MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jader201 | 2025-08-16 15:56:51+00:00
Why limit it to just two horizontal cuts?

I’ve always just made equal horizontal and vertical cuts, then slice the onion crosswise.

This results in pretty much no large pieces, and only some smaller pieces (which I prefer over larger ones, anyway).

I don’t care about standard deviation — I only care about minimizing the maximum size (but still without turning them to mush).

(Also, I know this was more of a fun mathematical look at chopping onions vs. practical. But still the “two horizontal cuts” thing seemed to be practical guidance, when it seemed like just equal horizontal and vertical cuts is far superior. But, granted, it’s a little trickier to do.)

EDIT: looking at Youtube, looks like the 2-cut thing is normal. But adding a few more cuts isn’t that much harder, and eliminates the larger pieces from the 2-cut method. I’ll stick to my method, even if it’s a little more work.
by lexokoh | 2025-08-16 15:56:58+00:00
Thank you. Instead of giving the agent your real API key, it gets a scoped, short-lived capability (e.g. “can post 1 message to Slack channel X in the next 30s”).

The short-lived nature means that if the token is leaked or the agent goes rogue, the blast radius is tiny, you can instantly revoke/deny new mints, and you get full audit and policy control. It turns “here’s my permanent master key” into “here’s a disposable permit slip for just this action.”

Let me know if that makes sense.
by rich_sasha | 2025-08-16 15:57:02+00:00
The suggestion of your post is that it's a heinous ripoff. I don't like it, and would find it annoying as a car owner, but I don't think it's quite that bad. It does make it, to me, a bad product.

Maybe an analogy is thus: I find often sports kit that is black or otherwise drab coloured is cheaper. I find this annoying, as I like my kit to be colorful - and I feel like I'm being made to pay extra for color pigment, which surely cost at most pennies more per item. On the flip side, if I go for the black item, it's kind of subsidised by the color-buyers (the comparator is one where black and colorful items cost the same average amount).

The fact that the hardware here is identical but software isn't is IMO an implementation detail.
by speakfreely | 2025-08-16 15:57:08+00:00
Of course, but no one is taking the bag physically so its destination. They're putting them on moving pathways that are matched to ever-changing information about gates, flight numbers, etc.

Flights arrive early or late or never at all, gates change frequently due to airport congestion. And the workers who are managing this are not known for their precision, so it has to be a super fault tolerant system.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-16 15:57:23+00:00
If I were the interviewer, I'd try to adjust the problem statement with some hypotheticals to tease out their depth of knowledge:

> "That's not really worth considering for this amount of QPS"

"What if Michael Jackson dies and your (search|news|celebrity gossip) service gets a spike in traffic way beyond the design parameters? How would you anticipate and mitigate such an event?"

(Extra points if the answer is not necessarily backpressure but they start talking about DDoS mitigation, outlier detection, caching or serving static results from extremely-common queries, spinning up new capacity to adjust to traffic spikes, blackholing traffic to protect the overall service, etc.)

> Interviewer: "Why wouldn't you use a queue here instead of a cron job?" "I don't think it's necessary for what this app is, but here's the tradeoffs."

"What if you have a subset of customers that demand faster responses than a cron job can provide?"

(And then that can become a discussion about splitting off traffic based on requirements, whether it's even worth adding the logic to split traffic vs. just using a queue for everyone, perhaps making direct API requests without either a queue or cron job for requests from just those customers, relying on the fact that they are not numerous or these requests are infrequent to trade capacity for latency, etc.)

> How would you choose between sql and nosql db?"

I would've expected the candidate to at least be able to talk about indexing, tradeoffs of joining in the DB vs. in the application, schema migrations and upgrades, creating separation between data-at-rest vs. data-in-flight, etc. If they can't do that and just handwave away as "whatever the team is most comfortable with", that's a legit hole in their knowledge. Usually you ask system design interviews of senior candidates that will be deciding on architecture and, if not hiring out the team directly, providing input to senior managers who will be hiring, so you can swap out the team nearly as easily as swapping out the architecture.
by Bender | 2025-08-16 15:57:38+00:00
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is literally a government office. I will let June explain. [1] Their logo is a form of psychological warfare that manipulates people into thinking they are somehow related to Aid.

They used to psyop other countries, now they manipulate the masses in the US and EU via social media, chat sites, reddit, chan sites and this site. Someone will say they were defunded by that just means moving to another org that does the same thing. The internet was peaceful for just over a week, same time and period 4chan was offline.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUOwPcfc1MM [video][27 mins]
by ycombinete | 2025-08-16 15:57:50+00:00
Just looking now at his channel now. I’m happy to see a critique of Gabor Mate’s ADHD theory in his playlists.

I’ll watch that for sure as I’ve always felt very uneasy, and a little indignant, listening to Mate talk about ADHD; but I’ve never been able to put my finger on why exactly!
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-16 15:58:32+00:00
Cryptocurrencies are many different things to different people. Putting aside the speculative mania, the payment processor problem is one of the main problems private cryptocurrencies solve.

Stablecoins are not without issues, but they've largely solved the problem of price volatility. Objections around issuance and backing might be raised, but this is more interesting for trading and less relevant for merchant transactions.

Yes, there are no chargebacks with cryptocurrencies. This is an advantage for the merchant. Before anyone goes off the deep end here, let's recall the context of the discussion: one time payments to reputable merchants for trivial amounts. Game purchases do not require life changing amounts of currency to change hands. Steam and Itch are well known brands.

So what is left to object to? My impression is that there is excessive cultural and political baggage.

From the article:

>Capitalism sucks. The economic ecosystem sucks. People unrelated to transactions in any way except "They have the tech to facilitate them" deciding that entire industries don't get to make money and feed their staff because "It's risky to handle these payments" suck. That these entities can also be attacked by PACs and shamed into being the morality police sucks.

...

>But I still hate crypto.

Note that even though the author correctly observes the high regulatory overhead and political, non-market forces, they still manage to blame "Capitalism".
by gdubs | 2025-08-16 15:59:12+00:00
AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they talk about hallucination and haven't tried Deep Research as an alternative to traditional web-search.

Then there's a tendency to be so 'anti' that there's an assumption that anyone reporting that the tools are accomplishing truly impressive and useful things must be an 'AI booster' or shill. Or they assume that person must not have been a very good engineer in the first place, etc.

Really is one of those examples of the quote, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."

It's a rapidly evolving field, and unless you actually spend some time kicking the tires on the models every so often, you're just basing your opinions on outdated experiences or what everyone else is saying about it.
by PhilipRoman | 2025-08-16 15:59:21+00:00
In some common implementations if $LANG is set to certain values, it will fail to match some ASCII letters. This is because not all latin character using languages put Z last in the alphabet.

Try this (you probably need to enable and generate the locale first)

echo y | LANG=lv_LV.UTF-8 grep '[a-z]'

Locales in general should be considered a "trap", just look at Windows CSV separator handling, etc.
by brnaftr361 | 2025-08-16 16:00:26+00:00
Toothpaste is not a complicated compound to make.

The question is one of optimization. What size (mechanical) or what type of keratin is most suitable, or do we depolymerize (chemical) it first or let oral enzymes do it..? Is brushing as-is sufficient or do we need a longer dwell time..?
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-16 16:00:49+00:00
But that is counter-balanced by being able to issue debt in your own currency at low interest rates. So while yes you do run a deficit, you are in control of your own destiny so to speak, with the ability to print your way out of it (providing you do so wisely so as not to trigger runaway inflation), rather than being at the mercy of lenders due to foreign-currency issued debt (i.e., South America and the IMF).
by jpalawaga | 2025-08-16 16:01:17+00:00
I was looking for information on where I might find the daily words for Connections, accessible ideally behind a CORS-enabled resource. I stumbled across a Reddit thread where some users described an NYT json endpoint that lists crossword puzzles.

When I tried to see if anyone else on the internet talked about these endpoints, I stumbled upon a trove of machine-translated pages bearing the user's original names but the content rewritten. The only thing I think that distinguishes it is the "See Original" link.

I can't help but feel this is a bit disingenuous.
by hackyhacky | 2025-08-16 16:01:57+00:00
> No. We’re back to my earlier point of you and I have fundamentally different understanding of cognition, intelligence, and learning. And genuinely not trying to be condescending, but I suspect you don’t have a good grounding in the technology we’re discussing

Yeah, that definitely came off as condescending. Especially on HN, where pretty much everyone here has a grounding in the technology we're discussing. In any case, your arguments have not dealt with technology at all, but on hand-wavy distinctions like "temporality."

Anyway, to the larger point: I agree that "you and I have fundamentally different understanding of cognition, intelligence, and learning" but your inability to explain your own understanding of these terms and why they are relevant is why your arguments are unpersuasive.
by borroka | 2025-08-16 16:02:08+00:00
It might sound funny in a juvenile way, but it just takes the uncontrolled flatulence of one impolite passenger to make the flight experience miserable for all the others. I was recently on a long-ish flight of a few hours and there was a passenger, whom I could not locate, who every 15 minutes or so was freeing themselves of some poison. The misery of the experience is difficult to describe, but I am sure that many will have felt something similar. All it takes is one rude bully to turn what should be a miraculous experience, like flying ought to be, into a depressing one. Many parallels can be drawn.
Ask HN: What are you *not* working on?
by password4321 | 2025-08-16 16:02:48+00:00
In the spirit of an casting an even wider net in a low-key weekend discussion, I'd like to hear more about projects that are no longer a priority and even just ideas perhaps offered with the hope that someone else can at least share their feedback or even make your dream come true!

User david927's unofficial monthly "What are you working on?" (July: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702833) are always a hit with many comments about projects either not quite ready for their own 'Show HN' or linking to one that didn't get traction... I'd like to use this submission to open the discussion up to include the not-yet/currently-makers.
by glimshe | 2025-08-16 16:02:53+00:00
I studied a little bit of occultism, but wasn't as dedicated as you must have been. I also wondered about whether there was something there worth finding. I couldn't find anything but "captivating fantasy". Some RPGs are very much like Occult texts, such as Mage (White Wolf) and Ars Magica. These were literally based on the occult tradition.

I wonder if the occult authors would today be releasing their texts on drivethrurpg.com!
by jt2190 | 2025-08-16 16:02:54+00:00
> I'm not a lawyer and don't fancy being the test case for whether entering your PIN on a third-party website/app counts as "knowingly providing" it.

I guess I'm assuming that you would design the iOS app to collect and store the PIN number on the device, and never ever share it, since (if I read the post correctly) that's all you'd need to get to basic auth. I take your point that that might still be considered "sharing with a third party" but honestly I suspect that (a) they wouldn't notice for a long long time and (b) they would typically start by sending a c&d, not hiring a team top-notch lawyers and going straight to court unless you're really wealthy and there's some prize to be had for all of those legal fees.
by alwa | 2025-08-16 16:04:10+00:00
In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly mortified herself—and, generally being closer to the screamer than anyone else is, would certainly make it stop if she could.

Screaming children test my patience too, but I’m really not sure screaming adults do much to resolve that. It’s always seemed to me that grace is the better part of maturity.

Sometimes you can get earplugs if you ask nicely.
by saurik | 2025-08-16 16:04:55+00:00
We live in a world where it has become increasingly possible--by a number of different mechanisms--to rent access to things rather than sell them, and we need to step in and better regulate that: if I pay for your product, you don't get to control it anymore, you don't get to watch how I use it, and you don't get any say in if or how I modify it while I am using it. The idea that it is more profitable to rent people a calculator than to sell them one is simultaneously true and horrifying, as the reasons it is more profitable are all bad for the user. If your service is a thing that can't be sold, it should be designed in a way where you can't continue to access it from the inside, no more so than you are allowed to rent me an apartment and leave a bunch of cameras inside it.
by latexr | 2025-08-16 16:05:39+00:00
> Tesla crash test hoax

First I’m hearing of that. In doing a search, I see a lot of speculation but no proof. Knowing the shenanigans perpetrated by Musk and his hardcore fans, I’ll take theories with a grain of salt.

> and (partially?) faked his famous glitterbomb pranks

That one I remember, and the story is that the fake reactions were done by a friend of a friend who borrowed the device. I can’t know for sure, but I do believe someone might do that. Ultimately, Rober took accountability, recognised that hurt his credibility, and edited out that part from the video.

https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-21-viral-glitter-bomb-video...

I have no reason to protect Rober, but also have no reason to discredit him until proof to the contrary. I don’t follow YouTube drama but even so I’ve seen enough people unjustly dragged through the mud to not immediately fall for baseless accusations.

One I bumped into recently was someone describing the “fall” of another YouTuber, and in one case showed a clip from an interview and said “and even the interviewer said X about this person”, with footage. Then I watched the full video and at one point the interviewer says (paraphrased) “and please no one take this out of context, if you think I’m saying X, you’re missing the point”.

So, sure, let’s be critical about the information we’re fed, but that cuts both ways.
by latchkey | 2025-08-16 16:05:45+00:00
> I am no fan of crypto as today it is being used as store of value(which it is not) instead of mechanism to transfer value(which it is). Once we finally move into the right direction, I know I'll have a good day.

People need and like to use credit, but they are doing it wrong by contributing to the "rotten" system. Crypto is a great store of value because you can use it as collateral to borrow against. Supply eth, borrow usdc, withdraw as usd. This is tax free since the conversion is 1:1 and there are no gains to report.

Instead of buying things with a credit card and paying it back every month, provide crypto as collateral, borrow against it and then pay it back. The difference is that this takes an upfront investment in order to get yourself started. Not too much different than the way credit works in SE Asia, since they time lock a deposit, to enable a debt card.

Maintaining your collateralization ratio (this answers the price volatility question) is no harder to do than paying the exorbitant fees to credit card companies for your balance. This could easily be wrapped into a nice UX. It would work globally and enable all sorts of great commerce. No more giving up all your information to the credit card companies. No more credit scores to get hacked either.
by GolDDranks | 2025-08-16 16:06:01+00:00
Nice solution!

Out of curiosity to the OP, did you use an AI to tweak/refine the text? It contains a lot of similar writing patterns as some read-aloud 4chan greentext/copypaste YouTube channels, especially liberal use of whimsical similes: "like it's 2000 and I'm downloading a JPEG on dial-up" "starting to feel like cosmic punishment" "like it's protecting nuclear launch codes", and jocular asides: " -- exposed to British weather, coated in a mysterious film of protein shake and regret, probably being livestreamed to TikTok by someone's ring doorbell -- ".

So I started to wonder if my AI-radar was spot on, or is that style of writing something people naturally do – because I wouldn't bother, but then again, I don't run a blog that people actually read.
by azemetre | 2025-08-16 16:06:29+00:00
Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.

At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.

Why can't AIs be controlled with democratic institutions? Why are democratic institutions worse? This doesn't seem to be the case to me.

Private institutions shouldn't be allowed to control such systems, they should be compelled to give them to the public.
by Ja10th | 2025-08-16 16:07:10+00:00
Are you thinking of changing careers?

It’s exciting… but also overwhelming.

How do you leave behind what you know without wasting years starting over?

After working with professionals navigating this very challenge, I’ve seen a clear pattern: successful career changers don’t just “jump.” They follow a process.

Here are 3 crucial steps to get started:

Know exactly what you’re leaving behind and what you’re aiming for. Map your transferable skills from your old career Show proof because projects and results speak louder than a new certificate.

But this is just the beginning. In this article, I break down the step-by-step roadmap to a successful career transition, from networking to interviewing with confidence, and starting strong in your new role.

https://lnkd.in/d_n7t-Ae

Are you thinking about a career switch in 2025? Comment below
by stego-tech | 2025-08-16 16:07:23+00:00
For the US specifically (I can’t speak to other countries), that could be an excellent use case for the USPS: digital money orders. Pay with cash or debit card at the post office, claim it back to a bank account. Other postal services could reciprocate/honor those orders in that specific currency (or offer conversion at a publicized daily rate). Since it’s cash only (no credit), it significantly reduces chargebacks - and because it’s through national postal services, it still allows checking/tracking by governments to keep tabs on illicit transactions.

Thing is, that would absolutely be blocked by current payment providers and their lobbyists. I fully agree with you, though.

EDIT: Hah, I’m late to this party. Physical international money orders have already been discontinued by the USPS as of last year and are dwindling globally thanks to FinTech. The lack of a digital equivalent is definitely frustrating, as their flat fees and discretion were rather appealing.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-16 16:07:27+00:00
Just think through the consequences of your policy proposal. What you are saying is you will outlaw investment in a second house for rent. The result will be that only the people who can afford to buy a house can live in one. Everyone else, which is half of American households, has to live somewhere else. You haven't specified where that other place is, but I guess it would have to be larger apartment buildings, built and operated by larger organizations (corporations, or at best cooperatives).

I rent my house from the woman who lives next door. I could not afford to buy this house. I have a nice garden and my kids go to great schools. Your policy means that this arrangement is forbidden. My family is not allowed to access this life because I am not rich enough. That is a bad policy.
by immibis | 2025-08-16 16:07:28+00:00
At worst I have a neutral opinion of the Mullvad team because I don't know them at all and don't use their product. I have a negative opinion of the guys who stole everyone's money at Mt Gox and who destroyed Freenode, because they stole everyone's money at Mt Gox and destroyed Freenode. In any case, why would I ever have a positive opinion of them, which is what's required to exceed my neutral opinion of Mullvad? What have they done to deserve a better-than-neutral opinion?

Not sure how you can "debunk" that Freenode was destroyed - it clearly was - and the fact that an identical network minus that person is now running just fine, proves that person was the problem. All evidence points to the fact that Freenode (under a different name) seems to have been saved by kicking out the guy who was trying to blackmail it by having ownership of the name Freenode.

You're right, Intel CPUs aren't trustworthy either since they tend to stop working after just a year or so. I have a greater confidence that my CPU doesn't contain an intentional remotely exploitable backdoor, because that takes serious effort (also because it's AMD), than that Intel hasn't sent a couple of short bitstrings to the US government.