MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by franktankbank | 2025-09-05 17:40:56+00:00
Its one variable in the sum of all the times. You are asserting without much evidence that the bottleneck is the dev turnaround time. I think for a lot of people there's evidence that its dev is about 10% or less of the back and forth. I've sat on my hands for months while requirements have got sorted and no this wasn't something I could just jump into which I'm sure you'd (wrongly) suggest is the right approach. Have you ever been involved in a profitable project?
by 7thaccount | 2025-09-05 17:41:18+00:00
Bentonville Arkansas is basically like a cheaper Denver Colorado.

They have one of the best coffee roasters/shops out there, tons of bike and hiking trails, you're in the Ozarks, a major university is next door in Fayetteville. You're not that far away from doing a float trip on the buffalo river either (1.5 hours). They have tons of concerts there too in Walmart's ampitheater. Also, there is some industry for sure and decent schools (for the south anyway).

It is very trendy. Northwest Arkansas is nothing like south Arkansas. Not geographically or politically. I wouldn't expect it to be THAT difficult to convince folks to relocate to somewhere like that. Walmart does pump a lot of money into the area.
by bionhoward | 2025-09-05 17:41:29+00:00
Is this really surprising given how VC funded capitalism works? Spend money to build amazing technology and gain market share, then eventually flip into extraction mode.

Yes, a pullback will kill some weaker companies, but not the ones with sufficient true fans. Plus, we’re talking about a wide-ranging technological revolution with unknown long term limits and economics, you don’t just give up because you’re afraid to spend some money.

I don’t want to pay Anthropic, because I don’t trust them, but I will absolutely pay cursor, because I trust them, and I doubt I’m alone. My cursor usage goes to GPT-5, too, so it’s definitely not 100% Anthropic, even if I’m the only idiot using GPT5 on Cursor

It’s fun to innovate. Making money is a happy byproduct of value creation. Isn’t the price of success always paid in advance, anyway? Why would winning AI tech companies pack it up and stop crushing it over the long term just because they’re afraid to lose someone else’s money in the short term? Wouldn’t capitulation guarantee losses moreso than continued effort?
by xanderlewis | 2025-09-05 17:41:40+00:00
In the amateur radio community, yes. You probably know this, but for those who might not: CW isn’t totally synonymous with Morse code.

Morse is the encoding scheme; CW is one particular method of transmission. You could instead flash a light source, or you could use FM radio, or… I don’t know… use smoke signals! CW (‘continuous wave’) just means ‘pulsing a carrier wave on and off’.
by yannyu | 2025-09-05 17:41:42+00:00
We know what you're saying is true because Wells Fargo execs were originally charged with penalties for opening accounts on behalf of customers who didn't ask for them, and then those customers were charged overdraft and inactive account fees: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-08-3...

And then this year, those Wells Fargo exec penalties were reduced to a mere pittance. https://occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2025/nr-occ-202...

This also coincided with some major donations from Wells Fargo to our current president's inaugural parade. Quite a coincidence. https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/05/02/trump-wells-fargo-ina...
by busymom0 | 2025-09-05 17:41:42+00:00
This recently happened to me when I was using an online website for preparing for a drivers license test. After finishing a 20 question practice test, the site would show a cool confetti animation on top of everything. While cool, it would prevent any clicks from registering on the entire site for the entire 5 second duration of the animation. I emailed the company to add `pointer-events: none;` to the confetti `div`. That fixed the problem.

Since the website had been around for a very long time, I wonder how many millions of seconds had been wasted on this animation to complete.
by renehsz | 2025-09-05 17:41:47+00:00
On the surface, it seems like CW usage should be in a decline because 1) CW is no longer required to get a license in most countries and 2) digital modes like FT8 are clearly superior at very low signal-to-noise ratios.

But the bands tell the opposite story, as crowded as they often are. I think the primary reason to use CW these days is because it's fun, it feels like you're really doing something and not just delegating the whole task to the computer, and CW is definitely far better than SSB for DX at low, possibly QRP, power.
by mothballed | 2025-09-05 17:41:55+00:00
So what is your solution to get the border guard to have as much incentive to make sure good people, who mind you already have a visa, get in just as eagerly as he wants to collar the criminal who will bump up his chances at promotion?

I guess another option might be to give the similar kind of promotional awards to metrics of good immigrants being let in as they do to collaring criminals.

>If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.

I'm talking about the officer having an incentive to actually follow the "guidelines." His cost to reject someone is basically zero. He gets rewarded nothing for letting you in. I'm not talking about the officer getting paid to let in people without a visa, I'm talking about having an incentive to actually do his job and not just chase reasons to reject people with no cost to a bunch of false positives.

Edit:

(As an aside, the US actually has a loophole that allows US businesses to bribe foreign officials, including for immigration, to get them to do their job that they were already obligated to do. So really they would just be legalizing it for "them + the rest of world" instead just "the rest of world." Pure American exceptionalism to realize grease payments are legitimate and helpful everywhere but magically the US)

Regarding payments to foreign officials, the act draws a distinction between bribery and facilitation or "grease payments", which may be permissible under the FCPA, but may still violate local laws. The primary distinction is that grease payments or facilitation payments are made to an official to expedite his performance of the routine duties he is already bound to perform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-09-05 17:41:59+00:00
But if you expect the request to take some amount of time, how do you communicate that to the user?

Even if you don’t know the actual progress, the spinning cursor still provides useful information, namely “this is normal”.

Edit: Fwiw, I would agree with you if we were discussing progress bars as opposed to spinners. Fake progress bars suck.
by flail | 2025-09-05 17:42:10+00:00
Sure. And yet, last time I checked, we've had plenty of applications for maps.

I like this metaphor. Looking at a map, we may get a pretty good understanding of whether it's a place we'd like to spend time, say, on vacation.

We don't physically go to a place to scrutinize it.

And we don't limit ourselves to maps only. We check reviews, ask friends, and what have you. We do cheap validation before committing to a costly decision.

If we planned vacations the way we build software products, we'd just go there (because the map is not the territory), learn that the place sucks, and then we'd complain that finding good vacation spots is costly and time-consuming. Oh, and we'd mention that traveling is a bottleneck in finding good spots.
by kobieps | 2025-09-05 17:42:19+00:00
(I’m on the PowerSync team)

I’m glad this post made its way to HN, since it allowed me to reflect on how much progress we’ve made since it was written. The blog post doesn’t support comments, so here goes:

> The DX is the worst by quite a margin.

DX is something that we care a lot about. Like it’s a topic in every single planning and strategy session. We’ve made a ton of progress since this was posted, and we have a lot more on this front on our roadmap.

> Not only does it require Postgres-level integration

If you’re looking to stream data from your Postgres database to clients, I’m not aware of any other way to do this but to integrate with Postgres. So I’m not sure why this is framed in a negative light. PowerSync also only requires a user with SELECT privileges, so it’s not an invasive integration.

> it also needs a HA MongoDB cluster

It’s now possible to use Postgres for intermediary storage instead of MongoDB. I actually recall we gave you a shout out in one of our product updates on this :)

> a lot of arcane yaml configuration

We’ve since published a schema for the yaml config - add this to powersync.yaml:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://unpkg.com/@powersync/service-schema@latest/json-sche...

> It also required us to completely denormalise our Postgres tables, as relations are not properly supported across the sync buckets.

This is ultimately a function of our decision to build a system that scales well. Having said that, we have plans to address this limitation this year.

> we found horrifying problems like off-by-one bugs in their Drizzle ORM integration

This was fixed around the time of the post, and our Drizzle integration is now in beta i.e. fully supported in production environments.

> queries returning data from local db very slowly (100ms+),

It’s hard to say what was causing this without knowing more, but as mentioned elsewhere in the comments here we’ve since added support for OPFS which provides a big performance boost.

> and long initialisation times (45s+ after login to Marco) with the UI view not updating until the sync fully completed.

We’ve added APIs to solve this - if you want to sync everything up front you can use sync priorities to log the user in quickly and sync the rest in the background [1]. We’ve also implemented many optimizations like transport-level compression, a waaaay faster rust sync client, etc with more to come. Also, using sync streams (available in the next few weeks) [2] you can sync data just in time as the user navigates around the app instead of syncing everything up front.

> No real case studies

It’s often quite a slow process to get case studies published with large companies, but you can see logos of customers using PowerSync on our website. But yes.

[1] https://docs.powersync.com/usage/use-case-examples/prioritiz... [2] https://github.com/powersync-ja/powersync-service/discussion...
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-05 17:42:59+00:00
Two things to bear in mind here:

1) As much as JD Vance and his puppetmaster wishes they were the president, they are not. The tech fascism isn't happening, just regular kind. What you're seeing here with the "deregulation" is just a big fat scoop of plain corruption. Give Herr Führer a nice golden trinket and he deregulates your industry or tariffs your competitors.

2) While they are deregulating heavily, there's absolutely zero sense of "Small Government" going on. You need only look at the oppression of groups like LGBT people. There's no bigger government than controlling which toilets people use or inspecting the genitals of children if they want to participate in sports.

And outside of LGBT rights, just look at the whole situation around Israel. Literal secret police going around arresting people for non-violent protest and simple thoughtcrime.
by wkjagt | 2025-09-05 17:43:05+00:00
Some of these, including one I had as a kid, produce sound through a small gramophone inside. No electronic amplification at all, just a needle on a tiny "record", mechanically connected to some kind of speaker shaped cone.

Here's someone taking apart the exact robot I had, and showing that mechanism: https://www.windytan.com/2013/02/the-atomic-powered-robot.ht...
by whstl | 2025-09-05 17:43:21+00:00
IME, in most cases, it's the dickhead's fault in the first place.

This is often a CTO putting pressure on a dev manager when the bottleneck is ops, or product, or putting pressure on product when the bottleneck is dev.

The normal rationalization is that "you should be putting pressure on them".

The actual reason is that they are putting pressure on you as a show of force, rather than actually wanted it to go faster.

This is why the only response to a bad manager is to run away.
by tgma | 2025-09-05 17:43:28+00:00
> And I know the article says no one uses the backwards compatible stuff but that’s bizarre to me – setting up N clients and a server that use protocol buffers to communicate and then being able to add fields to the schema and then deploy the servers and clients in any order is way nicer than it is with some other formats that force you to babysit deployment order.

Yet the author has the audacity to call the authors of protobuf (originally Jeff Dean et al) "amateurs."
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-05 17:43:32+00:00
> Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

If (and that’s a big if) animation is used in moderation only when it actually communicates something and isn’t an active impedence (as demonstrated in the linked post), I think it has a significant effect for users. It’s just not the effect that many might expect.

Meaningful, unintrusive animations are one of the myriad puzzle pieces that come together to form a positive impression. They’re a sizeable chunk of that last 20% that separates “good” and “excellent” in users’ minds. They’re not strictly necessary, but between two equally good competitors they’ll help one pull ahead of the other, because users come away with a stronger impression of “solidness”. It’s not unlike how people tend to consider heft and resistance to flexing as markers of higher quality in physical products.

The problem is that since a decade or so ago, UI design as a whole has veered heavily in the direction of vibes, slideshow wow factor, and “branding value” (I felt a pang of nausea just writing that) and away from the volumes of well-researched best practices, and regard for good use of animation has been lost along with it. We’re well overdue for a correction that pushes UI design back in the direction of practical usability and away from Dribbble appeal.
by Uehreka | 2025-09-05 17:43:47+00:00
Honestly, I think the best way to reason about LLM behavior is to abandon any sort of white-box mental model (where you start from things you “know” about their internal mechanisms). Treat them as a black box, observe their behavior in many situations and over a long period of time, draw conclusions from the patterns you observe and test if your conclusions have predictive weight.

Of course, if someone is predisposed to incuriosity about LLMs and refuses to use them, they won’t be able to participate in that approach. However I don’t think there’s an alternative.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-09-05 17:44:03+00:00
> secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents

Complete aside, just because you brought up this thought and I like the concept of it:

My mom trained professionally as a secretary in the 1970s and worked in a law office in the 1980s; at that point, if you were taking dictation, you were generally doing longhand stenography to capture dictation, and then you'd type it up later. A stenotype would've been a rarity in a pre-computer office because of the cost of the machine; after all, if you need a secretary for all these other tasks, it's cheaper to give them a $2 notebook than it is a $1,500+ machine.
by linguae | 2025-09-05 17:44:07+00:00
I’m at a conference at Stanford University right now. I was going to take BART and the Dumbarton Express to avoid having to drive in traffic, but when I drove to the Dublin BART station, I found out BART wasn’t running. I ended up having to drive to Stanford, since the only public transportation over the hills separating Dublin/Pleasanton from the inner East Bay is the Altamont Commuter Express, which is much less convenient due to its few runs. Thankfully traffic wasn’t that bad today, but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.

I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
by treetalker | 2025-09-05 17:44:21+00:00
Great name.

I accidentally reloaded the page on my phone, thus losing all my (meaningless, auto-complete generated) text. So maybe an auto-save would be better?

Years ago there was a lightweight app for the then-current version of Mac OS X called Grandview. When invoked, it would fill your screen with a background color and you would see only a huge version of the single word you were currently typing. (I don't remember, but I think it might have displayed the entirety of the last sentence after you ended it too.) It also deactivated your backspace key so you could only keep typing. That was peak focused writing, and it was an awesome app. I miss it, and similar, small apps that did one thing incredibly well.
Show HN: Resist – Nutrition Labels for Digital Content
by bipsandbytes | 2025-09-05 17:44:39+00:00
Hello HN,

I have a confession: I’m addicted to X/Twitter. But I'm terrified that my brain is being force-fed digital sugar: a cocktail of controversy, clickbait, and cat videos. We ask what’s in our food. Why don’t we ever ask what's in our feed?

The deleterious effects of social media are quite well documented: more screen time = more depression[1]. But it's even more insidious. We no longer program the timeline; it programs us. I often feel anxious after scrolling through my feed because it is incentivized to feed me controversy. The usual advice is to quit the app and go cold turkey. But that doesn't work the same reason fad diets don't work. You can’t quit sugar. You can’t quit Twitter.

So I drew inspiration from the efficacy of nutrition labels on packaged foods[2][3][4][5][6] to add a 'digital nutrition label' to every tweet in my feed, analyzing its Education, Entertainment, and Emotion content. What started off as a quick and dirty bookmarklet turned into a full fledged (completely free and open-source) Chrome extension that I call 'Resist'[7].

For example, take these 3 posts, all news, and yet different: @OpenAIDevs comes across as just educational, @paulg's perhaps evokes anxiety, and @SamAntar's leans controversial. Resist understands the content, not just the app. For the first time, you see what you're truly consuming.

https://imgur.com/QFXwNd4

https://imgur.com/lXrtuNb

https://imgur.com/KFRiIed

With Resist, you can also set an attention budget — a digital diet for your mind. It tracks, it tallies, and when you go over, it autohides the junk. Willpower not required.

https://imgur.com/Ciu1KN6

That's the long bet: disengaging from the junk, starving them of clicks, and breaking the loop. Without the oxygen of engagement, I'm hoping the timeline adapts to what _we_ choose. Just like food labels reshaped supply chains[8], attention labels could reshape our feeds.

Resist is a proof of concept and has some serious drawbacks: it’s web-only, the categories are just a first draft, it currently works only on Twitter (but can be extended), and the classification models are sometimes way off. But it presents what could be: a world where you are in control of where your attention is directed.

Full blog post: https://bipinsuresh.info/blog/resist.html

Video demo: https://youtu.be/UmWCdgHQ_8o

Download: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/resist/paeflkahgaod...

Twitter thread (for irony): https://x.com/bipsandbytes/status/1963385093080404043

Code (MIT license): https://github.com/bipsandbytes/resist

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6340779/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32493057/

[4] https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-019...

[5] https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2014/13_0161.htm

[6] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

[7] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/resist/paeflkahgaod...

[8] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
by fuckinpuppers | 2025-09-05 17:44:42+00:00
Not surprising.

1. Tariff uncerainty. Businesses love instability and inability to plan ahead 2. Mass adoption and prioritization of AI 3. Bullying and trying to take over the fed by the executive 4. Large scale downsizing of the government workforce 5. Government contract cuts, which trickle down to the private sector in multiple ways

The executive branch is at war with the world and the middle and lower class of the US. They’re not even doing many favors for the upper class, the decisions aren’t even helping them a lot of the time
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-05 17:44:46+00:00
That’s likely apocryphal.

Morse requires you to know when the tone both starts and stops in order to differentiate a ‘dah’ from a break indicating a new letter or word or even just a ‘dit’.

Tapping a pencil only gives you the start of a tone since the pencil lift is silent. There is no real way to distinguish between a short tone and a pause (letter e) and a long tone (letter t) if you don’t know when the tone ends and a pause begins.

The same trope is shown in movies. You cannot tap Morse code if the recipient cannot hear when the tap ends.

In other words, the receiver has no way of knowing whether you sent an e or t without there being a signal that the pencil has lifted. Note that e or t can be substituted for any other number of paired letters.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-05 17:44:58+00:00
So much theft going on for metals. Many streetlights get robbed for their copper wire. The new 6th street bridge in LA gets routinely stripped of wires. Most of the older bridges have been robbed of their old brass lamps already. Many brass plaques in parks or on infrastructure has been stolen.

What is interesting is that this has been ramping up just in the last couple of years. Some of the brass has been out in public for decades but is only now getting stolen hand over fist. I wonder what the impetus has been these days that wasn’t there in the past?
by joshuanapoli | 2025-09-05 17:45:24+00:00
Yes, this is it. When I'm experimenting, I'm happy to pay an extra $40 for the name-brand device that has 1000s of blog posts supporting it, since it's probably this community is going to help me be more successful and learn faster.

I would reconsider the choice when I have a commercial product that I have some scale of production, where a few bucks off the BOM is important.
by fortran77 | 2025-09-05 17:45:28+00:00
It's very hard to decode morse from just "taps". You need to be able to hear two distinct symbols, "dash" (long) and "dot" (short) and the spaces. I remember in school we used to be able to do morse if we could see each other, using one finger for dot and one for dash, but we'd copy by looking at the fingers, not the sound of the taps.
by anentropic | 2025-09-05 17:45:31+00:00
A bigger problem I find is many Amazon listings having a large number of genuine positive reviews, but for a completely different product than the one currently for sale.

Recently I was buying a chromecast dongle thing and one of the listings had some kind of "Amazon recommends" badge on it, from the platform. It had hundreds of 5 start reviews, but if you read them they were all for a jar of guava jam from Mexico.

I'm baffled why Amazon permits and even seemingly endorses this kind of rating farming
by schnaars | 2025-09-05 17:45:44+00:00
Missing Pulsar from Pulsations Night Club outside Philadelphia. In the 80's, it would deliver cocaine and cocktails to people. I think that it was also the robot from one of the Rocky movies too.

https://youtu.be/uB4FqfIX9JY?si=VokrpZM8xAhLxdVN&t=184

Crazy times growing up back then.