MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahirbmirza | 2025-10-05 10:16:38+00:00
Whatapp and other chatapps are popular because they are instant and have overcome the initial adaption issues that arrise with new messaging platforms. The interface of email its backend is too dated for instant chat messaging. Why were the MSN and yahoo messenger apps so popular in the early days of the internet? They were an evolution of written communication methods. Unfortunately, email is just a legacy product that no one wants to improve. So we all have to end up working around its limitations.

As much as I want to create a non-meta alternative to Whatsapp or a better email infrastructure, there is no compelling enough differentiator for most users. Just look at the privacy benefits of Signal, yet, people don't care. Just look at the aesthetic benefits of iMessage, yet people don't care. They just want an easy to use and responsive cross platform method of communication.

A good solution is a unified messaging app, able to combine all platform's messaging, but these often become defunct because of API issues or T&C breeched.
by tkgally | 2025-10-05 10:16:43+00:00
The main reason I prefer email over messaging is that it allows me to correspond with the widest range of people. I work in academia and publishing and have various personal interests, and I want to be able to interact with people in many countries and walks of life. There is no single messaging service that would make that possible.

Also, I want people to be able to contact me unsolicited. Many interesting jobs and opportunities have come my way over the years because someone I didn’t know reached out to me by email.

I do wish that email was standardized with better formatting conventions, though.
by OskarS | 2025-10-05 10:18:08+00:00
Yeah, I do this on occassion as well, but I aleays try the Swedish retailers first, and only go to Amazon when I can’t find whatever I’m looking for. It’s pretty rare I have to go to Amazon.

It’s rough, because you know that it will probably be cheaper and delivered faster from Amazon, at the moment it is probably the most consumer friendly place to buy. But you know once the honeymoom is over and all the Swedish retailers are gone, it’s just going to devolve to garbage. Support your non-Amazon retailers!
by wrf | 2025-10-05 10:18:12+00:00
Interesting comment. Do you have more information about this please:

> The industry-wide standards for character design, costume design, theming, even mechanics are all set based on these guidelines, which have evolved into ironclad requirements. You will not get funding for your game, nor support or approval from the major platforms (particularly consoles) without complying with these guidelines.

I don't personally play video games but have noticed a lot of disgruntled discourse around things such as "Body Type 1" and "Body Type 2" in lieu of "Male" and "Female" being implemented in new releases. Is that as a result of these guidelines?
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-05 10:19:16+00:00
Nobody suggested it was easy. We were just arguing against your claim that it’s impossible

Saying something is possible isn’t the same as saying something is easy.

If you were to have said “it’s a different problem to solve because of…” then you wouldn’t have had any pushback. But you didn’t. You said it “this is not possible”. And that’s the part that people were disputing.
by Pamar | 2025-10-05 10:20:00+00:00
I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.

The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.

In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.
by Theodores | 2025-10-05 10:20:12+00:00
> nobody knows how to write emails anymore

I think the problem is bigger than that, nobody knows how to write anymore. In the past, people wrote in handwriting ('cursive' in America) on plain paper (with no guide lines) and with a fountain pen. We didn't keep what they put in the bin, so there is some survivor bias, however, when I look at letters my ancestors wrote, I am amazed at how few corrections there are.

As I understand it, we have two thinking modes, there is the quick thinking by reaction and then there is the more convoluted 'slow' thinking where we use logic and reason. I am not convinced that too many of us have the skill of putting 'slow thinking' into written words, or the desire to put complicated ideas to paper.

So, what changed?

SMS and Twitter did have a text limit of 140 characters. This was not good if you need 140 characters just to introduce what you have to say, however, it didn't take long for people to adjust. Spelling was no longer important, neither was punctuation or sentence structure.

Soon this 'communication with grunts' replaced eloquence, and we degraded our collective literacy. Nowadays you can't write beautiful emails to people as it is a bit of an imposition, you have spent maybe hours crafting words, they only have seconds to respond due to the all-pervasive 'busy lives' excuse, and they definitely don't have the ten minutes it takes to read your carefully written words. Hence, writing in full just means you get ghosted at best.

Clearly there are more books being written than ever. School assignments also get done, same with work-related documents. However, the craft of writing has become even more professionalised, even though everyone can open some type of word processor, pick up a dictionary and write something awesome without having to get the old fountain pen out.

As for the post, what if I was the son of the author, and I had to tidy up his affairs after some tragic accident? All of those emails would be gone, lost to posterity and only the emails from the bank read (because money). All of that obsession on having every email organised for the last four decades would be for nothing, outside of the mind of the author.
by pcodesdev | 2025-10-05 10:20:20+00:00
After dealing with yet another AI tool malfunction at work, I investigated why so many companies are quietly regretting their AI investments.

Key findings: - The "hallucination tax" - employees spending more time fixing AI errors than they saved - 55% of companies regret replacing humans with AI - Major providers spending $40B/year, generating $20B in revenue - Striking parallels to dot-com bubble economics

The core issue: current LLMs don't know what they don't know. They're prediction engines, not knowledge systems. This works great for creative tasks but fails in high-stakes, accuracy-dependent applications.

Happy to discuss the research and answer questions.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-05 10:21:07+00:00
The important distinction between gambling and options is that there are many additional information sources available to bias the outcome.

Options are a Bayesian game. Jane Street is much more likely to win than I am, but there are still rare cases where I could come out ahead with very high certainty (I know something they don't).

Card counting and being escorted out of the casino aside, there aren't any ways to acquire private information in a gambling context.
by pcodesdev | 2025-10-05 10:21:15+00:00
After dealing with yet another AI tool malfunction at work, I investigated why so many companies are quietly regretting their AI investments.

Key findings: - The "hallucination tax" phenomenon where employees spend more time fixing AI errors than they saved - 55% of companies regret replacing humans with AI - Major providers spending $40B/year, generating $20B - Striking parallels to dot-com bubble economics

The core issue is that current LLMs don't know what they don't know - they're prediction engines, not knowledge systems. This works great for creative tasks but fails catastrophically in high-stakes, accuracy-dependent applications.

Happy to discuss the research and answer questions about the economics, technical challenges, or potential solutions.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 10:21:48+00:00
> Relatedly, having a long term archival might come as a bit creepy, even. In apps this happens too, but at least I can say something extremely controversial and delete it for both people a couple minutes later. Or send a "view once" mesage.

I agree but in practice Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc are quite long term already. I can easily look up my chats from 15+ years ago on Fb.

But there is indeed a cultural unease, and it relates to the other top h post about social cooling. As you said, people want an online equivalent of phone calls and in person discussion. It's creepy and in some places even illegal to record phone calls or live conversations.

On the other hand, written letters used to be private but meant for archival. Many people inherit a big box of neatly organized letters received from friends and family when grandma etc die.

Email is a bit more letter-like in this.

But these norms are in flux and especially for different generations the intuition can be different.
by flntzr | 2025-10-05 10:22:06+00:00
I wasn't aware that plane windows create this much drag. If the reported 60% fuel reduction (on small jets) yields similar results on commercial planes, I wonder how much more viable electric planes will become.

As usual with new tech these days, there's a caveat near the end of the article: "[...] it’s “possible” they could even display airline safety videos, in-flight entertainment (like movies and shows), or advertisements".

Ads aren't something that private jet owners will be concerned about, but if you've ever been on a Ryanair flight, you know they will pull every stop to make the experience as terrible as possible to extract a couple more cents out of you.
by 1659447091 | 2025-10-05 10:23:02+00:00
The post of your I replied to with the source says

> Sure, we could get into a discussion on the morality of gambling itself, but if we look at pretty much every global ethical tradition (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) it is frowned upon strongly.

Yes, that was how it reads to me, that gambling itself is frowned on; based on the post that reply was for where they stated "I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral." and that the problem is addiction and money. And I also agree with that. But gambling is gambling and while no part of it is immoral to me (I hold higher standards for that word), there are major issues with it due to greed.

Which is what your souce is saying Christians have a problem with, not it being widespread or happening at all -- simply the trying to get rich, the addiction to money -- thats the sin. Not gambling, gambling is fine; it's when it turn into a money issue, then there is a problem. And that can happen at your local bingo parlour or Macau, or Vegas or the back-room of a gas station or your buddy's poker game. The Christian bible/church have an issue when greed happens, not gambling (widespread or not).
by jstimpfle | 2025-10-05 10:23:50+00:00
Even if you just go for big-O, don't forget that a resizable array won't give you even amortized O(1) delete in many cases. This alone is likely prohibitive unless you can bound the elements in the container to a small number.

And if you're trying to trade away good big-O for better cache locality, don't forget that in many cases, you're dealing with stateful objects that need to be put into the list. That means you likely need to have a list or queue of pointers to these objects. And no matter how flat or cache-friendly the queue is, adding this indirection is similarly cache-unfriendly whenever you have to actually access the state inside the container.
by latchup | 2025-10-05 10:23:57+00:00
> If a company is so broken that promotions are decided based on factually incorrect information, there's nothing to do other than escape to a different company.

To me, this means that every traditionally run company (top-down) must be broken by construction. And indeed, I have never seen or heard of truly fact-based management.

The entire challenge with multi-level management is that you always play a long game of telephone with increasingly less technical people, which are unable (due to lack of time and understanding) to grasp the ground-truth facts without simplification. Thus, management based on hard facts is impossible in this setting, though it is a great theoretical ideal many aspire to.

In practice, doing so is very hard and people are lazy, so the "facts" can become so twisted as to be entirely unrecognizable.
by debugnik | 2025-10-05 10:24:30+00:00
References and lifetimes are where Rust wins over Ada, although I agree that Ada has many other great type features.

Access types are unable to express ownership transfer without SPARK (and a sufficiently recent release of gnatprove), and without it the rules for accessibility checks are so complex they're being revamped entirely. And access types can only express lifetimes through lexical scope, which combined with the lack of first-class packages (a la OCaml) means library code just can't define access types with reasonable lifetimes.

Also, I appreciate that Rust is memory safe by default and without toying with a dozen pragmas. Ada needs a profile that guarantees that code can't be the source of erroneous execution and constrains bounded errors further.
by maccard | 2025-10-05 10:24:42+00:00
It’s obviously way more nuanced than 2/3/5 lines of text on both sides but;

It’s not about speculating vs achieving what I’ve assigned them. It’s an over simplified example but if an engineer has two tasks to be completed that are dependent, it’s poor engineering for task A have to be re-done for task B to work (imagine an API that has ambiguity in the definition of done). A good engineer thinks just a little bit farther ahead.

At a staff+ level, 8: expect them to not only consider that but to consider “how likely is it what I’m going to have to re do this work” and scope accordingly, or to come to me and say “hey, every feature we add to service Alpha, we end up having to do XYZ to it, but with Beta we don’t”. They spend 10x more time than me writing code so they know that better than I do.

My team know my priorities, know what I value and know the areas I’m keeping an eye on. If one person is continually going on unhelpful tangents then that’s a single person issue to be handled with them directly.

YMMV with team sizes, team maturity, and where you are with your product dev.
by keiferski | 2025-10-05 10:24:46+00:00
I’ve always thought email needs a new “view mode” that somehow imports the email structure without actually using a separate program like Slack. Something like an expanded workflow view that shows emails as a series of separate nodes flowing in one direction.

The key point being that this is not a separate program, but a different way to view the data already inside emails.

I’m just brainstorming here so apologies if this doesn’t make much sense.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-10-05 10:24:48+00:00
Well, if you understand that this is a "genuine problem" then what have you done to solve it? A quick look at the abstract of your follow up paper does not reveal an answer.

And let me be clear that this is a major limitation that fundamentally breaks whatever you are trying to achieve. You start with some LLM-generated text that is, by construction, unrelated to any notion of truth or factuality, and you push it through a verifier. Now you are verifying hot air.

It's like research into the efficacy of homeopathic medicine and there's a lot of that indeed, very carefully performed and with great attention to detail. Except all of that research is trying to prove whether doing nothing at all (i.e. homeopathy) has some kind of measurable effect or not. Obviously the answer is not. So what can change that? Only making homeopathy do something instead of nothing. But that's impossible, because homeopathy is, by construction, doing nothing.

It's the same thing with LLMs. Unless you find a way to make an LLM that can generate text that is conditioned on some measure of factuality, then you can verify the output all you like, the whole thing will remain meaningless.
by dubeye | 2025-10-05 10:27:56+00:00
My reason for using Amazon has changed over the years it used to be for the good returns but now my situation is such that I’ve no interest in taking the time to use the return service. And I use the service for the quick delivery of small items that I can write off if I don’t like and it works for that fine on the occasion I have returned stuff. It’s never been an issue. I suspect that some of the posters on here have passed some kind of returns threshold which impacts their experience.
by OtomotO | 2025-10-05 10:28:11+00:00
I am paid to work in Java and C# among Go, Rust, Kotlin, Scala and I wholeheartedly agree.

I hate the implicitness of Spring Boot, Quarkus etc. as much as the one in C# projects.

All these magic annotations that save you a few lines of code until they don't, because you get runtime errors due to incompatible annotations.

And then it takes digging through pages of docs or even reporting bugs on repos instead of just fixing a few explicit lines.

Explicitness and Verbosity are orthogonal concepts mostly!
by LiamPowell | 2025-10-05 10:28:33+00:00
This is something I was surprised to see when trying to get some passwords out of Firefox a while ago and I'm curious what others think about it.

Other browsers such as Chrome store an encryption key in the system keychain so it can not be stolen at rest, but Firefox stores it in a plain text file next the the encrypted database, which seemingly defeats the purpose of having an encrypted database.
by imtringued | 2025-10-05 10:29:15+00:00
Whenever I see code like this, I'm starting to think that GPUs are uniquely unsuited for matrix multiplication.

You're pretending that each streaming multiprocessor can handle independent threads, when in reality you're feeding something that only exists once or twice per SM. It's like independently controlling one out of 32 cars on a 32 lane highway where the cars aren't allowed to switch lanes and having the controls on one car replicated to all the others when in reality everyone is sitting in the same bus.
by louwrentius | 2025-10-05 10:29:35+00:00
It’s always fun to see how people build their home labs but I went exactly the opposite route.

I focused on energy consumption, because of cost and - gasp - wanting to be mindful about it given the current predicament.

Anything that needs to be on 24/7 is on a Pi, and anything that consumes more power is turned off by default (remote poweron possible).

For me at home there is zero need for redundancy and I use a cluster of four tini-mini-micro 1L PCs for my lab work. There are also turned off by default and are also low-power.
by lou1306 | 2025-10-05 10:30:14+00:00
Did not know Patreon's tech was lock-in. I subscribe to a podcast on Spotify and they give you a private URL that you can feed to any app. If you are worried about malicious customers sharing the URL you may likely enable some form of rate limiting (e.g. the server may only serve up to x MiB/month on this URL)
by maccard | 2025-10-05 10:32:11+00:00
> if you go off-piste you should have some confidence it’ll work

Just remember that the definition of “working” is in the eyes of your manager. Assuming they’re competent and not pointy haired boss, then they might have different goals and priorities to you. I’d you end up diverging from them, even if what you did is technically good and a good fit for the project, you’ll probably have a bad time.
by cesaref | 2025-10-05 10:33:19+00:00
I think the point is that the API doesn't specify that the returned integers are positive, or are monotonically increasing, then it's fine for the service to return any unique integer.

If a client application makes an assumption about this, then their engineers will accept this as being their bad and will fix it.

I'd defend this as being pragmatic - minimising disruption to clients instead of the more 'correct' solution of changing the API. I'm hoping that they managed to roll out the new API update alongside the old one and avoid a 'big bang' API change with this. Sometimes this isn't possible, but it's great when that works out.
by aduty | 2025-10-05 10:33:24+00:00
If you have a workplace (not just a manager or even a set of them but an entire organization or subset thereof) that is allergic to punishing people then it's easier and less headache inducing to just tell everyone to use a particular framework with a set of customizations to maintain some semblance of unity. This is true if large teams and small "teams" that are overburdened with lots of disparate projects.

Should they be allergic to punishing people? No, but it be how it do.
by necovek | 2025-10-05 10:33:25+00:00
I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots.

If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously).

Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help get Trump into power twice?
Show HN: ZeroDistraction – A Firefox extension that blocks distracting websites
by jsattler | 2025-10-05 10:33:51+00:00
I built a Firefox extension to block distracting websites. Similar to LeechBlockNG, but simpler. I wanted something to get started with zero configuration, which was the main reason to build the extension. Let me know if you like it or if there is anything you are missing.
by Hendrikto | 2025-10-05 10:34:46+00:00
> After all, Linus would never break userspace right?

It was marked experimental. No promises were made.

> It's not at all clear to me what really happened to make all the drama. A PR was made that contained something that was more feature-like than bugfix-like, and that resulted in a whole module being ejected from the kernel?

If you followed the whole saga, Kent had a history of being technically excellent but absolutely impossible to work with.

He did not follow the kernel development process over and over again, instead choosing to post long rants and personal attacks to the mailing lists. Instead of accepting that he has to adapt, he always had (still has) the attitude that he knows best, everybody else are idiots and should just accept his better judgement. Of course the rules should apply… to anyone but him, because his work is special.

Moreover, this was not a one PR thing. Linus actually had a long history of defending Kent, being patient, bending the rules, and generally putting up with him.

This is unambiguously 100% Kent’s fault, which is very sad, because — as mentioned before — Kent’s work is technically excellent. He had a lot of good will that he squandered in spectacular fashion.
by pydry | 2025-10-05 10:35:21+00:00
The problem isnt technical feasibility it is market incentives.

Most companies have no incentive to let you hold your data when they can just hold it for you.

If they do this they can mine it for data to improve their product as well as sell or otherwise indirectly profit from it. And, it's easier.

Also, while the market for privacy focused products isnt nothing, the number of people willing to pay a lot extra to compensate for the missed opportunities companies get by collecting your data is, i think, smaller than many people imagine. Which is sad.

I think the only way it will grow to an appreciable size is by seeing up close and personal what a really vicious stasi-like secret police does with dragnet surveillance and come out the other side, with scars. I believe we've only seen a small taste of this.