MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by extraisland | 2025-08-19 13:31:57+00:00
Repairing a known item makes sense when the costs are small compared to a replacement. I have old bicycles that are worth nothing and I am quite happy to spend maybe £50-£150 in components to fix. Costs are much lower than buying a new good bike or trying to find another good second hand bike (which I would need to fix anyway).

However that frequently isn't the case with car. It is £300-1000 every time I need to get it repaired. This happens at an increasing frequency as the car ages. This can then add up to several 1000s quite easily.

e.g In the last year I owned that Astra I had to to fix the following issue (all costs include labour):

- New Clutch (and it needed to be towed to the garage as the clutch wouldn't engage). £1000 for clutch replacement, £150 for the tow. I also needed to rent a car to drive to a funeral. That cost me another £100-200 IIRC. So we we are up to £1350.

- Car would randomly go into Limp mode. New sensor cost £300. Vehicle was never really fixed. It just went into Limp mode much less, so there was another problem somewhere. Which would need another trip to the garage.

- Service. This flagged several issues with the car. All these small repairs was another £800.

I am already upto £2,450 and I know I've forgotten stuff. I bought the car for £4000 originally.

If it was something like a classic barn on wheels Volvo which are bullet proof, or a classic Rover like a Rover P5. I might be willing to keep dumping money into it. But it isn't, it is a Vauxhall Astra.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-19 13:32:10+00:00
I don't understand why companies doing hardware do this, surely it is much more expensive to design so many different devices? It dilutes the brand and makes the supply chain more complicated.

Like how much extra market capture really gets from having 4/5 different versions of the same basic segment?

Like I can see a reason to create several different versions based on screen size and upcharge for memory because that is a rather minor change. But otherwise why make them different at all?

Like if they really wanted to make different screen sizes just iPad 16'', iPad 14'', etc. Why make such a fuss with extra design changes besides that.

Like you said, Apple was the one company that didn't (over)do this, but not anymore.
Ask HN: Founding Engineer/CTO (equity) for music rights/data infra (UK/US)
by Ritwq | 2025-08-19 13:32:30+00:00
I’m building a quiet, behind-the-scenes data/permissions infrastructure product for music—infra, not consumer/streaming. Goal is simple: turn messy ownership + policy into clean, programmable rails so a music-use request can become a verifiable licence in seconds.

What you’d own (0→1): • v1 APIs: /resolve → /quote → /license.issue • Data plumbing: record linkage/de-dup (think ISRC↔ISWC), audit trail, versioning • Reliability: auth, idempotency, webhooks, retries, observability

Must have: shipped production APIs; Python or Go; Postgres; basic AWS/GCP; security (JWT, key rotation, webhook sigs). Nice: entity resolution/IR, DDEX/CWR, Stripe/Adyen (pre-auth/escrow), ACR/vendor integrations.

Stage & terms: lean two-person team; advance POC / early MVP by Dec ’25 to support a pre-seed. Equity-heavy co-founder role (cash post-funding). Location: UK or US; London preferred; remote OK within GMT±5.

If interested, please reply with a link to something you’ve shipped (repo/product) and a couple of time windows, or email workritwikpunjwani@gmail.com.
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-19 13:32:30+00:00
With "type": "module" there's very few reasons to do dual compilation unless you have very conservative downstreams that hate promises and async/await, and even then there's mitigations now (sync `require()` of async ESM).

It's been a while since I've had a trouble importing an upstream CommonJS library. Often it is easy enough in the rare cases where upstream is particularly old/gnarly you can vendorize an ESM build with rollup or esbuild.

That said, CommonJS is also now a strong maintenance signal for me and if a library doesn't have recent ESM builds I start to wonder if it is at all well maintained and not just a pile of tech debt to avoid. JSR has started becoming my first place to search for a library I need, ahead of NPM, because of JSR's focus (and scoring systems) on ESM first and good Typescript types.
by saynay | 2025-08-19 13:32:41+00:00
The confusing choices are deliberate way to exploit psychology of potential buyers into up-selling themselves. The idea is to entice them by the more reasonable base price, but use the uncertainty on if it will really meet their needs to push them up a ladder of upgrades.

Maybe the 16e sounds good at $599. But, it might be a bit underpowered, so maybe you should just upgrade to the 15 at $699. Then it is only $100 more to just go for the 16 (or 15 Plus), so might as well right? But maybe you want a bigger screen or twice the storage, which are both another $100. Then for another $100, you can get the nicer materials or the extra camera, etc for the 16 Pro...

This is a marketing strategy you see in a lot of the phone market, and has proven to be successful at pushing customers into the higher-margin devices.
by dariosalvi78 | 2025-08-19 13:32:52+00:00
I do the same, I include a few news outlets, HN, some good blogs I follow, even podcasts. All sorted chronologically: you can filter by source or tag, no clutter, no ads, just links and often even the full text. All is hosted on an ancient RaspberryPi 3 and exposed over public Internet (with password protection).

https://freshrss.org/
by nelox | 2025-08-19 13:32:58+00:00
I think you are spot on. What makes Chiang remarkable is that he never just builds a clever world and then leaves it at that. The counterfactuals are always put under pressure until their human consequences show through. That is why the religious stories work so well. He does not mock belief from the outside, he imagines a world where belief is literally true and then forces us to face the consequences. The horror comes from taking doctrines at face value and discovering that they are not comforting at all.

Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.
by Gravityloss | 2025-08-19 13:33:24+00:00
Yes, I agree. But the whole business area has also changed and matured. B737 is 56 years old, but A320 is 38 years so not very new anymore. Certification takes very long nowadays, for any company. So the financialization might not have happened in a vacuum or because of some villain, but motivated by the situation that there was less money to be made with engineering anymore.
by photonthug | 2025-08-19 13:33:25+00:00
Ok this nerd-sniped me pretty good, never seen this before and assumed it would be quickly connected to the Ulam spiral mentioned elsewhere in the the thread. That particular rabbit hole kinda bottoms out in polynomial residues and the very mysterious-sounding "Conjecture F" [0].

This parallax primes thing though led to the linked page [1] which has lots of background and other connections, including the most satisfying part, which turned out more geometric [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral#Explanation [1] https://www.novaspivack.com/science/we-have-discovered-a-new... [2] https://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Arithmetic/PrimesFro...
Show HN: A paycheck calculator for all 50 US states with 2025 tax rules
by lion__93332 | 2025-08-19 13:33:31+00:00
A web-based paycheck calculator has been built to reflect the latest 2025 federal and state tax policies across all 50 US states. It estimates after-tax income by accounting for federal, state, and FICA deductions, and supports different pay frequencies (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.).

The intent is to provide an up-to-date, lightweight tool for anyone trying to quickly understand take-home pay. The design goal was simplicity: one page, minimal inputs, instant breakdown.

Questions for the community: • What additional features would actually make this more useful (e.g., 401k, health deductions, local taxes)? • Would people prefer a simple “quick estimate” vs. a more configurable advanced mode? • From a technical/product perspective, what would you change or add?

Feedback is welcome, especially from those who have dealt with paycheck calculators before or have strong opinions on usability.
by infecto | 2025-08-19 13:34:01+00:00
I am going to have to disagree. This is really not about Texas but folks get hung up on Texas. There are ways to have market based systems in the power grid while still maintaining capacity. Having a market based system does not mean you cannot have interconnects. I think Texas gets some things right and some things wrong but I believe it’s too easy to lump everything into the bad bucket.
by wojciii | 2025-08-19 13:34:08+00:00
I agree. Store only apps are painful to use and there should be one app (or several implementering same apec..) that you can use (or not if you want to do it the old school way) to deliver your info to shops. The same app could be used by everyone if we just agreed on a spec to implement. Something very basic.

I didn't mean that every shop should have its own app .. but Ikea already has something and it works somewhat ok..
by pc86 | 2025-08-19 13:35:25+00:00
I agree it's not a binary thing but you're still viewing it as "an unfair system that is trying its best" vs. "a corrupt society" and my entire point is that is a completely false dichotomy. As Madison said, "enlightened men will not always be at the helm" - you have to design your system in such a way that bad actors are limited in their scope.

Proportional fees "hurt" everyone the same and give the government the discretion to "hurt" whomever they choose via malicious prosecution and selective enforcement. Flat-rate fees at minimal amounts save most people from this corruption. If the difference is between a flat rate penalty that hurts 5% of society if imposed, and a proportional penalty that hurts 100% of society if imposed, how is the first one not objectively better in the nearly certain scenario of a bad actor being in charge at some point in the future?
by anthk | 2025-08-19 13:35:35+00:00
Indeed. Brutalist architectures would work well in Northern Europe, not much in the south when you have both hot summers and cold winters were heat AND cold spread over.

Thick brick/stone walls would protect you both from the heat in summer (down to 15 degrees colder as it's crazy as it sounds) and from chilly winters if you got a bunch of blankets.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-19 13:35:44+00:00
> how much extra market capture really gets from having 4/5 different versions of the same basic segment?

Enough, at Apple's scale. The harmonic seems to be upstarts target a niche with a specialised offering and then scale until they can target other niches, perhaps one bigger than the one they initially went after, but all of which muddles the product focus until a paradigm shifts and someone simplifies again.
by mitkebes | 2025-08-19 13:36:30+00:00
I remember when the first iPad was in development, there was a lot of speculation about how Apple would solve the "large touchscreen keyboard" problem. Typing on a large touchscreen was hard, just blowing up a iphone keyboard wouldn't cut it. It'd be too large for thumb typing, but you also couldn't type on it like a physical keyboard, it would be awkward hovering over the touchscreen and you couldn't hold it while you typed.

Tech sites and bloggers talked about how Apple cared too much about the user experience to just release a big keyboard, and how we were about to see a revolutionary new keyboard design. There was speculation about split keyboards, radial keyboards, and more. People weren't sure how Apple was going to fix the keyboard issue, but it was going to be magical.

Finally the actual iPad reveal came, and it was just literally a giant iphone keyboard. Jobs showed how to type on it by balancing the ipad on his knees, and hover hand typing onto it.

Honestly that was the point where my opinion of Apple started to decline, it honestly wasn't even that big of a deal, but it changed them in my eyes from a revolutionary tech company into one that just wanted to appear revolutionary. I've never quite been able to separate that initial disappointment from the iPads, and that disappointment is still the first thing that comes to mind whenever I see one or read an article about them.
by sgarland | 2025-08-19 13:36:31+00:00
To clarify, I mean you can’t do this:

SELECT id AS foo FROM MyTable WHERE foo = 1;

Similarly, you can’t do this:

SELECT id FROM MyTable WHERE id = MAX(id);

Because in both cases, when the WHERE predicate is being executed, the engine doesn’t yet know what you’re asking it to find - for the former, SELECT hasn’t yet been called, so the alias isn’t applied; for the latter, the aggregation happens after filtering, so it can’t know what that maximum value is.

You can of course alias columns for SELECT however you’d like, and can also use those aliases in ORDER BY. You can also trivially refactor the above examples to use subqueries or CTEs to accomplish the goal.
by mc32 | 2025-08-19 13:36:50+00:00
Interestingly, in most of Europe, paper ballots and hand counting are preferred methods. We have seen times when electronic ballots have had glitches and have had inaccurate counts. Electronic ballots have experienced errors in tabulation and also loss of data, so it's not foolproof. In addition, vendors are known to be slow to patch security vulnerabilities in their systems --this leads to loss in confidence. Also as others have observed, in order to subvert paper ballots and counting, you have to compromise lots of people.
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-19 13:36:58+00:00
Hand counts and paper in the UK too. It's just not a problem you need to solve with machines, and while UK politics is deeply stupid, flawed and unserious in many ways, at least this endless, endless bullshit and screeching over chads and machines and hacking and conspiracies and all the other nonsense the cousins get up to is not part of it.

Results don't take long to count, even though there are about 30 million ballots. Polls close at 10pm, the first constituency declares some time between 11 and midnight usually, it's 90% done by about 6am[1], and the last will be some time on the second day if there are multiple recounts. Due to the FPTP system, it doesn't really even matter about the rest once the post is already reached - which is its own problem, but it's not like machine-based recount drama doesn't drag on for ages too.

[1]: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
by orangeboats | 2025-08-19 13:37:17+00:00
>A referendum was held in April 1975, where over 97% of voters supported abolishing the monarchy and joining India.

I know you are trying to express that the annexation is supported by the Sikkimese... But referendum is by far the worst tool you can use to support your point. Even more so, when South Asia is notorious for election rigging.

By the same logic, Crimea should "rightfully" be under Russia's rule.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-19 13:37:19+00:00
It helps that, to be able to use an IBAN for withdrawals, you basically have to "sign" a recurring transfer agreement. Otherwise it's pretty much always a "push" transaction from buyer to seller.

Better than being able to commit ACH fraud merely by virtue of having the bank's routing and account number.

Side note: shout out to both MB Way and Multibanco payments in Portugal that have made it so I haven't have to give payment information to an online vendor in years.
by dogleash | 2025-08-19 13:37:25+00:00
> Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?

I disagree with the premise. The modern UIs are rife with more special cases, hidden gestures and non-transferable knowledge than the old “one mouse button is enough” or even early windows’ ugly but constant model. Gen Z has harder UI, over a superficial simplicity that is really just a constrained interaction space.

The problem for zoomers is now when they use a deep interaction model, the new complexity of UI becomes a frustration multiplier rather than fixed cost.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-19 13:37:32+00:00
I mean, I found it pretty trivial to write parsers for my XML files, which are not simple ones, TBH. The simplest one of contains a bit more than 1700 lines.

It's also pretty easy to emit, "I didn't find what I'm looking for under $ELEMENT" while parsing the file, or "I expected a string but I got $SOMETHING at element $ELEMENT".

Maybe I'm distorted because I worked with XML files more than decade, but I never spent more than 30 seconds while debugging an XML parsing process.

Also, this was one of the first parts I "sealed" in the said codebase and never touched it again, because it worked, even if the coming file is badly formed (by erroring out correctly and cleanly).
by jshaqaw | 2025-08-19 13:37:37+00:00
My first neural net code (very very bad) was on a 286/287 back in the early 90s. 286 is kind of a forgotten chip since 386 32 bit changed the game but give a kid (ie teenage me) a 286, a 40mb hard drive, and Turbo Pascal and I felt like I could build anything!
by like_any_other | 2025-08-19 13:37:43+00:00
Are minor, random inaccuracies due to hand-counting mistakes the main danger a voting system must guard against, or is it against covert, malicious manipulation from compromised computer systems?

> Prior to 2022, no legislatures were considering this [mandating hand counts] extreme proposal.

An honest article wouldn't call the counting method used in most of Europe, Canada, Japan, India, and countless other countries, "extreme". Of course it deftly omits mention of any other country, leaving the reader uninformed. I'm sure it's just a coincidence..
by dleslie | 2025-08-19 13:37:49+00:00
We hand count in Canada and don't have a notable accuracy problem, and ballot security is a rare concern. We manage that by having simple ballots which make voter intent clear while having the count being run by an independent, non-partisan national organization _and_ each table where tabulating is occurring can be watched over by representatives of the parties running.

_And_ we have mail-in ballots.

When issues do arise it tends to occur when a ballot box needs to be transported between locations; when this occurs it is taken quite seriously by Elections Canada.

It works great. Perhaps the USA should contact Elections Canada and learn a thing or two.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-19 13:38:29+00:00
What a load of nonsense. In several EU countries, ballots are counted by hand and an accurate result is there usually by midnight.

In Germany, the Supreme Court has banned voting machines as unconstitutional.

The method is simple: Have relatively small voting districts, recruit civil servants as supervisors. Allow anyone from all parties to supervise and be present, especially during counting. Hand out the ballot sheet upon displaying an ID. Upload the counted result to a website where people can check that the reported count matches the actual count.

The EU has a lot of problems, efficient voting isn't one of them.
by abullinan | 2025-08-19 13:38:29+00:00
Agreed. I can see how people who approach it like social media find it adversarial. But I think that is on them. If you don’t look at the feed, it’s a great Rolodex like you said. If you do look at the feed, then you’re just hooked on social media which isn’t the platforms problem.

I just no longer like my personal info being online anymore.
by ajross | 2025-08-19 13:38:30+00:00
First paragraph is very reasonable. Second is insane. It clearly does not follow from "Canada does accurate hand counts" that "voting machines are inaccurate".

In fact voting is extremely accurate throughout the democratic world regardless of counting method, and this fact wasn't particularly controversial for decades and decades.

The idea that we somehow have a problem to be solved is the actual attack on democracy. And it's working. I know it sounds like hyperbole, but there is a very serious risk that the USA has already seen its last peaceful democratic handover of power. The people with control of the levers of power seem extremely disinclined to accept loss of that power.
by consp | 2025-08-19 13:39:05+00:00
I'm not going to agree to any of the "free" (you sign away all rights to the things you made free) tiers. Not that anyone would ever use my things but it's out of principle. FreeCAD has issues but is good enough for most people. And once you want to do really complicated things and also can cope the hundred of euros per years fine, but don't complain other people should do the same because you can.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-19 13:39:09+00:00
> I remember when the first iPad was in development, there was a lot of speculation about how Apple would solve the "large touchscreen keyboard" problem. Typing on a large touchscreen was hard, just blowing up a iphone keyboard wouldn't cut it. It'd be too large for thumb typing, but you also couldn't type on it like a physical keyboard, it would be awkward hovering over the touchscreen and you couldn't hold it while you typed.

I liked how Windows 8 did it on one of my laptops / touch devices, the keyboard would split in half and be on each edge of the screen, so if you truly wanted to type with your thumb, you could.

A lot of people did not like Windows 8, but I had fun with it on devices designed for it.

I do prefer whenever I find my Apple Pen (I have a knock off one from Logitech) that I can just write text over a text field, and the iPad will happily fill it in for me.
by sn0opy | 2025-08-19 13:39:21+00:00
Just for comparison:

I've got a Juwei-17 (Onstep harmonic drive with performance similar to the ZWO AM5N, but at nearly half the price) paired with the ZWO TC4 carbon fibre tripod.

The tripod has a load capacity of 50 kg (110 lbs) and weighs just 2.5 kg (5.5 lbs). The harmonic drive mount has a load capacity of 13 kg (29 lbs), or 18 kg (lbs) with a counterweight, and weighs 5.5 kg (12 lbs). Alltogether, the setup weighs about 8 kg (18 lbs) since I don't have to use counterweights.
by gpm | 2025-08-19 13:39:54+00:00
The same way you accept any contribution, because it isn't technically relicensing. You already granted them an AGPLv3 license when you uploaded your change to github without modifying the license file - that's what the "or" in the file means [1] - which entitles them (and anyone else) to create and distribute derivative works under only the AGPLv3 without any GPLv2 grant...

[1] Quoting the license file:

This software is provided under a dual license. You may choose to use it under the terms of either:

1. GNU General Public License, Version 2 (GPLv2), or

2. GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 (AGPLv3).
by jajko | 2025-08-19 13:39:59+00:00
No I didn't find other ways, desktop is the only gateway for me even after maybe 6 years. I am generally not a very addictive personality generally (at least compared to many peers), don't have mental ticks, insecurities or mental issues that I feel I need to feed by instant dopamine kicks.

But it still saved me a lot of time in long run (and some phone battery too). I don't go to FB much, don't use instagram, tiktoks, tweeter and so on, and happy with that. Quality of actual real life and all that.
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-08-19 13:40:15+00:00
Titan/Tidis (the redis compatible servers built on top of TiKV) don't seem to have any recent activity in their public repos: - https://github.com/yongman/tidis - https://github.com/distributedio/titan

KVRocks (which _is_ mentioned) does, as does valkey (also not mentioned, but probably only because it's not that different from redis at this point IIUC).