MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by waxo-tech | 2025-10-30 13:09:06+00:00
Hey everyone!

So this weekend, I was a bit bored and decided to challenge myself by building something simple but fun — Linkify. I know there are already similar link hub tools out there, but I wanted to create my own version from scratch, just to see how far I could take it in a couple of days.

It started as a small side project, but I ended up really enjoying the process — designing the layout, adding customization options, and making it look clean and easy to use. The goal was to build something minimal yet beautiful, where anyone can share all their social profiles, websites, and content in one place.

This project was mainly for fun and learning, but who knows — maybe it can actually help others who just want a simple, personal link hub without all the extra clutter.

Would love to hear what you think, any feedback or ideas for improvement are super welcome! Thanks for checking it out
by adriand | 2025-10-30 13:09:35+00:00
Also: how confident are we in the safeguards that, say, North Korea or Pakistan have in place? And how confident are we in the systems that tell us, and our adversaries, that an attack is taking place?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov :

“His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that would have likely resulted in a large-scale nuclear war.”
by Thorrez | 2025-10-30 13:09:49+00:00
The birthday paradox equation is approximately the square root. You expect to find a collision in 365 possibilities in ~sqrt(365) = ~19 tries.

You expect to find a collision in 2^256 possibilities in ~sqrt(2^256) = ~2^128 tries.

You expect to find a collision in 10^10000 possibilities in ~sqrt(10^10000) = ~10^5000 tries.
by bluGill | 2025-10-30 13:10:25+00:00
That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a few smart researchers could figure something out. Just going through all their archives would have done the job if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of course they couldn't have known that and so a track to create it from scratch would also be needed).

Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-30 13:10:25+00:00
It comes up again and again, because people don't realize that solutions already exist(ed) and they don't spend the time to figure things out.

I have managed reproducible Python services and software for multiple years now. This was solved already before uv, although uv does it faster and maybe offers a bit more comfort, although I abstract away such tooling using a simple Makefile anyway.

The reason you are having such a bad time getting random Python projects to work out of the box is, because people creating them did not spend the effort to make them reproducible, meaning, that they do not ensure the setup has same versions and checksums of every direct and transitive dependency. This can be facilitated using various tools these days. poetry, uv, and I am sure there are more. People are just clueless and think that a requirements.txt file with a few loose versions slung in is sufficient. It is not, and you end up with not working project setups like in those cases you refer to.
by jasode | 2025-10-30 13:10:42+00:00
>I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry.

Your mention of "VC funding" may be a placeholder for conversational purposes but just to clarify, OpenAI is way beyond the small pocketbooks of typical Venture Capitalists. They have investments from huge sovereign wealth funds (e.g. billions from Middle East oil funds) and trillion-dollar corporations like NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, etc.

In other words, OpenAI has embedded itself into the money and tech ecosystem much more deeply than the dotcom failed startup Webvan burning through the limited cash of Sequoia VC.

There are lots of heavily funded vested interests that don't want to see Google be the ultimate winner (or only winner).
by Aurornis | 2025-10-30 13:10:43+00:00
> painkillers in amounts and at purities street users can only dream of.

It’s true that pharmaceutical purity is higher, but it’s very much incorrect to say that hospital patients routinely receive higher amounts or doses than street users.

The doses used by chronic opioid, benzo, and stimulant addicts can be absolutely insane compared to even high doses given in medical practice. Even more so after tolerance builds.

This can be a real problem for severe addicts who become hospitalized or end up in the ER because their tolerance is so high that even the high end of doses used in normal patients may do next to nothing in patients with severe addictions.

Addicts also have several factors contributing to the increased severity of their condition: Their route of administration is designed to maximize the ramp up of the dose, which leads to stronger effects, habituation, tolerance, and withdrawal dynamics.

Undergoing many cycles of habituation and withdrawal (missing doses, running out, or just abusing on weekends and trying to stay sober during the week) can actually sensitize addiction problems and exacerbate the problem, even if the doses are not extreme. This is not a problem in a hospital where doses are scheduled and regular.

Finally, the duration of exposure and area under the curve is dramatically different. An addict may be exposed to 100X or 1000X as much of a drug over years due to higher dosing and long term addiction relative to someone in the hospital who undergoes a procedure and then is tapered off.

It’s really misleading to compare opioids or benzos prescribed in a controlled hospital setting to the use by addicts. They are so dramatically different that you can’t compare the addiction and withdrawal dynamics at all.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-10-30 13:11:10+00:00
> Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads.

A lot of people already pay for YouTube since the introduction of Premium. Google/Facebook don't push for paid versions of these products because the data from billions of "free" users is more valuable to them than payments from millions of paid users.

If Google search were paywalled (pre-AI) the most likely outcome would be a separation of consumers into "premium" customers paying for Google, some people paying for cheaper but not quite as good alternatives, and everyone else getting by with the free alternatives. There would also likely be some kind of enterprise tier for indexing your corporate resources or some such.

There's a reason Adobe is still extracting billions from its ~~victims~~ users despite many great free (or reasonably priced) alternatives existing.
by andrepd | 2025-10-30 13:11:42+00:00
I really don't see the problem with the current notation. I find that is very simple and intuitive: function calls bind tightly, use a space to change that.

f_i(x) vs f_i (x)

1/x(a+b) vs 1/x (a+b)

ab vs a b

So simple. Being too "smart" invariably leads to more headaches and confusion than just having a simple, consistent rule.
by setopt | 2025-10-30 13:11:50+00:00
> > Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

Imagine for simplicity that we consider only vectors pointing parallel/antiparallel to coordinate axes.

- In 1D, you have two possibilities: {+e_x, -e_x}. So if you pick two random vectors from this set, the probability of getting something orthogonal is 0.

- In 2D, you have four possibilities: {±e_x, ±e_y}. If we pick one random vector and get e.g. +e_x, then picking another one randomly from the set has a 50% chance of getting something orthogonal (±e_y are 2/4 possibilities). Same for other choices of the first vector.

- In 3D, you have six possibilities: {±e_x, ±e_y, ±e_z}. Repeat the same experiment, and you'll find a 66.7% chance of getting something orthogonal.

- In the limit of ND, you can see that the chance of getting something orthogonal is 1 - 1/N, which tends to 100% as N becomes large.

Now, this discretization is a simplification of course, but I think it gets the intuition right.
by yubblegum | 2025-10-30 13:12:04+00:00
> The term "reality" implies a perceiver

No. Subjective reality is what we experience as sentients. There must be an object reality and imho that is the only statement of truth that can be uttered in language, with "language" to be understood in the sense that Werner Hisenberg uses that term.

So I'm with Bohr, Hisenberg on this matter. We can not 'presume' to speak of the Real with capital R. It exists but it can not be 'encompassed'.

No vision can encompass Him, but He encompasses all vision. Indeed, He Is the Most Subtle, the All-Aware! - Qur'an - 6.103
by skywhopper | 2025-10-30 13:12:26+00:00
I loved Smalltalk when I had to learn it for my first job out of college. Clean and clear OO with a flexible, play-inside-of-your-code runtime. Unfortunately the Smalltalk community is pretty small.

So imagine my delight when I found Ruby in 2005. It took the best of Perl and the best of Smalltalk and gave it a much better syntax than either, plus it had a massively growing community.

Ruby breaks a lot of the rules for what people claim they want (or should be allowed) from a programming language these days, but for me there’s still no more joyful and easy programming language to express my ideas.
by OJFord | 2025-10-30 13:12:26+00:00
> These mirrors were valuable — they’ve been found with other luxury grave goods — but only somewhat useful. They were reflective to an extent, but aren’t capable of reflecting much detail or color [image] Still, the people of ancient Anatolia thought it was worth hours of labor to see even a dim reflection of their own faces.

I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some stropping material or process capable of making them significantly more reflective than we image.
Another nuisance Facebook pixel lawsuit threat
by jayess | 2025-10-30 13:12:32+00:00
Just FYI to everyone who manages a website. We received another facebook pixel "wiretapping" lawsuit demand from another bottom-feeding ambulance chasing law firm. This is despite us having a CMP and blocking the pixel for people in CA who don't consent. It just not worth the headache anymore. We're just dropping the facebook pixel altogether. The marking team will have to figure out how to live without it.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-10-30 13:12:34+00:00
At my current job working for a big corporation, a big reason why we use Kafka for non Kafka workloads is that getting alternate stacks approved is annoyingly difficult. Someone already went through the pain of getting Kafka on the company network for their big data use case, and entreprise IT will set it up for us. Using something else for queueing would require way more paperwork.
by codegeek | 2025-10-30 13:12:45+00:00
"I've come to realize burnout is a function of expectation mismatch"

This. No amount of break will solve the issue until you adjust your expectations, especially from yourself. I have been burnt out as a founder and taking time off made it worse because I still have a business to run and you cant just switch off as a founder. Can work for employees but not for founders. Only way is to stop expecting too much from you but still jeep the balance of keep moving forward.

Really hard to do. I struggle every day but I cannot quit doing it because i cannot do anything else (EDIT: I mean other than being a founder).
by reactordev | 2025-10-30 13:12:45+00:00
Yes on the physical dice rolling, no on the tombs and tombs of dead trees to lug around with me. Even just the handbooks are over 1,000 pretty printed shavings of poplar pulp. Having a cardboard paper screen and a small scratch pad and empty character sheets is the most paper I’ll bring.

Physical books feel better because it’s physical. You can touch it, you can smell it, you can read it, and some you can hear (when you open them or turn the pages). This is why we prefer it. However, I reserve those for the shelves at home.
by saispas | 2025-10-30 13:12:46+00:00
I chose Roman Britain because I live in a city (Deva) which was once meant to be the capital of the whole province, where the evidence of lost glories would have been glaringly apparent to everybody for a long time, even though the settlement was still major in contemporary terms.

More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.

Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)

Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.
by barnabee | 2025-10-30 13:12:57+00:00
I mostly listen to albums, the Spotify “library” is a reasonable way to browse my saved albums.

Spotify (now) supports lossless.

Spotify connects to Sonos, wiim, etc. devices

Spotify supports marking albums and playlists for offline sync, including to my Garmin watch.

I participate in a number of collaborative Spotify playlists (e.g. on group trips, at parties, etc.). I’ve never seen anyone make a collaborative playlist on another platform, much less missed out on participating in one.

Shazam results have an “Open in Spotify” button and Shazam adds everything it identifies to a Spotify playlist.

When I’ve used it, the YouTube Music UI has felt like it’s not really designed for people who listen to music the way I do at all.

I’m not willing to go without YouTube just to spite Google but I’d rather not give them money or attention/usage if I can avoid it.

I don’t know how many of these would also be ok with YouTube Music, but it’s clearly not all of them and I suspect it’s close to zero. I’m fortunate that the cost of Spotify is not a burden for me, and I’d much rather pay it to get closer to the experience I want than try to get by with YouTube Music.
by sjs382 | 2025-10-30 13:13:36+00:00
> The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet.

From the technical/talent/funding side, I agree with you. With Alphabet, the real risk is that they lose interest/focus and kill (or pivot) products early. I don't really see that happening in the short term (considering the hype/investments/cash around AI) but maybe in the medium to long term if things start to get stale.

Even with that risk though, I agree with you.
by fzwang | 2025-10-30 13:13:44+00:00
From my experience and talking to other founders/engineers ...

1) It's good to analyze what's the source of the burn-out. In many instances, it's not exactly exhaustion per se, but lack of meaning in what they are doing beyond the money. There are acute stressors, like coming out of an intense sprint, and chronic stressors, like not knowing why you're even doing this. If you had fuck-you money, what would you be doing long-term instead? beyond take a vacation, buy a house, etc.

2) Learning to say no to things. Let go of "hero" mode. Good enough for now is good enough for now. Cut down on complexity to reduce cognitive load. Really assess which things you do are real and which are performative.

3) Better understand how work fits in your long term goals. Having worked in VC, a lot of advice for founders are very investor-centric. The core of the thinking is that some sort of exit will solve all your problems, and is worth grinding for. I see many founders become entrepreneurs to "work for themselves" and not be a corp wage-slave, just to become a VC grind-slave. Their health falters, their personal life implodes (divorce/breakups), and they've no genuine friendships (just business acquaintances). When they do get to a good financial exit, they're still miserable. Do try to make the company/product building process enjoyable too. Sometimes it means slowing down, smell the roses, think things through to avoid problems.

Overall, the right advice is very situational. The most important part may be talking out loud to someone you trust about it. Sometimes just verbalizing it helps.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-30 13:13:47+00:00
My rationale for staying up to date aggressively is that it minimizes integration work. Basically integration work multiplies, it doesn't just accumulate. So the further you fall behind the more that can break when you finally do upgrade. And you create needlessly more work related to testing and fixing all that. Upgrading a system that was fully up to date until a few days/weeks ago is generally easy. There's only so much that changes. Doing the same to something that was last touched five years ago can be a bit painful. Apis that no longer exist. Components that are no longer supported. Code that no longer compiles. Etc.

I see a lot of teams being overly conservative with keeping their stuff up to date running with years out of date stuff with lots of known & fixed bugs of all varieties, performance issues that have long since been addressed, etc. All in the name of stability.

I treat anything that isn't up to date as technical debt. If an update breaks stuff, I need to know so I can either deal with it or document a work around or a (usually temporary) version rollback. While that happens, it doesn't happen a lot. And I prefer knowing about these things because I've tried it over being ignorant of the breakage because I haven't updated anything in years. It just adds to the hidden pile of technical debt you don't even know you have. Ignorance is not an excuse for not dealing with your technical debt. Or worse compounding it by building on top of it and creating more technical debt in the process.

Dealing with small changes over time is a lot less work than with dealing with a large delta all at once. It's something I've been doing for years. If I work on any of my projects, the first thing I do is update dependencies. Make sure stuff still works (tests). Make sure deprecated APIs are dealt with.
by macNchz | 2025-10-30 13:14:21+00:00
I dunno, while they didn’t tell me to ask for cash, my parents basically made me invest any cash I got as gifts, plus everything I earned at summer jobs. I think that this kind of “investing by default” mindset (plus getting my own desktop computer for Christmas at age 11) extremely significantly impacted my current life in a positive way.

Also, learning to use Excel by playing fantasy stocks during the dot-com bubble, and having a Lycos homepage “Portfolio” widget just like my mom did is a fond memory for me, and zero people on Earth would call me a finance bro today.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-10-30 13:15:28+00:00
It 100% counts. As a somewhat irregular DM, DnD is a very poorly designed game.

Using digital tools as a DM for any sort of TTRPG is justifiable for the same reasons we use computers instead of books.

But the real problem is that players need digital tools too as the character sheet for any character with spellcasting is unworkable by hand.

Any prepared caster would need to manually copy every spell of the right level from their spell list onto paper every few level ups. If they don't write out the spell exactly as written (i.e, if they summarize) then you're opening the flood gates of rules lawyering and googling/book opening mid session.

Many other TTRPGs don't have this problem because they are designed with "playing with paper" in mind.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-30 13:16:17+00:00
“Lack of dopamine” isn’t an accurate description. It’s a reductionist pop culture metaphor that feels scientific but it’s not really accurate. Drugs of abuse involve multiple systems including opioid receptors, which modulate reward. There is much more going on than simple levels of a single neurotransmitter, which can actually be completely normal relative to non-addicts. Dopaminergic systems are actually involved in driving certain addictive and craving mechanisms, which should be a hint that it’s not as simple as “lack of dopamine”.

In fact, the side effects of certain drugs that directly increase dopamine levels (L-DOPA) or drugs that directly stimulate dopamine receptors (dopamine agonists like bromocriptine) include a risk of compulsive gambling, shopping, and risky behaviors.

Ironically it’s more accurate to simply say “withdrawals” than to try to inject reductionist neurotransmitter speak.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-30 13:17:32+00:00
But here you refer to implementation details. Isn't the point about message passing that objects themselves communicate with one another through such messages? And in turn, messages can also be assumed to be small objects. I don't think any of those implementations really fulfil that as a meaning. Or perhaps I misunderstood Alan Kay here. He drew inspiration more from biological cells and communication pathways therein. Naturally biology can not be mapped 1:1 onto in-silico hardware, that wouldn't even make sense either - but for instance, erlang's model appears to me closer to different objects happily communicating with one another in a very flexible, safe, fault-tolerant manner. I don't think it is the implementation detail that is about message passing. I also don't think "sending a message" is the confinement either - it's an important but, but does not appear to capture all that is meant with a "message". A message could be many things, including objects that themselves could change at any moment in time again. I see it more as an intrinsic part of communication at all times.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-30 13:18:13+00:00
Yes, the trick with houses is that it’s the only chance most retail can get 5:1 leverage. Your brokerage will never extend that to you to invest in equities.

But without leverage, long run return of residential real estate is like 3% after costs, which is less than equities but above bonds.

At least that’s what I tell myself as I go to sleep in my apartment, a non-homeowner watching people accumulate serious paper gains in their houses ;(

Source: a paper called the real return on everything.
by mhb | 2025-10-30 13:18:18+00:00
> There is nothing I can do to help there.

What is wrong with "helping" Sudan? Your comment suggested that the only reason you weren't "helping" in Rwanda is that you couldn't because it was 30 years ago.

If you think commenting here is "helping" "Palestine", you need to recalibrate your assessment of the impact of HN comments on the world.