MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Why'd I pick 48 hours? A genuine approach to global connection
by abilafredkb | 2025-10-11 20:59:22+00:00
Hi there, I'm Frederick. Today I set out to achieve a goal, and this would be one of the most authentic HN posts I've ever written (without the help of AI).

I've lived off the internet my entire life. I created my first Facebook account when i was 8 years because I had a Samsung Keypad phone (similar to blackberry) which allowed me to access it. Home was boring and I was an only child then (well my younger brother had just been born so I just didn't count). Facebook was so fun then, I could actually remember connecting with a few well known celebrities in my country and it's hard to make anyone believe that but it's all in the past.

Fast forward i've grown and evolved and even though i've had some great and awesome friends in real life, the internet helped transcend borders. Being able to speak to someone a 100 miles away from me is the kind of technology i'll forever cherish (i doubt i would've had the patience to live through the pigeon era).

Fast forward, three years ago I met my mentor on Facebook and he's been so awesome in contributing to my growth. Well the initial question was Why would i pick 48 hours?

The answer is quite simple, initially when he reached out after reading an article about me I simply ignored him because I was tired of what Facebook had turned into (i'd already fallen for so many scams there that i had simply lost hope of meeting anyone genuine) but within 48 hours I gave it a chance, had a call with him and the conversation took off from there.

Those 48 hours helped me make a very firm decision, one that I could've risked if i didn't take the chance and one that would've cost me dearly if it went badly.

I have learnt from those experiences and realized that sometimes we just need to think, listen and give someone the chance. The world is full of uncertainties and we might never know what that decision may yield in the future.

So a month ago, I set off to help bring that story to millions of people across the world. I built Eintercon on a similar concept, 48 hours to two strangers several miles apart at different parts of the world but with similar interests.

Eintercon is my way to bring my successful experience to the world and to help people discover the world amidst all the clutter.

Eintercon isn't about likes/followers but about genuine connections and friendships that could yield something positive in the future.

I will sign off with this quote "I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples." by Mother Theresa. I have cast my stone and have made some ripples. Now it's time to give others the same mantle to write their own stories through Eintercon.
by jmpeax | 2025-10-11 20:59:40+00:00
The description of the algorithm is frustratingly confusing.

"Now pick another random black dot to start from and color it white too. From this black dot" from which black dot, the white one?

"single step in a random direction, coloring the new dot white and drawing a line between the two dots". How big of a step is we need to draw a line? Ok, so where not talking about pixels, and where drawing black and white dots on a background of... let's imagine grey?

"backtrack along your path until you’re back at the dot that you were trying to color white" does this algorithm ever terminate in any tractible time?
by gdulli | 2025-10-11 21:00:11+00:00
It's not conspiracy or hypothesis that the only point of these products is ads, it's the straight up business model. When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies? It wastes our time and it's boring to keep responding with, what did you think was going to happen? We've tried not shaming these people, will shame get them to stop buying this stuff and actually creating change in the world? What will work?

> “This is getting ridiculous and I'm about to just toss the whole thing and move back to Google,” one Redditor said of the “full-volume” ads for Alexa+ on their Echo Show.

Any article that quotes this and doesn't point out the crushing stupidity of it has failed. Do it politely, if you must, Scharon Harding. But if I wanted to be exposed to Reddit quality ideas I'd be on Reddit.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-10-11 21:01:05+00:00
According to Ed Zitron, OpenAI needs roughly $1 Trillion over the next four years to honor their current commitments and run the business. For perspective, the projected supply of US venture capital at the end of 2025 is $164B, and the top 10 PE funds combined represent $477B in liquidity.

I’m not sure there’s anything “theoretically” scary about what they’re doing.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-onetrillion/
by tonycletus | 2025-10-11 21:01:28+00:00
We built Builder Lab to solve a problem we saw with our internship program. Developers spending too much time researching tools instead of building.

It's a curated database of 200+ developer tools across 15+ categories, each with: - Hand-picked by experienced developers - Clear use cases and difficulty levels - Complete implementation examples - Step-by-step integration guides

Open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/programmify/builder-lab
by 9dev | 2025-10-11 21:02:28+00:00
I don’t trust big channels especially, because I assume they have just sold themselves out to the biggest sponsor. Influencers only exist due to campaign deals, where companies try to sneak their ads into your mind by abusing your inclination to trust another human being. All of it is sickening.

In comparison, I’d rather read a general review magazine with a long history. At least they don’t try to trick me into believing they are working out of the goodness of their hearts, and they usually aren’t married to a single big sponsor.

Online reviews are broken beyond repair.
by thierrymarianne | 2025-10-11 21:02:36+00:00
I've even learned a thing or two that I'd like to share since they went against my initial intuition: - I thought relying on the `scrollend` event ^2 would work to clean up the viewport... and it didn't (for some reason, the listener was periodically removed, quite annoying and I assume it could be to prevent memory leaks). - Same thing when (trying to) use the intersection observer API ^3, which can actually be used to measure how long elements have been made visible to a user like ads for example or most likely I just didn't understand how it could be done . However it incidentally allowed me to pinpoint with the debugger some function belonging to a minified lib using itself the intersection observer API when my own customization failed (not so gracefully) via the error stacktrace.

In the end, i just went for busting the promoting content every 0.5s, which surprisingly seem to work out of the box (until it won't anymore with the next release). It just worked from the start in the console and I went down a rabbit hole with premature optimization being the root of all evil and all that (this is not AI-generated... I can assure you).

^1: it works with Chrome on my machine™ ^2: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/scrollend-a-new-javascript... ^3: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-11 21:02:43+00:00
I’m not talking about “content blockers” that have been available since iOS 8 where an extension gives the Safari browser a list of urls to block that works well and has been around since iOS 8.

I mean real web extensions

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/iphone/iphab0432bf6/io...
by neilv | 2025-10-11 21:02:45+00:00
I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting around my home was so depressing, I paid the extra $10-$15, to retroactively turn it into an ad-free device.[1]

Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home screen. This is one of the reasons I find the home screen a little bit unpleasant to look at, and avoid it as much as possible.

[1] If you want to remove Special Offers from your own Kindle/Fire (I don't know about Echo Show), go to https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices , click on the icon for your device, and scroll down, to find an option to disable Special Offers by paying some amount. IIRC, it said the amount was the difference between the original retail prices of with-ads and ads-free versions of the device. I've also heard some people can get Special Offers removed for free by customer service, but in my case it seemed like a fair deal, so I just paid the modest fee.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-11 21:03:25+00:00
What a nonsensical thing to say. You said to call "for line in file" -- you can't do that on a string, even if it originally came from part of a file. Or are you suggesting one should...?

And I said your "generally" was wrong. You were provided general advice, I'm saying it's wrong in general. Do you see me giving numerical quantities anywhere?
by andrepd | 2025-10-11 21:03:57+00:00
Jesus christ give the body cavity thing a rest. It was an expression somebody said 1 time and you latched on like a pitbull to an infant. Obviously you're not in good faith arguing like this.

> Measuring heart rate, using a computer which can log its data, is the exact opposite of arbitrary. It's an objective measurement. You don't seem to understand the words that you're using.

There is NO correlation between that measurement and criminal activity, that's the point. It's NOT OBJECTIVE like a polygraph test is not objective even though it's recording objective measurements. This would be just a tool for the state apparatus to harass arbitrary citizens with a veil of plausible deniability ("ah but my sensor says you're nervous, what are you hiding citizen??"). I would also do well without the condescending attitude tyvm.

> Do you think they get bonuses for doing them? It's beyond ridiculous that you can't keep your argument straight

Did ICE need bonuses to ramp up their actions over the past 9 months? Did the SS need bonuses, did the Stasi, the NKVD, any of the repressive apparatus of any totalitarian regime of the 20th century? Jesus h christ.

> I've almost certainly read far more than you on history and law. I'm likely more experienced, well traveled, and much more concerned about actual infringement on liberties.

> Your weak attempts to talk down to me, while at alluding to non-specific events in history, would embarrass you if you knew enough to be embarrassed.

Ahaha okay this is one step below a navy seals copypasta, so let's leave it at this. Enjoy your weekend!
by groby_b | 2025-10-11 21:04:02+00:00
> it totally sours everyone's view of you.

That's the part that doesn't matter at all. Your life isn't contingent on others having a specific view of you - the rest of the world can, for lack of better words, go fuck themselves.

What matters is if you want to live a life where you can't drive a car, you might poison yourself with your cooking, you lose your mental facilities, etc. That is the relevant choice here.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-11 21:04:32+00:00
> Everyone loves the "you can't beat the S&P" trope, but that's also just ignorance.

This seems like a willful misinterpretation.

They say “you won’t beat the S&P” because maybe some HFT firm with highly secretive and advanced technology and MIT PhD quants might… but you, Mr. Retail McDumbMoney, don’t stand a chance.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-11 21:05:07+00:00
I disagree, because 1) complete denoising is simply impossible while preserving fine detail and 2) noise is a serious artistic choice—just like anamorphic flare, lens FOV with any distortion artifacts, chromatic aberration, etc. Even if it is synthetic film grain that is added in post, that has been somebody’s artful decision; removing it and simulating noise on the client butchers the work.
by 9dev | 2025-10-11 21:06:39+00:00
Is that strictly bad, though? Being able to run an enterprise service by setting configuration values declaratively, and get all the guarantees of a well-tested framework, seems like a pretty good thing.

Yes, it’s weird how that’s still Java, but using standard components and only using code as glue where it’s absolutely necessary seems very similar to other engineering disciplines to me.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-11 21:07:24+00:00
> When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies?

How should they know? Genuinely asking. Yeah WE know, we've known forever because we're the people who make this shit, both professionally and in our spare time. We know the costs associated with making these little magic devices, and we know the ongoing cost of powering them. Your average consumer does not. Not only do they not know, they do not care, until they feel their privacy is being eroded by it.

Instead of being mad at people for taking a product advertised to them at face value to just be a useful thing for them to use, and not something actively designed to spy on them and then use that collected information to bombard them with ads, why don't we just say to companies: hey, it's no longer acceptable to sell loss-leader products that perform a handful of user-friendly functions that also then double as privacy violations and harass customers with ads?

If we kill surveillance capitalism, not only do we de-fang the advertising industry which is actively making every tech product on the face of the earth worse to suit it's purposes, not only do we permanently end the privacy issue on the side of users, we also reduce climate threatening emissions and hideous power waste that is required to make all this atrocious shit work.

And you might say "well they SHOULD care!" and yeah, I kinda agree, and also I recognize that people have a lot of shit they already have to care about, and frankly, I don't think they should have to care about this. I don't think you should have to worry if your new TV is spying on you, I just think you should be able to buy a fuckin' TV, and take it home, and plug some shit into it, and watch TV. I think that's a better world to strive for than all the consumer awareness we can muster. I am perfectly able to, but don't WANT to have to shop for electronics like I'm actively negotiating a hostage crisis where the hostage is my ability to jerk off in my living room without 3 ad agencies knowing about it, and I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take.
by gettingoverit | 2025-10-11 21:08:53+00:00
Oh, it's not a problem, until you're a Kuznetsov-father trying to get on a plane with your Kuznetsova-daughter, and you become a suspect of kidnapping until you don't prove it's actually your daughter. After you get your mortally scared daughter back from authorities, you probably start thinking that having the same surname is something you actually need.

And no, US authorities won't make it easy for you or her.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-11 21:09:43+00:00
That's a bit contradictory, isn't it? If caring for helpless infants is an objective good only for those who inherently understand why that is, then that's a dependence on the observer's understanding and so it is subjective.

There's a world of difference between something being objectively a certain way, and between feeling really strongly some way about something and thinking that everyone else reasonable would feel the same way too. There are things that are encoded into (most of) our very instincts, things we (for the most part) find absolutely common sense, but this doesn't make them objective. I wish language was able to succinctly express these different levels of "being on the same page", but alas I don't believe it does at the moment, and abusing the word "objective" I can't say I love as an alternative.
by mihaaly | 2025-10-11 21:09:51+00:00
You are right.

Children today can be as conscious music listeners as we, who collected and sought out music of our own in our youth in the 80' and 90'. Or as unfastidious as those listening to top chart hits exclusively (including both Mike Oldfield and Milli Vanilli, whichever is in the top) in our childhood.

Two, possibly related anocdote.

My goddaughter is 12. She is in a revolting phase where difficult to find way to her heart. But we are on the same wavelength and can engage in hours and hours of excited conversation (we are 40 years apart btw.) about music beacuse she listens to those I listened when I was in her age or more. "Today's music sucks", she argues, and we share playlists. Actually I am able to show her those do not suck today but rarely found because you have to broese similar atrists of a similar artist from somthing you found by accident as a background music of a movie. These kind of discovery through huge music databases is great! About the same good as being lost in a huge vinyl/cd shop. You cannot touch, but you can listen!

Another is just interesting, and a reflection to the "todays music suck" kind of oversimplification. But also to how young people can discover their own music. Once in Germany waiting for a tram a loud group of graduating high school student like figures came by shouting the refrain of '99 Luftbalons' while it was playing from an uncomfortably loud boombox. I could not stop smiling thinking of them. : )
by dpark | 2025-10-11 21:10:15+00:00
I agree with you that it is good to care for helpless infants. The fact that this cannot be clearly explained to someone who doesn’t inherently agree indicates that this is not an objective good, though.

The devil’s advocate would probably also ask how it would be objectively good to protect baby Hilter, knowing that protecting his innocent infant life would lead directly to the deaths of millions.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-11 21:10:30+00:00
Yeah, it works until it isn't. And they good luck debugging it. I'd prefer simple obvious linear code calling some functions over this declarative magic any day.

cronService.schedule("xxx", this::refresh);

This isn't any harder than annotation. But you can ctrl+click on schedule implementation and below easily. You can put breakpoint and whatnot.
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-11 21:10:45+00:00
> Age restrictions have been normalized regardless of effectiveness.

For the record.

A law doesn't stop anything.

All a law does is says "If some behaviour meets definition X AND the state becomes aware of it, then consequence Y will be applied by the state"

The hope is that people will see that and make a choice that ensures that they aren't liable for the consequence.

It's also, like everything, as effective as the enforcement. If it's not enforced well, nobody will abide by it.
by jader201 | 2025-10-11 21:10:57+00:00
To be fair:

1. I get a lot more value out of (some) Reddit threads than I get out of most online journalism, including Ars Technica, so I’m never surprised to see really bad quality from journalism.

2. I’ve had two Google displays in my home for over 5 years, and have never seen a single ad on mine (with default settings / no hacking). So it’s not that surprising (to me anyway) to see these reactions from customers (unless you already had higher expectations from Google vs. Amazon).
by neilv | 2025-10-11 21:12:22+00:00
IIRC, when it was launched, with the camera, the Web page had a top image of the product sitting on a bedroom night stand, naturally pointed at the owner's bed.

Either the marketing people weren't very aware of privacy (specifically, the chatter around that time, about covering webcams against hackers, and about whether adtech was listening in on device mics), or they have a dark sense of humor.
by torginus | 2025-10-11 21:13:07+00:00
which is kinda horrifying - it means the framework designers didn't find the language powerful enough to express app logic, and hotglued their own custom arbitrary behavior on top of it.

Clear language code should be endeavor to be readable/understandable when printed on a sheet of paper by anyone, acceptable code should be understandable by anyone who knows a bit about the technologies and has some IDE support.

Garbage code is what you have when the code in question is only understandable when you actually run it, as it uses arbitrary framework logic to wire things together based on metadata on the fly.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-11 21:13:51+00:00
My only definition of “morality” is are you doing something that affects other people. If you aren’t doing anything to hurt other people, I consider that “morally neutral”. If you aren’t doing anything to help other people, that’s “morally good”.

How is my hypothetically deciding to end my own suffering “morally bad”? I don’t owe suffering from a terminal illness to anyone.

Your calculation for what you will suffer to enjoy another day of life may be different than mine and that’s fine.
by idiotsecant | 2025-10-11 21:14:55+00:00
It's not so absurd. The only afterlife that exists (in a materialist sense) is what other people think of you. The only part of 'you' still around us quite literally just a memory in someone's head. That's not nothing.

Whether we should care about that or not is a philosophical conversation, I suppose. I would take the side of if we care about what people think about us when we are alive, surely we should care what they think of us when we are dead. Otherwise, we only value their opinion of us as a function of what they will do for/to us, which seems not great.
by hinkley | 2025-10-11 21:15:07+00:00
> Officials from Indonesia’s nuclear energy regulatory agency have traced the source of contamination to a steel manufacturer in the Cikande industrial area known as Peter Metal Technology, or PMT. Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed.

> It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack, he said.
by cm2187 | 2025-10-11 21:15:31+00:00
You can find cheap used enterprise SSDs on ebay. But the problem is that even the most power efficient enterprise SSD (SATA) idle at like 1w. And given the smaller capacities, you need many more to match a hard drive. In the end HDD might actually consume less power than an all flash array + controllers if you need a large capacity.
by drdeadringer | 2025-10-11 21:15:36+00:00
This reminds me of a small but fond memory of mine. One of my friends in high school, up from elementary, was slightly a troublemaker. But not terribly so. One day, we found ourselves sitting at the same lunch table. He occasionally smoked, I did not (I still don't). This meant that he had a lighter and I at the time did not (I now carry a lighter with me at all times for unrelated reasons).

He made a comment about how good orange peels smelled when you burned them. I leaned into this comment with curiosity and personal ignorance on the matter.

He said yeah and then looked around made the shush shush signal and leaned in, and invited me to do the same. He took an orange peel and brushed it across his opened lighter flame. Nobody caught us, and I smelled firsthand What he was talking about. Nobody got into trouble over this innocent demonstration. But for sure as hell you would have gone into trouble for this uncensioned demonstration of fire usage.