MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rick_dalton | 2025-09-15 21:00:21+00:00
I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.
by delusional | 2025-09-15 21:01:14+00:00
I completely understand why I would want paypal as an intermediary in the unlikely case I wanted to send bitcoin to somebody. I think what makes less sense to me is why people who actually like crypto would want paypal.

I want a regulated middleman answerable to democratic legislation. Crypto people (largely) don't.

I guess this is mostly a play that crypto people won't actually care if there's a middleman if it creates some liquidity. That just seems like giving up to me.
by rgo | 2025-09-15 21:01:42+00:00
There are now many solutions, and full-blown startups, under the "swarm", "agent orchestration" and other similar keywords, for spinning agents in the cloud. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but I totally see most of vibe coding being replaced by powerhouse agents, placed locally or in the cloud, picking up tasks and working them out until its really done.
by mxkopy | 2025-09-15 21:01:46+00:00
In the graph you’re referencing, K = 2 never reaches C = 0.2. K = 3 only reaches C = 0.3 before getting cut off.

I’m not even sure why that would be a problem, because he’s projecting N basis vectors into K dimensions and C is some measure of the error this introduces into mapping points in the N-space onto the K-space, or something. I’m glad to be shown why this is inconsistent with the graph, but your argument doesn’t talk about this idea at all.
by hermitcrab | 2025-09-15 21:02:21+00:00
I've sold downloadable software for Windows and Mac for 20 years and I have never used any of the app stores. I just can't be arsed with jumping through their endlessly changing hoops, only to give a large chunk of the sales to the store.

I heard that when the MS Store started they started off paying a bounty to every developer who added an app, so they could populate the store. Consequently they ended up with loads of reskinned open source apps and their store was garbage from day one.
by jchw | 2025-09-15 21:02:23+00:00
For AV1 this is true, but we don't really need to postulate about whether or not Apple plays games to suppress open codecs, they do it constantly. Like when they finally eventually added support for Opus, but not Ogg containers, so you had to stuff Opus in a CAF that only Safari can support. Opus is also now supported in WebM, but you still can't just decode Ogg Opus, and there is still no sensible audio-only Opus container supported in Safari right now.

Apple devices have had accelerated VP9 devices for literally years, which didn't stop them from simply not supporting VP9 during that time period, despite no reason (i.e. battery life) and despite that it has been patent unencumbered for that entire period.

And so much for battery life... If you are on a Wikimedia website on an iPad, it will use open codecs no matter what, and if you are on an Apple device, you might just get a software decoder in WebAssembly instead, if you're not on a new enough OS.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-09-15 21:03:52+00:00
> No they're not. Not really, unless you consider disk access and interacting with the page cache/inode cache inside the kernel to be blocking.

The important point is that the kernel takes locks during all those operations, and will wait an unbounded amount of time if those locks are contended.

So really and truly, yes, any synchronous syscall can schedule out for an arbitrary amount of time, no matter what you do.

It's sort of semantic. The word "block" isn't a synonym for "sleep", it has a specific meaning in POSIX. In that meaning, you're correct, they never "block". But in the generic way most people use the term "block", they absolutely do.
by moffkalast | 2025-09-15 21:04:12+00:00
Just because they react to these objects doesn't mean they can see them clearly. It's just physics based on the eye and lens dimensions. With human eyes that threshold is about 10 cm, and if you try seeing objects closer than that you can still very much track and identify them, but they are blurry nonetheless. Maybe cat brains are also better at compensating for it, that part we can't really know, but they are most adapted to be ambush predators that don't really need to see things up close once they lock on and pounce.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-15 21:04:56+00:00
> Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason

I just told you the most commonly cited reason, and instead of arguing that I'm wrong, you're arguing orthogonal to my point. Detroit became less special as time went on and there was nothing that Americans could do about it - the culprit was neoliberalism. Unions or not, that is the reason why the economy could not persist.

So let me rephrase my question: barring unions or state-subsidized housing, how was the US supposed to prop-up a manufacturing economy in the 1980s?
by echelon | 2025-09-15 21:05:08+00:00
I really do not want Google to win anything. They're a giant monopoly across multiple industries. We need a greater balance of power.

Antitrust enforcement has been letting us down for over two decades. If we don't have an oxygenation event, we'll go an entire generation where we only reward tax-collecting, non-innovation capital. That's unhealthy and unfair.

Our career sector has been institutionalized and rewards the 0.001% even as they rest on their laurels and conspire to suppress wages and innovation. There's a reason why centicorns petered out and why the F500 is tech-heavy. It's because big tech is a dragnet that consumes everything it touches - film studios, grocery stores, and God only knows what else it'll assimilate in the unending search for unregulated, cancerous growth.

FAANG's $500k TC is at the expense of hundreds of unicorns making their ICs even wealthier. That money mostly winds up going to institutional investors, where the money sits parked instead of flowing into huge stakes risks and cutthroat competition. That's why a16z and YC want to see increased antitrust regulations.

But it's really bad for consumers too. It's why our smartphones are stagnant taxation banana republics with one of two landlords. Nothing new, yet as tightly controlled an authoritarian state. New ideas can't be tried and can't attain healthy margins.

It's wild that you can own a trademark, but the only way for a consumer to access it is to use a Google browser that defaults to Google search (URLs are scary), where the search results will be gamed by competitors. You can't even own your own brand anymore.

Winning shouldn't be easy. It should be hard. A neverending struggle that rewards consumers.

We need a forest fire to renew the ecosystem.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-15 21:05:34+00:00
Yep! It is. The issue has been that Hyundai is trying to bring in long-term technician labor on VWP and B visas, when they should be classified under H2B or L1B.

And the added issue is, most other companies (even Korean ones like Samsung) have been able to bring comparable projects online without ending up with the same scandals.

Hyundai has a common and persistent practice of bringing in Koreans from Korea to work manual labor abroad, and was warned by regulators on multiple occasions about this [0], and even their employees in Korea warned management that they were breaking regulations [0]

Even during the Biden admin we warned Korean companies not to play it fast and loose [0]:

"U.S. Department of Commerce official Andrew Gately warned South Korean companies and their contractors last year not to "cut corners" in visa applications. "Please do not put your employees or the employees of your contractors at risk," he said at a seminar in Seoul."

This isn't a Kilmar Abrego Garcia situation, especially given that Korean business media is framing this as a "how dare they touch Koreans after we invest" situation instead of as a humanitarian situation. Why should FDI buy impunity - especially when projects like the Hyundai one were funded by IRA subsidizes.

Installing machinery does not fall under the B visa exemption [1]. An engineering manager advising on software would.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/workers-say-k...

[1] - https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
by asadotzler | 2025-09-15 21:05:57+00:00
Apple no longer cares about disabled people.

Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."

Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.

It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.
by strcat | 2025-09-15 21:05:59+00:00
Librem 5 not only doesn't provide firmware updates for serious security vulnerabilities but goes out of the way to block the OS from doing it and block updating firmware in general. It uses a bunch of low security components. It's a closed source device with closed source firmware. Not updating the firmware from the OS has nothing to do with a threat model but rather a loophole in a definition of freedom where a device with a fully closed source OS would be considered free as long as it couldn't be updated by anyone...
by cogman10 | 2025-09-15 21:06:38+00:00
The way MPEG runs things there are some oddness with the likes of H265. MPEG likes to add little extensions to a codec over time. That's why H265 was first released in 2013 but ultimately had like 10 different extensions after that fact (the last one in 2024).

AV1 and VP9/VP8 before that have, in contrast, been pretty much static after they were released. AV1 has had a single errata after it's release.

So I could see why you'd see H265 as the competitor. I mostly don't simply because I believe they explicitly stated that they were trying to be competitive with 266.

I personally prefer the way AOMedia is running things and I suspect hardware manufacturers do as well. No licenses and AOM is creating open source reference encoders/decoders. They are working very hard to make it easy for manufacturers to be able to pick up the spec and run with it. Keeping the stream standard static for a long period also means manufacturers don't have to worry that they won't get a new extension next year. Content encoders are also reasonably guaranteed that their encoding with today's software still works with yesteryear hardware.

MPEG, on the other hand, is paywalling the crap out of everything.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-15 21:06:51+00:00
LOL. An overview article that was obsolete even in 2016 when it was published. You need to get with the times.

"... the amount of uranium in seawater is truly renewable as well as inexhaustible."

"New technological breakthroughs from DOE's Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater economically possible."

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1882/nuclear-power-becomes-...

More recently:

Ultra-highly efficient enrichment of uranium from seawater via studtite nanodots growth-elution cycle

Nature, 2024.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50951-4

High-capacity uranium extraction from seawater through constructing synergistic multiple dynamic bonds

Nature, 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00346-y

If you prefer a popular overview:

Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

A speculative bubble is not the same as serious serious demand, and the actual demand never materialized. The vast majority of the "prospecting" was just speculators, not serious mining companies. And for serious prospecting, the 4 year time-frame was way too short, you just barely get done with the early stages of

- land acquisition and permitting

- Geological surveys (airborne radiometrics, mapping, geochemistry)

- Target generation

- Initial drilling programs

- Preliminary resource estimates (if successful)

You don't have enough to get to actual serious exploration and feasibility studies:

- Infill drilling

- Metallurgical testing

- Environmental baseline studies

- Scoping and feasibility studies

- More permitting

- Community consultation

Breeder reactors exist, they face the same problem as recycling: mined uranium is still way too cheap to make investment in those technologies economically attractive.

Should Uranium get more scarce and thus more expensive, the economic incentives change very quickly and then we can pull those technologies off the shelf.

Same for Thorium reactors: currently not necessary, as we have plenty of Uranium for the existing Uranium based designs. Doesn't stop companies like Copenhagen Atomics from investing, as they see other advantages in addition to very readily available fuel.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-15 21:07:05+00:00
> They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations.

In the US, this is true with some important caveats.

"If you have opened a PayPal Debit Card Mastercard® account, enrolled in Direct Deposit, or bought or received cryptocurrency with your personal PayPal Balance account, we will place your U.S. dollar PayPal Balance funds at one or more Program Banks. Any other balance funds and all cryptocurrencies are not held in FDIC insured bank deposits. Cryptocurrencies may lose value." [1]

[1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc
by hamdingers | 2025-09-15 21:07:44+00:00
Suburban homes capable of overproducing power also have by far the highest per user grid maintenance costs due to simple distance. I agree you would see an uptick in solar adoption with your scheme, but only because apartment-dwellers are being conscripted to subsidize your grid connection.

Early subsidy plans were short sighted and came from politicians, not grid operators, and gave homeowners a massively inflated sense of the usefulness of the meager kWh they produce. Power is cheap, infrastructure is not. It's far better deal for the commons if you use all the kWh you produce (via storage) and pay what it costs to deliver a grid connection when you fall short.
by whycome | 2025-09-15 21:08:24+00:00
Are they an egregious form of Ewaste really? (Serious question). Because there’s so much reusable hardware in so many of the other things we throw out (phones, cars, laptops, etc) but we don’t make reasonable efforts to limit that. I’d love if the vape hardware was standardized to a degree for cool reuse projects like this. Donate a bunch of used vapes as hardware platforms for school projects? Like arduinos…but not.
by setopt | 2025-09-15 21:08:50+00:00
I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.

But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-15 21:09:24+00:00
What's not to understand? If you have a specific question about the 'immediate negativity', perhaps comment on one of the puzzling comments to ask for clarification

For a general background, searching for 'paypal' reveals a thing or two: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paypal

> - Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again

> - “We found PayPal vulnerabilities and PayPal punished us for it”

> - We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

> - PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

> - More Paypal nonsense

That's five of the top eight results. The last one pretty much sums up the sentiment of the whole page
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-15 21:09:35+00:00
You see this complaint a lot with chip bags, which are mostly air.

But chip bags are always mostly air, and can't change, because the air is needed to provide padding that prevents the chips from being ground into dust before you open the bag.

This tends to discredit the genre of "the packaging is there to fool the customer" complaints. If you can't identify when the packaging is critical to the product, why listen to any complaints?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-15 21:09:44+00:00
Germany is very famously pro-union and boasts a strong auto industry. What did they do differently

The German auto industry is in a world of shit, actually, but I don't think they can blame the unions for that. Their "works council" model is very different from a typical UAW stronghold in the US. The unions (and in many cases the state itself) are active partners in corporate ownership and management, so they have a stronger incentive not to kill the golden goose.
by FooBarBizBazz | 2025-09-15 21:09:52+00:00
I too was so surprised by that Banks quote that I still wonder if maybe he was lying or being deliberately provocative.

(I wouldn't call The Culture "leftist" exactly, as it seems to be a space version of liberal imperialism, which the international Left always opposed. Though it is "left" in the American Fox/CNN-tier sense.)

If I choose to believe Banks' quote, then I have to interpret The Culture as merely the best possible society, in a universe where human nature severely constrains what societies are possible. To me it seems to be a world full of pointlessness and barely-suppressed existential angst -- so perhaps he is saying: "Imagine that we can solve death and supply unlimited entertainment and pleasure. Even then, you will not be able to escape a kind of background noise, an omnipresent drone, in a minor key -- because that's inevitable to existence."

Now I imagine a back-story: The people of The Culture, the Minds, everything -- they are actually in Hell. Their universe is Hell. They are incredibly clever; they have outwitted the gods (to the extent possible); they have ended the tortures, chained Satan (or whoever used to administer), and found ways to roast marshmallows over the lakes of fire. It is a tremendous triumph. And yet they are still in Hell, and no matter the palaces they build there or the drugs they take, there is pain beneath the surface.

I read The Culture books as a subtler version of that story, where it is never spelled out clearly where they are.

At the same time, don't take this to mean that I want to force some religious meaning onto the books. My meaning is also secular. Hell is a metaphor of some kind. The meaning I am suggesting is more existentialist than religious.
by jumploops | 2025-09-15 21:10:10+00:00
Yes, regardless of tool, I always create a separate plan doc for larger changes

Will try adding the instructions specific to refactors (i.e. copy/move files, don't rewrite when possible)

I've also found it helpful, especially for certain regressions, to basically create a new branch for any Codex/CC assisted task (even if part of a larger task). Makes it easier to identify regressions due to recent changes (i.e. look at git diff, it worked previously)

Telling the "agent" to manage git leads to more context pollution than I want, so I manage all commits/branches myself, but I'm sure that will change as the tools improve/they do more RL on full-cycle software dev
by jasba58 | 2025-09-15 21:10:18+00:00
If you want 100% GHG reduction, for every 1 watt nameplate solar rating, 1 x 0.2 capacity factor x 730 hours a month x 3 months a season = 438 Watt-hour of battery or other energy storage. 80% reduction needs 100 hour vs a whole season, so 20 watt-hour required storage. Dr. Chu of Stanford is my source.
by kjuulh | 2025-09-15 21:10:38+00:00
There is always a "better" thing. I do think that it is fine to have a bit of stability in the frontend space. Should react stay the default for the future, probably not, but it is fine if it stays that way for a while.

React is a good enough choice for a lot of problems, heck, going without a framework is often a good enough choice, we don't always have to choose the "best" option, because what we value might not actually be that important, over other important metrics. Signals might have performance, elm elegance and purity, etc, etc. But for 95% problems, and teams React is just fine.

A bonus is that I can come back to my project in a year, and not have to rewrite it because everything changed since then.

In Danish we say

> Stop mens legen er god

Stop, while you're still going strong (ish). React is plenty equipped to solve a lot of problems, it doesn't need to solve all of them.
by Klonoar | 2025-09-15 21:10:42+00:00
Now imagine it being said by someone presenting and doing the same hand pyramid stance that they make every Apple employee in WWDC videos do.

All kidding aside, it’s weird to read. Ever since I was a kid, I was taught that beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” is not “correct”. Times change and all that, I get it - it’s just weird though.
by dang | 2025-09-15 21:11:21+00:00
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines and using HN exclusively for political battle. Those things aren't ok here, regardless of what you're battling for or against.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by seanssel | 2025-09-15 21:11:26+00:00
Hey, thanks for the response. I'm in my mid 30s and have considered myself a "space cadet" my entire life. School was absolutely brutal for me, and I'm still amazed at myself for getting through it. Assumed that most of inability to focus was because of mild depression and anxiety, but I'd like to see if something else is going on. Feels like I've been living in a daze for decades.

Guess I'll reach out to a GP first and see what they think. Appreciate you.
by sojsurf | 2025-09-15 21:11:28+00:00
I live near Detroit, not Hollywood. Most union workers are not movie stars, directors, staring quarterbacks or soccer stars. Most are cops, teachers and automotive workers.

Speaking with a friend around me who worked in automotive, the unions are a double edged sword. They provide security for you, but they also provide security for a bunch of folks who realized they won't get fired if they put in the bare minimum. My friend found this incredibly frustrating.

Many unions here put large amounts of money toward political goals I don't support. If I want a job at such a company, under Michigan state law I can be compelled to pay the dues, even if the union is working against me politically. Until I can work somewhere without being forced to pay union dues, I am not interested in those jobs, even if they pay more.
by ShroudedNight | 2025-09-15 21:11:28+00:00
I'm not sure what your point is here.

1) They don't sell for $3-4 a pack, yet your post seems to imply that the system has failed for cigarettes.

2) For externalities beyond the input cost of a product, the default [natural] condition is for those costs not to be included - one needn't enforce anything. Rather, it requires that someone with power put their thumb on the scale to enforce the inclusion of those costs during a sale[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
Ask HN: What Single File Web Apps do you know of?
by calebm | 2025-09-15 21:12:01+00:00
I'm trying to get a Wikipedia page for Single File Web Apps approved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Single_File_Web_Apps), and I'm trying to find good examples of Single File Web Apps (web apps that are just a single HTML file). Please comment if you know of any.