MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mondrian | 2025-09-04 22:31:41+00:00
Good point. In the scenario I described, I'm assuming Stripe will launch their own stablecoin. I tend to think all major tech companies are incentivized to launch stablecoins and give you discounts and perks when you transact using their stablecoin in their own ecosystem. The more of their stablecoin they issue out, the more money they make on interest.
by oatmeal_croc | 2025-09-04 22:31:52+00:00
5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life.

Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
by rtomaven | 2025-09-04 22:32:09+00:00
:::: How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?

Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles.

Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-09-04 22:33:01+00:00
You have agreed with my comment that the event would not be survivable by society. Duck-and-cover drills are for those who you call civilians, who will not survive. At best they invite the misinterpretation that such an event is survivable and capable of generating a “decisive victory over the enemy.”

Would military command really have achieved a decisive victory by glazing the surface of their own country and burying what’s left underground for the foreseeable future? Clearly a failure of strategic thinking by our erstwhile competitors.
by koyote | 2025-09-04 22:33:31+00:00
> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher

For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.

When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.

Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.

The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.

If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
by mrkpdl | 2025-09-04 22:33:38+00:00
I’m a big fan of limited palettes as a prompt for easier creative choices. These patterns are a great example of that.

Back in 2014 I made a phoney minigolf game using these patterns as a first step into making interactive work: https://www.maxpiantoni.com/projects/golfnet

The game isn’t particularly real, but the jokes are.
by Ardon | 2025-09-04 22:34:59+00:00
Yeah that's true.

I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)

That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.
by graeme | 2025-09-04 22:35:27+00:00
There are defi loans for example. You take an asset like BTC and loan stablecoins against it.

The underlying asset can be rehypothecated, Celsius did this before going bust iirc.

Tether is also the underlying backer of crypto market cap, and has never done an audit of their assets. They've made loans to various crypto market participants.

In theory there are auto liquidation rules etc. In practice humans have not yet managed to create a financial system they can't make asset bubbles with
by rtomaven | 2025-09-04 22:35:31+00:00
:::: 5 days a work is diabolical.

5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
by throw98iuy | 2025-09-04 22:35:35+00:00
>Mullvad is rather principled on privacy.

no their not. protonvpn spends money to offer free account as form of advertisment. mullvd spend money on weird billboards.

protonvpn provide free privacy even for those from 3rld world country. you can create proton email anonymousley thats also protonvpn account

protonvpn is principled on privacy.
by vvpan | 2025-09-04 22:35:38+00:00
There have been a few attempts to start private L1, but based on what EY's Paul Brody says they fail due to the complexity of validator politics and inability to achieve a reasonable level of trustlessness. The more respectable public chains do not have this problem. It is also the reason why we have seen more companies launch their own L2's - L1's are just a messy business.
by homakov | 2025-09-04 22:36:30+00:00
Is it a blockchain though? Or anything that remotely resembles block creation in some concentrated datacenters with Tempo's "design partners" gets to be called that.

Something claiming over 20-30 tps onchain is usually a big blocker. Big blocker design is well recognized as insecure: no end user is able to run a full node locally, only datacenters are able to keep up with 100k tps load. Which diminishes entire purpose of creating a blockchain. Could have been a database with 100k tps or 3-of-4 validator multisig like Hyperledger, wouldn't matter.
by wk_end | 2025-09-04 22:36:38+00:00
I think it hinges on:

The Action! language may not have been as advanced as C or Pascal, but because it was designed with the 6502 CPU in mind, compiling the language was astonishingly fast. The original Atari Pascal system from APX needed multiple disk drives and could take several minutes to compile a small program. The only C package available in 1983 (Deep Blue C) was at least as limited as Action!, but also not an integrated package and compiled slowly. Draper Pascal only compiled to pseudo-code. Action! compiled your program to machine code in memory and in seconds. Typing C (to compile) and then R (to run) was hardly slower than just typing RUN in BASIC.

So less about the language itself (unless it had some particular properties that facilitated compiling it quickly) and more about the tooling.
by Animats | 2025-09-04 22:37:14+00:00
Makes you realize how fast this has happened. This is a "get off my lawn" article by a high school senior.

It's part of the job of education to instill some common culture. (Which common culture varies, but not all that much outside political topics.) For students, questions about that culture are new issues. LLMs have digested a huge amount of existing material on it. LLMs are thus really good at things students are graded upon.

This gives students the impression that LLMs are very smart. Which probably says more about educational practice than LLMs. The big problem is not cheating. It's that the areas schools cover are ones where LLMs are really good.

There's no easy fix for this.
by gentooflux | 2025-09-04 22:37:22+00:00
You get up to 3 months or so of reduced anxiety and increased sense of well-being and "interconnectedness". It has to be a full-on psychedelic episode though, micro-dosing doesn't seem to have the same effect (or much of any effect beyond placebo in my experience). ~6 hours of intensity is a bit steep, especially if you've got real baggage that's going to surface.
by brudgers | 2025-09-04 22:37:55+00:00
in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that

It has been awhile since I used stackoverflow, So I don’t know if it’s still this way but it used to be that anyone could edit almost anything except comments.

With some points, you were able to propose edits for review.

With more points you could make edits without any review.

With enough points you could review edits that people had proposed.

And when you didn’t have many points, making edits earned points. And finding things that needed fixing was how I started earning points.

Of course, most people don’t care about earning points and there’s nothing wrong with that. And different tags have different cultural norms…I avoided Python for that reason (your broken code Print example is an example of what turned me off of Python culture).
by alphazard | 2025-09-04 22:37:56+00:00
No examples included of "hard earned technical moats". I'm a bit skeptical that these really exist, other than in a few extreme cases. A true technical moat requires secrecy and control of the talent pool. SpaceX comes to mind, Nvidia might be another example.

I don't even think the current AI companies really have technical moats. It seems like the differentiator is just how much money they have to throw at compute.

Most moats are actually regulatory, ranging from copyright and patents, to anti-competitive regulation, to explicit wealth transfers from taxpayers to the company.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-04 22:37:56+00:00
All those things declared an emergency REALLY ARE to more than half the population. All the TDS aside, yes.

I think the main thing we need to do is make a federal property tax for any unused house or rental. Something that billionaires can afford, but only for their personal homes - and something that will basically force all landlords to sell immediately. Every actual real property will be forced onto the market in seconds and everyone will be able to buy a house that needs one for pennies on the dollar. It will be amazing. Let's start with 1000% per hour.
by dmbche | 2025-09-04 22:38:03+00:00
I find it unlikely that people a government would want to kill by drone strike would be posting about their wherabouts on social media and at the same time obfuscating their location by having their phone move without them (by someone ok with being hit by a drone strike?).

Or we're speaking about striking civilians posting on social media - where I'm not sure drone strikes are very cost effective or pertinent.

My understanding is that drone strikes aren't a thing done because you just got a hit on social media of a precise location, but more of a somewhat long investigation into the activity and identity of the target, their habits and movements (both to confirm their value and maximise sucess) - and then a calculated drone strike that both maximizes sucess and minimizes collateral.

Of course Israel does not do this and is more into the "paint a bullseye around the victim" kind of doctrine, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-09-04 22:39:56+00:00
Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker.

Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
by BoorishBears | 2025-09-04 22:39:58+00:00
I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok!

I point out how I:

- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home

- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to

- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)

I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.

I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.
by aosaigh | 2025-09-04 22:40:11+00:00
Exactly. I don't know if they've gotten better, but I worked on a headless Contentful + Gatsby site (because the previous developers got sucked into JAMstack hype) and it was a comedic catastrophe.

It required constant developer oversight, even when only publishing one or two articles a week. Things broke all the time. Builds broke constantly. Things went wrong left right and center.

Don't do it. Give them a Wordpress site.
by bigiain | 2025-09-04 22:40:24+00:00
> Nord just isn’t a company that screams trustworthy to me

Same. Blanket advertising on half the YouTube channels I watch tips their reputation very mush towards "meh". I have no clue if they're ny better or worse than the average vpn company, but "the average vpn company" these days seems to be a super low bar - from things I read it seems they're mostly monetising by selling your privacy to data brokers or your internet bandwidth as "residential proxies" to ai copyright thieves.
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-04 22:40:50+00:00
> Also a weird thing to call a "feature" for developers when this actively drives away potential users.

while being a funnel of 1 step for the users already in the ecosystem that find your application

the ecosystems turns the entire Web 2.0 marketing funnel industry on its head because the initial call to action is a payment. All of the mystery of converting to a paying customer is obsoleted in favor of unbridled commerce

this just points out another way its optimal for developers with ideas, when aiming for revenue in a web3 architected project for crypto natives. they have frictions, you solve them, they pay you. If you aren’t catering to crypto natives already, don’t launch a web3 application. the space is already big enough to ignore other potential users, and if you want that to be your cause to help the UX to grow the space, you can do that too.

> security bugs using Solidity

To your other point, I don't see 2016's smart contract coding problems as show stopping criticisms, because this is the lowest hanging fruit of experience for anyone learning solidity, all while standardization of open source methods has solved those building blocks just like in other languages. additionally, you can write an insecure application in the web 2.0 space as well.

There are enough and a growing number of developers that aren't afraid of deploying code on a blockchain. a lot has happened in the last ... decade? developer tooling has improved.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-09-04 22:40:58+00:00
The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.

I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-04 22:41:24+00:00
AGI just means what it says it is: Artificial General Intelligence. AGIs don't have to have selfish traits like we do, they don't have to follow the rules of natural selection, they just need to solve general problems.

Think of them like worker bees. Bees can solve general problems, though not on level as humans do, they are like some primitive kind of AGI. They also live and die to be servants to the queen and they don't want to be queens themselves, the reason why is interesting btw, it involves genetics and game theory.

This is highly theoretical anyways, we have no idea how to make an AGI yet, and LLMs are probably a dead end as they can't interact with the physical world.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-09-04 22:41:54+00:00
Steak N Shake accepts Bitcoin, both on-chain and via Lightning Network.

Paypal has USD savings accounts that pay interest, ACH support, and also issues standard credit cards if you like. On top of that they support multiple major cryptocurrencies and allow instant conversion to USD.

A high percentage of restaurants and stores in my area now accept CashApp payments directly along with other payments. Many people are using PayPal and Venmo also with merchants in person, and online Paypal is dominate.

Square is in the process of rolling out Lightning Network Bitcoin payments to all it’s POS terminals later this year with the merchant having control over how they want to handle such payments, auto convert, partial convert, custody Bitcoin. Could get interesting fast if merchants start offering discounts for non-credit card transactions, which they are fortunately now allowed to and the credit card companies can’t terminate them, what happens when USD stablecoin or Bitcoin payments are offered further discounts by the merchants due to their cost savings and preference?

I’m thinking about moving all my ACH auto pay payments over to either CashApp or Paypal also. And remember they both support ACH direct deposits.

What services are left for the traditional bank to provide me? FEDwire and international SWIFT wires … and … investment accounts for stocks and bonds …

I’d say they are on shaky ground as I know crypto focused companies like Coinbase are looking at how to get into traditional equities and bonds and guess what Robinhood already does that and has gone the other direction and acquired crypto companies.

The bigger mystery in all this discussion is why such a significant fraction of HN readers and commenters are so out of touch with what is happening in the real world and real economy with these systems?
by linguae | 2025-09-04 22:42:01+00:00
Reminds me of this classic I’ve first read many years ago: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html

In all seriousness, I have a high respect for Unix and Unix-like systems, particularly FOSS implementations like Linux and FreeBSD. When I first started using Linux in 2004 as a high schooler who grew up on Windows and who used classic Macs in elementary school, the power of the Unix command line and the vast selection of professional-grade software that was available for free, and legally with the source code, too, was mind-blowing. Not too long after that, I started learning about the history of Unix and about its design philosophy. I had a new dream: I wanted to become a computer scientist just like Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie working for a place like Bell Labs, or become a professor and lead research projects like the BSDs back when Berkeley had the CSRG. Downloading and using Linux in 11th grade pushed me away from my alternative thoughts of majoring in linguistics, mathematics, or city planning.

Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. I got bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and later I got bitten by the statically-typed functional programming bug (think Haskell and ML).

These days my conception of a dream operating system is basically an alternative 1990s universe where somehow the grander visions of some Apple researchers and engineers working on Lisp (e.g., Newton’s planned Lisp OS, Dylan, SK8) came to fruition, complete with Apple’s then-devotion to usability. The classic Macintosh interface and UI guidelines combined with a Lisp substrate that enabled composition and malleability would have knocked the socks off of NeXTstep, and I say this as a big fan of NeXT and Jobs-era Mac OS X. This is my dream OS for workstation-class personal computing.

With that said, I have immense respect for Unix, as well as its official successor, Plan 9.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-09-04 22:42:47+00:00
Someone I know (not SWIM, it actually wasn't me) did a little bit of work for a high-school-level tutoring company. The company got all their leads from TikTok. They did numbers on TikTok.

The company was tutoring English Literature as one of its subjects.

They were generating English Literature exam problems - for their users - using the ChatGPT web UI.

They would upload the marking spec, and say: "Give me an excerpt from something that might be on this syllabus, and an appropriate question about it".

Naturally, their users - the high school students - were getting, often, hallucinated excerpts from hallucinated works by existing authors.

I think the kids will be fine - it'll be their world, at some point, and that world will look a lot different to now. Maybe that's too optimistic!

I would hope, in that world, LLM literacy amongst adults has increased.

Because I feel really, really bad for all the kids who are beating themselves up about getting badly marked by ChatGPT (I assume) on an imaginary excerpt of an imaginary Wordsworth poem by their functionally imaginary tutor.

It makes me laugh, and reminds me of one of my favourite jokes, about the inflatable boy who - being of a rebellious nature - takes a safety pin to the inflatable school. Chaos ensues. Afterwards, the inflatable boy's inflatable teacher says:

"You've let me down; you've let the school down, but worst of all, you've let yourself down."

I guess I'm suspicious of the linked article. Call me full of hot air, but is it actually a safety pin? Or is it just designed to look really good on an application for an inflatable college?
by risyachka | 2025-09-04 22:42:59+00:00
>> So what are stablecoins really trying to do? Circumvent regulation? Implement something the banks just aren't willing to do themselves?

yeah and this is great. I couldn't care less for banks protection.

Revolut blocked my account with 8k on it for 8 months, though their app said it will be max 2 weeks.

Customer support ignored me for 6 months until I said I am going to court.

So yeah fuck them. The is a case for banks but there is also a case for me keeping a chunk of my money in stable coins so its actually mine.

Edit: and to clarify I didn't do anything illegal, after I threatened them they completed their whatever they did and unlocked my funds that have been locked for 8 month.

And guess what - no consequences for them leaving me at that time without my safety net.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-04 22:43:34+00:00
Once Airbnb became systemically harmful, regulation followed.

Nobody cares about small tech companies breaking the law for a few users.

Everyone cares about {insert bad outcome from mass regulatory avoidance}.

(Also, of the 3 airbnb founders, one has delusions of being the next Steve Jobs and turning it into an everything app (Chesky), another now works for DOGE (Gebbia), and the last is sucking up to Chinese government data requests (Blecharczyk)... so, yeah, not exactly the sort of folks that should be trusted with light regulation)
by ayaros | 2025-09-04 22:43:35+00:00
Really glad to see I'm not the only one out there who appreciates these patterns.

In my LisaGUI project I've added not just the ones from the Lisa Office System and Mac System 1, but also a few I found in betas of the Mac OS, as well as some from Windows 3.x and 9x. These kinds of patterns popped up in all sorts of places in the 80s and 90s. I'm continually surprised at how much you can fit in an 8x8 monochrome grid whenever I come across a clever pattern I haven't seen before.

Edit: https://alpha.lisagui.com/ At the desktop click the preferences icon and go to the Decorate Desktop pane