MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cesarb | 2025-08-26 00:34:44+00:00
> Then, one day, an app developer thought: Wouldn't it be cool if there was an app that would interrupt what the user was doing, play a sound, vibrate the device, and put up a full-screen dialog, that this all could be activated remotely by any other device by simply typing in a short numeric code

When you're actively using your smartphone, phone calls show up as notifications, not full-screen dialogs (which trips up my non-technical relatives, since they don't know how to answer a call through the notification). Given that, it's not that different from what we had on computers with instant message applications like ICQ. In a world without the concept of phone calls, they would be a natural evolution from these instant messengers (and, as I'm sure you remember, ICQ used a short numeric code as the user identity).
by the_af | 2025-08-26 00:35:21+00:00
> Ask yourself why. The usual answer is that top experts either can't be bothered to create better content, or they actively gatekeep, believing that their field must remain hard to learn and the riff-raff must be kept out.

This oversimplifies things.

It's sometimes a third option: the topic is complex enough it cannot be digested into a ready to consume blogpost without previous work (reading and practicing), which in turn requires previous work, and so on, until you've turned it into an introductory course.

And that's not gatekeeping or "cannot be bothered to simplify" -- it's a falsehood, a kind of internet new age mantra, that everything can be made simple enough to explain in a blog post. Some things can't. There's nothing elitist about it, since everyone has the mind power to take that introductory course.

> It's also good to ponder if the details we get worked up about actually matter. Outside the academia, approximately no one needs a precise, CS-theoretical definition of big-O notation. Practitioners use it in a looser sense.

The article made some genuinely serious mistakes and the author here (graciously, it has to be said) admitted to being wrong about some things like Big O being "the worst case".

In this cases, maybe the damage could be limited by saying "I know this isn't Big O, this is what some engineers call it but it's actually something different. Because practitioners find useful nonetheless, I will explain it (explanation follows)".

I found the visual presentation top-notch by the way, it's clear some effort was put into this and it shows!
by plst | 2025-08-26 00:35:40+00:00
> And they believe it.

Two reasons: they are not educated about devices they use, desktop operating systems are still awful at security (exe from a mail attachment can have a pdf looking thumbnail, executed with two clicks, even if accidental, immediately gets access to all user files... the whole concept of antivirus software...). It has nothing to do with side loading, especially on Android, where sideloading is a very explicit action already, and then you need to allow the application to do harm.

> Giving them the power to run any software they want, also means giving everyone else the power to make them run any software they can be tricked into installing.

You are taking away people's agency. Either you get to control your bank account risking that you get scammed, or someone will control it for you.
by kragen | 2025-08-26 00:36:00+00:00
Another minor note as I read the rest of the page:

> the resistor material itself is $1-$2/kilowatt. (...) There are only a few materials that are even acceptable as resistors.

This depends strongly on your target temperature and conditions. Nichrome may cost US$2/kW but galvanized barbed wire doesn't. It can kill you with the fumes, and in oxidizing conditions it won't last long above 200°, but zinc fumes inside a dirt pile won't hurt anybody, and you can probably maintain reducing conditions by mixing some humus into your dirt initially and keeping the pile dry. If process heat or climate control is your objective, you don't need temperatures high enough to oxidize iron rapidly even in an oxidizing environment.

(Incidentally, reducing conditions will destroy nichrome at the temperatures people use nichrome for. Maintaining oxidizing conditions inside your dirt pile over the years is going to be a lot more challenging, I suspect.)

I suspect keeping the pile dry is the reason for not just trenching in existing soil. Dryness is essential for maintaining temperature over 100°.

My intuition is that you could probably scale the seasonal-sensible-TES-in-dirt approach further down from the few megawatts he's talking about if you can use real insulation instead of dirt. But insulation is expensive at this scale, even things like perlite and vermiculite.

Spitballing, suppose we want to withdraw 100kW energy for 4 months (1TJ) and can deal with a time constant of 8 months, so leakage is ballpark 50kW. Suppose we have 1J/g/K sand and ΔT = 200K. Then we need 5300 tonnes of sand; at US$20/kg that's US$100k, a dollar a watt, cheaper than power from a coal plant but not really competitive. A larger ΔT can save you but might shorten the life of your barbed wire. But at those low temperatures you pretty much can use any old dirt, US$5300 of it by Vernon's embankment figure.

But that's about 2000m³, whose minimum insulated surface area would be as a 7.8m sphere with 800m² of surface area. 50kW of leakage over that area would be 70W/m², or 0.3W/m²/K, or 3K·m²/W.
Show HN: Stop saving your scans on 3rd party servers
by docsorb | 2025-08-26 00:36:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I built DocsOrb to solve a simple but stressful problem (and my own problem too since many years!): keeping track of important documents like passports, rental contracts, and insurance papers. Too often they're scattered across folders, emails, or piles at home... and you only realize it when you urgently need them.

DocsOrb helps you: > Scan documents with auto-crop and enhancements (mobile camera or file upload) > Organize them around life's "moments" (travel, housing, insurance, etc.) > Search quickly using Key Information > AI extracts Key Information so the most important details are always at your fingertips > Export or share in one tap > AI Bulk organize: load up multiple images from your Photos to automatically organize them as documents, put them in the right folders, extract Key Information and also suggest a recommended name and description.

Everything stays on your device by default, with optional cloud backup if you want it. Privacy-first, so you're always in control.

Tech-wise: it's built with Nuxt + Capacitor, Supabase for structured storage, and a custom scanning flow (to avoid pricey SDK lock-ins).

I'd love your feedback: > Does this flow make sense to you? > What's missing in how you manage important documents? > Any suggestions before I go full blast on Marketing?
by mhh__ | 2025-08-26 00:37:37+00:00
I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like:

TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience

Twitter+offline meetups for everything else.

Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-26 00:37:55+00:00
What to supplement your understanding of COVID, schools, and myths vs facts? This was NPR The Pulse recently:

Back to School in a Rapidly Changing World

https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_12369_085cdf46-2a33-4f24-...

Let just say, if you’re looking for baloney, this podcast (and the author / book it discusses) delivers. In short, we were gravely (?) misled.
by rootusrootus | 2025-08-26 00:38:29+00:00
An alternative approach that has worked for me is to get out of the habit of using little muscles as much as I can. I don't use my wrist much with the mouse, I move my whole arm. I try to apply that to everything I do and I've managed to avoid repetitive motion injuries. Last time I experienced anything like carpal tunnel was in college (decades ago).
by kelnos | 2025-08-26 00:39:33+00:00
> This won't end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back.

This makes me quite angry, but I guarantee more than 90% of Android users will not be bothered too much about this. Many of them will actually like it, and most of those who don't will just shrug and go on with their day.
by altairprime | 2025-08-26 00:39:48+00:00
M1’s efficiency/thermals performance comes from having hardware-accelerated core system libraries.

Imagine that you made an FPGA do x86 work, and then you wanted to optimize libopenssl, or libgl, or libc. Would you restrict yourself to only modifying the source code of the libraries but not the FPGA, or would you modify the processor to take advantage of new capabilities?

For made-up example, when the iPhone 27 comes out, it won’t support booting on iOS 26 or earlier, because the drivers necessary to light it up aren’t yet published; and, similarly, it can have 3% less battery weight because they optimized the display controller to DMA more efficiently through changes to its M6 processor and the XNU/Darwin 26 DisplayController dylib.

Neither Linux, Windows, nor Intel have shown any capability to plan and execute such a strategy outside of video codecs and network I/O cards. GPU hardware acceleration is tightly controlled and defended by AMD and Nvidia who want nothing to do with any shared strategy, and neither Microsoft nor Linux generally have shown any interest whatsoever in hardware-accelerating the core system to date — though one could theorize that the Xbox is exempt from that, especially given the Proton chip.

I imagine Valve will eventually do this, most likely working with AMD to get custom silicon that implements custom hardware accelerations inside the Linux kernel that are both open source for anyone to use, and utterly useless since their correct operation hinges on custom silicon. I suspect Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony already do this with their gaming consoles, but I can’t offer any certainty on this paragraph of speculation.

x86 isn’t able to keep up because x86 isn’t updated annually across software and hardware alike. M1 is what x86 could have been if it was versioned and updated without backwards compatibility as often as Arm was. it would be like saying “Intel’s 2026 processors all ship with AVX-1024 and hardware-accelerated DMA, and the OS kernel (and apps that want the full performance gains) must be compiled for its new ABI to boot on it”. The wreckage across the x86 ecosystem would be immense, and Microsoft would boycott them outright to try and protect itself from having to work harder to keep up — just like Adobe did with Apple M1, at least until their userbase starting canceling subscriptions en masse.

That’s why there are so many Arm Linux architectures: for Arm, this is just a fact of everyday life, and that’s what gave the M1 such a leg up in x86: not having to support anything older than your release date means you can focus on the sort of boring incremental optimizations that wouldn’t be permissible in a “must run assembly code written twenty years ago” environment assumed by Lin/Win today.
by danenania | 2025-08-26 00:40:01+00:00
Maybe reading out the draft to confirm before sending could be a nice middle ground? Could help with peace of mind about exactly what's being sent, and you could go back and forth on the message if it's not quite right. Once people use it for awhile and trust it more, they could then enable auto-send.

Congrats on the launch btw—cool stuff!
by evanelias | 2025-08-26 00:40:33+00:00
They greatly improved the situation over the past couple years. Azure Trusted Signing is only $10/month and provides cloud-based signing.

It's a huge pain to set up initially, but it's smooth sailing after that. There's a good tutorial at https://melatonin.dev/blog/code-signing-on-windows-with-azur...
by integralid | 2025-08-26 00:42:02+00:00
As you said, that's a bit hypocritical. 4chan content is legal content, they're operating as a lawful company. In fact, they ban most ways to stay anonymous (tor, vpns, known proxies), so if you want to commit crimes, don't do it on 4chan.

Mandatory disclaimer that /pol/ is only one board, and most of 4chan is not actually politics.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-26 00:42:22+00:00
5k in python is tremendous since the lack of {()} will make reading a long function quite the journey, this is of course my naive assumption that some of the functions are very long, in theory you could just put 1000 functions each of which 5 lines but i doubt that's the case in practice, the LLMs tend to give long and detailed statements from time to time.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-08-26 00:42:45+00:00
The only silver lining I see is if it allows you to bypass this by enabling dev mode on your phone. If you can't sideload unverified apps even in dev mode, that would be insanely bad.

IF that is the case, I'm actually willing to be slightly inclined to see this as a positive? We should normalize installing apps outside of Google Play, but that means malware becomes a serious issue with people downloading and installing random APKs.

e.g., this may normalize people hosting downloadable APKs whilst also reducing malware risk for "normies", which idealistically could weaken the "monopoly" of Google Play on android.

The problem is that Google is the gatekeeper.
by kllrnohj | 2025-08-26 00:43:22+00:00
> The main thing this permission would be used for would be blocking ads.

This permission has existed for longer than runtime permissions. You have never been able to revoke it, it was just something you agreed to when you installed the app or you didn't install the app.

It was "removed" in that era because if every app requests the same permission, then nobody cares about it anymore. When every app asks for the same thing, users stop paying attention to it. So no, it had fuck all to do with ads because that was never a thing in the first place. And ad blocking doesn't require this permission, either.

> Also distinguishing shitty apps that are full of ads from those that aren't. If there is a calculator that needs Internet and one that doesn't, which one are you going to use?

You can still use it for this. Apps are required to declare the permission still, it's listed on the Play Store under the "permissions" section. Similarly the OS reports the same thing. Presumably F-droid or whatever else also has a list of permissions before you install, and it'll be listed there.

Although Google's own Calculator app requires Internet permission. Take that for what's it worth.
by wiredpancake | 2025-08-26 00:44:12+00:00
Console isn't even enabled by default. The average player would need to:

1. Enable Developer Console in Settings 2. Find a server via a third party website 3. Use said IP + Port to connect. * This results in low dedicated server player counts due to effort and the issues mentioned in the blog above.

Valve has expressed intentions directly and indirectly to remove the console from CS2 and operate almost exclusively out of the in-game Settings menu.

Over the years, this setting menu has increased in options. Although to cover the vast amount of commands is simply impossible.

Yet known the debug or cheat-protected commands.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-26 00:44:18+00:00
So this is why we were told to wear masks that were ineffective at blocking viruses? In short, we effectively went mask-less for the duration and spreading was relatively minimal; certainly not mitigated by disposable masks.

This was also interesting:

Back to School in a Rapidly Changing World

https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_12369_085cdf46-2a33-4f24-...
by JimDabell | 2025-08-26 00:45:03+00:00
> Tombstone one and use the other.

Like I said:

> If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post.

> people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.

When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
by acdha | 2025-08-26 00:45:17+00:00
This is a good example of why you want to interrogate the urge to be contrarian and ask whether it’s leading you into a cognitive pitfall. While it’s true that there is an element of consumer choose, that has to be seen in the light of the respective power gradients and knowledge - otherwise you’re like the tobacco companies arguing that people just love the taste or oil companies arguing that Americans don’t care about climate change and just love driving everywhere, ignoring the enormous amounts of money spent promoting that culture and removing competing options. The average millennial sure used Uber and AirBnB a lot - and probably believed that prices were lower due to efficiency rather than VCs subsidies trying to run competitors out of the market. Social sites like Facebook spent billions of dollars trying to make their products more addictive – I know neuroscientists who were recruited for that specific goal – only to struggle with finding enough new content to keep people seeing ads, I have to assign most of the blame to the people who intentionally built that system rather than the people who fell into it not realizing that their trust was misplaced.
by wk_end | 2025-08-26 00:45:18+00:00
I don't follow him closely, but I'd always thought that John Gruber - while often a very good writer - got a little too much exposure to the Reality Distortion Field. So I'm a little surprised to see him come down so hard on this.

Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?
by Lienetic | 2025-08-26 00:45:24+00:00
Can you explain a bit more about this? Are you building a profile of what I write and who I write it to? Fetching relevant examples and passing that through some (cloud?) LLM when writing the email?

I'm definitely curious on the technicals but there is also a bit of a trust element here - both on trusting that my email (likely some of my most sensitive data) is handled with care and trust that the actual responses are phrased well.
by kelnos | 2025-08-26 00:46:04+00:00
If an alternative, privacy-focused OS like Graphene can support contactless payments (universal, like Google Wallet does it, not having to install an app per bank or card), and can 100% reliably get around apps requiring SafetyNet (or whatever they call it now) attestation, then I'd start using it.

I'd also need an alternate, safe source for common apps like Uber, Lyft, Slack, Kindle, Doordash, my banking/credit card apps, and a host of others that I use regularly. (And, no, "just use their website" is not acceptable; their website experiences are mostly crap.)

Way long ago I used to run CyanogenMod on my Android phones, and it was trivially easy to get every single app I needed working. Now it's a huge slog to get everything working on a non-Google-blessed OS, and I expect some things I use regularly just won't work. I hate hate hate this state of affairs. It makes me feel like I don't actually own my phone. But I've gotten so used to using these apps and features that it would reduce my quality of life (I know that sounds dramatic, but I'm lacking a better way to put it) to do without.
by evanelias | 2025-08-26 00:46:20+00:00
If an executable isn't code-signed, Windows SmartScreen displays a big scary "This file may harm your computer" warning box, requiring multiple clicks to get past. Been like that for years.

Code-signing certs used to be very expensive and annoying to obtain. The situation has improved a lot since the launch of Azure Trusted Signing, and now it's roughly on par with the cost and annoyance level of code-signing for Mac binaries.
by ignoramous | 2025-08-26 00:46:38+00:00
> It strikes me as an example of automated code assistance that's e.g. more useful than "the item under the cursor has type <X>, here's its documentation". ... I trust that LLMs are patient (you can ask them stupid questions without consequence).

DeepWiki does add tremendous value already: I maintain open source projects and frequently direct volunteers to use DeepWiki to explore those (fairly convoluted) codebases. But ... I've caught DeepWiki hallucinating pretty convincingly far more than once just because a struct / a package / a function was named for something it wasn't doing anymore / wasn't doing it by the book (think: RFCs, docs, specifications etc). This isn't a criticism more than it is of the refactoring practices by the maintainers themselves. "Code readability" and tests (part of "gyms" for Agents), then I imagine, are going to come in clutch for OSS projects that want to benefit from a constant stream of productive external contributions.
by bigiain | 2025-08-26 00:47:11+00:00
> why on earth would anybody smart ever do that?

Because they're leaving the country tomorrow and don't plan on ever coming back. And you offered them a round of drinks or two for them and their other friends.

(Thinking about it, you're probably right - I still feel that's "safe" in Australia, I doubt I'd be prepared to do that in 2025 USA. But then I'm not intending to visit the USA in the near/medium term future, or possibly ever again.)
by bigC5560 | 2025-08-26 00:48:09+00:00
PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube.

It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.

I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.

All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-26 00:48:50+00:00
I don't blame Goggle. Apple escaped anti-trust by simply not allowing anyone except themselves to put software on iPhones. Seriously, Apple doesn't allow competitors so it can't be anti-competitive according to the case.

Totally brain damaged ruling, the judge must have been molested by an Android phone at some point, but here we are, and google is now moving closer to an Apple model.