MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2025-07-31 12:53:22+00:00
Do you mean the land reform so that the minority white descendants of colonists don't still control 90% of the land even 30 years after the apartheid was officially ended?

If not, can you share links to proof that there is something more serious going on, that would deserve to be called genocide against the white population?
by myth2018 | 2025-07-31 12:53:56+00:00
I'm in a similar situation of yours (I don't feel any kind of regret though, I just feel this is a phase and it will pass someday). Anyway, I still read (and indeed not much more than that) a lot about my passions, but taking notes and writing down ideas to maybe try in the uncertain future has helped me to feel engaged with my intellectual pursuits. Stay strong my friend.
by Pamar | 2025-07-31 12:54:00+00:00
Sorry, I should have been more specific maybe: I do know about Montecarlo, and yeah, the circle stuff is a more or less canonical example - but I wanted to know more about the Markov Chains, because, again, I only know these in terms of sequence generators and I have some problems imagining how this could "solve problems" unless your problem is "generate words that sorta sound like a specific language but it is just mostly gibberish".
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-31 12:54:20+00:00
I disagree. Mature open source projects last long enough without significant disruption to still be relevant after they make it onto the certification exam. Products, not so much.

Investing time building familiarity with proprietary software is already a dubious move for a lot of other reasons, but this would be just one more: why would I build curriculum around something that I'm just going to have to change next year when the new CEO does something crazy?

And as bad as it might be for many of us who hang out here, killing off proprietary software would be a great step forward.
by t-3 | 2025-07-31 12:54:36+00:00
The legislation is trying to stop insider trading by legislators. Stock market reform could mitigate much of it (although I don't know that it's something that causes any kind of real-world harm, it provides incentives for legislators to do even more unethical things, like manipulating the markets). Removing money from politics is much, much broader and way more complicated.
by fhd2 | 2025-07-31 12:54:41+00:00
They don't get donations from Google, but get paid to include Google as the default search engine, right?

No important difference though. Mozilla tried to switch to Yahoo a few years back and backpedaled. In terms of what users expect, they don't have a lot of options. Google OTOH could do without the users Firefox has left. And I've personally observed Google strong arm "partners". Not sure I see a conspiracy here, but I'm pretty sure that if Google asks for concessions, Mozilla will see what they can do.
by onionisafruit | 2025-07-31 12:54:45+00:00
I configure ci to run tests with -race and that works out pretty well. I value short ci runs, so testing with -race is a sacrifice for me even if it only adds ~10 seconds typically. I like your idea of a regular job that runs without caching, but your best tip is gaslighting users. Maybe I should start prefixing error messages with “look what you made me do”.
by os2warpman | 2025-07-31 12:55:03+00:00
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client did not rob that bank. He only made a Google Maps link to directions to the bank, a link to an Imgur image containing the vault's combination, and a link to a Pastebin with instructions on how to disable the security system available. He merely packaged that information together and made it publicly available in a single source in a format only really useful to robbers for the purpose of robbery training. It's twoo hward to actually look at the information one is compiling and releasing to the public and to expect even a microscopically minuscule cursory amount of minimal effort to that end is unreasonable. He is clearly innocent."
by exasperaited | 2025-07-31 12:55:37+00:00
X is weaponising it by asking for adult verification for things that don't need it and saying "oh we are forced to do this" because it angers the Reform-voting meatheads who will be voting for the candidates Musk is going to find a way to bankroll in 2030, even -- I would guess -- if it means breaking UK election law to do it.

He is intent on meddling in UK politics.
by presentation | 2025-07-31 12:56:10+00:00
I find success basically limiting it to the literal coding but not the thinking - chop tasks down to specific, constrained changes; write detailed specs including what files should be changed, how I want it to write the code, specific examples of other places to emulate, and so on. Doesn’t have to be insanely granular but the more breadcrumbs the higher chance it’ll work, you find a balance. And whatever it produces, I git add -p one by one to make sure each chunk makes sense.

More work up front and some work after, but still saves time and brain power vs doing it all myself or letting it vibe out some garbage.
How Remote Work Died: A Girardian Tragedy in Corporate America
by la_joconde | 2025-07-31 12:56:14+00:00
In 2020, remote work felt like an inevitability. Studies showed productivity didn’t collapse. Employees were happier. Companies saved on real estate. Tech workers—especially engineers—started doing something radical: living well.

They fled San Francisco for Lisbon, New York for Buenos Aires, D.C. for Kraków. They claimed the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, slashing their tax bills. They worked from cafés, beaches, and co-living spaces—delivering the same (or better) output than their office-bound peers.

Then, suddenly, the backlash came. CEOs demanded a Return to Office. Managers moralized about “collaboration.” HR departments spun up surveillance tools to track badge swipes.

What happened?

The usual explanations—productivity! culture! innovation!—are weak. Study after study showed remote work didn’t hurt performance. So why the crackdown?

The Girardian Unmasking

French philosopher René Girard’s theories on mimetic desire and scapegoating explain this better than any MBA analysis. Here’s how:

1. Mimetic Desire: The Office as a Shared Delusion

Girard argued that humans don’t desire things directly—we desire through others. For decades, white-collar workers mimicked a single model of success:

Live in an expensive city.

Grind 60-hour weeks.

Chase promotions for status.

This system worked because everyone bought into the same fiction. Then came remote work—and a new model emerged:

Geoarbitrage.

Tax optimization.

Lifestyle freedom.

The moment workers saw colleagues thriving outside the system, the old model started crumbling. The desire shifted. But instead of adapting, corporations panicked.

2. The Scapegoat Mechanism: Sacrificing the Digital Nomad

When mimetic rivalry escalates, Girard says societies restore order by uniting against a scapegoat. Remote workers became that scapegoat.

Executives couldn’t admit the truth (“We’re jealous you escaped”), so they invented moral crises:

“Remote workers aren’t collaborating!” (Yet Slack/GitHub metrics disproved this.)

“We need office culture!” (But only after commercial real estate values tanked.)

“It’s not fair if some work remotely!” (A classic Girardian complaint—masking envy as justice.)

By forcing RTO, they ritually sacrificed the remote worker to restore the old order.

3. The Sacred Myth: “Offices = Serious Business”

Every institution has sacred myths it defends at all costs. For corporations, the myth is: “Real work happens in offices.”

Remote work exposed this as a lie. Worse, it revealed that:

Middle managers exist to supervise, not produce.

Commercial real estate is a paper tiger.

The tax-optimized nomad is winning capitalism better than the CEO.

The backlash wasn’t about productivity—it was about protecting the myth.

Today, hybrid work is a compromise no one loves—the worst of both worlds. But the genie won’t go back in the bottle. The more companies enforce RTO, the more they reveal the system’s fragility.

If you have a scapegoat story, share it.
by Apreche | 2025-07-31 12:56:21+00:00
The headline is a bit misleading. I thought it meant it was about triggering a command on a computer that has no power, which is obviously impossible.

What it’s actually about how to automatically automatically trigger a command on a Linux computer (almost certainly a laptop) in the event that it switches from AC power to battery power.

The example given is your laptop is plugged it at a café. Someone steals it, which involves unplugging it from the wall. At the moment it is unplugged it automatically shuts down, locks itself, etc.

I wonder if the same approach will also work for a computer connected to a UPS. Probably not!
by Aurornis | 2025-07-31 12:56:31+00:00
If you have a static site with content you want to share broadly, nothing is wrong.

It becomes a problem when it’s used to spam unwanted content faster than your human moderators can come up with.

Someone might bot to scrape your content and repackage it on their own site for profit.

The bots might start interacting with your real users, making them frustrated and driving them away.
Show HN: Vorsteh Queue – A powerful, ORM-agnostic queue engine
by noxify | 2025-07-31 12:56:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Marcus, an open-source enthusiast, and I'm excited to share a new project!

I recently faced a common challenge: building a reporting page that needs to fetch and process data from a remote source daily, providing a simple UI for various KPIs.

While `prisma-queue` has served me well in other projects, its tie to the Prisma ORM wasn't ideal for this new use case, where the ORM choice was still open.

Many popular job queues are Redis-based, like BullMQ. However, I felt there was a gap for a robust, database-backed queue that leverages PostgreSQL's reliability without being locked into a specific ORM. And so, Vorsteh-Queue was born!

While there is currently no official "1.0" release yet, I believe Vorsteh Queue is ready for community feedback to help shape the future (code & docs) and accelerate the v1 launch.

Key features that might interest you:

* UTC-first timezone design: All timestamps are stored as UTC.

* Full TypeScript support with generic job payloads: Your job handlers are properly typed.

* ORM-agnostic with adapters for Drizzle and Prisma (PostgreSQL): More adapters are planned.

* Advanced scheduling: Includes priority queues, delayed jobs, cron scheduling, and progress tracking.

Vorsteh-Queue offers a compelling alternative for those who prefer to manage their background jobs directly within PostgreSQL, providing strong transactional guarantees and eliminating the need for a separate Redis instance.

Why the name "Vorsteh-Queue"?

The name is a tribute to my German Spaniel, a "Vorstehhund" or pointing dog. Just as a pointing dog indicates its target, Vorsteh-Queue aims to reliably point your application towards efficient background job processing. It's a nod to the personal passion that drives open-source development, inspired by stories like Bruno, the API client!

Try it out and let me know what you think! All feedback, contributions, and ideas are highly welcome.

Quick Links:

* Github repo: https://github.com/noxify/vorsteh-queue

* Docs: https://vorsteh-queue.dev/
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-07-31 12:57:11+00:00
> The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google

This is not reflected in the numbers, at least from what I've found: 300m/year in 2011[1], 400+m/year in 2020[2], 485m/year in 2025[3].

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1543269/google-to-pay-...

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

[3] https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefo...
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-07-31 12:57:15+00:00
I don't understand how age restrictions on signup should prevent that, since "greater society and workforce" largely includes people over the age of 18.

I think age restrictions are a misguided attempt at fixing the root issue. I am not against draconian legislation against social media giants, but age restrictions on the internet will negatively affect everyone other than the social media giants the most. I think the main problem with social media right now is the incentives that the tech companies have to optimize for engagement above anything else, and the reason they have that incentive is simple: targeted ads are an insanely lucrative business model. The fix is pretty simple, but draconian: ban any form of targeted advertising on any digital platform.

Age restrictions will just cause a loss of privacy, increase the risk of government censorship, increase the risk of government misusing this for imposing morals and risk causing smaller independent sites to become inaccessible to the young even if they don't actively promote inappropriate content (I will also claim that defining what is child-appropriate content on the internet is impossible). Last but not least, the proposed technical solutions for this, at least in the EU, rely heavily on technologies such as Google Play Integrity and Apple App Attest, which means that they basically require EU citizens to accept Google's or Apple's TOS if they want to participate on the internet, and further preclude them from using an alternative open source operating system such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS. This alone is enough of a reason that I am fiercely against this, but it is by far not the only reason.

Keep the internet free and open for the users, but regulate the hell out of predatory business models.
by ralferoo | 2025-07-31 12:57:17+00:00
My website has a "public" directory for things I wanted to be publicly accessible, but there's an index.html there so you can't trivially discover what files are there.

I was mirroring this to another machine, and I'd foolishly already configured haproxy to serve from either machine. In the 10 minutes (guesstimate) between starting to populate the directory and closing off access, I had one bot scrape every single file in there. What was worse was that it'd cached the index, and continued scraping these files from the other backend too, so I had to shut off access to that directory on the live server as well as the backup.

Whilst technically, all of these files were "public" because I wanted to share them, some of them weren't publicly linked to (things like my CV etc) which I'd rather hadn't been scraped by some random bot (that of course, didn't identify itself or respect robots.txt).
by tbbfjotllf | 2025-07-31 12:57:25+00:00
I believe it has more to do with having a great user experience than to do with whether it's a native app or a web app. Figma was convenient and way ahead of it's competitors. The thing that made it stand out was the collaborative features and the extension ecosystem. The features it didn't have were launched by highly motivated people as extensions. It made both collaboration and working fast extremely simple. Both collaboration and extensions are features that can easily be added to a native app. I love figma but I do miss the ability to be able to work offline.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-31 12:58:21+00:00
There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?

Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.

So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.
by konsuko | 2025-07-31 12:58:52+00:00
Hey everyone! I just wrote a blog post about the (very bumpy) journey of porting Penko Park to Nintendo Switch.

I’m curious: Have you done any console ports yourself? What was your biggest surprise or pain point? Was it all worth it in your opinion, after you launched?

I’d love to hear other devs’ experiences (good and bad)!
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-31 13:00:31+00:00
It's well known, but this video[1] is a proof of concept demonstration from 4 years ago, Casey Muratori called out Microsoft's new Windows Terminal for slow performance and people argued that it wasn't possible, practical, or maintainable to make a faster terminal and that his claims of "thousands of frames per second" were hyperbolic, and one person said it would be a "PHD level research project".

In response, Casey spent <1 week making RefTerm, a skeleton proto-terminal with the same constraints Microsoft people had - using Windows APIs for things, using DirectDraw with GPU rendering, handling terminal escape codes, colours, blinking, custom fonts, missing font character fallback, line wrap, scrollback, Unicode and Right-to-Left Arabic combining characters, etc. RefTerm had 10x faster throughput than Windows Terminal and ran at 6-7000 frames per second. It was single-threaded, not profiled, not tuned, no advanced algorithms, no-cheating by sending some data to /dev/null, all it had to speed it up was simple code without tons of abstractions and a Least Recently Used (LRU) glyph cache to avoid re-rendering common characters, written the first way that he thought of. Around that time he did a video series on that YouTube channel about optimization and arguing that even talking about 'optimization' was too hopeful, we should be talking about 'not-pessimization', that most software is not slow because it has unavoidable complexity and abstractions needed to help maintenance, it's slow because it's choked by a big pile of do-nothing code and abstraction layers added for ideological reasons which hurt maintenance as well as performance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg - "How fast should an unoptimized terminal run?"

This video[2] is another specific details one, Jason Booth talking about his experience of game development, and practical examples of changing data layout and C++ code to make it do less work, be more cache friendly, have better memory access patterns, and run orders of magnitude faster without adding much complexity and sometimes removing complexity.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAVbI1HIzCE - "Practical Optimizations"
by lapcat | 2025-07-31 13:00:32+00:00
> You see this in juries for example. They select the smart or authoritative person among them to be the foreperson and look to that person for direction. This is how humans naturally form hierarchies.

This is a mischaracterization of juries. It's not a hierarchy. Every juror has an equal vote. And each juror gets paid the same, including the foreperson (not much, but they usually get paid something for their service).

The foreperson has two special roles: (1) to announce the verdict in court and (2) to guide the deliberations. Neither of those roles has any personal benefit to the foreperson. The second role exists merely to keep deliberations orderly, prevent them from devolving into cacophony and chaos. And in fact the foreperson is charged with making sure that every juror is allowed their input, otherwise one or a small number of jurors might dominate the discussion. Some kind of order is needed in group discussions. This is why Robert's Rules of Order exists, for example.

Democracy itself always requires some form of order: people entrusted with scheduling, administering, and counting the votes. But that doesn't make these people our leaders.
by al_borland | 2025-07-31 13:00:40+00:00
Pulling up my results, these are some of the named tests that were administered, with a short summary of what it's for (after asking Chat-GPT what they're all for.

- WAIS-IV (full scale IQ)

- WRAML-3 (memory)

- CPT-3 (ADHD - selective attention, impulsivity, and vigilance)

- BDEFS-SR (ADHD - executive functioning deficits in daily life activities, including self-management to time, self-organization, self-restraint, self-motivation, and emotional self-regulation)

- DKEFS (higher-level cognitive functions related to executive functioning)

- ADOS-2 (Module 4) (ASD - diagnostic tool for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in adults)

- SRS-2 (ASD - social impairment)

- PAI (inventory that assesses personality traits and psychopathology - self-report)

- Beck Depression Inventory (depression - self-report)

- Beck Anxiety Inventory (anxiety - self-report)

I think there was more than this, but I wasn't counting. It was about 4 hours of test after test after test. I was told it would take 4-6 hours; I think I finished slightly under 4 hours, taking no breaks.

During the test when I asked what various things were for, they wouldn't tell me, so I don't know which test was for what. There was one that was pretty clearly for ADHD, it was on the computer and to hit space bar or something each time something came up on the screen at random intervals. That was the worst one. I sucked at it.

When getting the results, I spent most of the time asking if I could have gamed it, or if they were just a mill for handing these things out to anyone who seemed like they wanted it. I was told that since it is a mix of quantitative vs qualitative testing, with multiple tests that all have to align for a diagnosis, it would be nearly impossible to do that.

Some testing centers have online screening test, which are going to be better than the Buzzfeed style quizzes. But they are largely self-reports. For me, they were pretty accurate. For my dad, they seemed less accurate, as he has a lifetime of skills built up to help manage things and was taking all those into account. During testing some of those things came up, where they'd ask if I had an issue with X, and the answer was no, but it was because I did Y to make sure that didn't happen, which they said would be a coping mechanism or something.

I have heard some of the things you have about it being hard to get tested. For me, in the US, it was pretty easy. It did still take about 6 months, and cost me about $3k (I think) out of pocket. Insurance didn't cover it. But cost and waiting aside, there weren't any roadblocks standing in my way.
by presentation | 2025-07-31 13:01:05+00:00
Unlike stack overflow, if it doesn’t know the answer it’ll just confidently spit out some nonsense and you might fall for it or waste a lot of time figuring out that it’s clueless.

You might get the same in Stack Overflow too, but more likely I’ve found either no response or, or someone pretty competent actually does come out of the woodworks.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-07-31 13:01:21+00:00
One of the first things he told me after he got it up was that this is the end of SaaS.

The thing is, not everyone knows about these tools. Many small businesses are focused on their day to day. Even if you can build it yourself, there is still some operational overhead. Even if you don't have to be technical as an engineer, you still need to know a bit about apps -- what's React? What's a database?