MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 06:41:36+00:00
I think I would agree with you that it’s a dramatic show, and since these are characters, they tried to smash too much together into a supergroup of larger than life achievers with egos to match. I think you’re right that they did try to juice the drama a bit more than was believable in a few cases, but it was meant to show the full gamut of the tech industry and associated scenes, and it kind of felt strained or forced at times. I wouldn’t really call it a gimmick either, but perhaps that is the best word for their reach exceeding their grasp.

It’s a kind of myth making, I suppose. Folks want to feel like their own lives are meaningful and exciting, and so they seek out content that is familiar and validates their life choices. Lots of folks in the tech industry are passionate. Others want to want things, but their get up and go got up and went. Halt and Catch Fire is a kind of wish fulfillment for tech folks, but there aren’t unqualified happy endings in the show, so the successes of the characters do feel largely earned by them, even if the dramatic hurdles do seem somewhat overblown or unrealistic. I’ve known enough folks in the industry to see all kinds, from very stable geniuses to shameless sycophants. Most are just regular people, but they rarely make for good television, so regular folks are the side characters or spouses. The viewers are here for drama, not realism.
Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?
by diasks2 | 2025-08-25 06:41:42+00:00
I developed a game called "Putter King Adventure Golf" for iOS and Android back in the 2010s. It's long since disappeared from the app stores, but my son recently asked if he could play it, which got me thinking about whether it might be recoverable.

I'm wondering if there's any way to find a copy of it somewhere on the web (I assume it was probably pirated at some point during its lifetime). And if I could find it, what would be the best approach to get it running again?

Has anyone here successfully recovered and revived their old mobile apps? I'd appreciate any suggestions on:

* Where to look for archived APKs or IPAs * How to sideload/run old mobile apps on modern devices * Whether emulators might be a viable option
by zoeey | 2025-08-25 06:42:05+00:00
I once heard a live a cappella performance in a church, and the moment the voices began, it felt like the whole space wrapped around me in silence. That was when I really understood the beauty of choral music. It is not just about the melody but about how the sound blends in the room and resonates with the air. It is something you simply cannot feel through headphones.
I built a Task manager to prevent developer Burnout
by BlogCat | 2025-08-25 06:42:42+00:00
Hey HN,

For years I've struggled with the typical developer productivity cycle: I feel inspired, take on way too much, get overwhelmed by a giant list of tasks, and end up procrastinating because I don't even know where to start. Then, when I finally pick up a complex task after a weekend or an interruption, I waste an hour just trying to remember the context of what I was doing.

Existing todo apps felt like part of the problem. They are great for making lists, but they don't help with the actual process of focused, sustainable work. They felt like tools for project managers, not for developers in the trenches.

Detailed Article: https://medium.com/@priyeshnd555/i-built-a-minimalist-todo-app-to-fight-developer-procrastination-and-burnout-ffcb7cde9836
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-25 06:43:56+00:00
I wouldn’t have minded if it were about relationships with tech as a backdrop but I don’t think the writers did a good job fleshing out those relationships either. Most of the time it felt very one dimensional. Largely because the characters were one dimensional. Ironically, the supporting cast felt more “human” than the leads.

Agreed with your point about SV and IT Crowd. There does seem to be a real lack of drama using tech as the backdrop which isn’t either a comedy nor non-fiction.
by kissgyorgy | 2025-08-25 06:44:44+00:00
It's so much easier to build a mental model of a code base with LLMs. You just ask specific questions of a subsystem and they show files, code snippets, point out the idea, etc.

I just recently took the time to understood how the GIL works exactly in CPython, because I just asked a couple of questions about it, Claude showed me the relevant API and examples where can I find it. I looked it up in the CPython codebase and all of a sudden it clicked.

The huge difference was that it cost me MINUTES. I didn't even bother to dig in before, because I can't perfectly read C, the CPython codebase is huge and it would have taken me a really long time to understand everything.
by pontifier | 2025-08-25 06:44:44+00:00
I did this by accident in bash scripts many years ago when I was just getting into linux. I'd be running a script, and editing the script at the same time. It caused some REALLY weird issues before I figured out what was happening. For instance I'd change the text somewhere and it would change in the running program, or the program would get into states it should never be in. I didn't use it constructively, I just avoided editing running programs after that.
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-08-25 06:44:46+00:00
Mostly agree with the author. But I also believe that this is very emergent tech and we’re still figuring out the best way to actually make use of it

The clearest example is in AI generated visual content. If you dig through what people are doing, its clear that only a very small % of users are actually getting truly high-quality, ready-for-production content, while the rest are just prompting in pure slop. There is a skill level to this that hasn’t really permeated the mainstream

Once that happens, we might see some of that 95% waste figure change to, maybe, 50% waste
by dijit | 2025-08-25 06:44:50+00:00
It’s really not though.

It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.

Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).

The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..

however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave

if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
by jterrys | 2025-08-25 06:44:53+00:00
I agree with you in principle.

But I also, I guess, kinda just have a dumb thought about this whole ordeal. Broadly speaking, we are in a position where we, the general public with the backing of the government, want to change how a private corporation uses it's products that it sold to us. Not for any other reason that would shield us from harm or prevent risk, but rather because the corporation's products are so successful a lot of people use them too much! But wait! That's not actually true because there's enough products on the market that we don't actually need to use this product...but we like it because its incrementally the best and the chat bubbles are blue and applications run better and seem higher quality (which is a selling point of the product we are now actively dismantling but I digress...)

I know its tiring to use food cliches, but imagine if like, I make a business selling apple pies and my apple pies are incredibly successful and everyone eats them all the time and now all of a sudden I need to also guarantee that my business can make cherry pies because my apple pies sell so damn well. But truth is, its not really about the apple pies at all. It's about my baking trays. We actually just want to make sure that the baking trays of my business are now capable of also cooking for cherry pies even though that's got nothing to do with my fucking business. I sell apple pies. I'm so confused
by opo | 2025-08-25 06:45:12+00:00
Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The LCOE for consumer solar is between $81 and $217 per MWh. This is MUCH more expensive than grid based solar.

https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

>...This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.

The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.

>...A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.

It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run.
by kazinator | 2025-08-25 06:45:27+00:00
The author misses this:

Choral music is boring because the tempos tend to be slow. The instruments used are generally incapable of fast passages in which notes have a sharp, clear attack. Not just fast passages, but interesting passages. Choral melodies tend to be uninteresting, because they have to be singable. If there are too many awkward leaps, only some rare genius with a perfect ear and vocal control can pull it off; yet the same melody would be nothing to a violinist, pianist, or flutist, at twice the tempo, who would have all the notes crisply articulated with good intonation and a quick attack.

In a nutshell, some people like their Western Art music when it shreds.

Otherwise, not so much.

Which is not to say that vocals as such are unexciting; far from it. The problem is that choral works often just have too many people singing. Exciting vocals mainly have one vocalist, or at most a very small number, doing something powerful with their voices, not just hitting the notes in a score.

I'd rather listen to a good barbershop quartet than some Baroque chorale---even if it's by Bach! However, if the latter were reduced to an ensemble of just four people, it could work a lot better.

E.g. this actually sound pretty cool: five ladies singing the Toccata and Fugue in Dm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKI9VThPB4w

Much more fun than any random Bach chorale, sorry J. S.

But still, only to a point. Though they are hitting the notes and the harmonies are crisp, there is a lot of portamento (gliding from note to note). The attack of an instrument isn't there.

In terms of vocal power, it's a joke compared to swing, blues, rock.
by hofrogs | 2025-08-25 06:45:48+00:00
The language of the blog post is extremely bitter, self-aggrandizing and mocking, and points out hypocrisy that isn't there -- it's just multiple different groups of people who enjoy different things. There are zoomers that chat in XMPP, subscribe to RSS feeds and use other decentralized tech, and there are many that are not, there are those who enjoy frutiger aero look and feel and there are many that do not, and these groups may or may not overlap. You complain about being banned from some discord for advocating the use of XMPP, and I really can't blame them if you came there with the same tone and ego that you put on display with this post.

If you want people to listen to you and want to spread the values of decentralization and freedom you shouldn't be pouring hot oil on them from your ivory tower and then complain about how they are so dumb to mistreat and misunderstand you.
by ivape | 2025-08-25 06:46:01+00:00
Influencers, streamers, crypto …

Housing is back …

Dotcom came back…

Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it.

So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years.

AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it.
by mac-monet | 2025-08-25 06:46:06+00:00
Wow these would have saved my team and I a ton of time. Thanks for the links.

For what's missing from the TUI. The fact that the outputs in the main window are not selectable makes it difficult to keep the fuzzer running but copy the call sequence. I have to ctrl+c to get it into my terminal output and copy from there. I think these tools might help here though.
Show HN: Lekh – write-only, encrypted micro-journal at your own URL
by doodyman | 2025-08-25 06:46:23+00:00
I built Lekh, a minimal writing site with a write-only philosophy. Create lekh.space/yourname, set a password, and just write—no auth, no feeds, no distractions. Auto-saves; content is stored encrypted; reading isn’t the focus (you can view your own history at /yourname/all).

Live: lekh.space

Code: github.com/swappysh/lekh

I’d love feedback on: (1) the “can’t edit” constraint (2) use-cases you’d try (3) rough edges to fix first. I’m here to answer questions!
by toast0 | 2025-08-25 06:47:14+00:00
> There's also the "netheads and Bellheads" theory from the 1990s which can be taken to say that phone companies would never make technical changes to make themselves collect less data, or to be less helpful to government surveillance.

You've got to sell them on something that's useful for them. Present the case that eliminating data collection simplified their network, saves money, reduces staffing, and reduces interaction with government.
by cjblomqvist | 2025-08-25 06:48:21+00:00
Pragmatism rules here, but yeah - the common way to do this (at least if you have keys generatable by the client), eg. using REST, is to not allow POSTs, but only PUT. Most APIs I've seen use PUT solely for updates (of existing items), but as is obvious from the wording it's not the original intention.
Show HN: Spoon-Bending – a framework for analyzing GPT-5 alignment behavior
by pablo-chacon | 2025-08-25 06:48:34+00:00
I put together a repo called Spoon-Bending, it is not a jailbreak or hack, it is a structured logical framework for studying how GPT-5 responds under different framings compared to earlier versions. The framework maps responses into zones of refusal, partial analysis, or free exploration, making alignment behavior more reproducible and easier to study systematically.

The idea is simple: by treating prompts and outputs as part of a logical schema, you can start to see objective patterns in how alignment shifts across versions. The README explains the schema and provides concrete tactics for testing it.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-08-25 06:48:42+00:00
The origin of the term 'black list' had absolutely nothing to do with the melanin content of anyone. In fact, when that term was coined, it had nothing to do with the melanin content of anyone. It was a list of the enemies of Charles II.

That's why I posted that. I'd also point out that in my lifetime, folks with darker skin called themselves black and proudly so. As Mr. Brown[0][1] will unambiguously tell you. Regardless, claiming that a term for the property of absorbing visible light is bigoted, to every use of such a term is ridiculous on its face.

By your logic, if I wear black socks, I'm a bigot? Or am only a bigot if I actually refer to those socks as "black." Should I use "socks of color" so as not to be a bigot?

If I like that little black dress, I'm a bigot as well? Or only if I say "I like that little black dress?"

Look. I get it. Melanin content is worthless as a determinant of the value of a human. And anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely and sadly mistaken.

It's important to let folks know that there's only one race of sentient primates on this planet -- Homo Sapiens. What's more, we are all, no matter where we come from, incredibly closely related from a genetic standpoint.

The history of bigotry, murder and enslavement by and to our fellow humans is long, brutal and disgusting.

But nitpicking terms (like black list) that never had anything to do with that bigotry seems performative at best. As I mentioned above, do you also make such complaints about black socks or shoes? Black dresses? Black foregrounds/backgrounds?

If not, why not? That's not a rhetorical question.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM1_tJ6a2Kw

[1] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jamesbrown/sayitloudimblacka...
by TheDong | 2025-08-25 06:49:43+00:00
Someone already is "being an evil hacker" i.e. running ghrc.io

Is microsoft liable for people typoing a "docker login" command? Is there any chance of a lawsuit?

The fact that there is already someone exploiting it, and it's a big "meh" kinda proves the point perfectly that it's not really a big enough of a deal for the world to fall into chaos.
by 14 | 2025-08-25 06:49:53+00:00
I also remind people that laws change over time and that perfect crime prevention is actually a bad thing. The easiest example one can point to homosexuality. We now accept that people attracted to the same sex. But at one point in time in many places that was illegal. The last person in Canada to go to jail for being gay was in 1965, charged with gross indecency. But times and morals change so imagine if we had perfect police and everyone had to wear a camera at all times and every single thing you did was monitored and reported back to the police. No gays, no abortions, no alcohol, no speaking against governments or police, so many ways we would be oppressed. I am not saying people who harm children should free to break the law but the solution can not be to monitor everything every person does. The solution for me would be to teach people how to better set parental controls for their kids and to educate both parents and kids about dangers and online safety.
by herbst | 2025-08-25 06:49:57+00:00
More than half of my traffic is Bing, Claude and for whatever reason the Facebook bots.

None of these are main main traffic drivers, just the main resource hogs. And the main reason when my site turns slow (usually an AI, microsoft or Facebook ignoring any common sense)

China and co is only a very small portion of my malicious traffic. Gladly. It's usually US companies who disrespect my robots.txt and DNS rate limits who make me the most problems.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-25 06:50:29+00:00
> Simply put and in at least the near term, agents will be LLMs configured in such a way that they can plan, reason, and execute intellectual labor.

"...Look, just configure them, alright? If they look like they plan and reason, that must mean they're already doing it. I'm an ideas guy, I can't get bogged down in engineering details."
by gorgoiler | 2025-08-25 06:51:13+00:00
Thanks, I didn’t see that.

I still think the advice is misguided. Double-quote semantics are a fundamental and important part of getting shell scripting right. Trying to bend the default settings so that they are more forgiving of mistakes feels worse than simply fixing those mistakes.

In terms of maintainability, fiddling with IFS feels awkward. It’s definitely something you’ll need to teach to anyone unfamiliar with your code. Teach them how "" and @ work, instead!

(I agree about maintenance being hard. sh and execve() are a core part of the UNIX API but, as another comment here suggests, for anything complex and long-lived it’s important to get up to a higher level language as soon as you can.)
by Negitivefrags | 2025-08-25 06:51:17+00:00
I do agree with you, but I think there a non-zero chance the situation might be different now.

We are not getting the same insane gains from node shrinks anymore.

Imagine the bubble pops tomorrow. You would have an excess of compute using current gen tech, and the insane investments required to get to the next node shrink using our current path might no longer be economically justifiable while such an excess of compute exists.

It might be that you need to have a much bigger gap than what we are currently seeing in order to actually get enough of a boost to make it worthwhile.

Not saying that is what would happen, I'm just saying it's not impossible either.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-08-25 06:51:26+00:00
You have reading comprehension difficulties.

From the post I was replying to: “and it's a fallacy to imagine you'll never end up there if you don't ever do anything wrong”

“IF YOU DON’T EVER DO ANYTHING WRONG”

But you are right, interacting with this sort of person on the internet is probably a waste of my own time.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-25 06:51:32+00:00
Full title and subtitle:

> This cash experiment cut child deaths in half. Here’s the catch. Cash transfers can save lives. Just not very cost-effectively.

And from the article:

> Perhaps the most significant caveat about the study, however, is that, while the effect on infant mortality was large, the cost-effectiveness of the cash program as a lifesaving tool isn’t impressive. The cash program cost $25.75 million, and, per the study results, saved 86 children’s lives, for a cost per life saved of $299,418. That’s very good by rich country standards. For comparison, Medicaid takes $5.4 million to save a life. But it’s not competitive with the most cost-effective ways to save lives in countries like Kenya. GiveWell estimates that Vitamin A supplementation can save a life for about $3,500, while malaria prevention meds can do the same for about $4,500.