MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by muddi900 | 2025-10-10 14:25:41+00:00
App blocking does not work. Delete the apps from your phone that you do not need. That usually means "all social media but youtube". Turn off autoplay/autoplay next on Youtube. On desktop, I actually use LeechBlock to even block youtube during work hours. It has a feature that blocks any override for specific sites or sets. If I want to use youtube, I pull it up on my phone. I play the video while putting my phone propped up on the kick stand on its case, next to my laptop.

Seems counter intuitive, and a recipe for distraction. But it works. With autoplay off, you have to manually pick up your phone and select the next video.

Podcast apps are a great replacement for youtube to play in the background. I use Pocket Casts, but I am grandfathered in because I bought it before they went subscription. I can't speak for the free version. If you are Mac/iOS, Apple Podcasts is now very good. It is also available on the web for Windows/Linux. The default option on Android is Youtube Music, which is a disaster. I would recommend Pocket Casts there. The free version can't possibly be worse than this. Pocket Casts is also available on web/desktop so your listening can sync.

I understand that you think you will eventually bypass these barriers, but this belief leads to failure. And the only way to move forward is to believe you can follow through.
Show HN: BookSmarts – An app to remember what you read using active recall
by HarryBullman | 2025-10-10 14:26:32+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of BookSmarts.

I have a terrible habit of reading a fantastic book, only to forget most of the key ideas a month later. Standard note-taking always felt passive and I'd never end up reviewing the notes I took.

I built this to solve my own problem. BookSmarts is a simple web app that helps you retain information using active recall. After you finish a book (or a chapter), you can test yourself with questions that are contributed by the community or generated by an AI. The goal is to move from passive reading to actively retrieving the information, which is proven to be more effective for memory.

It's still early days and the app is pretty simple right now, but it's at a point where I find it genuinely useful myself. It's completely free to use.

I'm posting here because I would love to get some direct and honest feedback from this community. Is the concept clear? What features is it missing to make it truly useful for you? I'm ready for any and all feedback.

Thanks for taking a look

P.S. I am currently watching peacemaker and will be available to answer and questions for a decent while
by nchmy | 2025-10-10 14:26:48+00:00
I'm not referring to the language barrier - I live in a place where I write and speak at a juvenile level. I'm referring to the very low quality of thinking on display in the article, and in this reply (english is not from the US of A. And, moreover, the level of literacy in that country is nothing to envy)

Here's a HN post from today for a coherent article about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-10 14:27:16+00:00
this is actually what it's like getting pants hemmed at men's wearhouse once the salespeople realize you won't be paying their rent today with the commission on a big purchase. I needed them in a week. Dude quoted me 3 weeks, then 10 days, then 8 days, then said he could get it done in 15 minutes. I get that under the hood capitalism is about charging the most you can get away with and offering the least the other guy will expect, and he's supposed to do the same and y'all strike a middle ground that makes nobody happy but is acceptable to everyone. But you're not supposed to flat out look at me and go "What's the worst you'll accept from me right now?"
by palmfacehn | 2025-10-10 14:27:19+00:00
You've chosen a poor example to illustrate your case.

The Dutch East India Company was a state granted monopoly. Obviously in this case, the regulations (state charter) empowered the abuses you feel so strongly about.

More generally, I'd caution against applying the present day norms around human rights to a distant historical case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysi...
by mayhemducks | 2025-10-10 14:27:22+00:00
The people who live in Texas are completely and utterly shocked every time the temperature goes below 40F. Even though there is some kind of "winter" weather almost every winter, none of the houses or commercial buildings have insulation on any of the pipes. A lot of high traffic roadways are elevated and banked making them completely unusable if someone so much as spills a coffee on them, let alone having ice or even just rain on them. "Winterizing" is just not a thing. It is always deemed too expensive. Then disaster strikes, everyone freaks out, then forgets about it in a few months because the temp in the summers stays well north of 100F for weeks at a time. OF COURSE they haven't learned. It goes against human nature to think more than a few months ahead when the state "rainy day fund" is at stake.
by damnesian | 2025-10-10 14:27:43+00:00
My current plan is moving to self-hosted photo and web (I'll be paying the ISP no matter what), embracing minimalism and the Fediverse for connecting with others. Open source software, hardware I control. Relationship between commercial entities and consumers is starting to feel like a war, and every consumer needs a bunker.

It also wouldn't be a terrible idea to convert a sunny room into a vertical hydroponic vegetable farm.
by user_7832 | 2025-10-10 14:27:44+00:00
I saw someone else mention this, it would be ironic if it were easier to run software of your choice via a VM on Android than simply install an apk. Nonetheless, I would love to see gpu acceleration being well supported. It's already insane how many old games can be emulated, and being able to run even just desktop versions of apps is excellent.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-10 14:28:01+00:00
Especially the lifecycle ones. The class based lifecycle methods are much more explicit and easy to reason about. Compare these for example:

import React from 'react'; class WindowWidth extends React.Component { state = { width: window.innerWidth }; handleResize = () => { this.setState({ width: window.innerWidth }); }; componentDidMount() { window.addEventListener('resize', this.handleResize); } componentWillUnmount() { window.removeEventListener('resize', this.handleResize); } render() { return <p>Window width: {this.state.width}px</p>; } } export default WindowWidth;

and this

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react'; function WindowWidth() { const [width, setWidth] = useState(window.innerWidth); useEffect(() => { const handleResize = () => setWidth(window.innerWidth); window.addEventListener('resize', handleResize); return () => { window.removeEventListener('resize', handleResize); }; }, []); return <p>Window width: {width}px</p>; } export default WindowWidth;

Whats going on here? I see it adds and removes a resize event listener… okay, when?What happens with the function it returns?

Why do I need to pass in an empty array? What could even go in there? What happens if I omit it (it is empty).

Where is the unmounting and mounting? What order do things happen in and when?

These have answers of course. The function runs according to the dependency array (prop, state, etc) and just on mount if empty. And the callback runs on unmount, if any. But you have to learn them. Before you do, it's magic. And when you step away, you have to re-learn it. And when it gets a bit more complicated, you're going to have to sit down and learn it better.
by kyledrake | 2025-10-10 14:29:04+00:00
You can set cookies that strictly stay on the root domain and don't cross to subdomain origins, and vise versa (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Coo...). We've been doing this for 12 years without issue.

Strict cookies crossing root to subdomains would be a major security bug in browsers. It's always been a (valid) theoretical concern but it's never happened on a large scale to the point I've had to address it. There is likely regression testing on all the major browsers that will catch a situation where this happens.
by ricudis | 2025-10-10 14:29:20+00:00
Most (though not all) Greek surnames are also gendered. The common practice is to inherit your fathers surname, changing the gender if you're born female. For example, a quite common surname is Papadopoulos (masculine) / Papadopoulou (feminine). It was usually chopped into "Pappas" when Greek immigrants to US were passing through Ellis Island.

Till the '90s at least there was an unofficial convention of anglicizing our surnames using the masculine form, ending up with things like Eleni (Helen) Papadopoulos, which in Greek sounds like a grammatical monstrosity.

Other surnames were commonly mangled in weird ways - Nicholas Metropolis (of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) surname was Μητρόπουλος (Mitropoulos). Metropolis is quite near phonetically but grammatically makes no sense in Greek.
by dynm | 2025-10-10 14:29:29+00:00
This is a bit of a tangent, the whole concept of "domain reputation" can be infuriating. For example, my blog has been marked as suspicious by spamhaus.org: https://check.spamhaus.org/results?query=dynomight.net

As a result, some ISPs apparently block the domain. Why is it listed? I have no idea. There are no ads, there is no user content, and I've never sent any email from the domain. I've tried contacting spamhaus, but they instantly closed the ticket with a nonsensical response to "contact my IT department" and then blocked further communication. (Oddly enough, my personal blog does not have an IT department.)

Just like it's slowly become quasi-impossible for an individual to host their own email, I fear the same may happen with independent websites.
by dahart | 2025-10-10 14:29:45+00:00
Yes we have clear & good descriptors available. I wasn’t arguing against those. I was simply pointing out that those aren’t the only definitions of the words free & open, which is a fact. It’s a fact that FSF and OSI have both used in their own arguments! I’m slightly surprised by the pushback and downvotes (which probably means I didn’t state things clearly or come off how I intended). OSI’s definition is logical today but took a long time to develop. It’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine never having heard, but if you had never heard it, you almost certainly wouldn’t jump to OSI’s definition upon hearing “open source” the first time. The lay public generally doesn’t either, and don’t know about licenses and the software community’s terms of art.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-10 14:29:50+00:00
Is this game actually ready, or is it a pre-purchase where you pay now and get it when it's done? The splash page seemed to be giving me mixed messages, but dearth of screenshots/video makes me think the latter? A bit sketchy to take people's money for a pre-pay for an unfinished game without being entirely clear that's what's happening? Or it obvious to gamers?
by dylan604 | 2025-10-10 14:30:09+00:00
why do you assume that the living, breathing human hired by theGoogs will be competent at handling all of the crazy that will be flung at them by the living, breathing human on the other end of the line. One single person cannot handle that. Naturally, you need a team of living, breathing humans. You might even have them in triage level groups like level 1 support, level 2 support and so on where each level is a more trained/experienced living, breathing human. Eventually, you'll have an entire department of people of varying degrees of skill. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, I thought it was the year 2000.

Hopefully, this helps you understand why your living, breathing human is such a farcical idea for theGoogs to consider.
by avhception | 2025-10-10 14:30:11+00:00
I very much feel what you're saying. I could spew out quite a few of these sediment layers from our projects as well - lerna comes to mind, for example. We still have that lerna monorepo that somehow still needs to chug along. Just the thought of having to touch that CI pipeline gives me PTSD, something something EFILTER and I don't know what it was any more, yarn workspace, lerna.json: conventionalCommits yadda yadda.

And as I wrote in another reply: of course other technologies are not without issues and have their churn and warts and problems, but the sheer amount of JS hype and tool and framework churn I experienced over the last few years was insane.

It might have cooled down somewhat by now, but I'm burned out. So reading about more churn to fix the churn just rubbed me the wrong way.
by jmclnx | 2025-10-10 14:30:16+00:00
First of all, the "crime" you are referring to is a misdemeanor, you know, like jaywalking.

>A first-time illegal entry is a federal misdemeanor

https://legalclarity.org/18-u-s-c-1325-illegal-entry-and-its...

How about going after felonies instead, you know, the people who B&E, rapist, murder, assaults, and other such crimes.

This is nothing but a waste of resources.
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-10-10 14:30:22+00:00
It does feel like it hide the important context often summarized as a meme: a) it doesn't happen b) ok it happens, but it's rare c) ok it's not rare but the impact is minimal d) ok it's not rare and the impact is not minimal but here's why it is necessary and a good thing

Of course blanket "not surprised" is perhaps not helpful without linkage to the people who denied the risks at steps a, b, c etc. But this is why we really need decision makes and politicians to be treated like anyone making a bet: we need to have collateral takes and enforcers. The "I am surprised" people who are silent would be forced to show they believe "it does not happen" by backing the bet and the "I'm not surprised" people would be raking it in.

With no bets, no collateral (or rather other people's lives), you just get this kind of lying in accounting and a scam. It happens in all kinds of domains with commons risk. This is a particularly good example because it is not so emotionally triggering and divisive (most people presumably don't want their data leaked and can't argue immediately that you are Xist or whatever).

Anyway, I love thinking about this stuff. Hopefully HN does not think these meta-discussions are spammy.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-10 14:30:24+00:00
You've gotten so nitpicky that you've apparently started mixing your own terms: graphemes, letters; and you're doing so incorrectly to boot (Muphry's Law, perhaps).

There are characters (U+308 in this codepage), letters ("E" and "e"), accent marks (which require an accompanying letter), and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").

Instead of iteratively correcting each other by refining and redefining words in each response, how about we communicate in good faith on the actual topic: cuneiform.
by culturalgeology | 2025-10-10 14:30:35+00:00
“My Luddism comes from conviction. It also has much to do with temperament, and trace amounts of incompetence and disorganization. But fundamentally the tech world—with its buzzwords, pitch decks, and perennial hype, everything always “amazing” and “awesome” and “unprecedented”—creeps me out. All this talk of changing the world, rendered in the same market-tested fonts and colour schemes, always makes me ask: Is there any there there?

Put another way, I am skeptical of hype, not only in my tech, but in my religion. I enjoy parties and wine and snappy aesthetics as much as the next person. But when it comes to branding campaigns for Jesus, carefully coordinated church Instagrams, hip merchandise, the pastoral pitch from a megachurch mainstage, I worry that it all looks a little too much like any other marketing scheme.”
by mcphage | 2025-10-10 14:30:53+00:00
> But then there are dozens of impoverished and unjust places on earth.

They only give out one prize, which means that no matter which they pick, there will be dozes of impoverished and unjust places that don't get recognized by it. That can't be used to reject a choice, since it's true no matter what choice they make.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-10 14:31:01+00:00
I agree with a couple of the other comments here. If I'm doing fixed-price work, I require half of it paid up front, and the other half paid at the time of final delivery and acceptance. If I'm doing time-based work, I require the prepayment of a reasonable amount of that time up front.

It's the best way I've found to reduce the risk of clients stealing from me through non-payment. If they've already paid a significant portion, they're more likely to pay the rest. And even if they don't, at least I got something.

And don't be shy about using the small claims courts if the dollar amount is low enough to allow it. You don't even have to hire an attorney to do that (although you should have an attorney as a matter of good business practice anyway).
by bccdee | 2025-10-10 14:31:17+00:00
> Saying "fuck you" to someone who gave you something amazing for free, because he's not giving you as much as you want for free

I don't have a problem, on principle, with paywalling new features. I don't like it, but I don't think it's bad behaviour.

Putting up a paywall around features that were previously free, however, I do take issue with. It's deceptive and it's not common practice. It tricks people into becoming invested and then holds hostage the features that they've become invested in using. Frankly, fuck that.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-10-10 14:31:37+00:00
I liked it when Stackoverflow did something similar.

https://stackoverflow.com/documentation

We have shut down Stack Overflow Documentation. Documentation was our attempt at improving existing reference materials by focusing on examples. The beta ran from July 21st, 2016 until August 8th, 2017. For more details on why we ended it, please see our post on meta. Thank you to everyone that participated. As always, the content contributed by our community is available under CC BY-SA.
by tomjakubowski | 2025-10-10 14:31:52+00:00
Years and years ago, the MongoDB Java driver had something like this to skip logging sometimes in one of its error handling routines.

} catch (Exception e) { if (!((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1))) { return res; } final StringBuilder logError = (new StringBuilder("Server seen down: ")).append(_addr); /* edited for brevity: log the error */

https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-java-driver/blob/1d2e6faa80...
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-10-10 14:31:56+00:00
Despite 76 comments, the article talking about it explicitly, there’s only a single mention of the word union here. If you think you can ride this wave to make your fortune, you’re probably wrong if AI ends up eating all jobs.

Collective action is the correct move here, for those who can actually see what is going on. The class war has been going on for awhile. If you are reading this, you aren’t going to cross the class thermocline to escape the societal consequences of it. (No offense intended there.)
by robocat | 2025-10-10 14:32:18+00:00
I have a similar set of questions about a different puzzle game.

I've reached a point where I don't feel I'm improving and I'm not discovering any more tricks.

Going online to find other people's solutions just feels wrong. Like buying a "how to complete $X" from the olden days. I don't learn when someone else provides the way to a solution; I like progressive learning, and I dislike the frustration when I stop progressing.

I keep wondering about the meta-problem of how to change my mental gears...

There's an itch to create my own version of the game which would force me to learn the underlying mathematics. Most games are designed to level your skills or knowledge up slowly (sometimes a social component involved). Building yourself forces one to understand the constraints better.

OR do I just train up my meta-skills e.g. playing similar but different games?

I do feel stupid!

Obviously I've also reached my limit on the metagame here, given that I'm asking...

When you reach an impass with a solo intellectual challenge, what's the next step?
by spankibalt | 2025-10-10 14:32:25+00:00
> "In the past half century, “progressives” have pushed through huge societal advances (particularly) across Europe in areas of family rights, women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, worker's rights."

Progressives, sans scare quotes, fought long and hard for lobbying access to get the parties in power push through what should be considered basic human rights in any civilized society.

> "Things that were anathema in my very Catholic country just 20 years ago [...] are now so mainstream that even “conservatives” (never mind “centrists”) have co-opted most of them."

In my reality, many conservatives, especially of the clerical variety, are very busy rolling back these basic human rights. And their centrist allies play ball. As usual.

> "Now, we're starting to find out what 'ideological purity' looks like when that gets co-opted by the right side of the spectrum."

Starting to find out? You sound like you labor under the absurd illusion that conservatives/right-wingers of any couleur never had some sort of ideological ideal they tried to pitch to hoi polloi. Well, there's enough libraries worth of works to cure someone of that misbelief.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-10-10 14:32:46+00:00
Trump might win it anyway. If he stares at Norway long enough and his minions find a way to harass the country (which is the MO these days), I have a feeling Norway will find a way to give him one (or two if he fancies), just like they found ways to not give it to many deserving people throughout its history, just because nations with convincing physical likeness would not have appreciated that.
by WD-42 | 2025-10-10 14:33:08+00:00
Datastar always rubbed me the wrong way. The author was constantly pushing it in the HTMX discord, telling anyone who would listen that if they liked HTMX how great Datastar would be for them. Some pretty classy comments from them on reddit too:

> It was a full rewrite. Use the beta release forever if it has all the tools you need. No one is stopping you.

> Open source doesn't owe you anything and I expect the same back.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-10 14:33:13+00:00
Interesting features of this "case":

There's no copyright for AI generated imagery, but there is liability?

If AI is pure thought, is any crime manifest through AI a pure thought crime?

A man who had ideations of a disaster gets anxious when interrogated by police about such thoughts.

The bulk of the evidence comes from a personal machine that is a capsule for the holder's thought as it relates to activity. If the machine is a truly personally owned extension thought, then consider the implications of 5th Amendment. If the machine belongs to others, then what is their liability? And... troubling implications (thoughts) should come to kind about surveillance, authority, and liberty.

The wording of the article suggests using Uber is subject to routine background checks... a number of troubling implications (thoughts) should come to kind about surveillance, authority, and liberty.

//Among the thousands of structures destroyed in the fires were the homes of a number of celebrities, including Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton and Jeff Bridges.//

This paragraph about losses of celebrities bookends a point about "closure and justice for those affected" by a disaster that was as much about failures of emergency mgmt as the emergency event, with an orientation towards scapegoating.

There are a number of other interesting features of this story which loom over the future of personal tech.
by jongjong | 2025-10-10 14:33:13+00:00
Some code should be single core; like for example, a frontend UI for a web application... You don't want to be hoarding all of the user's CPU capacity with your frontend.

But I do like implementing my backends as multi-core by default because it forces me to architect the system in a simple way. In many cases, I find it easier to implement a multi-core approach. The code is often more maintainable and secure when you don't assume that state is always available in the current process. It forces a more FP/stateless approach. Or at least it makes you think really hard about what kind of state you want to keep in memory.