MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by generj | 2025-08-03 02:46:49+00:00
Potential buyers should also be aware the fountain pen community on Reddit has soured massively on Goulet.

In addition to deteriorating service and slow shipping concerns compared to alternatives, there’s a view that purchasing from the company directly funds anti-LGBTQ owners and organizations. The owners cofounded a branch of a church whose pastor made wildly anti-LGBTQ remarks. The response to the controversy was not well handled by the Goulets (essentially radio silence then an highly misleading statement). The controversy came around the same time a well beloved podcast employee Drew was fired.

There was also the prior controversy with Noodler’s Inks and the Gaulet’s rehabilitating him after anti-Semitic imagery was placed for a second time on his bottles.

Because so much of the original megathread was deleted (whole lot of subreddit moderation drama occurred because of this incident) I’m linking a later summary for those curious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/1heveiu/the_2...
by doright | 2025-08-03 02:47:53+00:00
For a long time I tried to start an exercise habit, but it didn't stick. I could jog 15 minutes every day for a month and instantly be sick of it a few days after.

I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.

A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.

Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
by linguae | 2025-08-03 02:48:04+00:00
Many undergraduate CS programs require their students to take one or two classes where students learn about grammars, parsing, abstract syntax trees, interpreters, and compilers. I’ve also taken graduate courses in programming languages that involved adding features to languages.

Writing a new language from scratch is typically beyond the scope of a semester. It’s trivial to implement a small language like Scheme in a semester, but more complex languages will take more time.
by westurner | 2025-08-03 02:50:21+00:00
From "Getting hit by lightning is good for some tropical trees" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506262 :

>> "Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms" (2024)

>> "Gamma rays convert CH4 to complex organic molecules [like glycine,], may explain origin of life" (2024)

TIL that gamma radiation destroys Teflon. And lighting storms produce gamma radiation.

And that "Lightning on Earth is sparked by a powerful chain reaction from outer space, simulations show" (2025) https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/lightning-on... :

"Photoelectric Effect in Air Explains Lightning Initiation and Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes" (2025) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JD04...
by joules77 | 2025-08-03 02:51:59+00:00
Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West was written 100 years ago and the theory says - Countries/Civilizations are like Organisms - born - grow - age - die. He shows the life cycle of an empire.

People are so individually different in values/ambitions/knowledge/skill/personality etc etc they start thinking about their own needs and run in different directions. Sooner or later what holds the group together is nothing. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls it the immanent frame but they don't teach Philosophy these days.

Things that last are Religion (shared stories that hold people together).

Religions have learnt long ago (the hard way) keeping very different types of people together for the long term, involves making them focus on something much larger than themselves.

So we still have the Vatican or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism etc that have lasted longer the Nations. Nations come and go.
by boroboro4 | 2025-08-03 02:52:37+00:00
Yes? Not everything is about capital owners and their profits. There is a lot of importance in the competition in the market and customers having choice of best products around. Figma competing with adobe is one of the examples.

Even from capital point of view everyone is now forced to make their bet - either on adobe or figma, so it’s more efficient capital allocation too.
by recipe19 | 2025-08-03 02:52:40+00:00
These aren't annual pay packages. It's some "can't retire on that" base salary plus a promise of gradually vesting equity on a multi-year schedule. For public companies, you'll get that amount if you hang around for x years and there is no sudden decline in market price. For non-public companies (OpenAI), the equity is more pie-in-the-sky.
by tombert | 2025-08-03 02:54:12+00:00
I had to do a UML thing for the first time in years for a class a few weeks ago[2].

I'm not 100% convinced that UML is actually useful at all. Obviously if you find value from it, don't let me take that from you, by all means keep doing it, but all it seemed to provide was boxes pointing to other boxes for stuff that really wasn't unclear from looking directly at the code anyway. It's really not that hard to look directly at the class and look directly at the "extends" keyword (or the equivalent for whatever language you're using) and then follow from there. Maybe if you had like ten layers of inheritance it could be valuable, but if you're doing ten layers of inheritance there's a good chance that your code will be incomprehensible regardless.

I'm not against visual diagrams for code, I draw logic out with Draw.io all the time and I've been hacking on the RoboTool [1] toolkit a bit in my free time, but what UML offers always felt more masturbatory than useful.

Maybe I'm wrong, it certainly wouldn't be the first time, but every time I've tried to convince myself to like it I've left a little disappointed. It always kind of felt like stuff the enterprise world does to look like they're working hard and creating value.

[1] https://robostar.cs.york.ac.uk/robotool/

ETA:

[2] By "class", I meant like an education class, not a Java class.*
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-03 02:54:45+00:00
> Look at trucks in the 1990s and compare the size.

If you actually compare similiar configurations, you'll find basically no difference in size.

Compared to a 90's F-150, a modern f-150 is

* 1" wider

* Either 0' longer or 1' longer depending on the exact configuration

* 1" taller

* Nearly 1k lbs less heavy (lots of weight optimization in the past ~35 years)
by 9rx | 2025-08-03 02:55:07+00:00
> e.g. null checks, function parameters are correct type.

Once you've tested the complex things that (almost) no language has a type system able to express, you also have tested null checks, function parameter types, etc. by virtue of you needing to visit those situations in order to test the complex logic. This isn't a real problem.

What you might be trying to suggest, though, is that half-assed type systems are easier to understand for average developers, so they are more likely to use them correctly and thus feel the benefit from that? It is true that in order to write good tests you need to share a formal proof-esq mindset, and thus they are nearly as burdensome to write as using a formal proof language. In practice, a lot of developers don't grasp that and end up writing tests that serve no purpose. That is a good point.
by kelnos | 2025-08-03 02:57:07+00:00
My experience has been similar, over perhaps 4-6 weeks of Claude Code. My first few days were a bit rough, and I was tempted to give up and proclaim that all my skeptic's opinions were correct and that it was useless. But there is indeed a learning curve to using it. After a month I'm still learning, but I can get it to give me useful output that I'm happy committing to my projects, after reviewing it line by line.

Agreed that context and chunking are the key to making it productive. The times when I've tried to tell it (in a single prompt) everything I want it to do, were not successful. The code was garbage, and a lot of it just didn't do what I wanted it to do. And when there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, CC has trouble making targeted changes to fix issues one by one. Much better is to build each small chunk, and verify that it fully works, before moving on to the next.

You also have to call its bullshit: sometimes it will try to solve a problem in a way you know is wrong, so you have to stop it and tell it to do it in another way. I suppose I shouldn't call it "bullshit"; if we're going to use the analogy of CC being like an inexperienced junior engineer, then that's just the kind of thing that happens when you pair with a junior.

I still often do find that I give it a task, and when it's done, realize that I could have finished it much faster. But sometimes the task is tedious, and I'm fine with it taking a little longer if I don't have to do it myself. And sometimes it truly does take care of it faster than I would have been able to. In the case of tech that I'm learning myself (React, Tailwindcss, the former of which I dabbled with 10 years ago, but my knowledge is completely out of date), CC has been incredibly useful when I don't really know how to do something. I'm fine letting CC do it, and then I read the code and learn something myself, instead of having to pore over various tutorials of varying quality in order to figure it out on my own.

So I think I'm convinced, and I'll continue to make CC more and more a part of my workflow. I'm currently on the Pro plan, and have hit the usage limits a couple times. I'm still a little shy about upgrading to Max and spending $100/mo on a dev tool... not sure if I'll get over that or not.
by defrost | 2025-08-03 02:57:39+00:00
The land isn't free and arable land with good water is hard to come by.

Mangoes are not grown in the Tanami or Great Sandy Desert. They're not grown around Kalgoorlie (that relies on piped in water from far, far away), etc.

Mangoes (Mangifera indica) are predominantly grown in the Northern Territory and Queensland, and when combined, produce approximately 95% of the total national crop. Mangoes are also grown in Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

from: https://www.industry.mangoes.net.au/who-we-are/our-industry/

crop map: https://www.industry.mangoes.net.au/resources/resources-libr...

The areas they are grown have tropical rainforest (Qld), vast Wetlands (those parts of the Northern Territory with fresh water crocodiles, swamps, etc), annual monsoons (Kimberley), etc.

But yes, we do have on point water management.
by mlyle | 2025-08-03 02:58:35+00:00
I just put down a deposit. I make things from plywood sometimes, and even in my wife's R1S it's a pain. When we don't take the R1S, all 5 of us have to fit in my car (Honda Clarity). I coach robotics teams and sometimes need to haul a lot of stuff. Sometimes we do some light offroading in the R1S.

Looks like this will do all the things I need OK. I would like to drive something small and easy to park, that I could offroad a bit, carry my family a bit, haul stuff a bit.

And I've always liked the weird aesthetic of kei trucks and things like the Jeep Forward Control.
by mlyle | 2025-08-03 02:59:29+00:00
Payload's around 1700-2000 pounds, TBD.

Towing is possible but limited-- this is a weak point for all electric vehicles-- but good enough to haul a trailer to the dump or a boat a small distance.

But the bed is better in some ways than the Tacoma.

Big question is whether they can reach production and really deliver for this pricing, etc. They have ~11k preorders and could develop a lot more.
by tombert | 2025-08-03 02:59:49+00:00
I'm not a C++ developer at all, but unless I'm missing something this didn't seem terribly difficult?

This isn't meant to make myself seem smart or to try and make you seem dumb, I'm just curious what was confusing about this even from a high-level perspective. It felt like a clever but not too atypical metaprogramming thing.

Maybe I've just done too much Clojure.
by ChipopLeMoral | 2025-08-03 03:01:21+00:00
I really like the solar roof and bed cover add-ons. They don't have specs but should be roughly 4 square meters combined or so? so about 800w at peak power. Not enough to let you rely on it even if you live in a sunny place, but it could add up to a nice reduction in cost per mile if you use it to commute and park it in the sun.
by jdefr89 | 2025-08-03 03:02:06+00:00
Seriously. The transformer coupled with tons of compute is why we got here. When that paper came out and people (AI researchers) saw the results many were confused or unconvinced. No one has any clue such an architecture would yield the results it has. AI systems has always been far more art than science and we still don’t even really know why it works. I feel like that idea being stumbled upon was sort of more luck than anything…
by timr | 2025-08-03 03:04:02+00:00
> Problem is, by the time she got into power, everyone had consolidated so icing the transaction market was pretty much only outcome.

That's the talking point, but it doesn't survive even 30 seconds of thought. Yes, the biggest tech companies are very big -- debatably too big! -- but there are easily hundreds of smaller cap companies that you probably haven't heard of who are big enough to acquire startups. If anything those companies are the bulk of the M&A market, and the FTCs actions shut it all down [1].

The problem with the Khan view of the world (IMO) is that it was so fixated on the killing the whales that it didn't realize it was killing the other fish.

[1] By way of explanation: just by the nature of software economics, if you're big enough to make acquisitions in some niche industry, you probably own that industry (or are at least a duopoly player) and are therefore concerned that the FTC will target you.
by philwelch | 2025-08-03 03:04:25+00:00
My interpretation of the original claim was that, on a per capita basis, the rate of fatal accidents among motorcyclists with license, registration, insurance, and helmets is 30% that of motorcyclists who have none of those things, with no particular claim implied about motorcyclists who fulfill between 1-3 of those four criteria. I know that wasn't necessarily the only possible interpretation but I think it's a reasonable one.
by habitue | 2025-08-03 03:04:27+00:00
Basically, this article is saying "modelling your domain logic in a type system is hard" and suggests wimping out.

Just get good!

Your job as a programmer is to think through the domain logic, find the right abstractions to represent that logic, and then tell the computer to enforce those abstractions for you. Punting business logic to "it's all messy, type systems can't be used to model it" is just saying "I cant take the time to find the right abstractions, sorry"
by johannes1234321 | 2025-08-03 03:05:24+00:00
It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches.

Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release.

Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.
by vel0city | 2025-08-03 03:06:04+00:00
The margaritas at the places I go to are often $3 for a large. Lots of places will have cheap "domestic" beers for $2. Fancy craft beers can be had for $7-10. And that's after COVID price hikes. Less than a decade ago I'd get $2 craft pints often if you knew where to go.

I'm in one of the largest metros in the US.

Yes, there are plenty of places that will charge $12 for a beer. I don't go there. I can get the same beer cheaper down the street and have a more entertaining crowd.
by jdefr89 | 2025-08-03 03:06:09+00:00
Lmao right!? Dude stole all that from Xerox and MS came out with palm pilots early 2000s then you had black berry. Amazing how many people think CEOs actually did the work they get credit for when they almost virtually all were in the right spot with the right people. Notice none of them can reproduce or start another ultra successful startup… Zuckerberg is a perfect example of one hit wonder and he wasn’t even the first to create social sites.. You had MySpace and a ton of others..
by narrator | 2025-08-03 03:06:18+00:00
The best way to do long-term care for a loved one is to hire the nurses they like at a facility they stay at for a short while to treat the sick person at home. This is vastly cheaper than doing so in a facility, and the nurses earn more and are incentivized to keep the person as healthy as possible because the job pays very well since there is no facility extracting enormous overhead and executive salary costs from their salary.
by Atheros | 2025-08-03 03:09:18+00:00
I don't think the issue is that they are naive or lack social skills, I think they just choose against it, and then lie about the motivation for their choice. It's all over this thread: "No time and no money!" But you know it's false. I think they know it's a lie too they just don't want to admit to themselves and others that they like TikTok more than people. Being a lame couch potato is socially acceptable if and only if you connect it to the big class-based social cause. They relished in the COVID lockdowns for similar reasons.

It's not naivete; it's dishonesty.
Ask HN: What crypto payments options should I offer for my VPN?
by willprice89 | 2025-08-03 03:10:17+00:00
I run a VPN service designed to get around censorship. Customers are mainly people in countries like China, Iran, and Russia. Unfortunately those countries don't have easy access to common Western payment methods (credit cards, PayPal etc.)

I thought adding a cryptocurrency payment option could give more people access, but I don't have any real experience in the area and the information I've found searching online seems extremely unreliable.

So I'm hoping I can get some better answers from Hacker News. Here are my questions:

1. Is crypto a good choice for this use case? Are there other options that would achieve my goal (allow people who can't use Western payment methods to pay)?

2. Could I start with one or just a few specific cryptocurrencies? Or do I need to support a whole bunch of different coins?

3. Any recommendations for self-hosted tools or third-party processors for actually accepting the payments?
by mizzao | 2025-08-03 03:12:45+00:00
Second this! My daughter stopped around lesson 53 when she was 4, but it stuck now at 6 years old she's able to read full books on her own, with her reading speed and ability increasingly exponentially.

TL;DR version of the article, and our experience with kids' reading, is that phonics is probably the best way to teach reading but people have tried many other crackpot techniques that don't work very well.
by sizzzzlerz | 2025-08-03 03:14:18+00:00
I live in the San Jose end of the bay. We haven't had temps above mid-80s all this summer. Typically, July has at least one week of 100+ temperatures. This summer, its been mostly 70s and low 80s. I'm not complaining and we still have to get through August and September so we'll see. It is unique however. I've been living here since '78 and it is definitely the coolest summer in that time.

'
by xivzgrev | 2025-08-03 03:14:55+00:00
Wow this cue method was confusing to me. It's like saying the most efficient way to drive a car is to press the pedal, while turning a crank, while also tooting a horn.

No. The most efficient way is to just drive the car with the pedal. Likewise, efficiently being able to identify words is, surprise surprise, the most efficient way to then read a series of words (sentence).
by SamBam | 2025-08-03 03:15:11+00:00
But the point is that you'd be extracting the nonce from someone else's existing video of the same event.

If a celebrity says something and person A films a true video, and person B films a video and then manipulates it, you'd be able to see that B's light code is different. But if B simply takes A's lighting data and applies it to their own video, now you can't tell which is real.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-03 03:15:43+00:00
This is incorrect: Alacritty does not have significant lag on old hardware. I suspect you actually meant "hardware that does not have (what is colloquially called) 3D acceleration".

That said, I agree with Terminal elitism being weird: as long as a terminal implements truecolor, both leonerd's and kitty's input protocols, undercurl, OSC52, and maybe OSC8, and otherwise isn't weirdly broken, its good enough.

On that list, alacritty, wez, kitty, foot, WT, anything that uses libvterm, and maybe Ghostty (last time I looked at it, it was just trying to look cool, not being an actually fully implemented terminal, but people swear by it now). Also, multiplexers that implement these requires are on the good enough list, such as tmux or zellij, but not screen (screen tries to pass unknown sequences through, but still sometimes mangles them by accident).

Things that are not required to be on the good enough list: tabs and split panes and any sort of menu bar. These are not show stoppers that prevent compatibility with terminal programs.
by vel0city | 2025-08-03 03:16:56+00:00
I live in a suburb in the US

> The front stoop/street/sidewalk where everybody hangs out?

My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.

> The public square?

The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.

> The park?

My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.

And that's before getting into the public sports facilities and other recreation facilities.

> The market—not to buy or sell necessarily, but because everybody’s there?

I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.

> The library?

Excellent library with lots of events going on. They're rebuilding the main building after a fire, but even in their temporary space its great. Its usually pretty busy. It has excellent transit and bike paths to get to it, even in its temporary location.

> The public pool/baths?

Lots of city pools. Even one with a lot of water slides, its like a small water park.

> The house of worship in walking distance?

There are plenty of churches in Texas, trust me.

So once again, what's missing? And I'm not in an absurdly wealthy place, my suburb has a pretty average average household income. And its been roughly like this for most places I've lived or stayed at for significant periods of time. Maybe a bit less on transit, that is something my current place is probably a decent bit better than the average US suburb there.