MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-24 21:13:47+00:00
One of the fundamental truths of American aviation is a significant fraction of fliers will buy the cheapest ticket every time. They’ll bitch about it. But if you cut some leg room and a few dollars off your tag, you’ll swing them from another.

Basic economy doesn’t exist because of Google Flights. It exists because it sells. Well enough that it sustained entire discount airline fleets until the majors copied their model.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-24 21:13:48+00:00
No, N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide is the IUPAC name. Paracetamol & acetaminophen are "generic" names for it when used as a drug. Tylenol, Panadol, and quite a few other brand names are used worldwide¹.

The International Chemical Identifier is InChI=1S/C8H9NO2/c1-6(10)9-7-2-4-8(11)5-3-7/h2-5,11H,1H3,(H,9,10).

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paracetamol_brand_name...
by araes | 2025-09-24 21:13:54+00:00
Personal view on the Xcode issue is this part of your comment:

> lock people into your ecosystem

There's no real alternative to Xcode, if you're going to develop for Apple, you pretty much just have to take the dive, buy Apple hardware, and use Xcode. You don't really know what you're getting into before you get there, and by then you've got sunk cost and just have to trudge through. Somebody a while back had a comment that kind of epitomized it (paraphrased from bad memory): "I thought I was their target customer. I'm not. I'm not sure who their target customer is. Who is this even written for?"

_mlxl had a pretty funny one from 4 years ago also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932848

> (...) I think its left a little bit of taint on my soul. It is unfathomably bad. Apple keep bolting stuff on to it. It's slow, broken in numerous ways, depends on file formats that aren't used anywhere outside of Apple and completely undocumented. It is such a painful tool to use.

Maybe as an Xcode user you have a better perspective, yet Android was actually better personally than most of the development ecosystems from my own perspective. Actually managed to at least publish three apps. Never went anywhere, yet that's a different issue.

Had a comment on another thread's Switch 2 development complaints, re. the few I have tried - Nintendo, Steam, and Google.

Nintendo - The process itself is opaque, confusing, and difficult to determine your status or progress, even large companies have difficulty.

Steam - Signing up and putting launch title info was difficult, yet Wayyyyy easier and clearer to navigate. Tools are kind of a mess, and figuring out everything you need is a challenge. (comments on the SDK are at least funny sometimes)

// This is really, really bad. We're sorry. But it's been this way for // a long time now and it's scary to change it, as there may be others that // depend on it. // Recommended amount // Quite a bit // Practically everything // Wall of text, detailed packet contents breakdown, etc /* Prefer user version of the interface. But if it isn't found, then use gameserver one. Yes, this is a completely terrible hack */ // This totally sucks, but this information can't be gleaned any // other way // (200 lines later) actually no way to do this yet. // um, yeah, clipping is enabled (?) // (500 lines later) ???? is clipping ever turned off ?? // hush for now, less spew

Google Play - Dramatically easier to sign up. Much clearer steps, progress, and timeline for release. Inclusions to actually release, much clearer. Actually managed to release three products.

Nintendo "How do I even sign up?" Steam "Great, signed up, how do I release something?" Google "Easy sign-up, somewhat easy release of products, eventually got three out the door. Your products have been removed for (mumble mumble legalese)"
by aeternum | 2025-09-24 21:14:07+00:00
Both administrations (Trump 2016 + Biden) adopted the guidance of Fauci and others at the NIH/NIAID more or less directly. So the guidance came through the administrations but originated with the NIH/NIAID.

You had direct statements like this from scientific experts, those experts turned out to be the middleman group that was funding Wuhan via NIH grants.

Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has been among the most vocal critics of the idea of a lab leak, wrote, “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Given an expert statement like that, youtube can and did take down lableak videos because they were misinformation (contrary to the information provided by the experts).
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-24 21:14:09+00:00
> For images and videos I guess each character, creature, idea in it is a token?

No, for images, tokens would, I expect, usually be asymptotically proportional to the area of the image (this is certainly the case with input token for OpenAIs models that take image inputs; outputs are more opaque); you probably won’t have a neat one-to-one intuition for what one token represents, but you don’t need that for it to be useful and straightforward for understanding pricing, since the mathematical relationship of tokens to size can be published and the size of the image is a known quantity. (And videos conceptually could be like images with an additional dimension.)
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-24 21:14:09+00:00
> And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.

> Surely you're not suggesting...

Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed plausibly to happen.
by wormius | 2025-09-24 21:14:14+00:00
I'm old enough to remember this: https://www.nydailynews.com/1998/12/17/test-tot-dna-sez-rudy...

(1998, NYC, "America's Mayor" before he became such)

"Mayor Giuliani said yesterday that he favors DNA testing for all children at birth as a tool to fight crime, track deadbeat dads and resolve paternity suits. Though not formally proposing such a plan, the mayor told reporters, “I would have no problem with that or fingerprinting all children. “I think DNA should be available the way fingerprints are available,” he added. The mayor’s comments added fuel to the heated debate over Police Commissioner Howard Safir’s plan to collect DNA from prison inmates, parolees and crime suspects."
by missinglugnut | 2025-09-24 21:14:15+00:00
The last flight I was on was American Airlines. We waited in the plane while they tried to figure out to start it because the auxiliary power unit was out, and the generator American uses to start planes with no APU was also broken, so they had to borrow one from another airline. And no APU also meant no air conditioning until the plane is started.

It was only a 30 minute delay but the heat made it miserable.

I paid for a name brand airline, paid to choose a decent seat, could have paid for more upgrades, but no amount of money short could prevent me from waiting out a delay in a hot cabin because the airline failed to maintain their equipment. The folks in first class faced the same miserable heat.

It's a market for lemons. Paying more doesn't assure quality, it just means you spent more money to get screwed. So people aren't willing to pay.
by Negitivefrags | 2025-09-24 21:14:15+00:00
> Someone who thinks COVID was a hoax isn't going to be one to dig deep.

This is kind of a side point, but people with fringe beliefs tend to dig a lot deeper to validate those opinions than those with a mainstream view.

You can bet that someone who thinks that the moon landing was a hoax to the point that they would tell someone about it will know more about the moon landing than a random person who believes it was real.

It often takes an expert in something to shoot down the arguments.
by jimbo808 | 2025-09-24 21:14:47+00:00
That's a fairly bad example. They don't have any trouble taking unrelated things and sticking them together. A world model isn't required for you to take two unrelated things and stick them together. If I ask it to put a frog on the moon, it can know what frogs look like and what the the moon looks like, and put the frog on the moon.

But what it won't be able to do, which does require a world model, is put a frog on the moon, and be able to imagine what that frog's body would look like on the moon in the vacuum of space as it dies a horrible death.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-24 21:14:55+00:00
My suggestion to the OP talking about compression.

First up, consider just PNG compressing the image for simplicity. It's a mostly black image with color dots. That would generally compress really well with PNG.

But also, knowing the nature of the image, you could pretty easily compress the image by doing offsets to the next pixel. The format could look roughly something like this

[offset byte, color byte, offset byte, color byte].

It will fail in cases where each pixel has a color and will excel when there is a run of black pixels (which there will be a lot of those). It's a dead simple format to implement and read as well.

You can even keep the frame around for writing. You'd just be counting black pixels left to right top to bottom, emitting that number or 255 then 0 resetting and then counting some more.
by foresto | 2025-09-24 21:15:15+00:00
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.

15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point?

Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but:

While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses.

The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore.

And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-09-24 21:16:02+00:00
There's a possibility that some of the evidence in the investigation is classified and/or stems from classified sources and methods. If the scammers are mixed up in foreign counterintelligence type stuff (very common with Chinese and Russian cybercriminal actors) then things get murky and people might go off the record because the documents they're reading have classification markings on them.

Just a possibility, I too feel this is weird.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-24 21:16:11+00:00
This doesn't appear to he exclusively anti-evil maid. It takes "build an AMI that doesn't have enough userland to extract the keys" and extends it to "only approved AMI's can access the keys."

Lateral movement of attackers. Shadow IT. People modifying things between test and Prod.

All easy examples that don't require you to trust AWS hasn't backdoored it to still get better security.
by weinzierl | 2025-09-24 21:16:28+00:00
Places that prevent selection completely is not something I encounter that often.

What I do experience regularly is places where selection is broken or unnecessarily fiddly. On iOS I find it often easier to screenshot and select in the image.

Screenshot, select, paste is a much smoother workflow than trying to select what I want three times, failing, selecting too much on one end, not enough on the other, copy, paste in Notes, fixing it up, select and finally copy what I wanted in the first place.
by rpcope1 | 2025-09-24 21:16:49+00:00
You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-24 21:17:12+00:00
Product Hunt turned into a meta-game long ago. Getting attention on Product Hunt is more about collecting a metric for your Product Manager resume these days.

There is an anti-pattern in Product Management where some PMs want to build the product launch around making a big splash on Product Hunt. Anyone who knows the drill won’t allow this and will instead do what’s best for finding customers, but I’ve seen some naive startups get pulled into chasing the Product Hunt launch follows by disappointment when the Product Hunt launch signup cohort has the worst retention rate of any of their signups.
by mmmore | 2025-09-24 21:17:32+00:00
> a zero-sum game

I don't see any reference to the game being zero-sum in Tao's words.

> Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own?

I don't think Tao is saying the uncontrollable force of technological and economic advancement exhibits a genuine agency of its own. Just that our current technology and society and has expanded the role of the extremely large organization/power structures compared to other times in history. This is a bit of technological determinist argument, and of course there's many counter-arguments, but it at least has a broad base of support. And at the very least it's a little bit true; pre-agricultural the biggest human organizations were 50 person hunter-gatherer bands.

Honestly, I feel like you are filtering his words through your own worldview a bit, and his opinions might be less oppositional to your own than you might think.
by arandr0x | 2025-09-24 21:18:53+00:00
I found the take a little too much on the doomer side for someone who presumably has several years of management experience. Yeah there's been a lot of social media posts and talking about the efficiency era, AI slop etc but over there in the real world you're working with humans. Some are going to be operating under a shareholder- or investor-derived goal to improve margins and some are not, but even for those who are "improving margins" looks different at every business (depending on e.g. current headcount, COGS, whether you use contractors, etc). I feel like it's a super reductive take to go "aaah, this current culture is anti-human or anti-empathy" rather than like, look at the actual actions that are being taken, who is benefitting, and what specific negotiating room yourself and your team have in this value context.

I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.
Ask HN: Decent Builtwith alternative for finding leads?
by Poomba | 2025-09-24 21:19:20+00:00
Is there a cost-friendly Builtwith alternative that lets me find businesses that use a specific tech product? I find Builtwith a bit too expensive for my needs as it's $299 for 2 technologies, and I have 10+ I want find businesses for. And BuiltWith doesn't seem to have a lot of technologies I'm looking for either. I've tried Wappalyzer too, and though it's much less expensive, it also doesn't have data for a lot of niche technologies I'm targeting either.

For context, I own my own tech consulting business and want to find businesses that are trying to seriously start/expand an engineering team. I've already exhausted asking my network, existing clients, etc, and thinking of expanding now into more outbound stuff.

I was thinking of finding businesses that started using a particular Javascript framework or started using a "starter-level" devops product like BitBucket, as a way to find those businesses that are just beginning to scale their dev team

Are there any good alternatives out there? It feels like the type of tool that the HN crowd would be building...
by michaelt | 2025-09-24 21:19:45+00:00
Many airlines offer different fare classes. For a return ticket half way around the world, I can pay $1100 for Economy, $2800 for Premium Economy, $3900 for Business Class and $6900 for First Class.

It seems you have to charge a big, big premium to deliver a less crappy experience.

And even then, the experience is only better in some dimensions - your checked luggage receives the same handling no matter what ticket you buy.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-24 21:20:16+00:00
Here's the official Dutch government solution for if your mobile phone doesn't have NFC, if they don't support your phone's OS, or if they actively went out of their way to block your android distribution: "go ask for another person's device then" https://www.digid.nl/stappenplan/id-check-toevoegen-aan-de-d...
by Const-me | 2025-09-24 21:21:02+00:00
The support for BMI1 instruction set extension is almost universal by now. The extension was introduced in AMD Jaguar and Intel Haswell, both launched in 2013 i.e. 12 years ago.

Instead of doing stuff like (word >> bit_offset) & self.mask, in C or C++ I usually write _bextr_u64, or when using modern C# Bmi1.X64.BitFieldExtract. Note however these intrinsics compile into 2 instructions not one, because the CPU instruction takes start/length arguments from lower/higher bytes of a single 16-bit number.
by backflippinbozo | 2025-09-24 21:21:04+00:00
No doubt, this toy demo will break your system if the research repo code runs unsecured code.

We thought about this out as we built a system that goes beyond running the quickstart to implement the core-methods of arXiv papers as draft PRs for YOUR target repo.

Running quickstart in sandbox is practically useless.

To limit the attack surface we added PR#1929 to AG2 so we could pass API keys to the DockerCommandLineCodeExecutor and use egress whitelisting to limit the ability of an agent to reach out to a compromised server: https://github.com/ag2ai/ag2/pull/1929

Been talking publicly about this for at least a month before this publication, and along the way we've built up nearly 1K Docker images for arXiv paper code: https://hub.docker.com/u/remyxai

We're close to seeing these images linked to the arXiv papers after PR#908 is merged: https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-browse/pull/908

And we're actually doing a technical deep-dive with the AG2 team on our work tomorrow at 9am PST: https://calendar.app.google/3soCpuHupRr96UaF8
by Illniyar | 2025-09-24 21:21:30+00:00
What is a lead developer in this context? An engineering manager? Is it like an architect (staff engineer/whatever)? An engineer who is in charge of a specific project?

There are different dynamics at play in each role and reading the guy's bio I'm getting the sense that he is a freelancer? or has a consulting company? which would have a whole different dynamic.
by Awesomedonut | 2025-09-24 21:21:53+00:00
Creative writing! I mainly do scifi & fantasy (I love combining my technical background with artsy stuff). I'm currently working on a silkpunk (Ancient China setting + retro-futuristic technology based on Ancient Chinese science) science fantasy multimedia webnovel. I'm in the middle of inventing my fictional computing system (tentatively named rune engines) that ties into the magic system. I think, for a lot of science fantasy, the creators tend to keep the science and magic quite separate (ex: the science and magic of Star Wars is pretty clearly distinct) and I'm trying to create a system that combines the both of them. It's been super fun to prod at the question "how would I approach this fantastical universe using the scientific method".
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-24 21:22:14+00:00
The likely future is where you'll be given a USB-C charger to charge your phone. If you have no phone or is broken, it will be the equivalent to having a strongly damaged passport. No fly that day, get a new phone, fly on another date, just like if you needed a new passport. The phone will be your ID, passport, credit card and everything. But since it will be all backed up in Google/Apple/Microsoft cloud, maybe you'll be able to buy a new simple phone near the gate, log in via fingerprint and facial recognition and go on your merry way. But also, once all this stuff is connected up in the cloud, maybe facial and fingerprint recognition will be enough to fly. NFC chips under the skin are probably too bad optics for the near future, but in one or two generations, attitudes will shift.

> I've never lost a boarding pass, but if you lose one, you can get it re-issued somewhere, right?

Yes, typically there's a fee for getting it printed at the check-in counter.
by toast0 | 2025-09-24 21:22:27+00:00
US doesn't really have bypass fraud as a category, no; there's no real pricing difference based on the source of a call. Inbound international calls don't have to pay extra termination costs vs domestic calls and outbound international calls aren't paying much more than the cost of a local call + whatever the foreign carrier charges for termination. If you were doing bypass fraud in another country for calls to/from the US, you don't need SIM farms in the US, because you could just get a SIP account.

These boxes would be used for pricing arbitrage where a mobile phone user can get 'unlimited' calling or messaging but a bulk messaging/calling customer would have to pay something per message or minute, or to avoid customer identification or restrictions on message that would happen with a bulk account.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-24 21:22:53+00:00
> Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD.

At one time in my life, I might have called you out for bad-taste hyperbole… but no, this kind of thing is genuinely traumatising. And that's ridiculous: what has the world come to, that desktop operating systems are giving people PTSD‽
by everfrustrated | 2025-09-24 21:23:36+00:00
I'm not aware of AWS ever confirming tape for glacier. My own speculation is they likely use hdd for glacier - especially so for the smaller regions - and eat the cost.

Someone recently came across some planning documents filed in London for a small "datacenter" which wasn't attached to their usual London compute DCs and built to house tape libraries (this was explicitly called out as there was concern about power - tape libraries don't use much). So I would be fairly confident they wait until the glacier volumes grow enough on hdd before building out tape infra.
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-24 21:23:51+00:00
In the aerospace world, it's called a "systems engineer."

The lead:

1: Understands the whole system, but not necessarily every detail.

2: Plans the whole project.

Edit:

Sometimes in the software world, the title is "architect."

This is rarely the "manager," except in organizations that have a hard-on for hierarchy and artificial promotion for "career advancement." Managers are usually concerned with people, schedules, and resources; but don't go very deep into technical issues.

That being said, the lead/manager may fill in for each other when one is on vacation, sick, quits, ect.