MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throawayonthe | 2025-08-30 21:17:14+00:00
https://atproto.wiki/en/working-groups/indiesky/stack

multiple different levels of independence to be had in the atmosphere, so it's not directly comparable (doesn't help atmosphere's case though)

i personally am more excited about ATproto as a protocol, and hope https://freeourfeeds.com/ et al can pull it off
by danabramov | 2025-08-30 21:17:27+00:00
This seems misleading.

Different AppViews would obviously be branded differently, but the whole point of ATProto is that there is a shared "picture" of the world. People are running alternative AppViews that consume Bluesky posts (and serve Bluesky threads).

Here's the same thread on three different AppViews:

- https://zeppelin.social/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu...

- https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbo...

- https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/po...

These are three independent webapps indexing the same information and serving it independently. They're not different frontends for one API; these are all independent backends.
by nullc | 2025-08-30 21:19:35+00:00
I started using them in 2008 or so (I think) when I created a custom keymap to added greek characters and nbsp. I stopped using them after MacOS changed to make them automatically because then their use started to be an obvious sign of being an apple user (see also: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096459).

Someone recently created some long list of my reddit comments using them as a farcical claim of having used ChatGPT to author many dozens of 2010 comments.
by touisteur | 2025-08-30 21:20:00+00:00
I ... kind of agree with the difficulty. I don't get it - DPDK is at its core really not a complex API ! Allocate a pool of buffers, and in an infinite loop, ask your NIC to fill these buffers. There. After that, yes you have to decap every packet (ethernet then IP - don't forget reassembly - then whatever you have over - UDP is absolutely no effort, TCP... not so). It's wholly manageable to anyone knowing a bit of light C++ (more C-like) and lower layers (and can parse the sometimes very dry and cryptic doc, for all the utility fonctions. Interaction with the actual consumer of the data can be done with DPDK-provided primitives or simple shared memory... it's really not hard for a mid-level systems programmer. But I still find myself unable to hire people who can work at that level of the stack, a bit baffling. I can't see how they'd be better with io_uring or AF_XDP and all their inherent complexity. Anything harder than a socket and epoll and you're a wizard now...

One other big plus of DPDK for me is the low-level access to hardware offload. GPUDirect (when you can get it to work), StorageDirect or most of the available DMA engines in some (not so) high-end hardware. The flow API on mellanox hardware is the basis of many of my multi-accelerator applications (I wish they supported P4 for packet format instead, or just open-source whatever low-level ISA the controller is running, but I don't buy enough gear to have a voice). Perusing the DPDK documentation can give ideas.

So, yes, very low-level with some batteries included. Good and stable for niche uses. But far smaller hiring pool (is the io_uring-100Gb pool bigger ? I don't know).
Show HN: Captan – Open-Source Cap Table Management CLI
by acossta | 2025-08-30 21:20:24+00:00
I built Captan (https://github.com/acossta/captan), a tiny open-source CLI tool for managing startup cap tables.

Instead of juggling spreadsheets or paying for expensive SaaS cap table solutions, Captan stores everything in a simple JSON file that you can version-control in Git.

It supports:

- Stakeholders (founders, employees, investors)

- Security classes (Common, Preferred, Option Pool)

- Share issuances

- Option grants with vesting schedules (monthly, cliff)

- SAFEs (record + simulate conversion at a priced round)

- Cap table math (Outstanding vs Fully Diluted)

- CSV/JSON exports

- Audit log ("the ship’s log")

Overall a JSON in git will offer better auditability and version control than most commercial solutions out there.

Modeling different scenarios is super easy, just create a git branch and model whatever you need.

Quick taste:

---------------------------------------

npm install -g captan

$captan init --name "Acme, Inc." --pool-pct 20

$captan enlist stakeholder --name "Alice Founder"

$captan issue --security sc_common --holder sh_alice --qty 5000000

$captan chart

Example output:

Captan — Cap Table (as of today)

Name Outstanding %

Alice Founder 5000000 100.00%

Totals

Issued equity: 5000000

Vested options: 0

Outstanding total: 5000000

Fully diluted total: 7000000

---------------------------------------

Why I built it: early-stage founders (myself included) often don’t need Carta or Pulley yet — just a clean, hackable way to track ownership. I wanted something transparent, developer-friendly, and Git-native.

Repo: https://github.com/acossta/captan

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/captan

I’d love feedback on what features would make this more useful to you?

Thanks!
by hinkley | 2025-08-30 21:20:25+00:00
I learned pretty early on that people get really tired of optimization of code that is directly in the call stack they have to breakpoint in. Later on I clocked some of that as code smells pulling attention and analysis time during debug work.

But the trick I found is that if you can extract a function for only the part of the code you’re optimizing/improving, and then make your change in a single commit, two things happen. One, it’s off the code path, so out of site, out of mind. Two, people are more forgiving of code changes they don’t like but can roll back by reverting a single commit. That breaks down a bit with PRs, since they tend to think of the code as a single commit. But the crisp boundaries still matter a lot.
by lqet | 2025-08-30 21:20:45+00:00
> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.

That may all be true. But many authors of that era (e.g. Dickens and Dostoevsky) published their work mainly in monthly installments. Chapters are then, exactly like TV show episodes, simply a technical necessity.
by timsh | 2025-08-30 21:21:07+00:00
Im all in for the ai hate, but this kind of hysteria on HN is devaluing all the serious discussions about AI safety, skepticism and regulation.

They literally show you a full-page popup with clear text snd OPT IN toggle. It doesn’t seem really shady to me (or worth 10 separate posts on HN).

That said, if this popup doesn’t appear when you sign up after 28th, that would be a dark pattern and shady stuff. For now it’s just clickbait
by lloydatkinson | 2025-08-30 21:21:28+00:00
I really resonated with the link to the MacUser article on word searches.

> Word Search will generate and print the sort of word puzzles where you have to look forwards, backwards and diagonally to Find a given set of words. Even though you can only dis¬ play and solve a puzzle of 32 X 16 on your screen, larger puzzles can be created for printing. To give you an example of what can be done with the program, a set of 10 puzzles including states, mouths and composers are on the disk.

It later goes on to describe something I've personally experienced.

> And printing seems to take a while, but when others sit and fuss over your creation, you’ll say the wail was worth it.

Over the last couple of years I've been working on a side project involving mazes and also... word searches! Last Christmas I printed off a bunch of Christmas themed word searches I generated for the family to play on Christmas day. Seeing real people have real fun with something I created felt like remembering what programming was supposed to be about – bringing actual joy to people, instead of adding another forgettable feature to some product manager's roadmap.

I posted it to HN at the time, but I have a small writeup of it here. https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/year-in-review/#-wo...
by pessimizer | 2025-08-30 21:21:48+00:00
Yet that furiousness hasn't ever delayed either of the parties for going on wars of adventure for even a moment. We made Al Qaeda a financial dependent within 20 years of 9/11. We funded Nazi militias to topple a government in order to harass a nearby enemy, who they think of as the Asiatic-Jewish-Muslim invader they want to fight off with pork, and whose language-speakers they'd like to ethnically cleanse from their country. We went out of our way to intervene and hold together a dangerously unstable apartheid state, and basically gave it a stake in our government. We're monsters.

The only unforced delay there has been on a military adventure since Bush Sr. pulled out of Iraq was Obama resisting interventions in Syria and Ukraine that were being heavily lobbied for by both his and his opposite party. Immediately reversed once he had one foot out of the door, and he had made up for it by bombing everyone else.

America, and I mean its electorate, finds joy in murdering nonwhite children, or Slavs, or really anybody that speaks in a language that sounds funny or gutteral. It makes us feel safe. They'll know not to mess with us, because they know we're not afraid to murder even the most innocent and saintly civilians. We'll give them the Nobel Peace Prize and kill them 10 years later. We'll give people the Nobel Prize who kill children. We'll hear about atrocities in Venezuela and wonder how we should invest.
by danabramov | 2025-08-30 21:23:23+00:00
How does it work?

In ATProto, there is no need to do this on-demand because the data is already there in the AppView. When you want to serve a page of replies, you read them from the database and serve them. There is no distributed fetching involved, no need to hit someone else's servers, no need to coalesce them or worry about limiting fetches, etc. This is why it works fine for threads without thousands of replies and hundreds of nesting levels. It can also be paginated on the server.

If you don't have this information on your server, how can you gracefully fetch thousands of replies from different servers and present a cohesive picture during a single request? I'm sure this PR does an attempt at that but I'm not sure this is a direct comparison because Mastodon can't avoid doing this on-demand. If we're comparing, it would be good to list the tradeoffs of Mastodon's implementation (and how it scales to deep threads) more explicitly.
by hinkley | 2025-08-30 21:23:48+00:00
It’s a pain in the ass to source a copy of this book without giving Jeff Bezos all the money. If anyone reading this thread knows John, could you bring this to his attention?

I even tried calling the bookstore on his campus and they said try back at the beginning of a semester, they didn’t have any copies.

My local book store could not source me a copy, and neither IIRC could Powell’s.
by dspillett | 2025-08-30 21:23:50+00:00
DISTINCT is often a smell at the head (or middle) of a complex query as you are throwing away processed information, sometimes a lot of it, late in the game. Much better to filter it out earlier and not process it further, where possible. Filtering earlier, as well as reducing waste processing time (and probably memory use), increases the chance of the query planner being able to use an index for the filter which could greatly decrease the IO cost of your query.
by touristtam | 2025-08-30 21:23:58+00:00
The banality of evil, was the central them of Hannah Arendt thesis while working on the coverage of Eichmann trial by the Hebrew state of Israel. I doubt people attempt to join Facebook to apply their devious nature, more like that FB is paying handsomely to not think too hard about the goal of the organisation and the means to reach those goals.
by Kwpolska | 2025-08-30 21:24:41+00:00
My use-case isn't very common? Apple has been selling laptops with high DPI screens since 2012, and over in the PC land, many laptops that aren’t cheapo garbage ship with screens that run at 125% or 150% scale. On the other hand, many external displays run at 100% scale, or otherwise at a different scale than the primary screen.
by zkmon | 2025-08-30 21:26:09+00:00
Children were always told to cram as much as possible into their memory. It was even claimed that, more you put into memory, you mind works better.

Not quite. Human mind has evolved to interpret the sensory data collected by senses, and cause necessary action. Some of that interpretation uses memory to correlate the perceived data with the memory data. That's pretty much it.

Overloading the human memory with tons of data which is not related to the context in which the person lives, can cause negative effects. I suspect it can also cause faster aging. New experiences, new information is like scales on a tree trunk. As you accumulate more of it, you age more.
by msgilligan | 2025-08-30 21:26:23+00:00
> The only way that makes any sense is if you subtract returns for sales made in a different period to the sales period you are considering

Exactly. That's the way accounting works. They did not know in the previous quarter that the product would be returned in the following quarter, so they end up having negative sales in the current quarter.

Yes it produces "garbage output", which I find amusing.
Hemi: Bridging Bitcoin's Security and Ethereum's Programmability
by Victornomics | 2025-08-30 21:26:24+00:00
This is really a huge innovation building on two top blockchains in the space. Hemi is creating a network that takes Bitcoin’s unmatched security and combines it with Ethereum’s flexibility for building apps. Using its Proof-of-Proof system, Hemi locks transactions to Bitcoin, making them extra secure while still letting developers build powerful DeFi projects.

Hemi delivers transactions are as secure as the Bitcoin chain itself. The network’s tech stack the Hemi Virtual Machine (hVM) and Hemi Bitcoin Kit (hBK) lets developers build powerful DeFi apps that tap into Bitcoin’s liquidity without sacrificing programmability. After an incentivized testnet that processed over 20 million transactions, Hemi’s mainnet went live in March 2025 and the momentum hasn’t slowed.

Now, with Hemi listed on BingX, the project is opening its doors to a wider audience of traders and investors who believe Bitcoin and Ethereum should work together, not compete.

Can Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain work hand in hand together, what's your opinion?
by kyle-rb | 2025-08-30 21:27:19+00:00
Running a PDS server for yourself and a few friends is not very expensive afaik, but there's also not much benefit to doing so, because the point of the PDS is to have a clean separation between your own data and the rest of the network.

The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable.

For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-30 21:27:35+00:00
I dunno. A good demo is all about the feeling it gives. One thing I got out of my adventures in startup land is how to go up on stage and demo some software that barely works and make it look like a million bucks.

At the last hackathon I went to I was sitting in the audience at the presentation at the end with one teammate while the other one was upstairs pounding away at last minute revisions. We were scheduled last but I still had to make excuses to the organizers.

He showed up with something that basically worked but I kept cool under pressure, made sure I didn't commit to anything until I was sure about it, and used good showmanship. We were all shocked when we won the 'player's choice' award. Mind you, it helped that he was experienced at writing platformers in Unity and the other student could draw, but thanks to my showmanship people saw everything that didn't worked and didn't notice the bugs and people were left with the impression that 'wow that looked like a polished game' whereas the main author said 'I don't think I'd want to play it' afterwards. My continuous push towards a 'minimum viable product' combined with their push to make something that looked polish really helped that showmanship work.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-30 21:27:50+00:00
I do think there's a difference. Unfortunately a very large number of Americans have cult-related beliefs about the supposed importance of Middle Eastern affairs. There was genuine "grassroot" support for involvement there; so there was at least a genuine element of the government doing what the American people wanted from it.

With Venezuela, I believe that only a tiny portion of Americans had a preexisting desire for military intervention. This is a case of the government driving democracy in reverse by telling people what to believe. It's a far worse breakdown of democracy than the Middle East wars.
by MadnessASAP | 2025-08-30 21:28:30+00:00
It may seem like that on the surface, but you should recognise that these sorts of situations seem to follow Kent around.

So either Kent is on a righteous crusade against unreasonable processes within the Kernel, Debian, and every other large software project he interacts with. Or there's something about the way Kent interacts with these projects that causes friction.

I like Bcachefs, I think Kent is a very talented developer, but I'm not going to pretend that he is innocent in all this.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-30 21:29:09+00:00
SMTP, HTTP, DNS, routing protocols work pretty well despite decentralization/federation. Their "problem" is their greatest strength: they're stupidly simple.

E-mail is really ingenious. It doesn't even define how to send and receive messages in the same standard. One standard is just for delivering messages; you have to figure out how you're going to receive them separately.

Of course most people have an e-mail address hosted by one of a handful of large companies. But you don't have to. And if you buy your own domain, changing providers is easy. Delete your old mail on the old server, upload it to the new server, people can still contact you the same way they did before.

I'm not on social media, so I don't have any dog in this fight. But all the properties of a good decentralized/federated platform are already there in decades-old protocols.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-30 21:29:38+00:00
Decimation was way worse than reduction by a tenth. It was a punishment in the Roman army where the offending unit was divided into groups of 10 and each group had to draw straws. Whoever drew the short straw must be stoned or clubbed to death by the other 9.

If you threatened me with death if I didn't cut off my feet, I wouldn't consider that "reduction by 10%" even if mathematically it might be.
by hinkley | 2025-08-30 21:31:35+00:00
Some people use a gardening metaphor for code, and I think that since code is from and for humans, that’s not a terrible analogy. It’s organic by origin if not by nature.

When you’re dealing with perennial plants, there’s only so much control you actually have, and there’s a list of things you know you have to do with them but you cannot do them all at once. There is what you need to do now, what you need to do next year, and a theory of what you’ll do over the next five years. And two years into any five year plan, the five year plan has completely changed. You’re hedging your bets.

Traditional Formal English and French gardens try to “master” the plants. Force them to behave to an exacting standard. It’s only possible with both a high degree of skill and a vast pool of labor. They aren’t really about nature, or food. They’re displays of opulence. They are conspicuous consumption. They are keeping up with the Joneses. Some people love that about them. More practical people see it as pretentious bullshit.

I think we all know a few companies that make a bad idea work by sheer force of will and overwhelming resources.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-30 21:31:51+00:00
It doesn't. The fact that the IQ test takes a lot of time means that generally only people who want validation of their high IQ will be motivated enough to take the test.

"Test your fitness with this 1 hour workout! ... Hmm our totally unbiased test shows that everyone is really fit."

See? Unbiased sampling is really hard but an hour long test means you're not even trying. (Which tbf they might not be.)
by RulerOf | 2025-08-30 21:32:06+00:00
I'm a fan of s6 after getting exposed to it through the Linuxserver.io project... but I'm not certain it's appropriate when you're using an orchestrator like k8s.

Take health checks for example. I can't decide—in principle—if they should live at the highest level, the lowest level, or every level of the stack. Or if they are everywhere, should there be automated remediation with exponential trigger times... stuff like that. S6 and supervisord would be good for that. But higher-level remediation steps make something simpler more appealing.
by zakirullin | 2025-08-30 21:32:22+00:00
Software engineering is a relatively immature field. Nobody knows how to cook it in a proper way. What we know for sure is how to fail (point of the article). There was an analogy about building bridges and writing software. Building a bridge is boring, it's a very mature engineering field, and it's clearly known how to do it the best way possible. Software development is far from it. Unknown unknowns, ever changing requirements, different mental models in people's brains...
by wtallis | 2025-08-30 21:32:59+00:00
I don't think you've successfully demonstrated that those assumptions are bad. They're simplifying assumptions that are necessary to have a "basic" economic theory in the first place—one with tractable and understandable mathematics that can produce an answer without immediately dumping you into partial differential equations or requiring impossibly detailed input data.

The assumptions are only bad if they prevent the simple models from being useful, and the existence of a scenario where a model's simplifying assumptions prevent it from being useful does not prove that the model is worthless.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-30 21:33:20+00:00
Not to be that guy, but in my parent's old country - someone like your daughter would not have been given a chance to even get a bachelors degree. And we're from a country with the same tracked educational system as Romania.

I agree that "common core" is bulls** (I'm part of that generation as well, but my Asian parents made me take Kumon and taught me personally, but I was also lucky/blessed that my mother was a teacher in the old country), but the motivation wasn't wrong.

And this is what pains me about American educational reform. It has become ideological, instead of outcome driven.

Personally, our outcomes should be

1. Building a talented workforce (we need more October Skys)

2. Giving space for creativity (we need more Darias)

3. Building physical fitness (we need more Currahee Hill montages, as an ex-ROTC [found out I'd lose my OCI if I commissioned])

And this requires giving students autonomy to explore their limits mentally and physically. If peeps don't want to learn, nbd, but why should we limit access to students who want to but didn't initially build the fundamentals.

We also need to decouple emotion from education - no major or degree is better or worse than others. We should treat a HS grad, an AA/AS grad, a BA/BS/BE grad, andn a grad school grad the same.

Let's be a "Great Society" [0] again.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuEFTgodc8