MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toddbonzalez1 | 2025-09-04 23:57:42+00:00
It's annoying how the author mentions "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" along with buying from Bandcamp but doesn't describe how they integrate music from Bandcamp into their collection, instead linking to programs that seem designed exclusively for downloading from torrents and usenet.

I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it.

[1]: https://beets.io/

[2]: https://xkcd.com/1205/

[3]: https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl
Show HN: Alva Digital Downloads – I built a better way to sell files on Shopify
by alva | 2025-09-04 23:58:37+00:00
Hey HN! I've been frustrated with how complicated most digital download apps are for Shopify and lack of functionality, so I built Alva Digital Downloads with a focus on simplicity, security and responsive human support.

What it does:

Auto-delivers digital files (PDFs, videos, ebooks, courses) after purchase Built-in fraud protection that holds suspicious orders for review (a common problem with digital products is they get delivered to the fraudulent customer before the actual payment fails) No bandwidth limits even on the free plan Time limits, download counts, and IP restrictions to protect content Works with Shopify's native checkout and customer accounts

What makes it different:

After trying dozens of digital download apps, most were either too complex or had non existent support. I focused on making setup as simple as it can be and providing real human support. The free plan is actually useful (1.5GB storage, unlimited bandwidth) - not just a trial. The fraud protection is a major benefit for stores. Almost every one of my competitors delivers digital files after product purchase but before the purchase has reached the end of the payment lifecycle. A growing number of people are aware of this and are using fake CCs to get whatever digital content for free. Alva Digital Downloads solves this problem, keeping your content secure until the payment has fully completed.

Try it out:

If you have a Shopify store: Install directly from https://apps.shopify.com/alva-digital-downloads For more info and a demo link check out https://www.alvadigitaldownloads.com/

Tech stack: Built with Node.js, React, and uses CloudFlare R2 + Workers for file storage and delivery. I launched this in August and would love feedback on the UX, pricing, or features you'd want to see. Happy to answer any questions about building Shopify apps or the challenges of digital product delivery!
by rvz | 2025-09-04 23:58:37+00:00
There is always a sword of Damocles hovering over everyone's heads to pressure workers to overwork day and night.

Overworking long hours on someone else's terms and management doesn't care as they'll replace anyone with another worker + AI to do the work instead and that could be driven purely to get that silly promotion.

What these companies won't tell you is that they know those on H-1Bs cannot leave unless they find another role - which means one can be threatened over their job to overwork in order to keep it; risking their health as well.

All that BS isn't worth your health.
by dankwizard | 2025-09-04 23:59:14+00:00
Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...
by latchkey | 2025-09-05 00:00:07+00:00
> How do we know that this unusual transaction is you doing what you want and not someone else controlling and defrauding you?

That's what they'd like you to believe, but fact of the matter is that you're still not protected. For example, at my last company, the finance department was phished into changing a bank account number and transferred $50k to another account. Bank just shrugged.
by _boffin_ | 2025-09-05 00:01:13+00:00
Here’s a fun one I given many years ago: I had a friend/client who was professor. We’d talk about ADHD, issues, and other things. One day, I came to him saying, “a lot of times, I’ll read a paragraph 20 times, but not remember a single thing from it. It’s drudgery and almost painful to read it. It’s a fight.”

His response was profound to me: “instead of you reading it how you are, try to understand why the author spent their life, time, and effort to learn that material and then convey it to you. What made them fascinated in it?”

By flipping the script… changed my world
by nomel | 2025-09-05 00:01:35+00:00
For some napkin math:

I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs.

I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years.

Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month.

Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month

If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.
by sempron64 | 2025-09-05 00:03:46+00:00
This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.

If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.

Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.

It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.
by amluto | 2025-09-05 00:03:53+00:00
This happens every now and then. Basic LP isn’t conceptually so bad, but the ICPC environment doesn’t come with CPLEX or Gurobi, let alone a less fancy open source tool. And there is definitely not a copy of cvxopt around to make this easy. Even if you want to quickly kludge up an interior point solver, you don’t have a linear algebra package available (sorry, no numpy or BLAS).

What you can do is to submit a 25 page PDF that the organizers will print and stick on your desk for the competition. And you could put a careful implementation of a very basic simplex solver using dense matrices that is optimized for ease of transcription, taking up, say, half a page. You would hope not to use it because it’s absurd, but then if this problem C shows up, the fastest typist on the team can type it in verbatim.

If I, personally, did this and won the contest as a result, I would feel slightly bad. In my opinion, the contest organizers should either provide an LP solver or refrain from giving obvious LP problems like this.

Obviously OpenAI could kick everyone’s butt by typing faster than any human and by effectively having a large memorized library of pre-written code. Honestly, LLMs vs humans in the ICPC feels a bit like IBM’s old Jeopardy stunt where the machine had a huge advantage in its ability to push the button.
by sfRattan | 2025-09-05 00:04:54+00:00
> stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.

I've largely given up on algorithmic recommendations and gone back to human curation. There are humans out there writing about music, movies, and everything in culture. I've found the ones whose tastes I largely trust, and I follow them via RSS to read about the things I might like.

Are some of those critics probably using algorithms themselves? Sure. Let them dive into that swamp and pull out the gems. I'll stay on the shore, watch, and wait.
by manquer | 2025-09-05 00:05:09+00:00
C++ isn't all that much harder or different from Swift to learn. They play fairly well with each other, you can import and call C++ quite easily from Swift.

It is not like switching from a REPL, browser friendly,inferred typed forgiving language like say JavaScript to Rust with the occasionally cryptic compiler, the unforgiving borrow checker and ownership concepts.

Perhaps people are less comfortable with the libraries and SDKs and tooling from the C++ world for app development. I didn't imagine that such a market was worth buying a company for $610M in 2025 when most apps are web based in one way or other.
by cortesoft | 2025-09-05 00:05:11+00:00
> A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that

How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc.

I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
by titanomachy | 2025-09-05 00:05:23+00:00
Very interesting article, thanks for publishing these tests!

Is the manual loop unrolling really necessary to get vectorized machine code? I would have guessed that the highest optimization levels in LLVM would be able to figure it out from the basic code. That's a very uneducated guess, though.

Also, curious if you tried using the MAP_POPULATE option with mmap. Could that improve the bandwidth of the naive in-memory solution?

> humanity doesn't have the silicon fabs or the power plants to support this for every moron vibe coder out there making an app.

lol. I bet if someone took the time to make a high-quality well-documented fast-IO library based on your io_uring solution, it would get use.
by kulahan | 2025-09-05 00:05:24+00:00
If you want the world to be run by a 700 year old Xi jinping, if you want your children to suffer under a thousand year rule of monopolistic Bezos, if you want to see Altered Carbon become a reality, then that’s your opinion and you can hold on to it.

But don’t you dare force that on anyone else.

See how unconvincing these platitudes are?

I literally cannot imagine why you would want infinite life. The short timespan is 99% of the reason life is so valuable. We need to do what we can with the time we’re given.

I never said nothing could be done about aging anyways. I think we’ll reach the point where people only die when they choose to.

That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.

Imagine if King George were still ruling England. No rules can change ever - he’s the king. Hope you like eternal monarchy.

I sometimes wonder if people are so afraid of death because they never talk about it frankly? My wife and I converse about it regularly.
by altairprime | 2025-09-05 00:06:36+00:00
> it sounds like a free markets entrepreneurs wet dream

Landlords would either have to give up profit to pay for these installations, and/or raise rent on their tenants to afford them.

Many tenants can neither inflation increases in rent, nor increases covering the capital expenditure of electrical outlets in rental parking spots. This share of tenants grows each year that inflation outpaces wages, independent of whether landlords bother with that capital expenditure (which, to date, they largely do not).

As this business opportunity is associated primarily with the worker class rather than any wealthy class, the opportunity only becomes profitable when those businesses that employ 'worker class' personnel — think Starbucks barista rather than SFBay A.I. engineer — are distributing profits to those personnel in the form of wage increases to a sufficient degree that the household's renting power is not decreasing. Any wage gap chart will show that, since the 1980s, non-wealthy households — including the former 'middle' class — have experienced a continuous reduction in purchasing power for several decades. One can reasonable assume this will continue barring non-free interventions in the market.

Given that any reasonable business would never voluntarily give up profits as wages unless compelled, we can assume that those footing the bill for the 'entrepreneur's wet dream' you describe would be landlords — there is, quite literally, no one else left to pay that bill. The state can't impose regulations requiring such upgrades and let the free market work it out because landlords will simply dump that cost into rent, sharply worsening the nationwide poverty and housing epidemic, which would reduce the total amount of revenue available from the rental market. Neither the state nor the landlords would benefit from that outcome.

If you have a different theory of free market that involves business voluntarily sharing revenue with workers without raising price, or landlords investing revenue in enhancements without raising rental costs — and especially without imposing 'non-free' regulatory or union pressures — then I'd love to hear more about that.
by milkshakes | 2025-09-05 00:07:55+00:00
you're building a tool that is designed to sink its tentacles into peoples' most personal accounts and take unsupervised automated actions with them, using a technology that has serious, well known, documented security issues. you haven't demonstrated any experience with, awareness of, or consideration for the security issues at hand, so the ideal amount of code to share would likely be all of it.
by rogerbinns | 2025-09-05 00:08:04+00:00
SQLite has a builtin session extension that can be used to record and replay groups of changes, with all the necessary handling. I don't necessarily recommend session as your solution, but it is at least a good idea to see how it compares to others.

https://sqlite.org/sessionintro.html

That provides a C level API. If you know Python and want to do some prototyping and exploration then you may find my SQLite wrapper useful as it supports the session extension. This is the example giving a feel for what it is like to use:

https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/example-session.html
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-05 00:08:45+00:00
Trying posting online about what you really think should happen to, say, the head of state, and you'll get a visit from the Secret Service, which will just be the start of your problems.

Compare this to enemies of the state, where we're allowed to wantonly express, depict and act out, sometimes literally, desires and calls for even lethal harm against them.
by therealfiona | 2025-09-05 00:09:20+00:00
Been rebuilding my music library from my sailing the high seas days when I did not have money. CDs sound really good. Some much better than streaming Spotify.

Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back.

_grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_
by wombatpm | 2025-09-05 00:10:44+00:00
I’ll try that next. The flow use to be “pharmacy” “something else” phone answered by pharmacist. Then they threw Pharmacy Technicians into the mix. Then they centralized the pharmacy technicians into a call center.

I hate having to call. I hate having the system be insistent on hearing my problem first. 25 years with the same medications, if I’m calling it’s for something that is not usual. And if the system were truly trying to be helpful it would realize I’m calling about the insulin that is delayed when I specifically requested pickup today, and maybe it could figure out I need to transfer it to a pharmacy that has it in stock.
by Lammy | 2025-09-05 00:10:48+00:00
Self-hosting is cool and is what I already do for myself, but suggesting it is not relevant here because it's not feasible for a ton of people who might not even have one particular machine that can run 24/7 to self-host a control plane. Think about a person who has three laptops and two phones or whatever, where if any two of them are online they should be able to communicate over the mesh.

The post I was replying to is suggesting paying-for-Tailscale-Mullavad-mesh as a substitute for paying-for-NordVPN-mesh to which I say “yes, but”. It is a total non-starter to try and push most people into “install all this software, register a domain, set up this TLS automation, write this Headscale config, know what the config keys mean†, keep this machine up 100% of the time, stay on top of updates, don't get haxx0red” compared to “install this app, log in, and enter your credit card details”.

† Do you really expect the app-and-credit-card crowd (who are totally valid and deserve working mesh networking that doesn't spy on them!!) to know what even one of the keys in this config means? Really? https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/main/config-examp...
by siddthesquid | 2025-09-05 00:11:06+00:00
Yes, that trust is the fundamental difference. However, that trust costs money in the form of needing more nodes.

You usually can trust your bank, as long as you trust your government. Regulations make it difficult for banks to misbehave.

That being said, not trusting your government (which I can believe is a valid stance in some countries) is probably the only valid use case for blockchain IMO.
by inetknght | 2025-09-05 00:11:23+00:00
It's right in the documentation for mmap() [0]! And, from my experience, using it with an 800GB file provided a significant speed-up, so I do believe the documentation is correct ;)

And, you can poke around in the linux kernel's source code to determine how it works. I had a related issue that I ended up digging around to find the answer to: what happens if you use mremap() to expand the mapping and it fails; is the old mapping still valid or not? Answer: it's still valid. I found that it was actually fairly easy to read linux kernel C code, compared to a lot (!) of other C libraries I've tried to understand.

[0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mmap.2.html
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-05 00:11:58+00:00
If testing is taking up so much time it can't fit inside schools then my god definitely have them spend less time on education.

In high school, with so many hours of classes per day, homework should be a small part of the day. There's enough time to get the important parts into the actual classroom. If homework is a very large amount of time, then there should be less homework.
by orlp | 2025-09-05 00:12:16+00:00
The team manual I referred to when I was in university does in fact contain such a basic simplex LP solver: https://github.com/ludopulles/tcr/blob/master/tcr.pdf (page 22).

I'd just like to clarify that I'm not saying this is necessarily the solution the problem writers were looking for, or that it will run within the allocated time. Just that it's a feasible solution.
by freetime2 | 2025-09-05 00:12:32+00:00
Wow I had no idea this was even a thing, or that it could be more common than regular softball in Chicago.

Reminds me a bit of Candlepin bowling [1]. When I was growing up in New England, that was the only type of bowling we had in my town. And even now that both types are available (often in the same bowling alley), we still call regular tenpin bowling "big ball" bowling.

I wonder what other such regional sports variations are out there that I've never heard of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlepin_bowling
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-05 00:12:57+00:00
Same thing as all the "no-code" or "low-code" frameworks we see coming up from time to time.

No need to learn a programming language, wow, anyone can be a programmer now. A few projects come out of it, people marvel at how efficient it was, and it fizzles out and programmers continue writing code.

If anything, things like visual programming did more than AI does now. For games, if you want to see the shovelware, look at Flash, RPG maker, etc... not AI. On the business side of things, Excel is king. Can you get your vibe coded app out faster than by using Flash or Excel?
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-05 00:13:53+00:00
Startups. Every startup I've seen treats their engineers like the responsible professionals they are. Flat salary, no fixed hours, don't ever have to show up to the office at all unless it's laying hands on a physical product.

At current job, the principal engineer rolls in at 1pm, if at all. I have no idea when he leaves because I'm in the office 10 to 4. My best work happens at 12-3 and 6-9 so that's when I work. It's nice.
by specialist | 2025-09-05 00:14:04+00:00
Yes and: Maintain your balance. Get tested (assessed). Do the exercises. (For anyone who hasn't heard.)

My mom and her bf were hard core. Swimming, biking, running, the works.

They served as one of the hosts for BBC's program Are You Fitter Than a Pensioner? [2010] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tyr5n My mom was 70 at the time. Spoiler: The seniors smoked the youths.

Alas, as with so many: falls -> injury -> idleness -> decline.

Some balance stuff can't be helped. Mom's bf got spells of vertigo; apparently the little balancing sensor bone inside the ear gets loose with age.
by anyfoo | 2025-09-05 00:14:08+00:00
Indeed. But to be fair, in today's world it is not only somewhat hard to imagine an OS that does not rely on things such as a filesystem with opaque binary files, directories, and hierarchical paths connecting these, but in order to properly communicate with the "outside world" you more or less have to have those things. Even AS/400 / IBM i added IFS, which is basically a bolted on hierarchical filesystem, to their system a long time ago by now.

Still sad that it has to be that way. I've long come off of thinking "everything is a file", and a file then just being a binary blob, is a good thing. (That's not even talking about other concepts from Unix we take for fully granted yet.)
by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK | 2025-09-05 00:14:41+00:00
"they don't have to take days to process a transaction" Unlike blockchains, banks are required to check the tx validity against fraud, money laundering, sanction lists, terrorist financing etc, must ensure funds could be returned if a mistake was made. They could not be processed on weekend or at night, because some transactions require manual review by human workers.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-09-05 00:15:07+00:00
Instead there's a bunch of other arguments that are just as reasonable which underline why deploying their security focused OS on such a hardware platform would be a waste of their time. This is your refutation?

It really seems like you're more concerned about hurt feelings than objective fact here. Every link you've provided thus far was framed by you as evidence of poor decisions or behaviour on the part of the GrapheneOS team but you've done nothing to elaborate, and after reading the content of those links for myself there is nothing there that support the things you've been implying.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, at least not unless I put myself into the mindset of a child and read any negativity expressed towards FOSS projects as an attack, or taking their choice to not target phones I like personally.