MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-16 16:07:49+00:00
> In any case, I believe a DB per backend service isn't a decision driven by the frontend - rather, it's driven by data migration and data access requirements.

I think the idea of breaking up a shared enterprise DB into many distinct but communicating and dependent DB's was driven by a desire to reduce team+system dependencies to increase ability to change.

While the pro is valid and we make use of the idea sometimes when we design things, the cons are significant. Splitting up a DB that has data that is naturally shared by many departments in the business and by many modules/functional areas of the system increases complexity substantially.

In the shared model, when some critical attribute of an item (sku) is updated, then all of the different modules+functional areas of enterprise are immediately using that current and correct master value.

In the distributed model, there is significant complexity and effort to share this state across all areas. I've worked on systems designed this way and this issue frequently causes problems related to timing.

As with everything, no single solution is best for all situations. We only split this kind of shared state when the pros outweigh the cons, which is sometimes but not that often.
by nebezb | 2025-08-16 16:08:01+00:00
> Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.

Nailed it. Anyone can move money.

As a consumer, I always opt to pay for credit card where available. The safeties provided to me facilitated by everyone in the network – from issuer to acquirer and everyone in between – is exactly why. I don't want to consider waiting 12 months in line at small claims to get back $200 sent over Interac for services that were never provided by a shoddy business owner.

The cost of those consumer safeties and convenience is incurred by the merchant. This is the cost of business.
by lend000 | 2025-08-16 16:08:02+00:00
It seems to me the two are effectively the same unless you have significantly misshaped teeth (remineralizing vs regenerating). I also use hydroxyapatite, just to reduce my fluoride exposure, although I believe fluoride is supposed to be a more potent remineralizer (and fluorapatite is allegedly stronger than natural hydroxyapatite). But the upside is that I don't mind swishing hydroxyapatite around in my mouth for 10 minutes, twice a day, so whenever I go to the dentist, I'm the healthiest mouth of the day (not the case pre-hydroxyapatite tooth paste/powder).
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-16 16:09:06+00:00
Apple has on a few occasions in the past come in after people have spent a lot of time and energy developing things and making a small market, figuring out how it should actually work, making a nice version 1.0 of how it should actually work, making that market explode 100-fold and taking all the money.

That smart homes are more trouble than they are worth currently sounds to me like ripe territory for Apple to poach.

However not sure if without Jobs and Ive if they can actually do anything like what they used to.
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-16 16:09:23+00:00
>it could also pocket money that would be paid by CC.

No.

The card processor will return the customer's funds for various reasons. In many cases, "no reason" is sufficient for a chargeback, especially if you are dealing in intangibles, such as software licenses or digital media. In addition to returning the customer's funds, the merchant is typically penalized a "chargeback fee". This means as a merchant, if your chargeback fee is $25 and the product is $5, one chargeback can set you back 6 sales.

For these reasons, as well as other minimum rates, certain price levels are untenable. Consequently, many products are either not sold at all or sold at a much higher price.

The conditions make it more sensible for the merchant to sell high priced items to less troublesome customers. The percentage of the card processor's fees are relatively less. The probability of a chargeback is lower. As you have less customers, you can more easily provide support and contact them directly.
by toast0 | 2025-08-16 16:09:36+00:00
US banking has wire transfers, but they cost $15-$40 and can only be reversed with the cooperation of the receiving bank. We use them to transfer large sums of money and for transfers that need to be settled immediately; most often for house purchases where both apply.

We do have ACH (single nightly batch), same day ACH (four? batches throughout the day), and the new FedNow (immediate). But all of those involve providing account numbers and we don't like to provide those (both payers and receivers prefer not to give the other participant their ach numbers). Also, there's not a consistent way to link a payment/debit with an invoice, because memo fields don't necessarily show up with the payment.

Also, credit card purchases can be reversed without the cooperation of the merchant. Most issuers are generous with chargebacks (at least historically). You could take a merchant to court if you did a wire transfer, but that's expensive and time consuming.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-16 16:09:50+00:00
"I don't see any way around this apart from not taking flights, or paying a lot more for these privileges"

But someone else might see ways around it; not every www user is the same

For example, it's possible to use a popular browser for banking and purchasing tickets while using some other program(s) for reading and commenting on HN

If one only ever uses the internet for banking and purchasing tickets, and refrains from any noncommercial use, e.g., reading HN submissions and commenting on them, then a popular web browser might be all one ever needs

But how many websites submitted to HN require "cybersecurity theatre "verification" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies""

Other www users might only spend a relatively small amount of their internet usage making purchases

Not every www user is the same, nor is every website on the internet the same

"... lest the site explode."

I use a setup that differs from web developers and I have never seen a website "explode"; this includes commercial websites

Like the OP suggests, it's just text
by thegrim33 | 2025-08-16 16:10:02+00:00
To play devil's advocate, how is your argument not a 'no true scottsman' argument? As in, "oh, they had a negative view of X, well that's of course because they weren't testing the new and improved X2 model which is different". Fast forward a year .. "Oh, they have a negative view on X2, well silly them, they need to be using the Y24 model, that's where it's at, the X2 model isn't good anymore". Fast forward a year .. ad infinitum.

Are the models that exist today a "true scottsman" for you?
by immibis | 2025-08-16 16:10:07+00:00
The opening of new jobs has been causally unlinked from the closing of old jobs - especially when you take the quantity into consideration. There was a well of stuff people wanted to do, that they couldn't do because they were busy doing the boring stuff. But now that well of good new jobs is running dry, which is why we see people picking up 3 really shit jobs to make ends meet. There will be a point where new jobs do not open at all, and we should probably plan for that.
by mmmore | 2025-08-16 16:10:18+00:00
If AI that can fully replace humans is 25 years off, preparing society for its impacts is still one of the most important things to ensure that my children (which I have not had yet) live a prosperous and fulfilling life. The only other things of possibly similar import are preventing WWIII, and preventing a pandemic worse than COVID.

I don't see how AGI could be centuries off (at least without some major disruption to global society). If computers that can talk, write essays, solve math problems, and code are not a warning sign that we should be ready, then what is?
by rsync | 2025-08-16 16:10:55+00:00
The supply chain - especially for SSDs - is full of old parts being sold as new:

https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/

... some vendors have been found tampering with SMART data which can be done on certain models ...

In the post-chia[1] landscape, I would advise extreme caution in sourcing drives and a decent shortcut is to not buy from Amazon ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network
by nprateem | 2025-08-16 16:11:04+00:00
The trouble with AI shit is it's all contaminated by association.

I was looking on YT earlier for info on security cameras. It's easy to spot the AI crap: under 5 minutes and just stock video in the preview or photos.

What value could there be in me wasting time to see if the creators bothered to add quality content if they can't be bothered to show themselves in front of the lens?

What an individual brings is a unique brand. I'm watching their opinion which carries weight based on social signals and their catalogue etc.

Generic AI will always lack that until it can convincingly be bundled into a persona... only then the cycle will repeat: search for other ways to separate the lazy, generic content from the meaningful original stuff.
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-16 16:11:23+00:00
I think that's a red herring. You are a knowledge worker. You are paid to disagree when necessary. Yes, people will probably take offense when you say "that's just a dumb question" but if they can't at least be approached when you offer your opinion in a palatable(sic) way, that's simply not going to work.

Understand what is being asked. Your insight on a topic is being tested. Offer an answer that does not read like a dodge or a coin flip.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-16 16:11:54+00:00
Synthesizing between you two’s thoughts, extrapolating somewhat:

- human individuals create wealths

- groups of humans can create kinds of wealth that isn’t possible for a single indovidual. This can be a wide variety of associations: companies, project teams, governments, etc.

- governments (formal or less formal) create the playing field for individuals and groups of individuals to create wealth
by gethly | 2025-08-16 16:12:04+00:00
There is no difference to the bank transfer(as that is what all of this is just wrapping inside). If you are paying with a debit card, you have the same "protections" as basic bank transfer. And from personal experience, the bank is near useless and you won't be even able to call your card company.

On the other hand, credit cards are something else. Those are essentially short-term loans that are insured. As there are many parties involved that profit from you use of these, there indeed is a lot of protection in this case. But credit cards are very niche part of online card payments and mostly it is a USA thing.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-16 16:12:05+00:00
I’m going to assume this is a good faith comment, but I encourage you to understand that Europe and the US are different places, with significantly different ecosystems.

I also encourage you to read about Chesterton’s Fence. Make sure you understand why something exists before you think about how to replace it, then maybe you won’t see Americans’ use of credit cards as “irrational,” but instead, reasonable under the circumstances that exist.

That said… the US did roll out FedNow (similar to SEPA) but because the US banking ecosystem is more fragmented, adoption takes a while.

Wire transfers here are expensive and don’t provide consumer benefits (cash back, credit options, consumer protections like fraud and chargeback, or merchant coupons). In your example, if an unscrupulous store pockets the credit card payment, the credit card / issuer will often reimburse your purchase. (This is a law in the US.)
by CPLX | 2025-08-16 16:13:27+00:00
I agree with you. I am a perpetual cynic about new technology (and a GenXer so multiply that by two) and I have deeply embraced AI in all parts of my business and basically am engaging with it all day for various tasks from helping me compare restaurant options to re-tagging a million contact records in salesforce.

It’s incredibly powerful and will just clearly be useful. I don’t believe it’s going to replace intelligence or people but it’s just obviously a remarkable tool.

But I think at least part of the dynamic is that the SV tech hype booster train has been so profoundly full of shit for so long that you really can’t blame people for skepticism. Crypto was and is just a giant and elaborate grift, to name one example. Also guys like Altman are clearly overstating the current trajectory.

The dismissive response does come with some context attached.
by bitwizeshift | 2025-08-16 16:13:45+00:00
I don’t really think one needs to define intelligence to be able to acknowledge that inability to distinguish fact from fiction, or even just basic cognition and awareness of when it’s uncertain, telling the truth, or lying — is a glaring flaw in claiming intelligence. Real intelligence doesn’t have an effective stroke from hearing a username (token training errors); this is when you are peeling back the curtain of the underlying implementation and seeing its flaws.

If we measure intelligence as results oriented, then my calculator is intelligent because it can do math better than me; but that’s what it’s programmed/wired to do. A text predictor is intelligent at predicting text, but it doesn’t mean it’s general intelligence. It lacks any real comprehension of the model or world around it. It just know words, and
by thfuran | 2025-08-16 16:14:11+00:00
>American hate for wire transfers will never sound anything other than irrational to me.

I'm assuming "wire transfer" means something different to you than what it means in America. In the US, a wire transfer is when you call up your bank, give them a routing number and account number, tell them to wire however much money to it, agree to pay like $20 or something for the transfer, and then they tell you the transfer will happen tomorrow morning because it's 3:30 PM and the last batch gets handled at 3:00. They're not so much hated as pretty much entirely irrelevant to everyone. I've made one wire transfer in my life, and that was for buying a house.
by Voultapher | 2025-08-16 16:15:18+00:00
Yep. The EU has also enacted various regulations to enable cheap bank to bank transfers and online payments but pix seems even better - haven't use it though. 3% transaction fees are ridiculous and only possible because Visa/MC have successfully - until now - lobbied against any good alternative in the US.

Privatizing water supply is an awful deal for citizen - ask the UK - since the incentives are anti-consumer and public infrastructure is more often than not a monopoly by definition. I'd count transferring money online as public infrastructure and it should get the same treatment.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-16 16:15:37+00:00
> people are tired of responding to the same points over and over again

For example, not a single person has addressed the fact that that the Democrats platform is to raise taxes on corporations, which this change accomplished during their watch. So I have to keep bringing it up. People are downvoting facts that they don't like, for political reasons and to reduce visibility.

Anyway you're right, this is not worth my time or effort. There is no open exchange of facts or ideas, it's just party line downvoting to suppress them. It's best not to engage at all, just like all the others with alternate viewpoints that stopped engaging on here. That's what the downvoters want anyway, they win. The only way I can possibly make a difference to combat this behavior is changing how I vote at the ballot box.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-16 16:15:40+00:00
Language evolves, sure, but not aimlessly. “Poach” for employees didn’t arise independently, it’s a metaphor using the hunting term. If you never realized that, that’s a you thing.

It should be pretty obvious. “Poaching” employees has negative connotations. It’s seen as something illicit. If you do a search for the term, just about every single result will be some page discussing whether or not it’s illegal, and the ethics around it. It is directly analogous to poaching animals and people clearly think there are potential ethical problems with it, to the extent that people think it might even be against the law.
by borroka | 2025-08-16 16:16:58+00:00
The seats are also too small, at least for Western men (and increasingly for women too). I am quite tall and find flying an experience to be endured by gritting my teeth, but for taller and heavier people it is almost torture. I recently saw a man with half his leg in the aisle, taking up almost all the walking space. If you are unlucky enough to sit next to a very large man, a fairly common sight especially in the US, the entire flight becomes a series of small and large movements, squirming and twisting.

However, people want to pay less and less, while airlines earn more and more. Competition is limited and I don't see how flight comfort can improve for the average passenger.
by feoren | 2025-08-16 16:17:02+00:00
This ignores the obvious solution of not cutting all the way through. If every other radial cut is only through half the layers, you avoid making the inner pieces too small. It's funny how common it is for people to claim some sort of optimality with lots of math and analysis while completely failing to consider a better possibility. Never take seriously claims that someone found a "mathematically optimal" way of doing something. They didn't.
by throwanem | 2025-08-16 16:17:31+00:00
Wasps shit as freely as one might expect of animals for whom perambulation is as afterthought, however needful betimes, as taxiing for aircraft. Their feces are of course at our scale minuscule, and while I can't speak for their stronger-jawed and more carnivorous cousins the yellowjackets, paper wasps' diet almost exclusively of simplistic sugars leaves their excreta no more offensive, and considerably less substantial, even than those of the horse.

As one who has had occasion to tidy up after wasps who were little accustomed, though palpably interested, quite so closely to share human habitation, you make me wish I read French. Do you happen by chance to know if the work has had a worthy English translation?
by gethly | 2025-08-16 16:17:36+00:00
I never mentioned bitcoin and you are missing the point here. Cryptocurrency network is just a publicly available distributed ledger that records "financial" movements, these movements are denominated in the inherent cryptocurrency of the network. They are just units of measure but they themselves do not store any value. The world needs to start actually using crypto for payments, so you can exchange FIAT or precious metals for a crypto coin and then use it to buy groceries. It is just a means of exchange of value, not the value itself. The fact that people take it as store of value should necessitate a nee designation beyond the "retard" classification.
Ask HN: What economic reasoning is there that bigCos have an advantage post-AI?
by jppope | 2025-08-16 16:18:01+00:00
I've been following a lot of the discussion surrounding transformation in the market/world following the impact of LLMs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892283) and there seems to be a forgone conclusion that large corporations will capture more value than small business or entrepreneurs and I'm struggling to follow the reasoning.

To me if individuals or small groups have the ability to use tools (LLMs) at greater leverage than larger groups, company size actually puts bigger companies at a disadvantage because of the overhead they are maintaining. I'm not excluding other market factors like brand or network effects, etc but if someone could explain to me the reason why capital has an advantage here if AI is commoditized not monopolized (the current trend).

Bonus points for any studies you can provide.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-16 16:18:52+00:00
> That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.

There was no way for the Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. And there were multiple republican co-sponsors or even bills introduced by them to repeal the provisions. It didn't even get to a vote because the dems killed the efforts. They like higher corporate taxes so it tracks, they didn't care about the damage caused. Once the Repulicans were able to repeal it on their own, they immediately did it ASAP.
by tonymet | 2025-08-16 16:19:00+00:00
Putty is obsolete for SSH terminals, but is still useful for serial terminals (like when you need to flash a bricked router )

Putty is a terminal emulator and an SSH + telnet client all in one. Now Microsoft offers a number of platforms that overlap to provide similar functionality.

WSL2 (aka WSL) is the Linux system that runs a Linux kernel and apps within Windows (technically a hidden HyperV VM) with some loose bindings to the OS resources for networking, files etc.

OpenSSH is the SSH client installed with Windows. It can be used via CMD or Windows Terminal + Powershell . You don’t need WSL installed. So it’s great for VMs or remote shells.

Powershell is the Windows Shell (like bash on Linux or CMD on earlier windows) that lets you run openssh and other windows CLI Apps

Windows Terminal is the new-ish (6+ years) terminal emulator that lets you run a variety of shells. Most commonly Powershell , Bash (WSL), or you can SSH to any host using openssh . It works like tmux with tabs/windows into any remote host .

I decided to lay this all out because Windows apps for SSH and terminals are a little different than Linux.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-16 16:19:02+00:00
(1) Around the Christmas break I made a chess program in Python that was good enough to challenge my son who was a serious beginner. I did some work towards a Java program that would be able to respect time control that I could take to the chess club but my son got into sewing rather than chess and then got into the guitar which is really his thing. (The other night he unplugged one subwoofer from my A/V system and hooked it up to a prototype 1-string electric octopus’s!). I really gave up on this one.

(2) I have a QooCam Ego stereo camera so far my main way of sharing images is the red/cyan anaglyph which only goes so far. I want to make something for sharing them online, that probably includes some UI I can do to adjust the ‘stereo window’ by shifting the images horizontally and something where you can walk around in an art gallery. It can all be done with WebXR, three.js, A-frame and all that but to get it to work on the Meta Quest 3 I’ll need to be careful about memory management. Might do it someday but I am so busy taking photos, developing photos, posting on my socials, and trying to sell more sports and event work.

(3) I want to build a general purpose text classification framework that automatically trains and selects from: bag of words, ModernBERT + pooling + Classical ML , and ModernBERT + (Bi)LSTM. I was working to build one in 2017 at a job which was marginally successful, today I know a lot more and the technology is better. This is blocked by transitioning my ‘nemesis’ system for collecting training data to Postgres away from arango though maybe that’s an excuse because if I didn’t care about my other projects in the queue I could start working from Kaggle downloads which I need to do anyway because it has to be ‘general’ and not just work for my problems.