MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cedws | 2025-07-14 10:45:40+00:00
With this and the UK government forcing Apple to backdoor iCloud (which lead to them no longer offering ADP in the UK), it feels like we're losing the battle for any kind of online privacy. It feels like the ship is sinking and I want to leave more than ever.

>It's surely the darkest fear of any mum or dad - losing their child to a world that's out of sight, a place where they can't protect them.

Why is it the government's responsibility to parent children?
by sharperguy | 2025-07-14 10:45:51+00:00
There are very few unbanked people in western countries, and so its natural that it would be unusual to come across those use cases there. There are in fact services that will act as a glue between the bitcoin ecosystem and "fiat", such as bitrefill which allows you to buy gift cards for many different stores using bitcoin. However for most people and every day payments there isn't really a compelling reason to try to use bitcoin. In fact, if you have both bitcoin and national currency, with rising prices it makes more sense to hold onto the bitcoin and spend the national currency.

There certainly have been some countries where stablecoins have gained in popularity. They are a little easier to use than bitcoin and prices are more stable. It tends to be in places where governments are not heavily enforcing against their use, while at the same time the local currency has been unstable, such as in Argentina.

The downside with stablecoins is that they rely on trusted entities to maintain the peg, whereas bitcoin enforces its own scarcity and trades at its own value.

I don't really think its responsible to go around telling people that bitcoin will gain in value, but there are certainly many people who believe this to be the case, and the pool is growing. I think the key value for this community is that we have something which is easier to transfer globally than a hard asset like gold, while being independent from particular jurisdictions such as the US, EU or China.

And yes I see the lack of awareness in bitcoin community about the extent to which it has become the defacto standard for internet scammers, who trick vulnerable people into depositing their life savings into a bitcoin ATM using various methods. You can see many examples of this on kitboga's youtube channel. At least, he has been able to work with some bitcoin exchanges to fight back against this in a small way.
by seethedeaduu | 2025-07-14 10:46:05+00:00
We have been saying that the DSM is a joke for years, and that you can't diagnose someone of being trans just by ticking boxes, the only way to go about it is self identification. So yeah sure, they used the DSM to diagnose and then perform conversion therapy on GNC children who never necessarily claimed to be trans, and from that they inferred that most trans kids end up "becoming cis".

> Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life?

I don't have enough funds to perform such a research, maybe there exists such a paper but I have not looked for it. In general trans topics are woefully underfunded. But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
by the_third_wave | 2025-07-14 10:48:02+00:00
It is both fruit factory fanboyism as well as anti-EU sentiment and it has nothing to do with 'capitalists' not liking 'consumers' having choices. Without capitalism the problem would not exist, so much is true. It would not exist because there wouldn't be anything to choose from: no browser market, no mobile devices, no choice. This tired anti-capitalism rhetoric needs to be shelved with the other books from the 60's and 70's.
Show HN: Decision-layer – your refund logic doesn't belong in Slack
by emt00 | 2025-07-14 10:48:06+00:00
You know the drill.

Some mix of product, support and eng decides how refunds work. It lives in a Notion doc. Then Slack. Then hardcoded as a bunch of if statements. No tests. No trace. No version control.

decision-layer is a small framework to clean that up.

You write the logic in YAML. Run it like code. Test it. Trace it.

What it does: - Versioned YAML policies - CLI to run and test them - Trace output with every rule fired - Examples: refunds, escalation, tiering

All in plain Python. No weird dependencies. Just testable logic defined clearly.

⸻

Would love to hear what confuses, breaks or annoys you. (Or what would make this usable where you work.)
by furyofantares | 2025-07-14 10:48:16+00:00
It seems the same as gold to me, gold having a nonzero physical value isn't meaningful when its price is so out of whack with that.

I think bitcoin has a culture that fortified itself against wild price swings and has lots of people on HODL / to the moon. It's their long term plan, they're not selling it just like you probably aren't selling your retirement account.

I'm not really convinced the stock market is that different to be honest. It's good that it gives companies a way to raise money with some basis in who people think will do well. But from my perspective as an individual with a 401k I'm just buying and holding. One day you look at your retirement account and it's a lot more than you ever put in, you didn't do any work beyond putting it in and I guess paying whoever runs the index fund or whatever. What are we doing here except pooling our money with the richest folks and watching money concentrate, holding until we retire and hoping it doesn't all come crashing down?
by pjc50 | 2025-07-14 10:48:27+00:00
It was also a mistake for me to not buy a lottery ticket with the numbers 4 11 17 25 41 51.

There's a slow drip feed of stories of people who did buy BTC and have lost it, either to human error, lack of backups, crime, or failure of institutions. Remember MtGox collapse in 2014? The whole fad was obviously over by then, wasn't it?

We're going to have another 2008-style bubble collapse eventually. But it's not clear what the radius of effect will be.
by edanm | 2025-07-14 10:49:03+00:00
> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.

I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.

You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.

That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).
by spwa4 | 2025-07-14 10:49:13+00:00
I agree but there's only a single factor that matters: special treatment of mortgage loans. In tax. Government guarantees, both for owners and for banks. Special interest rates. Repo with government support. The list goes on.

And now you can say "yes, but ending those will cause a crash in house prices, which will hurt a lot of people, a lot of owners", which is true, but anything you do to change house prices will cause that hurt.

In a way you can look at it as the usual problem: governments effectively sold houses, handing out cash to constituents for votes and power, and now they want, maybe even need, them back. They can't pay to get them back. That's what the argument is about. If the government wanted to buy back houses the way everyone else has to play, by paying market price, nobody would be arguing much. Because of how property taxes work, even if governments crash the housing market, say by ending mortgage guarantees, governments will lose a lot of money they have already spent.

And the fundamental problem is not the division of houses, but how many there are. Crashing house prices is only part of the problem. They need to be torn down and rebuilt denser if you want to make any difference. That also needs to be paid for.
by kayxspre | 2025-07-14 10:49:24+00:00
Three months ago there is a report that 119 Thai citizens were deported from Cambodia after a call center ring was busted. Out of these numbers, 100 willfully worked for the ring. 15 worked for the illegal gambling establishment. Only 4 minors are reportedly the victim of human trafficking. Ironically, when those people came back (willfully or otherwise), they will claim that they were being "misled" or "coerced" to do it even though the evidence suggests that they willfully do so.

Thai authorities are trying to combat this issue by cutting off supply of basic utilities (electricity, network connection) to hinder their work. The government claimed that this reduces the volume of scam attempts by 20%, though it's not entirely gone as long as they can find a way to circumvent it
by imtringued | 2025-07-14 10:49:53+00:00
The point of sales is that you sell the game to people who think the game is worth full price at full price and those who have less money or think the game is worth less to them at the price they would rather pay.

It's basically a reverse auction process, where the bids start high and get lower over time.

The KSP1 DLC is basically never worth it at full price to me.
by khalic | 2025-07-14 10:49:59+00:00
Food for thought!

Our mental models are inadequate to think about these new tools. We bend and stretch our familiar patterns and try to slap them on these new paradigms to feel a little more secure. It’ll settle down once we spend more time with the tech.

The discourse is crawling with over generalization and tautologies because of this. This won’t do us any good.

We need to take a deep breath, observe, theorize, experiment, share our findings and cycle.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-14 10:52:05+00:00
> There certainly have been some countries where stablecoins have gained in popularity. They are a little easier to use than bitcoin and prices are more stable. It tends to be in places where governments are not heavily enforcing against their use, while at the same time the local currency has been unstable, such as in Argentina.

Yes, I think this really is a use case even if it's not one that flatters the prejudices of American bitcoiners. People from non-US countries want access to shadow-dollars, yet the US has built a large and intrusive industry based on keeping them out.
by paffdragon | 2025-07-14 10:52:16+00:00
This is very familiar. Rough draft, some manual execution often wrapped in a unit test executor, or even written in a different scripting language just to verify the idea. This often helped me to show that we don't even want to build the thing, because it won't work the way people want it to.

The part about distraction in code feels also very real. I am really prone to "clean up things", then realize I'm getting into a rabbit hole and my change grows to a size that my mates won't be happy reviewing. These endeavors often end with complete discard to get back on track and keep the main thing small and focused - frequent small local commits help a lot here. Sometimes I manage to salvage something and publish in a different PR when time allows it.

Business mostly wants the result fast and does not understand tradeoffs in code until the debt hits the size of a mountain that makes even trivial changes painfully slow. But it's about balance, which might be different on different projects.

Small, focused, simple changes definitely help. Although, people are not always good at slicing a larger solution into smaller chunks. I sometimes see commits that ship completely unused code unrelated to anything with a comment that this will be part of some future work...then prio shifts, people come and go, and a year later we have to throw out all of that, because it does not apply to the current state and no one knows anymore what was the plan with that.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-14 10:52:44+00:00
> Letting most of your population twiddle your thumbs all summer without any consequences

What do you think the unemployment rate actually is in European countries?

Having a social safety net doesn't make most people want to loaf around. I get that there's a massive amount of propaganda on this point in the US, but like, it doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

> I'd love to see a Venn diagram of countries that "Actually Colonized" (tm) and countries with really generous welfare systems/labor protections.

I encourage you to try diagramming that and see how it goes. Don't forget to include Ireland and the Nordics ;) And always remember that correlation isn't causation.

While you're at it, maybe have a look at the research on inequality, or the benefits of social safety nets.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-14 10:54:36+00:00
I’m fine with (and in support of) market forces to let grandma decide that it’s worth selling her home; I’m not okay with using government mechanisms with no market reference points to price her out of it. (Raise everyone’s property tax rate and reference appraisals to market sales? Fine. Determine that her specific piece of land is worth $X despite no comparison of open-market land-only transactions? Not fine.)

From that, it’s fair to conclude that I’m ok with renters having to pay market rent, regardless of their age or matriarchal status.
by webdevver | 2025-07-14 10:54:59+00:00
i totally get this mindset

i think one of the big challenges of the 21st century is coming to terms with the fact that playing by the rules actually makes you poorer...

whereas speculative investment, like bitcoin, has yielded only winners. huge transfer of wealth from the rule-followers to the "but what if it moons..."-crowd and the "yeah i shouldn't do this, but..."-type of people.

this will surely have an evolutionary impact, since the now-wealthy bitcoiners (and others) will no doubt have plenty of reproductive success, thus arming their numerous progeny with a similar risk-taking mindset.
by grafmax | 2025-07-14 10:55:04+00:00
Inequality is built into our society’s structure - capitalism divides people into two classes - workers and owners. The level of wealth inequality in the current world is quite extreme. Even if you accept some degree of it because “it’s always going to be messy and chaotic” - the current level is truly poisonous for a healthy society. And it’s the result of neoliberal policy across the world since 1980 - the deregulation ideology of the rich filtered into governments. We have concentrated wealth; this wealth concentration has intensified itself as those benefiting from it in turn shape government policy in a vicious circle. The bleak world today is shaped by these forces - impending climate catastrophe (as fossil fuel interests can’t be reigned in), austerity (as the rich refuse taxes and control the governments who would tax them), authoritarianism (as the relationship between money and power can’t be bothered with pretense anymore), concentration camps (as the wealthy manufacture scapegoats for the mess they’ve made).

Turning around and blaming consumers for this while pretending it couldn’t be better both is truly a shallow take. Carlin wouldn’t let these people off the hook like you do:

> A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street
by aatd86 | 2025-07-14 10:56:06+00:00
I don't think anyone would advise to do everything from scratch all the time.

It's mostly about libraries vs opinionated frameworks.

No one in their right mind would say: just use the standard library but I've seen it online. That discourse is not helping.

I think people get this miscontrued on both sides.

A set of reusable, composable libraries would be the right balance in Go. So not really a "framework" either.

I think that reflects better the actual preferred stance.
by tzs | 2025-07-14 10:56:39+00:00
> There are very few unbanked people in western countries, and so its natural that it would be unusual to come across those use cases there.

In the US it is 6% of adults [1] overall. It is 23% of adults with family incomes below $25k. It's 14% for Black adults and 11% for Hispanic adults.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2024-economic-we...
by reedf1 | 2025-07-14 10:56:48+00:00
> To me, overusing AI, destroying ecosystems, covering up fuck-ups, and hating minorities are all “bad” for the same reason, which I can mostly sum up as a belief that traumatizing others is “bad”. You cannot prove that AI overuse is “bad” to a person who doesn’t think in this framework, like a nihilist that treats others’ lives like a nuisance.

But you haven't defined the framework. You know a bunch of people for which AI is bad for a bunch of handwavey reasons - not from any underlying philosophical axioms. You are doing what you are accusing others of. In my ethical framework the other stated things can be shown to be bad, it is not as clear for AI.

If you want to take a principled approach you need to define _why_ AI is bad. There have been cultures and religions across time that have done this for other emerging technologies, luddites, the amish, etc. They have good ethical arguments for this - and it's possible they are right.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-07-14 10:58:01+00:00
Reading through the comments here, it seems that most people on HN vastly underestimate the significance of the "store of value" use case.

It is a core aspect of human life.

And there is no other asset that does that with as little inflation and risk as Bitcoin. That seems counterintuitive because Bitcoin is portrayed as a very risky asset. Which it is in the short term. But long term, fiat, gold, equity, and real estate all have an even worse inflation and risk profile.
by aziaziazi | 2025-07-14 10:58:09+00:00
If that isn’t cynicism, here’s some optimisation thoughts:

- start with the humans that pollute more - which is way more correlated to their consumption that their solar roof surface. Sorry USA, you go first. Others high standard living countries follows.

- Regarding the cows, they have a shorter lifespan and don’t shop much neither do they heat their house or shower water. We could just stop breeding new ones and keep the existant till their death.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-14 10:58:28+00:00
Nope. It's a "Me" thing. I write code that I want to see. I have fairly big files, and it makes it easy to scroll through, quickly. It also displays well, when compiling with docc or Jazzy.

My comment/blank line-to-code ratio is about 50/50. Most of my comments are method/function/property headerdoc/docc labels.

Here's the cloc on the middle project:

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 2.04 T=0.03 s (1319.9 files/s, 468842.4 lines/s) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Swift 33 1737 4765 5220 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 33 1737 4765 5220 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by emadda | 2025-07-14 10:58:37+00:00
> Instead you should focus on creating notes that you are likely to revisit or likely to share.

One interesting thing I have discovered: the interface matters just as much as the content.

The faster you can recall notes, the more useful you find them, which makes it more likely you will write more notes.

I also put answers in the titles of my notes which allows me to scan a list of previously solved issues. The combination of a vague yyyy-mm-dd.md title and just a file system UI makes recall harder.

I have a fuzzy search app for Apple Notes that has been working well for me:

https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
by WillAdams | 2025-07-14 10:58:37+00:00
Stories such as this make me nostalgic, and wish my Cube still booted up, and/or that GNUstep would get some traction, or even that I had a better successor to Altsys Virtuoso than toggling the settings for my stylus in Windows so that I can run Macromedia Freehand/MX.
by intrasight | 2025-07-14 10:59:06+00:00
Something strange happened to someone somewhere but it hasn't happened to me.

I ordered Indian food from one of my favorite local establishments. I was home alone so I wanted it delivered. I called the restaurant and placed my order. The owner showed up 20 minutes later in his Mercedes to drop off my delivery.

Some restaurant owners know that they can buy themselves nice things and still provide excellent customer service if they don't give all their profits to a delivery service.
by yegg | 2025-07-14 10:59:18+00:00
This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true. It also reinforces a conspiracy theory that we’re owned by Google, which also of course isn’t true. Kindly please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

We’ve been sounding the alarm about Google analytics, tag manager, and other Google trackers for years and why we started making our own extensions and browsers to block them and provide more comprehensive protection. On our homepage and everywhere else we can we try to get people to install those to get that additional protection, which you can compare here: https://duckduckgo.com/compare-privacy
by lottin | 2025-07-14 10:59:32+00:00
For the most part inflation threatens cash holdings and fixed-income instruments (such as bonds) which have not priced in inflation. Therefore in order to "hedge" against inflation you should reduce your exposure to such assets to the largest extent possible. But a crypto-currency is a high-risk investment, so using it as a "hedge" against inflation is unwise because you're swapping one risk for another (potentially) greater risk.
by physicsguy | 2025-07-14 10:59:41+00:00
I really don't think that frequency was 'normal' in the UK at all. I'm a similar age and we had a takeaway maybe once a month (usually fish and chips, occasionally a curry or chinese). Meals out were a bit rarer, usually a pub but occasionally McDonalds. For the generation above mine, my grandparents on both side basically never ate takeaways unless it was fish and chips on holiday - culturally it just wasn't a thing. I just asked my wife who was much wealthier growing up than I was and she similarly reckoned she didn't eat out much / have takeaways often.

Looking at economic stats, spending on food and drink outside of the home grew enormously between 1992 and 2004 to overtake spending on food within the home: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-3010...
by koiueo | 2025-07-14 11:00:10+00:00
If you want to print a string from your function, you must supply it to the function. The fact that your function now receives `str: []u8` doesn't make it str-colored.

On a side note: the entire "coloring" metaphor is extremely unfortunate and confusing IMO. It's somewhere at the top of my list (right beside the shroedinger's cat) of things which could've been explained better without dumbing them down.