MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ptribble | 2025-08-09 12:12:05+00:00
There are over 30 desktop options (including quite a few of the older window managers, which is a bit of a blast from the past).

I do include CDE and Open Look (the window manager and toolkit, at least). In both cases the add-on tools that were present in Solaris (like the whole of the DeskSet suite) aren't available, because they were never released in source form.
Show HN: Remembering the year you were 18
by zknowledge | 2025-08-09 12:12:16+00:00
Hey I'm Zalmay and built this little webapp that gives you essentially a Spotify Wrapped of the year you were 18. Fun bit of nostalgia.

I might extend it to have some hardcoded moments for years from users and update the sharing. For now, enjoy a quick blast to the past (if you're old enough lol).

Github link here as well fyi: https://github.com/zkarimi22/wheniwas18
Show HN: I built an app that uses math to find restaurants nearby the sweet spot
by mayukh180505 | 2025-08-09 12:12:18+00:00
I recently built an iOS app called Settld: Group Restaurant Finder that helps friends decide where to meet by finding restaurants that are roughly equally far from everyone’s location, and displaying information about them.

We’ve all been in chaotic group chats where no one can agree on where to eat — this app cuts through that by calculating a “sweet spot” for the group. For 2 people, it’s the midpoint. For 3 people, it’s the circumcenter. For 4–6 people, it uses a minimum enclosing circle approach (Welzl’s algorithm).

It then shows the top 15 nearby options so there’s no more “where do we meet?” chaos — or $50 dinners after a gruelling 2-hour trip just because no one planned. If anyone’s wondering why I capped it at 15 options, it’s to cut down on decision paralysis.

I’d love to get your thoughts on the concept: https://settld.space/
by ramses0 | 2025-08-09 12:13:16+00:00
It wouldn't fly and/or would be "one more SKU" to support with expensive software development.

They've seriously stuck themselves in a pickle with their WatchOS offering. They can't move away from touch-screen b/c they've committed to "being able to enter a PIN" from the device (so they can offer AND PROTECT on-watch payment capabilities).

They can't move away from touch-screen b/c they've duped all the uber's and door-dash's, and big-bank.com into writing "watch apps" that assume a touch screen.

The Garmin Fenix has the best response to this that I've seen so far, a "pinch-to-activate" touch screen on some of their watches with "enough" buttons (Up, Down, OK, Back, "light"). You can use the watch normally without fear of accidental activations and when you start up the map-type-stuff, it'll either auto-activate a twiddly touchscreen or you can "pinch to activate" (hold two diagonal buttons for 2-3 seconds) and then start messing with it (or are able to turn it off w/o issue).

They can't move away from bright color screens because then people can't have pictures of their kids on their watch, and at that point it's no longer an "Apple" product.
by Jenk | 2025-08-09 12:13:28+00:00
Why shouldn't "causuals" (and/or "professionals" for that matter) be allowed to use AI for some reasoning or whatever?

One of Claude's "categories" is literally "Life Advice."

I'm often using copilot or claude to help me flesh out content, emails, strategy papers, etc. All of which takes many prompts, back-and-forth, to get to a place where I'm satisfied with the result.

I also use it to develop software, where I am more appreciative of the "as near to pure completions mode" as I can be mot of the time.
by teiferer | 2025-08-09 12:14:53+00:00
Then "what floats your boat" is adherence to laws. That's a reasonable take, but other people may value other things.

I'd also say that what the people want should eventually trump any written text. Society changes, the rules that are the foundation need to be able to adapt over time. To me, that serves the people better than adherence to some supposedly forever-immutable scripture which, as a concept, bears too much resemblence to regligious holy text. In my taste.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-09 12:15:09+00:00
Color me totally shocked. Not really.

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) with $10B in assets isn't really a benign "community foundation", but a way for billionaires to promise wealth/asset giveaways later and get tax breaks now.[0]

0. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...

Every billionaire is a policy failure and likely a deeply greedy, malevolent, and out-of-touch (and bordering on crazy) individual with far too much power and influence over other people and the fate of the species and planet Earth.
by IanCal | 2025-08-09 12:15:14+00:00
That came far after csv files started being used and many parsers don’t follow the spec. Even if they do, editing the file manually can easily and silent break it - my criticisms are of entirely valid to the new spec files. The wide range of ways people make csvs is a whole other thing I’ve spent years fixing.

It’s not about the stupidity of the humans, and if it was then planning for “no stupid people” is even stupider than those messing up the files.

> Maybe you need a database or an app rather than flat files.

Flat files are great. What’s needed are good file formats.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-09 12:16:11+00:00
Yes it has religious qualities. The decline of Christianity opened a gap in the market. Climatism preaches a definition of good person that's tangible and easy to understand. You're a good person if you fear the wrath of Gaia, believe in an Armageddon in which humanity is punished for its sins, if you recycle your trash, if you buy indulgences when flying on vacation and if you never doubt the clergy even when they contradict themselves. You're a bad person if you doubt the integrity of the Chu-sorry the Institutions, if you don't believe in Armageddon, if you don't fear Gaia, if you think recycling is overhyped and above all if you don't Fucking Love Science!™

This belief system is highly attractive to the nerdy types who hang out here, because it explicitly privileges the nerdy and proclaims them the new priesthood, whilst draping itself in clothes designed to look like science and maths whilst refusing to hold itself to rigorous standards.

So we get BEHOLD ALL YE UNBELIEVERS type rhetoric, and then people with graphs that say "nothing to see here" get booed but not responded to.
by Someone | 2025-08-09 12:16:25+00:00
> They're standardized[0]

From that article:

“This memo […] does not specify an Internet standard of any kind”

and

“Interoperability considerations:

Due to lack of a single specification, there are considerable differences among implementations. Implementors should "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (RFC 793 [8]) when processing CSV files”
by the_real_cher | 2025-08-09 12:17:52+00:00
If every billionaire gave away every cent of their wealth it would fund the federal government for 1 year.

do a web search!!

America has a massive overspending problem which is inflating the currency which is hurting the middle class more than than anything billionaires could do.

America is almost 40 trillion dollars in debt and spends almost 7 trillion a year and tax revenue is only 5 trillion per year.

(rough numbers)

Currency is devaluing at a rate of 'reported' 3% per year but everyone on the ground knows it's more than that.

This is not a party specific problem this is both Democrats and Republicans responsible for this.

So sure you could tax the rich more and they could give away their wealth but it's just a drop in the bucket compared to government spending.
by mxmlnkn | 2025-08-09 12:19:30+00:00
I concur with most of these arguments, especially about longevity. But, this only applies to smallish files like configurations because I don't agree with the last paragraph regarding its efficiency.

I have had to work with large 1GB+ JSON files, and it is not fun. Amazing projects such as jsoncons for streaming JSONs, and simdjson, for parsing JSON with SIMD, exist, but as far as I know, the latter still does not support streaming and even has an open issue for files larger than 4 GiB. So you cannot have streaming for memory efficiency and SIMD-parsing for computational efficiency at the same time. You want streaming because holding the whole JSON in memory is wasteful and sometimes not even possible. JSONL tries to change the format to fix that, but now you have another format that you need to support.

I was also contemplating the mentioned formats for another project, but they are hardly usable when you need to store binary data, such as images, compressed data, or simply arbitrary data. Storing binary data as base64 strings seems wasteful. Random access into these files is also an issue, depending on the use case. Sometimes it would be a nice feature to jump over some data, but for JSON, you cannot do that without parsing everything in search of the closing bracket or quotes, accounting for escaped brackets and quotes, and nesting.
by tgv | 2025-08-09 12:19:47+00:00
> What makes Europe democratic control something to cherish?

First, the claim is that it strengthens democratic control. I can't see how you could be against that.

Second, the more, the merrier. In this case, more search indices means more search freedom. If your country censors something, you can try another index. But only if that index actually exists, and falls under different rules.
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-09 12:20:05+00:00
As so many others I'm currently evaluating the 5 series while keeping 4o in production. 5 behaves significantly different. My current outlook is it's a nice improvement, but not a drop in replacement/upgrade some of those 4->5 mapping tables suggest.

Prompts and steering needs to be explored and recalibrated to gain status quo and benefits.
by nchmy | 2025-08-09 12:20:39+00:00
Local first is fantastic. But something that I can't figure out is why the OG of local first, RxDB, never gets any love.

As far as I can tell, it's VASTLY more capable than all of these new options. It has full-text search, all sorts of query optimizations, different storage backends in both the browser and server, and more.
by mriet | 2025-08-09 12:20:58+00:00
I can understand this for "small" data, say less than 10 Mb.

In bioinformatics, basically all of the file formats are human-readable/text based. And file sizes range between 1-2Mb and 1 Tb. I regularly encounter 300-600 Gb files.

In this context, human-readable files are ridiculously inefficient, on every axis you can think of (space, parsing, searching, processing, etc.). It's a GD crime against efficiency.

And at that scale, "readable" has no value, since it would take you longer to read the file than 10 lifetimes.
by SebFender | 2025-08-09 12:21:18+00:00
Back in the 90's my dad and I put a more than 500k on a Volvo 740 and mostly running original parts (oil filters, brakes etc were changed throughout the decade 84/96 - Québec winters included).

The car ran fine and was ultimately sold to a taxi driver that apparently brought it to close to a million (no proof though).

I think now days people treat cars like phones. Minimal continual maintenance can work wonders and save you a bundle in the process.
by lsdforme | 2025-08-09 12:22:00+00:00
> I realised that I needed to interview my prospective employers as much as they were interviewing me

This is so important, and most of the “fit” problems working I’ve experienced are because I didn’t weigh something heavily enough in the interview.

If you are even the slightest bit concerned with an employer, that is a red flag in your long-term prospects there.

For example:

- If your future boss seems even a little clueless about the job itself, you may be lucky to find adequate structure or information available to do your job well.

- If your future boss seems guarded, they may be hiding something; they may not be equipped for the job or could be a psychopath.

- If they have greater than average benefits or the recruiter calls you a rockstar, it may be some form of hell, and you won’t find that out until a few weeks in.

- If more than one person seemed like they were afraid to say something during the interview and were very quiet, either the environment there will be weird or it may be a serious hell and/or there is no chance to be able to fill the shoes of the person that left.

- If you sense that they overestimated your ability or you overstate something accidentally in the interview, you may not overcome that as much as you want to believe in yourself. No, you can’t make up for years of experience with hard work. Your LinkedIn profile description must be essentially you, with the burrs removed and buffed up a little; It’s not just to get past a machine or recruiter.

- If anyone you interview with is an arse, even if they work in a different team, that’s not a good sign.

- If you are ___, and no one else there is, that may be a serious problem. This is age, sex, religion, politics, number of kids and ages, pets, what they do/don’t do socially, emotion, humor, tech stack, clothing, what vehicles they drive, style of workplace, and everything else that either you won’t like or they won’t like about you. Diversity is a sham if you’re the only one different, though I know that some may not ever realistically find a place to fully fit in.

- If you join when they’re hiring others for your team at the same time, and the business itself isn’t growing significantly, that can be a bad sign.

- Claims that they don’t fire people are a lie or a hope.

None of these are absolute rules, but find your people, and if anything doesn’t seem right or seems too good to be true, it probably is. Weigh that extra salary against the impact of having to find another job if you quit or are let go later.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-08-09 12:24:10+00:00
3.2% decline in a year is massive because a year is way too short a time to see anywhere near the full effect due to things like leases often being for 10 years, technology rollouts being slow, etc. On a 10 year timeline i would expect tjat number to be much higher. Its a value judgement whether the wage was a good idea or not but it does us no good lying to ourselves about what that judgement actually cost
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-09 12:25:09+00:00
> The model predicts that the search for biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres may find planets with Archean-like atmospheres, but probably will not find the signature of a planet with a Proterozoic or modern Earth-like atmosphere.

Making testable predictions is a sign this is real science, and not just mystical gibberish.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-09 12:25:28+00:00
Windows power users are sometimes their own worst enemy.

The top cause of broken Windows Update or Windows Stores is in my experience people either running malware as part of pirating stuff (it's not zero-daying their browser), which then nukes the background services needed for Windows Store/Update to work. Or they deliberately run scripts that stop Windows updating because they find it annoying not realizing that they corrupted their system by doing so. Or they do other things that break Windows like changing the permissions on c:\Program Files\WindowsApps which is meant to be private and managed only by the OS, but power users hate that idea so they mess with it and then things break.

Windows shouldn't allow itself to be reconfigured in ways that let users deliberately break it, but ultimately it's just software and can't stop users fucking with its internals if they try hard enough.

On macOS things are much better. Apple transitioned to immutable system images and de-powered the root user a long time ago. They also managed to create a culture where even power users recognize that SIP is good for security and don't turn it off so there's way less of a culture of random hacks. Their security is way better as a whole so there's less malware and it's less invasive. And their OS engineers are just better so they don't tend to ship updates that botch stuff like Microsoft do.

Easy example: disable the Windows license check background service, and the Security app no longer opens. There's no error message, just nothing happens at all when you click it. Why does Microsoft allow users to do this? Well the whole OS is just in maintenance mode due to tech debt bankruptcy so fixing anything has become nearly impossible, let alone the kinds of huge moves Apple has made.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-09 12:25:28+00:00
Surely you'd understand how this sort of approach eliminates all contingency from the past. Especially given that tech trees are usually present in video games where they look forward rather than backward.

If you are doing a large project on the history of science (you have clearly put a ton of work into this) but you aren't communicating with historians of science that's concerning to me.
by palsecam | 2025-08-09 12:26:19+00:00
Btw, a Tor relay can be relatively lightweight. I run one on a $5/mo VPS (which does many other things). You need 1 GiB of RAM, but a single basic CPU core largely suffices. My relay sends/receives ~150 GiB of traffic per day (~15 Mbits/s). It’s not an exit node, so no legal worries.

Here’s my torrc:

SocksPort 0 ExitRelay 0 ORPort NNNN DirPort NNNN Nickname X ContactInfo X@X.com RelayBandwidthRate 80 megabits RelayBandwidthBurst 120 megabits MaxMemInQueues 384 megabytes AvoidDiskWrites 1 HardwareAccel 1 NoExec 1 NumCPUs 1

Here’s my override config for systemd (Ubuntu 24.04):

$ sudo systemctl edit tor@default [Service] Nice=15 CPUAffinity=0 CPUWeight=60 StartupCPUWeight=6 IOWeight=60 TimerSlackNSec=100us MemoryMax=896M MemoryHigh=800M OOMScoreAdjust=1000 LimitAS=2G LimitNPROC=512 LimitNOFILE=10240 PrivateDevices=true ProtectSystem=true ProtectHome=true
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-09 12:27:03+00:00
Calculus is used in basically everything hard or worthwhile. Its like the most useful part of maths to learn, along with linear algebra, for doing real world stuff.

I've personally used it in my career for machine learning, non ml image processing, robot control, other kinds of control, animations, movement in games, statistics, physics, financial modelling, and more.
by reactordev | 2025-08-09 12:27:31+00:00
>Note also that the order of columns matters! We need to clearly understand which ID is the manager and which ID is the team member.

If it were true 6NF than no, you don’t need to order, you need to make sure your naming conventions are on point.

`id` is good. `manager_id` is good. `parent_id` a little less so but still practical when abstracting away the business vernacular from the logical problem.

Other than that, everything was good. Attributes vs links trip up even the most seasoned devs. If you have a grouping of 3 or more attributes that relate, consider making it a link and splitting it off into its own table, normalizing your data further.
by nly | 2025-08-09 12:27:56+00:00
I have a system at work that relies on HTTP long polling + chunked transfer encoding to do "streaming"

It took me a while to realise you can't observe this properly through "mitmproxy" during dev like you can with a regular request because the proxy by default effectively tries to wait until the entire response is in before forwarding it.

cURL at least does minimal to no buffering processing chunked responses.
by mzk_pi | 2025-08-09 12:27:58+00:00
Thank you for the information; I learned a lot. Regarding the LETS issue of “services not expanding,” this protocol was originally designed as an emergency disaster prevention system, so it’s fine even if a single community doesn’t expand excessively.

Time-based currency has a similar orientation. The challenges of skill value imbalance and the difficulty of sustainable operation due to declining motivation are indeed present. Each local operating organization should run a PDCA cycle to evaluate and improve, and AI-based fair evaluation support could also be effective.

The “limited scope of use” and “dependence on the issuing company” problems of Canadian Tire money are addressed in this protocol by allowing communities around the world to autonomously issue currency without relying on a single company.

We want to offer this protocol free of charge to talented engineers worldwide.
by horsawlarway | 2025-08-09 12:28:48+00:00
Caveats from that document, top one basically blows this whole thing up.

Maven can't give you reproducible builds with version ranges, because it has no lockfile.

---

More Details Reproducible Builds for Maven:

Require no version ranges in dependencies, Generally give different results on Windows and Unix because of different newlines. (carriage return linefeed on Windows, linefeed on Unixes) Generally depend on the major version of the JDK used to compile. (Even with source/target defined, each major JDK version changes the generated bytecode) For detailed explanations, see Maven “Reproducible/Verifiable Builds” Wiki page.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-09 12:29:12+00:00
> As an open source SaaS startup, we need to be able to do both: Ship quickly while also offering a self-hosted version.

You want to, you don't need to.

> This makes shipping updates harder because customer instances are a black box.

Containers for software updates.

> Even low-risk fixes like renaming a database column can break a billing run when a job is currently using that data.

Why is anyone renaming database columns in the year 2025? Have we not had five fucking decades of experience that this is a terrible thing to do? If your application's internals are exposed to the customer, you have messed up. If you have an API or user interface, it has to be backwards-compatible. These are table stakes.

> You can’t extend/integrate cloud software beyond what APIs allow you to do.

True, API integration is by definition vendor lock-in. But that's what people like these days. Nobody wants to spend the time to develop an interoperable standard when they can just churn out an API and force somebody else to make it work with what they have.

> If a cloud vendor has a security issue, you now have a security issue.

So vet the cloud provider for its security practices. Enterprises do this as a matter of course. The decent (read: expensive) providers have better security than you'll implement.

> If a vendor fails/gets sunset by an acquirer, their software disappears.

True enough (again, API integration is vendor lock-in), so make sure you use vendors in a way that's highly cohesive and loosely coupled so they are easier to replace. In general, part of your maintenance budget (80% of the cost of software is maintenance) is in upgrading or replacing EOL software. This is more true of self-hosted software than cloud-hosted.

Building a self-hosted thing isn't significantly different than a cloud-hosted thing. Remember when we didn't have a cloud? Everything was self-hosted. What's hard is just software engineering, because new people aren't learning the lessons old people already learned. It's like building construction, with no zoning code, no manual, no 5-year apprenticeship. It's hard to learn; it's not hard to practice once you've learned.
by stuvinton | 2025-08-09 12:29:16+00:00
Hi HN, ClipCert is a personal project I built to explore a simple idea: Can we use cryptographic signing (not AI) to prove whether a video is authentic?

How it works: You digitally sign a video. Later, anyone can verify that video using your username (linked to your public key). The system gives a match percentage, showing how closely the submitted video matches what was originally signed.

It’s not detection, it’s verification!

Right now this is just a proof-of-concept (scaled down i.e. 10s max videos, .mp4 only, etc.).

I’d love your feedback — on the concept, tech, risks, and use cases. Could this add real-world value?

Feel free to test!

Thanks — happy to answer anything. Stu