MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Has the Gaza war affected the HN crowd?
by padraic7a | 2025-09-10 15:29:35+00:00
I'm curious whether others in the HN community have felt ripple effects from the Gaza war—either directly or indirectly.

In Israel, the war has triggered a noticeable academic brain drain, with foreign students and collaborators pulling back from Israeli institutions (Haaretz). In tech, the impact has been even more pronounced: thousands of workers have relocated abroad, especially to the U.S., and investment in Israeli startups has dropped sharply. Some VCs now require Israeli companies to incorporate outside Israel to mitigate perceived risks (Calcalist).

At the same time, there's growing tension within global tech companies. Internal protests—especially at firms like Google and Microsoft—have raised questions about how Israeli professionals are perceived, and whether political affiliations or national origin are starting to affect hiring, collaboration, or workplace culture. Google recently fired 28 employees after a sit-in protest over its cloud contract with Israel (The Verge), and Microsoft faced a lockdown after activists occupied its president’s office (NYT).

It’s also important to acknowledge that Palestinian professionals and supporters of Palestine may be facing their own challenges. In some cases, expressing solidarity or criticism has led to workplace tensions, reputational risks, or even job insecurity. For many of us who are just observing what is happening online there is also an impact. This can shape how we feel about the historical conflict. These dynamics are complex and vary widely by geography and company culture, but they’re part of the broader picture.

For those of you working in tech, academia, or investing:

- Have you seen changes in how Israeli or Palestinian colleagues are treated?

- Are relocation trends affecting your teams or hiring decisions?

- Is internal culture shifting in response to the war or related protests?

- Have your opinions changed over the course of the 'war'?

Would love to hear perspectives from founders, engineers, researchers, and investors—especially those with ties to Israel, Palestine, or working in globally distributed teams.

== sources ==

Academic brain drain from Israel Haaretz: “Foreign Students Are Fleeing Israeli Universities” https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-20/ty-article/.premium/foreign-students-are-fleeing-israeli-universities/0000019f-2e6e-dc3c-a7df-3f6e2f7b0000

Investment decline and relocation in Israeli tech Calcalist: “ההייטק הישראלי איבד 8800 עובדים מאז תחילת המלחמה” https://www.calcalist.co.il/local-news/article/hyq0j00x0c

Google employee firings over protest of Israel cloud contract The Verge: “Google fires employees who protested its cloud contract with Israel” https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/18/google-fires-employees-protest-israel-project-nimbus

Microsoft office protest over Israel ties New York Times: “Microsoft Protest Over Israel Ties Ends With Lockdown” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/technology/microsoft-protest-israel.html
by jorgejr | 2025-09-10 15:29:48+00:00
I get that YouTube creators are worried about the drop in views, but honestly, this isn’t much different from what happens in every other industry. For the rest of us, markets change, laws change, inflation hits, taxes go up, new tariffs appear… and we all have to adapt. The market is never static, and everyone else works under constantly shifting conditions. So instead of complaining, maybe it’s time to adjust, just like the rest of us do.
Show HN: Nooki – a minimal, text-only Reddit alternative (soft launch)
by lakshikag | 2025-09-10 15:29:55+00:00
Hey guys. I’ve been building a side project called nooki.me - It's a very minimal Reddit-style discussion site focused only on text discussions (no images, videos, or memes)

It has communities (like subreddits), voting, and comments, but I’ve tried to strip away everything else. The idea is to see if a text-first, distraction-free space for discussion still feels good in 2025.

For now it’s only text posts, but if it ever takes off and people want to post media, I’d consider adding image/video support.

I’m soft-launching it now to gather feedback and early impressions. Would love to hear what the HN thinks: – Does the minimalism feel refreshing or limiting? – What’s missing that you’d expect in a community site? – Any ideas for features that would make it genuinely useful?
by mint5 | 2025-09-10 15:30:20+00:00
Well there’s overhead like cost of administering the claims etc etc so actually if it were literally replacing the house every 20 years the annual premium would be like house$ / 10 not 20.

But if it gets even remotely close to that point the yearly insurance is a significant portions of the house worth and it’s obviously not affordable/insurable - whatever term one wants to use.

At that point if one can’t self insure then they can’t afford the house
by ttepasse | 2025-09-10 15:30:27+00:00
I was surprised to see an Eckart Walther cited as an co-creator of RSS. That was news to me, and I followed the RSS wars since 2000. I thought I knew the names of everyone involved.

Turn's out: he really is. RSS was created by Ramanathan Guha, Dan Libby and Eckart Walther at Netscape first as an RDF Site Summary but only Guha and Libby are named on the original specs. That format then got transformed into a pure XML-based format, then merged with Dave Winer’s format, who then became chief author for the following RSS 0.9x and 2.0 versions. And of course in parallel there were the rivalling RSS 1.0 specs (again RDF based) and the Atom effort.

Should anybody be interested in now obscure histoy: Twobithistory did a longer retrospective of the feed wars:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

And the (slightly disputed) RSS Board, its own fractal in the RSS history, keeps copies of the original specifications:

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-history
by loudmax | 2025-09-10 15:30:48+00:00
The Not Just Bikes channel really makes clear the benefits of living in an environment that isn't designed around cars, but also the challenge of designing such an environment. You can't just plop in some busses and bike lanes and expect immediate improvement, you really need to think about transportation holistically. This means considering how cars, trucks, busses, bikes, pedestrians and everything will interact.

The Netherlands is lauded as a model, but it took them decades to get where they are today. This isn't to say that we can't do it in the US or Asia or anywhere else, but that we should be clear-eyed about the magnitude of the challenge.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-10 15:31:24+00:00
My message starts with "it's a reason among others".

And bike-centric policies have led the city to invest in bike lanes, rather than in the aging public transport and to remove surface parking, making it almost impossible to own a car if you have a family. All of this is in the article that I linked.

An unexpected casualty of this is that it's now complex to get trade workers to come to Paris for construction jobs, and, funnily enough, public works to build bike lanes are more costly as trucks and workers spend a lot of time in the traffic now.
by akudlacek | 2025-09-10 15:31:27+00:00
Found this to keep my computer awake temporarily but there's a lot more useful stuff here, and it's available on the Microsoft store.

Favorites so far: PowerToys Awake - keep a computer awake without having to manage its power & sleep settings File Locksmith - check which files are in use and by which processes PowerRename - bulk file renaming Text Extractor - copy text anywhere on screen
by readbeard | 2025-09-10 15:31:43+00:00
They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and your phone is usually with you. In any case, some professional photographers actually prefer shooting on their phone even for planned, high-profile shoots—perhaps they like its convenience, or that its unassuming nature puts subjects at ease. Or perhaps they find it creatively freeing to be burdened down by only minimal gear.

For example: https://www.gadgetmatch.com/time-covers-shot-iphones/
by donkeybeer | 2025-09-10 15:32:09+00:00
At the high school level of presentation and rigor, Biology is hard and boring full of memorization without anything that reduces or compresses the data. Chemistry is very hard, lots of memorization and also lots of mathematical thinking. Physics is easy, very few basic laws that are quite intuitive and whose proofs you are not expected to learn and links in most directly to real life things you can feel and experience such as levers, moments etc.
by ordord00 | 2025-09-10 15:32:14+00:00
This is the way. My son (10) went from actively trying to do anything else while he was supposed to be reading, to actually settling down and reading continuously for at least 30 minutes every night. We've had the rule since he was 6, but it seems like in the last year he has flipped from not being that interested to now highly valuing it and being upset if something impinges on his reading time... which of course we will extend bed time a bit to ensure he gets his reading time.
by kbolino | 2025-09-10 15:32:42+00:00
This is an interesting perversion of Amdahl's law.

Yes, if you are looking at a single request-response interaction over the Internet in isolation and observing against wall clock time, the time spent on JSON (de-)serialization (unless egregiously atrocious) will usually be insignificant.

But that's just one perspective. If we look at CPU time instead of wall clock time, the JSON may dominate over the network calls. Moreover, in a language like Go, which can easily handle tens to hundreds of thousands of parked green threads waiting for network activity, the time spent on JSON can actually be a significant factor in request throughput. Even "just" doubling RPS from 10k to 20k would mean using half as much energy (or half as much cloud compute spend etc.) per request.

Changing formats (esp to a low-overhead binary one) might yield better performance still, but it will also have costs, both in time spent making the change (which could take months) and adapting to it (new tools, new log formats, new training, etc.).
by dh2022 | 2025-09-10 15:32:44+00:00
But here is the thing-almost all meetings are on Temas. Because Microsoft campus is so spread out managers do not have time to go from building to building to meet other managers. Azure for example is spread out over 10 building just 8n Redmond. Never mind connecting with teams in Bay Area, Atlanta and India. All of these mangers spend their meetings on Teams.

Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.
by stetrain | 2025-09-10 15:32:59+00:00
And the cost to buy into these developments where they do exist suggests a supply and demand imbalance. Near me a new-ish 'town center' development with a mix of apartments, shops, restaurants, grocery store, townhouses, and single-family homes is easily double or triple the price of an equivalent house in a standard cul-de-sac neighborhood a 15 minute drive away.
by simoncion | 2025-09-10 15:33:09+00:00
> it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work.

I agree. Though, you seem to have missed the part of my statement where I said "[It is a not-infrequent sight to find] folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop [the company-provided couches and comfortable chairs in the office].".

Add to that the fact that it's bloody hard for a casual onlooker to distinguish "doing real research on the Internet" from "fucking off on one's computer", and also the fact that heading out for a long lunch or coffee/smoke break to "talk strategy" [0] with a coworker is a common activity in the office, and you end up with a lot of tacitly-company-sanctioned fucking off on company time. Like, a staggering amount.

Perhaps the companies you've worked for have all been merciless results-focused taskmasters and the situations I'm describing are entirely alien to you. If that's the case, then -for you and your coworkers- absolutely nothing relevant would change in an all-WFH environment.

[0] Read as "shoot the shit where noone can overhear"
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-10 15:33:26+00:00
That link directly contradicts what you are saying.

> This means that in an ordinary index scan, each row retrieval requires fetching data from both the index and the heap.

Note that it says _index and the heap_. Not _index and the primary index and the heap_. (For a B-tree-organized table, the leaf heap nodes are essentially the bottom of the primary index, so it means that to find anything, you need to follow the primary index from the top, which may or may not entail extra disk accesses. For a normal Postgres heap, this does not happen, you can just go directly to the right block.)

Index-only scans (and by extension, INCLUDE) are to avoid reaching into the heap at all.

> The downside to creating covering indexes is that it's more work for Postgres to go update all the INCLUDE values in all your covering indexes at write time, so you are trading write speed for increased read speed.

For updates, even those that don't touch INCLUDE values, Postgres generally needs to go update the index anyway (this the main weakness of such a scheme). HOT is an exception, where you can avoid that update if there's room in the same heap block, and the index scans will follow the marker(s) you left to “here's the new row!” instead of fetching it directly.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-10 15:33:55+00:00
Libraries are more than checking out books, but your point is well made. I prefer printed books, but absolutely use e-books when they're more convenient. I still think it's useful to have a librarian AT THE SCHOOL to help students with all the things libraries do that aren't related to circulation or lending. Having the librarian at the point of use increases the chance that students, faculty and administration will make best use of the library's services.
by strken | 2025-09-10 15:33:57+00:00
To me, whether there's enough space for cars and walkability are both part of how dense a city is. Leaving room for cars must make a city less dense and usually less pleasant for pedestrians as well; in the same way, a suburban area with single family homes and limited low-rise apartments needs car infrastructure because public transport gets worse the longer each trip is and the fewer riders there are.

You can accommodate both regions within one city, but they can't overlap without compromising one or the other (edit: although this compromise is a desirable middle ground for some people). Note that Pontevedra built huge free parking areas on the outskirts of its urban area. For their whole city it's not either-or, but in any given place they've had to make a decision.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-10 15:34:19+00:00
On 2, the US DOEd has decided for at least the last couple decades that it is inherently racist if a school's punishment metrics are misaligned with their demographics (e.g. white kids are 50% of the school population but receive only 40% of suspensions).

That environment makes it risky to punish anyone, and a lack of order causes or compounds almost every other item on your list (which I largely agree with).
by b_t_s | 2025-09-10 15:34:54+00:00
I think this is probably very genre specific. I suspect the nonfiction and realistic fiction boy/manly/macho genres(outdoors, machines, fighting, and the like) may have been especially cannibalized by games/video. I don't recall seeing any of this stuff on my last trip to a physical bookstore. But on the fantasy/geeky side there are more great options than there have ever been, and, as a girldad, I can tell you that female main characters are tough to find.
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-10 15:35:17+00:00
It's impossible to reach conclusions about the motion of the object solely by looking at the FLIR footage.

But that's irrelevant if you understand anything about the logistics here.

There are really only two possibilities here: either the object really was moving as claimed, or multiple retired military aviators are lying in unison.

As described by the aviators who've described things publicly (Fravor, Dietrich, Underwood, Slaight, Underwood), these encounters cannot possibly involve a gross misunderstanding about the motion of the object.

The UAP was initially spotted by the Princeton on radar. The fighters were initially 60 miles away from the object(s) and were directed on an intercept course by the Princeton, at which point they observed it via some combination of visual observation and/or FLIR. At this point we're talking about a minimum of four aviators (pilot+WSO aboard each fighter) and the radar operators on the Princeton and likely other ships as well. A second flight of at least one (but perhaps more likely two) F/A-18 were dispatched to later confirm. Brings the total to 6-8 aviators.

If the radar operators on the Princeton didn't have a precise understanding of the object's speed, location, and heading they would not have been able to direct the pilots to intercept the objects.

If the aviators had a gross misunderstanding of the UAP's motion they would have been out of visual and FLIR range found themselves quickly, so even an initial gross misunderstanding would have become quickly apparent.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-09-10 15:35:22+00:00
They could make it configurable. You can have your cake and eat it too in this situation.

I don't like KDE's default settings but it took me a mere seconds to get the desktop I like.

Of course this is not a new idea and how it used to be on Windows. The real question is why removing user choice has become so fashionable in UX design. Maybe it's just a phase and will pass.
by tzs | 2025-09-10 15:35:23+00:00
Many things that can stop imports take a lot longer than 12 months to resolve. Wars can take several years for example.

Getting a domestic replacement in 12 months of belt tightening would still be a lot better than having to deal with several more years of that.

Also I'd expect that there are cases were we export X and import Y, and if Y was cut off we could switch to using X somewhat as a substitute. I don't know offhand of any specific plant foods where this is the case, but pork and beef illustrate the idea. We import about 15% of our beef. If that got cut off we could cut some pork exports and use that as a substitute. It's not a great substitute but it is calories that can get you through a crisis.
by ndiddy | 2025-09-10 15:35:32+00:00
> It's forever damned to the 5% of people who are willing to toil with a CLI

I've never really understood this complaint. On GNOME/KDE, all the normal system administration/configuration stuff (the types of settings you'd see in the control panel on Windows) are accessible through the settings GUI. The situations in which I've had to use the CLI on Linux are basically equivalent to when I have to use the Registry Editor, Group Policy Editor, Services Manager, or PowerShell scripts on Windows, none of which are really any more user friendly than the Linux CLI.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-09-10 15:35:59+00:00
I know that Google engineers have a cushy life but I actually find it unlikely that a guy, who isn't attempting some radical new type of search (like pagerank back in the day) can hope to compete with the orgs in Google who support search.

Again, those orgs are likely too comfortable and less productive than people would like, but we're talking about many-many thousands and depending upon how you define "the work" of search upwards of 10k.

I didn't see any new secret sauce in the article and Google is has said that since 2015 (?) Google Brain has been involved in search.

This is not to say that Google couldn't be dislodged by search via LLM or similar, that is "new" research.
by LiamPowell | 2025-09-10 15:36:17+00:00
> Say rsync.net or borgbase

Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.
by normalaccess | 2025-09-10 15:36:21+00:00
Although unfortunate this falls within the margin of error for such events. I hope everything gets resolved but a dragnet will cause a few false positives.

Just the same as if the cops bust a party where there is under age drinking, one or two people might be old enough but you can't tell until you process everyone.

And this wouldn't be the chaos it is if the border wasn't a free for all in the first place.
by jrm4 | 2025-09-10 15:36:27+00:00
Lots of Obsidian talk here. As someone who started with the OG https://zim-wiki.org, I tried Obsidian and never found it compelling enough to switch.

I did, however, with Logseq.

On the surface they're deeply similar -- but Logseq's native handling of outlines -- including collapsing and and expanding on the fly (org-mode does this as well, but you know) is absolutely killer. It's the first one to kind of reliably "free" me from the whole "every note is a page" thing that causes lots of friction.

I think it could go well to solving op's problem as well. Quick expanding and collapsing and easy search helps me to poke around older knowledge in a fun and useful way.

(actually, I didn't "switch," I still keep day-to-day important stuff in zim, but for that storing and exploring old knowledge, I'm now all about logseq).
by mooiedingen | 2025-09-10 15:36:32+00:00
Nothing new as it has been done before, the concept is simple enough: step 1: indexer, solr/lucene Step 2: crawler of which there are several foss, build one yourself? or you just run yacy which is a combo of the above, hook combine with an oldschool searx instance and you will be granted the title as seeker by the spirit of Fravia+ who was elder of the searchlores!!! Not only will you filter crap made by machine learning models, but thou shall find what thou seek! I refuse to call a 16 line long for loop triggering in memory loaded tokenized data where data can be anything from a scientific paper hallucinated by a chatbot to a message between two lovers anything intelligent for it is not intelligence but a blob of tokenized fcking data in memory getting triggered for an output by a derp with a 16 line long for loop!!!
by panny | 2025-09-10 15:36:37+00:00
The important part of his statement to me was:

>on my site

That means not uploaded to github. That means self hosted, as is the point of the main discussion.

>these scanners don't respect the LICENSE file

I don't think github scans outside repos, but what is stated there certainly applies to OpenAI and others. They don't have a license to do what they are doing, but the US is not enforcing copyright law on them out of fear of losing the AI race.
by wiether | 2025-09-10 15:36:38+00:00
I am part of a network of "Plex admins", meaning each one of us own and maintain their own Plex server with their own library.

Thanks to the centralized Plex account, we can share our libraries with each other in a few clicks.

You can do the same if you don't have a server also, basically being a member of various Plex server and accessing everything through a single account and interface.

Sure, requiring an account if all you want to do is being the single user accessing your own instance is useless, and if it's your usecase, then Plex is not the right tool for you.

I tried Plex, Emby and Jellyfin, but I staid with Plex because of this easy sharing feature.