MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterSandman | 2025-09-15 12:06:10+00:00
Can we stop calling things you find weird “American?” Like Jesus Christ, Europe isn’t some special land where everyone makes food from scratch and capitalism doesn’t exist.

I’m not even American, but are we seriously judging people for baking cakes using cake mixes? It’s been around for almost a century. I highly doubt that cake mixes aren’t just as common in Europe than they are in the US within a margin of error.
by ilamont | 2025-09-15 12:07:26+00:00
> What I don’t understand is why some people can’t just reach out and request it — instead of going straight to a chargeback.

Customers don't want to "reach out" if it means hunting deep in their account settings to find the cancel button, or calling a number which may or may not lead them through an endless phone tree to waste 5 minutes talking with someone on the retention team reading from a script.

People don't remember they signed up.

They can't remember how to log in from a different device to cancel.

It's easier to use their credit card app to dispute the charge.

The company name is different than the product name - even a slight difference may indicate a scam, like all of these highway toll scams using a slightly different domain name.

A worker or family member signed up using someone else's card, and that person has no idea what the charge is for.

People expected one thing from your SaaS product, and got something else that they are not willing to pay for.

They rarely check or read their email.

Your account reminders are going straight to spam.

The communications around the product, pricing, or requirements was lacking.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-15 12:07:43+00:00
I think this is increasingly clearly a false equivalency. If somebody took the equal but opposite of every Charlie Kirk position, they could go to the most religious or conservative universities in the United States and feel 100% safe, even without any sort of personal security. They'd probably have to worry much more about a false flag attack than somebody genuinely trying to hurt them because of their opinions. But many of the positions he expressed in ostensibly liberal areas suddenly open one up to the threat of overt violence, up to and including murder. Liberalism in the US has become highly dysfunctional, and I say that as somebody who still identifies as liberal, though I'm not sure for how much longer if "we" continue down this path.
by mrtksn | 2025-09-15 12:08:45+00:00
That's the point, I don't subscribe to the idea that %30 is ridiculous if you don't have a full blown department to handle that. Can be argued that Apple should give people that option but for anyone who minds being charged $43.95 for transaction that goes badly will be beter off to pay Apple and have piece of mind as long as their margins allow that.
by eagerpace | 2025-09-15 12:09:47+00:00
We’re a technical crowd here, we understand inflation, and we can do math. I suspect most of us here are in a position to change the world, make things better, healthier, safer, faster. It is difficult for me to empathize with “I just can’t out of principle” when the change is so minimal. How can we ever fix big problems if people can’t adapt to such small ones? She didn’t have to deal with inflation for the last 30 years, now she is having to deal with some. To me, the bigger change would be for people to have to go without her cookies! I hope those of us growing up in this faster changing world can remember in our later years that change is necessary.
by squishy47 | 2025-09-15 12:09:55+00:00
Totally agree. It takes a while to "load" the project but then once it's loaded moving around a large codebase is a breeze but as soon at the code changes broaden and I slow right down cos I have to rebuild the map with the new additions. only way i can describe it: it's like loading google/apple maps and instead of it showing a low detail view with only the big roads displayed i'm loading the entire super details map, it takes a while but once it's loaded there's 0 lag.

also it's actually reassuring knowing someone else is similar, no-one in my life seems to work the same.
by blibble | 2025-09-15 12:10:20+00:00
> What’s really going on here? Why do banks completely ignore the terms customers agreed to when they subscribed, or even in cases where the claims are obviously false? And why aren’t customers required to provide any proof at all?

they have a banking relationship with their client, and none whatsoever with you

if they decline the chargeback they then take on a load of risk (they might lose their client, they might get reported to the regulator, they might be sued by their client and then stuck with the bill)

but if they just pass it on then you take all the pain

not surprising at all given the structure of how credit card payments work
by Sammi | 2025-09-15 12:10:27+00:00
Anecdotally: Happy people seem to like to talk about anything and everything. Unhappy people don't like to talk or only talk about one thing.

I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far: https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw

Thank you for the set up.
by teo_zero | 2025-09-15 12:10:38+00:00
I think we agree without understanding each other.

It must be possible to sort all system events in an "absolute time line". To do so, the system must know in every moment at what point of this "absolute time line" we are, so that it can stamp the event with such absolute time marker.

Now, we can make it coincide with any known TZ, but once set, we must not change it. I set it to UTC; you might prefer your home TZ, if you have a place you call "home". But then don't change it when you travel or when switching DST on and off!

Of course you can still change the TZ of the time that's displayed to you (so that it's synchronized with the local church's bells, for example, which is convenient and might avoid you a lot of misunderstanding with your local friends), but not the TZ the OS uses for itself.

I find that any choice of home TZ would be arbitrary, so UTC is the best choice.
by eesmith | 2025-09-15 12:10:52+00:00
I fully agree that weighing is better, but if you apply your standards to weighing you'll end up concluding there's also no such thing as "weight measurement."

- The so-called "weight" will differ depending on the type of scale and how it's used. People used mechanical kitchen scales just fine even when some measured a bit less and a bit more

- While digital scales can be more accurate, accuracy can still vary, and of course the reported weight can vary depending on where an object is on the scale or how the scale is set up. (Yes, I've used a scale that wasn't on a smooth flat surface. It worked out fine.)

- "Dry materials" like flour are hygroscopic, and even though weighing is better than measuring by volume, you end up weighing the flour + water, when what you want is just the weight of the flour (e.g. you may have to consider the storage history of your flour)

- There's the ~0.4 % weight difference between the equator and the poles.

Yes, these are all very picky, but that's how your "no such thing as" comes across to someone who grew up using volume measurement in the home kitchen.

Instead, simply say that weight measurement results in more reliable and predictable cooking. Perhaps also add that cleanup can be a lot easier when ingredients don't need intermediate staging.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-15 12:11:21+00:00
Dunno, almost all of the people I know anywhere in the ML space are on the C and Rust end of the spectrum.

Lack of types, lack of static analysis, lack of ... well, lack of everything Python doesn't provide and fights users on costs too much developer time. It is a net negative to continue pouring time and money into anything Python-based.

The sole exclusion I've seen to my social circle is those working at companies that don't directly do ML, but provide drivers/hardware/supporting software to ML people in academia, and have to try to fix their cursed shit for them.

Also, fwiw, there is no reason why Triton is Python. I dislike Triton for a lot of reasons, but its just a matmul kernel DSL, there is nothing inherent in it that has to be, or benefits from, being Python.... it takes DSL in, outputs shader text out, then has the vendor's API run it (ie, CUDA, ROCm, etc). It, too, would benefit from becoming Rust.
by shireboy | 2025-09-15 12:11:58+00:00
I have a family member falling for these on a regular basis. In their case it’s possibly tied to mental health issues. They are able to drive, converse, care for self, but are sending money to groups that are clearly not real (example: fundraiser for a celebrity supposedly in the hospital, when news shows they weren’t. Was convinced actually conversing with the celebrity). Rest of the family has taken some steps but does feel at a loss. How do you prevent them from being seriously hurt emotionally and financially while respecting their autonomy and dignity? Even when they “come anround” to the fact they have been scammed, that adds insult to injury. The vector is definitely social media and sms/phone.

Any tips would be appreciated. Locking down phone hasn’t really helped, and finances are already segregated to hopefully avoid giving away total life savings.
by fryry | 2025-09-15 12:12:01+00:00
I very rarely refund anything, but when I do, I send a single email that I want a refund and if it isn't done promptly I will chargeback. It's usually the best customer service I get. No security questions, no Indian call centres, no "are you sure" questions. I don't blame people for just hitting the dispute button though. Years of piss poor customer service has conditioned it.
by foofoo12 | 2025-09-15 12:12:15+00:00
Add a warning email 24 hours before the transaction. In the subject put "You'll be charged $10 for renewal in 24 hours".

> we also provide a simple, self-service way to cancel the subscription

It's hard to comment without seeing screenshots and description of the process. When people are cancelling under a perceived threat (will be charged otherwise), any inconvenience will become an extreme one.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-15 12:12:15+00:00
> Some government forms and processes for poor people assistance I've seen (and I imagine that forms and processes for new immigrants may be similar)... some of it is insanely kafkaesque

There's little political pressure to make it easier, and constant worries about "fraud" by claimants, or means-testing, which is turned into adding more and more fields to the form.
by xenobeb | 2025-09-15 12:12:16+00:00
I have never heard of this but cannabis has a powerful effect on ghrelin.

It wouldn't be shocking that at extreme use ghrelin stops acting without stimulation from cannabis.

The problem with discussion on these things is everything is dose dependent.

If you drink a glass of wine once a month the state of the extreme alcoholic is not going to line up with your experience from "drinking alcohol."
by jokethrowaway | 2025-09-15 12:12:21+00:00
We have kids, we're a bit crammed in our current place and we're building a 3x bigger and much nicer place. Location is a small LCOL country in Europe with high foreign income. So, I see your point about naturally needing more room with kids, but there is also a lifestyle upgrade factor for us. We would be comfortable with 2x the space and without modern / luxury finish, spending less than half.

The rent I pay now is 1/12 of the rent I would get charged on the property I'm building. I'm happy paying my current rent, but I would never rent a fancy property and spend all that money with no equity, even if it would be less than 30% of my monthly income.
by amelius | 2025-09-15 12:12:42+00:00
What I don't understand is why my banking app does not show a "cancel subscription" button with the payment.

When I click that button, the recurring payment is automatically canceled, and the SaaS company can check that and know that I unsubscribed. Or something along these lines.

There is already a power-asymmetry between consumers and companies. This should not extend to unsubscribing. Here, the consumer should have all the power.
by repstosb | 2025-09-15 12:13:15+00:00
This is exactly how technical debt accumulates. You can write a comment documenting that "unsafe is actually safe here in routine X because Y will always do Z," but if the code lives long enough, someone may eventually change X or Y in a way that falsifies that claim, or try to cut-and-paste X's code into a new context without those guarantees. No, that's not /prudent/, but it happens nevertheless, and the costs of tracking down and fixing the errors are almost always higher than just implementing more conservatively in the first place.
by mawad | 2025-09-15 12:13:22+00:00
Meet Iris — a lightweight open-source library for multi-GPU programming in Triton.

Iris is about 370 lines of Python + Triton and exposes SHMEM-like Remote Memory Access (RMA) primitives — load, store, and atomics — for GPUs. The repository includes examples from simple memory operations to distributed GEMM with fused compute and concurrency patterns, so you can get started quickly.

The project is fully open source. More examples are on the way, and contributions are welcome — issues, discussions, and PRs all help shape where Iris goes next.
by 7thaccount | 2025-09-15 12:13:26+00:00
I've noticed this too and it's always bothered me. It isn't true in everything (I love the split decision making when roller skating in a crowded rink), but when it comes to something like learning new mathematics, my wife is so much faster that I feel like I'm in some kind of slow motion bubble. My processing power just isn't there. The bio-CPU is out of date so to speak. I eventually get there, but in a completely different way after putting together sufficient metaphor and then examples. She just...gets it. Then again, I'm much better than her in other ways (I've never met a stranger). I think brains are just weird.
by benterix | 2025-09-15 12:13:45+00:00
> (I don't think it was very nice of whoever downvoted you, presumably because you're wrong, given you explicitly allowed that you might not be getting it.)

I believe this is how this website works: if someone thinks you are wrong, they will downvote your comment. It's best not to think about in terms of niceness but more about getting the content most people agree with, or considered the most valuable by the majority, to the top so that more people can view and discuss it.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-15 12:13:49+00:00
> Algebraic Types are Just Elementary School Algebra

My math prof did say the exact same while torturing students with question about proofs about their arcane set of arbitrary numbers and if they can be considered a field or ring or a group or everything at the same time.

Sure, just some + and *...

And sure, for a programmer it is mostly about which operations are defined on the type. But with just a few tweaks here and there you can transform a tool into a torture device...

Jokes aside, I think this is a good explanation about the concepts and parallels.
by kafked | 2025-09-15 12:14:06+00:00
I mean, when the site first came out, Google started to show product pages and impressions started to grow, but after a couple of weeks they dropped completely to zero and the pages were excluded from search index, and I don't see anything changing, only some pages got into the index, mainly because of links referring to the site. Well, there are almost 100k products here now and I hope this collective unconscious never gets into search results
by uncircle | 2025-09-15 12:14:07+00:00
This is in reference to a meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stop-doing-math) and made relevant by the first paragraph of the post.

> Have you ever seen a Number grazing in the fields? Or a Functor chirping in the trees? No? That’s because they’re LIES. LIES told by the bourgeoisie to keep common folk down.
Show HN: State Algebra, new algebraic framework for logic, an alternative to BDD
by dmitry_stratyfy | 2025-09-15 12:14:08+00:00
Hey HN,

My co-author and I just published a paper on arXiv that formalises a framework we've been using successfully in probabilistic logic for many years. We decided it was time to properly lay out its foundations for classical propositional logic.

We cast propositional logic into a formal algebra where logical formulas are represented by sparse matrices. State Algebra isn't an algorithm in itself, but rather a language for manipulating Boolean functions. It provides a new set of tools that lets you express and reformulate existing optimization heuristics (like those from modern SAT solvers) and design completely new ones. State Algebra is trading the strict canonicity of ROBDDs for greater representational flexibility.

For those interested in abstract-algebraic logic, we build a self-contained formalism from the ground up. The core building block is an object we call a "t-object," which forms the basis of the algebra. It provides a different way to look at the structure of logical problems.

The algebra naturally extends to handle real-valued coefficients, which turns it into a tool for probabilistic logic and Weighted Model Counting.

The paper is a bit of a deep dive into the maths, but we'd love to hear your thoughts. We'll be in the comments to answer any questions. Critiques are very welcome!

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10326
by cubefox | 2025-09-15 12:14:09+00:00
Also interesting:

The area of the Euclidean unit disk (area of a circle with radius 1) is equal to π. However, the volume of the unit ball (ball with radius 1, one dimension more) is larger, namely 4/3π ≈ 4.18879. So how does the hypervolume for unit n-balls change in higher dimensions, where the 1-ball is a circular disk and the 2-ball an ordinary ball?

Surprisingly, it first increases but then converges to 0. The maximum is achieved for a unit 5-ball with a hypervolume of about 5.2638. For higher dimensions the value decreases again.

However: If we allow fractional dimensions, the 5-ball isn't at the peak volume. The n-ball with the largest volume is achieved for n≈5.256946404860577, with a volume of approximately 5.277768021113401, which are slightly larger numbers.

These were computed by GPT-5-thinking, so take it with a grain of salt. But the fractional dimension for peak volume is also reported here on page 34: http://lib.ysu.am/disciplines_bk/8d6a1692e567ede24330d574ac3...

Curiously, the paper above says that the area of the hyper surface of the n-ball (rather than its volume) peaks at n≈7.2569464048, while ChatGPT calculated it as n≈6.256946404860577, so exactly one dimension less than the paper. I assume the paper is right?

Also curiously, as you can see from these numbers, that fractional dimension with the peak hyper surface area is exactly two (according to the paper) or one (according to ChatGPT) dimension larger than the fractional dimension of the peak volume.
by 00100C000111 | 2025-09-15 12:14:13+00:00
Well, have you heard of Attaullah Baig?

https://youtube.com/shorts/33Cm88Dazoo?si=Eb1CfOZB6Ri34Dov

They could just ask Meta, most europeans use WhatsApp anyway. Or we know where WhatsApp sends back ups to, totally unencrypted.

So what do we have. TG chats not encrypted by default, Signal works fine to the best of my knowledge. But with physical access to devices MAC with file vault off and most windows machines, its lights out right away.
by mrkeen | 2025-09-15 12:14:13+00:00
In this case that’s the >>= from Maybe.Monad. As long as you satisfy the signature, it’s happy . do has nothing to do with Monads! Who lied to you?

Could have been a stronger point by using a non-monadic >>=.

I've been doing a lot of parsing lately and I find I don't need to reach all the way for monad (applicative is usually enough). But I guess that's what ApplicativeDo[1] is for.

We’ve got to be explicit now which Functor or Monad we’re importing, and you can’t have do notation for different Monads in the same module.

This is a bit rough for usability (not to mention also undermines the point above).

But overall I like the approach of trying something radically new.

[1] https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/appl...
by aurareturn | 2025-09-15 12:14:57+00:00
but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets.

In a single day, I vibe coded an internal tool for my team to run unit, integration tests. It has a professional looking UI, a few nice to have features that usually never get built, and a server component that connects to our app APIs.

In the past, it would have taken me at least 1-2 weeks to build this. It was actually never going to get built because of that. But vibe coding finally let us complete the project.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-15 12:15:01+00:00
This isn't really convincing.

They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.

But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
by Galanwe | 2025-09-15 12:15:25+00:00
At the end of the day, you do you, but my experience with SElinux is that using it on the desktop is vastly overkill.

At a high level, the essence of SElinux is to limit the possibilities of exploitation and escalation by carefully specifying which process can access which resources in which context. Now that makes sense for a server opened to the www, or a host shared with untrusted users. But Omarchy is a _sole developer_ focused flavor of Arch Linux, think your typical dev laptop. There's no service exposed there, you most likely can't even listen on the internet behind your typical home router. The realistic threats that you face is your laptop being stolen (which is why LUKS is a default) or your laptop sitting unlocked (which is why hypridle & hyprlock are a default).

Of course there's always the tails of a compromised software, but it's much more unlikely.
by mkovach | 2025-09-15 12:16:36+00:00
It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!"

She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake.

Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!"

She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life.

At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect.

Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-15 12:17:01+00:00
I really wish I could get diagnosed too. My psychiatrist refuses to even consider it because she says with my psych history as a kid they'd have identified it. But that's nonsense because thinking some adhd has changed hugely since the 80s. You needed to be rain man to be seen as autistic. And adhd was only diagnosed for loud obnoxious kids. My psychiatrist is also very old and kinda clings to those definitions.

But because of this I'm locked out of medication :'(

I'm very typical of both though. AuDHD.