MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yorwba | 2025-08-05 09:54:05+00:00
During my undergrad in Germany, the CS department was in the process of switching from optional homework to various forms of mandatory homework (either directly counting towards the final grade, or requiring a minimum score on the homework before allowing registration for the exam). AFAIK this was because under the old system, there had been too many students registering for exams despite being woefully unprepared, and then predictably failing as a result.

I think optional homework works for classes that are obscure enough only somewhat intrinsically motivated students would consider taking them, but in mandatory classes or trendy majors, there's going to be many people who need a bit more external motivation to study.
by captainbland | 2025-08-05 09:55:11+00:00
I think words are less the problem so much as evidence. The symptoms of chronic conditions kind of are what they do.

Maybe you could say something like: I planned to complete five items on this list today and only completed one, because I was too fatigued to continue and could not complete another item despite telling myself to do so or attempting to engage in the activity. This creates a goal-outcome gap in language. This is useful but the real problem is it's still open to challenge in terms of intangibles like motivation, work ethic, whether you deliberately set yourself up to fail to make a point etc. even if you have diagnostics to back it up.

But I think this is telling of a deeper truth in those cases: others considering you a burden and looking for excuses to lighten themselves of that burden. At some point there's no convincing someone who selfish in that way to believe something which they perceive to have consequences against their own interests.

We live in these ideologically competitive western societies, and at some point the tension between organisations' perception of their own competitiveness overrides the societal pressure to support people with problems into work.

That being said if someone with a chronic disease has evidence like a diagnosis and that's linked to studies backing up their condition and others are listening to accusations on the basis of unfalsifiable intangibles then at some point you have to consider those without evidence are probably not acting in good faith. This is really relevant when it's an employer, for example, but it comes up in e.g. politics a lot as well where it comes to taxpayer spending etc.

Edit: maybe there is a potential term in there like "supportphobia" to describe actions/speech which is designed purely to free an individual or organisation from the burden of supporting those with legitimate conditions.

Nevertheless I think goal-outcome gaps like that are pretty useful to explain what's going on. Especially if the goal is something simple like "staying awake for a normal period of time" and yet you find yourself falling hard asleep in the middle of the day despite having slept well for well over a week beforehand.
by lazide | 2025-08-05 09:55:17+00:00
That is where this is clearly going, yes. Which is why AWS is making this move, to try to head it off.

For those with nothing they particularly care about, it will be enough. For those with something to lose - currently small, but increasing, see the 80’s and the French Industrial espionage scandal - they’ll move back to on-prem if they haven’t already.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-05 09:56:45+00:00
That makes a nice "just so" story in the mind of HN and perhaps you'll pull the wool (pun intended) over some of the most ignorant here but that's not how it happened and anyone who has a lawn anywhere freeze-thaw is a thing should know it.

If you clear cut a forest it will be grass or brush or whatever in short order, a year or two. The roots of that vegetation, even just light grass is enough, will bind the soil all together as it freezes and keep the rocks from getting pushed up. You need a mostly dirt field to push up rocks. This means actively utilized pasture or farmland.

The walls were not dodgy and disorganized initially. Most of them were constructed before 1840 and have had close to 200yr of the ground moving under them to break them down. You occasionally see "good ones" on select areas of land where the soil and drainage situation made water in the earth basically nonexistent so therefore expansion and contraction were minimal and the wall aged gracefully. Damn near all of New England was clear cut pasture or farm at that time due to some circumstances in global commodities markets making it very worth everyone's while to raise sheep for wool on any land that they didn't need use some other way.

Nobody would have moved the rocks if they were not in the way, as would have been the case if they simply wanted the wood.

Animals have a habit of trying to get at the bottom layers of fence as they try and reach through for grass on the outside of the pasture and it's really hard on fencing over time. If you are rotating fields between pasture and crops or even just pasture it behooves you to drag the rocks away, straight to the edge is the shortest path. And if you're gonna do that it takes little extra effort to stack them well and create a rock wall for the lower portion of your fence. Spending that extra effort will pay you back in reduced wood fence maintenance.
by frou_dh | 2025-08-05 09:57:35+00:00
As I understand it, AdGuard uses (in addition to a browser extension) a system-level local network proxy so can do anything to requests and responses?

Confusingly, there are 3 offerings: "AdGuard for Mac", "AdGuard for iOS" and "AdGuard for Safari" and I think it's the first 2 that are the good stuff, even for Safari.
Show HN: I made a tiny, playable benchmark where LLMs compete head-to-head
by yz-yu | 2025-08-05 09:57:49+00:00
TL;DR: LLM Fighter is a small, open-source, playable benchmark for agentic behavior. You bring an OpenAI-compatible API; the demo runs in the browser. It creates head-to-head “battles” that stress tools, planning, and efficiency, and shows step-by-step logs you can download.

What it does well: quick, honest feel for how agents act under the same rules. What it’s not: a formal academic benchmark or a single “score”. Why I built it: I wanted something you can play in minutes and still learn from.
by wiradikusuma | 2025-08-05 09:57:49+00:00
While we're on the topic of ERP:

I have noticed that, in 2025, many small businesses still use Excel. Is there an underserved market? Or simply a "tarpit idea" (deceptively attractive but actually unscalable, time-consuming)

I asked 5 friends who are business owners and 5 who are working for SMEs. None of them use "apps". The best they use is accounting app.
by AngryData | 2025-08-05 09:57:49+00:00
Yes and no. Unfortunately it isn't a simple and easy topic which is what makes it so complicated to deal with.

Real thick top soil isn't really the natural state of land in most places, a large bulk of it was grown by the people farming it who spent multiple generations fertilizing it, maintaining it, and putting as much organic waste as they could back into it. It is its own ecosystem that was grown just as the crops above it are grown in higher than natural abundance. In most places it takes 80+ years to build up a significant top soil layer, and in the short term letting the land sit fallow for a bit of time will let some nutrients build up in the soil and will provide larger yields in following years. But if you let it go truly wild, the wild stuff starts growing and is also going to start consuming those nutrients until some sort of balance is achieved between top soil and plants above it. And the natural balance in most places only going to be a few inches of good top soil, not the 1-2 foot of topsoil that maximizes crop yields.

As to over utilizing it, you can both maintain that top soil and get higher yields from it, but if you are willing to push the land a little further and add a little more crop density or not fallow or fertilize the land quite as often, you can push the yields a little higher still. Like pulling a bit of the capital out of your investment account along with the interest payments. You can do that for 10 years, and have more to spend/yield for it, but each time you are spending capital/top soil and reducing yield for following years. Then 10 years in, your interest/yield expectations are lower than ever, so if you want to maintain even the old non-exploitive yield numbers you have to take out even more of it. 10 years again and now you are back to a shitty few inches of top soil. Oh sure, you can try growing it again, but just like capital the less you have to start with the longer it will take to grow, and it took others over an entire lifetime to grow what you spend in just 20 years.

Family farmers didn't usually do that because it would just be fucking over your own kids. But in this modern age, how many farms are actually being passed on to kids? How many people give a shit if the land is dead in 20 years if their plan was to sell out of it at that point? Or if they killed off other local farms by out competing with unsustainable practices that the others refused to emulate, why not buy their good land and run the scam over again? By time any of the shortsightedness of those actions culminates they will either be old and rich with investments into other industries, or dead, and the people who will ultimately suffer for it will just be poor strangers they never cared about and the cause of their plights easily deflected onto other sources.
by jfyi | 2025-08-05 09:57:51+00:00
Mastercard doesn't care.

Payment processors that handle adult material exist but they charge a premium rate. These companies could switch to CCBill as quick as they could code it up. Exactly the same as what OnlyFans did. They would have to explain to their entire customer base across the board why they have to charge more though.

Also, look at https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...

They absolutely targeted paysafe and paypall. Paypall was the very first on their list, I wonder why that is. They knew the processor is the weak link.

After 10 years in the POS industry, I can assure you it came from their processor. The only card network I have ever seen take action like this is AMEX and they have have separate processing. Processors involve themselves in their customers' business constantly for risk assessment. Collective action like this is enough to make them ask, "Should we treat this as a video game vendor or as adult industry?" It's that simple to tip the scale.

Also, it doesn't make sense that Itch did it themselves. Why would they throw their vendors under the bus instead of just pulling the titles? Or are we supposed to believe they facilitated collective shout just to pull a couple of low value titles? I can't see any angle here that doesn't border on conspiracy.
Ask HN: Posts/sites about breaking mental conventions
by etherus | 2025-08-05 09:58:15+00:00
I seem to remember a particular blog post I may have found here which, as an exercise in thinking outside the box, outlined a number of things one can do given the resources that we typically mentally confine to a particular situation. For example, you can talk to a lot of political figures or famous people for whatever reason. Their contact details may well be public - just talk to them! Anyhow, I'd like to explore this topic a little further but finding it difficult to search on. Any ideas? Thanks :)
by chilmers | 2025-08-05 09:58:23+00:00
I'm tired of hearing the exact same arguments, "not needed", "just syntax sugar", "too much complexity", about every new syntax feature that gets added to JS. Somehow, once they are in the language, nobody's head explodes, and people are soon using them and they become uncontroversial.

If people really this new syntax will make it harder to code in JS, show some evidence. Produce a study on solving representative tasks in a version of the language with and without this feature, showing that it has negative effects on code quality and comprehension.
by mopsi | 2025-08-05 09:58:36+00:00
> You should be careful with this numbers because Western media reported numbers seem to be inflated and not agree with other statistics.

This is a desperate cope. Russian losses in the fight for just 10% of Ukraine now exceed even the independently collected and individually verified Russian losses, where every name is known and confirmed.

The German Army Group South captured Ukraine between June and November 1941, suffering an estimated 80 000 to 100 000 killed in action. In contrast, Mediazona has verified the deaths of 121 507 Russian soldiers, with the current estimate around 165 000, because their count is based on sources like obituaries and lags behind events. There is no way to spin it into anything even remotely resembling a "victory." Germans lost 27 000 soldiers in the battle of Kyiv. Russia loses that many for each small tiny provinical town, with Kyiv being hopelessly out of reach.

> Also you should remember that many of those who died were convicted criminals. So if you count only non-convicts the numbers would be even lower.

And if we count only those who own property in Rublyovka, would the number be zero?
by bluenose69 | 2025-08-05 09:59:08+00:00
Regarding the phrase "imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable" in the text, I'm old enough to know what has changed.

Today, many university students struggle with basic calculations. I'm not talking about long division of 8-digit numbers. I'm talking about things like expressing 2/10 as a percentage or knowing how many zeros to use when writing 1/1000 in decimal form. Many very bright students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, struggle with such things. It's heartbreaking.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-08-05 09:59:34+00:00
> - I write a VS Code extension for plain text passkey storage for simplicity. Do you allow servers to reject this? What should they reject? To oversimplify, the corporate folks argue for more control, the open source folks for less.

Irrelevant, servers can never control what clients do. The only way to control passkeys is using attestation CAs, which is insanely restrictive (not (just) for the users, but for the implementors), e.g., you only allow Yubikeys, Yubico provisions a TPM guarded endorsement key on the valid keys, and you send an additional challenge that must be signed by the endorsement key and validated by Yubico servers. This is completely, absolutely impractical outside of a closed org that supplies all of its own keys.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-05 09:59:55+00:00
The Rule of Three: “When you’ve written the same code for the third time, that’s when you should stop and refactor it into an abstraction.”

I think it's from Martin Fowler's book Refactoring. (It's been a while).

The gist of it is that with one or two cases you might create the wrong abstraction. When you have three, you can abstract away the right bits without creating a monstrosity of optional parameters and booleans.
What's the latest on NAD+ and longevity in 2025?
by Yoonreterna | 2025-08-05 10:00:02+00:00
A year ago, NAD+ boosters like NMN and NR were everywhere — in Reddit threads, podcasts, even VC-backed health stacks. Now in 2025, things feel quieter.

Some of the noise has died down, but the research hasn’t. Sinclair’s still backing NMN. Resveratrol’s back in the mix. And some brands (Decode Age, Jinfiniti, Wanderfeel, OMRE, etc.) are still iterating on NAD+ protocols.

Anyone here still experimenting with NAD+ optimization? Any noticeable long-term effects — good or bad?
by smallerfish | 2025-08-05 10:01:17+00:00
I run Frigate with 5 IP cameras (3 Hikvisions, 2 Amcrests) and 1 USB camera. I'm using a USB Coral TPU, which does a good enough job that Frigate can keep up with an average of only 30% CPU usage on an old Dell with 4 core i7-6700.

Frigate's better than anything else I tried, but not perfect. As mentioned in another thread, it has some issues with codecs from some cameras (playing clips from Amcrests is fine, Hikvisions not so much) and therefore you may need to transcode. Also it has no built in option for sending your recorded clips offsite; theoretically you could mirror its storage directory, but as far as I've found it's not organized in a way that you can separate just important events.
by Roark66 | 2025-08-05 10:01:50+00:00
One good reason for cameras. They promote civil behaviour.

Since I installed a visible security camera above my front door I never had couriers throwing packages, they very rarely not show up and claim "no one was home" and so on. Also I had a neighbour damage my fence every single time he was doing his farm work (plowing, harvesting). In addition he would use an unfenced portion of my property as a turning place leaving deep/huge tire marks and did other silly shit like that despite me asking him many times not to do it. Once I installed cameras it hasn't happened once.

Then there are other practical reasons, I can review the recordings to find out which way my cat went if he is gone for a long time, or I can check is he waiting in front of the door in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed. Also my cameras resolved a mystery how one of my cats got injured once (hint - deer really don't like cats).

Finally, let's say there is a huge storm forecast and I'm away. I can check remotely everything is fine.

Finally, cameras are very good for insurance purposes. At least in my country insurers are known to weasel they way out of paying very often. If you have an actual recording that is much more difficult for them to do.

The only issue I have with most reasonably priced Cctv cameras is that they go towards more megapixels when they should go towards more IR sensitivity. Almost every consumer grade camera can be defeated at night if a subject is moving quickly. The picture will be smeared. So for ID purposes I use lower resolution more "professional " cameras.

As for open source, I've been using ZoneMinder with local (and on camera) AI for ages.
by nolok | 2025-08-05 10:01:54+00:00
I'm not tempting you do to it or anything, but I want to say given your point of view, if one day you need a crude+ app and try to do it using laravel, you might be really surprised by what modern php actually is.

There was a point were I thought the language and it ecosystem was going down the drain but then they recovered and modern php is 90% what do you want to do and don't worry about the how, it's easy.

I don't use it much anymore, but every time I do all I see are possibilities.
by bluecalm | 2025-08-05 10:02:12+00:00
I was recently explaining to my non-programmer gf what programming is to me. I said that I first make some bricks and then when I have enough I try to assemble bigger bricks from small ones and then after a while build things from them.

I agree 100%. Bottom up of the way to go if you're doing it without deadlines, requirements or investors with expectations looming over you.
by arkey | 2025-08-05 10:02:53+00:00
A blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure.

The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."

That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.
by lormayna | 2025-08-05 10:03:27+00:00
Exactly. Motion can detect objects in the images, but not recognize the object type, but it's easy to integrate with a third party services like the one that you are linking with the scripts features [0]. I have personally integrated with S3 and self-hosted notification to create a small CCTV system, but there is no limit to the imagination of possible integrations.

- [0] https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetai...
by WASDAai | 2025-08-05 10:03:34+00:00
This paper dives into reversing the process of turning basic one-dimensional trust scores from security frameworks back into detailed high-dimensional embeddings that represent device trustworthiness, proposing a straightforward method that stitches together paired scores with statistical moments and proves it converges to a unique solution using fixed-point math. Through simulations with noisy data on 20 devices over 10 time steps, it shows the reconstructions keep the original geometric relationships intact, backed by error guarantees tied to data length, but warns that sharing these scores poses a real privacy threat by exposing underlying behaviors of devices and models. To counter this, it suggests fixes like rounding scores, injecting controlled noise, or scrambling embeddings, all while weighing the trade-offs between transparency and secrecy in connected AI setups.
by nolok | 2025-08-05 10:03:53+00:00
Because back compat' is a very strong feature of the language, same reason "match" was created instead of replacing switch.

As a result, taking a php 5.2 script and moving it up to 8.5 is super easy, and taking a PHP 4 one is barely harder only longer (since it probably uses the horrors that were register_globals and co).

Ultimately, I prefer this than a fragmented ecosystem impossible to resolve.
by xg15 | 2025-08-05 10:03:58+00:00
But this is exactly the problem: Passkeys as a core principle require that there is a third party that manages access between the user and a service. That's the entire idea.

In the absolute best-case scenario, the user gets to choose which third party to trust and could even switch to a different one later - but the general dependence on a third party will always stay.

It's DRM for passwords.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-05 10:04:10+00:00
With JS' async/await system basically running on creating temporary closures, I don't think things will change all that much to be honest.

Furthermore, I don't see why engines should police what is or isn't acceptable performance. Using functional interfaces (map/forEach/etc.) is slower than using for loops in most cases, but that didn't stop them from implementing those interfaces either.

I don't think there's that much of a performance impact when comparing

const x = fun1(abc); const y = fun2(x); const z = fun3(y); fun4(z);

and

abc |> fun1 |> fun2 |> fun3 |> fun4

especially when you end up writing code like

fun1(abc).then( (x) => fun2(x)).then( (y) => fun3(y)).then((z) => fun4(z))

when using existing language features.
by huhtenberg | 2025-08-05 10:04:24+00:00
To help with language learning I tried Anki, didn't like the UX and ended up writing my own SRS, from scratch.

One thing that becomes very obvious very quickly is that all cards derived from the same piece of information should be treated as a group. The last thing you'd want is to see "a cow / ?" quickly followed by "una mucca / ?". This is just pointless.

So while I appreciate the in-depth write-up by the author, I must say that its main insight - that the scheduling needs to account for the inter-card dependencies - lies right there on the surface. The fact that Anki doesn't support this doesn't make it any less obvious.