MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crackrook | 2025-07-06 17:07:41+00:00
At least in my circles I'd have a much harder time getting access to meth or heroin than I would a product that can be bought from a special store. I imagine there are many individuals like me, but I'm not sure, which is why I ask for data.

There's no doubt in my mind that addicts know how to find dealers, and don't have trouble finding new dealers when their former dealer gets arrested. What I'm worried about and asking for data about is the possibility of legalization creating a new cohort of addicts who would start to use hard drugs if they were to be as conveniently-obtained as liquor.

I'm not advocating for the war on drugs, to be clear, I'm dubious about treating hard drugs like alcohol, tobacco, or weed (in some states). I still lean towards decriminalization of possession and harm-reduction as being better policy, but I recognize it doesn't solve all the issues.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-06 17:07:47+00:00
What else would these companies have to gain by making their games online only? Perhaps game developers even have contractual obligations to uphold, or incintives to include third party network interactions. The presence of Twitch, Cloudflare, and Microsoft on this list are interesting, because Microsoft drives a lot of threat intel and also makes a popular OS among gamers. If you want to reduce network traffic and reduce your reliance on third parties and internet access, migrating from Windows and using Proton on Linux would probably be a step in the right direction for many games that you would want to play single player.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 17:08:04+00:00
> establish/find a consumer protection group to help legislative bodies craft the documents

Yes, that's one of the ways to address this. Active consumer participation is still necessary, though, as the consumer protection group can still lose its way.

> The hang ups can’t simply be nihilistic complaints about the government’s abilities without any solutions proposed. That’s an argument for doing nothing

No, it's factually not. If I order soup from a restaurant, and it arrives and is terrible and I complain, I do not have to specify what the chef did wrong, or how they should fix it, for my complaint to be valid - and the fact that I'm not providing the solution does not mean that I think nothing should be done. Similarly, I don't have to point out what the solution has to be for my complaint to be valid, and that does not mean that I think nothing should be done. That's just insane.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-06 17:08:30+00:00
> I can buy that humans can see at least 120hz at a minimum. 60Hz is the generally accepted threshold, but I’ve long suspected that 120Hz has mostly imperceptible effects that are still noticeable, if rarely.

There are videos on youtube showing people perceive differences at much higher framerates. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA (long video, so you can skip to the end - they found that even casual players were performing measurably more consistently at 240Hz than even 144Hz.)

Anecdotally, I recently switched to playing racing games at 165FPS and the difference is massive!
by ptramo | 2025-07-06 17:08:35+00:00
As to how you can perceive the difference between 120 events per second and 240, I have what I hope is a fairly simple explanation.

It's like lightning strokes of tens of microseconds making a lasting impression on your perception of the scene. You don't "count" strokes over time, but in space.

When you make circles fast and large enough on screen, you can evaluate the number of cursors that appear before your eyes. At 4 circles per second, is each circle made of ~60 pointers or ~30? Belief not fact: it's not hard to guess.
by kolme | 2025-07-06 17:09:08+00:00
> But UIs are not pure functions, they have a deeply effectful nature, and being reactive all those effects are highly “situated” if you will (to use Rich Hickey’s word).

Oh, but we do this in ClojureScript the whole time.

You can express events and actions in pure functions as data and then take care of the effects outside of the core of your application.

A great example of how to do this is the "re-frame" framework [1] [2]. The documentation is also a joy to read.

> An example of this impedance surfacing in backend programming is a nontrivial map/reduce pipeline. What is the shape of the document at stage six?

There's many ways to find that out in Clojure/Script. There's the built-in `tap>` function [3] which can be used for debugging. You can use that to visualize complex data with Portal. [4]

(defn inspect [coll] (doto coll tap>)) (->> coll (map this) (inspect) (filter that))

[1] The framework: https://github.com/day8/re-frame

[2] A library with HTTP-Effects for your re-frame applications: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame-http-fx

[3] https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/tap%3E

[4] https://github.com/djblue/portal
by networked | 2025-07-06 17:09:53+00:00
> For file management these days, Dired is my interface of choice. It is simply the more elegant tool for the job. Case in point: renaming a bunch of files in a directory to arbitrary names. With a shell, my standard approach would have been to run some variant of `ls -1 > foo.sh`, edit `foo.sh` to insert `mv` on each line to a renamed target file, `chmod u+x foo.sh` to be executable, run `foo.sh`, delete `foo.sh` and call it a day.

I used to do this before I discovered vidir. [1] vidir is not actually tied to vi; it lets you rename and delete files through your `$EDITOR`. You edit a temporary file that looks like this:

... 0093<tab>./fstab 0094<tab>./fuse.conf 0095<tab>./fwupd ...

There is also https://github.com/bulletmark/edir designed to improve on vidir. I haven't used it yet.

I'll give Emacs another try some day, I swear, and Dired is one of the reasons.

Edit: [1] I linked to https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir here at first. That is a fork; vidir comes from https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/. You probably want the original. It is packaged for Debian, FreeBSD, Homebrew, etc. as part of the package `moreutils`.
Ask HN: Keep losing belief in own projects?
by throwaway567324 | 2025-07-06 17:10:07+00:00
Hello HN, not sure where else to ask such a thing online regarding startups and what not.

The long and short of it is, one day the project I'm working on feels worthwhile, and the next day I'm job hunting or trying to brainstorm a new project. This is all in the context of me already having a decent remote day job, but not in an industry I care about or find meaningful (think advertising or something like that). So it pays the bills and gives some free time.

Anyways, I'm trying to take the obvious advice of getting in front of potential users/customers for the project, as their interest would certainly be a motivational boost. There's maybe a few months' lag from when I'll have something high enough fidelity (and a website) to do so. However, having just been through this process 6 months ago and getting practically no interest + rejections from customers and investors, the prospect of doing this again certainly causes a bit of dread.

After a decade of failed startups, 5 years working jobs I don't care for, it feels pretty high pressure trying to get something new going. I'm in my mid 30s now. If it goes nowhere, I've wasted time on the wrong project and I'm stuck in the dead-end job. Of course this is no reason to not try, but it's something I don't remember feeling throughout the entirety of my 20s when I pretty much just 'went for it' without regards to much else. At least back then I had conviction and consistency and shipped things. I bounced between failures much better too.

Now there's thoughts like, 'I should just be applying for better jobs', 'I should go back to school', 'I should work on something trendy like AI SaaS', etc. Yeah I'd say the lack of conviction is pretty tough lately.

Anyone experience similar, especially regarding the experience of trying startups constantly from their 20s to 30s?
Show HN: ARZY-G – A token born from AI-verified usefulness (not mined or bought)
by arzykul | 2025-07-06 17:10:12+00:00
Hi HN!

I’m Arzykul from Kyrgyzstan , and I’ve built a new kind of token: ARZY-G.

It’s not mined, not bought, and not farmed. It’s born only from real-world usefulness, verified by AI and Chainlink Functions.

Our goal: create a fairer, purpose-driven economy — what we call Web4.

GitHub + Whitepaper: https://github.com/arzykul/ArzyNet

I’d love your feedback, criticism, or even questions. I'm a self-taught founder, building this from scratch.

Thank you for reading!

— Arzykul Muratov (@Arzykulm)
by pembrook | 2025-07-06 17:10:18+00:00
I’m sure the handicrafts laborers prior to the industrial revolution felt the same way.

However, they also likely had little education, 1-2 of their children probably died of trivial illnesses before the age of 10, and they lived without electricity, indoor plumbing, running water or refrigeration.

Yes, blacksmithing your own tools is romantic (just as hand writing python code), but somehow I’m guessing our ancestors will be better off living at higher layers of abstraction. Nobody will stop them from writing python code themselves, and I’m sure they’ll do it as a fun hobby like blacksmithing is today.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 17:10:25+00:00
> Lots of bad takes in this thread

That's sneering. Don't do this. If you have a specific argument that you respond to, then do it. Generically sneering at other comments is profoundly anti-intellectual, extremely boring, and directly against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - it actively degrades the quality of HN.
by ben_w | 2025-07-06 17:10:29+00:00
While true, that's still an improvement on being a conspiracy theorist.

My mum was New Age type who regularly gave me homeopathic tablets labelled "sodium chloride" and "titanium dioxide", and later Bach flower remedies.

Someone in the pocket of, say, Big Tobacco is going to downplay smoking risks; but that's still not as bad as suggesting replacing all pharmacies with table salt and white sand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_hospitals_in_the_N...
by masswerk | 2025-07-06 17:11:03+00:00
It also happens on the PET, before BASIC 4.0.

I had a cursory look at it: there's no check for REM, of any kind, but there's, of course, a check for quoted strings. For any tokens, an offset count is calculated by subtracting 0x7F from the token and then a loop starts searching for set sign-bits in the keyword list, decrementing the counter each time, it finds one. If the counter is zero, we must be right at the keyword, we're looking for. – But in those cases, where we are not…

For values larger than 0xCC (shift-L), the routine actually wraps around. E.g, shift-M is listed as FOR (0x81), shift-N as NEXT (0x82), and so on. This is, because the keyword list is exactly 256 bytes long (including GO and the terminating zero-byte, like on the C64) and is inspected by an indexed load instruction. So the index register just wraps around.

(BASIC 4.0, on the other hand, has to deal with a longer keyword list anyway, so it uses a more complex method to read the list, involving a pointer. Thus it happily spills over into the list of error messages, which follows immediately after this and happens to be encoded in the same way. Therefor, it will expand any excess-tokens into error messages. I guess, this will be the same with BASIC 7, and so on, if they are anything like this.)
by raintrees | 2025-07-06 17:12:09+00:00
"There ought to be a law" is why we have nanny-state government. I imagine that is why there have been "no spitting" and "no chewing gum" laws on the books.

People going to lord it over others in the pursuit of what they think is proper.

Society is over-rated, once it gets beyond a certain size.

Along the same lines, I am currently starting my morning with blocking ranges of IP addresses to get Internet service back, due to someone's current desire to SYN Flood my webserver, which being hosted in my office, affects my office Internet.

It may soon come to a point where I choose to block all IP addresses except a few to get work done.

People gonna be people.

sigh.
by rshemet | 2025-07-06 17:12:17+00:00
Interesting to think about the concept of local-first in the age of AI.

Wanting to be able to run AI fully privately, and offline is the reason we created Cactus:

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus

Fully open-source, cross-platform & blazing-fast; lets you plug in private AI into any app on your phone.
by vroot | 2025-07-06 17:12:27+00:00
Yeah, and they’re blurrier.

I was also surprised at how many times I didn’t choose the final icon as my favorite, annd more so how many times it was one of the even older ones.

This sort of thing smells of group decisions.

Jobs and Ives were the voices of reason at Apple. They need someone to fill-in for them.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 17:13:06+00:00
> And of course the usual sinophobia

This is factually not sinophobia, by the literal definition of it - "prejudice, hatred, hostility, and discrimination that is directed towards Chinese people or Chinese culture"

This tactic is straight out of the PRC influence playbook, badly breaks the HN guidelines, is extremely anti-intellectual and profoundly uninteresting. Please don't do it.
by theturtle32 | 2025-07-06 17:13:42+00:00
My working theory, which I hold quite confidently, is that anything that doesn't test well with new users in usability testing focus groups or A/B testing eventually gets the axe. But the people conducting that testing are - intentionally or unintentionally - optimizing for the wrong metric: "how quickly and easily can someone who has never seen this app before figure out how to do this action." That's the wrong thing to optimize for at a macro scale. It might make your conversions go up for a while, but at a long term cost of usability, capability, and discoverability that enrages the users that you want to convert into advanced, loyal, word of mouth evangelists for your app because they love it.

When people who are not thinking in that bigger-scale, zoomed-out, societal-level perspective conduct A/B testing or usability testing in a lab or focus group setting, they focus on the wrong metrics (the ones that make an immediate, short-term KPI go up) and then promote the resulting objectively worse UX designs as being evidence-based and data-driven.

It has been destroying software usability for the last 20 years and doing a deep disservice to subsequent generations who are growing up without having been exposed to TRULY thoughtful UX except very rarely.

I will die on this hill.
by 827a | 2025-07-06 17:13:45+00:00
Couldn’t agree more. There are awesome use-cases for AI, but Microsoft and Google needed to shove AI everywhere they possibly could, so they lost all sense of taste and quality. Google raised the price of Workspace to account for AI features no one wants. Then, they give away access to Gemini CLI for free to personal accounts, but not Workspace accounts. You physically cannot even pay Google to access Veo from a workspace account.

Raise subscription prices, don’t deliver more value, bundle everything together so you can’t say no. I canceled a small Workspace org I use for my consulting business after the price hike last year; also migrating away everything we had on GCP. Google would have to pay me to do business with them again.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-06 17:13:46+00:00
> If your CGI script takes a generous 400 milliseconds of CPU to start up and your server has 64 cores, you can serve 160 requests per second

...and then you're wasting a 64-core server at 100% CPU load on just starting up and tearing down script instances, not yet doing any useful work. This is doing 160 startups per second, not requests per second

Would be a pretty big program for it to require 400ms on a fast CPU though, but the python interpreter is big and if you have one slow import it's probably already not far off
by jtms | 2025-07-06 17:13:53+00:00
Absolutely feel the same way. I have been writing software professionally for over 20 years and truly love the craft. Now that I am using Claude Code basically 100% of the time my productivity has certainly increased, but I agree there is a hollowness to it - where before the process felt like art it now feels like industrialized mass manufacturing. I’m hoping that I can rediscover some of what has kept me so fascinated with software in this new reality, because quite a bit of the joy has indeed been stripped away for me.
by tverbeure | 2025-07-06 17:14:07+00:00
Higher refresh rates don't have to be perceptible to be useful: they can shift the balance in head-to-head gaming.

Imagine 2 identical gaming setups with 2 players that have the same skill set. In an FPS game, you'd expect each of those players to win 50% of the games.

Now switch one monitor from 120Hz to 240Hz. On average, the player on the 240Hz monitor will see their adversary 4ms earlier than the player on the 120Hz monitor and thus be able to push the mouse button earlier too.
by panzi | 2025-07-06 17:14:42+00:00
Thanks a lot! This finally did what I want:

widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 4

widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 20

Though I'm not sure if I maybe want:

widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 3

widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 30

Plus of course that, which I had found earlier and did nothing on it's own:

widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled = false

layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled = true
by kickingvegas | 2025-07-06 17:15:15+00:00
FWIW, for just "using" Emacs, I wrote a number of keyboard-driven menus for different modes called Casual. Read all about it here: https://github.com/kickingvegas/casual

For understanding Elisp, I wrote an "Elisp Cheetsheet for Python Programmers" to help as a reference.

https://github.com/kickingvegas/elisp-for-python
by snzixjxjxjsn | 2025-07-06 17:16:35+00:00
Translation is the one thing everyone expects AI to be good at. And while I’m not an expert in above posts languages so I can’t review, I’d be willing to bet there’s not obvious mistakes that could end up being pretty significant. The same thing happens with language I’m an expert it.

It’s odd the post describes what it’s doing as creating something new - that’s only true in the most literal (intellectually dishonest) sense.
by varispeed | 2025-07-06 17:16:40+00:00
I often say an odd thing on public forum or make up a story and then see if LLM can bring it up.

I started doing that once LLM provided me with a solution to a problem that was quite elegant, but was not implemented in the particular project. Turns out it learned it from GitHub issues post that described how particular problem could be tackled, but PR never actually got in.
by dfxm12 | 2025-07-06 17:17:07+00:00
Obviously we could have a conversation, it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).

This says more about you than them. What was the point? To have a conversation or to get your coworker to behave a certain way? You're annoyed at arbitrary aesthetics, as if this person didn't show enough deference to your preferences, even though you were sure they turned off their music and you were able to have a conversation.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-06 17:17:15+00:00
1. Tips are not a reliable source of income (I am an American who also survived on tips).

2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.

3. If any computer science job ever contemplated adding tipping to my compensation package, I'd go get my pink slip within the hour.
by jfengel | 2025-07-06 17:17:21+00:00
Just moments ago I noticed for the first time that Gmail was giving me a summary of email I had received.

Please don't. I am going to read this email. Adding more text just makes me read more.

I am sure there's a common use case of people who get a ton of faintly important email from colleagues. But this is my personal account and the only people contacting me are friends. (Everyone else should not be summarized; they should be trashed. And to be fair I am very grateful for Gmail's excellent spam filtering.)
by ipogrjegiorejkf | 2025-07-06 17:18:03+00:00
I like the speed. It's very fast!

A couple of suggestions: 1. Yeah, you should probably require a login to add spaces - especially since you can't verify the locations individually. 2. I'm not sure what xeeting is so maybe on that button put X's logo on there to make it more obvious 3. The vibe might change during the day. It might be more social after work hours or vice-versa. 4. Are there any free spots? I only see paid options. Libraries are free. Starbucks is free-ish since you could get away without buying anything.
by freedomben | 2025-07-06 17:18:19+00:00
I wonder how common this is. Personally, looking at code examples can be helpful, but the vast majority of my learning comes from doing, failing, trying a different approach, succeeding, rinsing and repeating.

I also haven't had much luck with getting llms to generate useful code. I'm sure part of that is the stack I am using is much less popular (elixir) than many others, but I have tried everything even the new phoenix.new , and it is only about an 80 to 90% solution, but that remaining percentage is full of bugs or terrible design patterns that will absolutely bite in the future. In nearly everything I've tried to do, it introduces bugs and bug hunting those down is worse to me than if I just did the work manually in the first place. I have spent hours trying to coach the AI through a particular task, only to have the end solution need to be thrown away and started from scratch.

Speaking personally, My skills are atrophying the more I use the AI tools. It still feels like a worthwhile trade-off in many situations, but a trade-off it is
by crote | 2025-07-06 17:18:30+00:00
> If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all

But such a gradient would be completely unusable for any ICE! EVs can deliver an absolutely insane amount of power at even the slowest speeds. If an EV has the power to sustain highway speeds, it'll also have the power to go up a steep hill at a snail's pace. On the other hand, an ICE will struggle significantly with steep hills - even if they technically have the horsepower to do it.

I highly doubt it'll result in a fire, though. Measuring motor current isn't exactly rocket science, so it'll just go into an overload mode. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if EV motors were explicitly designed to survive short-term stall currents. Measure the wheel speed and it's pretty obvious to figure out when you're stalling and should shut down to avoid damage.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-06 17:19:25+00:00
Would be interesting to see if this kind of watermarking survives the frankenstein types of editing they are presumably doing. Per the linked account, they took a model, changed tokenizers, and added layers on top. They then presumably did some form of continued pre-training, and then post-training. It would have to be some very resistant watermarking to survive that. It's not as simple as making the model reply with "my tokens are my passport, verify me" when you ask them the weather in NonExistingCity... Interesting nonetheless.
by xnx | 2025-07-06 17:19:31+00:00
> Public services like public transport shouldn't be seen as for-profit entities.

This is fine, but it's a question of how much/little useful service should they provide for the money provided. Is $1 billion per mile of subway OK? Is $2 billion?

My radical idea would be to turn the subway right-of-way over to licensed or automated electric shuttle on-demand shuttle vans. There would be challenges for sure, but it's hard to do worse than the efficiencies some of these systems are operating at.