MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quacksilver | 2025-10-04 06:16:56+00:00
I used to have an online maestro card (was solo and now known as debit mastercard) and an offline card (was switch, now also known as debit mastercard) from a UK bank, due to having two current accounts there.

The offline card was from a current account with an overdraft and also worked as a cheque guarantee card, for cheques up to £250 under the (discontinued ~2011) cheque guarantee scheme[0] and had a special hologram on the back. The retailer would watch you sign the cheque and write details about you, the card and any CCTV etc. on the back of the cheque. I imagine the offline behavior of the card was similar, and was a carry over from that.

The online card was from a basic account with no overdraft facility and acted a bit like a prepaid debit card.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque_guarantee_card
by oefrha | 2025-10-04 06:18:26+00:00
No shit. One major frigging selling point of Electron vs OS web view is the developer controls the browser version and has a stable target to develop and test against, rather than having many moving targets that shift after the app is shipped.

And you really think the entire ecosystem has never heard of this honking great idea named shared libraries from the good old days? Being smug about obvious things like this usually just betrays your shallow understanding.

Disclosure: I’ve criticized Electron aplenty. But these are complex tradeoffs and people dismissing them with obvious wins in their minds are clueless.

Disclosure 2: I was once a member of the maintainer team of a major package manager. Shared libraries, oh my, I can tell you horror stories all night long. If your experiences with them are great chances are a team behind the scenes has blocked and/or fixed faulty updates for you and shielded you from most of the issues.
by lukan | 2025-10-04 06:18:38+00:00
For sure, but most bridges aren't in scenic places and robocops will still be limited in numbers, so no worries, just ask your LLM assistance in case of doubt under which bridge you won't get evicted from. Altough, that would probably be illegal advice, but they can try to help you with therapy should you end up in such a situation. Not the top model of course, but hey, it is a benefit.
by andrethegiant | 2025-10-04 06:19:16+00:00
I am so sick of these anthropomorphized names that have nothing to do with anything that we’re all supposed to remember now. Why are we giving products first names? The worst offender is probably Amazon Rufus. It’s all so dumb and I hate it. At least attempt to be clever and name it something that relates to the product itself. Even Google Wave, despite its shortcomings, made sense as a product name.
by avidiax | 2025-10-04 06:19:32+00:00
I used to work for Uber, but not on this feature or anything related.

Apropos to the article, as a programmer for this feature, what you are actually asked to do is write a greybanning engine. It can take various features (geofence, denylist of phone numbers/emails/device identifiers/payment, etc.) and use it to calculate a score that applies a greybanning policy. The policy may be that the cars in the app are now fake, the ride will never come, your CC is "denied", etc.

Nothing illegal or unethical about this feature, as written, but it is a "dual-use" technology.

The feature has been used to literally save lives. There were taxi-affiliated people in South America that would call an Uber and then, at best, trash the car and beat the driver. At worst, they'd kill the driver. Those people need to be greybanned, along with scammers, criminals, and abusive people of all sorts.

The local market administrators, however, definitely might ban users that the know to be police ticketing the drivers, might ban any account signup from the police station, might ban city credit cards, etc.

You, as the programmer on this feature, can't defend against that unethical use of it.

If you work at the insurance company and get asked to write a rules engine but not the rules, this same thing applies to you.
by ankuranand | 2025-10-04 06:20:49+00:00
I recently wrote about optimizing cache expiration for millions of TTL-based entries without melting the CPU.

The naive approach — scanning every key every second — works fine at small scale but collapses once you hit millions of entries.

So I implemented a Timing Wheel in Go — the same idea used in Kafka, Netty, and the Linux kernel — replacing the O(n) scan loop with an O(1) tick-based expiration model.

Here’s what I found when comparing both approaches at 10 million keys:

Avg Read Latency: • Naive Scan → 4.68 ms • Timing Wheel → 3.15 µs

Max Read Stall: • Naive Scan → 500 ms • Timing Wheel → ≈ 2 ms

At that scale, the naive loop stalls reads for half a second. The timing wheel glides through them in microseconds.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/ankur-anand/taskwheel
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-10-04 06:22:43+00:00
Yeah I think in America it's a pretty distinctly East Coast thing. I grew up in Southern California and had to travel a lot for work, and it was super obvious when I traveled to the East Coast and went out drinking with coworkers that I didn't have those banter/shit-talking muscles trained, because nobody in my circles social circles ever really treated each other that way.

They never directed any of it at me because they were emotionally intelligent people, but even so, I did find it kind of annoying and off-putting - it was just a legitimate cultural difference.
by ralph84 | 2025-10-04 06:23:32+00:00
Replacing it isn’t the problem, buying it is. Yes I’m sure you can find showerheads with illegal flow rates available online, but reputable stores won’t sell anything over 2.5 gpm anywhere in the US, and over 2.0 or 1.8 in the states that have those limits. Amazon won’t ship the higher flow rates into a lower flow rate state.
by taormina | 2025-10-04 06:24:40+00:00
Taxi-by-app existed pre-Uber, the innovation was making the taxi actual show up. Austin had the apps, and I would order one, and the taxis would get distracted on the way to my house and pick up other fares, so I couldn't go where I wanted. They had every chance to not be outcompeted by Uber, but they couldn't stop being taxis. And, here we are.
by asplake | 2025-10-04 06:27:11+00:00
> The last time I used [a doubly linked list] was in the nineties. I know the Linux kernel uses them, but that design was also laid down in the nineties; if you were designing a kernel from scratch today, you would probably not do it that way.

Curious to know in the Linux context whether moves away from doubly linked lists have ever been tested?
by ben_w | 2025-10-04 06:27:17+00:00
Although the rockets are developing fast enough, I've seen zero work on ISRU needed for returns; and politically, with two presidential elections due by then, the US now has a dichotomy between leadership who hate Musk and who will also destroy the US economy and might start wars with allies, and potential leadership that just hates Musk, a fork which is a fantastic way for even the world's richest man to find himself banned from working on rockets.
by tossandthrow | 2025-10-04 06:27:49+00:00
Here is likely not that much handling cost for an independent hairdresser just earning their own (quite meager) salary.

In the EU you can not charge a card fee on consumer transactions, so the merchant has the eat the cost.

If your revenue is - 2-3000 Eur a month, payment fees (and terminal subscription fees) can have a big impact.
by concinds | 2025-10-04 06:27:54+00:00
SwiftUI is still broken for any non-simple apps, almost a decade after its introduction. Completely unacceptable for big apps. Look at OmniFocus, who inexplicably became early-adopters of it, and it's had a bunch of UI glitches and inconsistent behavior requiring app restart (like you select one list item, but the inspector shows you details for another list item) ever since.

Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-04 06:29:13+00:00
IIRC, many TPMS systems run as CAN over IP, basically giving unsecured network access to a car if it thinks it's talking to a TPMS. Granted that some/most these sensors typically have to be "paired" with a car using a scantool (sometimes), but IIRC, some are self-pairing creating a vulnerability where the legit sensor could be replaced with a hostile one. Also the possibilities of spoofing, sniffing, and/or packet injection seem real too.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-10-04 06:29:13+00:00
>It's counter-productive to punish someone for something out of their control.

For people in specific classes that benefit from networks and status: it is not.

It should be default. If you abuse your power and position, it should have cascading effects not just for you but people that benefited from it.

This idea that only one person at fault when there are 10's of people that hide behind the crime is just non-sense and has done immeasurable damage to society.

And I stress again: it should be income bracket/class based. The higher you are, the harder the fall.
by wisty | 2025-10-04 06:29:36+00:00
Australian here.

It's always astounding that no-one in the US mentions the elephant pooping in the living room - that the US spends more tax dollars than Australia and IIRC the UK, and Canada.

Per capita, or as a % of anything reasonable. The US is such bad value that Medicare and Medicaidel, VA, as well as othe government programs cost IIRC more than Canada's system. And Canada has a huge area with poor economies of scale.

Republicans don't want to admit that they're taxing as hard as the French (for healthcare), Democrats don't want to lose the gold plated Medicare system that old people vote for, and literally everyone from nurses to band aid makers to doctors to healthcare CEOs makes more than in other countries.

Maybe I have missed something, but universal single payer healthcare (especially with a hybrid system like Ausralia) seems cheaper than what the US does.
by quacksilver | 2025-10-04 06:29:40+00:00
From memory, online and offline transactions are usually split out by BIN number (first six digits)

The BIN will tell you which bank was the issuer and which class of card you have, like standard or premium, though most readers probably don't take that into account beyond the card scheme and card type associated with the range that the individual BIN is in. Many banks will have multiple BINs for the same card type if they are large.

Credit / online debit / offline debit usually get different ranges. The reader gets a list of the ranges when it updates and they don't change super often. Offline readers can be configured to reject cards with a number in an online only range.
by neel8986 | 2025-10-04 06:29:51+00:00
Simple hypothesis. Top 5percent of US wealth now belongs to top 50 richest American. Even if you ignore corruption, lobbying and any ill intent you can definitely conclude that this top 50 individuals have better way of getting return from money than rest of the population. Even if if their delta of return is 5% we can assume that withing next 50 years there is a high probability that these guys will own 30-50% of wealth. I have a strong belive AI will acclerate that further.
by rich_sasha | 2025-10-04 06:29:58+00:00
It's the beauty of a commercial system, no? Businesses have a duty to make a profit for their shareholders first, second to their clients (keeping their customers happy), and no obligation to the wider society, other than following regulation.

If a private hospital figures out that by jacking prices up by 50% they make more profit, keep their fewer customers happier (not even necessarily more alive!) and treat less people, they are 100% following their mission as a private business.

A European PoV might be that you can counterbalance a private system with a public system, whose goals are explicitly to keep the society healthy and help as many people as possible. The NHS, admittedly not the gold standard for anything good recently, optimises for maximising "quality-adjusted life expectancy improvement" over the whole society.

It's not a metric you could ever replicate with private businesses.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-10-04 06:31:19+00:00
I got my first Credit Card in 2000 (I think that was 2000 or may be 2001). Credit Card swiping devices were rare and many a store just use that Imprinter thingy, and I sign on the carbon papers. That was an offline process. This was in Bombay (INDIA).

I think something similar to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-10-04 06:32:14+00:00
There are ID3 tags used for MP3 and other files. Old players may not know about them and may misread their data as MPEG frames. To prevent this a tag may break up sequences of 00 bytes with an FF byte. Or may not, because now most players are aware of tags. So there is a preference, at two levels, default and for a single tag. Not too hard to program, but rather unfriendly to a grammar-based approach.

(Another example are checksums.)
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-04 06:32:56+00:00
The development timeline has been so strange. Falcon 9 was made so quickly compared to Starship.

I would have expected a working rocket would have been quick - especially given they have a wealth of experience making the first one. And then I would have expected a protracted period of nailing down the landing and reuse

And yet.. just getting this thing to orbit has been seemingly as hard as catching it coming down

Does anyone in the know have a good assessment of what's up? Did they just take bigger risks making the Falcon 9? Is the workforce burnt out?

From the descriptions and how they speak, they don't seem interested in getting to orbit unless it's reusable. But it seems like a giant non-reusable rocket would already be a huge win. It's at least shut down the ridiculous SLS program and freeup a bunch of funding
by bob1029 | 2025-10-04 06:33:34+00:00
The sprawling mess of Houston has ostensibly contributed to its very low housing costs. A lot of the other problems in the area begin to melt away when everything is ridiculously affordable.

The golden path is to live in the Houston area while working remotely. This helps you to avoid the worst aspect of the region while maximizing the best aspects.

A million dollars buys you an incredible length of runway in the Houston market. You could buy a very high end home in the woodlands in cash, put a Porsche in the garage, and still have enough to go for a decade before you had to find a source of income again.
by hunglee2 | 2025-10-04 06:34:10+00:00
there are few (maybe none?) examples of society's where there are absolutely no speech taboos. Policing what can be said seems to be a universal condition of the maintenance of social cohesion. How societies differ is the topic of the taboo, and the mechanisms of enforcement. The tension we are currently seeing in the US is about what topics should stay or be moved into taboo, and what penalties should be levelled at the transgressors.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-10-04 06:35:20+00:00
>Very nice of them to have automatic time conversion to my local time when visiting the page.

F1 finally has a really nice system for showing time[0]. They show both the local time at the circuit and the local time wherever the user is. For years they showed only the track time, without even a hint about the timezone the track was in.

[0] https://www.formula1.com/en/racing/2025
by aidenn0 | 2025-10-04 06:36:58+00:00
While away, I thought of an example.

In baseball, the baserunners are allowed to advance to the next base at any time the ball is "in play" which includes when the pitcher (vaguely similar to bowler in cricket) is holding the ball.

When a baserunner tries to advance without the ball ever being hit, this is called a "steal."

When the baserunner and batter are coordinating so that the batter will try to hit the ball during a steal, this is called a "hit and run." The idea is that the infielders will be getting in position to get the runner out, so won't be in good position to play a ground-ball hit by the batter.

So consider a play where a batter strikes out, then the baserunner is thrown out trying to advance (a strike-out throw-out double play). If it's a swinging strike, that might be a failed hit and run, but if it's a strikeout looking, then it's almost certainly a failed attempt at a steal (with the minority of the time it being the batter missing the signal for a hit and run).

I should acknowledge that 2 strikes with fewer than 2 outs is not considered a good count to try a hit and run; unless a poor batsman is up next you are often better off having a fresh count with the next batter. On the other hand a hit and run is really only effective when it's a surprise.
by finaard | 2025-10-04 06:37:27+00:00
I'm running the same setup - our larger builders have 2 32-core epycs with 2TB RAM. We were doing that type of setup already almost two decades ago in a different company, and in that one for over a decade now - back then that was the only option for speed.

Nowadays nvmes might indeed be able to get close - but we'd probably need to still span over multiple SSDs (reducing the cost savings), and the developers there are incredible sensitive to build times. If a 5 minute build suddenly takes 30 seconds more we have some unhappy developers.

Another reason is that it'd eat SSDs like candy. Current enterprise SSDs have something like a 10000 TBW rating, which we'd exceed in the first month. So we'd either get cheap consumer SSDs and replace them every few days, or enterprise SSDs and replace them every few months - or stick with the RAM setup, which over the live of the build system will be cheaper than constantly buying SSDs.
by intothemild | 2025-10-04 06:37:27+00:00
As a very avid runner. The only reason I have Strava is because others have Strava. It is totally interchangeable with whatever someone comes up with next.

But my Garmin? that's a very expensive hardware choice that you have zero ability to change. And I wouldn't be the only one here.

Suunto, Coros and Polar just don't compare. Garmin has really tried pushing a few features into its Fenix line that long distance runners like myself don't care about.. and Coros have been very aggressive with trying to lure us to them.

But once again... It's a very expensive hardware choice that I make once every 5-10 years.

It would be if a social media app decided to stop making an app on either iPhone or Android.

People won't just swap hardware to use software. We would swap software.
by nine_k | 2025-10-04 06:37:46+00:00
Inkjet printer makers sell printers way below cost of production, making the money on the ink.

There will always be enough people who would buy a $129 printer and postpone the reckoning in ink, instead of buying a $329 printer that can print reams using cheap bulk ink.

(Laser printers are superior anyway, unless you print photos.)
by ruszki | 2025-10-04 06:37:59+00:00
It’s definitely not that simple. It’s totally random. I have only European debit cards, and I can pay everywhere. The same was true with my cards from other countries. Sometimes only Apple Pay/other NFC based system worked for some reason, which is connected to the same cards, when on the same airline I could pay with my physical cards in any other instances. Sometimes I can pay only with my physical cards. Sometimes one of my card doesn’t work. However, I didn’t have problems with them in the US in the past few years. It was more complicated over there before COVID.
by stevage | 2025-10-04 06:38:33+00:00
I guess we are just in very different professional circles. I've worked with dozens of teams over the last 10 years or so, and I've never come across anyone that self-hosts a repository. The vast majority use Github, and there's been a couple of Bitbuckets, and a couple of GitLabs. That's it.

Prior to that there were a few Subversions, a Perforce, MS's thing (TFS?).
by jkaplowitz | 2025-10-04 06:39:54+00:00
> If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the law force you to return it?

The general answer to that is: it depends on a lot of factors, but sometimes yes and sometimes no. The specific answer varies between jurisdictions, I think even between different US states and certainly between countries. It's often relevant whether you knew or should reasonably have known at the time of purchase that the property was stolen.
by dgrin91 | 2025-10-04 06:41:16+00:00
Was the falcon 9 that much faster? They also had issues with the initial launches of falcon 1 and 9. Plus they did not start with reusable rockets like they are here - it took years and many landing failures to get there. And of course the scale is a totally separate ballpark - falcon was in a scale that was well known, starship is in a scale rarely worked with.

Probably the closest comparable rocket to starship would be the N1, and that never successfully flew
by ternaryoperator | 2025-10-04 06:41:54+00:00
Sorry for the delay in replying.

We want to complete the interpreter and then decide what to do moving forward. The two principal options (and both might be followed) are 1) performance and 2) a separate UI that connects to Jacobin via Websocket or other protocol and enables display/observation of JVM instructions as they're being executed (and of course many of the other observable events).

The biggest hurdle we've faced is the vast number of native methods called by the HotSpot JVM, which need to be reproduced in go for a go-only JVM. I think we've spent as much time working on the native methods in the various libraries as we have on the JVM proper. By our analysis, the JVM calls a total of 1800 native methods. Many won't be needed by us b/c we use go's garbage collector and we don't implement the security manager (which Oracle is deprecating)--but that still leaves quite a few.
by kiba | 2025-10-04 06:42:00+00:00
I am not even a rocket scientist but I heard starship was described as a ridiculously hard and super ambitious program. So it's not unexpected that it would take a while for the program to mature.

Falcon 9 was SpaceX's second rocket, but it also underwent several major changes before it becomes the workhorse that launches more than the rest of the world combined.

Again, I have no idea what the difficulties actually entails.
How/what to track on a complex .NET application
by regular8901 | 2025-10-04 06:43:04+00:00
We have a very complex .NET application, it is quite old project - our goal is to improve CI/CD processes and we need some data. What would you track to see how users use the app and how could we utilize this data? I am thinking it could show us where to implement automated tests with highest priority, etc. Does anyone have any experience?
by catears | 2025-10-04 06:43:28+00:00
To add some more context to your comment. One of the big attacks was in 2021 with the Kaseya ransomware attack that caused one of the larger grocers (coop) to essentially be unable to operate. Made national news as they had to give away product for free in some places.

source in swedish: https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/aPrJWL/hackergruppen...

And yes, we use cash so seldom that most people cannot from memory recall what the bills/coins look like!
by bigyabai | 2025-10-04 06:44:54+00:00
Well, this article is deleted now. Rightfully so; it's genuine nonsense.

If you too are dumbfounded by the afforementioned bowlslop, then inquire here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250920070942/https://unherd.co...

Unherd is maybe one of the only publications with bad enough editing to rival Buzzfeed...
by timschmidt | 2025-10-04 06:45:21+00:00
It seems like you might have missed a few words in this comment, I'm honestly having trouble parsing it to figure out what you're trying to say.

Just for fun, I kicked off a cold build of Bevy, the largest Rust project in my working folder at the moment, which has 830 dependencies, and that took 1m 23s. A second hot build took 0.22s. Since I only have to do the cold build once, right after cloning the repository which takes just as long, that seems pretty great to me.

Are you telling me that you need faster build times than 0.22s on projects with more than 800 dependencies?