MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aidenn0 | 2025-09-22 16:22:58+00:00
> Because very, very annoyingly it's not default behavior on Linux distros for removable devices to be mounted with write caching disabled

About a decade ago, removable devices definitely were mounted with the "sync" option on some distros. It really tanked write performance though, so perhaps that's why they changed it. Certainly Plasma (and probably most DEs; I only use plasma) will tell you when the device is fully unmounted when you use the udisks integration.
by hungryhobbit | 2025-09-22 16:23:03+00:00
Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :(

Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections.

SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) had seen before. Nowadays, you can probably get something similar on WebMD, but at the time it was crazy impressive.
by lubujackson | 2025-09-22 16:23:32+00:00
I have been working at startups for 20+ years and would say the "hack it out/craftsman" dichotomy is the wrong mindset. I would say the more interesting idea of working at a startup is that you can use your experience and nearness to the business objectives to know when you should hack something together vs. "craft it".

But to me, crafting the software is less about making a test suite, robust observability, etc. and more about architecting the code with the right "hard" and "soft" elements.

A DB structure in flux may start out as a JSON field so we can tweak it without hassle. Something that may need to support heavy volume may have more modular and minimal components up front that can be swapped out for more performant ones down the road.

Now if you are at a micro-managed startup where you have no time or latitude to affect any of those decisions, then you are going to have a bad time no matter what. But work at a startup introduces a more flexible concept of "craft" that can be as equally (or more) satisfying than following "best practices" in a consistent way.
by woodruffw | 2025-09-22 16:23:38+00:00
> "YAML" should mean something.

Sure, agreed. Another comment notes that GitHub probably should call this their own proprietary subset of YAML, and I wouldn't object to that.

> Well, hopefully they also prioritize fixing that?

I expect they won't, since it's not clear what version of YAML they even aim to be compatible with.

However, I don't understand why engineers who wouldn't jump off of a bridge because someone told them to would follow a spec to the dot just because it exists. Specifications are sometimes complicated and bad, and implementing a subset is sometimes the right thing to do!

GitHub Actions, for example, doesn't make use of the fact that YAML is actually a multi-document format, and most YAML libraries don't gracefully handle multiple documents in a single YAML stream. Should GitHub Actions support this? It's entirely unclear to me that there would be any value in them doing so; subsets are frequently the right engineering choice.
Show HN: Grow and Monitor Your AI Search Traffic
by asteroidandy | 2025-09-22 16:23:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Spiderseek, a platform to help track and grow website visibility in AI-powered search engines (e.g. Perplexity, ChatGPT, and other agents).

Traditional SEO tools are expensive and focused on Google-style search. I wanted something lightweight and AI-first, so I built Spiderseek:

AI Research – Explore domains and keywords to uncover new opportunities.

AI Analytics – See traffic, crawl activity, and page metrics, plus insights from AI agents.

Content Submission – Get content indexed instantly in major AI agents.

Rankings – Browse the top 1000 domains sorted by citations and sources.

It’s very early, but live and priced at $1/month while I grow the database and features.

I’d love feedback from the HN community on:

How useful this data feels.

What additional features you’d want.

Which AI Search Engine Coverage is most important to you (e.g ChatGPT vs Copilot Vs Gemini)

https://www.spiderseek.com

Thanks! Andy
by ryandrake | 2025-09-22 16:23:57+00:00
If there is anything as inevitable as death and taxes, it's "wealthy people complaining about taxes." Every year, the usual articles make the rounds about how all these wealthy people are moving out of California because they're sad about their taxes, and every year it doesn't significantly happen. I'm starting to think the "moving out of California" meme is just a media re-run that the wealthy get together and fund every year, and then it's back to sipping their wine in their mansions in Beverly Hills and Atherton.
by RS-232 | 2025-09-22 16:24:05+00:00
We need something like tracking cookies for model inputs and outputs.

Creators should be able to trace and quantify exactly what data of theirs was fed into the grift machine and be reimbursed directly by the grift machine custodian each time their data is used to generate new output.

A middleman who collects a giant chunk of creator royalties, for data that will be used perpetually by the grift machine... that sounds like a bad deal.
by seec | 2025-09-22 16:24:27+00:00
Apple is quietly but surely increasing its control on macOS. That definitely makes it a less desirable desktop OS.

Today when you generate a PDF from you own content (from Apple Notes app) you are asked about opening links you click on. I thought that they were surely joking and there would be a way to disable that behavior. But no, this is intended and there is no way to disable that. It makes the Preview app a pain in the ass as a PDF reader, which means you have to replace it and begs the question of even using Apple software in the first place.

The answer is that there are fewer and fewer reasons. I mean if you are OK feeling like a child biking around on a cycle with training wheels while an overbearing parent keeps nagging you, it might be for you. Otherwise, the experience is really more like a prison/walled garden and the funny thing is that you paid for it !
by Yizahi | 2025-09-22 16:24:40+00:00
I'm a bit wary about arguing with a psychiatrist, especially if it is Scott Alexander, but ADHD is clearly not just "low ability to concentrate". It is hard to explain to normal people without phrases like "executive function paralysis" but it is a severe illness, and not some variation of a norm.

I would also challenge his premise about boring monotonous work is ill suited for humans, hence the ones with ADHD are people who can't do it (as good as others). ADHD people can do boring monotonous work for hours, month after month, and often not even struggle with that. On the other hand some banal easy (and short!) tasks, which won't even register as a task for normal human, will leave ADHD person in shambles, unable to even think about it.

There is lots of bad shit going in on the ADHD brain, it is certainly not just "20% worse concentration" debuff.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-22 16:24:51+00:00
In general, most ISP have a usage agreement posted which prohibits excessive client server traffic.

This is why most NOCs enforce an asymmetric firewall bandwidth limit for download focused customers, and install colo Google/CDN rack appliances.

Most ISP are just the modern retooled Cable company business. Try to stream video off your home platform on a normal service port, and you will hit the caps pretty quickly. =3
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-09-22 16:25:00+00:00
>who is pushing the horrible left wing messaging that racism is bad?

It's those triple-damned Demonrats! In between molesting and eating babies, they go on and on about "multiculturalism" and "systemic racism" and all kinds of other ridiculous crap.

Yes. The darkies are inferior and need to be firmly controlled and/or exterminated. No sane person thinks any different. Those people aren't really people, are they?

They're subhuman animals who need to be dealt with. The fact that they can touch our women should be an immediate death sentence.

Hell, I'm not really sure why we're even bothering with these "deportations." Just shoot on sight for heaven's sake. Just the way Jesus says we should!
by mg | 2025-09-22 16:25:01+00:00
ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked

Why are micropayments so hard?

I wonder how the web would look like if one could click "pay 1 cent to continue".

Maybe content would become better? Maybe it would make one think "Hmm... one moment, is this something I want to read or am I just doomscrolling?".
by mid-kid | 2025-09-22 16:25:17+00:00
> Unless you believe that content creators should work for free, or that they are somehow not needed anymore — both of which are naive assumptions

Realistically, what was the benefit of the ad-driven model? From my point of view, most of the highly-valuable information came from the various forums, wikis and personal sites, on all of which people would publish the information for free. Ads were largely used to cover hosting costs of the large forums and wikis, but the content creators saw not a single dime.

Over the last 15 years, the search results have shifted from this, to instead become 100% news articles and SEO spam, all with a lot of fluff and very little substance, tons of ads, pop-ups, autoplay videos and subscription walls. All of this is well funded thanks to the business model, but for what? I can't imagine anyone sitting through all that crap to get to what they were looking for. There's a reason people would tell others to add "reddit" to the search query only a few years back, and even that's becoming less worthwhile.

Is this really what we want to preserve? Big publications and their interests?
by brightball | 2025-09-22 16:25:33+00:00
I always wondered about framing this as a sort of self-defense position.

When I was working on a site a decade ago where people were constantly defrauding the users we built a lot of tools to creatively deal with these people to make them less effective. It became very clear that law enforcement wasn't prepared to deal with the problem (at the time at least, maybe they've gotten better) so we had to figure out anything that we could do to protect our users.

The fact that you're essentially only allowed to play defense is IMO the reason it keeps happening. If we were able to hire a cybersecuurity company to hack the people defrauding our users for us, we would have done it in a heartbeat and it would have been worth every penny. It always seemed like, in the US at least, this could have fallen under the 2nd amendment as a self defense response.
by firefax | 2025-09-22 16:25:38+00:00
OTOH there are four critera for a legal stop -- they need to see you enter without the merchandise, select it from the shelf, conceal it, then walk past the point of sale AND all merchandise. And you have to have an unobstructed view of the person, because if they discard the item you stop them for, you're in for a world of (legal) hurt.

Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.

If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.

So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.
by poisonborz | 2025-09-22 16:25:47+00:00
I don't really get "local apps with sync". Sync to what, each other? In most cases there needs to be an always-on central authority (where backup also happens). My point is that "some device sitting alone in a corner with software and data stored on it" model is outdated (this is the "problem", I hope the "why" is obvious). But "local" should live on, just in the form of users owning most of their infrastructure.
by beloch | 2025-09-22 16:25:50+00:00
In theory, relatively poor people should be easy to coerce into different behaviours with taxes. In practice, that doesn't appear to be true. e.g. We've seen that carbon taxes on fuel don't really change vehicle purchases or behaviour at the pumps to a large degree unless the taxes are set very high.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that wealthier folk aren't moving to different countries over a tax that is smaller to them, in relative terms, than carbon taxes are to the poor. What is money for, after all, if not to enable you to live the life you want to live? If you need to move to Dubai to avoid taxes, how can you consider yourself wealthy?
by tracker1 | 2025-09-22 16:25:51+00:00
I've done a few tests with CF hosted webapps... overall it's pretty good experience, and for my usage has been free, despite opting into a paid account level, I haven't exceeded the free usage.

For mostly-static or static-site content it's pretty nice all around. I've not gotten into the SQLite service so much though, which I might and seems interesting.. there's also Turso to consider as an alternative option... Not to mention Deno, Fastly and other similar options.

Kind of hoping to see something similar start to gain traction to support wasm backend systems similarly.

This is beyond their DDoS/Proxy protection, but worth considering as part of what they offer. There's a lot there to like.
by jebarker | 2025-09-22 16:25:53+00:00
> Then there is the issue of food security and virtuous cycle, much of large agriculture depends on fossil fuels and it's questionnable if we should let go of animals provided inputs.

My understanding is that the production of animal products is far more environmentally damaging and land intensive than plant agriculture. Don't forget that a large amount of plant agriculture actually exists to produce feed for animals, so a reduction in producing animal products has an accompanying reduction in plant agriculture. There would need to be an increase in plant agriculture to replace the calories/nutrition not coming from animals (although addressing food waste would mean that might not be huge).

This understanding was informed by recently reading "Not the end of the world" by Hannah Ritchie, but I'm open to contradicting evidence.
by jorvi | 2025-09-22 16:25:58+00:00
Hey, another hg enjoyer! I miss it too. So much simpler.

Apparently 'jujutsu' makes the git workflow a bit more intuitive. Its something that runs atop git, although I don't know how much it messes up the history if you read it out with plain git.

All in all I'm pretty happy with git compared to the olden days of subversion. TortoiseSVN was a struggle haha.
by kragen | 2025-09-22 16:26:02+00:00
Sure, I git cloned my copy from https://github.com/ForthHub/F83, and it runs fine under DOSBox. If you have Git and DOSBox installed, I think you can just type

git clone https://github.com/ForthHub/F83 cd F83 dosbox . f83 : fish 0 do i . ." fish" cr loop ; 7 fish
by kiitos | 2025-09-22 16:26:11+00:00
> and so I read the YAML specification

but there isn't a single YAML spec, there are at least 2 in common use: yaml 1.1, and 1.2, which have discrete specs and feature-sets. re: anchor stuff specifically, 1.1 supports merge keys whereas 1.2 explicitly does not, so that's one thing

and github actions does not actually specify which yaml spec/version it uses when parsing workflow yaml files

it's unfortunately just not the case that "YAML means something" that is well-defined in the sense that you mean here
by lelanthran | 2025-09-22 16:26:26+00:00
> For me, integrity means I will change my mind when presented with convincing data.

It's not as binary as that.

Each new convincing data point may cause me to re-evaluate my position, but simply re-evaluation may not cause me to change my mind, but may cause me to slightly shift in the direction of the new position.

At some point, I would have ingested and/or seen so many convincing data points that my position is effectively neutral. And some point after that, my position may have actually shifted and not be neutral anymore.

IOW, it's a spectrum, and journeys across this spectrum are:

a) Slow - position moves in tiny amounts, and

b) Not guaranteed to end up on the opposite end - you might get to neutral and remain there for the rest of your life, or you might shift back towards your original position.
by ghaff | 2025-09-22 16:26:29+00:00
In the specific case of Massachusetts, living in New Hampshire (no income tax or sales tax) instead is pretty practical for a lot of people. Doesn't help you that much if you commute to an MA employer but I know a lot of people who did commute in from NH and, these days, a lot of people who became officially remote workers in NH.

Of course, there are lots of other reasons why out-of-staters might choose to move to MA.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-22 16:26:44+00:00
I'm no materials scientist, but here's been my observations in working with glass receptacles and bottles over the years:

Shape is a very important aspect of how strong glass things are. Perfume bottles (or any small bottle) tend to be stronger just due to the fact that they usually lack large, flat-ish areas and the thickness-to-surface area ratio tends to be higher.

For instance, if you drop a small glass soda bottle and a large glass soda bottle, the large one is far more likely to suffer damage than the small one.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-22 16:26:48+00:00
I mean, we evolved in these conditions - plenty of UV rays, fresh/clean pre-industrial air, and quite a bit of built-in social distancing between ape tribes.

Putting people in a small poorly-ventilated box with a bunch of strangers (some of whom perhaps recently flew to the other side of the planet and back) is the abberant behavior, really.
by palmotea | 2025-09-22 16:26:55+00:00
> Yes the wrist watch, was a worker's item, because it enabled him to look at the time while his hands were doing something else. Gentlemen wore pocket watches. But that has nothing to do with the general idea of a watch or time-keeping device.

It looks like you're wrong. It sounds like it was an upper-class women's item, then a military officer's item, then demands of trench warfare mad them an enlistedman's item, and demobilization finally erased the gender coding.

At no point in this history is there division between workers and gentlemen like you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch#Wristwatches
by slater | 2025-09-22 16:26:57+00:00
What always gets me with this kind of "millionaires will take their money away!!!" story is that, for one, they weren't paying much to begin with (thanks to tax dodges, endless tax relief due to various forms of "philanthropy", etc.), and two, we used to soak the rich six ways from Sunday up to the 50s/60s, and we got to go to the moon. Then the 70s rolled around, the hippies grew up and said "no more of that", and presto-change-oh, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Oh and three, for all the warnings and blackmailing, as the studies show, they never actually go through with their threats. MACO - Millionaires Always Chicken Out? /s
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-22 16:27:07+00:00
AI drives search, search leads to vapid content, vapid content has ads, big incumbents get lots of money for serving ads. Only difference is Google is now an AI engine rather than a search engine. There will be a few more large rent-seeking "platforms" that will make billions to prop it all up. The internet will be filled with complete crap that is inescapable.

So, same as it is today.
by maxloh | 2025-09-22 16:27:16+00:00
As far as I recall, many libraries in the Java ecosystem, as well as the Android API, don't have the official tutorials or guides you're referring to. The JavaDoc and the Android API reference are often the only officially available resources.

So no, Those aren't just there to refresh developer's memory. In many cases, they are the only resource for learning the system from scratch.
by isodev | 2025-09-22 16:27:37+00:00
I think as a publisher, you should be worried that Cloudflare is taking the first step towards the 2025 version of what “rights holders” have done to the movie and entertainment industry.

Imagine trying to create and distribute a movie without the backing of your local distributor/broadcasting cartel. Only instead of gating the movie theatre, Cloudflare is the single access to all things web. Also, based in the US, so good luck producing content their government doesn’t like.
by trashb | 2025-09-22 16:27:56+00:00
This is not a systems issue this is a UI issue, the state status needs to be communicated to the user. It is ridiculous to retrofit locally first to a app that pretends to the user that it is always online.

Social media could allow you to make posts as a "draft" and automatically send it when you have a connection think of a email outbox. Or even give you a notification if after syncing with the master and it turns out the comment you replied to changed.

If you look at the web a lot of older (fundamental)protocols and applications have local-first build in. Often the design requirements required communication over a connection that is not as available. A few I can think of of HTTP, EMAIL, FINGER, GOPHER, FIDONET, NEWGROUP and more. A shared state is managed for a lot of different domains (code, gaming, chat, message boards) so I feel like it is already quite a solved problem, but there is no one size fits all solution. IMHO that's the sane thing to do for a networked application as you can never grantee that either party is available, and you want to still serve your user the best you can.

It can also have huge benefits for the data provider, especially at scale. - You can lower your bandwidth required drastically. - You can keep a consistent state for your user. - If you are evil you can send a lot more telemetry data or valuable (harvested) data instead.

the LWW is only really useful if you have a value where you can discard the previous updates for the latest, it's a bit like using UDP instead of TCP for communicating your position in a multiplayer game. Or if you don't mind forcing your user to resubmit.
by walleeee | 2025-09-22 16:28:25+00:00
> [ants] are incapable of recognizing innovation, so even if you throw in a group of Fermat ants into the mix, they will still end up working as just slightly more efficient drones.

And yet the anthill does very complex things even though its Fermats might feel their unique talents go unused. This strengthens the case unless you posit that humankind is so close to a universal intelligence limit that we can see its precise contours and can therefore know exactly what can be known and done, and how, exhaustively.

Separately, everything you say needs an operationalization of intelligence. I understand IQ is your proxy of choice. Presumably this measure correlates to innovation in such things as physics and mathematics. Presumably also to innovation in speculative financial vehicles, elaborate social schemes, weapons of mass destruction, and success in the war against nature. Will you adjust your definition when some of its manifestations come into tension with others, or stick with it come what may?

There is no intelligence absent context. Intelligence is a relation between an agent and everything else relevant, with respect to a goal.
by lapcat | 2025-09-22 16:29:02+00:00
Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete...

From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet and be taken seriously.