MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2025-07-19 08:59:46+00:00
Yes, I mentioned debit cards in the second of the three sentences in my comment.

It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).

This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.

You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
Ask HN: What rules do you think beginners and users should follow HN?
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-19 09:00:12+00:00
The Hacker News community loves its rules, which are not even mentioned by the organizers of this site, so I would like to know what rules, in your opinion, a user's comment or post should follow, for or example, what can and cannot be done, what type of post is best and what is not interesting, etc.
by Yoric | 2025-07-19 09:01:17+00:00
While this is indeed the most common use, I'll bring as counter-examples Rust (or C#, or F#, or OCaml 5+) that supports both OS threads and async. OS threads are good for CPU-bound tasks, async for IO-bound tasks.

The main benefit of having async (or Go-style M:N scheduling) is that you can afford to launch as many tasks/fibers/goroutines/... as you want, as long as you have RAM. If you're using OS threads, you need to pool them responsively to avoid choking your CPU with context-switches, running out of OS threads, running out of RAM, etc. – hardly impossible, but if you're doing more than just I/O, you can run into interesting deadlocks.
by TFYS | 2025-07-19 09:01:56+00:00
People don't use things that they know are bad, but someone who has grown up in an environment where everyone uses social media for example, can't know that it's bad because they can't experience the alternative anymore. We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. The positive effects of these things can be bigger than the negative ones, but we can't know that because we're not even trying to figure it out. Sometimes it might be impossible to find out all the effects before large scale adoption, but still we should at least try. Currently the only study we do before deciding is the one to figure out if it'll make a profit for the owner.
by Hamuko | 2025-07-19 09:02:51+00:00
I recently used an electric car charger where the charger is controlled by a mobile app that's basically a thin wrapper over a website. Unfortunately I only had a 0.25 Mb/s Internet plan at the time and it took me several minutes just staring at the splash screen as it was downloading JavaScript and other assets. Even when I got it to load, it hadn't managed to download all fonts. Truly an eye-opening experience.
by 9dev | 2025-07-19 09:04:01+00:00
> Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.

Speak for yourself, this is either heavily overstated or a fringe opinion, luckily. Most people definitely do trust both government and banks to a sensible degree, even if they don’t like some decisions.

Some people like you apparently also don’t appreciate the immense freedom of SEPA transactions. Sure it’s good to have cash as an escape hatch for the occasional transaction off the record, but for almost everything else bank transfers are safe, inaccessible to third parties, free from fees, and easy to use. And above all else, we have a working democracy and not an oppressive regime? This whole debate often feels very disconnected and overblown in Germany.
by psychoslave | 2025-07-19 09:04:26+00:00
I'm not sure they are that different, you could just as well store function calls in some constant each on its line then addition the result on a third. This is only syntax, not conceptual difference here. And on practical level, the difference is that the operator can be directly matched with some machine instruction, with operands being native data type such as integer.

Still, you might then prefer a word as permutability, or swappability.
by ckw | 2025-07-19 09:04:34+00:00
According to O3 US public health spending (state + federal) is 8.6% of gdp. For perspective, here's a list of countries with universal systems which spend less (these numbers include private spending), and life expectancy (US is 78.4 for reference):

Singapore: 5.6%, 82.9 Israel: 7.2%, 83.2 Estonia: 6.9%, 78.5 Poland: 6.7, 78.5 Luxembourg: 5.7%, 83.4 Czech Republic: 8.1%, 79.9

and a couple which spend a bit more, though again, this includes private spending:

France: 11.9%, 82.9 Japan: 11.5%, 84 Portugal: 10.5%, 82.3 Spain: 10.7%, 83.9

So it seems like we could have universal coverage and higher life expectancy if the US government simply spent exactly what it is currently spending, but on everyone, rather than just the old, poor, and veterans.
by stavros | 2025-07-19 09:05:51+00:00
I am similarly confused. I thought it was about the model, but then it mentions a grid system, typography, JS? Then I was wondering if it was about the editor AWS released, as it was similarly named and maybe I conflated the two, but that doesn't make sense in this context either.

I read the whole thing and still I'm not sure what it's about.
by Hamuko | 2025-07-19 09:06:52+00:00
These days Steam allows hiding games from your public profile by marking them as "private", meaning that people can't see that you own the game and can't see that you are playing the game (which is presumably what you would want if you were a fan of "Sex Adventures - Incest Family - Episode 9"). I imagine this is good enough for people so that they won't bother having a separate Steam account just for porn games, as having a single account is more convenient. There's a reason why people hate having multiple game launchers on PC.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-49...
by fariszr | 2025-07-19 09:06:59+00:00
Great blog post, but unfortunately from my experience with my kinda tech-friendly family, i can tell you that not exposing service publicly is an absolute UX killer.

Nobody uses the local nextcloud because they just don't think they can rely on it, it doesn't always work from their perspective, and is too finicky to use, because it needs an external app (Tailscale).

This can be only fixed when the app itself can trigger a vpn connection, and I don't think this is going to happen any time soon.
by motorest | 2025-07-19 09:07:27+00:00
> Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age.

I am perplexed by this blend of comments. It reads like a desperate attempt to whitewash and normalize the trainwreck that is the Trump administration. Trump is not in the same category as any other president in terms of utter destruction and dismantlement of social safety nets available to US citizens. They are not the same.

It's baffling and completely unserious to even insinuate Harris, by extrapolating Biden's work and legacy, would be equivalent or comparable to the hostility the Trump administration exhibited towards the working class and low income families. Biden fought hard to push forward policies like the student debt forgiveness program, which Trump-supporting republicans did everything in their reach to eliminate and revert. They are not the same. Even suggesting they are is insulting to everyone's intelligence.
by ksec | 2025-07-19 09:07:40+00:00
The AI "bubble" if you call it a bubble, it currently provides most of the oxygen for transistor improvements. Had it not been AI, Smartphone and PC alone would not be able to scale the 2 - 2.5 years improvement cycle alone.

And as someone who have seen the PC, Internet and Smartphone cycle. I will say ChartGPT ( or AI ) adoption cycle is way faster than anything I have seen.
by latexr | 2025-07-19 09:07:47+00:00
> I hypothesize that parasites affecting the human nervous system (…) Toxoplasmosis

Yeah yeah, I read that same article fifteen years ago. I don’t buy it.

For one, there are many other symptoms besides behavioural changes, so we’d have way more known cases of infections. For another, those parasites aren’t transmissible over the internet and thus do not explain the whole of human fascination with cats.

It’s a much more plausible explanation that cats are interesting and reliable companions, with distinct personalities and preferences.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-07-19 09:08:49+00:00
Tangent, but each of those events should be a reminder of why we must fight to never, ever live in a cashless society.

Because once big entities control the pipeline of what you can buy and you have no alternative, they basically can dictate what you can and can't do.

We saw that during the wikileak story when visa prevented Europeans to give to the org despite the fact it was perfectly legal to do so on their soil.

Just like data handled by an Apple device is not really your data since they can prevent you from doing what you want with it, money handled by Visa is only your money until they don't like what you do with it.
Show HN: Klartraum, a neural rendering inference engine
by fortmeier | 2025-07-19 09:10:19+00:00
Hi HN, the last half year I spent some of my spare time on learning Vulkan (mainly the compute part) and applied it directly in developing a gaussian splatting renderer. I am not sure where I will go with this, but I thought some of you might find it interesting and/or have suggestions on how to proceed.

Ultimately, I want to Klartraum to be an extensive neural network and rendering inference engine (no training, backprop, autograd) running on embedded devices and VR headsets with high performance. My major obstacle right now is that writing GLSL compute kernels is tedious compared to CUDA ...

What do you think should be added so the library would be of use for others?
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-19 09:10:29+00:00
It's also worth noting that the mainstream German parties have actually supported ethnic cleansing abroad, in Nagorno-Karabach, etc. while the AfD opposed those things, so I don't think it's very clear cut that AfD is the dangerous party.

Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.

I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
by qayxc | 2025-07-19 09:13:48+00:00
It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.
by lcnielsen | 2025-07-19 09:13:59+00:00
Yeah, but the only reason for this time wasteage is because website operators refuse to accept what would become the fallback default of "minimal", for which they would not need to seek explicit consent. It's a kind of arbitrage, like those scammy website that send you into redirect loops with enticing headlines.

The law is written to encourage such defaults if anything, it just wasn't profitable enough I guess.
by palata | 2025-07-19 09:16:54+00:00
Nice article, great list! I just would like to mention a few things:

* Regarding email, when someone is ready to change their address (e.g. from "@gmail.com" to something else), really the first step is to get their own domain. Then it completely removes the lock-in: in the last 4 years I changed provider 3 times, but my address stayed the same. I landed on Migadu and am very very happy with it.

* I really like that Cloud providers like Hetzner or Infomaniak are starting to offer "managed self-hosted solutions". Not everybody can set up their own server with e.g. Nextcloud, but paying 5$ per month to have a managed instance on those providers is actually powerful. Not sure how the Nextcloud export situation is, but if it was easy to migrate to another provider, it would make it even more appealing (avoiding lock-ins again).

* For the password manager, I would mention Bitwarden.

* I am a bit surprised by the mapping advice: OpenStreetMap is everywhere. Ever used Uber or Lyft? Chances are that your public transportation app uses it too. It is great and it is open source. The first step into OpenStreetMap, IMO, is to install Organic Maps. Then slowly understand what OpenStreetMap is and enjoy the plenty of apps using it.
by crawshaw | 2025-07-19 09:17:37+00:00
If you want to have fun with this: the initial window (IW) is determined by the sender. So you can configure your server to the right number of packets for your website. It would look something like:

ip route change default via <gw> dev <if> initcwnd 20 initrwnd 20

A web search suggests CDNs are now at 30 packets for the initial window, so you get 45kb there.
by nicomt | 2025-07-19 09:17:48+00:00
It's not open-source or self-hosted but putting it out there: CloudFlare zero-trust is amazing and free. In my setup, I have a cloudflared tunnel configured in my homelab machine and I expose individual services without a VPN or opening up my firewall. You can also set up authentication with SSO, and it happens before reaching the backend application which makes it more secure. This is easy for family and friends to use, because they don't need to setup anything from their side, just go to the URL and login. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-19 09:18:58+00:00
Absolutely agree with that. I recently visited the BBC website the other day and it loaded about 120MB of stuff into the cache - for a small text article. Not only does it use a lot of extra energy to transmit so much data, but it promotes a general atmosphere of wastefulness.

I've tried to really cut down my website as well to make it fairly minimal. And when I upload stuff to YouTube, I never use 4K, only 1080P. I think 4K and 8K video should not even exist.

A lot of people talk about adding XYZ megawatts of solar to the grid. But imagine how nice it could be if we regularly had efforts to use LESS power.

I miss the days when websites were very small in the days of 56K modems. I think there is some happy medium somewhere and we've gone way past it.
by yorwba | 2025-07-19 09:19:33+00:00
> At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible

Sure, but that's for small, everyday amounts. For values upwards of 500€, I think the familiarity of paying cash would be swamped by the nervousness of carrying way too much money with you, what if it gets stolen?

> this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees

The only time my bank has ever charged me a per-transaction fee was, ironically, when I withdrew cash abroad using my credit card.
by xg15 | 2025-07-19 09:20:10+00:00
> What is going on here? Do we really like cats because they have ‘baby faces’ or because they are ‘neotenous’ or kittens sound a little like human babies? These are common theories, but make little sense to me. The relationship between baby-faces and animal liking is weak to begin with (eg. Archer & Monton 2010). Cats objectively do not look that much like babies.

This strikes me as a too simplistic view of neoteny.

You could have a look at Anime or Pixar or cartoon characters and ask the same questions. They also objectively don't look like kids if you make a photo comparison side-by-side (at least in certain styles). Their features are so exaggerated they strictly speaking don't even look human.

Nevertheless, they can cause strong reactions and emotions in viewers in a similar way OP here described for cats.

My guess is that both (cats and anime) hacked our visual network in a sense: They took some visual features that evoke "cuteness" in humans and which likely evolved for the purpose of driving us to protect our kids - and dialled them up to 11 and combined them with not child-like features to evoke a response that's even more intense than the one we have for kids.

So in a sense, they look more like kids than actual kids do.
by deanc | 2025-07-19 09:20:56+00:00
The reality is the data that is gathered is so much more valuable and accurate if you gather consent when you are running a business. Defaulting to a minimal config is just not practical for most businesses either. The decisions that are made with proper tracking data have a real business impact (I can see it myself - working at a client with 7 figure monthly revenue).

Im fully supportive of consent, but the way it is implemented is impractical from everyone’s POV and I stand by that.
by twwwt | 2025-07-19 09:21:00+00:00
The important thing to me is to distinguish between the abstract concept of asynchronism and how it can be implemented, and by the latter I mean both at the abstract level of a programming language and by technical coordination means in a machine. For the abstract concept at the highest level, well, it is just the dual of synchronism: two (or more) parties that somehow need to work together (i.e., one has a dependency on the other in a way that certain things need to happen before another one can continue) are not synchronized, meaning that it is not known or not defined when the things that need to happen after something else will be done. Seen that way, this definition is not hard. The hard thing can be the abstract means designed in a language: the amount of cognitive effort it takes in order to comprehended them and/or use them (in an fault-free way).
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-19 09:21:05+00:00
Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give a darn about even trying to send a signal.
by Hamuko | 2025-07-19 09:21:19+00:00
These chargers have an RFID tag too, but I'd forgotten it in my jacket, so it was mobile app for me.

There are some chargers that take card payments though. My local IKEA has some. There's also EU legislation to mandate payment card support.

https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to...
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-19 09:23:22+00:00
I recently received an email[0] from a UK entity with an enormous wall of text talking about processing of personal information, my rights and how there is a “Contact Card” of my details on their website.

But with a little bit of reading, one could ultimately summarise the enormous wall of text simply as: “We’ve added your email address to a marketing list, click here to opt out.”

The huge wall of text email was designed to confuse and obfuscate as much as possible with them still being able to claim they weren’t breaking protection of personal information laws.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/aN4wiVp
by moorow | 2025-07-19 09:23:40+00:00
I mean I understand that's the goal, but in this specific CVE it looks like the issue was introduced in Bitnami's own scripts sitting on top of everything, so a ideally-zero-CVE underlying OS isn't going to solve that problem at all.

It also seems like this set of changes was made in this specific way to forcibly disrupt anyone using the existing images, many of which were made off the backs of previously existing non-bitnami open source projects, so I assume you can understand why people are annoyed.

But again, anyone with any knowledge or experience of Broadcom saw this coming, so...
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-07-19 09:24:09+00:00
Sounds like progress is being made on the language spec front, that's good to see.

I'm not following what you meant by this though, it seems like a contradiction:

> A language specification is not required to be qualified. The behavior of the compiler needs to be described.

But they're putting work into reviving the language spec, to enable certification? Also, if the source language hasn't been described, then surely the compiler's behaviour hasn't been described.

Or did you mean that their documentation is for the Ferrous flavour of Rust and might not reflect the latest version of the Rust language?
by mrweasel | 2025-07-19 09:25:15+00:00
The complaint that OOXML was overly complex was a criticism when Microsoft first introduced the format, but as you point out, it needed to be able to handle decades of old formatting rules back then already. While I'm sure that there are stuff in the format that Microsoft made needlessly complex, one has to remember that they still need to be able to maintain the code, so throwing in to many roadblocks for open source developers would likely come back to haunt them. Still we know they did just that with SMB, so why not with OOXML.

What surprises me is how well LibreOffice handles various file formats, not just OOXML. In some cases LibreOffice has the absolute best support for abandoned file formats. I'm not the one maintaining them, so it's easy enough for me to say "See, you managed just fine". It much be especially frustrating when you have the OpenDocument format, which does effectively the same thing, only simpler.
by meindnoch | 2025-07-19 09:25:46+00:00
>I don't get this. Did you mean

>IsOdd(E(x)) = x mod 2

No, that's literally the point. IsOdd() operates on the cyphertext E(x). It doesn't see the plaintext x. And yet, due to its algebraic properties, the server can answer the query without decrypting it.

For example:

Client: x = 13 k = 45 E(x) = 13 xor 45 = 32 Server: IsOdd(E(x)) = 32 mod 2 = 0 Client: D(IsOdd(E(x))) = D(0) = 0 xor TrimLength(45, 1) = 1 (we trim the decryption key to the length of the response, which is 1bit)

So what happens in this case is the server sends you a bit, which you'll either flip or not flip, depending on the key k. The server doesn't know whether you're going to flip its answer or not, so it doesn't know if your plaintext number is odd or even.
by letria | 2025-07-19 09:26:34+00:00
After a few years of hiatus, the Libre Space Foundation is organising the Open-Source CubeSat Workshop on October 25-26 in Athens, Greece. The event will be hybrid, with presentations taking place in person (and everyone who wishes to join us in Athens is welcome), while it will also be streamed for those who want to follow online. You are welcome to join OSCW and possibly submit an abstract too (if that sounds interesting to you). The event is not about CubeSats alone. It is all about open-source software and hardware. So you are more than welcome to submit an abstract.

The deadline for abstract submissions is the end of July.