MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chneu | 2025-09-03 18:52:51+00:00
Missing the point. When developers dont have to give a shit about resource usage it can become a problem. When every app is using way more ram/memory than necessary it starts to add up.

This is why modern programs and games can barely run on modern hardware in many circumstances. There is no incentive for devs to be efficient.

It's not one program using a lot of memory. It's 45 of them all using way more than they need to. It adds up.
by bluGill | 2025-09-03 18:53:10+00:00
You can buy the full series. Or check the likes of amazon. The books were first written in 1980, so they are fairly widespread. You can find plenty of youtube videos of people trying to make them, and once in a while forums dedicated to people making them (and suggested upgrades). They are not the best machine cools you can get/make, but they are serious tools and better than most DIY attempts (though the video here is better than most DIY attempts I've seen)
by godelski | 2025-09-03 18:53:21+00:00
Lidar is cheap now.

But no, roads are not designed with just vision in mind. Designers use tecture not just for grip but to help communicate things to the driver. There's many subtler ones, but the most obvious one is the grooves you often find on the edge of highways that are used to warn you if you're veering off. This vibrates the car and creates a loud noise. That's two more senses that you're constantly using while driving even if you don't recognize it. Sure, I wouldn't rely on smell, but it is also a useful sense for some diagnostics and may help in some edge cases. But my point is that we're not just vision based creatures. You think about vision more, but the others are very important.
by stordoff | 2025-09-03 18:53:25+00:00
There are various services that do this, e.g. BrightData:

> Bright Data is the World’s Largest Residential Proxy IP Network providing companies the ability to emulate a real user in any country, city or carrier (ASN) in the world. [...] Bright Data has an SDK (software development kit) that is implemented into applications. Bright SDK provides an attractive alternative to advertisements by providing the app user with the choice to opt-in to Bright Data’s network instead. For every user that opts-in to the Bright Data network, Bright Data pays a monthly fee to the application vendor, who passes that value on to the user by not displaying ads.

I haven't heard of any of the VPN providers doing this, but it wouldn't really surprise me.
by elondaits | 2025-09-03 18:53:49+00:00
What about a malicious DNS (on a public spoofed or hacked WiFi) that forwards you to a lookalike domain? Unfortunately many times public WiFi doesn’t work with Google’s or Cloudflare’s DNS servers (I think the Deutsche Bahn’s WiFi was such a case, if I remember correctly, but I know I came across a few on the last few years while traveling). I don’t think there’s anything protecting against that when you’re using a browser.

Sometimes circumstances force one to connect to a public WiFi (e.g. airports, where WiFi is always super dodgy).
by codedokode | 2025-09-03 18:53:59+00:00
A worse lie is memory usage reporting, I think in every major OS it is understated and misreported. In case with Linux, I wanted to know who is using memory, and tried to add PSS values for every process, I never got back the total memory usage. In case with Windows/Mac I judge by screenshot of their tools which show unrealistically small values.

As for the article, the slowdown can be also caused by increased use of shared resources like caches, TLBs, branch predictors.
by 9dev | 2025-09-03 18:54:07+00:00
Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.

Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well.

I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content.
Show HN: Accounts Draft – AI tools to automate accounting tasks by accountants
by Rob_Benson-May | 2025-09-03 18:54:12+00:00
Hi, my name is Robert Benson-May. I'm the founder of Accounts Draft.

Over the years, I've been building businesses in my spare time with varying degrees of success, but I always really had one problem - I selfishly never really created something people want (I'm sure this may resonate with some of you…)

For some reason, I thought that making something that was new or pushed the boundaries of technology, wouldn’t make me any wealth (dumb me, eh?), so in the past I pursued things like e-commerce and an email newsletter.

Well I've now kind of realized that making something of real value actually goes hand in hand with wealth. I quite like this, it's fun building stuff that no one has built yet.

Anyway, it started with a chat with my dad. For a bit of context I'm a chartered accountant, working full time as a partner, and my Dad is also. He works at his own practice though, not the one I’m at (thank God, I'd kill him!).

He was badgering me for an hour while we were on a car journey back from my brother's, to build stuff for accountants instead of making memes on the internet (a pretty fair suggestion tbh…)

I've been building a bunch of the internal systems at the accountancy practice, so it kind of made sense. So I thought, what the hell? I'll give it a go.

So at Christmas, I sat down and started playing around. After having spent ages building with AI on the other startups, I was very pleasantly surprised at what I was actually able to automate. Okay, if I'm honest, that is a real understatement. I was extraordinarily surprised just how much I could automate from my Job.

After a bit of messing around, I set out with one intention to build something that is an order of magnitude better than what is available on the market. I thought, "If I can automate stuff I do at work, then maybe I'd have a bit more spare time to build the startup”. Hopefully therefor a continuous acceleration loop.

It looks like that might have worked to be honest. I haven't shared it with loads of people yet, only a few partners at the firm, but it seems to be spreading like wildfire internally.

One of the tools automates reviewing the notes, policies & disclosures in a set of statutory accounts, exactly the same way as I'd review them myself. We're now using this as a preliminary review on all my teams clients.

Probably the other one which is finding the most use is the "Ask Tax Questions" one. Very simply, it's just a more accurate assistant chatbot than ChatGPT.

There's a bunch more that are in there, and also a bunch that we're using internally that aren't released yet (like something which automates our clients post/letters we receive), but I won't drown you with all that detail.

Anyway, without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce, Accounts Draft.

Thanks for reading! - If any of you try it out, hope you find it useful. Any feedback would be more than appreciated.

Kind Regards, Rob

Robert Benson-May, ACA
by ryandv | 2025-09-03 18:54:18+00:00
Why are you not pasting the full sentence and blatantly strawmanning by taking my words out of context?

> high school geometry classes are just basically using cleaned up and modernized texts based on Euclid's Elements, right?

So you are admitting then that Euclid is too antiquated and required "clean up" and "modernization" to be presented to modern American audiences? Do those "cleaned up and modernized texts" still have you do compass and straightedge proofs? What about instruction in the use of an abacus?

Fuck modern mathematical algebraic notation too, let's expend paragraphs of ancient Greek to describe a mathematical object that would be one line in modern notation.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-03 18:54:20+00:00
So you feel offended on behalf of someone else?

I found the comment(s):

[REDACTED]

> I am closing this PR because it would be quicker for me to write my own bindings than explain everything wrong with it and then hope they get fixed correctly.

The funny thing is that we are talking about a vendor library, one that does actually work (I tested it as I needed curl in Odin)! Seems like the major issues were purely stylistic.

BTW "Please try to keep the original naming conventions and DO NOT change it to Odin's core convention." and "Maybe remove the CURL prefix?" are contradictory.

It is "CURLOPT" in curl.h. "OPT" seems out of place. I am not even sure what I would have named it were I to follow his advice. You?
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-03 18:54:42+00:00
The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables[1] are what you use for things like that. (The former can also be overridden by the --date= option to git commit, and there’s also various situational stuff like --reset-author for git commit or --reset-author-date and --committer-date-is-author-date for git rebase. No, that last one is not parody.)

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#_commit_information
by whalesalad | 2025-09-03 18:55:03+00:00
I've been absolutely waist deep in a bitemporal system on top of PostgreSQL using tstzrange fields. We manage an enormous portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domain names. Every time our core db is modified, before/after states are emitted to a change table. We've been doing this since 2022. Those changes get lightly transformed via trigger into a time travel record, with the valid from/to range and a gist index to make asking questions about the state of the world at a particular point in time easy. For perspective our change table has 90M rows.

All of it works quite well and is decently performant. We can ask questions like, how many domains did we own on March 13th, 2024? Or look at the entire lifecycle of a domains ownership (owned, released, re-acquired, transfered, etc).

The big challenge and core issue we discovered though is that our data sucks. QAing this new capability has been a moving target. Tons of mistakes over time that were partially undone or manually undone without proper audit trail. Ghost records. Rapid changes by our bulk editor tool a->b->a->b that need to get squashed into just a->b. The schema of our database has evolved over time, too, which has made this tough to view a consistent representation of things even if the fields storing that data were renamed. When the system was first introduced, we had ~5 columns to track. Now we have over 30.

Suffice to say if I were to do things over again, I would implement a much better change tracking system that bakes in tools to clean/erase/undo/soft-delete/hard-delete mistakes so that future me (now) wouldn't have so many edge cases to deal with in this time traveling system. I'd also like to just make the change tracking capable of time travel itself, versus building that as a bolt-on side table that tracks and works from the change table. Transitioning to an EAV (entity-attr-value) approach is on my spike list, too. Makes it easier to just reduce (key,val) tuples down into an up to date representation versus looking at diffs of before/after.

Really interesting stuff. I learned a lot about this from Clojure/Datomic and think its quite neat that so many Clojurists are interested in and tackling this problem. As the author notes in this post, XTDB is another one.
by ajross | 2025-09-03 18:55:55+00:00
> I don’t use Google search [...]

I know. But you're posting confidently (along with a ton of other people) in a subthread about Google search anyway, making statements about its behavior which you straight up admit to be unqualified to make. And I'm calling out the disconnect, because someone has to.

No one in an echo chamber thinks they're in an echo chamber. This is 100% an echo chamber.
by thisislife2 | 2025-09-03 18:56:02+00:00
I do trust my ISP more than any foreign VPN service providers because I have the option to take my ISP to court if they violate my rights. I stopped caring about anonymity on political subjects when I realised not being anonymous made me more civil online, and more mindful of what I want to talk about. (Ofcourse, I can think like this because I have the privilege of living a democracy).
by Tor3 | 2025-09-03 18:56:12+00:00
I have source I wrote using SCCS as version control, which later was moved to CVS, preserving the commits as well as commit dates, and at some point moved to Git, again preserving commits and dates. So some of my personal Git repositories have commit entries going back to the late eighties.

For any ordinary commit you can simply include "--date=" with the 'git commit' command, e.g. -m "This is an old change" --date="2001-03-02 18:05:47"
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-09-03 18:57:14+00:00
> habr.com

interesting to see this forum show-up again.

remember 15 years ago there were posts about DYI drone from some random guy with lots of theoretical physics about stable conditions derivations. it got a lot of criticism. now looking back and following what DJI is doing with sensors, his approach was totally wrong and that community nailed it with feedback. the forum got some extravagant ideas and some worthy criticism. at least back then.
by inejge | 2025-09-03 18:57:29+00:00
Someday I'm going to download one of HN data dumps and find the earliest mention of this particular scare story. It must be ten or even fifteen years old by now, ever since Amazon started offering 3G equipped Kindles with an always-on connection.

Sneaky cellular access hasn't happened so far, not because the vendors wouldn't like the capability, but (IMO) because it would introduce enough of its own costs and complications to be unprofitable. It's easier to piggyback on customers' internet and disregard the small fraction of privacy-conscious buyers.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-03 18:58:00+00:00
This quote from the original article reveals its author's fruitless strain to justify his ridiculous idea:

"(Note that IT liberalists who claim encryption is a human right never realize this should also include the right not to be forced to use encryption against one's will.)"

It would be true in context only if the users were given two options, like two buttons: "Click here for strong encryption" and "Click here for breakable stuff".

Who would click the breakable stuff? Yeah, me neither.
by immibis | 2025-09-03 18:58:30+00:00
If you lived in a place like Germany or the UK, you could get arrested for posting online that you don't like what Israel is doing in Gaza or that you think Elon Musk is a Nazi (among other things you could get arrested for saying). In this case, routing your traffic through an unknown intermediary makes sense.

You said you have to be mindful of what you say and how you say it, in order to comply with the law. In other words, your legitimate speech is being chilled. Why do you think that's okay?
by leshokunin | 2025-09-03 18:58:38+00:00
“Nemesis decided to write his LaserActive emulation as a component of multi-system emualtor Ares, partially out of respect for its late creator, Near.”

This wasn’t just a very dedicated coder with an obsession.

This is someone who deeply cared and loved emulation and the community and did a monumental effort to preserve a part of culture that doesn’t get care. Much like Near did.

Legends.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-03 18:58:50+00:00
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.

Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
by leoc | 2025-09-03 18:59:21+00:00
Right, though there's two or three different questions here: whether DEC BASIC influenced MS BASIC, whether MS should have acknowledged that today, and whether DEC BASIC's influence on MS BASIC amounted to a copyright violation. On the last question, my guess would be that there's at least a reasonable argument that MS' use of the DEC BASIC code was transformative enough to get it off the hook, but IANAL. To the extent that it is in a grey area, honestly that's probably a good reason for MS to keep a diplomatic silence about any possible DEC influence today.
by tuckerman | 2025-09-03 18:59:48+00:00
At conferences I've attended I think it's extremely rare to have a speaker be compensated (maybe outside of the cost of flights/hotels). Perhaps this colors my view on the situation and might be true of the other folks here who are more open to novice presenters.

Also, it's more than reasonable to expect someone to rehearse, but I don't think there is any substitute for the real thing. It's like the saying about testing... everyone tests in prod, just some people try test before that too.
by Communitivity | 2025-09-03 18:59:51+00:00
I used lit for a project a couple years ago, and loved it. It had some warts, mostly around working with React components and the Shadow DOM. But it's barebones IIRC. One of the things I loved about it was that it was focused on implementing and using WebComponents via the standard, rather than re-inventing all their own thing.
by derefr | 2025-09-03 18:59:52+00:00
> This plays music from sources that did have a right to give you a copy (e.g. youtube).

The distinction being that any random copy of something on YouTube might be there not because the rightsholder explicitly wants it there, but merely because the rightsholder 1. doesn't work with a big label that participates in the YouTube DMCA content fingerprinting program, and 2. doesn't have the resources to stay on top of every unauthorized upload of their work on their own (or perhaps doesn't even have awareness that anyone is doing such.)

In other words, while YouTube Music (the music and music-video hosting and proxied-leadgen service) is essentially as authorized as MTV, YouTube (the user video hosting service, where a video might just so happen to be music + a static screen/lyrics) is a definite "grey market" for music. There's plenty of legit music there (e.g. live performances by the musicians themselves) but also plenty of freebooted content (...of mostly non-RIAA musicians, sure; but what of it?)

And in my mind, that makes YouTube (again, not YT Music, YT-the-video-host — yes, they're collapsed together at the UI level, but crucially, not at the API level!) not really any different from your average BT tracker, in terms of its ability to guarantee authorized-ness of what it hosts; which is why I think the comparison between "an app that plays videos it finds on torrent trackers" (Popcorn Time) and "an app that plays music it finds on YouTube" (Nuclear) is valud.
by immibis | 2025-09-03 19:00:02+00:00
There are also apps that purport to pay you up to a dollar a gigabyte (no joke) for proxying traffic.

And it's not even illegal, not even shady. I see nothing wrong with getting paid to help big companies compete with/destroy each other.

As a bonus you help rid the world of Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves more captchas to ISPs with more proxies. When every ISP is captcha'd, every user will hate Cloudflare.

It's not a get rich quick scheme - there's low demand for proxying at that kind of price.

I'm not going to shill specific companies, so just Google 'get paid to share mobile data' or something.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-09-03 19:00:09+00:00
There's the "WAIT 6502,X" Easter egg[0]!

Lines 6530 - 6539 are the "MICROSOFT!" that gets printed.

Line 4914 is the code to check the address passed to WAIT and, if correct, print the "MICROSOFT!".

It really is inconspicuous. A source licensee definitely wouldn't find it by quickly perusing.

[0] https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43
by abxyz | 2025-09-03 19:00:34+00:00
I find it confusing too. There are a bunch of different things that influence pricing (what's "auto" vs. "fast"?) and also "results"? Does that mean if I ask for 25 results, I pay $5 per 1000 requests, and if I ask for 26 results, I pay $25 per 1000 requests? or is that based on how many results Exa returns (which depends on how much data Exa has)? I'm sure if I understood the product (as your customers do) it would make sense, but as an outsider, it's not clear to me how much I would pay for the example searches (e.g: "space companies based in the US") or the demos.

Also minor notes:

* Research link in the footer is a 404 * Changelog link in the footer is a link to the blog

edit: after reading the documentation, there are 4 search types, "auto" and "fast" are 2 options that have been combined into a single column on the pricing table. The "latency" at the bottom is a description of the "fast" and "auto" options. I think I understand it now.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-03 19:00:49+00:00
I mean, it’s more like 0.1% of the time but I’ve definitely had to do this in embedded programming on ARM Cortex M0-M3. Sometimes things just didn't compile the way I expected. My favorite was when I smashed the stack and I overflowed ADC readings into the PC and SP, leading to the MCU jumping completely randomly all over the codebase. Other times it was more subtle things, like optimizing away some operation that I needed to not be optimized away.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-09-03 19:00:55+00:00
most of the jews in israel are sephardic, theyre from the middle east and were kicked out by racist regimes so they fled to israel. The mindset you are espousing about palestinians not surrendering will end very badly for the palestinians. They can not win a war against israel, the more they fight the worse things get for them. Pushing them to fight more only does them a disservice.
by danilor | 2025-09-03 19:01:04+00:00
Great article! You can tell the author is frustrated while the tone being quite considering.

I found the part on self-handicapping a bit strange, though. Is that idea real, measurable psychology, or is it more of an interpretation of behavior? I find it hard to conceive how to properly measure such "unconscious intentions". Maybe I misunderstood the author and they only meant it as an analogy.

I feel like there's more to explore on understanding why people think the world is so doomed. My impression is that those convictions are formed from being blasted with news, and not by looking at data. Are there papers out about this?

Another perspective I'd find interesting to learn about is why is it that people that believe problems are solvable do/do not take action themselves. Could the reason behind the decisions be incredibly multifaceted, or could it correlate strongly with, say, personality traits and age?

As I wrote the paragraph above, I came to realize I don't how to create a study that is able to measure a causation/correlation that only exist when two variables interact. Like when a correlation with X only exists if variables A and B are "high" at the same time, not independently. My first thought is that it's a really difficult analysis to make because there are so many possible combinations and thus many opportunities for things to correlate by chance. I'd be happy to hear if you know how to do analysis as such.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-03 19:01:18+00:00
Audiobooks and other material you want to listen to (articles, blog posts, etc.).

There's a lot of stuff I don't have time to sit down and read, but want to listen to while I cook/laundry/shower/drive/etc.

Often recordings don't exist. Or when they do, an audiobook just has a bad voiceover artist, or one that just rubs you the wrong way.

The more human text-to-speech sounds, the easier and less distracting it is to listen to. There's real value in it, it's not "because I can".

You know how it's nicer to read in 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi? Or in Garamond rather than Courier? Or in Helvetica rather than Comic Sans? It's like that, only for speech.