MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Learn Blockchain History – Simple and Fun
by tanduorou | 2025-07-31 15:39:46+00:00
Hi! I made a website about blockchain history.

You know how we use phones to pay for things? Blockchain is the echnology that makes digital money safe.

My website tells this story from 1970 to today. It's like reading a story book!

What's cool:

- Easy words that anyone can understand - Works in English and Chinese - 13 short chapters - Dark and light themes - Clean and simple design

I made it simple so kids and adults can both learn. It shows how smart people invented new ways to keep our digital money safe.

The website is easy to read and perfect for students and teachers who want to learn about blockchain!

What do you think? Is it easy to understand?
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-31 15:39:50+00:00
> It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.

More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail. It's becoming crystal clear that "we the people" have no power anymore, and the way we can take some of that power back is by not participating in their laws - self hosting, use services outside of the jurisdictions where backdoors are mandatory, educating and helping others do the same.

Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.

When preventing the laws from passing fails, we still need to make it as difficult as possible to enforce.
by neilv | 2025-07-31 15:40:01+00:00
Captchas seem to be more about Google's "which human are you?" cross-site tracking. And now also about Cloudflare getting massive amounts of HTTPS-busting Internet traffic along with cross-site tracking.

And in many cases, it's taking a huge steaming dump upon a site's first-impression user experience, but AFAICT, it's not on the radar of UX people.
by blargey | 2025-07-31 15:40:11+00:00
It’s a (preview for) a slide deck / webinar analyzing a selection of successful PE acquisitions that already completed with an exit, marketed towards the PE-involved/aspirational.

Probably not what people expect based on the submission title (“Do PE firms create value? How?”) which seems removed from the “article” title “The Private Equity Value Creation Report: 2025 From Entry to Exit: How Do PE Firms Create Value?”.
by MITSardine | 2025-07-31 15:40:19+00:00
I think it's both.

You can see it with smoking. Only 20 years ago (I'll take France as the example), you could smoke indoors in restaurants and many public places and, a few years before that, even in classrooms.

Recently, it was forbidden in public parks and similar places. A perhaps still minoritary segment of the population would like it outlawed even in e.g. restaurant and bar terraces.

Since France remains behind on this compared to the US, you can get a time-traveling experience regarding this right now, by boarding a plane from Paris to e.g. Boston or back. You won't find a terrace where you're allowed to smoke (or even vape) in Boston (at least I didn't) or, if you're American, you might find the French very comfortable smoking right under your nose.

There is no doubt these are good policies as far as public health is concerned. But they outline how, in the tug-of-war between personal freedom and safety, there has been a tendency lately for safety to win.

Other examples, as far as I'm aware, there weren't even speed limits on non-agglo roads before the 70s (France, again). Drinking (under the limit of manifest ebriety, and the tolerance must have been pretty lenient) and driving was not illegal until 1970. You could drive a motor scooter/moped including on high speed roads (though they wouldn't break 40km/h unless unbridled) from the age of 14 without any paperwork, nowadays it requires a minimal license. I'm very doubtful people didn't know this was a dangerous situation, or that they didn't care, I think they simply prioritized freedom and simplicity over living in a zero-risk society.

I point to these safety regulations because they're where the compromise between social order and personal freedom is most evident, but they're only manifestations of a broader change of the Zeitgeist, in my mind.

Another clear tendency seems to be an obsession with so-called insecurity which, according to politicians and a worryingly large portion of the French (judging by election results), is at an unbearable all time high; in fact, violent crimes have never been so rare (for comparison, murder rate is 1/5th that of the US).

Everyone seems obsessed with risk and danger, be it the right of being mugged, or the left of precarity (which I can better sympathize with). It seems one half of the population wants to live in a police state with no personal freedom, and the other wants to live in an absolute socialist state with no financial freedom.

Just to conclude, it also seems the newer generation has been found less promiscuous, which, to me, is not a very adventurous attitude.
by throwanem | 2025-07-31 15:40:20+00:00
Yeah, and it cost $10,000, right? Just like every other PC and workstation AT&T ever sold.

If you want to compare apples to apples, look at the Tecra 500CS from 1996 that was my first laptop in '97 - it cost me $700 practically new. (Then as now, ex-fleet machines are a great way to go, as long as you pick ones that were issued to people who hate computers.) For what this was doing half a decade later, it doesn't make the 1991 model look too shabby, although I concede nothing in those days had as much as one one-millionth of the price/performance of almost anything you can pick off a shelf today.

https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Toshiba/Tecra/Toshi...
by milanm081 | 2025-07-31 15:40:33+00:00
I love books. When I look at the 5000 books on my bookshelf, I see more than paper and ink; I see a personal board of mentors I never had. Over the years, as an avid reader, these books have quietly reshaped how I approach coding, leadership, and even thinking itself.

Early in my career, I assumed improving my skills was all about writing more code or learning the latest framework, like everyone else. But the most significant improvements in my growth came from hours spent flipping pages in some of the best books out there.

There’s something tactile and deliberate about reading, scribbling notes in the margins, dog-earing pages, that forces me to slow down and reflect.

Here, I want to share five books that influenced my journey from engineer to CTO the most. Each of these books contributed beyond just technical knowledge; they challenged my assumptions, introduced new mental models, and ultimately changed how I work and lead teams.
by empath75 | 2025-07-31 15:40:53+00:00
> Congrats, rustc forced you to wrap all your types in Arc<Mutex<_>>, and you no longer have data races.

Or you can just avoid shared mutable state, or use channels, or many of the other patterns for avoiding data races in Rust. The fun thing is that you can be sure that no matter what you do, as long as it's not unsafe, it will not cause a data race.
by SilasX | 2025-07-31 15:40:54+00:00
I played through a lot of it, and while it was fun, I wouldn't call it gamified in the sense that Zachtronics does it. As an FYI, here are some sticking points I ran into as well:

1) It uses the term "goal" for the the current stage of the proof you're working on, which is counterintuitive. In common speech, the goal is the theorem you're trying to prove, not the current step you're on in proving it. It would be like if I were helping you get to work in the morning, and I said, "Okay, you're current [sub]goal is that you're done brushing your teeth." No. That's not a goal. That's progress toward a goal.

2) It doesn't warn you early on about the left-associativeness of the operator binding, or what to do about it. So you can apply what seem like valid transformations but then parentheses pop up that you don't expect, and which you have no guidance on how to deal with. I had to ask ChatGPT what was going on to solve it.
by Kilonzus | 2025-07-31 15:40:54+00:00
There seems to be a typo in the 4th paragraph (directly under the struct memory table). I'm counting a padding of 7 bytes. 96 (size of struct) - 89 (size of primitive types) = 7. The first padding consist of 3 bytes to correctly align the 4 byte int after a 1 byte bool. Second padding is 2 bytes due to a 4 bytes int following two 1 byte bools and third padding is 2 bytes as described in the blog, 3+2+2=7 bytes of padding.
by criticalfault | 2025-07-31 15:41:01+00:00
This is only fair.

Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird.

Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M.

To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run it into the ground
by quotemstr | 2025-07-31 15:41:16+00:00
Just wait until you read about Wine or captive NDIS. You'll probably enjoy User Mode Linux most of all.

The concept of an OS still makes sense on a system with no privilege level transitions and a single address space (e.g. DOS, FreeRTOS): therefore, mystical low level register goo isn't essential to the concept.

The boundary between the OS is a lot more porous and a lot less arcane than people imagine. In the end, it's just software.
by PeyTy | 2025-07-31 15:41:19+00:00
The code is mostly in the https://github.com/GreenteaOS/Tofita and https://github.com/GreenteaOS/Caramel

People check the https://github.com/GreenteaOS/Greentea which currently mostly contains binary assets. This repo will have user-space apps. Currently sample apps are taken from ReactOS project.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-31 15:41:28+00:00
Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.

Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.

Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.

It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-31 15:41:32+00:00
Much "irrational" behavior isn't. People make decisions with incomplete information and the subset of information they have differs between people. People also have different objectives when engaging in similar behavior. Asserting that a choice is rational or not is often making the unwarranted assumption that their objectives are the same as your objectives.

For example, people often have a preference for certain flow patterns in traffic that they prioritize more than the route with the shortest time.
by throwanem | 2025-07-31 15:42:32+00:00
It was more that you don't seem to know what you have said. But that two people happen to agree on a point and independently pursue it isn't close to the same as saying they are the same person.

My identity has been obvious from my HN profile for nearly that profile's entire existence. The identity of the person, whom you have accused of using me as a throwaway, is likewise quite visible. They are plainly not the same. So unless you mean me to go on under the conclusion you are incompetent to defame by virtue of being overtly delusional, I'm not really clear on your intent.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-31 15:42:39+00:00
I'm guessing, however that using nuget packages means having at least a .csproj file near your .cs file with the packages defined. And downloading the packages, compiling to a space under the .csproj path, similar to a node_modules directory (bin and obj for .Net).

What I like about Deno, is the packages are downloaded/cached to a shared location not next to your script, and you don't need additional files configured. At least for shell scripts.

I'm glad shebang works, that will actually help with some process checking I'm wanting to do from CLI without launching my entire services around it.
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-07-31 15:42:48+00:00
Forever, until our cursed profession gets an official licensing body like other real Engineering professions. A Civil Enginnee can't sign on a prototype bridge design that then gets built and opened to the public, because any problem means potential jail time and possibly loss of licence.

There should be legal consequences for treating people's data with reckless abandon. It's normal for restaurants to be inspected. Commercial apps should also be inspected by independent bodies and fines must be paid if serious negligence is found. Imagine finding out that your favorite restaurant had a rat infestation on their storage room for a year.

And of someone gets food poisoning because the restaurant used expired ingredients, it gets heavily fined and possibly shuttered. This should also happen with software. If your root AWS user key is leaked in your frontend, your service deserves to be shuttered.
by smokel | 2025-07-31 15:42:55+00:00
Unfortunately it is not that easy to simulate traffic, especially not on city scale or larger.

The most important input to a traffic simulator such as this is the so-called "traffic demand", i.e. the routes that vehicles follow. Typically this is provided in the form of origin-destination matrices, but this data is not freely available.

Next up is the way in which traffic lights work. Reality is very hard to model here, again because the data is not freely available.

And then, due to numerous modeling errors in vehicle density, in the way that roads differ from e.g. OpenStreetMap, and how traffic behaves, the simulations are highly unrealistic, unless one spends some time to calibrate it.

It costs quite a lot of money to set up a realistic simulation, and most governments use commercial tooling that is easier to use, such as Vissim or Aimsun.
by tikhonj | 2025-07-31 15:43:02+00:00
> I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team.

I'd start by thinking through how much of that "need" is real.

What is driving the things your team "needs" to accomplish? What hard external constraints are you operating under? What are the interaction points between your work and the rest of the organization? How much flexibility do you have? And, holistically, how much flexibility should you have?

After that, it's a matter of negotiation. Given some understanding of the real constraints as well as the personal/political factors driving your manager, how can you come up with a better approach for your team and your work? I personally found the book Splitting the Difference really useful for approaching these sorts of conversations, but I'm also not especially good at that sort of thing naturally!

Unless you have an absolutely awful relationship with your manager, a starting point would be asking these questions to them. The trick is to pose these as legitimately open-ended questions. I learned the value of this first-hand: if I'm trying to convince somebody about something, asking an open-ended question will either get them to rethink their beliefs or they will come back with an answer I didn't think of, and either way I got something valuable out of it.

At the end of the day, you need to find some way to have slack in your work, or the team will fall apart. Slack can come from changing what you're doing and how you're fitting into the broader organization, or it can come from factors the organization does not "see". That latter is where the real risk lies: that's the dynamic that results in unreasonable corner-cutting and then burns people out.

I should add that I have not been in this situation as a manager, but I have been in that situation as a lead with no formal, positional power. That seems similar enough to be a good staring point, but I'm sure it's different enough that you should take everything I say with a grain of salt!

One thing I've realized is that we talk about "plans" and "budgets" and "roadmaps" as something constant and immutable, but they're not. They're just decisions that the organization made. We can make different decisions! But that in particular might be a view that's more useful as a lead than as a formal manager, because it very much goes against the way most organizations are run. This realization changed my perspective on what's going on, but I suspect it would be impolitic to emphasize it when negotiating up the chain.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-31 15:43:47+00:00
The second edition is almost a complete rewrite - much more up to date, but loses some of the core nerdiness of the original.

It's worth mentioning that "computer music" in the original sense was more about generative compositions and experiments with synthesis and DSP, all controlled and generated by hand-written software.

DAWs are much more emulations of a traditional recording studio that happen to run on a computer. So although a computer is involved, they're not "computer music" in the traditional sense.

The difference is that you can do far more with languages like Supercollider. Max, PD, and Csound, especially when controlled with custom code.

But they're much harder to work with. Unlike DAWs and VSTs, they're not optimised for commercial production values. This makes them more experimental and more of a niche interest.

There isn't a lot of notable pure computer music around outside of academia. The biggest success was probably the THX Deep Note. BT made some albums with (mostly) Csound. Autechre used Max quite heavily. Holly Herndon is another name.

So commercially, DAWs are everywhere, but there's no huge commercial computer music fan scene in its own right.
by Jackpillar | 2025-07-31 15:44:06+00:00
Important to note he didn't mention success once despite you doing so twice. Rather he said children are a detriment if you have "strong intellectual interests". He also didn't make a value statement of being happiness/unhappiness or talk about "pursuing some larger goal". He said it's a different - not worse -lifestyle that isn't the most conducive to said hobbies/interests. Which anyone with a child would immediately resonate and agree with.
by toast0 | 2025-07-31 15:44:09+00:00
IMHO, shared memory parallelism as the norm, means we're still in the dark ages.

Yes, shared memory is useful sometimes, but I don't think it should be the norm. But I've done parallel stuff in lots of languages, most recently Erlang and Rust... Message passing is so much nicer than having threads all mucking about in the same data if you don't need them to. You can write message passing parallel code in Rust, but it's not the norm, and you'll have to do a lot of the plumbing.
Show HN: Contestit.app – Social media giveaways with games
by StanMakesThings | 2025-07-31 15:44:30+00:00
Hey, I'm Stan and I made a app called Contestit. It's a social media giveaway app that let's users create giveaways. It gives the user a link they can share to their followers. What I always disliked or found annoying about giveaways is the fact that they were all the same, here's the prize. All you got to do is like, follow, and comment to be entered. That always bored me so i wanted to make it more interactive. Here's how it works: Users still get a shareable link for their giveaway, but after people sign up, they can play games to earn more entries instead of just waiting around. Right now there are three game types:

-Daily spin wheel (self-explanatory)

-Custom trivia contests (creators set their own questions)

-Photo contests (either "best photo wins" judged by the creator, or points-based where more engagement = more entries)

The photo contest is my personal favorite. If you got any ideas for some games i could add let me know. :)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-31 15:45:42+00:00
Having LLMs capable of generating text based on human training data obviously raises the bar for a text-only evaluation of "are you human?", but LLM output is still fairly easy to spot, and knowing what LLMs are capable of (sometimes superhuman), and not capable of, should make it fairly easy for a knowledgeable "turing test administrator" to determine if they are dealing with an LLM or not.

It would be a bit more difficult if you were dealing with an LLM agent tasked with faking a turing test as opposed to a naieve LLM just responding as usual, but even there the LLM will reveal itself by the things that it plain can't do.
by const_cast | 2025-07-31 15:45:57+00:00
Right, but theres levels of vendor lock in. Going up to more lock in doesn't necessarily mean an easier experience, that's what I'm trying to point out. So you have to do the risk analysis.

The fallacy I'm trying to point out is that if you outsource some functionality to locked in vendor implementation, then your life is easier. It can be, but Its often not.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-07-31 15:46:05+00:00
My new A16 iPad seems to use more power sitting closed much than I would have thought. I came here to say this, but found you got to it first. I hope someone here has some thoughts on the matter.

I am more Android guy, so I am not yet familiar with the options. Does the iPad have a power usage app describing what apps/services are using the power? Bluetooth for one to keep the Apple Pencil ready, I suppose.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-07-31 15:46:46+00:00
That is so weird. How much mAh can a single “wake and renew lease” possibly take? Like it has to be milliamp-milliseconds (mAmS?). I mean my phone is chattering with the cell network probably all the time even in a fairly deep sleep mode. The laptop is lighting up the WiFi stack to send and receive (and process) like a few packets?

Like you said though, it’s pre Apple silicon so who really knows! Maybe it decided to do some other stuff while it was awake?
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-31 15:47:24+00:00
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?

Boom-bust cycles, including environmental ones don't do anything to harm capitalism. Rather, they just make it stronger. AI systems have locked in existing power structures forever and guarantee that we will technologically advance fast enough to solve for or at least adapt to climate change.

I'd argue that the whole climate movement for the last 20 years stymed and significantly harmed the left as a result. The anti-nuclear and some anti-vax positions taken by parts of the green left in particular were anti-scientific and have cost that portion of the party the support of many scientist types.

Scare porn about what will happen if you don't de-develop society and reduce your CO2 footprint just makes folks want to eat even more burgers. Same reason why the majority of non cyclists hate cyclists.

It's the same thing when you show a ton of kids how a chicken nugget is made. They all go "eww" for a moment, then you ask them "who wants chicken nuggets?" and literally every hand goes up[1] . We want our slop. We don't care that it's slop, and these days, emotions of cruelty, subjugation, and schadenfreude are political dominant and in the zeitgeist.

[1] https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148
by wildzzz | 2025-07-31 15:47:32+00:00
I have a bug catcher that kind of looks like a Dyson bladeless fan but runs in reverse. Inside the ring, there's UV (?) LEDs to attract bugs. Once they fly in, the fan sucks them down into the base where there's a sticky paper. The base has a tight mesh around it so they are trapped if they somehow manage to not hit the sticky paper immediately. We use it for soil gnats but I've also seen some houseflies in there too.