MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epaga | 2025-10-24 12:52:21+00:00
Hey HN - I'm John Goering - Java dev by day and indie app dev by night. :)

I've just started a public beta of Mindscope 2, a mind-mapping thought organizer app for iOS and macOS that’s been in my head for nearly 8 years, and I thought to celebrate, I'd post a Show HN.

The "spark" for this app came when I thought how cool a combination of Scapple's free-form layouting and Workflowy's focused hierarchy drilldown might be, especially if the primary goal was to keep things as simple, smooth, and fast as possible.

The first version of Mindscope was one of my earliest iOS apps, written in Objective-C. It worked well - MacStories reported positively on it - and it's been fun hearing from people over the years how much they've used it and love it, but as other projects grabbed my attention, it ended up on my back burner.

But for the last few years I’ve slowly been rebuilding it from scratch in SwiftUI, adding macOS and watchOS support, proper CloudKit sync, as well as features I had always wanted myself, like deep linking, reminders, long-form notes, OPML import and export, and lots more.

It’s a freemium app (all features included with 2 boards and 200 entries free) with a Pro subscription plan for unlimited notes and boards. During the beta, the Pro version is free, of course.

I would appreciate feedback or questions of any kind!

P.S. Here's the direct link to the TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/hKwsgjPX
by tyleo | 2025-10-24 12:52:40+00:00
I have a brand new Core i9-14900F in an Alienware Aurora R16. I also have a brand new M4 Max in a 16” MacBook Pro.

The M4 is ~40% faster on almost every test I’ve run (I’ll be sharing raw data in a blog soon). The M4 is faster on battery than the i9 is sucking juice from the outlet.

I feel like there are issues more fundamental than supply shortages. A wide gap has opened up in performance and an even wider gap in performance/power.

I’d like to know Intel’s answer to that.
by codeulike | 2025-10-24 12:52:57+00:00
CSCI 3240: Ignoring Hype

- How to ignore the latest platform/library/thing everyone is talking about on HN

CSCI 3120: Novelty Driven Development

- How to stay interested in your job by using the latest platform/library/thing everyone is talking about on HN even if it isn't actually necessary

NB: CSCI 3120 cannot be taken at the same time as CSCI 3240

PSYC 4870: Meeting Techniques

- mentioning problems before, during or after meetings - different techniques for different manager types

- small talk conventions in different cultures

- camera on or camera off - the modern split in corporate habits

PSYC 5630: Accepting Organisational Friction

- how to motivate yourself to write documentation that no-one will ever read

- managers are people too - understanding what makes someone think they want to be a manager

- Everything Will Take A Long Time And No-one Will Remember What Got Decided - working in large organisartions

- Cake and Stare - how to handle a leaving do
by kcplate | 2025-10-24 12:53:18+00:00
I’ll admit to owning one and I use it.

The charging port location is weird and stupid, but I have never needed to charge it while I am using it. When it hits about 15%, I plug it in at the EOD and don’t have to charge it again for maybe a month. I am a neat freak and you have to look hard to see any cable on my desk rig.

The multi touch stuff works fine for me, but perhaps I am just used to it.

The only complaint I have is the shape, it’s not “comfortable” to use. Easily addressed by a stupid 3D printed humpback add on that changes the aesthetic but makes it comfortable for me to use. I shouldn’t have to buy a mouse accessory…but I did.

Here is the thing though…it’s just a mouse. I point, I click, then I move my hand back to the keyboard. It’s fine. While I’m sure there is a better designed one out there, is any mouse truly revolutionary?
by ModernMech | 2025-10-24 12:53:45+00:00
That case was tried and adjudicated before a court of law, and Trump was convicted on the merits. Trump had the opportunity to argue that the prosecution was selective, vindictive, or otherwise unjust, and his arguments failed.

Obviously he's upset by this outcome, but even if you agree with him, his response has been to burn down the rule of law and the entire concept of justice. Even if you feel he was wronged by James, weaponizing the DOJ against James is not justified by "She started it".
by jaemo | 2025-10-24 12:53:58+00:00
Fair point—sleep and time-blocking are probably the highest-leverage interventions. I've been using pomodoro on and off but find I still need something to get into the focused state, especially on days when sleep wasn't great.

The caffeine question is interesting. For me it's less about needing stimulation and more about managing the side effects of what I'm already using (coffee). If I could get the alertness without the jitters/anxiety, that'd be the win. But you're right that fixing the root cause (sleep, focus discipline) is probably more sustainable long-term.

Curious—do you avoid caffeine entirely, or just use it strategically?
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-10-24 12:54:52+00:00
Let's be real for a moment. I just looked it up and found a playlist for the full Handmade Hero series which contains 696 videos. Adding up the total duration of the playlist gave me a time of 4726711 seconds, or 1313 hours.

Even for the most passionate of developers, you're gonna have a hard time getting someone to commit even a fraction of that time towards educational content.

If you think there are any specific videos from the Handmade Hero series that are really worth watching, you should recommend them directly. But pointing someone to 1300 hours of content is an absurd suggestion.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-24 12:55:42+00:00
> The AI flagged a bulge in his pants pocket

It's not totally clear -- we haven't seen the picture. The point is, it seemed to look like a gun. Shadows and reflections do funny things. For you to say with such confidence that this is absurd and bonkers, is itself absurd without us seeing the image(s) in question.

> It is frankly mind-boggling that you or anyone else can defend this crap.

That's not appropriate. Please see HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by g-b-r | 2025-10-24 12:56:35+00:00
The history of the development since its beginning can help a lot in studying the code, so I encourage people to avoid the single commit as much as possible.

It's much better to refactor (rebase) the messy commits, removing the personal or embarrassing stuff; although that might result in a "false" history, a series of smaller-sized commits will usually be much easier to follow than reading a whole code base all at once.

Really, I see a ton of open-source projects that do this, and it results in a lot of more opacity and friction than necessary.

It results in less people being able to check the code and contribute to the project.
by imchillyb | 2025-10-24 12:56:46+00:00
Building a business off of another’s business is risky. There is a non zero chance that the original business will take steps to manipulate, change, alter, or outright control the outcome. That’s what Valve did.

Tomorrow Valve could decide that the value of crates is too high so they drop the price of crates to a penny a piece. What would that do to this 3rd party market? Poof.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-24 12:57:08+00:00
Googled this:

>As of March 2025, the cost of residential solar energy in Australia averaged just AUD $0.90 (USD $0.59) per watt—less than a quarter of the U.S. average.

It's generally attributed to consistent sensible regulation which has created a competitive market and reduced any time wasting paperwork.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-24 12:57:34+00:00
It's not arrogant. Trump culture, and the subset of conservative US culture it grew out of, explicitly positions itself to be described in these terms. You don't have to be a mean or arrogant person to acknowledge that reality, unlike with most "normal" political parties.

It's also an opinion that doesn't require omniscience to hold. I don't know why that's the bar you've set. Yeah - of course nobody can really know what's best.
by Avamander | 2025-10-24 12:57:38+00:00
I enjoy the ability to do massive refactors and once it builds it works and does the expected. There are so few odd things happening, no unexpected runtime errors.

I've written probably tens of thousands of lines each in languages like C, C++, Python, Java and a few others. None other has been as misery-free. I admit I haven't written Haskell, but it still doesn't very approachable to me.

I can flash a microcontroller with new firmware and it won't magically start spewing out garbage on random occasions because the compiler omitted a nullptr check or that there's an off-by-one error in some odd place. None. Of. That. Shit.
by gryfft | 2025-10-24 12:57:40+00:00
> It is really, really hard for me to direct my monologue to everyday routine activities.

+1 to that, I would say it's virtually impossible for me, and I really entirely on nonverbal/muscle memory for said things, and that's the only reason I'm able to function at a "bathes and eats" level, much less gainful employment. It might not be neurologically accurate, but it sure feels like I have a verbal hemisphere and a nonverbal hemisphere.
by sotix | 2025-10-24 12:58:09+00:00
I recently bought an original iPhone SE in hopes of using a smaller device. But I can't use it for anything worthwhile because I can't sign into an Apple ID due to having encrypted backups on my account, which was introduced in iOS 16.2. The SE only supports 15.8.5. So I'd have to disable encrypted backups for all of my other devices in order to sign into my account.

Why am I unable to use Apple Music on my device while I can use it from a web browser or from an android phone that don't have encrypted iCloud backups enabled?

Unfortunately this also prevents me from jailbreaking the device because I have to sign into an Apple account in order to trust a developer certificate on the device required for the jailbreaking tool. It's my device! Let me approve of the certificate without an Apple ID!
by The_President | 2025-10-24 12:58:13+00:00
Your doubt in US intelligence and military capability shows. Venezuela attacking US assets would result in swift, almost instantaneous elimination of the threat.

The speed boats hauling ass in international waters are known smugglers on known routes using customized craft only drug smugglers use.

Policy of vaporizing these boats with weapons is both a) fairly effortless target practice for our military and b) puts major financial strain on that drug cartel operation.
by duxup | 2025-10-24 12:58:37+00:00
What amazes me is watching Delta specifically on several occasions their crew management system seems to be a huge weakness. Once it goes down it seems to heavily rely on crews calling in to note where they are and other status details.

It's like once it goes down all state is lost and for a long time, often days, crews describe having to call in and wait while they figure it out who does what / goes where.

I don't like to oversimplify, but it really seems like a solvable problem ...
by em-bee | 2025-10-24 12:59:39+00:00
Mould King and Cada do not have the same consistency of fit that LEGO does

that's simply not true. i have mould king bricks that are indistinguishable in quality from lego. and many other brands as well. i have been buying other brands in china and i haven't seen a difference in quality for about a decade or so. the last issue i remember reading about was that some factory produced bricks with varying tolerances depending on the season, because the factories were not climate controlled. and that story is already several years old.

so yes, you could have an old set from a bad charge. but the times where lego was guaranteed to be better are gone.
by georgehopkin | 2025-10-24 12:59:55+00:00
Nearly one in 10 news articles published by American newspapers contains artificial intelligence-generated text, with smaller local outlets far more likely to use AI than major publications, according to new research examining 186,000 articles.

The study by University of Maryland researchers and AI transparency firm Pangram found 9.1 per cent of news articles across 1,500 US newspapers contained partial or complete AI-generated content, with usage rarely disclosed to readers.
by dangus | 2025-10-24 13:00:05+00:00
In some fairness to them, getting your specific job is less important than avoiding a lawsuit from Apple’s rather aggressive legal department.

I definitely empathize with your perspective. Simultaneously, I can also see how it would be most ideally fair to candidates to have some method of evaluating them without relying on intimate details of recent job experience.

E.g., let’s pretend that Steve Wozniak took 5 years off to raise children, are you going to pass him up because he has no job experience from the last 5 years? You’d be well within your rights to, but as a hiring manager I want to choose the best candidate, not the candidate with the best resume.
by DannyBee | 2025-10-24 13:00:32+00:00
Of course they are freeloading - and users often suck - but your latter doesn't follow.

It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.

It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.

Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.

More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)

The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-10-24 13:00:45+00:00
Yanis Varoufakis is now writing and warning us about digital feudalism, seemingly based on his learnings at his Valve tenure.

Valve, as a digital feudalist, generates funds, practically for free, from both transactions of items and the lootboxes. It operates the markets on which digital goods are traded, taxes all sales occurring on these platforms.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-24 13:01:07+00:00
One of my most vivid memories from youth is of the accountant who pulled up to a computer store I was hanging out in and announced to the clerk:

>I want a Visicalc.

After explaining that he would need a computer to run it and that the guy did not yet own one, the clerk then proceeded to put together a purchase which was not quite one (or more! Dual-Disk Drive setup) of every Apple product in the store, incl. a 132 column printer and an 80 col. display.

After ringing it up (for which the guy wrote out a check), I was enlisted to help load things into his black Trans Am and he drove off into the sunset.

The thing which most clearly echoed that after was using Lotus Improv on a NeXT Cube --- these days, I either use Google Docs, or pyspread --- really wish Flexisheet would compile under GNUstep or that there was some nice, elegant, multi-dimensional spreadsheet option with a clear, easy-to-understand formula pane (which was the big advantage of Improv --- all formulae were gathered in one place).
by Neywiny | 2025-10-24 13:01:19+00:00
I guess I'm torn on it. I won't ever support people being unemployed from things they have passions for or can only earn a living that way or anything like that. I don't wish them any badness. But on the other hand, I don't care what IGN or these other media say about a game. Over the years their rating system has even become joked about. I evaluate for myself if a game looks fun based on YouTube videos. I don't care about rumors, journalist only demos, or stuff like that. So to me I'm not losing anything of value. But still reiterating that I wish them well
by taneq | 2025-10-24 13:01:44+00:00
Pro tip if you're trying to deal with any of these: Do it while it's cold. Do not (as I did the first time) gird your appendages in towels and other random shielding, then do it in the mid-afternoon when it's been warm for hours and they're prepped to go like fighter jets with warmed up engines. Get up first thing in the morning when it's crispy and you can just get a can of bug spray and coat each one as it comes out. Ethical? No. Effective? Yes. I believe those two might be at odds.
by Avamander | 2025-10-24 13:01:57+00:00
Man, if I had a nickel every time some old Linux utility ignored a command-line flag I'd have a lot of nickels. I'd have even more nickels if I got one each time some utility parsed command-line flags wrong.

I have automated a lot of things executing other utilities as a subprocess and it's absolutely crazy how many utilities handle CLI flags just seemingly correct, but not really.
by xpe | 2025-10-24 13:03:08+00:00
Unrelated to wasp eradication, but interesting, still:

Three Valuable Peptides from Bee and Wasp Venoms for Therapeutic and Biotechnological Use: Melittin, Apamin and Mastoparan [1]

BBC: Wasp venom 'a weapon against cancer' (2015) [2]

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8000949/

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34115112
by foobarian | 2025-10-24 13:03:22+00:00
Similar story, had a nest in the walls of a bay window bump. Too far up the side to spray effectively, but they had one weakness: there was a clear entrance spot. So I duct taped a pool vacuum hose next to it and ran it into the garage attached to a shop vac. Left it running for a day, problem solved. It was fun listening to the "ka-thunk" sound when each insect got sucked in. I think for next time I'll make some kind of detector based on audio to count the kills.
by micahkepe | 2025-10-24 13:03:41+00:00
I just published a deep dive on Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust, where he talks about the compiler-level backdoor he described in his 1984 Turing Award lecture that would let him login on compromised systems.

The post walks through how a compiler can teach itself to hide a Trojan that reproduces even after the source is “clean” and annotated snippets from Thompson’s actual code (shared by Russ Cox).

Would love feedback or corrections, especially from folks who’ve studied or implemented compiler bootstrapping or reproducible-build systems.
by pxc | 2025-10-24 13:04:23+00:00
The primary reason you yourself gave was a view of "immigration issues" that is detached from the reality that Democrats have continually increased funding for CBP and ICE and increased militarization of the border with every single presidency since and including Clinton.

At the same time, your belief is that failure to enact a nativist crackdown will result in "a civil war". I thought it went without saying, but this is a very extreme view, to say the least...

The connection between nativist policy advocacy and white supremacist ideology in the US isn't new. It goes back to the very notion of "illegal immigrant"; the politician who shepherded the bill that criminalized unauthorized entry to the United States was an open an enthusiastic white supremacist who pushed this bill forward to advance his white supremacy: https://immigrationhistory.org/item/undesirable-aliens-act-o...

At the same time, this relationship is not ancient history. Indeed, nativist sentiments and white supremacist ideology are still closely linked today. See, e.g.:

https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/150/2/40/98317/Immigrati...

> The correlation between immigration preferences and racial resentment was significant in every year. The steady correlation of 0.30 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was impressively strong by the standards of opinion data of this sort. The rise from 0.30 to 0.50 by 2018 indicates an uncommonly strong relationship. [...] [E]very measure we have indicates that Whites' views of immigration are closely tied to their views of race.

There are many, many similar correlations between nativist beliefs and policy support and "racial conservatism", white supremacist beliefs, and Trump support (including support of Trump's extreme immigration measures).

"Racist" is not currently a label that many people in the United States are willing to openly embrace, even to themselves. It's not surprising that actual or perceived accusations of racism are received with defensiveness. But individual (and nominal) disavowal of "racism" is frankly less compelling than the entire history and presently observable empirical reality of nativism in the United States.
by codingrightnow | 2025-10-24 13:05:03+00:00
True or not that the wealthy pay a greater share of their money in taxes, it doesn't matter. The money has to come from somewhere and the middle and lower classes can't afford it. Also the middle class can't pay more and continue buying the super wealthy's goods. We need to spend less and tax more. 1 trillion in interest per year is insane.
by gregoriol | 2025-10-24 13:05:23+00:00
It's not so much about security, as FOSS conversation groups would be open to anyone anyway, but it's not a good look for a project to use a tool that is known to be quite shady while there are FOSS tools, or simply tools with a better reputation. Also the project group seems to be french, not english-first-language, and Telegram is absolutely not well seen in France, not used by much more than a few percent
by echelon_musk | 2025-10-24 13:05:25+00:00
In true off-topic HN style...

I used hamstrung at work recently and I reflected that it is somewhat old fashioned English word. I asked a friend afterwards and they were unfamiliar with the term.

In doing investigation around the word, I discovered its origins are in the brutal history of the transatlantic slave trade, where captured runaway slaves would have their hamstrings severed to prevent them from ever running again.
by cjfd | 2025-10-24 13:08:01+00:00
Maybe history teaches us that planning and design do not work very well....

I think one of the problems is that if someone uses a word, one still does not know what it means. A person can say 'design patterns' and what he is actually doing is a very good use of them that really helps to clarify the code. Another person can say 'design patterns' and is busy creating an overengineered mess that is not applicable to the actual situation where the program is supposed to work.
by pseudony | 2025-10-24 13:08:07+00:00
Aside from there being no crises, rewriting a set of utilities with nearly no bug reports for years and for which no new features is needed accomplishes what exactly? Aside from new bugs, that is.

There surely would be a more beneficial undertaking somewhere else. If then you’d argue that they may do as they please with their time, fair, but then let’s not pretend this rewrite has any objective value aside from scratching personal itches and learning how cat and co are implemented.
by justonceokay | 2025-10-24 13:08:11+00:00
In philosophy of mind, there is the concept of a “zombie”. This is a person who acts just like a real person would in all circumstances, except that they do not have an internal experience of their senses. No “qualia”.

My little engineering brain has always recoiled at any use of these zombies in an argument. In my reckoning the only way a machine could act human in all circumstances would be if it had a rich internal representation of the world, including sensory data, goals, opinions, fears, weaknesses…

The LLMs are getting better at the Turing test, and as they get better I wonder how correct my intuition about zombies is.