MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lordnacho | 2025-07-06 16:03:55+00:00
Why not make a solar-electric narcosub? That way you don't need fuel, and you're not relying on an IC engine with a bunch of moving parts, and that has a heat signature. The sun is shining in the ocean that these cartels are sailing in anyway, so there should be power.

Steer with GPS, that way you are only listening.

I wouldn't rely on Starlink, it seems like something that could be discovered easily. Any authority that had a map of where legit ships are could filter down to the mysterious Starlinks that are in the middle of the water, but near a remote coast, having traveled from Colombia, not on a known vessel.

Maybe if you need the comms, you rely on radio. Whatever the ham radio people use could perhaps be made into something. You don't need a lot of bandwidth anyway.

I guess the question is economics, then. How many trips could you get on a little boat that has a solar panel, electric engine, a battery, GPS, and a radio? And what would that cost?
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 16:04:00+00:00
> What is sad is that they used to be local files first note app and then they moved to sqlite citing some sync and performance issues.

They're still a local-first note application. It's just slightly harder for you to edit your notes externally, and not even by that much - it's very easy to directly query (read and write) SQLite databases, and if you really cared you could have made a script to grab a note, export it to a temporary text file, allow you to edit it, then update the SQLite database.

> I can't version controlled backup and sync those files

You absolutely can - you can dump SQLite databases to text files that contain SQL queries that will restore the database that you can then backup and sync: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75675/how-to-dump-the-da...

> then they moved to sqlite citing some sync and performance issues

Yes, that's because "plain text" files are bad for performance and harder to sync correctly. For people who (1) have over a hundred thousand notes they want to keep (like me) and (2) want maximum confidence that they're not going to lose years worth of work, that's incredibly important.

The devs made the right choice. You can always write scripts to interface with a SQLite database with an external editor. You can't take plain text files and magically make them as fast and durable as a database.
by alexpotato | 2025-07-06 16:04:51+00:00
At a past job, I was in charge of investigations as to why latency had changed in a high frequency trading system.

There was dedicated team of folks that had built a random forest model to predict what the latency SHOULD be based on features like:

- trading team

- exchange

- order volume

- time of day

- etc

If that system detected change/unexpected spike etc, it would fire off an alert and then it was my job, as part of the trade support desk, to go investigate why e.g. was it a different trading pattern, did the exchange modify something etc etc

One day, we get an alert for IEX (of Flash Boys fame). I end up on the phone with one of our network engineers and, from IEX, one of their engineers and their sales rep for our company.

We are describing the change in latency and the sales rep drops his voice and says:

"Bro, I've worked at other firms and totally get why you care about latency. Other exchanges also track their internal latencies for just this type of scenario so we can compare and figure out the the issue with the client firm. That being said, given who we are and our 'founding story', we actually don't track out latencies so I have to just go with your numbers."
by dangus | 2025-07-06 16:05:15+00:00
And at the bottom it’s revealed that this costs $200/month. I have trouble convincing myself to give Autodesk $50/month and I need that software for my primary hobby.

And none of these AI companies are profitable. Imagine how much it will cost or how much it will be enshittified when the investors come looking for their returns.

If everyone whose code illegally trained these models won a copyright lawsuit against Claude it would suddenly not be so good at writing swift code.

Do we really want to bet on Disney losing their AI lawsuit?

Honestly I realize my comment is not adding much to the discussion but the AI fatigue is real. At this point I think HN and other tech forums would do well to ban the topic for posts like this.

Imagine if we were upvoting stories about how people are getting lots of coding done easier with Google and StackOverflow. It would be rightfully ridiculed as vapid content. Ultimately that’s what this blog post is. I really don’t care to hear how yet another dingus “programmer” is using AI to do their hobby/job for them.
Show HN: Trump Tax Changes Comparison
by nepalvibes | 2025-07-06 16:05:15+00:00
Threw this together pretty quick because I kept seeing different takes on the new tax bill everywhere. Some sources saying it's bad for lower/middle class, others saying everyone saves money - figured I'd just build something to visualize it instead of trying to figure out who's right.

Used Cursor to help build the website and make it interactive so you can plug in your own info. Hosted using Cloudflare pages.

This definitely isn't perfect and you shouldn't use it for actual tax planning or anything serious. I'm not a tax expert, just someone who wanted to see the numbers laid out clearly.

Would love feedback on any major calculation error or better way to visualize it.
by exceptione | 2025-07-06 16:07:05+00:00
> it's the richest people in the world holding on to power while the > neoliberal house of cards that made them rich comes crumbling down.

Bingo. With al their tax rulings, exemptions, privatizations of public services, disinvestment in education, the ecosystem starts to suffer. They either reverse course, share power, go to a win-win mindset, or... double down and hollow out the last institutions, while distracting people with rage about imaginary transgenders and people with melanin. When the host dies, they jump onto the next victim. There are already sightings of Vance in Germany.

What we are seeing time and time again, the parasites are able to reprogram the host, steering it towards its own death.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-06 16:07:34+00:00
> "The material is not motivated." Not motivated? Judas just stick a dagger in my heart. This material needs no motivation. Just do it. Faith will come. He's teaching you analysis. Not selling you a used car. By the time you are ready to read this book you should not need motivation from the author as to why you need to know analysis. You should just feel a burning in you chest that can only be quenched by arguments involving an arbitrary sequence {x_n} that converges to x in X.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R23MC2PCAJYHCB
by cdaringe | 2025-07-06 16:07:42+00:00
Id actually like to redact that prior message and think further, here. We already have information egress thru URIs, with some amount of “protection” via CSP. But I didn’t think of other types of attack vectors at length. Someone above remarked that this is just a general form of conditional, which perhaps unlocks new vectors. Im always surprised by CSS so i should slow down and keep an open mind :)
by cdrini | 2025-07-06 16:07:55+00:00
I was going to comment on how the rise in obesity is a global phenomenon in almost all countries, but I double checked the data, and France and Spain are, as far as I can find, the only countries with a _decreasing_ obesity rate! So indeed +1 whatever France/Spain are doing because it's working. Although it might also be worth analyzing if this correlates with increased immigration, which might affect this level in some ways.

Here is France + some other European countries + US/CAN/UK:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...

And here is France + other top GDP countries around the world:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
by hinterlands | 2025-07-06 16:08:05+00:00
The actual claim is that you can keep the game state for a rather minimal 8x4 game board in two uint32_t, one uint64_t, and one uint_8t.

That's not the entirety of program state - stack aside, there are some loop counters that the author isn't including in the total, along with some implicit variables e.g., for keypress data.

It's a nice optimization exercise, but the result is not particularly mind-blowing to me. You could probably make it significantly more compact at the expense of readability. For one, the shape of the snake on the game board is not random: there's plenty of combinations, such as an alternating checkerboard pattern, that are physically impossible. So the shape is likely compressible.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-07-06 16:08:14+00:00
Lots of comments that a few plastic knobs, switches, wiring add to the cost. Yes. But buttons and knobs are more intuitive, less distracting, can be operated blind while keeping eyes on the road.

So guess what Mr.Auto Manufacturer, you can keep your hifi $30K-70K touchscreen surveillance machine on your lot. I'll keep driving my 20+ year old Corolla until you learn to do better.
by adi4213 | 2025-07-06 16:08:24+00:00
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by mettamage | 2025-07-06 16:08:28+00:00
Have you seen non-technical people use LLMs to build things? It's usually a lot slower or a disaster. You don't necessarily need to be technical perhaps in time, but you still need to be precise. Just knowing about HTML to the level we do allows us to embed text into it so the LLM can reason more sharply about it, etc.

Being technical still is an advantage, in my opinion.
by pyrale | 2025-07-06 16:08:55+00:00
> How do they handle piracy, unless they don't?

So your point is that you need to fuck your paying customers in order to mildly annoy people who don't buy your games?

Besides, the proposal doesn't even require you not to have anti-piracy servers; it only requires you to avoid bricking the game once you turn of the servers.

> simply let consumers reward such companies with their money?

For that you would need to be upfront about it.
by nyrikki | 2025-07-06 16:10:04+00:00
The one place that I think the previous discussion lost something important, at least to me with functions.

The popular lens is the porcupine concept when infinite dimensions for functions is often more effective when thought of as around 8:00 in this video.

https://youtu.be/q8gng_2gn70

While that video obviously is not fancy, it will help with building an intuition about fixed points.

Explaining how the dimensions are points needed to describe a functions in a plane and not as much about orthogonal dimensions.

Specifically with fixed points and non-expansive mappings.

Hopefully this helps someone build intuitions.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 16:10:13+00:00
The reason you can use these tools so effectively across native, mobile, Go, React etc is that you can apply most of what you learned about software development as a Python engineer in these new areas.

The thing LLMs replace is the need for understanding all of the trivia required for each platform.

I don't know how to write a for loop in Go (without looking it up), but I can write useful Go code now without spinning back up on Go first.

I still need to conceptually understand for loops, and what Go is, and structured programming, and compilers, and build and test scripts, and all kinds of other base level skills that people without an existing background in programming are completely missing.

I see LLMs as an amplifier and accelerant. I've accumulated a huge amount of fuzzy knowledge across my career - with an LLM I can now apply that fuzzy knowledge to concrete problems in a huge array of languages and platforms.

Previously I would stay in my lane: I was fluent in Python, JavaScript and SQL so I used those to solve every problem because I didn't want to take the time to spin up on the trivia for a new language or platform.

Now? I'll happily use things like Go and Bash and AppleScript and jq and ffmpeg and I'm considering picking up a Swift project.
by octopoc | 2025-07-06 16:10:46+00:00
Yeah there are a lot of things in programming that I don’t enjoy, that I can now avoid doing, like learning how to do the same technical thing in a different language/framework.

But the stuff I enjoy doing is something I don’t delegate to the agent. I just wonder how long the stuff I enjoy can be delegated to an agent who will do it cheaper and faster.
by matteason | 2025-07-06 16:11:28+00:00
He mentions in an earlier blog post [0] that the audio files are behind Cloudflare already so if Cloudflare did its job so I think the actual bandwidth impact on the origin server should have been pretty limited. Hopefully he'd turned on the option to ignore the query string to avoid the cache being bypassed.

I run a similar audio-heavy site [1] that's reached the front page of HN, also behind Cloudflare - the traffic spiking to terabytes a day is a bit of a shock at first but if everything's configured properly CF works well

[0] https://mynoise.net/blog.php#landed

[1] https://ambiph.one
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-07-06 16:11:36+00:00
It might be the intention of some game developers. I can tell you however that the intention of the people who run my company is to make as much money as possible.

My opinion is that you, as a consumer, should reward the companies who treat you best with your money. You should not require the government to do it for you, because if you do, the thing you end up with might not be the thing you receive, sadly.

And yes, this logic holds for most industries, but not all. I for one think there should be stringent rules for food processing, since that can actually kill you, and yet still putrid beef and tainted baby formula are sold on a relatively frequent basis.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-07-06 16:11:54+00:00
private server where the default in the past. that's why games that are 30 years old like quake, doom and unreal tournament (all created by dev teams the size of about a dozen with as much funding as current indie games) can still be played to this day and as long as software allows it forever with 0 effort or cost by the developers.
by anon7000 | 2025-07-06 16:12:09+00:00
I think it’s yet another layer of abstraction on top of complex ideas. There will always be room for people working on the infrastructure, tools, maintenance, and operations side of things. The biggest danger is if you stop learning because you trust AI to just do it.

I’ve been (carefully) using AI on some AWS infrastructure stuff which I don’t know about. Whenever it proposes something, I research and learn what it’s actually trying to do. I’ve been learning quickly with this approach because it helps point me in the right direction, so I know what to search for. Of course, this includes reviews and discussions with my colleagues who know more, and I frequently completely rewrite what AI has done if it’s getting too complex and hard to understand.

The important thing is not allowing AI to abstract away your thought process. It can help, but on my terms
by metalman | 2025-07-06 16:12:20+00:00
any light reflected in a domestic situation will no longer be a cohearant laser.if it was very focused UV it could cause temporary blindness, but a milisecond pulse will not contain enough energy to burn @ 40 watts, all that said, it is a given that certifying lasers for full on autonomous bug zapping(a dream of billions), is a very steep regulatory hill to climb, and will not be decided on redit, or here but as insectides get less effective while also proving to be realy bad for our environment, and the possibility of a true plauge bieng vectored by mosquitos a constant concern, I am absoulutly certain that research into laser bug zappers is going to progress
by spacemadness | 2025-07-06 16:13:06+00:00
“Early access… usually happens just 1–2 years before release.”

I had a good laugh at this. So many titles have taken money and silently failed or seem to figure they can stay in early access indefinitely. On the plus side early access seems useful to smaller devs that are close to finishing but need a bit more cash and free QA. But is also a bit of a scam the way is it’s used for many others unfortunately. Find a genre with a passionate fanbase, make a prototype, collect some cash and fade away.

Any way, not to suggest it’s a bad writeup as I enjoyed reading about the author's experiences.
by dandersch | 2025-07-06 16:13:18+00:00
Having followed this initiative quite extensively from the beginning, the most baffling thing has been the underwhelming support from developers themselves, both from studios and individual devs.

You would think the very idea of years of your work being rendered unplayable in an instant would be enough incentive to signal boost any effort against this industry practice.

Instead, developer discourse has revolved around just how hard it would be to do what this is petition is asking for. You are an engineer for crying out loud. If you solved a problem but a new constraint arrives in the form of a law, you figure out how to solve the problem under the new constraint. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

It's almost like flexing your skills and signalling your elite knowledge is more important to people than simply defending what's right.
by hodgesrm | 2025-07-06 16:13:54+00:00
> Local-first apps, on the other hand, have better privacy and security built in at the core.

I love this article, but the section on security raised a lot of questions. What's the model for authorizing access to documents for collaboration? How do you managed keys safely for encrypted data? How do users recover "lost" keys?

Cloud computing models have a lot of security mechanisms built-in. You might not like the model (AWS IAM for example) but at least there's a foundation already in place.
by naoru | 2025-07-06 16:14:02+00:00
Oh and you also might be interested in this one too: https://github.com/cakama3a/Polling

Although it's for gamepads, it's pretty much indispensable in debugging gamepad-related latency issues. For example, I found that my presumably 1000Hz controller can do only 500Hz in ideal conditions and it starts to drop at a much lower distance from the computer than advertised. Neat stuff.
by bichiliad | 2025-07-06 16:14:14+00:00
I feel like local-first or offline-first can be seen as something catered to niche users when it's brought up in front of strategy or planning folks — they imagine most people having good, reliable internet all the time. The truth is always more frustrating to account for. It is extremely frustrating to see the falloff in functionality in apps when internet is spotty or slow, which happens a lot. Try doing anything in most apps on the subway in New York (where there isn't service in most tunnels) and you'll feel the pain. Or, try doing anything in a crowd and the cell towers are saturated. Fastmail's client won't show you emails without internet, Balatro hangs while it looks for a cloud save, the list goes on and on.
by venusenvy47 | 2025-07-06 16:14:42+00:00
Yeah, just one. Here is the service manual: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/optiplex-7070-sff...

I got a refurbished unit for $180 last year, using this deal (now expired): https://slickdeals.net/f/17490348-dell-coupon-50-off-refurbi...
by toofy | 2025-07-06 16:14:43+00:00
anyone ever noticed how so many completely different restaurants food tastes almost exactly the same? it’s because so many of them use the exact same food suppliers to buy their food before they cook it. [0]

gaming over the last few years feels the same way. like they all taste almost the same.

> Simply pretending these very real concerns don’t exist is nonsense land.

i don’t believe this to be true at all.

if all of the things you listed are limiting game development so much, than this isn’t “progress” in the games space. if it’s really that bad, maybe we should regress, start from the basics and let some of the incredible indie studios or midsize studios take the lead who will A) bring us actual originality, not more IP rehashed for the thousandth time, B) not bleed gamers wallets dry and C) lets us actually own the thing we buy.

sooo many amazing games were made in the past that were able to do this and do it well, the difference is they didn’t cry if they “only” made $40 million in profit.

cod3 made like $400 million in the first 24 hours.

the difference now is the AAA studios are sucking all of the air out of the room and not leaving nearly as much room for midsize studios.

[0] sysco, us foods, and pfg supply an absolute massive number of restaurants in the US. sysco alone distributes to something like 700,000 restaurants.
by chrsw | 2025-07-06 16:14:47+00:00
I'm American.

This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.

Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.

Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants

Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.
by cagey | 2025-07-06 16:14:59+00:00
> Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Exactly. The outliner feature in Borland's Sidekick Plus was my all-time favorite, but its lifetime was brief (due to the entire product being a TSR), so I used Symantec's Grandview 2.0 sporadically over the decades, even in DOSbox out of desperation (as recently as 5-6 years ago!).