MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beeflet | 2025-07-20 21:07:41+00:00
Cryptocurrencies are volatile specifically because they are used as a speculative investment rather than a means of exchange. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

>And that's not even getting into the issues of crypto UX as a form of common currency for the average person.

The conventional banking system is just as complicated and less secure, yet people have adapted to its flaws. What's the difference between FedWire and ACH? Why does it take time for checks to clear, and why does it show that I have a balance immediately? What are money orders? Why are banks only open on weekdays when the entire economy relies on them to function?
by esprehn | 2025-07-20 21:07:45+00:00
This was tried with Polymer way back in 2014 too, ex. making network requests with <iron-ajax> - https://github.com/PolymerElements/iron-ajax

There was also Adobe Flex of the similar era that exists these days as Apache Royale: https://apache.github.io/royale-docs/features/mxml

There was also XAML and inside Microsoft they made NetUI and FlexUI to make Office 2007+ too.

It all seems great on paper, but in practice the markup abstraction turned out to be worse than code first solutions like JSX even for novices.
by anarticle | 2025-07-20 21:08:31+00:00
Let me put it this way: in my area, the vast majority are veneers or what looks like a vinyl sticker. This is an inversion of what it used to be, which was the majority were hardwood. The market in every geo is different, but I am in a top 10 major city in US. I don’t buy from Ikea online, so maybe that is possible! It doesn’t change my experience though.

This is the crux of my argument against these types of articles, they try to retcon “you are the one who is crazy! it’s always been like that”. I was searching at an autistic level for a dinner table for the last five years from IKEA until I just gave up and bought a vintage thing made of real teak, made by a craftsperson for less than a mid range sticker and mechanically separated wood table from IKEA.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-20 21:09:34+00:00
If you take a small plot of wild land, say 50'x50' and visit it everyday watching all the various mushrooms which will grow there (there will be far more then most people realize or expect) and try and find the sense in where and when they fruit it becomes difficult to write it all off as simple biological responses to environment/following the food/etc, and even if you do look at it that way and start adding up the possible causes and effects you can end up with such a long list that it becomes difficult to not see it as some sort of at least instinctual level intelligence and that the growth of mycelium often has more in common with crawling than mindless growth.

For example, many mushrooms are very good at fruiting just out of sight from trails, walk 20' off the trail, turn around and suddenly you start seeing mushrooms. Instinct is to say that all the mushrooms which grow within sight of the trail get picked by curious people or kicked by children but if you start looking for remains and stumps and mushrumps and those hard to spot just starting to fruit immature buttons, you find surprisingly few. So you think environmental, the trail alters windflow and runoff, animal movement, etc, but than you notice that this is true of even those small trails created by a fox or children which only affect a bit of low growing undergrowth so only has a tiny effect on a very localized area. On and on it goes until you run out of explanations.

I am mostly convinced there is some level of intelligence here and we just can not see it because it is so very different from what we understand as intelligence. But, I may just spend too much time with mushrooms, during the season I always seem to have at least a dozen various mushrooms which I will visit everyday to watch them grow and rot away.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-20 21:09:46+00:00
SLC residents are perfectly capable of, and very happy to be rude to you and treat you with disdain for a multitude of reasons (and SLC is the most "tolerant" city in Utah. Anywhere out of downtown and you find that rapidly disappearing). My former employer was in SLC so I spent a lot of time there.

NYC people are superficially rude, sure, as a stereotype. But when I've had a genuine issue or question, I've found most people there willing to help. SLC people are just as superficially "really nice", for that comparison.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 21:10:24+00:00
"Transaction is irreversible via automated system" and "transaction is irreversible via court order" are two different things. The first is a problem when you have merchants that legitimately provided a service (e.g. adult content, buying fungible commodities that themselves can't be clawed back) because customers issue chargebacks against merchants that didn't scam them, e.g. because the spouse disputes a charge for adult content that the person who made the purchase doesn't want to admit to buying. But the second is the thing you need to prevent scams and ransomware.
by Aardwolf | 2025-07-20 21:10:34+00:00
I'd love it if there was someone with tetrachromacy who also knows a bit about color theory and perception and can talk about it!

How do you describe the experience scientifically? Do you get a whole bunch of extra colors you'd want to give a distinct name since they're so clearly different from the standard trichromatic colors?

Is a computer screen annoying because it can only produce a subset of the colors you can see?

Do you notice that you have a fourth parameter or dimension in the colors you see, so would want a 4th component in RGB, HSV, etc... color sliders? E.g. for our HSL, would the fourth parameter be hue-like, saturation-like, lightness like or some completely novel other thing? If hue like, do the hues also form a 2D sphere or torus like topology similar to how our trichromatic hue forms a circle?

I'd expect at least twice or 3x as many named colors, since for every regular color (red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, pink, grey, brown, black, white, ...) , you'd have a fourth dimension altering it that can be low, medium or high in value ...

E.g. for our yellow, you'd have yellow with not the extra signal, a bit of the extra signal or lots of the extra signal. Is this the case or not? Perhaps the overlapping reduces it, but as said in the article trichromats also have overlap yet we definitely see a lot more distinct colors than dichromats.
Ask HN: Thoughts on wasp-JS, a full-stack framework for node
by fazkan | 2025-07-20 21:10:37+00:00
Exploring, less verbose web-frameworks for my codegen product.

Anyone used wasp-js in production?

They claim a lot of things, but wanted to make sure it can handle workers and async jobs.

https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp

Could only find three case-studies of actual deployment on their site. Hopefully the founders will respond.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-20 21:12:00+00:00
It's not country-wide policy though. They aren't deciding what people can and can't buy. They're deciding of what they will or won't facilitate the sale.

The American pornography industry has solved this problem by 1. recognizing that there is higher risk, like "oh no honey that $5.99 charge from onlyfans on the statement must have been fraud! do a chargeback." and 2. recognizing that the optics of selling pornography are bad and not everyone wants to assume what is essentially an externality (bearing that optics cost) without being paid extra for it. So there are providers that handle "high-risk" payments like that. Or they take crypto.

One of the cool things about the fact that companies are profit-seeking and really like making money, is that when they turn down what looks like an opportunity to make money you can be pretty sure it's for a good reason.
by sofixa | 2025-07-20 21:12:31+00:00
> Having worked for the French state and wrestled a few times with its IT services, I can tell you that the reason for choosing Microsoft isn't cost, or "efficiency

While this is generally not wrong, the French state still uses and creates open source software extensively. Gendermerie Nationale have their own Linux distribution ; Ministry of Foreign Affairs runs Debian for diplomatic personnel. Multiple pieces of public software was developed out in the open (including the government SSO and the COVID tracking app).

So while there is definitely bad, it has been getting progressively better over the past ~10 years.
by thefourthchime | 2025-07-20 21:12:34+00:00
I was mostly nodding my head until he got to this part.

The fundamental requirement for the LLM to be used is: don’t use agents or things like editor with integrated coding agents.

So right, is he like actually copying and pasting stuff into a chat window? I did this before Co-Pilot, but with cursor I would never think of doing that. He never mentioned Cursor or Claude Code so I wonder if he's even experienced it.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-20 21:12:47+00:00
> Streetcars were already on the decline when car companies bought them.

And yet... LA has, still, 1,000 miles of light rail, and many other locations 500 miles plus.

And then you have Melbourne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Melbourne

> ... consists of approximately 1,700 tram stops across 24 routes. It is the largest operational urban tram network in the world and one of the most used, with more than 500 trams and 250 kilometres (160 miles) of double tram track. It carried 154.8 million passengers over the year 2023-24. Trams are the second most utilised form of public transport in Melbourne after the city's metropolitan commuter railway network.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-20 21:13:35+00:00
Some people with two X chromosomes have this ability. And all birds.

If you are bored, try to get Gemini/claude to make a color wheel for birds or tetrachromats.

An aside: Recently I learned that birds are reptiles. That hurt my brain and I’m still recovering. Especially since the modern dinosaur exhibit claiming this fact contradicted the 1980s era reptiles exhibit down the hall (both at the British museum).
by oconnor663 | 2025-07-20 21:14:09+00:00
> It's perfectly clear to a human that this code is fine and doesn't have any actual ownership issues.

I think there's another part of the story in a few of these examples that the author might be missing. Sometimes Rust doesn't want to infer/allow things because of the Halting Problem or whatever, but other times it's because that inference would amount to a compatibility hazard that the user might not've realized they were creating. "Types implement `Copy` automatically" is a good example of one of these. It would be an easy rule to implement (and it is in fact how `Send` and `Sync` and some other things work), but it would also mean that adding a non-Copy private field to a struct that didn't previously have one could break callers. I wouldn't call it a slam-dunk case for the rules being what they are -- and you could argue that it prioritizes the needs of library code over the needs of application code -- but anyway it's some context.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-20 21:14:21+00:00
Yeah, looking back to my father's SLR. Incredible lens, went all the way up to 100mm! He'd probably faint (can't, he's long gone) if I showed him my DSLR with a 28-300 lens on it that takes far better pictures than his could. And the wastefulness of setting the default on my camera to be a 7-shot bracket??? 5 actual shots per roll??? You measure your shooting capacity in batteries rather than film??? You can put 10,000 rolls of film in that little case that would survive if a truck ran over it???
by koito17 | 2025-07-20 21:14:40+00:00
> Full Browser window size cancas ... and draw everything yourself

This was already tried to some extent with Flash. Many sites were a single Flash module (or multiple). Implementing accessibility then required maintaining an invisible DOM representation of the Flash canvas. I personally don't want to return to the era where login and register buttons were dedicated Flash modules (MegaUpload did this back in ~2009) and many sites were an 800x600 image using the <area> tag for hitpoints.

Even Flutter has a DOM target because painting to a full <canvas> violates at the very least the operating system's text rendering, scrolling, and accessibility.
by aipmtools | 2025-07-20 21:15:04+00:00
I used to spend hours creating client-ready project status reports.

So I built this free AI-powered toolkit to automate it using Notion + ChatGPT — now it takes <60 seconds.

Includes: • Weekly status report prompt • SOW generator • PDF-ready layout

Would love feedback — and open to adding more templates if useful to others.

[Free download at the bottom of the blog]
by wiremine | 2025-07-20 21:15:10+00:00
Jon has been around for a long time, and I've been a long-time fan. He's a bit of an elder: he's seen a lot of things, and he's worth listening to.

> I’m a fan of web components but it’s the React flavor that dominate and they are not accessible to the kind of developer who could productively use Visual Basic components back in the day.

I think this is the most important statement in the piece. The rest of the post explains the technical details, but this explains _why_ this exists. This is a bold statement, but I don't think he's wrong.

Now, is XMLUI the _right_ set of abstractions to help these developers? We'll have to wait an see. But I love to see the attempt!
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-20 21:16:45+00:00
> The USA is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic.

I'm not sure why this basic issue is constantly attacked with the nonsensical claim that a republic is not a democracy. There are two forms of democracy - direct (never tried in the West) and representative (aka republic). In short, for all intends and purposes, the US and all other western democracies are both democracies and republics. And that's that.

The confusion goes back all the way to Hamilton who might have been too busy effing around to understand the difference.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-07-20 21:16:59+00:00
Over the decades, I've watched storytelling in games become secondary to monetization loops and studio mandates. As a response, I’ve been building The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge a text adventure written entirely in QBasic. No deadlines. No design committees. Just a slow, deliberate attempt to preserve what made early games meaningful. In my latest video, I reflect on The Silent Bell a chapter that explores how silence, memory, and absence can tell a story more powerfully than any cutscene. It’s part game design, part personal journaling, part meditation on what we’ve lost in modern development.

Not trying to sell anything just offering a look at one possible way forward.
by Nition | 2025-07-20 21:17:11+00:00
There is a good [dead] comment reply to my comment here by user sefn where they point out that in fact the spacing is not exactly equal, it varies by about 1mm (and they're correct).

If you've got "showdead" on, you can see it, click the timestamp on it, and click "vouch" if you want to vouch for it to come back. Seems inappropriately killed to me.

They have a second good [dead] comment in this discussion which I've also vouched to return.
by dharmatech | 2025-07-20 21:17:12+00:00
Alan Kay in 1997:

> I really would like you to contrast that with what you have to do with HTML on the Internet. Think about it. HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that should understand its formats. This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS. [Laughter] This is really a shame. It's maybe what happens when physicists decide to play with computers, I'm not sure. [Laughter] In fact, we can see what's happend to the Internet now, is that it is gradually getting—There are two wars going on. There's a set of browser wars which are 100 percent irrelevant. They're basically an attempt, either at demonstrating a non-understanding of how to build complex systems, or an even cruder attempt simply to gather territory. I suspect Microsoft is in the latter camp here. You don't need a browser, if you followed what this Staff Sergeant in the Air Force knew how to do in 1961. You just read it in. It should travel with all the things that it needs, and you don't need anything more complex than something like X Windows. Hopefully better. But basically, you want to be able to distribute all of the knowledge of all the things that are there, and in fact, the Internet is starting to move in that direction as people discover ever more complex HTML formats, ever more intractable. This is one of these mistakes that has been recapitulated every generation. It's just simply not the way to do it.
Navigating AI Dementia: Strategies for Safe Rollback
by upwardbound2 | 2025-07-20 21:17:20+00:00
As AI systems become increasingly integrated into our lives, the potential for AI dementia—a state where AI malfunctions, loses coherence, or exhibits unpredictable and harmful behavior—becomes a significant concern. Addressing this risk requires a multi-faceted approach, combining immediate rollback strategies with comprehensive global safety measures.

One of the primary strategies for managing AI dementia is the implementation of robust rollback mechanisms. These systems should allow for a swift return to a previously stable and verified state. Regular checkpoints and backups of AI models are essential, enabling developers to revert to a functional version if dementia is detected.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 21:17:26+00:00
To begin with, no they don't. They use hashing and signatures, which are mathematically related to cryptography and often packaged in the same libraries or used together to construct cryptographic protocols, but cryptography (literally "secret writing") is specifically about making information indecipherable, which is the thing cryptocurrency typically doesn't do.

More to the point, it's still misleading to call a ship the water.
by sofixa | 2025-07-20 21:17:38+00:00
Anyone using Azure is bizarre.

Just search for Azure on wiz.io's blog, the amount of terrible yet easy to exploit security vulnerabilities, often with shit responses from Microsoft, is terrifying. It clearly demonstrates nobody with power within the Azure org cares about security. How can anyone trust them with anything remotely critical? Let alone the terrible UX and absurdly eventual consistency.

Yeah, yeah, I know, the people who know and understand this aren't the ones getting wined and dined to buy it. But still..
by symbolicAGI | 2025-07-20 21:17:43+00:00
The Stockfish chess engine example nails it.

For AI researchers, the Bitter Lesson is not to rely on supervised learning, not to rely on manual data labeling, nor on manual ontologies nor manual business rules,

Nor on *manually coded* AI systems, except as the bootstrap code.

Unsupervised methods prevail, even if compute expensive.

The challenge from Sutton's Bitter Lesson for AI researchers is to develop sufficient unsupervised methods for learning and AI self-improvement.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-20 21:17:48+00:00
And when that happens, LibreOffice, GSuite and even Apple’s iWork suite can open the documents.

Word for the Mac has been in continuos production since 1986. It made through a 16 bit MacOS (I’m yada yada yada’ing) , to 32 bit “clean” System 7 on a 68040, to classic MacOS PPC to native OS X on PPC Carbon 32 bit, to x86 64 bit OS X APIs to ARM.

Would you really want to use Windows 3.1 Word in 2025? One of the major issues with Windows is that it carries stoubf cruft from 1992.

There are for instance still a dozen ways to define a string in Windows programming depending on the API and you have to convert between them
by cbarrick | 2025-07-20 21:17:53+00:00
The incompatible syntax of fish makes it a no go for me.

As an SRE, at my day job I often need to copy/paste commands that are generated from a playbook.

Our playbooks use Bash, and in practice Zsh is compatible. But a co-worker using fish often has to manually modify commands before running, and I'm not about that life.

The problem with fish is mostly the different syntax for setting variables and lack of heredocs. Sometimes the string substitution differences come up too.
by FredPret | 2025-07-20 21:18:09+00:00
Yes to both. This is my heuristic:

- think about what would happen if something is simply left undone

- can I do the same task with fewer steps

- if I relaxed the definition of success a little, does it get a lot easier?

- can I farm it out to a person or a service? (Like bill autopay, or Instacart)
by lelanthran | 2025-07-20 21:18:31+00:00
> SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game.

I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results.

They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1]

If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.

--------------------------------------

[1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.
by kubb | 2025-07-20 21:18:34+00:00
I think it's a compromise between:

1. We want to do brain drain to remain a leader in science and technology. 2. We don't want immigration and we don't like immigrants. 3. We can't discriminate based on where you come from, that's racist.

So let's have H1B (satisfies 1), but put a cap on it (satisfies 2), and have a lottery if the cap is exceeded (satisfies 3).

There could be a better solution for reaching these goals, you could switch priorities, cancel H1B altogether, or lift the cap, or have stricter requirements, or separate caps per country of origin, or per sector, there are a lot of options.

From my point of view, it's all still a lottery.
by nullc | 2025-07-20 21:18:37+00:00
>the xor of 1 through n

XOR[0...x] = (x&1^(x&2)>>1)+x*(~x&1)

Of course, you don't have to do this with xor, you can do it with just addition (mod wordmax) and the well known identity attributed to gauss will support you.
by sva_ | 2025-07-20 21:19:10+00:00
I've noticed that there's currently some kind of manufacturing consent going on in the EU, presumably preparing the population for, which I claim, plans to make it very difficult for European consumers to order from China directly.

Disclaimer: I gladly buy from local EU businesses, but not if they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products.
by nine_k | 2025-07-20 21:19:31+00:00
The technique is cool to know. SVG has many non-obvious abilities.

But the effect, due to the way it's produced, is more like a hot air distortion, only without the faint shimmering. It's completely raster in nature, AFAICT, and is likely implemented as a GPU shader (which is good from the performance POV).

An effect more like an unsteady human hand could likely be achieved by oscillating nodes in the direction perpendicular to the curvature, and adding some random jitter to the control points.