MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phyzix5761 | 2025-07-31 00:14:00+00:00
As a business owner I can tell you that price is not the only factor people look at when choosing to engage with a business. I've tried the whole "cheapest offer in the market" thing and its backfired terribly. The main insight I've gained is that customers have a perceived value of a product that aligns with things like branding, marketing, previous experiences, and perceived popularity. People are willing to pay more for these things.
by yellowapple | 2025-07-31 00:14:03+00:00
Even selling them at a loss would save more money than destroying them entirely, especially when there are indeed organizations willing to cover the costs to take them off the US government's hands:

> An organization called MSI Reproductive Choices said it and other funding partners had offered to pay for the shipping and repackaging of the USAID-branded supplies, but that the US government turned down the offer.
Show HN: Medici, an open-source Splitwise-like app for managing expenses
by mrkaye97 | 2025-07-31 00:14:23+00:00
Hey everyone!

I've been working on this little app I'm calling Medici after getting annoyed with Splitwise only allowing me to submit a few expenses a day. It has all the main Splitwise features (debt simplification, different ways of splitting expenses, default splits, etc.)

Would love feedback and just wanted to share! I'm self-hosting on my RaspberryPi and figured others might find it useful too :)
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-07-31 00:14:47+00:00
In many cases some of the stuff at the big enterprises is shockingly, remarkably bad. I've seen multiple contracting firms leave things behind that wouldn't warrant a passing grade in an 'intro to programming' class.

Most of the time it's not "don't give a sh!t"--it's they genuinely don't know any better, no actual stakeholders even see the codebase nor are in any position to pass judgement, etc.

Most of the time folks that are "enterprise architects" or some such haven't written code in a decade and spend many hours a day on meetings.
by rayiner | 2025-07-31 00:14:58+00:00
I get the impression that there is less ideological and religious polarization between civil servants and the public in Germany than in the U.S.

Also, keep in mind that U.S. civil servants have far more discretion than in Germany. In Germany, the parliament actively legislates, and the civil service is tasked with carrying out the law. In that system, it’s hard for the civil service to get too far out of step with what the governing coalition in the legislature—who are ultimately elected—wants to happen.

In the U.S., by contrast, Congress hardly legislates. So the civil service not only carries out the law, but in practice uses decades-old laws and applies them to new circumstances they were never intended to cover. Because the elected Congress doesn’t legislate, it has much less control over what the civil service does.
Show HN: BossOrToss – Vote on Real Executives (Anonymously)
by santiix | 2025-07-31 00:15:29+00:00
We built BossOrToss.wtf as a way to anonymously vote on real executives — the CIOs, CTOs, CEOs, and VPs who shape your Zoom nightmares or career wins.

It’s part satire, part corporate commentary: Vote anonymously on execs pulled from public LinkedIn data Submit new profiles if your “favorite” leader is missing

Help crown the weekly Top Boss and Biggest Toss See cartoonified avatars, sarcastic bios, and a rotating leaderboard

We don’t collect any personal data — all profiles use publicly available LinkedIn info and user submissions (which are reviewed). It’s a social experiment to gamify leadership perception, with a touch of snark.

Would love feedback from the HN crowd — does this resonate? Should we evolve it into a real feedback tool? Or just enjoy the chaos?

Hate your Boss, Love your Boss? Go for it, let everyone know, Anonymously
by cpncrunch | 2025-07-31 00:16:28+00:00
No well replicated studies.

>they seem to function differently

Except there isn't evidence showing this.

>5 tried to check for differences in mitochondrial respiration between ME/CFS patients and healthy controls, and 4 of the 5 found notable differences

But did they look at the same thing? I also don't think that includes all the studies that failed to show mitochondrial differences, and failures to replicate previous studies.

There is the recent Ryback study (currently a preprint) which failed to replicate Fluge and Mella's result, and showed no difference from controls. There is the Tomas study which showed no difference in the ATP profile test from controls. Also, a 2019 Tomas study showed no difference in respiration between patients and controls.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-31 00:17:21+00:00
> Stop clicking on clickbait slop and it will stop showing that to you.

Unfortunately, this simply isn't true. YouTube doesn't recognize "clickbait slop" as a topic of its own; it's a type of content which can be associated with many different topics. For instance, let's say that a child is interested in cats. They will probably be recommended a lot of horrible AI slop videos about kittens, even if they never click on any of them.
by lstamour | 2025-07-31 00:18:49+00:00
I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.

Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.

It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.

Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.
by foobarian | 2025-07-31 00:18:57+00:00
Even worse is, say you have 20 neighbors on the block each scheduling yard maintenance separately, then it's like the balls in bins problem, and you pretty much end up with these abominations making noise at least once a day (and weekends included because that's when Dad has time to do the weekend warrior thing and it takes him 3x as long as a professional crew). Sigh.
by ncruces | 2025-07-31 00:18:57+00:00
Let's watch together starts to fall flat when the primary use they have for a device is to chat with family and friends, where it's natural to want a modicum of privacy. I wanna know who they're talking to, not everything they say.

Then, they start watching what their friends share in group chats. I can mostly avoid social media doom scrolling by preventing them having accounts, but not so YouTube.

And it's a tough decision to blanket ban YouTube, since it is used for educational purposes, including by teachers (a teacher wouldn't point a 13 yo pupil to TikTok).

YouTube didn't need to compete with TikTok or Reels; they chose to.
by cheschire | 2025-07-31 00:19:00+00:00
I've tried each iteration of UI paradigm they've tried since WinRT and never really had any significant problems with any of them. WinRT, UWP, WinUI, MAUI...

But then they aren't even willing to invest the time to dogfood their own products and fully replace the windows UI. Really doesn't inspire confidence.

I suspect they also made a bad bet by going so hard on blazor without putting more support behind WASM itself. Now that's stalled out with WASM's own failure to reach critical mass.
by kmill | 2025-07-31 00:19:40+00:00
The "olean" files are a binary format that contain everything that was added to the Lean environment. Among other things, it includes all of the declarations and their Lean.Expr [1] expressions. People have written tools to dump the data for inspection [2], or to independently check that the expressions are type correct and the environment is well-formed (that is, check the correctness).

[1] https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/blob/3a3c816a27c0bd45471... [2] https://github.com/digama0/oleandump [3] https://github.com/ammkrn/nanoda_lib
by theluketaylor | 2025-07-31 00:20:05+00:00
Bus lifespan is 15-20 years max and needs tons of maintenance during that time. Trains last 40 years and go 100,000 miles+ between failures.

Trains are a bigger upfront investment, but are cheaper in the long run, especially once capacity is factored in. You need a lot of busses to equal moderate sized trains.

Busses have their place, but not as the backbone for rapid transit in even moderate sized urban areas.

BRT trades CAPX for OPEX. In Latin America where BRT is hugely successful capital is expensive and labour is cheap, so hiring a ton of drivers is easy. In high labour costs markets like the US, Canada, and Europe BRT falls apart. It's often all transit agencies think they can get funding and support for so it's pushed, but it's way too easy to cut back BRT attributes like signal priority, dedicated lanes, and all door boarding to end up with just a bus with a fancy livery.
by shagie | 2025-07-31 00:20:18+00:00
A Pseudorandom Number Sequence Test Program - https://www.fourmilab.ch/random/

Monte Carlo Value for Pi Each successive sequence of six bytes is used as 24 bit X and Y co-ordinates within a square. If the distance of the randomly-generated point is less than the radius of a circle inscribed within the square, the six-byte sequence is considered a “hit”. The percentage of hits can be used to calculate the value of Pi. For very large streams (this approximation converges very slowly), the value will approach the correct value of Pi if the sequence is close to random. A 500000 byte file created by radioactive decay yielded: Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.143580574 (error 0.06 percent).
by Timwi | 2025-07-31 00:20:21+00:00
I have to push back on this. It's the people who constantly assert that LLMs “don't think” who are not engaging in a conversation. It's a thought-terminating cliché.

Unfortunately, even those willing to engage in this conversation still don't have much to converse about, because we simply don't know what thinking actually is, how the brain works, how LLMs work, and to what extent they are similar or different. That makes it all the more vexing to me when people say this, because the only thing I can say in response is “you don't know that (and neither does anyone else)”.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-31 00:21:39+00:00
Honestly a pretty bad video by Veritasium standards.

Consider the nuclear reaction metaphor. It's clearly not memoryless. Eventually you'll run out of fissile material.

The diagram for that example is bad as well. Do arrows correspond to state transitions? Or do they correspond to forks in the process where one neutron results in two?
by SamBam | 2025-07-31 00:21:42+00:00
I feel this too, and always wondered if it related to the glymphatic system [1].

This is the system that clears out metabolic waste from the brain which builds up over time, and it's theorized that during slow-wave sleep in particular, the slow waves help pump out this waste fluid through microscopic channels the open up.

AFIAK, there were some researchers that were wondering if a drug of some kind could force this to happen more quickly, thus cutting down the amount we need to sleep. (Probably a bad idea.)

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-31 00:21:55+00:00
This is simply not true based on the interest rates and underwriting guidelines, and I own raw ag land that has been financed with nothing else besides a down payment and the land as collateral. Words mean things my dude. These are not hard money rates, these are credit products specifically for land with no business, cash flow, or other income stream at time of transfer. Being ignorant or unsophisticated is a choice.
by alain34 | 2025-07-31 00:22:12+00:00
I buy a domain name but struggled to find the time to work on it, so I put it up for sale as a holding page. I have accumulated a collection of... https://www.bankaccountstatements.com https://www.customerdatavalidation.com https://www.customerdatavalidation.co.uk https://www.confirmationofpayee.co.uk https://m.emori.es https://www.bankaccountchecker.com Grab yourself a bargain if you are interested to complete the project.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-07-31 00:22:37+00:00
Admittedly my calculations did not take walking-on-platform time into account, but what I have been assuming (based on figures I've looked up) is that each stop adds about 60 seconds to the journey time (30 seconds for dwell + 15 on either end for getting up to / down from cruise speed). I've also been assuming that the inter-station no-slowing-down time is 2 min.

So in a 2-of-5 stopping pattern you'd save 3 min every 5 stops, but depending on when arrive at the station you will sometimes get unlucky and just miss your train, in which case you'll have to wait an additional interval than you normally would for the next one (costing you 3 min). So for very short trips (under 3 stops) it actually makes travel time a bit worse since there's very few stops you can skip over in such cases. But for more median trips there is a saving, and for the longer trips it saves well into 2-digit minutes.

In your example I think in the case with the entrance at the middle of the platform there wouldn't be any real effect, because splitting the platform also in the middle doesn't marginally change how quickly you can get to the nearest open door on the train you want. There's no real need to get to the center of either boarding area. In the case of platform at the end of the station, I can accept that adds about 40 m of walking distance that wasn't there before (at least for some people), and that translates into an extra 20ish seconds. Less than that if you do the rational thing of walking briskly when you see you're about to miss your train.

So you're right that the platform split adds some time which isn't completely negligible, and depending on what fraction of the next n stops you want to skip it comes at a penalty of longer wait times for the correct train, but both of these are fixed upfront costs whereas the dividend accrues linearly the longer your on the train.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-31 00:23:21+00:00
As a land owner you should be much more worried about state and local laws than what goes on at the fed.

There are millions of Americans who own what would otherwise be "developable and valued as such" land that became basically worthless with the state passage of various environmental laws (particularly wetlands setback stuff) that make the juice not worth the squeeze except if the location were to become "major urban area" level dense while the municipalities passed zoning laws making it all but impossible for that to ever happen.

I guess when you think about it it's not that the land is less valuable. It's that there's no value left after doing what you'd need (endless engineering and construction hoops, lawyers, court, etc) to extract the value without the government just unilaterally deciding you no longer own the land and backing that up with violence.
by 9rx | 2025-07-31 00:24:24+00:00
I enjoy most of it, but, being a tech nerd at heart, I'm in my glory when I'm out in the field playing with the tech. More acres means more time to play. Something I don't feel I get enough of. I get the "I want to keep going" feeling when I disappointingly have to put everything back in the shed. Like I mentioned before, I figure doubling my acres would be the threshold where it goes from "I want to keep going" to "I'm good".
by LexiMax | 2025-07-31 00:24:31+00:00
They're not tech savvy because they didn't need to be.

That will change. One thing that has not changed from our parents generation to our generation to the upcoming generations is that teenagers will be troublemakers, push boundaries, get caught doing a number of things that displease you, and get away with many more things that you won't find out about for decades - if ever.
by dmix | 2025-07-31 00:24:35+00:00
Reactivity as an idea allowed you to manage data and dom/UI updates in a more performant way than the approach prior to React being popular.

But React started a movement where frontend teams were isolated from backend teams (who tend to be more conservative and performance minded), tons of the view was needlessly pushed into browser rendering, every paged started using 20 different JSON endpoints that are often polling/pushing adding overhead etc. So by every measure it made the Web slower and more complicated, in exchange for some slightly easier/cohesive design management (that needs changing yearly).

The particulars on the vdom framework itself are probably not that important in the grand scheme. Unless it's design encourages doing less of those things (which many newer ones do but React is flexible).
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-31 00:24:41+00:00
> Can someone please turn this into a Zachtronics style game?!

That game is called math :) Partially joking, but I do think a game version would be fun.

> Is this what pure math is about?

More or less yes for an undergrad, but when you get to research it feels different.

> I badly, direly want this

Consider checking out an abstract algebra book. Maybe Dummit and Foote or something else popular. Proofs in algebra often have a satisfying game-like quality. The more popular books will have solutions you can find online if you get stuck.
by westurner | 2025-07-31 00:24:55+00:00
> Abstract: [...] (K^4) transforms arbitrary log embeddings into compact four-dimensional descriptors (Precision, Recall, Density, Coverage) using efficient k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) statistics. These descriptors enable lightweight detectors to accurately score anomalies without retraining. Using a more realistic online evaluation protocol, sets a new state-of-the-art (AUROC: 0.995-0.999), outperforming baselines by large margins while being orders of magnitude faster, with training under 4 seconds and inference as low as 4 us.
by sshine | 2025-07-31 00:25:37+00:00
Because support requires understanding. If you can maintain long-term context for the LLM, then you have an approximation of actionable institutional knowledge.

But context is text documentation, and that stuff rots just as much, if not more, when LLMs generate it.

Nothing beats having the actual code and the thoughts that went onto it in your wetware. I still remember the hardest problems in my professional life in the last 15 years down to a scary detail.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-31 00:25:56+00:00
The reason is listed at the bottom of the page: "You can't type C-M-% on the terminal is because C-% is not part of the standard control codes." This page lists the standard control codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes (e.g., `^_`). There are only a few special characters that are recognized by a terminal with control (while all the letter keys are [although I think shift and lowercase are combined?]).

Everything is recognized with the meta, because meta just sends an escape sequence followed by the key code for the other characters.

With all that said, there are thousands of reasons it could be working for you "it's just software" so anything can be programmed, but I'm not aware of say a terminal spec that supports more control codes. Usually when this works it's because the user has implemented one of the many workarounds available online (e.g., change the terminal emulator to send a different key code, and change Emacs to use that key code for the command). It's also possible the terminal emulator you're using has custom support built-in specially for Emacs.

I could fix this myself if I wanted to, but I've just found it's better for my sanity to work with terminal emulators as a clear spec (which includes only the limited set of control character codes) rather than work against that. For an example of how much work this can be to maintain, this is fixing all the discrepancies I've found in Alacritty where it doesn't send the correct key code by default https://github.com/robenkleene/Dotfiles/blob/4d06e9855465c00... I mainly did that to make terminal Emacs usable in Alacritty.

With all that said, if you have another terminal emulator handy, I'd be super curious if it works with that one as well.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-31 00:26:11+00:00
That’s Elon Musks goal, but it’s not what they do. They lift and transport. Even the goal of lifting and transporting to mars is lift and transport. You could argue it’s all means to and end, but they’ve not done the end and they have only ever done the means and will continue to do so - making it a lift and transport company :-)
by yellowapple | 2025-07-31 00:26:42+00:00
The flip-side of this is that if something is too fast, it raises doubts about whether it actually happened at all. I'm reminded of the TurboTax case, where Intuit found that adding a bunch of artificial loading screens to make it look like TurboTax was taking its time to really pore over customers' tax returns ended up being more appealing to users than not doing so. The actual "analyses" happen within less than a second, but that was (allegedly) too fast for users to believe.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-31 00:27:03+00:00
To note, their whole ecosystem might be changing, allowing for more flexibility in the Office software space.

There's better online options and many of their needs can be fulfilled by in-house We apps instead of the perennial Access DB or Excel files passed around in mails.

Even the sole reduction of printed documents should have impacted how much is expected from Word or Powerpoint, and make alternatives a lot more viable.

Power users will still need all features in the world, but the rest of the user's are probably less held as hostages as before.
by chillfox | 2025-07-31 00:27:27+00:00
My understanding has always been that most hackers do it for the fun/challenge/sport of it and it's only a small fraction who are in it for the money.

Breaking things is just fun for them and the internet is their video game.

Also the vibe I am getting from places like reddit/etc... is that it's currently open season on vibe coded apps. Lot's of internet points to be had for destroying them.
by shagie | 2025-07-31 00:27:43+00:00
Piet: Programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40141777 https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

In the sample programs there's a big red one... https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

There's also the IOCCC classic https://www.ioccc.org/1988/westley/index.html