MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by herval | 2025-08-30 20:30:11+00:00
They lost the appeal because

1) global logistics normalized, moving the bulk of the money laundering activities back to their usual places (eg physical art),

2) people started realizing that the blockchain actually created a papertrail that’s much harder to conceal than a bunch of literal paper documents scattered across a web of global freight forwarding companies and shell companies and

3) KYC rules turned most fringe crypto exchanges into tightly monitored trading platforms

Crypto as a whole became less utilized as a laundering & gambling medium for those reasons, but it didn’t fully disappear since ETFs keep liquidity happening and transferring money with crypto is still better than swift in a lot of cases. NFTs went away because they had no use whatsoever
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-30 20:30:35+00:00
That's not the whole picture. Everything on eBay, Shopify, Etsy, that weird online shop that sells that weird thing you're into from London or Prague, whatever, all of it is now going to cost more money for everyone in America if it originates outside of the US.

Yes, the majority by volume is from China, and from large trash sites that rightly aren't sustainable...

... but the second order effects on small businesses and consumers who enjoy buying from them.
by baby_souffle | 2025-08-30 20:31:12+00:00
Essentially, yeah.

Chromecast and Netflix have done this for a while now to facilitate some sort of hand-off.

I don’t have the details handy, but a few years ago I was `adb shell` into my device to debug something untreated and did a quick `netstat` and noticed a few ports that were open / did not expect. Tracked them down to Netflix, specifically.
by sarlalian | 2025-08-30 20:31:20+00:00
Whether it’s an explicit design flaw that allows the gun to fire with no interaction with the trigger at all, or one where the gun is prone to fire unintended when circumstances are less that ideal, and an interaction that shouldn’t cause it to fire does. Who cares. It’s perfectly reasonable for law enforcement and the military to want a higher level of safety than what is apparently possible with this handgun.
by Swizec | 2025-08-30 20:32:14+00:00
> I think anyone that thinks mudball is OK because business is messy has never seen true mudball code.

I’ve seen and created some pretty bad stuff. Point is not that it’s okay, but that that’s the job: managing, extending, and fixing the mess.

Yes a perfect codebase would be great, but the code is not perfect and there’s a job to do. You’re not gonna rebuild all of San Francisco just to upgrade the plumbing on one street.

Much of engineering is about building systems to keep the mess manageable, the errors contained, etc. And you have to do that while keeping the system running.
by lukeschlather | 2025-08-30 20:32:34+00:00
I don't really like the axes Mort/Elvis/Einstein are on, they all seem like obviously pathological examples.

I think if I were to make three strawmen like this I would instead talk about them as maximizing utility, maintainability, and effectiveness. Utility because the "most business value" option doesn't always make the software more useful to people. (And I will tend to prioritize making the software better over making it better for the business.) Maintainability because the thing that solves the use case today might cause serious issues that makes the code not fit for purpose some time in the future. Effectiveness because the basket of if statements might be perfect in terms of solving the business problem as stated, but it might be dramatically slower or subtly incorrect relative to some other algorithm.

Mort is described as someone who prioritizes present business value with no regard to maintainability or usefulness.

Elvis is described as someone who prioritizes shiny things, he's totally a pejorative.

Einstein is described as someone who just wants fancy algorithms with no regard for maintainability or fitness to the task at hand. Unlike Elvis I think this one has some value, but I think it's a bit more interesting to talk about someone who is looking at the business value and putting in the extra effort to make the perfectly correct/performant/maintainable solution for the use case, rather than going with the easiest thing that works. It's still possible to overdo, but I think it makes the archetype more useful to steelman the perspective. Amanda sounds a bit more like this, but I think she might work better without the other three but with some better archetypes.
by zakirullin | 2025-08-30 20:32:45+00:00
Agreed on every point! From what I observed, some engineers try to express themselves through exciting architectures. They are proud of it, they get their dopamine. Their craft can't be simple, if it is simple then they are dull too. At some point in time some of them stop associating their code with themselves, and take somewhat business approach. Most of them do not pass this point, unfortunately.
by Bender | 2025-08-30 20:32:48+00:00
Do you have CPU or network spikes when opening HN?

None here. HN is nearly the lightest-weight site I use. Have you tried disabling all addons to see if one of them is choking on something? If using Firefox ago to about:processes to see where the spike is within the browser. There is probably a way to do this in Chrome as well but I have no idea how.

Also a while back someone was saying they were seeing packet loss on an IPv6 path to HN that was causing slowness for them. Are you on IPv4 or IPv6? Cellphone?
by daxfohl | 2025-08-30 20:32:52+00:00
There's no such thing as a temporary read in LLM land though. Once it's in context, you have to assume everything else connected to the agent will be able to exfiltrate it until the agent is killed and the context wiped.

Note, this is the case whether running in VM or not, so I agree that VM is not a security solution.
by computerdork | 2025-08-30 20:34:42+00:00
I completely agree with every in this article, but seems like it's just at different way of looking at the well-known software-engineering concept of "complexity." Yeah, the main difference is cognitive load is considering the complication of the system from how it effects the developer, while complexity focuses on the amount of complications in the system itself.

Yeah, if you go through this article and replace most of the places where it mentions "cognitive load" with "complexity," it still makes sense.

Yeah, this isn't a criticism of the article - In fact, there are important difference, like having more of a focus on what the dev is experiencing handling the complications of the system - But for those really interested in its concept, may want to learn about complexity too, as there is a lot of great info on this.
by firesteelrain | 2025-08-30 20:35:28+00:00
I was buying a lot of custom, fully populated hobby PCBs and the price has skyrocketed so much that it’s too cost prohibitive to order from JLCPCB. You can order PCBs from Oshpark however the boards don’t come fully populated with all of your components so you would need to order from like Mouser and surface mount all of them yourself (for my application)

To put it in perspective, used to pay about $85-$90 for 10 completed boards —- shipped —- now it is $316ish for 10 boards shipped.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-30 20:35:31+00:00
You had more than you think. The airport stuff gives the feds and police a high trust indexed representation of your face that will be used in all sorts of contexts in the future.

In 2025, when DOGE agents casually committed multiple felonies by exfiltrating sensitive data to god knows who, that should be really disturbing to you. Although, you see to be casually ok with some goomba landlord maintaining a dossier on anyone entering your apartment, so I guess it would be.
Show HN: Fur – a Git-like CLI for branching your chats and ideas
by andrewrg | 2025-08-30 20:35:57+00:00
I built a small CLI tool called FUR — Forkable, Unearthable, Recursive memory tracker. It’s like `git`, but for your chats, ideas, and AI conversations.

With FUR you can: - start threads and jot messages (inline or from Markdown files) - fork conversations into branches - jump back or forward in a thread - see your history as a tree or timeline - assign avatars (, , etc.) to different participants - switch between threads with a single command

Everything is stored locally as JSON + Markdown under a `.fur/` directory. No servers, no sync, just your data.

GitHub: https://github.com/andrewrgarcia/fur-cli Install: `cargo install fur-cli`

Would love feedback — especially from folks who’ve felt the pain of losing good AI conversations or wanted branching "save points" for ideas.
by mosselman | 2025-08-30 20:36:24+00:00
Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.

This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.

I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.

The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.

I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.
by frantathefranta | 2025-08-30 20:36:29+00:00
The interesting thing is that at least my shipments from Aliexpress to the EU were always invoiced at $3-5 no matter how much I actually paid for them, circumventing the need to pay tax and duty on packages. I wonder if they’ll do the same now for the US, because my last packages (to the US) were delivered in February and were invoiced at the correct amount (though they were not above the de minimis amount)
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-08-30 20:36:41+00:00
I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country".

Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.

Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.

Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.

Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.

To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.

Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.

Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.

Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.

In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.

All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.

Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.

Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.

I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-30 20:37:01+00:00
Pre-911, you absolutely could. On my first job, a consultant had a family emergency and couldn’t fly out to a client. I met him at the airport bar, grabbed the tickets, and was on the plane 20 minutes later. This probably 1998 or 99.

My uncle serviced turbines for power plants. Power plants are often in the back of nowhere. He travelled with a few thousand dollars and a revolver into the 1970s.
by hallole | 2025-08-30 20:37:18+00:00
I remember being very pleased when I first encountered what might be an abuse of notation, but is nonetheless super convenient: \Sum_{s \in S}, where s is an element of a set S. Or, even better, just: \Sum s_i. Of course, this is defensible as I was writing out 100 summations in a stats course, not writing teaching material.
by jtotheh | 2025-08-30 20:38:07+00:00
It's interesting...M$ is very sleazy in this, especially the way it turned out. Tim Paterson was clearly a great programmer. The really interesting person to me is Gary Kildall though, who I think invented a lot of the underpinnings of doing things with "microcomputers" and seems to have been a really great guy. Unfortunately, "business" is not about being nice (or having the best product). Gates has been a minor obsession of mine over the years.....I'd like to see him make good on all the promises he's made to give away his wealth. There's a book on him I think is interesting called "The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire". I mean he's smart, smarter than me, but I don't think he's as smart as he thinks he is, or necessarily even doing that much good in the world. Some good, but a lot of trying to micromanage things he doesn't know much about.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-30 20:38:50+00:00
Yes, this permission allows that. Docs say: “Allows applications to open network sockets.”[1], full description seems to be[2]:

> Allows the app to create network sockets and use custom network protocols. The browser and other applications provide means to send data to the internet, so this permission is not required to send data to the internet.

[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

[2]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
by ThatPlayer | 2025-08-30 20:40:01+00:00
For me bcachefs provides a feature no other filesystem on Linux has: automated tiered storage. I've wanted this ever since I got an SSD more than 10 years ago, but filesystems move slow.

A block level cache like bcache (not fs) and dm-cache handles it less ideally, and doesn't leave the SSD space as usable space. As a home user, 2TB of SSDs is 2TB of space I'd rather have. ZFS's ZIL is similar, not leaving it as usable space. Btrfs has some recent work in differentiating drives to store metadata on the faster drives (allocator hints), but that only does metadata as there is no handling of moving data to HDDs over time. Even Microsoft's ReFS does tiered storage I believe.

I just want to have 1 or 2 SSDs, with 1 or 2 HDDs in a single filesystem that gets the advantages of SSDs with recently used files and new writes, and moves all the LRU files to the HDDs. And probably keep all the metadata on the SSDs too.
by stebalien | 2025-08-30 20:40:13+00:00
"Decentralization" isn't the end-goal so measuring it here isn't all that meaningful. Personally, I care about:

1. How hard is it to censor the network.

2. How hard would it be for some major player to enshittify the network.

Furthermore, while the fediverse has a single axis for decentralization, BlueSky has 3: number of "big index servers", number of PDSs, number of domain names (how many people own their handle):

1. Increasing the number of PDSs doesn't make it harder to censor the network when everyone still uses the same big index node.

2. BlueSky's primary defense against enshittification is user account portability. I'd love to see metrics on how many users have their own domain names. Having many PDSs is also a good defense here because it reduces the impact of BlueSky (the company) shutting off the firehose, but I still think account portability is the primary defense here.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-30 20:40:19+00:00
TCP is generally zero-copy now. Zero-copy with io_uring is also possible.

AF_XDP is also another way to do high-performance networking in the kernel, and it's not bad.

DPDK still has a ~30% advantage over an optimized kernel-space application with a huge maintenance burden. A lot of people reach for it, though, without optimizing kernel interfaces first.
by neonrider | 2025-08-30 20:40:55+00:00
Love it. Make code accessibility a first-class citizen. Turn the rule books and their principles into guidelines. A smart coder knows to follow rules. A master knows code is meant to be read and develops contextual awareness for when and why to break a rule, or augment it, as the case may be. So, reintroduce judgment and critical thinking in your coding practice. Develop an intuitive feel for the cognitive costs and trade-offs of your decisions. Whether you choose to duplicate or abstract, think of the next person (who sometimes is you in six months).

For those asking why author doesn't come up with their own new rules that can then be followed, this would just be trading a problem for the same problem. Absentmindedly following rules. Writing accessible code, past a few basic guidelines, becomes tacit knowledge. If you write and read code, you'll learn to love some and hate some. You'll also develop a feel for heavy handedness. Author said it best:

> It's not imagined, it's there and we can feel it.

We can feel it. Yes, having to make decisions while coding is an uncomfortable freedom. It requires you to be present. But you can get used to it if you try.
by usrusr | 2025-08-30 20:41:06+00:00
So the difference is block everything until the dependency is available and then continue immediately, vs give up on time slots already reserved for downstream dependencies while continuing with those parts in the current schedule that are not blocked and copy the blocked parts at the end of the queue? Sounds like a trade-off that can go one way or the other? But yeah, I was using the term "stalling" in a browser sense, as the superset of both. No idea how incorrect that is.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-30 20:41:25+00:00
Still an incredible bargain compared to any US-based production house.

That's always been my problem with buying American. I'd be willing to pay 2x as much to support manufacturers in my own country. Maybe 3x. But 10x-15x as much? EABOD, I'll stick with China. While infuriating, the Trump tariffs are nowhere near enough to alter the outcome of that calculation.
by Marsymars | 2025-08-30 20:42:19+00:00
> TEMU's tagline is "Shop like a billionaire." I want you to really think about that. Marketers test hundreds of combinations to find what resonates. TEMU probably has thousands of marketers. They've tested millions of possible hooks. Millions. And this is what won. "Shop like a billionaire" is the message that resonated above all others.

Not saying you’re wrong, but I find “Shop like a billionaire” to be a deeply weird slogan.
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-30 20:43:04+00:00
Cringe philosophy.

Philosophy is the accumulated stuctured ideologues on wtf.

Anyone can be a philosopher, only those with well published original distinction are remembered.

Philosophy itself is the wetstone for the mind. It does not solve your problems, it gives you a context for understanding how large or small they are.

Philosophy is the search for the right questions, science is responsible for answers.
by dang | 2025-08-30 20:43:27+00:00
This is a belated reply, but you broke the site guidelines badly here. It's not ok to attack other users like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are. We ban accounts that do, so please don't do it again.

It's fine, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully, but that is a very different kind of comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by stusmall | 2025-08-30 20:43:50+00:00
Meanwhile if I see that I just move on. It just isn't practical to have a workable browser with JS whitelisting for the general case. I doubt people who do this actually do any kind of thoughtful review before hitting "accept". It just adds manual toil with limited benefit.

If they are doing meaningful review, I question how much they actually get done in life.
by sarreph | 2025-08-30 20:44:57+00:00
Smart move by Mitchell to omit (in his opinion) _why_ you have to feel it, as evidenced by the spread interpretation in the comments.

In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.

However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.

Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.

But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.
by msgilligan | 2025-08-30 20:45:12+00:00
TIL about the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index and I wanted to test it with a weird corner-case that I remember.

At one point in the late 1980's Microsoft had a GREATER than 100% market share of the Macintosh spreadsheet market.

How is this possible?

Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales. It just so happened that Lotus had more returns than sales of their failed spreadsheet, Lotus Jazz. So Lotus, had a negative market share and Microsoft had more sales of Excel than total sales in the market, resulting in a greater than 100% market share.

I don't remember the exact numbers and I believe there was at least one other competitor in the study. But let's just say the numbers were:

Microsoft: 102% Lotus: -2%

In that case the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index would be 102^2 + (-2)^2 = 10404 + 4 = 10408.

So, in this pathological case it is possible for the HHI to exceed 10,000.

Edited: Added (for a given period) above, for clarity.
by treyd | 2025-08-30 20:46:06+00:00
Google search does a lot more complex processing (crawling, historical weighting) and it does it on unstructured pages. Discoveravility in a microblogging system doesn't have to be a lot more than indexing/collation of structured posts, and end-user clients can be designed to participate in that. "Retweets"/"boosts" are already a form of that.
by arp242 | 2025-08-30 20:46:31+00:00
Kent brings up Debian himself, unprompted.

This is one of the problems: Kent is frequently unable to accept that things don't go his way. He will keep bringing it up again and again and he just grinds people down with it. If you see just one bit of it then it may seem somewhat reasonable, but it's really not because this is the umpteenth time this exact discussion is happening and it's groundhog day once again.

This is a major reason why people burn out on Kent. You can't just have a disagreement/conflict and resolve it. Everything is a discussion with Kent. He can't just shrug and say "well, I think that's a bit silly, but okay, I can work with it, I guess". The options are 1) Kent gets his way, or 2) he will keep pushing it (not infrequently ignoring previous compromises, restarting the discussion from square one). Here too, the Debian people have this entire discussion (again) forced upon them by Kent's comments in a way that's just completely unnecessary and does nothing to resolve anything.

Even as an interested onlooker who is otherwise uninvolved and generally more willing to accept difficult behaviour than most people, I've rather soured on Kent over time.