MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-30 16:45:51+00:00
> 3,000 samples is more than enough to have a statistically significant analysis of a population of 100,000.

It's not a valid sample because it's not a random selection - statistical sampling isn't only about sample size.

One reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the above numbers is that the Democrats in government are less stingy about donations, or that the Republicans there don't really like the GOP and are there for the money alone.
by jp57 | 2025-09-30 16:46:23+00:00
... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products.

I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but these brands deliberately signal nothing.

What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the store's brand that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose to shop somewhere else.

With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?

The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools or Spyderco knives)

Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops, either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the quality I wanted.
by pfexec | 2025-09-30 16:46:24+00:00
Took 10 seconds to find:

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/02/29/why-is-the-btrf...

> We had a few seconds of power loss the other day. Everything in the house, including a Windows machine using NTFS, came back to life without any issues. A Synology DS720+, however, became a useless brick, claiming to have suffered unrecoverable file system damage while the underlying two hard drives and two SSDs are in perfect condition. It’s two mirrored drives using the Btrfs file system
by unethical_ban | 2025-09-30 16:46:36+00:00
My make of it is the Left wing social values and perceptions of reality are broadly more tolerated than those of the far right that is complaining.

Is an editor "evil" for deleting or debating the addition of a politically charged article? Come on.

I weep for this country: if we had a voting system that allowed multiple parties (>2) to really compete, we could have an intellectually honest right wing.
by code4tee | 2025-09-30 16:46:41+00:00
I see the string of “30 Under 30” being a statistically valid predictor of future likelihood to go to prison continues. These lists feed on the narcissistic tendencies of grifters who are desperate to get on the list and then tell you about it on LinkedIn.

These lists have such a bad reputation these days that legit top folks are asking their PR people to keep the off!
by Aurornis | 2025-09-30 16:46:50+00:00
Believe it or not, smaller fraudsters get prosecuted all the time, too. One of the news reporters I followed on Twitter in my area liked to follow all of the small cases of real estate and business fraud in my area. There were a lot of prosecutions for people who were stealing <$10K at a time through affinity fraud and fake business investments.

You just don't hear about them as much because someone going to jail for stealing $60K from a couple families from their church in a fake real estate scheme isn't as exciting as a massive fraud against JP Morgan.
by paulmbw | 2025-09-30 16:46:51+00:00
I'm working on Fibre, a tool for secure file uploads for Intercom

https://fibre.framer.website

We use Intercom for support and our customers need to upload sensitive docs (think proof of address, bank statements, etc.). Intercom’s native uploads aren’t a long-term fit for us (100MB/file limits, docs live on Intercom’s infra which screams data privacy issues for us) and we need files to land directly in our own storage.

Still thinking about what to include exactly, but we appear to be on the right path!
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-30 16:46:56+00:00
Being on the 30 under 30 list only means you are more likely to scam people out of money than make it:

> The Forbes 30 Under 30 have collectively raised $5.3B in funding. They’ve also been arrested for frauds and scams worth over $18.5B. Incredible track record.

Some of the more notable: Martin Shkreli, Elizabeth Holmes, Charlie Javice, SBF, Caroline Ellison, Nate Paul.

Fun fact, filter for Stanford in those numbers and the disparity grows starker still.
by yunruse | 2025-09-30 16:47:22+00:00
I found this article while making my way about Wikipedia (as you do).

It's ice that burns: cages of water trapping methane, and indeed the largest non-atmospheric store of it on earth. It forms interesting fractals under a microscope, has subtle and historical climate effects, fosters methanotroph communities. It has commercial interest for methane extraction and may work well for static methane storage.

A fascinating topic to stumble upon!
by raincole | 2025-09-30 16:48:25+00:00
Kagi is probably the only pro-LLM company praised on HN. Perhaps people's hatred towards Google outweighs that of LLM.

Imagine if Google news use LLM to show summaries to the users without explicitly saying it's AI on the UI.

Ironically, one of the first LLM-induced mistakes experienced by average people was a news summary: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o.amp
by Aurornis | 2025-09-30 16:48:40+00:00
> It's interesting how nobody talks about due-diligence being completely broken.

The majority of the talk around this case has been about the due diligence failures. The judge even called it out.

Consumer businesses are harder to vet. It's not like a B2B with a dozen top customers where you can call them all and confirm that sales are happening. Non-response and customer churn is expected to be a high and changing number. From what I read she also invoked various privacy law excuses to give them the run-around while they were pressured to close the deal.

But JPMorgan's failures don't excuse the criminal actions. If someone enters your house and steals your computer, it doesn't matter if you negligently left the door unlocked. A crime is a crime.
by NickC25 | 2025-09-30 16:48:56+00:00
>Have you looked into this?

Yes. I get asked this frequently. I don't want to follow the same trend bandwagon that it seems everyone is on. Stick packs taste fake and often are loaded with non-essential junk (the FDA also doesn't regulate a lot of supplements).

A lot of stick packs are also leaning heavily into "natural flavors". A lot of our customers are people who go out of their way to avoid "natural flavors". If I put something in my body, I want to know what that something is, and I don't trust some catch-all term abused by corporations who put harmful chemicals in their products.

>Guessing the fresh part rules it out?

Correct. Gatorade is my competitor, not LMNT. If you're a fan of stick packs, you can replace LiquidIV/LMNT with half a teaspoon of pure sea or pink salt and a few drops of fresh squeezed lime and/or lemon juice in your water bottle. The end result will effectively be the same but you'll have more control over the flavor and saltiness. And it's cheaper.
by ajross | 2025-09-30 16:49:09+00:00
Right, it doesn't change the direction of criminality. But nonetheless JPM is out that money regardless (maybe some will get clawed back, but probably most of it was spent). "I got scammed and the perp is going to jail" isn't a good excuse to tell your boss about you lost $175M, either.

Lessons abound here. Slow down on the tech habit folks, especially if you're an investment bank and not a VC incubator.
by webstrand | 2025-09-30 16:49:32+00:00
Btrfs has a "happy path" so long as you don't use any features outside of the happy path, your data will generally be fine. Outside of that, your data is less reliably fine.

Btrfs also has issues with large numbers of snapshots, you have to cull them occasionally or things begin to slow down, bcachefs does not.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-30 16:49:57+00:00
It's all too easy to be unsympathetic. But the unsympathetic should remember the soliciting of donations to the non-existent charity for supposedly aiding children; and then bear in mind that there are going to be AI-wielding con-artists in other fields, closer to home, with other hooks for grabbing the marks, too.

Ironically, the religious have rules about doing unto others: be sympathetic to the people conned into giving their money away, in the hopes that they'll be sympathetic to you when you're conned in your turn.
by psnosignaluk | 2025-09-30 16:50:01+00:00
Captain Obvious chiming in here, but as one of those boring douche canoes whose concerns are data privacy, data locality and generally the ability to understand how AI trains off of and manipulates the data we feed it, I'm resistant to the tech. We're testing the use of AI to aggregate and explain patterns in the data we have, but this is limited to our ticketing systems and Slack. Until our current choice of AI provider can guarantee that our transactional data won't be stored outside of the EU, the people driving this internally and those keen to make the sale externally can take a long walk off of a short pier. I can almost smell the aroma of the coffee machine from the chamber in which an EU subcommittee is working on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) (EU) 2025/xxxx to add to the raft of regulations that financial entities in Europe need to concern themselves with. Maybe they'll be nice and just append it to an existing act.

AI might be great. AI might be terrible. I'm not all convinced that most data aggregation features baked into AI and used by most normal companies couldn't be implemented in R or SQL (disclaimer: I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag if the tool I was told to use was an axe). It's just wanted so that someone can crawl over data sets to ask simple questions like 'how many merchants exceeded n number of transactions between a and b date' or 'My customer needs an eIDAS certificate. What do I ask them to send us without having to talk to Captain Obvious?'. I mean, we're busting a gut on revamping our developer docs, but given that the spec is already public, I'm pretty sure that developers can already vibe code against that. Going to test that and see how it gets on.
by jedimastert | 2025-09-30 16:50:27+00:00
Oh don't worry, the judge absolutely LIT UP JPMorgan in the judgement. This is only a taste

> Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying “they have a lot to blame themselves” for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was “punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan’s stupidity."
by chatmasta | 2025-09-30 16:50:31+00:00
I wouldn’t be surprised if they waved it through because “who would be dumb enough to provide us a fraudulent list of customers?” She was always going to be discovered once they tried to market to the list. So I could see them speedrunning due diligence under the assumption that, if it’s totally fraudulent, it will be obvious eventually and then we’ll sue her. The deal is not large enough to affect our bottom line, and the obvious risk of defrauding us makes it unlikely she’s defrauding us.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-30 16:51:15+00:00
I read this book, and it's OK but both repetitive and biased. Surprisingly more "textbook" oriented works on PE are harder to find. Wiley had one but it's about 10 years old. The term "PE" also covers a lot of different models, from the worst 80's-style LBO "greed is good" ones, to honest invest-advise-stay out of the way funds. These modern huge deals almost always seem closer to the former. Having now been very close to two PE buy-outs and a big VC funding event, I think I actually prefer VC. Everyone is very transparent and open about what they are trying to do: pour rocket fuel on a fire and get rich. PE wants it all: big annual cashflow, cut all mid/long term costs (R&D, investment, etc) a juicy multiplier on the sale when they flip it to the next PE fund. Most recently I was at a 15 year old company that was doing 25% YoY ARR growth - amazing right? Well no, we were not covering our debt servicing from the most recent PE purchase, so had to cut everywhere and had a hiring freeze. You couldn't get any support to build for the next decade, because funds don't last that long and you don't want to be selling a company in the middle of a project that isn't generating revenues this year. It all makes me mad, sad and very tired.
by lesuorac | 2025-09-30 16:51:27+00:00
Image you have a goose that lays golden eggs. You could just keep selling the eggs every year but somebody comes up to you and offers you 2 billion dollars now and the public market values your golden egg business at 1.5 billion dollars so it seems fair.

It turns out that if you kill the goose there's a cache of 3 billion dollars worth of eggs within it.

The goose is gone and everybody made money off of it's demise.

---

PE (not always) is effective at finding under-valued companies and ensuring that they record the value on the PE's books.
by jerf | 2025-09-30 16:51:37+00:00
The way that due diligence would have discovered this was not to take the list and start doing spot checks on it.

The way due diligence should have found this is that it should have been written all over the financials. What do you mean you have 4 million customers and a support staff of 20? What do you mean you have 4 million customers but your revenue is {clearly too low}? What do you mean you have 4 million customers but your website spend is {clearly too low}?

It's over an order of magnitude. It should be written all over the company. Experienced DD should have smelled a rat within about 2-3 hours, although nailing it down could take much longer. The logical conclusion I draw is that there was no experienced DD done. In isolation this would a tough claim, however, I look around and I see a lot of Wall Street activity on this time frame that shows no evidence of Due Diligence being done and it seems to be part of a pattern.

(The question of why there was no DD is a separate one.)
by crazygringo | 2025-09-30 16:51:42+00:00
I've read the post but I still have no idea what this is.

Where is the data coming from? Why does it involve playing part of SMB to start with? Besides the sprites used, what does this have to do with SMB at all? How is this different from just a custom ROM that would play this music video? Could you even fit this much data into a ROM?

I feel like there's a bunch of context you need to understand what this is about, and I clearly don't have any of it. And the "objectives" list at the top isn't helping ("1. Do a little tomfoolery 2. Execute arbitrary code..."). What are the actual parameters of this challenge, to understand what is actually being achieved?

Can anybody here help explain?

Edit: thank you so much for all the replies! Now I get why this is wild.
by tarasyarema | 2025-09-30 16:52:06+00:00
Here's today funny story:

I'm building a company and as we are early stage, we have a newsletter for people that might be interested in our progress, and one of them is a good friend of mine. Nevertheless, he asked to be removed from our newsletter, and instead of just unsubscribing like a normal person, he said "just give me an RSS feed"... So I built this while having lunch today...

The interesting technical bit: Resend's broadcast API doesn't return email content (it's documented but still surprising). So you can't just fetch broadcasts and serve them as RSS...

The workaround is to:

1. Fetch broadcast metadata (subject, from address) 2. Fetch all sent emails separately 3. Match them by comparing subject + from fields 4. Cache everything in Vercel blob storage

The cron job respects Resend's 2 req/sec rate limit, so first sync takes ~4 minutes for 370 emails. But subsequent runs are incremental - only 9 seconds when there's nothing new.

Built with Next.js API routes + Vercel Blob + Vercel Cron. Works surprisingly well for such a hacky approach. The matching-by-subject thing feels fragile but hasn't failed yet jeje

---

PS: Are you still using RSS?

PS2: I initially thought of using Google Groups for this, but seems it's not supported. Sad :/

PS3: Thanks Claude Code 2 <3
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-30 16:52:34+00:00
> The conversion from 16 bits to 7 bits was using rounding.

As a very quick fix, you can dither by just adding a random value from [-0.5, +0.5] before rounding (to -64..+63 or whatever your range is). It will give you a dither, and probably sound slightly better; a bit more noise for much less distortion. Noise shaping is left as an exercise for the reader :-) (It is probably nontrivial to get perfect with variable sample rate anyway.)

> I used a custom NES emulator to emulate the generated inputs, and I had it count CPU cycles so I can convert that into seconds, then parse the .wav file with that info.

It sounds like you are just picking one sample without any filtering/averaging/anything (nearest neighbor); this will cause aliasing, which is another part of the reason for the “roughness” you may hear in the sound. You can do a very cheap trick here as well: Take some audio software you trust (say, Audacity) and convert the .wav file to 25208 Hz. This means that you'll get good filtering for most of your audio, and less bad filtering for the 13.85kHz parts.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-30 16:52:36+00:00
The investors?

At that point he had been stiffing his pilots on wages for weeks or months, and with many also paying fuel bills on their personal credit cards/checks, since many fuelers had canceled FedEx's accounts.

Yeah, $5K isn't a whole lot, but if I'm a pilot struggling to put food on my family's table, and the CEO takes company money to Vegas, I'm not thinking "Oh, but the investors" or "Sure, it's not that much money anyway".

I don't see why people (not saying you, in particular) see this as some heroic founder "risking it all". He wasn't. He was risking the company's "all", after asking the employees to suck up his mismanagement.
Claude 4.5 Sonnet just refactored my codebase in one call
by freakynit | 2025-09-30 16:52:41+00:00
Claude 4.5 Sonnet just refactored my entire codebase in one call.

25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.

It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.

None of it worked. But boy was it beautiful.

https://x.com/vasumanmoza/status/1972741452276072839
by Aurornis | 2025-09-30 16:52:42+00:00
Sentencing can be impacted by several factors like this. If the criminal shows a blatant disregard for the law and views lawbreaking as a risk-reward tradeoff to get what they want, they're more likely to commit crimes in the future.

If there had been more evidence that she reluctantly went with the scheme under desperation or pressure and held immense regret and remorse, in theory that would suggest a shorter sentence.

If I recall correctly, Elizabeth Holmes' lawyers tried to push the angle that she was pressured into committing the frauds as a way to lower the temperature of the case.
by mothballed | 2025-09-30 16:52:51+00:00
No because the assets ('money') deposited to SBF were crypto, and you just gamified it by doing a currency exchange to USD while disingenuously failing to note that in that time the USD value of the crypto went up.

If you want an accurate reflection, note how much of the crypto deposited went in, and then how much came back out after SBF lost it.

This would be like me depositing USD, someone stealing some of it, then you bragging the value went up because I have a larger quantity as measured in Venezuelan Bolivars. What actually happened is their % they recouped was less than 100 until you artificially change to an entirely different currency.
by accelbred | 2025-09-30 16:53:02+00:00
I used Zig for my projects for a while, but moved back to C for similar reasons. C23, with gcc extensions, and using MISRA-like coding style where it makes sense, provides a similar experience to Zig but with seamless C interop. You dont have comptime, but my biggest lesson from my time in Zig is that I usually want to pass a vtable instead of monomophizing over input types.
by fidotron | 2025-09-30 16:53:18+00:00
EA had some prime idiots in finance that did indeed make decrees that were problems.

I cannot go into the juicy specifics but on the EA publishing side you would be hard pressed to find someone that did not think the finance department were engaged in cutting off the company nose to spite the face of whoever in the company they didn't want to pay this week. (OTOH this was because there were supposed historical cases of excessive leniency, which from what I heard may even be understating it). I personally had a lot of trouble with the self fulfilling prophecies of marketing like "we didn't make money from X last year, so we won't do it this year", "that's because we didn't try it last year", "your point?" etc. but many were more sympathetic to that.
by dalejh | 2025-09-30 16:53:25+00:00
Congrats on the launch Imbue team!

I used Sculptor to build most of https://lingolog.app/ (featured in this post).

It was a blast - I was cooking dinner and blasting out features, coming back to see what Sculptor had cooked up for me in the meantime. I also painted the landing page in procreate while Sculptor was whirring away.

Of course, this meant that my time shifted from producing code to reviewing code. I found the diffs, Sculptor's internal to-do list, and summaries all helpful to this end.

n.b. I'm not affiliated with the team, but I've worked with some Imbue team members many years ago which led to being a beta tester.
by krrishd | 2025-09-30 16:53:28+00:00
Previous HN thread / article re: _why_ you'd issue your own stablecoin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45237035

TL;DR in this announcement seems to match: more control over rewards/yield (both in entitlement _to_it, and in the ability to customize the portfolio that generates it).
by jhanschoo | 2025-09-30 16:54:08+00:00
This is something that I want to emphasize. While of course, all this discussion is centered around the present-day US context. It is not realistic to expect parents to curate their children's world, it is too much supervision to expect from two people, and historically not the case. Parents do have a domain in which they are able to supervise children, but beyond that, they rely on a tripartite social contract with their communities immediate (school, family friends, neighbors, etc.) and distal (Internet, government social programs, parenting/baby products, entertainment) to help provide a safe enough environment for their children to apprehend the world in even in times when supervision is not possible.

In this case, Meta's product that is says are suitable for teens simply doesn't meet the expectations of safety that most parents expect and it's good that there is reporting on it to inform them.