MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-14 10:02:30+00:00
> I wonder how many are up to this, and what active resistance or movements inside the country look like these days.

Hard to find that out, as I can imagine outlets like HN are actively monitored as well - if an Iranian account would be like "hello I am in the resistance movement", they'd be painting a target on themselves.

But the US is heading this way too if I may put on my conspiracy thinking hat; "we" already knew, but the Snowden leaks confirmed that the NSA and co are inside all of the major internet companies, probably including Starlink.

When the shit hits the fan, it is us techy internet peoples' responsibility to ensure information continues to flow freely, be it through access to information (like these local portable wifi network devices that have a small internet full of knowledge like Wikipedia pages), communication (the Matrix servers mentioned in the article), and communication to the outside world.

On that note, what would be the next option if for example the US cut itself off of the global internet and Starlink? Ham radio / whispernet? I mean I'm pretty confident that at the moment there's just too much freedom still for an internet shutdown to be viable, but having the knowledge is important nevertheless.

ok conspiracy hat off. Disclaimer, I don't live in the US, but my grandparents did live through WW2, during which people had secret radios because the Nazis confiscated all of them to try and keep people uninformed. The radios were essential for the resistance movements, with public BBC broadcasts containing secret messages informing the reistance of e.g. sabotage supply drops. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance for a good starting point, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_during_World_War_II for the rest of Europe.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-07-14 10:02:42+00:00
Yes, Harper's book that I linked above is good for that, imho. It looks like the PDF that is there now is a subset of the chapters of the 2nd edition. In an older version of the page, there was a complete pdf of the 1st edition and that's the one that I used. You might be able to find it in Wayback if you go back to 2015 or so.
by aquariusDue | 2025-07-14 10:02:47+00:00
Probably because it's been trending on GitHub, at least that's how I found it yesterday before it was submitted to HN. After looking at the star chart in the project README and checking out their website it was pretty clear this was another mix of vibecoded half working product masquerading as open-source for promotional reasons.

I'm almost sure that the GitHub stars are manipulated or even bought but it's a baseless accusation on my part. These days Codeberg seems to be closer to what GitHub once aspired to be or more aptly was for a while.

I'd like to rant more about how GitHub is inching closer year by year to LinkedIn for devs with a hint of Product Hunt but eh, what's the point?
by pfdietz | 2025-07-14 10:03:11+00:00
Science benefits globally, not locally, and the current US government considers such positive externalities to have no importance. Arguments from prestige also get no traction.

Given the US fiscal situation, the benefit is perceived to be the reduction in cost.

There has been a presumption that science is locally important, but this presumption is being questioned, and needs to be better defended.

Other such globalist endeavors, like being world policeman, are also being questioned.
by cubefox | 2025-07-14 10:03:13+00:00
> Genuine question: why do you think CRTs are better?

They have many disadvantages, but an advantage is that CRTs mostly remove the "persistence blur" induced by smooth pursuit eye movements on sample-and-hold displays like LCD and OLED. Here is an explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604613
by blitzar | 2025-07-14 10:04:29+00:00
The 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation.

It didnt come from nowhwere, or from Silicon Valleys exceptionalism - It came from changing the value of money, labour and resources. It came from everyday people, deficits and borrowing from the next 10 generations of children.
by const_cast | 2025-07-14 10:04:47+00:00
> In order for me to gain all that weight back, I would have to eat a ton of calories per day and completely stop moving/exercise.

Yes, this is what usually happens. You've spent far, far more time with those calories than without.

> It’s been nearly a year

Okay, that's not a very long time is my point. It's much too early to think it's over.

I'm not saying that it's not possible to get off GLP-1s and maintain a good lifestyle. I'm saying that I don't think it's a moral failing or a lack of... sigh... "discipline" if people need to be on these drugs for life. Frankly, I think it's very rich that a baby skinny person is lecturing us on discipline. You've been doing this for less than a year. Discipline means sticking to habits for a long period of time, even when times are tough. I would not classify less than a year as that.
by ahofmann | 2025-07-14 10:05:07+00:00
It is always funny to read something like this: "[..] the telco, one of Germany's largest [..]"

There are effectively only three mobile providers in Germany. 1&1 is the fourth, but its network doesn't even cover the whole country. From those three networks, Telefonica is the smallest by quite a margin. So the sentence in the article is technically correct, but draws a nonsensical picture.
by pickledoyster | 2025-07-14 10:05:17+00:00
On top of that, iOS continues to push Safari on users by disregarding their default browser settings.

Steps to reproduce: 0. Select a different default browser, delete the Safari app (just for good measure, even though it's not really possible just like deleting IE in older Win versions) 1. Open the Books app 2. Select text 3. Select Search 4. Press Search the Web 5. Safari search results open as you stare in disbelief
by bigDinosaur | 2025-07-14 10:05:49+00:00
It isn't your place to know the political sympathies of everyone, nor is it your place to decide what constitutes 'support' about every possible issue. It is simply not viable to do this if you want to work together with large, diverse groups of people. There are people with objectionable but private views in the world and in the workplace, deal with it. This is entirely separate from people's public views.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-07-14 10:06:16+00:00
I work at an e-waste recycling company and I definitely agree that some manufacturers have way too many product lines and models. I'm not sure what the difference between an HP EliteBook and a ProBook is. At least with a ThinkPad or Dell Latitude, you know you're getting a half-decent laptop, but I'm not sure what the difference in the model numbers mean. (I remember a co-worker telling me he found a ThinkPad T-15. It could be a J-9,000,000,000 for all I know: it doesn't mean anything to me.)

Then there's the cheap laptops with what I call a "Shenzhen Special": a 1366x768 TN screen. Those should never have been a thing. Even cheap phones 10 years ago did not have screens that bad, but laptops 5 years ago do.
by whstl | 2025-07-14 10:06:36+00:00
I actually try to build it "well" in the first pass, even for prototyping. I'm not gonna say I succeed but at least I try.

This doesn't mean writing tests for everything, and sometimes it means not writing tests at all, but it means that I do my best to make code "testable". It shouldn't take more time to do this, though: if you're making more classes to make it testable, you're already messing it up.

This also doesn't mean compromising in readability, but it does mean eschewing practices like "Clean Code". Functions end up being as large as they need to be. I find that a lot of people doing especially Ruby and Java tend to spend too much time here. IMO having lots of 5-line functions is totally unnecessary, so I just skip this step altogether.

It also doesn't mean compromising on abstractions. I don't even like the "rule of three" because it forces more work down the line. But since I prefer DEEP classes and SMALL interfaces, in the style of John Ousterhout, the code doesn't really take longer to write. It does require some thinking but it's nothing out of the ordinary at all. It's just things that people don't do out of inertia.

One thing I am a bit of hardliner about is scope. If the scope is too large, it's probably not prototype or MVP material, and I will fight to reduce it.

EDIT: kukkeliskuu said below "learn one tool well". This is also key. Don't go "against the grain" when writing prototypes or first passes. If you're fighting the framework, you're on the wrong path IME.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-07-14 10:07:15+00:00
I find people overfocus on fast running tests, often to the exclusion of tests which test realistically and loosely couple to the code.

This is a pretty easy and natural thing to do because it's quite easy to go "I shaved 2.5 minutes off my build" whereas "I increased the maintainability and realism of our tests, adding 3 minutes to the build" is a much more nebulous and hard thing to justify even when it does save you time in the long run.

As Drucker says, what gets "measured gets managed" <- quantifiable metrics get more attention even when they're less important.

>A proper unit tests is high value, low maintenance and very fast to run (it mocks/stubs everything it needs, there is no setup cost).

^^ this is a case in point, mocks and stubs do make fast running test code but they commensurately decrease the realism of that test and increase maintenance overhead. Even in unit tests I've shifted to writing almost zero mocks and stubs and using only fakes.

I've had good luck writing what I call "end to end unit tests" where the I/O boundary is faked while everything underneath it is tested as is, but even this model falls over when the I/O boundary you're faking is large and complex.

In database heavy applications, for instance, so much of the logic will be in this layer that a unit test will demand massive amounts of mocks/stubs and commensurate maintenance and still tell you almost nothing about what broke or what works.
by scotty79 | 2025-07-14 10:07:19+00:00
Codium was built on Exafunction infrastructure.

https://www.unite.ai/varun-mohan-co-founder-ceo-of-codeium-i...

It's really a simple story, they built infrastructure years ago, initially they rented it, so companies outsourced their computing tasks to them. But eventually came up with the idea what product could they put on top of their infrastructure to sell it for dollars rather than pennies. And they did.

They don't need a moat because they provide turnkey utility to a lot of very rich corporations. They are not in the business of selling the vs plug-in to you. They are in the business of selling developer experience powered by their own vast compute to a lot of very rich corporations.

They had millions in revenue before they hired their first sales rep. I don't think just a VS plug-in startup could do that.

https://www.saastr.com/cro-confidential-how-codium-built-a-b...
App/Web for finding friends and like-minded people, which works?
by aidasp | 2025-07-14 10:07:42+00:00
After 30+ years of feeling lonely, I've been thinking about what's missing. Yes, there are apps for meeting people—Meetup, Bumble BFF, and others. But they don't quite capture what I'm searching for: a space to find people who share our passions, our curiosities, a desire to build RC aircraft or to have that Harry Potter marathon we've been putting off.

I'm searching for (or dreaming of building) a platform that:

Puts community over profit — No subscription tiers hiding basic features. No algorithms designed to keep you scrolling instead of connecting. A place where you can message interesting people instantly without hitting 3-messages-per-day limits (you don't have limits saying "hello" to people on the street, right?). You can search for people by location, interests, etc. without limits!

Connects through shared purpose — Find people who want to collaborate on projects, learn together, or simply share genuine interests. Not just "swipe right if you like hiking."

Builds lasting relationships — Success means people forming real friendships, not deleting the app after a single match.

Respects authenticity — No pressure for perfect photos or curated personas.

Grows organically — Ideally open-source, built by the community it serves.

I believe loneliness is one of humanity's biggest challenges—one that money, fame, or even AI can't solve. We're social beings. We need each other.

If you relate, or know any tools that already do this well, I'd love to hear from you. If you're interested in building something like this together — I'm more than happy to grab a cup of tea and jump on a call to connect and discuss more. ^^
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-14 10:08:37+00:00
I agree, but I think that's a different argument.

The argument here isn't "the goal of a software engineering job isn't economic", it's "sometimes quality is aligned with economic goals" (which is of course true).

If there's a 10-point scale from 0 = the most hacked-together nonsense and 10 = perfect formal proof of correctness, I'm arguing that a lot of engineers should come down from a 9 to a 6, not to a 0 (or at least, that they'd benefit from picking their battles about when to argue for a 9).

In business contexts, I often argue the opposite, trying to move them from a 3 to a 6, because nontechnical people often underestimate the importance of tech debt. That's not a typical problem on HN, though.
by throwup238 | 2025-07-14 10:09:10+00:00
It’s only a non-issue only if you have legal standing and the wherewithal/funding to push through to discovery, which in this case is a really (in)convenient catch-22 if you’re a constituent who wants to institute reform.

The fourth estate, the one that we ostensibly trust to hold power to account, again very conveniently, does not generally have that standing, FOIA excepted.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-14 10:09:11+00:00
I am not nearly as hopeful as you.

First, states like RI are already making incremental steps toward it (they have started taxing non owner occupied non rented properties above a threshold, mainly to get the billionares with fancy waterfront vacation real estate to either live in the places or rent them out). It's only a matter of moving that stuff down the economic ladder.

Second, all the "people oughta hang for this" quality legal precedent that enables. If you own a parcel and the government passes a bunch of laws saying you can't do things to the parcel going forward without jumping through economic non-starter sized hoops is that not a taking? They're basically forcing you to sell out to a developer big enough to jump through the hoops like in that supreme court case, only instead of a named developer it's basically a class of developers. And that's considered "not a taking". Straight up taxation is even less of a taking by comparison.

I'd be much more in favor of the taxation if it weren't for all the laws preventing small time land owners and speculators from developing on a scale and budget that befits them but if new punitive taxes get passed without rolling back all sorts of other regulation it's probably very bad for them.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-14 10:09:16+00:00
I sold 100 BTC back in 2015, which cleared all my debts and landed my first apartment. But obviously in hindsight, it was the most expensive mistake I've made in my life. I started following cryptocurrencies back in 2012.

Still, for my life, I can't see the real value. Back then, when things were starting out, the idea was to bank the unbanked, make money transfer seamless, cheap, and fast, and basically break up actors like PayPal et. al.

It is 2025, and I've yet to see shops here in Europe that actively take any crypto, or people that use it in their daily lives. "Fast and cheap payments" have been fixed using regular fiat and banking services. I daily transfer and pay for stuff without any charges.

Crypto in general, but stablecoins more so, just feels like another asset that's being pumped and dumped periodically, with some constant growth factor pushing it up. At least with metals as gold, silver, etc. there's some real usage - though most of the value is just "store of value".

I don't know, for me it is mentally difficult to just buy into some asset that that has practically no real value, other than that others are willing to purchase it for more. It is as if everyone has just agreed that it has value due to demand, and that's it. It feels so artificial, that it is hard to wrap my brain around why people are willing to trade it (other than the next guy buying it for more, as mentioned).

EDIT:

Sure, there are some very legit usage of crypto, like:

- Circumventing sanctions

- Laundering money

- Scams and transactions of illegal goods

And of course just a storage of value.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-14 10:09:50+00:00
In the US, a reasonable estimate is dozens of murders per year. I don't know if we can do any better without running a study: There's no good data easily available; the murder clearance rate in the US is now quite low; most insurance killings are, of course, staged to look like accidents.

But it's enough of a problem that there are quite a lot of legal journal articles about it, e.g.: https://scholarship.law.campbell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Life insurance has killed a lot of people. People who would otherwise be alive but for the existence of payouts upon their deaths.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-14 10:09:58+00:00
>You’re not a mom and pop landlord if you’re just buying a second home to move into with intent to sell your current one.

That's my point. The person I'm replying to is being obtuse and sarcastically arguing that the investor criteria requires owning 3+ as an attempt to use absurdity to force people to admit that 2+ makes you an "investor" thereby classifying the people who are simply swapping homes like you stated as "investors".
by pickledoyster | 2025-07-14 10:10:13+00:00
> tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware"

I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice. Also, from what I understand, Apple still leads in accessibility, so this would be an asshole move towards consumers stuck in that ecosystem just because Google and Microsoft can't get their act together.
by hocuspocus | 2025-07-14 10:11:11+00:00
> When Microsoft made TrueType the standard font format for Windows 3.1, they opted to go with Arial rather than Helvetica, probably because it was cheaper

That's a myth. Microsoft paid a lot of money to MonoType, as I believe they needed to task several full-time employees with the manual hinting of those fonts. The deal probably saved the foundry from bankruptcy.

"As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees, Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Microsoft paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country."

https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2011/09/blue-pencil-no-...
by torginus | 2025-07-14 10:12:47+00:00
Generally why I think rust compile is unfixably slow is the decision to rely on compile-time static dispatch, and heavy generic specialization, which means there's a LOT of code to compile and the resulting binary size is large.

Many-many people remarked that this is the wrong approach in todays world, where CPUs are good at doing dynamic dispatch prediction, but the cache sizes (esp. L1, and instr cache) is very limited, for most code (with the exception of very hot tight loops), fetching code into cache is going to be the bottleneck.

Not to mention, for a systems programming language, I'd expect a degree of neatness of the generated machine code (e.g. no crazy name mangling, having the same generic method appear 30 places in assembly etc.)
by thyristan | 2025-07-14 10:12:48+00:00
When a "bang" takes 30 years and costs 100 billion units of money, progress will be slow. "Something different" will have to be within the margin of error of all the successful "bangs". So this something won't likely be cheaper or faster. Physics is just at a state of sophistication where the scale of things to look at is so small or so vast that quick and cheap isn't possible anymore. At least for the last 100 years or so.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-14 10:12:49+00:00
As an old school font snob, I'm a huge fan of Zapf Dingbats, especially those elegant pointing hands. None of the modern brutalist hand emojis can hold a candle to them.

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20220705073411/https://www.inver...

Zapf Dingbats’ little pointing hands are less mere bullets than distilled manicules: their sleek, tapering wrists and attenuated index fingers fuse medieval marginalia’s flourishes with mid-century modernism’s rigor, transforming a humble signpost into a compact, almost fetishized arrow of attention.

They're sleek and minimal enough to function as crisply hard modern bullets, yet they retain a soft, calligraphic, Victorian flourish (the very essence of the medieval manicule, digitized by Hermann Zapf in 1978), making them perfectly at home in a vintage Beagle Bros Apple ][ Software Catalog.

http://asimov.applefritter.com/documentation/advertisements/...

https://beagle.applearchives.com/

How would you like to buy a new pair of hands?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVgg_yUN20
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-14 10:13:55+00:00
> Then there's the cheap laptops with what I call a "Shenzhen Special": a 1366x768 TN screen. Those should never have been a thing.

I disagree, sometimes all you need is some sort of screen, a keyboard, a wireless interface, and the cheapest x86 processor invented by man.

A whole laptop for less than 400 USD is a great thing for the other half.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-14 10:14:31+00:00
> A simple but powerful video editor that gets the job done. Works on any platform.

> Enter your email. Join waitlist

> 59284 people already joined

I would have expected a bit more from the main page, would be helpful to have a link to the /projects URL that someone else mentioned, or a screenshot demonstrating the software!

For the FOSS video editing software out there, I tried out Shotcut (https://www.shotcut.org/) and OpenShot (https://www.openshot.org/), though both of them were either a bit unpolished or unstable, with the occasional crash along the way.

I had a way better experience with kdenlive, which was my main video editor for a bit, has the basic features I'd expect, as well as decent codec support: https://kdenlive.org/

As for other options, DaVinci Resolve still feels like the more professional software suite that you'd go for, sans the cost, albeit the UI can be a bit awkward in places to someone used to the likes of kdenlive/Sony Vegas: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
by Lerc | 2025-07-14 10:14:32+00:00
I find it difficult to evaluate the potential regulation of cryptocurrency. I think it is necessary, in any domain, to have good laws that enable activity while protecting the people.

At the same time I don't have a great deal of faith in the ability of the existing government structures to enact legislation in the interest of society as a whole.

That presents a serious problem that makes the world of cryptocurrency pale into insignificance. Without belief that laws act in the interest of humanity in general, faith in the rule of law erodes. If that erosion is not stopped eventually nothing remains.

I hope things are not as bad as they seem to the outside observer.
by bencyoung | 2025-07-14 10:16:13+00:00
The Fens in East Anglia in the UK has a lot of interesting pumping tech. The latest can do 100m3/s (https://www.edie.net/st-germans-pumping-station-keeps-fens-f...). If all the pumps failed there would be hundreds of km2 underwater within days or weeks