight local time

*Interesting Problems Solved:*

1. *Question Quality at Scale:* Built a content pipeline with fact-checking, difficulty scoring, and A/B testing. Questions that score <60% or >90% get recycled.

2. *Global Synchronisation:* Distributing identical questions worldwide at optimal local times while handling time zones and edge cases.

3. *Leaderboard Performance:* Real-time rankings for 30+ users updating simultaneously. Ended up with a hybrid approach using Firebase + local caching.

4. *Difficulty Balancing:*Custom ML model that predicts question difficulty based on category, length, answer type, and historical data.

*Unexpected Learnings:* - Content creation was 90% of the work, coding was 10% - Users care more about question quality than anything else - Daily engagement patterns are fascinating. Huge spikes at morning, lunch, and after 9pm - International users have very different knowledge gaps (geography questions vary wildly by region)

*Current Architecture Handles:* - 1k+ daily API calls - Real-time score updates for 30 concurrent users - 15,000+ questions with metadata and analytics - Sub-100ms global leaderboard updates

Happy to dive deeper into any of the technical aspects. The intersection of content, community, and real-time systems has been fascinating to build and learn from

Live on App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/qwiz-daily-quiz-trivia-game/id...
by danbruc | 2025-07-31 10:09:06+00:00
I did not downvote the comment - I never downvote anything - but the argument that Israel gave some kind of sovereignty to the Gaza strip in 2005 just does not match reality. Israel removed its troops from the Gaza strip but still maintained heavy control over it - control of border traffic, maritime blockade, airspace control, control over water, electricity, and fuel supply. You do not need boots on the ground if you have that much control over everything that go in or comes out of some region.

Also the sentiment of the population does not matter if the government does not want a two state solution or only on conditions unacceptable to the Palestinians. Read up on the details of the proposals.
by prmoustache | 2025-07-31 10:09:44+00:00
An easy solution is to limit their access to the device. If they can only use the devices in your living room when you are sitting next to them you keep full control.

Admitedly at some point they are reaching teenage years and they should have a right to privacy so even having access to a timeline of actions seems like a no go to me. The same way they can wander off in the street on their own, write private letters to people or have private calls with friends.
by philipp-gayret | 2025-07-31 10:09:48+00:00
Fair enough. For me compacting conversation always feels a bit weird; I have no way to tell what it effectively deleted from the context but I (very) regularly have it re-read and update CLAUDE.md as part of the process or after "discussions" with the LLM so I would guess that might be why it follows patterns in it a bit stricter for me than for most. It would be nice if the tool took care of that automatically.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-31 10:10:28+00:00
>It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.

We would never excuse such ignorance of 2nd through Nth order consequences in any other context. Can you imagine "the catholic church wasn't trying to provide cover for abusers, that was just an accidental side effect of protecting their own image"? That'd be laughable.

So why does government get the pass?
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-31 10:11:56+00:00
They're solving for everyone who needs captchas solved.

It's a very old service, active since 00s. Somewhat affiliated with cybercrime - much like a lot of "residential proxies" and "sink registration SMS" services that serve similar purposes. What they're doing isn't illegal, but they know not to ask questions.

They used to run entirely on human labor - third world is cheap. Now, they have a lot of AI tech in the mix - designed to beat specific popular captchas and simple generic captchas.
by sshine | 2025-07-31 10:12:04+00:00
It should be.

But it’s not incorrect to say

The tree grown tall is the one I planted The horse raced past had somewhere to go

But when you don’t end the subject syntagma in an obvious way, you make it difficult to read.

It’s easier to read

The tree grown tall last year withered

because grown has a distinct past particle form. The past particle of raced is raced, which means you need more lookahead to determine its role in the sentence.

You can artificially push out the point at which the sentence disambiguates between whether the word is past tense or past particle, and make it seem that it’s probably past tense until it can’t be.

You could say that the sentence is LL(k) for an unintuitively high k.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-31 10:12:05+00:00
It wasn't so much "horror" as "this designer wants rounded corners". AJAX was well-understood but not yet standardized or widely supported, which is down to slow standardization bodies and browser developers like Microsoft and nowadays Google doing their own thing.

Anyway, show us your HTML site, document how you built it - that's the kind of thing this page is advocating for.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-07-31 10:12:31+00:00
I honestly think the main thing driving their adoption is that you don't need to _learn_ anything to use it. For 90% of use-cases, the UI is as simple as the iOS photo editing app. It's a familiar experience from the moment you open the app.

Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-07-31 10:13:33+00:00
On the contrary, he's solving a real business need for these small businesses at a fraction of the cost with a product that's easier to use and with better features.

The customers know there was a hack because the hacker emailed them (I had a test account and received the same email). Yet he's had no churn because there's so much value being delivered.

I think there's something to be said for that.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-31 10:13:44+00:00
I think there’s a natural tendency to want to document the process for those who have the work assigned to them, and some folks will self-assign it because they see the value.

Knowledge transfer through technical writing doesn’t always manifest itself if it isn’t part of the work process at the time you have that in your mental context. It’s hard to have that context to write the docs if you’re context switching from working on something else or not involved at that level, so it’s hard to just drop in to add docs if there isn’t some framework for writing ad hoc docs for someone to fix up later.

I don’t have experience at traditional employers though so I can’t speak authoritatively here. I’m used to contracts and individual folks and small business. Having human readable documents is important to me because I’m used to folks having things explained on their level, which requires teaching only what they need and want to know to get their work done. Some folks don’t even know what they need when they ask me for help, so that’s its own process of discovery and of documentation. I’m used to having to go to them where they are and where the issue is, so there was no typical day at the office or out of it. Whatever couldn’t fit through the door, I had to go to myself. I’ve had to preserve evidence of potential criminal wrongdoing and document our process. It taught me to keep notes and to write as I work.

I think most places do have some kind of process for doing this, and I suspect the friction in doing the thing is part of the issue, and the fact that it’s difficult thankless work that doesn’t show up on most tracked metrics is part of the issue.

If docs were mandated they would get done. If someone’s job was to make sure they were done well, that would help. I guess folks could step up and try to make that happen and that might be what it takes to make that happen.
by belchiorb | 2025-07-31 10:13:51+00:00
Seems very interesting!

I found that the word reader from the example isn’t using the Spanish language.

It’s using Portuguese, not sure if it’s because it’s able to find my locale or if just a mess up.

Also, it seems like it doesn’t properly handle German separate verbs, so it’s a bit hard to get a single word’s translation.
by atoav | 2025-07-31 10:14:28+00:00
Counter to the authors claim my experience is that friction is an essential building block of literally any organization.

Have a hard time reaching customer service? That is because they added friction to finding the number on purpose. Have to wait in the phone line and go through a maze of electronic voices before being able to talk to a person? Friction. That tax form seems needlessly complicated? Friction.

Friction is an essential design component of any system and some of it's uses are also legitimate.

Sometimes you want the costly action to have a small cost on the user side as well, which will act as a filter for people who really need your help, for example.

Let's say for example you have a self-service platform for students and they should be able to change their name. Now you could do that frictionless, but a name change is not frictionless in the bureaucratic backend of the student office. That means representing it to the user as a simple frictionless process, when it isn't is a misrepresentation of reality. Then it is better to represent it as a thing they can request and have to wait for till it is done.

Ideally of course the student office would have systems where names can be changed 10 times a second with flawless forward- and backwards-compatibility, but that isn't the world we live in.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-31 10:14:44+00:00
Kevin Buzzard is reportedly working on formalizing a modern proof of FLT. This effort has already managed to surface some unsound arguments in one of the prereqs for the proof (namely crystalline cohomology) https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-th... though the issue has since been fixed.
by Treegarden | 2025-07-31 10:15:15+00:00
I agree and dont understand the OP. I drink coffee out of the fear that I would waste my whole days time. The coffee allows me to spend some hours of focus time on what I want. In line with the blog posts point. This has been a struggle to all my life, its very hard to control my focus, my attention. I've been diagnosed with adhd (for whats that worth) and at some point took medication who's whole purpose was to allow me to control my focus. When I have unbridled focus, I suddenly have access to my brains full capacity. I think my IQ is easily 10 or 30 points higher / lower depending if I have focus or not.
by anshumankmr | 2025-07-31 10:16:34+00:00
If a commit was done a year or so back, then 20 commits would probably prove insufficient, and if say a team member is supposed to use some existing helper method already present in the codebase, which is easier to tell a person to use instead of an LLM writing another function to perform that same operation which is inefficient.

And even if you juiced up a context length of an LLM to astronomical numbers AND made it somehow better at parsing and understanding its context, it will not always repeat said capabilities in other codebases (see for example o3 supposedly being the top of most benchmarks but it will still fumble a simple variation mother-is-a-surgeon puzzle).

I am not saying its impossible for a company to figure this out, but it will be incredibly hard.
by rwmj | 2025-07-31 10:17:28+00:00
I'm wondering what 'seekcy' is. Possibly a Chinese security product?

$ journalctl | awk '/sshd/ && /Invalid user/ && $6 != "from" {print $8}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -bnr | head -n 30 34 admin 26 oracle 21 postgres 20 user 18 test 18 seekcy 17 ftpuser 15 ubuntu 15 inspur 9 zabbix 8 nginx 8 mysql 8 jenkins 8 hadoop 7 server 7 nagios 6 teste 6 amax 5 support 5 backup 5 administrator 4 git 4 demo 4 a 3 zyfwp 3 usuario 3 tomcat 3 testuser 3 test1 3 teamspeak
by grammarxcore | 2025-07-31 10:17:44+00:00
AWS finally added the ability to swap between a few accounts [1]. There’s an arbitrary limit of 5 so it’s really bad if, say, you work for an enterprise and have lots of accounts or, say, you work for a smaller business following the AWS Well-Architected Framework and isolate things. Containers still win.

1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/mu...
by defrost | 2025-07-31 10:18:01+00:00
> The ISP doesn't need to know what the content is or be pro-actively looking for content.

Sure, be it a torrent or pornography, the ISP doesn't have to care in Australia.

> The rightsholder would look at the connecting IP and then contact the owner of that IP for if that IP was allowed to view age-restricted content.

eg: Hollywood Inc. would contact the ISP to ask for details about the customer using that IP address at a particular time.

The existing court ruling establishes that the ISP has no obligation to provide customer details to Hollywood Inc. or to any third party provider of (say) pornography.

Also, typically an ISP customer is a household that contains adults, children, relatives, boarders, passerby's that use the router Guest account, etc.

So, not only is the ISP not obligated to provide customer details, those details are most likely those of an adult over the age of 18 as 12 year olds rarely have an account with an Australian ISP provider.
by ninjin | 2025-07-31 10:18:51+00:00
No worries, glad to help. I should also have added that on OpenBSD (and BSDs in general) base is much more complete than on most Linux distributions. I run a web, name, and mail server using OpenBSD and I do not need a single port or package for this. SMTP daemon, DNS daemon, web server, TLS certificate handling, etc. It is all in base and works together coherently, which is what draws people like me to BSDs.
by lazyasciiart | 2025-07-31 10:18:54+00:00
Sure, but I’ve seen plenty of senior co-workers deliver a pile of dynamite in Java and get a bonus for it, abandoning it to some other poor sod who will have to fix and maintain it. Managers who reward that behavior will probably be the ones who try to AI Everything, and it’ll probably work for just long enough to make all the devs redundant.
by metalman | 2025-07-31 10:19:48+00:00
Yes, amazing!, she has mad skills, and quite chearfully does not give a rats ass as to anything external to her actual work, other than family and friends, one interesting detail was that the price was quoted for a full set of tiles, implying that she will/may make a match for a missing or broken piece someone has lost, if she answers the phone and can understand your language/accent or there are journalists around she can hand the phone to translate for her assistant many lessons there
by ljchen | 2025-07-31 10:20:16+00:00
I always find it odd to put the two keywords "blockchain" and "DB" together (though I know quite a few similar projects). The essence of blockchain, in my view, is to decentrialize because people don't want or can't have a single authority, whereas DB is centralized. The priority of blockchain is not performance (well, after decentralization, of course you don't have performance), and DB always prioritizes performance. Putting the two together is the most conflicting thing I've seen in the tech world.
by avhception | 2025-07-31 10:20:38+00:00
Sometimes I feel like watching people dig a hole until it starts filling with groundwater. They then start bailing the water out with buckets. They're very busy doing that, so the actual digging work slowly grinds to almost zero. I stand at the edge of the pit, trying to talk to them about electrical pumps and drainage solutions and get yelled at: "I don't have time for your nonsense, can't you see I'm busy bailing water here!?"
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-07-31 10:20:41+00:00
Even a very 'light' definition would catch YouTube, I'm convinced of this. The UK's definition is—broadly—any site that a user can take an action on that would affect other users. This would definitely catch a forum like HN, any site with comments, etc. Personally, I feel that, combined with draconian identity requirements, that goes way too far, but I think I'd struggle to draw a line that better fits the alleged intent of these political moves.
by anenefan | 2025-07-31 10:20:52+00:00
Yeah text only pdf that repeats email content is a bit of a fail.

Though so much of the web has moved to accommodate modern smart phones - I'm not against it, the web should still accommodate those who just won't bother to set their email client to display html elements in emails - perhaps something this tool could additionally provide - include a simple block of text half decently formatted with the same info for those who prefer it that way.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-31 10:21:04+00:00
The article's final call to action:

> Developers working with open source packages should:

...followed by 5 bullet points of laborious to-do's, to try to minimize the risk from each of the open source packages you're using.

My take:

- Aggressively minimize the number of packages you use. Any idiot can import 1M LoC in a minute. Competent dev's don't.

- Be willing to re-invent some wheels. Especially when the alternative is importing wheel-lib v13.9.2j, along with its dozen or so dependencies.
by prmoustache | 2025-07-31 10:21:44+00:00
> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids.

The funny thing is hearing adult people shouting aloud that kids suffer from social media use and bla bla bla let the same people have been ruining their own relationship with their life partners, family and even their whole life for years by spending way too much time in front of TV, computers and by doomscrolling all day on instagram and tiktok.

I don't understand how these people are all acting as if only children need to be saved. Banning stuff to children won't even work if the only example they have of adulthood are people with a hunchback staring lifelessly at a small screen on the palm of their hand all day.
by usrusr | 2025-07-31 10:22:02+00:00
I guess it depends a lot on what you measure in "most": housing per head or housing in square feet? Lots of heads cramped into rented minimum viable housing. Lots of square feet held by owners who occasionally live there, when they do happen to be in town.

(the general upwards trajectory of real estate makes it an investment even when it does not generate any income, do much better than owning a boat!)
by Systemic33 | 2025-07-31 10:22:09+00:00
Just like the article mentioned, he has become almost synonymous with fairy tales associated with stories for kids, but for anyone who has ever read from a collection of his stories, a majority of them are most certainly not appropriate for kids. Some of them are incredibly sad, and as another comment says, the fate of the characters often can change for the worse in the last paragraphs, when you least expect it.

I can only recommend reading his works, they are deeply profound.
by sofixa | 2025-07-31 10:22:24+00:00
> but are actually leased by their operators in Europe; there are five or six, I think, main ROSCOs —- rolling stock companies —- in the UK for example.

Nah, this is a UK absurdity because they UK decided to privatise their railways in the worst possible way - every single part (rail infrastructure, operations, rolling stock) was privatised in a local monopoly manner. The rolling stock owners could lease to multiple different operators, so there was some limited competition on that front (probably eviscerated by the need for the ROSCOs to have a profit margin, on top of the fact that there were 10 of them, which meant reduced economies of scale both at acquiring but also maintaining those trains).

They're currently trying to nationalise some parts, after already nationalising the infrastructure (because people died due to bad maintenance due to misaligned incentives - maintenance doesn't bring profits).

But other than that, rolling stock leasing mostly exists in freight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_stock_company

> trains are actually not only mass produced (e.g. by Bombardier)

But yes, trains of all types are mass produced by companies such as Alstom (which were already massive and also bought Bomboardier's train arm), Siemens, Stadler, etc. They can be customised (size, features, etc.), but e.g. the Alstom Metropolis line of metro trains can be found all over the world.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-07-31 10:23:32+00:00
That's clearly not the case as the provisions against "disinformation" and "misleading information", which are very vague and subjective thing to judge, are aimed at constraining freedom of speech and to censor legal speech.

Someone's "misleading information" is someone else's political campaigning.

The EU commission is guilty of hypocrisy and doublespeak on this when it states that "the Code of Conduct aims to combat disinformation risks while fully upholding the freedom of speech" when those two things are obviously mutually exclusive.