MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krrishd | 2025-09-14 07:27:23+00:00
I think there is plenty of counter-evidence in how this is being approached:

- The obvious: these are stablecoins, whose value is pegged to and 1:1 backed by fiat currency / is not capable of the cliche pump&dump dynamics of other crypto tokens.

- To the extent that (eg. today) they are coupled to a network like ETH or Solana (whose holders stand to gain) - both Stripe and Circle are building L1 blockchains right now whose native gas tokens are stablecoins, and are therefore also decoupled from any of the bagholder stuff. Merits of those chains aside: the big players want to further eliminate that dynamic and are putting their money where their mouth is.

- Stripe (and other legitimate fintechs) want to use stablecoins specifically because they legitimately make cross-border payments much easier, and because there is serious/earnest usage emerging. SWIFT actually does suck (not just to the cliche engineer-who-wants-better-APIs way, but even a banking professional would tell you), international payments are more unsolved than you think outside of a few fintechs who are basically just managing massive ledgers + a ton of liquidity around the world.

(In short: I think your take is something that may have made more sense 5-10 years ago, when Stripe themselves ditched crypto for the reasons that it didn't work for anything useful and was primarily a means of gambling)
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-14 07:27:57+00:00
Sure it can all be solved, FUSE is an example of doing that for less important ancillary filesystems. I'd actually just make the protocol stateless and store fd state in the clients. My point is more general - the people who design operating systems know all about these tradeoffs and have to decide what to spend time on within a limited budget.

Consider: crash bugs are finite. Do you spend your time on complex rearchitecting of your OS to try and fail slightly less hard when some critical code crashes, or do you spend that time fixing the bugs? If the code is big, fast changing and third party then it might make sense to put in the effort, hence FUSE and why graphics drivers often run a big chunk of code out of kernel. If the code is small, stable and performance sensitive, like a core filesystem where all your executables reside, then it doesn't make sense and stays in.

Browsers also use a micro-kernelish concept these days. But they're very deliberate and measured about what gets split out into extra processes and what doesn't.

The microkernel concept advocates for ignoring engineering tradeoffs in order to put everything into userspace all the time, and says precious little about how to ensure that translates into actual rewards. That's why it's an academic concept that's hardly used today.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-14 07:30:28+00:00
Well, the black hole isnt hydrogen. This is the gas around it. And being pure hydrogen seems sus as there should be some helium in there according to most models.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis

Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-09-14 07:30:41+00:00
People trust powerful states who might occasional do shitty things because they tend to assert their dominance when necessary.

You can see that clearly now with how the EU completely messed up their negotiations with Trump regarding the tariffs.

If you are an investor and you are given the chance to invest in two companies, one of them located in a country that is not afraid of throwing it's weight around to get things done or defend it's interests and the other who might have a better record in terms of human rights but doesn't want to appear too aggressive, which one do you pick?

If the only thing you care about is ROI then the answer is easy. Is it right? Probably not but that is just the world we live in and the system that we are all part of.

Obviously this is a simplified example but you get the gist.

Personally I think that the problem with the USD is that it can be used as a weapon against other countries. Why would China risk being cut off from the global banking system like Russia was? It simply makes no sense.

Cutting Russia from SWIFT was major mistake.

It only reinforced what China and other countries already knew, that is, that it can be weaponized in an instant. That in turns means that we should see a decrease in the USD dominance and a shift away from the traditional big players like SWIFT in favor of other home grown systems like CIPS.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-09-14 07:31:33+00:00
For example, modern Python internally uses three forms (Latin-1, UTF-16 and 32) depending on the contents of the string. But this can be done for all encodings and also for things like file names that do not follow Unicode. The Unicode standard does not dictate everything must take the same form; it can be used to keep existing forms but make them compatible.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-09-14 07:32:51+00:00
I was literally experimenting with this today.

Use Google Nano Banana to generate your sprite with a magenta background, then ask it to generate the final frame of the animation you want to create.

Then use Google Flow to create an animation between the two frames with Veo3

Its astoundingly effective, but still rather laborious and lacking in ergonomics. For example the video aspect ratio has to be fixed, and you need to manually fill the correct shade of magenta for transparency keying since the imagen model does not do this perfectly.

IMO Veo3 is good enough to make sprites and animations for an 2000s 2D RTS game in seconds from a basic image sketch and description. It just needs a purpose built UI for gamedev workflows.

If I was not super busy with family and work, I'd build a wrapper around these tools
by mpweiher | 2025-09-14 07:34:28+00:00
> The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot,

It massively increased the price of electricity in Germany. And the same holds true of pretty much every other location that tried it.

And it did remarkably little for CO₂ emissions, massively increased our dependence on cheap Russian Gas thus emboldening Putin, cemented our fossil fuel dependence for reliable base load, entrenched our dependence on China.

On the whole, "wasted" is putting it kindly.

Yes, the prices of the generating equipment have come down from truly astronomical to only "not competitive without massive subsidies".

Had we spend the same money on nuclear power plants, we would have long been done with the decarbonization of our electricity sector, and probably well into the electrification and ensuing decarbonization of the other sectors as well.

Except we would have found it difficult to spend that much on nuclear power plants, because even at the price of the messed up EPR prototypes, the same money would have bought us over 50 reactors. At the price of the first three Konvois, around 100, adjusted for inflation and some increases. But when you build 50-100 reactors of the same kind (that's important: don't make every new one different like we used to do), the cost does go down.

France is increasing its fission fleet again, after repealing a law that made such expansion illegal beyond the then existing generating capacity 63.2 GW.

The goal of a reduction of the nuclear share to below 50% was also repealed. I do believe that the share of nuclear in France will decrease somewhat, because intermittent renewables can let the nuclear plants run at higher efficiencies by taking up some of the variability that is currently handled by the nuclear plants.
Show HN: Free QR Code Generator – Minimal, Fast, with Batch Support
by zh7788 | 2025-09-14 07:34:55+00:00
I made a free online QR Code generator tool.

Why? Most QR tools online are either bloated with ads, paid-only, or hard to use. So I built a clean and simple alternative.

Features:

Minimal design, mobile friendly

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Batch generation support

QR scanner included

Local history saving

Try it here: qrcode-generator-gamma-brown.vercel.app

Feedback appreciated!
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-09-14 07:36:35+00:00
Race relations were better in the 2000-2010 period, according to Gallup data:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU

I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at least a few of them will always be racist. The question is how powerful and influential the racists are. That's a question which social media feeds into.
by pmontra | 2025-09-14 07:38:12+00:00
This. Maybe we could call a method of the JIT (it must be exposed) and tell it that we won't use some features of Ruby, globally or inside that scope. That would let it skip some checks. Of course calling that method takes time so it should be something that is called only once. It depends on how the JIT accesses Ruby code.

And if the code actually does what we declared or must not do, we accept any runtime error that it might happen.

We must trust dependencies, including Rails if it's a Rails app.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-09-14 07:38:46+00:00
I think GFW is more of a fallback (hammer) in the overall system but yeah that does happen "in detail" on WeChat etc.

In the US, censorship is obviously a hot-button political topic (core values), but we are starting to see US concerns around things like troll farms, foreign influence, election misinformation etc and systems to quietly tamp that down. The sorts of things that appeared in the "Twitter Files".

The US doesn't usually need "big hammer" technical controls for this because they have legal control over the corporations involved and can ask them to moderate themselves in line with US law & natsec requirements.

Places like e.g. the UK are in an interesting pickle because while they are _largely_ culturally aligned with the US, their lawmakers don't have the same level of influence on platforms. They can either impotently "shake their fist at the sky"; or they can reach agreements so the major platforms co-operate with their governments; or they implement China-like technical controls.
by fweimer | 2025-09-14 07:39:24+00:00
The core issue is that tzdata files do not contain the time zone identifier. If you are unlucky in /etc/localtime is not a symbolic link, you have to scan the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo to find a match. PostgreSQL prefers shorter names: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...

That's why "US" wins over "America".
by qcnguy | 2025-09-14 07:40:02+00:00
Delusional. It's just come out that he was living with a trans roommate, as if it wasn't enough that he killed a conservative pundit, his bullets were engraved with far left Antifa slogans, sybols and songs, and the investigation has revealed a man "deeply indoctrinated into far left ideology". There is zero evidence for your viewpoint.

None of this is surprising. There's a long history of far-left Antifa and trans activist types trying to kill people. Look at the armed far-left militia that attacked an ICE office, or the "trans rationalist cults" that killed their landlord and others.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-14 07:40:03+00:00
Safety systems in aerospace, industrial, and critical sectors use more advanced methodologies than do web developers, and are typically "better" engineers who tend to be familiar with tools and methodologies like debuggers, profilers, tracing, testing, symbolic execution, and (semi/)formal verification. People in low level engineering like kernel, driver, and/or performance engineering tend to be more familiar with such tools and approaches, but aren't as likely to employ as formal or conservative approaches. Security ginreenigne folks should be lumped in for good measure.
by dismalaf | 2025-09-14 07:40:53+00:00
Wayland isn't a piece of software. It's a protocol. Compositors that implement it are Gnome's Mutter, KWin, wlroots, hyprland's compositor, and others. COSMIC implements their own compositor too and that's probably where the problem lies...

I use Gnome, and Wayland sessions have been flawless for years. Screen sharing works, everything works.

Also, I've seen colleagues struggle to get screen sharing working on both Windows and Mac; most OSes now don't just allow any program to read from any window, so if someone forgets to allow a permission somewhere, no screen sharing.

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti...
by choppaface | 2025-09-14 07:42:18+00:00
Yes but two other considerations:

1) Assume the buyer/seller holds capital from sources that the majority of the market considers “illicit” and/or is legally sanctioned and/or physically frozen or restricted. Aka the capital can never be called (or at a discount that is unknowable) or the transaction could be later legally reversed or nullified by one or more legal entities. But of course the StableCoin market maker fails to communicate this risk. Therefore the real value of either side of the trade could be zero despite the non-zero StableCoins being transferred. Thus that’s not really a “trade” because there are hidden substantial risks.

2) Along the lines of Matt Levine “Stablecoin treasury strategy?” Consider that the buyer is a publicly listed company, and they fundraise based upon purchase of the digital asset. Then you are doing what most banks consider is not trading but fueling speculation (and normally you can’t expose average retail investors to these risks).

The innovation of StableCoins is much less about Capitalism and much more about re-packaging fraud. And given how lax the prosecution of fraud was during the Financial Crisis, there’s a big meta-bet that StableCoin “traders” will never face losses.
by johnklos | 2025-09-14 07:43:19+00:00
I'm still running Sendmail on NetBSD, the way I've been running it since the '90s.

You'll find plenty of people telling you to not do it, but they mostly seem to think that others shouldn't do things because they can't.

The biggest problem with self-hosting email is deliverability, and it's easily handled by smarthosting through a reputable service, so anyone who says it can't be done hasn't really thought things through very much.
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-14 07:43:30+00:00
It's not designed to do that, no. But it is one of the goals, or at least one of the bonuses they expect to come of this. A big part of the freedom Stallman wants for everyone is the freedom to pay anyone who has the skills to work on your software, rather than the original creator having a monopoly on that and being able to charge monopoly prices to you.
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-14 07:43:59+00:00
1. Drumming up hate and violence and 2. arming the population dramatically increases the likelihood of widespread shootings. The risk is particularly acute for those at the forefront of these efforts. Dismissing the first point and downplaying the second does not alter the reality of the situation. These points also are in no way an encouragement of violence, despite your mental gymnastics.

> It is when you say it of someone who was pushed rather than jumping.

That's some blatant attempt at derailing the discussion, but even then you're still wrong. Cause and effect is still not justification.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-14 07:44:04+00:00
I have observed WWW browsers doing HTTPS lookups in my server logs, in 2025. Bad actors do them as well.

The sad thing is that the HTTPS resource record type will not upgrade HTTP directed to one domain into HTTPS directed to another domain. The RFC's examples (in section 10 and elsewhere) indicate that this should work. I made one of my WWW sites inaccessible to several modern WWW browsers for a day learning that in practice it does not.

One could view this as malicious compliance with section 9, as WWW browser writers have a decades long history, including the famous Chrome, Mozilla, and WebKit bugs, of fighting against DNS mechanisms that fix the apex problem.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dns-srv-record-use-by-clients.html#HTTP...

A more charitable view is that, this being the 2020s, they simply did not give much attention to the case of HTTP. The idea exists on paper in the RFC, but in practice I wonder whether I am one of just a few people who has actually tried apex aliasing from HTTP to HTTPS (as opposed to aliasing from HTTPS to HTTPS).
by fluoridation | 2025-09-14 07:46:45+00:00
>crash bugs are finite. Do you spend your time on complex rearchitecting of your OS to try and fail slightly less hard when some critical code crashes, or do you spend that time fixing the bugs?

Finite can still be a very large number. Clearly the former is preferable, otherwise your argument applies just as well to usermode code. Why bother having memory protection when the code should be correct anyway?

Remember the CloudStrike bug? That wouldn't have happened had the developer been able to put the driver in user mode. The module was not critical, so the system could have kept on running and a normal service could have reported that the driver had failed to start due to an error. That's much, much, much preferable to a boot loop.
by maxmoehl | 2025-09-14 07:47:28+00:00
> It's very difficult to review history. I stopped using it a while ago, but since everything's encrypted `git diff` won't give you anything useful and IIRC the command line tools were very hard to use for reviewing/restoring passwords when you mess up updates, etc.

pass sets up a .gitattributes and configures git to convert gpg files to text via a custom driver. This enables a text-diff of the encrypted contents out of the box (at least for a store I've just set up to test this).

~/.password-store # cat .gitattributes *.gpg diff=gpg ~/.password-store # cat .git/config # ... [diff "gpg"] binary = true textconv = gpg2 -d --quiet --yes --compress-algo=none --no-encrypt-to --batch --use-agent
by johnklos | 2025-09-14 07:47:45+00:00
> So, now you have to worry about your VPS/Internet provider deplatforming you. Or about your domain name being seized. And spam filtration, backups, redundancy...

Your VPS / ISP better have a good reason to "deplatform". If you're really worried, use two different ones.

Also, people have more problems with being "deplatformed" by Google, often with no reason given, and with no way to communicate with a human about the issue. Look it up. I'd be more worried about that.

DNS isn't a single point of failure. Nor is email when it comes to reception (that's what backup MXs are for). If you need redundancy when it comes to being able to fetch email, you can easily have the primary MX also forward to mailboxes on another host so you have two (or more) copies of everything. None of this is all that hard, and people have been doing it for ages. Give it a try :)
by jjmarr | 2025-09-14 07:47:56+00:00
> Anyway, poor UX. But of course TZ names could also be argued as poor UX. What if you just did PST/PDT as Los Angeles, CA; Oregon, OR, and Seattle, WA all on separate line items?

If your application can access the current location you don't need to expose a TZ selector to the user. You can figure out what time zone database sector you're in automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones...

> Sure, it's duplicate data but a backend system (Postgres config files, say) should only store the value of the TZ, i.e. -7 / -8.

Your backend needs to store location because places can switch time zones. The reason for the seemingly arbitrary list of cities is they each define a region where clocks have been synchronized since 1970.
by krrishd | 2025-09-14 07:49:05+00:00
>Assume the buyer/seller holds capital from sources that the majority of the market considers “illicit” and/or is legally sanctioned and/or physically frozen or restricted

This is not feasible legally, and is where your claim falls apart.

From the now-passed GENIUS act [0] which regulates the stablecoin issuer:

- "Permitted payment stablecoin issuers must maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, consisting only of certain specified assets, including US dollars and short-term Treasuries."

[0]: https://www.lw.com/en/insights/the-genius-act-of-2025-stable...
by Yoric | 2025-09-14 07:50:52+00:00
I co-implemented this in OCaml ~20 years ago, using no compiler magic (it did use a macro). Pretty sure that I've seen the equivalent in Haskell, too, and in variants of Scheme. Zig has it, too. And while, as you mention, the Rust implementation does use compiler magic, I'm pretty sure that it could be implemented as a macro, just more slowly.

etc.
by krrishd | 2025-09-14 07:51:37+00:00
I don't see why not - I'm sure the banks (or others more expert than me) would argue for stablecoins being somehow distinct in this regard, but yeah don't know why eg. Vanguard wouldn't also be a credible cause of deposit flight.

(I do vaguely remember reading that banks were concerned about people moving to money-market fund products that had bank-like functionality)
by astrobe_ | 2025-09-14 07:51:58+00:00
> There is a prevalent culture of expecting users to not make mistakes.

I think the older of us C/C++ programmers come from no-safety languages like assembly language. That doesn't mean that all of us are "macho programmers" (as I was called here once). C's weak typing and compilers emitting warnings give a false sense of security which is tricky to deal with.

The statement you make is not entirely correct. The more correct statement is that there is a prevalent culture of expecting users to find strategies to avoid mistakes. We are engineers. We do what we need with what we have, and we did what we had to with what we had.

When you program with totally unsafe languages, you develop more strategies than just relying on a type checker and borrow checker: RAII, "crash early", TDD, completion-compatible naming conventions, even syntax highlighting (coloring octal numbers differently)...

BUT. the cultural characteristics of the programmers are only one-quarter of the story. The bigger part is about company culture, and more specifically the availability of programmers. You won't promote safer languages and safer practice by convincing programmers that it has zero impact on performance. It's the companies that you need to convince that the safe alternatives are as productive [1] as the less safe alternatives.

[1] https://xkcd.com/303/
by Voultapher | 2025-09-14 07:53:12+00:00
As much as the alternatives (profiles) don't solve the issue, Safe C++ (Circle) does have substantial issues as well. You need a separate and largely incompatible standard library, including containers. Generic code (templates) is largely left unsolved on a conceptual level so far. At this point incrementally replacing parts of your code with Rust - which has a mature ecosystem and tooling, remember if you want provable safety none of your dependencies used in Safe C++ code are allowed to be unsafe - is going to be less hassle. Firefox showed you can do it, and even Microsoft is choosing that path for the Windows kernel. Waiting for Safe C++ to be usable, seems like wanting to wait for a worse Rust. Interop is hardly going to be much better than bindings generated by cxx.
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-14 07:54:16+00:00
> disks are not considered "slow devices".

And neither are the tapes. But the pipes, apparently, are.

Well, unfortunately, disk^H^H^H^H large persistent storage I/O is actually slow, or people wouldn't have been writing thread-pools to make it look asynchrnous, or sometimes even process-pools to convert disk I/O to pipe I/O, for the last two decades.