MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-11 22:49:22+00:00
Technically you’re correct, a 12000 BTU minisplit only uses around 1000 watts while running which is just over 4A.

The breaker size being 20A 2P is a consequence of the NEC requiring you to size the wire based off the equipment nameplate rating of 15A, which is based off the full load amps of the motors inside the equipment.

Full load amps is the max amount of current a motor can draw at a specific voltage and is used for sizing wire and overcurrent protection for a piece of equipment. It doesn’t always match up the current a motor draws while it’s running normally. You take full load amps times 1.25 to get minimum circuit ampacity, which you use to size the conductors.

So while you are correct that a 240V 12000 BTU minisplit wont draw anywhere near 20A, the specific minisplit I looked at required a 20A breaker due to the minimum circuit ampacity being 15A. If the MCA was 12A, you could use a 15A breaker; an MCA of 8A would allow using a 10A breaker, and so on.

If you use fuses, you can size the overcurrent protection at 100%, breakers require 125% of the load for a continuous load. So you could use a 30A fusible disconnect switch fused at 15A for a unit with an MCA of 15A.
by russellbeattie | 2025-08-11 22:49:28+00:00
I tried a bunch of different shoe styles, but decided that cheap sandals are really all you need. You people wearing boots, sneakers or loafers should really consider going back to basics.

I mean, we all have feet, right? And we all want to protect the soles of our feet, so there's really no need for all the bells and whistles like laces or padding.
by dan-robertson | 2025-08-11 22:49:43+00:00
A few thoughts:

1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things.

2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams.

3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
by anglesideangle | 2025-08-11 22:50:39+00:00
The problem with a federation system like mastodon/activitypub is that relying on propagation hurts usability and discoverability. [tangled.sh](https://tangled.sh/) is to federated forgejo what bluesky is to mastodon, where it relies on atproto to have decentralization without sacrificing ux
by genghisjahn | 2025-08-11 22:50:49+00:00
Main thing I learned with health and fitness is that, for me, I was always trying to do right long enough so I could cheat and "reward" myself. And that always lead to failure. I had to change my mindset from, "Be good until you feel like you can be bad" to ,"You've adopted a new lifestyle. This is you now. You're not building up points so you can buy a whole pizza and 3 beers. You're doing this because this is you now. This is the reward, being able to run miles in the heat. Right now, sweat all over you, breath going in and out. This is the reward." For some reason that worked for me.
by goncalossilva | 2025-08-11 22:51:31+00:00
> Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive.

OP was drinking 2+ liters of water per day. It may not be productive work-wise, but it's productive health-wise.

So... win?
Show HN: My First SaaS – Turn App Giveaways into a Marketing Asset
by tTarnMhrkm | 2025-08-11 22:52:02+00:00
This is my first SaaS, and I built it out of my own frustration. I wanted a better way to manage promo code giveaways for students or run campaigns on Reddit, but the manual process was a time sink. I spent hours sorting DMs, trying to be fair, and getting zero useful data from the whole process. I lost opportunity from users genuinely interested in my products.

This is where I realized my "first 20 DMs" giveaway was a liability, I needed to turn it into a marketing asset.

So, I built Promo Code Queue: https://promocodequeue.com

It's a web app that automates the entire giveaway process. You:

1. Add your product details. 2. Create a promotion and paste in your list of single-use codes (from the App Store, Stripe, Steam, etc.). 3. Get a single, shareable link.

When you post that link, the app handles the rest. It distributes the codes one by one on a fair, first-come-first-serve basis. It uses Cloudflare Turnstile and IP checking to ensure bots don't grab all your codes, and it stops automatically when the codes run out.

Crucially, when the codes are gone, the page instantly converts to a mailing list signup form. It turns that moment of scarcity into an opportunity to capture leads from interested users for your next drop.

The Pro plan also includes an analytics dashboard to track visitors, claim rates, and top referrers so you can actually see the ROI of your campaigns.

Tech Stack:

Frontend: Next.js / React on Vercel

Backend: Firebase (Firestore, Auth, and Cloud Functions for all secure logic like claiming codes, IP checks, and analytics aggregation).

Payments: Paddle

The Business Model: There are two simple paid tiers ("Starter" for one app, "Pro" for unlimited apps and analytics).

I'm also a big believer in open source. The self-hosted "Hobby" version is available now on GitHub: https://github.com/promocodequeue/promo-code-queue-hobby

To show you how it works, I'm giving away some codes for my most popular Mac app, "USB Connection Information."

If you have a Mac, you can grab one here using the platform: https://www.promocodequeue.com/promo/b7qg9jd

I would love to get your feedback on the app, the pricing model, and any features you think are missing.

Thanks for checking it out!
by phist_mcgee | 2025-08-11 22:52:10+00:00
I've done something similar for a refactor.

It simply forgets code exists during a port. It will port part of a function and ignore the rest, it will scan a whole file into context and then forget that a different codepath exists.

I would never rely on it for a 1:1 mapping of large features/code transformations. Small stuff sure, but beyond say a few large files it will miss things and you will be scratching your head for why it's not working.
by throwaway3b03 | 2025-08-11 22:52:28+00:00
I disagree. I spent about 2 years in Romania without healthcare of any kind. I was on a career break/sabbatical. And in the 4 years I've spent in the Netherlands, I've only went to a doctor's office once, for some abdominal pain. I was sent home by a receptionist, telling me to return the next day if it doesn't get better.

And I think that's my only interaction with the medical establishment for the last 6-7 years. The one before that was for some document I needed for my driver's license.

Of course, here in the Netherlands you can't avoid having health insurance, but it's technically free for low income people and not that expensive otherwise. In Romania, and I presume that a lot of other places, you can.

So is it that hard to stay uninsured? I do have some gripes to pick with the medical system, but yeah, I do think taking health into your own hands is a better choice (and a lot more is psychological in nature than the medical system would suggest, which is focused on symptoms and not causes).

I remember in my younger years, I would get a cold probably twice a year on average, and I would always get prescribed antibiotics by an overzealous GP. All of that stopped all of a sudden, and I haven't taken antibiotics in about a decade. I've caught a cold, maybe once every two years, but much lighter and goes away by itself in 2-3 days at most.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-11 22:52:37+00:00
> Stunned, I said, “Wait—tell me about this,” and he proceeded to explain prosopagnosia.

Tangentially related: As a nearsighted kid--and unaware of it--I would mentally catalogue what color clothes my friends were wearing in the morning so that I could improve my odds of finding them during outdoor recess.

Naturally, the first time I got glasses: "Holy Moly you mean everybody sees like this!?"
by mtmail | 2025-08-11 22:54:17+00:00
'Developer Voices' https://www.developervoices.com/ probably fits " in-depth conversations with the smartest developers in the industry."

Recently saw https://aolunderground.com/ on HN ("Interviews with hackers and staff of America Online (AOL), covering the 90’s/Early 2000’s."), but haven't listened yet.
by mehulashah | 2025-08-11 22:54:22+00:00
Tail recursion is beautifully deep and simple. It (and as a corollary CPS) makes clear what state matters to your loop (and function) and avoids extraneous variables in loops as well as implicit unneeded state in functions. It also makes it easier to show the correctness of your loops. Sure, there are other functional language constructs like fold and map, if your problem is amenable to them. Tail recursion is more general and simpler.
by elliotec | 2025-08-11 22:54:38+00:00
I had a problem with signing up for max with the wrong email, then thinking I didn’t actually do it, so I signed up with the one I wanted.

Saw the double bill and contacted them, I had a full refund in a couple days and a nice personal note thanking me for being a max user.

This was a couple months ago so it’s possible they’ve had a huge influx of requests that made it difficult to respond fast lately but I had a good experience with their customer service.
by brulard | 2025-08-11 22:55:05+00:00
Well, it turned from the original "breaking down", through "slight discomfort" to "skipping for a benefit". Just let me tell you for someone to break down can mean a panic attack, where they can not catch breath, or they just crawl into a corner acting like a kid, it can mean throwing up violently or it can mean falling into a long term depression. Everyone can have their own reasons and way of processing pain.
by jiangdayuan | 2025-08-11 22:56:53+00:00
I think you're misreading the comment. The reasoning isn't missing, it's implied by decades of good design principles: simpler is better. A normal developer would intuitively prefer <output>, so the question isn't "Why suggest <output>?" but rather "Why is <output-format> necessary?"

And in the context of LLMs, this isn't just a matter of aesthetics. More verbose tags mean more tokens, and more tokens mean higher costs. It's a perfectly valid and practical piece of feedback.
by twoodfin | 2025-08-11 22:58:17+00:00
OK, but at least from my perspective, the point of OTF’s is to allow ongoing interoperability between query and update engines.

A “standard” getting semi-monthly updates via random Databricks-affiliated GitHub accounts doesn’t really fit that bill.

Look at something like this:

https://github.com/delta-io/delta/blob/master/PROTOCOL.md#wr...

Ouch.
by h2zizzle | 2025-08-11 22:58:34+00:00
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.

But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.

Just some rambling, don't mind me.
by OJFord | 2025-08-11 22:58:51+00:00
I had a flatmate with this at university. On campus he'd totally blank me (different departments), like I'd left something awful in the sink. At home Hey y'alright how's it going like nothing had happened. Bit weird, but you get used to it.

(Basically I just learnt to ignore him out of context too. It was only politeness that would otherwise incline me to acknowledge someone like that, so if they don't recognise me that just doesn't really apply, no need.)
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-11 23:00:24+00:00
> The better question is why use Java for anything these days.

Java (the language) is pretty much "C for the JVM." By that, I mean frameworks/libraries intended for maximum potential use in languages running on the JVM (such as Kotlin, Scala, and of course Java) all support Java (the language) interoperability. Many written in alternate languages targeting the JVM, such as Akka[0], typically have some degree of Java (the language) support as well.

While I prefer to program in one of the alternate programming languages targeting the JVM, I understand why many OSS projects are implemented in Java (the language) for the reasons outlined above.

0 - https://github.com/akka/akka
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-11 23:01:16+00:00
Parents have plenty of capacity to exercise control over their children.

For example, how about a law that says websites have to restrict access to pornographic content if the client's user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems because the header contains no personally identifying information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt into it. But then parents can configure the kid's devices to send that header, without even impacting the kid's privacy to view content that isn't designated as pornographic, since the header is an opt-in to censorship rather than the removal of anonymity.

Also notice that an academic discussion of sexual identity isn't inherently pornographic but is something that can require privacy/anonymity.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-11 23:01:43+00:00
The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.

There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
by themadturk | 2025-08-11 23:02:03+00:00
At a law office I worked in during the 90s, several of the secretaries and paralegals had AOL Instant Messenger installed on their machines for IM inside the office (and to/from people outside the office too, I'm sure). I dunno if it violated any licensing agreements, but it worked well and didn't cost the firm a penny.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-11 23:02:08+00:00
> While Kyber may have been the winning algorithm, there will be great preference in the community for Bernstein's NTRU Prime.

There's IETF WG drafts for use of Kyber / ML-KEM, but none for NTRU, so I'm not sure about that:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-mlkem/

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem/

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-hybrid-desig...

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ipsecme-ikev2-ml...

And given that NTRU made it to the third round, and NTRU Prime is labelled as an alternative, I'm not how strong a claim Bernstein can make to being ill-treated by NIST.
by efavdb | 2025-08-11 23:02:52+00:00
I have had similar issues.

It has helped to remember to do things I know help me feel better: reading novels, going on walks etc. even though I know these help I can fall out the habit easily.

Another is to try to load balance my productivity by leaving low hanging fruit for the next day. Something easy to do or that I’m excited about. That helps me get started the next day on a good foot and avoid procrastination.

These have helped but have not solved the issue for me.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-11 23:03:14+00:00
There’s a balance to these things. I worked for a well run large government bureaucracy that was both confounding and frustrating and great at execution.

The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated.

The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.
by vladms | 2025-08-11 23:03:26+00:00
To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90 were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.

Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).

My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness, conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it will play out on the long term...
by tombert | 2025-08-11 23:03:32+00:00
I'm saying that if I do a regular loop, something needs to explicitly mutate, either a reference or a value itself.

`for (var i = 0; i < n, i++)`, for example, requires that `i` mutate in order to keep track of the value so that the loop can eventually terminate. You could also do something like:

var i = new Obj(); while (!i.isDone()) { //do some stuff i = new Obj(); }

There, the reference to `i` is being mutated.

For tail recursion, it's a little different. If I did something like Factorial:

function factorial(n, acc) { if (n <= 1) return acc; return factorial(n - 1, acc * n); }

Doing this, there's no explicit mutation. It might be happening behind the scenes, but everything there from the code perspective is creating a new value.

In something like Clojure, you might do something like

(defn vrange [n] (loop [i 0 v []] (if (< i n) (recur (inc i) (conj v i)) v)))

(stolen from [1])

In this case, we're creating "new" structures on every iteration of the loop, so our code is "more pure", in that there's no mutation. It might be being mutated in the implementation but not from the author's perspective.

I don't think I'm confusing anything.

[1] https://clojure.org/reference/transients
by kelnos | 2025-08-11 23:03:47+00:00
> No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.

This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps your experience is not a representative sample of tech people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless for either of us to state an opinion here based on our experience with our own slice of tech people.

It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
by achierius | 2025-08-11 23:04:07+00:00
> It's just not physically real, it was developed before we knew how DNA/RNA encoding handles the same issues in a more performant way.

That was a sharp left turn -- how do you figure DNA/RNA are relevant here? I feel like iteration pre-dates our modern understanding of RNA in particular (though I could be mistaken) so I struggle to imagine how DNA/RNA were particularly informative in this regard.
by dathinab | 2025-08-11 23:04:34+00:00
> progressive enhancement possible

no not at all extensible isn't the same as lenient

having a Content-Type header where you can put in new media types (e.g. for images) once browsers support it is extensibility

sniffing the media type instead of strictly relying on the Content-Type header is leniency and had been the source of a lot of security vulnerabilities over the years

or having new top level JS object exposing new APIs is extensibility but allowing overriding the prototypes of fundamental JS objects (i.e. Array.prototype) turned out to be a terrible idea associated with multiple security issues (like idk. ~10 years ago, hence why it now is read only)

same for SAML, its use of XML made it extensible, but they way it leniently encoded XML for signing happened to be a security nightmare

or OAuth2 which is very extensible, but it being too lenient in what you can combine how was the source of many early security incidents and is still source of incompatibilities today (but OAuth2 is anyway a mess)
by themadturk | 2025-08-11 23:06:46+00:00
Elderly people are often reluctant to change what they have grown used to. Not only did my mom continue to use dialup until she went into memory care in 2019, when her Windows XP machine died a couple of years earlier, she wanted me to make Windows 10 on her new machine look and act in every way like XP. (I was not successful at this.)
by more_corn | 2025-08-11 23:07:03+00:00
One of the best life lessons I learned was while perusing a poker strategy book in a bookstore as a teen. I’ve never been into poker, not even sure why I picked it up. One thing it said was the most important thing to remember is that most of your hands will be crap. Don’t get attached to a bad hand and don’t convince yourself that an ok hand is a good hand. If you just fold the bad hands and play the good ones you’re already a better player than most.

I took that to heart and it has served me well in life.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-11 23:07:03+00:00
It's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker.

You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.

Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
by t0lo | 2025-08-11 23:07:08+00:00
Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist-

plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years, telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.

This will only get worse as we are at the end of progression of this culture and cultural consensus has split between educated legacy media and uneducated young new media which develops its own often incorrect assumptions about the world- like about mental illness assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying parts of ourselves because they've grown too different. We need a new way forward and a new culture of contentment that champions the human.

If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.