MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by churchill | 2025-09-07 11:14:25+00:00
>Other nations with low thresholds (Canada, EU, etc.) forced traffickers into bulk smuggling channels, which are riskier and more expensive.

These countries still have issues with narcotics trafficking. Business has continued as usual. The impact of lower de minimis thresholds is a rounding error.

Drug cartels are sophisticated multinational corporations. They won't abandon a business channel that yields tens of billions of dollars' worth of annual profits because of a few lame obstacles on their path. If you factor in street value, you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of merchandise. This business isn't going anywhere.

>Fentanyl is incredibly potent - ~2 mg is a lethal dosage. 1 kilogram can produce 500,000 doses.

I'm not making a moral judgement here. Fentanyl is obviously bad. How much friction are you willing to inflict on tens of millions of everyday Americans, individuals and businesses to stem this tide? How about ending all trade with the rest of the world? Where does the cost-benefit ratio stop/start making sense?

For the most part, Chinese syndicates don't even sell fentanyl to America directly. They ship to Mexico, American mules (sometimes hired on Instagram) drive across the border, and their cars are retrofitted with hidden drug compartments, then they drive back with it across the border. Will you also shut down vehicular traffic into the US?

These cartels hire Pakistani engineers to build them multi-million-dollar submarines that carry drugs across the oceans, to Europe, Africa, and America's coasts. And they're just going to stop because they can't ship tiny packages for free?

>I would strongly suggest doing some basic research instead of making "nativist crowd" allegations.

I'm calling out the nativist crowd because they support tariffs & other trade disruptions for inconsistent reasons. They can't even stick to a reason, so they're guaranteed to fail because of the showbiz nature of US politics. First, it was trade deficits. Then Fentanyl. Taiwan. American debt. Raising revenue. Getting Mexico and Canada to do something about the border. Something, something Golden Age of America. Then the tariffs were dialed back significantly across the board.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not fighting the War on Drugs on the side of drugs. I think narcotics destroy the fabric of society. But the only realistic way to combat it is Singapore-style death penalties for possession exceeding certain amounts. HN's libertarian crowd may dislike this, but it's how Singapore has become one of the world's wealthiest countries by gdppc without a pronounced drug problem.

Stop chasing around small fish, wasting time pandering to American nativists who love showbiz-style politics. Or maybe I'm wrong. The problem isn't even supposed to be solved. It's designed to rile people up and it's working as intended.
by charcircuit | 2025-09-07 11:14:35+00:00
>by enabling corruption and money laundering.

The owner of the company being anonymous or not is not relevant here. These things can be done by people other than the owner and these people are already anonymous.

>That's an issue of shit policing.

It's an issue with every service. You can get prank pizzas, prank Uber eats, prank door dash, prank packages, prank letters (glitter, stinky, etc), etc. Almost no one ever validates addresses before a service uses them.

>The idea that you can exercise power in society and have zero accountability and demand to stay anonymous

I never required the former. There could still be a process to make anonymously owned businesses accountable.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-07 11:15:10+00:00
> I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. > Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt

I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. And then you select out of those the ones that think being interviewed on YouTube about that is a good idea. They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
by vintagedave | 2025-09-07 11:16:18+00:00
> The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest…

The rest of the essay talks about selection (and taste as selection) including in terms of art.

But I wonder what this means for AI consciousness, vs consciousness as, say, mere self-awareness, vs whatever we define sentience to be. An AI running a constant stream of thought: would that be, by the definitions here, conscious? And the selection or focus, something we’ve seen appear in agent systems especially as a result of multiple agents (we humans may not be ‘solo’ in our own heads either): could that view mean complex LLM-based systems could indeed be conscious?
by akio | 2025-09-07 11:16:19+00:00
It is not as rare as you might think.

The most recent time this happened was March of this year, with Chile's Aysén Region dropping DST and moving to the newly created America/Coyhaique.

https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/NEWS

I used to manage a large application for scheduling shifts at warehouses in many different locations, and storing future events as local timestamps and lazily converting them just before calculations into their location’s zoned time was the only way I could stay sane.
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-07 11:17:32+00:00
Never read his blog and I like the writing.

> he feels like an OpenAI mouthpiece now

That seems a little harsh. But, I felt the same about older blogs I used to read such as CodingHorror. They just aren’t for me anymore after diverging into other topics.

I really liked this article and the coining of the term “Research Goblin”. That is how I use it too sometimes. Which is also how I used to use Google.
by omnicognate | 2025-09-07 11:18:03+00:00
If you're going to go to those lengths you will need a way to map the geographical location to a time convention (and you'll probably need something better than an address for the location as those can change too). I don't dispute there are use cases where that may be required, and it's not what I'm advising against.

What I'm explaining is that it's usually wrong to store a nominal (date)time that can't be resolved to an instant in time without assuming extra information that isn't captured.

If fauigerzigerk isn't arguing in favour of doing that, and I've misunderstood the prior discussion, then great. The point should be made anyway, because people doing that is by far the biggest cause of time-related software issues in my extensive experience.
by 3np | 2025-09-07 11:19:04+00:00
The entire thread:

>>> This is a fuzzy recollection of something I believe I read, which might well be inaccurate, and for which I can find no corroboration. I mention it solely because it might spark memories from someone who actually knows:

>>> A company used 192.168.x.x example addresses in some early documentation. A number of people followed the manual literally when setting up their internal networks. As a result, it was already being used on a rather large number of private networks anyway, so it was selected when the RFC 1597 was adopted.

>> sun

> Wasn't 192.9.200.x Sun's example network?

of course you are correct. sorry. jet lag and not enough coffee.

---

So no answers.
Show HN: Canvas Confetti – Performant confetti animations for the web
by Li_Evan | 2025-09-07 11:21:37+00:00
I find this lightweight confetti library after getting frustrated with heavy animation libraries that would bog down pages just to add some celebratory flair. Canvas Confetti is designed to be performant, accessible, and easy to use.

Key features: • Tiny footprint: Just 1KB gzipped, no dependencies • Performant: Uses canvas for smooth 60fps animations, optional web worker support • Accessible: Built-in reduced motion support (`disableForReducedMotion` option) • Flexible: Custom shapes via SVG paths, emoji confetti, color customization

What makes it different: Most animation libraries are overkill for simple effects. This focuses solely on confetti but does it really well.

Demo: https://catdad.github.io/canvas-confetti GitHub: https://github.com/catdad/canvas-confetti
by baq | 2025-09-07 11:22:21+00:00
It’s a very interesting balance between ‘LLMs are unpredictable thus useless’ and ‘LLMs are an amazing revolution, next step on the ladder of human civilization’.

I find it informative that search works so well. I knew it works well, but this feels like step above whatever Gemini can do, which is my go to workhorse for chatbots.
by matt3D | 2025-09-07 11:22:24+00:00
It manifests as a sort of extension for Claude Code.

When I'm in the terminal I can call on Agents who can create standardised documents so there is a memory of the product management side of things that extends beyond the context window of Claude.

It guides you through the specification process so that you have extremely tight tasks for Claude to churn through, with any context, documentation and acceptance criteria.

Perhaps there are others similar, but I have found it completely transformative.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-07 11:22:35+00:00
I have found a strong correlation between what I eat and how much my skin reacts to the sun. I've been out as long as 2 hours in the Texas summer (zero sunscreen) without any kind of ill effect afterward. This is the best case though. If my diet has recently been trash, I can barely go 20 minutes before I start to feel it. I think consuming high concentrations of seed oil is a big part of what causes it. I don't know the exact mechanics of it biologically, but I do know that if I eat that whole bag of Sun Chips I'll effectively become a vampire for the next 3 days.
by nness | 2025-09-07 11:24:12+00:00
I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that.

"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.
by mattmaroon | 2025-09-07 11:26:26+00:00
One has to imagine that there were a substantial number of misfires along the way too. Multi-cellular organisms that popped up and died for one reason or another before they had a chance to reach escape velocity. Like an amoeba that eats a bacteria and incorporates it but the mud puddle they are in dried up.

Wouldn’t surprise if for us to know about 50 at this point there were orders of magnitude more that we’ll never know of.
by omnicognate | 2025-09-07 11:26:50+00:00
Are you arguing in favour of storing a nominal datetime without additional information that allows it to be resolved to an instant in time in those cases, or are you just debating the nature of that extra information?

If the latter, we don't disagree. There's more than one way to do it and plenty of use cases with special requirements (though IANA timezones are sufficient for most purposes). If the former, we profoundly disagree and if you are a professional programmer working in a field that makes significant use of times across multiple regions you will create misery for your colleagues until you change your approach.

But you will at least be far from alone in doing so...
by baq | 2025-09-07 11:28:18+00:00
Nah. The only thing we can establish precisely at the lowest levels is probability. We can and do engineer systems to maximize probabilities of desired outcomes and minimize probabilities of undesirable ones.

Frankly I don’t understand how software engineers (not coders mind you) can have issues with non deterministic tools while browsing the web on a network which can stop working anytime for any reason.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-07 11:28:18+00:00
> I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow.

Making things work properly is terribly passé in this brave new world of magic nonsense-generating robots.

You see this with Google Docs, too; after about a decade of stagnation, Google _finally_ started adding a few features (basic Markdown support, say, better comments, a few other bits and pieces) around 2022... And it finally got a bit less slow. But now that seems to have come to a shuddering halt; once more Docs stagnates, but it has about a hundred Gemini buttons now! It also feels like it's getting slower and buggier again.
by nopelynopington | 2025-09-07 11:28:27+00:00
The norden bombsight was a game changing piece of tech that allowed more precision than had been possible.

The RAF tended to carpet bomb at night, but the USAF wanted to precision bomb by day.

It was nowhere near as precise as today's tech but it vastly improved during the course of the war.

Ultimately it didn't work because the theory didn't work. German manufacturing was not disrupted by precision bombing enough to matter

Masters of the air also touches on this, and some of the disastrous missteps during the raids that led to aircraft loss
by marcusb | 2025-09-07 11:28:32+00:00
It isn't an article, but a mailing list post, and the post starts out with:

This is a fuzzy recollection of something I believe I read, which might well be inaccurate, and for which I can find no corroboration. I mention it solely because it might spark memories from someone who actually knows:

Spoiler: it sparks one memory from one person, who winds up being mistaken.

Offering an alternative hypothesis seems reasonable given the content of the post.
by fmajid | 2025-09-07 11:29:09+00:00
I generally prefer AMD Zen5 to Intel due to AVX512 not being gimped by crippled E-cores that really don't belong on a desktop system, SMT (hyperthreading) that actually works and using TSMC processes, but they've also had their issues recently:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/amd_ryzen_twice_fails...
by genezeta | 2025-09-07 11:30:19+00:00
You seem to be missing a link. It may be this one: https://krispy-the-goat.itch.io/prey-2006 this one: https://www.thegamer.com/prey-2006-fan-made-remaster-doom-3-... or maybe https://github.com/glKarin/com.n0n3m4.diii4a
by simonw | 2025-09-07 11:32:31+00:00
"It seems incredibly concentrated on OpenAI to the detriment of anything else."

My most recent posts:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/7/ai-mode/ - Google/Gemini

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/ - OpenAI/GPT-5

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/kimi-k2-instruct-0905/ - Moonshot/Kimi/Groq

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/anthropic-settlement/ - Anthropic (legal settlement)

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/4/embedding-gemma/ - Google/Gemma

So far in 2025: 106 posts tagged OpenAI, 78 tagged Claude, 58 tagged Gemini, 55 tagged ai-in-china (which includes DeepSeek and Qwen and suchlike.)

I think I'm balancing the vendors pretty well, personally. I'm particularly proud of my coverage of significant model releases - this tag has 140 posts now! https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm-release/

OpenAI did get a lot of attention from me over the last six weeks thanks to the combination of gpt-oss and GPT-5.

I do regret not having written about Nano Banana yet, I've been trying to find a good angle on it that hasn't already been covered to death.
by jdjdhdbdndbsb | 2025-09-07 11:33:17+00:00
Can you think a little bigger about the implications here?? Please understand the root key for this cert has absolute mother fuckton of power ... Someone who has this key can sign certs and pretend to be your bank, your crypto provider, anything you visit!!!!

You need to understand that a root ca key is generally stored offline , in shamir secret sharing pieces, likely in some vaults... if this dude is just keeping this on his computer with a shitty router in front of it, they are being criminally negligent.

This isn't hyperbole.

Edit: missed a word
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-07 11:33:20+00:00
I wonder if this hating on autism is part of the regime's focus on loyalty. Autistic people tend to make their own plans and are much more independent. I'd never be able to follow orders in an army for example.

Whereas the current administration is all about loyalty over facts. They even make the meteorological employees do a loyalty test now so they'll follow the narrative and not the science.
by lazide | 2025-09-07 11:33:34+00:00
The key element here that everyone seems to be confused about, is secret vs non-secret.

If you have an obvious security camera, or an obvious camera that normally would record audio, and you’re in public waving it around and it records audio? You are not secretly recording audio.

Same if someone is standing next to a obvious and clearly visible security camera which normally could also record audio, also, not secretly recording audio.

A hidden mic in your jacket, or like in that case, hiding the camera under a jacket? That is hidden recording.

The general rule of thumb is - if everyone can clearly see what you’re doing, it’s not secret.
by perching_aix | 2025-09-07 11:33:38+00:00
Same thing with models and cosplayers. Even Yandex isn't quite the same anymore I think.

Can be sometimes circumvented with cropping / stronger compression, but it made looking up who a given image is of / what imageset is it from pretty annoying - the opposite of what these people would want in this case too.

Sometimes I wonder if celebrities have issues using tech because of these checks.
by akio | 2025-09-07 11:33:56+00:00
That is not quite right. In Postgres, timestamptz (aka timestamp with time zone) represents an instant in time. timestamp (aka timestamp without time zone) represents what you are calling local time. timestamp (without time zone) is exactly what you should use to store future appointments.

Something that often trips people up is that they think timestamptz stores a timestamp plus a time zone (probably because of its unfortunate name). It does not; it always stores a Unix epoch without an extra time zone, converting any zoned timestamp that it is passed.
by throw0101c | 2025-09-07 11:34:06+00:00
The author recognizes it is not all roses:

> The shameful exception to capitalist opportunity was slavery. A revisionist historical school posits that slavery was the template for American capitalism, the irreducible fount of American prosperity. It oddly mirrors the propaganda of Southern planters who overstated the dependence of the Northern states and Europe on slave-grown cotton.

[…]

> The recurring weakness of American capitalism is inequality. During the first century of constitutional government, the disparities were muted. Cheap land offered an escape from poverty and imports exerted downward pressure on basic goods—iron, textiles and others. High tariffs after the Civil War created a protective umbrella for monopolies (known as trusts) just as railroads connected the country and the frontier escape valve disappeared. Factory workers were shunted into urban slums.

[…]

> Inequality 2.0 is alive and well. American capitalism remains fiercely competitive, remarkably productive, resilient in the face of a thousand doomsayers—and the author of a persistent wealth gap. Inequality significantly increased in the 1980s and ’90s and it remains well above previous levels. In 1979, the top 1% of earners took home 10% of the pie; today it is higher than 20%. Taxes and social transfers level it but only a bit; in 2022, the affluent 1% collected 22% of total income and 19% after taxes. Clearly, the market for talent is more skewed than before.

[…]

> One caveat. American capitalism doesn’t produce for those at the bottom. An American at the 10th percentile earns only $19,000 a year. In Europe, at least, poverty is mitigated by a richer array of social goods. For example, not only is life expectancy greater, but the poor experience less of a gap in life expectancy than the poor in America.

More on the author:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Lowenstein
by voidhorse | 2025-09-07 11:34:49+00:00
They still have modern versions of these machines at arcades in tokyo today, I just used some recently. The photo booth is gamified in the sense that you are timed throughout the process and are given some poses to try and replicate, and you only get two photos (which you choose) digitally, plus a selection of a few for the printed stickers. You can still get digital copies of the rest of the photos online for a fee.

It's pretty fun! The small amount of gamification adds an additional layer of excitement to the photo booth.
by 3np | 2025-09-07 11:34:52+00:00
"13:00 on the 12th Sept 2025 Europe/London" is already (a pointer to) an instant in time as much as any unix timestamp. Just a different reference frame. Now it's true you can not know in advance what UTC time will be at that moment which may bring practical concerns if one wants to synchronize that with a contemporary typical computer system clock. It would be true to say that not all points in time can be reliably stored as unix timestamps[0].

Recalling Einstein and that such a thing as global time reference is fundamentally impossible, you're nitpicking while being technically incorrect.

[0]: but please keep defaulting to it in code unless you really know why lol

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17070518
by undefuser | 2025-09-07 11:35:02+00:00
IBM 3380 Model K introduced in 1987, has 7.5 GB of storage and costed about $160000 to $170000, or adjusted for inflation it is $455000 in 2025 US dollars, that's $60666/GB. A Solidigm D5-P5336 drive that can store 128 TB costs about $16500 in 2025 US dollars, that is $0.129/GB. That's a 470279x price reduction in slightly less than 40 years. So what is likely going to happen to LLM pricing? No one knows and both your example as well as mine doesn't mean anything.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-07 11:35:25+00:00
Yeah, I think this is the only way the could sell them, at this point, with the 3rd gen about to come out. Though, where did you even buy it? I vaguely thought they had stopped making them entirely last year in preparation for the third gen (and if I go to Nissan's website it just offers me a third-gen).
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-07 11:37:13+00:00
1. OBBB rolled back the R&D deduction changes in Section 174 that (allegedly) triggered the layoffs and froze up hiring in 2022-2023.

2. It looks like rates will keep going down.

3. Fewer people are going into CS due to the AI hysteria. You might say oh there's a 4 year lag, but not quite. We should see an immediate impact from career changers, CS grads choosing between career and professional school, and those switching out of CS careers.

The tech AI fear hysteria is so widespread that I've even heard of people avoiding non-SWE tech careers like PM.
by kehvyn | 2025-09-07 11:37:20+00:00
I actually looked at supporting dates like this, but if you go through the Met's open dataset (https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess) that kind of "alternative calendar with no reference to the BCE/CE dates" is basically nonexistent.

There are references to the Islamic and Japanese calendar systems, but always next to the CE equivalent.

Data entry is fortunately being done by modern people, so the translation to CE/BCE is usually baked in, and all you need to support is every possible way somebody could say "the early half of" and "5th millenium B.C. to mid 1914"