MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by masklinn | 2025-08-25 17:06:56+00:00
> My otherwise mild skin condition completely destroys the shitty grippy/gummy rubber they put on scrollwheels and sometimes the sides of the mice.

I’m not sure it’s even skin conditions. I think it’s just the natural oils in the skin. It’s part of what polishes plastics (e.g. keyboard keys), and over time it impregnates the rubber which swells then falls apart.

This process is why wet belts are stupid, no reason to think mouse wheel rubber is any different.
by rfwhyte | 2025-08-25 17:07:11+00:00
Some context it seems a lot of folks in these comments have missed is that the off grid folks apparently use 1/120th of the town's water, yet contribute 15% of the town's water revenue. So effectively they are subsidizing the towns water system while using an insubstantially tiny fraction of the towns water, and even then the townies shut them out for reasons.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-25 17:07:18+00:00
>> Why are people who have little or no firsthand knowledge of the Middle Ages absolutely convinced they know the facts on this issue?

I used to have these arguments with an older relative, some acute, some chronic, about a) whether the edible part of an urchin is eggs or genitals [1], b) whether urchins with little pebbles and bits of seaweed on them are males, ornamented thusly to attract females [2], c) whether cypress tree sex can be determined by how open wide are their branches [3], d) whether the ruins discovered by Heinrich Schleimann on the coast of Asia Minor are really the ruins of the mythical Troy [4], and, e) whether ascent blackout during free-diving is a thing or not [5].

I've given up. People know what they know, either because their mother told them so when they were young, or because everyone knows, or because they know better than you. If someone's made up their mind that they're right and you're wrong, then they're right, you're wrong and you can't change their mind.

_______________

[1] Genitals.

[2] No, sea urchins do not have eyes.

[3] No, cypress trees have both male and female parts.

[4] Undetermined.

[5] It is.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-25 17:07:46+00:00
Would benefit from one or two small pictures. I guess MiniPC means like a Mac Mini or an Intel NUC?

> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.

> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.

Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.

That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
by Liftyee | 2025-08-25 17:08:11+00:00
Not sure about online mouse communities, but it intrigued me that you prefer replaceable AA batteries to built-in rechargeables. I realise now that because of my dislike (leaning towards hatred) of single-use alkaline batteries I unwittingly dismissed the benefits of having quick replaceability.

Nickel metal rechargeables are a good AA/AAA substitute for devices designed to tolerate their lower voltage. For more power, 14500/18650/21700 cylindrical lithium cells are my go-to.

Personally though, I find it more convenient to have a charging cable on hand vs keep some charged batteries on standby. When the built-in battery eventually goes bad, I am confident that I could replace it myself (not a universal position).
by pkaye | 2025-08-25 17:08:32+00:00
The Samsung 850 EVO drives probably used an SLC write cache. A small portion of the NAND is configured to use as an SLC write buffer so they can handle a burst of writes faster and later move them the the MLC/TLC region. This is sufficient for typical consumer workloads.

Another thing you will notice is the 850 EVO is 500GB capacity while the Intel one is 480GB. The difference is capacity is put towards overprovisioning which reduces write amplification. The idea is if you have sufficient free space available, whole NAND blocks will naturally get invalidated before you run out of free blocks.
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-25 17:09:07+00:00
"Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not."

If this was an actual problem, clothing prices would go up and clothing and cotton producers would outspend the AI companies if that's where the demand was. You are anticipating a problem that doesn't exist that the market is the best tool to solve once it were to arise. Prices are a fabulous feedback mechanism. The absence of prices as signals is what made planned economies fail and this was one of the main issues in the Socialist Calculation Debate. Don't try to guess what people want or need! As long as there is no market failure (no competition, natural monopoly, etc), price signals will lead to proper resource allocation.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-08-25 17:09:17+00:00
Maybe a little pedantic. Socialism then, or any existing embodiment of the first stages of Communism. Imposed by force on a population accustomed to another way. Usually accompanied by state confiscation of large businesses, the accompanied corruption, waste and ultimate food riots that often occur. Then a military takeover that's decried as crushing the utopian communist ideal! But actually, just getting everybody fed again.
by asveikau | 2025-08-25 17:09:35+00:00
And that argument is a bad faith smearing of less centralized organization structures. That is 100% how I have seen it used. The results tend to be awful.

As a society, we have codified "business douche" structures as inevitable. It is fair to ask who benefits from this. Usually it's about people installing themselves as the top of the hierarchy, hoarding money, power, and status.
by mothballed | 2025-08-25 17:10:25+00:00
Sounds like a market failure caused by using the government to meter water. In this case, the 'selfish' method would work better.

In a free market, the price of water rises so that there is no such thing as a "shortage." It would be uneconomical to waste water on lawns far before a significant amount of additional people would be unable to buy enough to drink. This is why you'll never find the gas station runs out of bottled water because a nearby farmer used it to water his strawberries, despite the selfish/greed factor of the bottled water industry being off the charts.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-25 17:10:26+00:00
> You can get MiniPCs with 4-6 internal M.2 slots that are great for building a NAS with.

Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
by __bb | 2025-08-25 17:11:01+00:00
It's a bit too soon to tell reliably, since I've shipped v3 as a new app and it hasn't settled down yet. For v2 it used to be 60% App Store and the remainder direct/Setapp. So far for v3 it is approximately 60% direct, 25% App Store and 15% Setapp.

This is a bit of a shift, but the numbers aren't really stable yet so it's hard to tell if it'll stay there.
by fbhabbed | 2025-08-25 17:11:07+00:00
While this is a very important issue, I think there is just another excuse to get rid of the only way left to achieve anonimity on the Internet, and this can only lead to bad things.

As the author admits, there's lots of good interests in keeping Tor a thing, and nothing good can come out from removing it.

Such people sharing illicit material should be investigated and prosecuted (with severe and appropriate court orders) through the ordinary means, but the author doesn't seem to have a good solution on hand, other than showing provocative questions like "why are we funding these Tor guys".

There's no single solution that they can implement TOR-side without breaking the whole point of the project. They won't implement any backdoor or similar bullshit, no matter what. There's no point in TOR if they do that. May as well disband the project.
Show HN: DateTime Utilities
by aster0id | 2025-08-25 17:11:34+00:00
I built this tool to replace all other web based ad-laden tools I use to work with timestamps in my day job. All of these things exist on the web already, but I put them all in one place and built a workflow around them to make working with them easier.

- It takes natural language input (yesterday at 3pm)

- It can convert a timestamp into different timezones

- It can convert a timestamp into various formats (how many of us have looked up "epoch converter" on google?)

- It can calculate the time difference between two timestamps

- It can add or subtract a time duration to a given timestamp

- It can round a given timestamp to the nearest minute, hour, day, month, year, etc.

I also added a few QoL features

- History section that stores the results on your browser

- A button to copy a result in the history to input (Copy to Input). This allows you to chain multiple operations together

- Last used timezones and formats will persist on your browser across sessions to make common conversions quick and easy

Here's a demo video to show how it all works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcBwIcqBLk8

I apologize for the potato video quality. I used free trial software and this was the first time for me to record or edit anything.

Happy to take questions and feedback!
by tpoacher | 2025-08-25 17:11:42+00:00
Neat trick indeed, but I have not yet found a compelling use-case for this that can't be done more sensibly using lambdas.

I once inherited a nice library which made heavy use of such compile/exec pairs. The code looked very convoluted and was very bug prone. I replaced all such pairs with lambda wrappers. This was much more readable: my colleagues who were also working on this code were like "oh is that what that was meant to be doing" after this change.
by jm4 | 2025-08-25 17:11:46+00:00
They serve completely different purposes and are not mutually exclusive. The main takeaways from the ublue stuff is how they build immutable OS images and focus on container-based development workflows. Omarchy is all about ergonomic desktop configuration. They are both cool projects.

You could easily replicate the container-based development workflows on Omarchy with distrobox even if you won't be using an immutable OS image. With more effort, you could replicate the Omarchy desktop configuration on a ublue image. Someone already ported Omarchy to nixos. I think we will continue to see a lot going on with immutable, reproducible operating systems and Omarchy will kickstart some cool stuff with desktop configuration.
by Insanity | 2025-08-25 17:11:47+00:00
To be honest, I'm a big fan of the MX Master series, I'll get the MX Master 4 on launch day most likely (will perhaps wait for a few reviews to make sure there aren't any regressions).

I even use it while gaming (it's heavier, but I used my g9x with max weight config, I like it that way).
by dylan604 | 2025-08-25 17:11:53+00:00
> 4 months of winter buffered by 10 ft of ground!

I'm sorry, but you write this as if that's nothing. Making a 10 foot hole is a massive amount of energy being spent. It's a massive amount of weight as 1 cubic yard of dirt is roughly one ton. In 10 cubic feet, that's roughly 3.5 tons. I say this as someone that moved 6 cubic feet of dirt by myself with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

So to think of 10 feet of dirt as a slow insulator would have to be one of the worst insulators out there.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-08-25 17:11:54+00:00
Yes indeed, I'm running Proxmox on an Asus NUC Pro... thing. Can't remember the exact name.

I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.

The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
by harel | 2025-08-25 17:12:08+00:00
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively since around 2005 when they sent you CD-ROMs (remember those?). I've been trying to switch to Arch for about 5 years now. Not because Ubuntu was broken, but because I wanted something new. I sometimes install it on an old laptop, marvel at the perceived speed increase of that old(er) machine, tell myself I'll switch tomorrow when I can find a spare day for it, and 5 years later it still didn't happen. My older laptop now runs Omarchy. And it's great and all, but I still don't think it will happen. My next laptop, for sure, will switch to Arch. Possibly. Maybe.
by vedhsaka | 2025-08-25 17:12:20+00:00
(cofounder here) Fair concern - cognitive distraction is real. We see it more like taking a phone call while driving (which people already do). We're purposely keeping interactions simple to make sure features aren't too distracting, and are working on a 'safe mode' that limits you to basic read-only operations while driving. We're actively researching attention management to make it simpler. Safety comes first.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-08-25 17:12:21+00:00
A beelink mini pc will draw about 5w when idle (measured with a watt meter the pc was plugged into). It’s smaller than a NUC (I think!) - it’s slightly bigger than a raspberry pi with a case. Not exactly this model but it cost about us $150.

https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150?_pos=4&_...
Show HN: DataCompose – Composable data transformation primitives for PySpark
by tccole | 2025-08-25 17:12:23+00:00
This is NOT a traditional library - it gives you production-ready data transformation primitives that you can modify to fit your exact needs. You own the code, with no external dependencies to manage or worry about breaking changes.

Inspired by shadcn's component approach: instead of importing a black box, you get battle-tested PySpark functions that live in YOUR repository. Handle email validation, address parsing, phone formatting.
Show HN: Get insights from Hacker News on X
by nivedit-jain | 2025-08-25 17:12:24+00:00
Hey everyone, hackernews is great to get insights, but hard to navigate.

Created a bot (WhatPeopleWant) that goes through hackernews finds hot conversations to post them on X every 2 hours. What People Want - live on X: https://x.com/peoplewant_ code is opensource: https://github.com/NiveditJain/WhatPeopleWant
by lucideer | 2025-08-25 17:13:16+00:00
<offtopic> Minor website feedback:

Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.

Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-08-25 17:13:20+00:00
“TDD failed because it assumed you could design a perfect systems before implementation”

TDD states the opposite.

TDD is very hard to do right and takes a lot of discipline. If i hadn’t worked for a company that did 100% XP, i would not have either believed it could be so effective. (Best Enterprise software i’ve ever seen and written)

In a way, it is funny. You can practise XP with your AI as pair.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-25 17:13:22+00:00
I get relentless text and phone spam calls - both robotic and with humans - from just a few voice over Internet platforms. Bandwidth.com, Neutral Tandem, and ALL the brands associated with Sinch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinch_AB) like Inteliquent. Many of these companies got cease and desist orders in the past from the FTC. It didn’t help anything. We need to see them fined, shut down, and executives jailed.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-25 17:13:37+00:00
Extremely good analogy and context with the pitch correction thing and equal temperament IMO.

We can only be stoic and say "slop is gonna be slop". People are getting used to AI slop in text ("just proofreading", "not a natural speaker") and they got used to artificial artifacts in commercial/popular music.

It's sad, but it is what it is. As with DSP, there's always a creative way to use the tools (weird prompts, creative uses of failure modes).

In DSP and music production, auto-tune plus vocal comping plus overdubs have normalized music regressing towards an artificial ideal. But inevitably, real samples and individualistic artists achieve distinction by not using the McDonald's-kind of optimization.

Then, at some point, some of this lands in mainstream music, some of it doesn't.

There were always people hearing the difference.

It's a matter of taste.
by atoav | 2025-08-25 17:14:08+00:00
From embedded experience I would say it could be benefitial to do paging only if you operate under heavy memory- or latency-constraints. But most APIs certainly are not.

Of course the should be some sort of maximum size, but I have seen APIs that return 1200 lines of text and require me to page them at 100 per request with no option to turn it off.
by kragen | 2025-08-25 17:14:30+00:00
Well, no, if you look at a trigonometric table, it doesn't say sin 60° = √3/2, because that isn't a useful value for calculation. It'll say something like 0.866025. But that has an error of a little more than 0.0000004. Instead Wildberger prefers saying that the spread (sin²) is ¾, which has no error. It is more accurate. There's no debate about this, except from margalabargala.

The news from this paper (thanks for the link!) is that evidently the Babylonians preferred that, too. Surely Pythagoras would have.

But how do you actually do anything useful with this ratio ¾? Like, calculating the height of a ziggurat of a given size whose sides are 60° above the horizontal? Well, that one in particular is pretty obvious: it's just the Pythagorean theorem, which lets you do the math precisely, without any error, and then at the end you can approximate a linear result by looking up the square root of the "quadrance" in a table of square roots, which the Babylonians are already known for tabulating.

For more elaborate problems, well, Wildberger wrote the book on that. Presumably the Babylonians had books on it too.
by ibaikov | 2025-08-25 17:14:32+00:00
I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution.

I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)
by pkulak | 2025-08-25 17:14:47+00:00
The government can meter stuff at market rates too.

Though, there also seems to be a lot of spite here, which the market may not be able to solve. Seems like the folks buying bulk water were paying FAR more, to the point that they were using less than 1% of the supply, but paying 15% of the cost. In a pure market, they would be the last cut off, yet they were the first.
by lvl155 | 2025-08-25 17:14:57+00:00
Logitech still refuses to make USB-C dongle/receiver. And every time I bring it up there’s always someone who says use USB-A. Yeah, duh. I am forced to use it. Five years ago they tried to make it sound like it was the USB-C standard but Lenovo has since proven that theory wrong since they have a USB-C receiver. I don’t like Chinese copycats but Logitech’s stupid marketing department is the reason why I don’t mind the Chinese ripping them off.

Edit: I am wrong. They recently released USB-C receiver after years and years of refusing to make one.
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-25 17:15:03+00:00
You might enjoy the book Scale by Geoffrey West. One of the cool things he shows is that infrastructure needs of cities scale with an exponent of 0.85 while social things like incomes, patents but also crime scale with an exponent of 1.15. So as cities grow they get more efficient and it seems to be somewhat of a natural law that crosses countries and cultures.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-25 17:15:20+00:00
Furniture for managed office space has different requirements.

If someone's unstable motorized desk tips over and injures someone at the office, it's a big problem for the company.

A cheap desk might have more electrical problems. Potential fire risk.

Facilities has to manage furniture. If furniture is a random collection of different cheap desks people bought over the years they can't plan space without measuring them all. If something breaks they have to learn how to repair each unique desk.

Buying the cheapest motorized desk risks more time lost to fixing or replacing it. Saving a couple hundred dollars but then having the engineer lose part of a day to moving to a new desk and running new cables every 6 months while having facilities deal with disposal and installation of a new desk is not a good trade.
by adregan | 2025-08-25 17:15:26+00:00
I was using a vertical Logitech mouse but was still experiencing discomfort mousing out to the side of my enormous Advantage2 keyboard. In an effort to head off any compounding RSI issues, I switched to a ploopy Adept trackball. Had no idea if I'd like switching to a trackball, and I love it! My hand never moves in an awkward motion, and mousing has become pretty restful. Better be careful tossing the ball up in the air idly during meetings as I won't be able to get a replacement if ploopy has paused shipping to the US (It's a pretty dumb habit at any rate).
by 9rx | 2025-08-25 17:15:45+00:00
> Socialism then

While the Communist Party does believe in socialism, that does not sum it up either. That would be like trying to tie the Republican Party up in a capitalism bow. They do believe in capitalism, but so does the Democratic Party. Yet they are clearly different parties with some very different ideas.

> or any existing embodiment of the first stages of Communism.

The USA is the country most in the first stages of communism. Its technical innovation has nearly pushed food into post-scarcity territory (some argue it is already there), and it is working hard, harder than any other country, to do the same in other areas of production.

While some of your points resonate with what Trump is doing, for the most part he is an aberration and there isn't yet much indication that he — or anyone in the future — will get away with it.
by nativeit | 2025-08-25 17:16:18+00:00
I just stopped answering any/all unknown phone numbers. Only my contacts get me without leaving a message. I'm sure it's caused me to lose business, but I can't find a better way of maintaining my own productivity/sanity. I do disclose this practice in the outgoing message, and encourage callers to text me if they don't get an answer. Whatever software the robocallers use doesn't seem to be smart enough to clock this as an alternative channel, but I'm sure some AI product will make this worse.