MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hgomersall | 2025-08-21 09:53:29+00:00
Engineering is just about wielding tools to solve problems. You don't need to use formal methods to do engineering in general. Sometimes they're useful; sometimes they're required; often they just get in the way.

In the context of software vs other sub-disciplines, the big difference is in the cost of iterating and validating. A bridge has very high iteration cost (generally, it must be right first time) and validation is proven over decades. Software has very low iteration cost, so it makes much more sense to do that over lots of upfront design. Validation of software can also generally be implemented through software tools, since it's comparatively easy to simulate the running environment of the software.

Other disciplines like electronics live a little closer to a bridge, but it's still relatively cheap to iterate, so you tend to plan interim design iterations to prove out various aspects.
by bsder | 2025-08-21 09:54:22+00:00
> About half of us are shocked and revolted by pretty much everything he says and does.

I'd put that at less than 1/3, actually.

The problem is that there is a good third of the US that seems to be completely oblivious that bad shit is going down until it shows up and kicks them in the balls personally.

This is, sadly, neither new nor limited to the US.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." John Philpot Curran--1790
by qwery | 2025-08-21 09:54:37+00:00
What does all of this have to do with (depictions of, references to, etc.) Anubis though? You responded to a comment about the mascot surely being a "jackalgirl" as opposed to a "catgirl" because of the Anubis name and other references. It seemed like you had an issue with the artwork, that it wasn't Anubisy enough, or something. Why would the drawing being more like the statues improve the situation?

Now you seem to be saying that anything that isn't what you wanted to find on the website is the problem. This makes sense, it just has nothing to do with what is shown on that page. But you're effectively getting frustrated at not getting to the page you wanted to and then directing your frustration toward the presentation of the "error message". That does not make sense.

> I like to talk seriously about art, representation, and culture. What's wrong with that? It's at least as interesting as discussing databases or web frameworks.

I don't have a problem with talking about art, you'll note that I responded in kind. When I said "I think you're taking it too seriously" I wasn't expecting that to be extrapolated to all subjects, just the one that was being discussed in the local context.
by curun1r | 2025-08-21 09:54:57+00:00
> almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway

The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.

I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
Show HN: ShipShipShip – Open-source tool for changelog and user feedback
by Iobs | 2025-08-21 09:55:16+00:00
Hello !

I was frustrated because every time I released a new feature on my website, users couldn't see it easily. So I created ShipShipShip, a self-hostable tool that creates a changelog page where users can see what has been released, what you're working on, and give their feedback.

The repo : https://github.com/GauthierNelkinsky/ShipShipShip

It's still very fresh and have a ton of features in mind to implement, so all feedback and suggestions are appreciated
by albumen | 2025-08-21 09:55:59+00:00
It's better if the sender includes tariffs/import duties in the price the customer pays originally, but it's easy to set up a system where the receiving country collects taxes on incoming deliveries. Ireland has it: https://www.anpost.com/Post-Parcels/Receiving/Pay-Customs-Ch...

I get an SMS saying that my parcel has arrived in the country but I have to pay customs before it's released for delivery, done via the site above.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-21 09:57:06+00:00
The price of assets (e.g., stocks, real estate, etc) is a function of the money supply. The responses to COVID inflated the money supply worldwide. If any area is in demand, of course the prices will increase, regardless of the money supply.

I can only assume some Copenhagen entity paid the WJS for this feature (to increase demand further). A new version of pump & dump?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-21 09:57:13+00:00
Based on the turnout you have 36% who silently approves the result since they didn’t turn up for the election.

Followed by 32% of the voting population which strongly approves of the result.

The ”not all of us” is a very tempting copout but it is quite evident that the American psyche is in general aligned with Trump.
by vvoyer | 2025-08-21 09:57:43+00:00
This 2024 re:Invent session says exactly the opposite:

"If you want to partition your data even better, you can introduce some randomness in your key names": https://youtu.be/2DSVjJTRsz8?t=2206

FWIW The optimal way we were told was to partition our data was to do this: 010111/some/file.jpg.

Where `010111/` is a random binary string which will please both the automatic partitioning (503s => partition) and manual partitioning you could ask AWS. Please as in the cardinality of partitions grows slower at each characters vs prefixes like `az9trm/`.

We were told that the later version makes manual partitioning a challenge because as soon as you reach two characters you've already created 36x36 partitions (1,296).

The issue with that: your keys are no more meaningful if you're relying on S3 to have "folders" by tenants for example (customer1/..).
by pembrook | 2025-08-21 09:57:45+00:00
Something feels bizarrely incongruent about the people using Anubis. These people used to be the most vehemently pro-piracy, pro internet freedom and information accessibility, etc.

Yet now when it's AI accessing their own content, suddenly they become the DMCA and want to put up walls everywhere.

I'm not part of the AI doomer cult like many here, but it would seem to me that if you publish your content publicly, typically the point is that it would be publicly available and accessible to the world...or am I crazy?

As everything moves to AI-first, this just means nobody will ever find your content and it will not be part of the collective human knowledge. At which point, what's the point of publishing it.
by Symbiote | 2025-08-21 09:58:08+00:00
Foreign businesses aren't required to register and collect UK VAT on items they send there, but by doing so they avoid their customers paying the £8 handling fee charged by Royal Mail.

An £8 fee makes a cheap product bought from China unappealing, so those sites do pay the fees. It's less important if the British person is buying something for €100 from a tiny French business.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-21 09:58:11+00:00
> UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough.

As a Brit I personally went through a phase of not really existing — no credit card, no driving licence, expired passport - so I know how annoying this can be.

But it’s worth noting that we have this situation not because of mismanagement or technical illiteracy or incompetence but because of a pretty ingrained (centuries old) political and cultural belief that the police shouldn’t be able to ask you “papers please”. We had ID cards in World War II, everyone found them egregious and they were scrapped. It really will be discussed in those terms each time it is mentioned, and it really does come down to this original aspect of policing by consent.

So the age verification thing is running up against this lack of a pervasive ID, various KYC situations also do, we can get an ID card to satisfy verification for in-person voting if we have no others, but it is not proof of identity anywhere else, etc.

It is frustrating to people who do not have that same cultural touchstone but the “no to ID” attitude is very very normal; generally the UK prefers this idea of contextual, rather than universal ID. It’s a deliberate design choice.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-21 09:59:57+00:00
> Crashes come when there was no real business value.

Indeed. That's why we don't have trains or the internet anymore; once they had their big crashes we knew there was no business value, so they went away.

... I mean, what? You generally can't get a big bubble without _some_ business value, so bursting bubbles almost always have _something_ behind them (the crypto one may be the exception).
by prmoustache | 2025-08-21 10:00:04+00:00
If you are in europe you have plenty of choice: slimbook, tuxedo, starlabs, novacustom, keynux, skikk....I think framework ships to europe and make sure their laptops are compatible with linux too:

https://frame.work/es/en/linux

EDIT: I hadn't seen the "without ordering online"

You just check what models/chipsets are supported when you are in the shops
by balamatom | 2025-08-21 10:00:14+00:00
>I like to talk seriously about art, representation, and culture. What's wrong with that?

It's no fun.

For one, you pulled your original response out of your ass. That the mascot is not a "catgirl" as identified by OP, but a canine variant of the same concept, because the project is named after the Egyptian god, is both obvious and uninteresting. You added nothing to that.

You're running around shouting "I get the joke, I get the joke" while grandstanding about how serious you are about art, one of the human pursuits helped least by seriousness, considering.

If you've decided you also need to be silly about it today, then at least have the decency to make up a conspiracy theory about the author being in fact a front for an Egyptian cult trying to bring back the old gods using the harvested compute, or whatever.

>massive failure of understanding the target audience.

Heh.

The anime image is put there as an intentional, and to my view rightful, act of irreverence.

One that works, too: I unironically find the people going like "my girl/boss will be mad at me if they see this style of image on my computer" positively hilarious.

>Maybe they could allow changing the art or turning it off?

They sure do. For money. Was in the release announcement.

Not enough irreverence in your game and you can end up being the person who let them build the torment nexus. Many such cases, and that's why we're where we are.

>That said, the anime I tend to like is more Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon and less kawaii girls.

A true connoiseur only watches chibi :3
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-21 10:02:33+00:00
> Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend.

Well... that's because capitalism incentivizes us to do it wrong. Instead of the dreams of the early sci-fi writers getting real - aka, robots and automation do the majority of the work, leaving humans time to socialize - we have it even worse nowadays, with even with the work force of women added to the labor pool, there still are constant political pushes to expand working hours or to even make it legal to hire children again.

If the profits from productivity gains over the last decades would have been distributed to the workers, either in terms of purchasing power or in free time, we wouldn't be in this entire mess.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-08-21 10:03:28+00:00
Tangentially related : It is possible to deanonymize users from kaggle dataset or netflix competition.

https://medium.com/@EmiLabsTech/data-privacy-the-netflix-pri...

Compared to the example of the medical records, Netflix had been very careful not to add any data that could identify a user, like zip-code, birthdate, and of course name, personal IDs, etc. Nevertheless, only a couple of weeks after the release, another PhD student, Arvind Narayanan, announced that they (together with his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov), had been able to connect many of the unique IDs in the Netflix dataset to real people, by cross referencing another publicly available dataset: the movie ratings in the IMDB site, where many users post publicly with their own names.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf

https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2018/project/Archie-Gers...
by LadyCailin | 2025-08-21 10:05:12+00:00
I’ve aleast applied some logic for all countries with shitty leaders. Russia, or Israel, or Gaza (Hamas) for instance. Who is responsible for the shittyness done by the governments of these countries? The governments, obviously. But when harm starts going to other nations, who is most responsible for stopping that? Surely the answer must be the citizens of that country? We can’t expect, say, Canada, or Zimbabwe, to be the morally responsible people and expect them to go in and stage a coup. If they do, maybe that’s fine, but they can’t be held culpable if they do nothing. The citizens however, must be, as there otherwise is no one else to stop the evil. Now, I include the US in this list too.

So, while it’s true that US citizens are not directly responsible for Trump, there is still a dereliction of ethical duty happening, in my opinion, assuming we agree that Trump is harming other people unnecessarily (which, naturally, many Trump supporters would disagree with.)

Of course, even if I’m right, what does that mean in practice? That random Americans on vacation in Italy can be snatched up and sent to The Hague? No, obviously not. I think the most practical effect is that this should give all Americans pause to think, and to at minimum ensure that they are not contributing to the problem in any way, and better yet, fighting the problem in some way.

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the fact that only 1/3 or so of Americans voted for Harris, which was the only choice that actually could have worked to stop Trump. 1/3 voted for him directly, and of course they are responsible, but another 1/3 couldn’t be bothered to vote, so it is actually a supermajority of the American people that are shitty, either because they couldn’t care less about other people, or they actively contributed to the problem.
by prmoustache | 2025-08-21 10:05:22+00:00
> Best of all, it all works on whatever I can get on Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Cool Blue, Conrad, Publico, Dixons,...

You don't expect MacOS to work on an ACER laptop you buy at the nearest Mediamarkt right? Nor do you expect to be able to plug a windows installer memory stick and install it on an apple silicon macbook air right ?

With only a couple minutes of research it is fairly trivial to find laptops compatible with linux, especially if you stick to business line of laptops such as the thinkpads, dell latitude. I could install and use Fedora on the last 3 professional laptops I have been given by my employers, as in all personal computers I have bought.
by rob74 | 2025-08-21 10:05:26+00:00
And if my neighbor purchases a cheap battery-powered product that violates all electrical regulations from TEMU and the fire started by it burns down my apartment too, who's responsible then? I guess my neighbor, and the insurance will probably cover the costs, but I will still have lost the apartment and all the stuff that was in it. And customs will maybe look at big shipments, but can't hope to check even a tiny fraction of the millions of small packages.
by sebstefan | 2025-08-21 10:06:04+00:00
There's a lot of noise around EVs between range anxiety, recycling, catching fire etc. Is this riding on non-existent problems or is it solving an actual real problem which I've been lucky to avoid so far?

I don't do e-bikes but I've had E-vespas and e-scooters and replacing a cell isn't really something I've had in mind. I've had lots of failures, none of them were from the battery. They all died too, before the battery.

The next step of the lifecycle is recycling, and that's done by professionals who do have arc welders, so they don't require such convenience
by glimshe | 2025-08-21 10:06:14+00:00
Great story!

I faced some problems in the old world of computers, but none as fun as this. I've always felt that computing was a lot more visceral back then because we were operating much closer to the machine.

Nowadays, software development is mostly about struggling against other humans: trying to undestand other people's mental models when patching libraries and APIs together. Back in the day, it was man vs machine.
by mpweiher | 2025-08-21 10:07:01+00:00
This was one of the changes I made to Smalltalk syntax for Objective-S[1]:

The pipe "|" as an analog to the cascade ";", but sending to the result, like a normal pipe would. This avoids having to go back and add parentheses when you have a longer expression involving keyword sends.

For example navigating a nested set of dictionaries

self classDefs at:className. (self classDefs at:className) at:which. ((self classDefs at:className) at:which) at:methodName.

vs.

self classDefs at:className. self classDefs at:className | at:which. self classDefs at:className | at:which | at:methodName.

[1] https://objecttive.st
by Cordiali | 2025-08-21 10:08:32+00:00
I was gonna mention that, but I felt I was waffling on a bit, so I deleted it!

We've got the same thing with GST, basically like VAT or sales tax. So that'll appear on the invoice from AliExpress or Steam or wherever.

Businesses have a threshold before they need to charge it though. If they're under that threshold (like a small business), but the value of goods is over another threshold, then the receiver has to pay GST.

If I remember correctly, customs would mail me a letter, and I'd pay it like a tariff. Which brings me back to the main point, that's just that the carrier has nothing to do with it. It's ridiculous to get them involved in a transaction they're not a party to.

Process might be slightly different, I'm remembering from about fifteen years ago.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-21 10:09:11+00:00
It's not that China is into junk production exclusively as your dishonest straw man claims. It's that china can make an overwhelming amount of it. The weird shipping situation subsidized the flow of junk from China to the US. It subsided everything else too but everything else didn't necessarily benefit as much from the subsidy so the junk is what really changes in volume based on the nickels and dimes of it.
by benterix | 2025-08-21 10:09:12+00:00
> That said, I strongly believe developers don’t do enough consideration as to how to maximize vendor usage in an optimal way

Because it's not straightforward. 1) You need to have general knowledge of AWS services and their strong and weak points to be able to choose the optimal one for the task, 2) you need to have good knowledge of the chosen service (like DynamoDB or Step Functions) to be able to use it optimally; being mediocre at it is often not enough, 3) local testing is often a challenge or plain impossible, you often have to do all testing on a dev account on AWS infra.
by sbene970 | 2025-08-21 10:09:20+00:00
Beware! This seems not robust at all right now. It seems to have bad problems with even simply managing an ongoing chat session. Yes, the simple task of keeping track of which messages belong to a session.. Which means that it randomly jumps back to earlier points in your conversation, with new messages simply getting lost or located in some random new session.

Go play with it, but don't use for important chats already.
by grhayk | 2025-08-21 10:10:05+00:00
I’m a backend developer and lately I’ve been struggling with API downtime going unnoticed until morning. Existing tools feel too heavy or expensive for small projects.

So I started building a lightweight API monitoring tool to send alerts when something breaks — especially useful at night.

I’d love to hear: how do you handle monitoring your APIs? Do you rely on tools like Pingdom, Datadog, or roll your own scripts? What works and what doesn’t?
by tengwar2 | 2025-08-21 10:12:03+00:00
From memory, I think we put ours (an FX80 rather than the MX80) in a box to keep the sound down. It was used with an [HP86](https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1982-10/pag...) controlling some lab equipment. Setting that up was my first paid job.
by kmac_ | 2025-08-21 10:15:01+00:00
In my opinion, there's a lot of unnecessary criticism here. The entire AI field is in a discovery phase, with new ideas, approaches, and methods emerging at many levels, including models and APIs. Right now, we don't even have a single standardized API for model responses (OpenAI's Chat Completions API is the de facto standard, but it's not formally standardized, lacks reasoning responses, and caching remains unclear, etc.). So some ideas from projects like this could stick and contribute something new.
by philjw | 2025-08-21 10:15:12+00:00
Interestingly I have seen a high share of iPhone Minis in my tech-affine bubble around Berlin / Amsterdam etc. - also my grandma switched from SE to 13 Mini.

Also bought used iPhone SE (2016) in 2019 and 2020 - both time from (UX) designers - but the same people also ride bicycles, trains - or if car, really reflect their user requirements - be it a small EV or a van for vanlife.

Average consumers just buy the largest, most marketed (high margin) or "whatever the neighbour has" option - aka SUV or Pro Max.
by closewith | 2025-08-21 10:15:34+00:00
> In the context of software vs other sub-disciplines, the big difference is in the cost of iterating and validating.

No, the big difference is that in the Engineering disciplines, engineers are responsible end-to-end for the consequences of their work. Incompetence or unethical engineers can and regularly do lose their ability to continue engineering.

It's very rare that software developers have any of the rigour or responsibilities of engineers, and it shows in the willingness of developers to write and deploy software which has real-world costs. If developers really were engineers, they would be responsible for those downstream costs.
by pembrook | 2025-08-21 10:16:02+00:00
I wish the rest of world would finally push back against US bullying. It's so pathetic that they don't even try.

When the Obama administration forced every bank in the world to start reporting the data and assets of any US-adjacent person (creating nightmare scenarios that continue today for most US expats), the entire world just rolled over and gave in. It was one of the greatest abuses of power, ever, all enabled by the US dollar's reserve currency status.

I can only hope this time is different due to the current administration being more hated around the world.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-21 10:17:45+00:00
I think social media platforms should have the ability to effectively ban abusive users, and I’m pretty sure that’s a mainstream viewpoint shared by most people.

The alternative is that you think people should be able to use social media platforms in ways that violate their rules, and that the platforms should not be able to refuse service to these users. I don’t think that’s a justifiable position to take, but I’m open to hearing an argument for it. Simply calling it “hellish” isn’t an argument.

And can you clarify if your position accounts for spammers? Because as far as I can see, your position is very clearly “spammers should be allowed to spam”.