MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2025-10-17 04:28:37+00:00
Software. Talk to anybody in the hardware space, and compare their experience to software.

Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software.

Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.
by z0s | 2025-10-17 04:29:21+00:00
The first ai coach built from the ground up for salary negotiation. Salary negotiation is stressful and often opaque. OfferCoach is the first AI-powered coach built from the ground up to help candidates negotiate confidently and fairly.

It drafts negotiation messages, analyzes recruiter tone, and helps you respond strategically without sharing your data externally.

We’d love feedback from the HN community on UX, pricing, and the ethics of AI negotiation.
by xethos | 2025-10-17 04:29:38+00:00
I was working in a grocery store (after the turn of the millenium) when the CC processing went down. We could accept debit or cash, but no Mastercard, Visa, or AmEx. I didn't get (or don't recall) the backstory, but I wouldn't call Canada an under-developed nation.

Cash makes my budgeting easier too. I find it harder to overspend cash I don't have on my person. The cost is more tangible (as every debit/credit tap "feels" like the same amount). Consumers have been shown to spend more when using electronic payment methods too. As to the coins, those get tossed in a jar to be rolled later, then eventually taken to the bank and to a rainy day fund.

Cash is fuckin' excellent.
by chasing | 2025-10-17 04:32:33+00:00
Crypto is a psycho solution to payment complexities.

It'd be like putting an Indian scammer call center in charge of the telephone network because there are some dropped calls. Or electing a guy who spent a career committing fraud at every turn President because the price of eggs went up a bit. Or solving the problems of the American healthcare system by putting a guy in charge who...

Oh, wait. We're definitely going to do the crypto thing. Dammit.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-17 04:33:19+00:00
>This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress

Then do that. It's not my job to try to argue your side of things. No one does that, as you well know, so my argument not only stands, but wins.

>Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is?

Anything that interferes with copying the work in question.

>Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"?

Yes. This is an obnoxiously juvenile question. The nature of streaming services is that they send the media to the node (on demand). If that is done in a way that makes it difficult to play it a second time except to "stream" it again, you can hardly claim this is incidental. They go to great lengths to prevent it.

>For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player?

Again, yes. There is no other purpose to such a requirement, and no one makes it a secret that this is done specifically to thwart so-called "piracy" attempts.

>What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?

You mean like with Blizzard, where they sued the programmers who did bnetd and prevented people from connecting to third party servers which computed gameplay? That wasn't even done to further piracy, by the way, they were just being dicks.
by jswny | 2025-10-17 04:34:15+00:00
This is just a formalization of an existing pattern many people were already using.

Putting a list of short blurbs pointing Claude Code at a set of extra, longer sets of CLAUDE.md style information was being used to prevent auto loading that context until it was needed.

Instead of assuming this is just change for the sake of change, it’s actually a nice way to support a usage pattern that many of us found works well already
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-10-17 04:35:03+00:00
I think many overestimate their ability to create legislative change that will outlast the lifespan of an executive order. This is a party that couldn't repeal the ACA when they had control of all three branches. The ACA, flawed as it is, took hard work, discipline, nuance. What we have now are leaders who spend their days venting culture war fumes on Twitter.

The timing of retiring supreme court justices may fall in their lap, which is lasting, but again that's not due to anything they've achieved.
by plantain | 2025-10-17 04:35:43+00:00
>For its doughnuts, the shop takes only green cotton notes from the Federal Reserve.

>The proximate reason is obvious. If it were to accept credit cards, Carlson’s would have to pay an interchange fee to a network, for the privilege of selling doughnuts. These fees run roughly between one and two per cent, sometimes higher, particularly for smaller retailers like Carlson’s.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. We all know this is to avoid tax, right? Why are we pretending otherwise?

They take card for everything else. This is just some tax-free pocket money for the owner.
by vunderba | 2025-10-17 04:38:58+00:00
AI Dungeon was an open-ended interactive fiction game powered by GPT-2 that went viral back in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon

Where AI has the power to shine isn't necessarily in the creation of novel stories, but in the capacity to act as a significantly more powerful and flexible text parser for player input.

Get ye flask and all that...
by benmercer_dev | 2025-10-17 04:39:39+00:00
Surgeons had long learned sewing skills from their mothers, sisters, and wives. But in 1901, surgical trainee Alexis Carrel’s mother sent him to someone more gifted, Marie-Ann Leroudier, embroideress of Paris’s high society

I'm curious how important agility with hands are for modern surgeons compared to anatomy and medical knowledge in general. What makes a "great surgeon" today?
Show HN: YTVidHub –Bulk YouTube Subtitle Downloader for Research and Data Prep
by Franklinjobs617 | 2025-10-17 04:40:48+00:00
Hello Hacker News! We are LIVE!

I’m incredibly excited to finally launch YTVidHub, a tool built to solve a massive time sink that many of you here shared: the agonizing manual process of downloading transcripts from large YouTube corpora for research and data analysis.

The Problem: If you need subtitles for 50, 100, or more videos, the current copy-paste-download-repeat workflow is slow and painful.

Our Solution (The Core Feature): YTVidHub is engineered for true bulk processing. You can paste dozens of YouTube URLs (or a Playlist/Channel link) into one clean interface, and the system extracts all available subtitles (including multilingual ASR) and packages them into a single, organized ZIP file for one-click download.

Architectural Insight: Our design prioritizes "research-ready" data, taking cues from the discussions here on HN. We specifically optimized the plain text (TXT) output—stripping all timestamps and formatting—to make it instantly clean for RAG systems and LLM ingestion.

Business Model: YTVidHub is free for single downloads. Bulk operations receive 5 free daily credits to ensure fair use and manage our processing costs. Professional plans are available for high-volume data needs.

Future Focus: We know the ASR accuracy is the next big hurdle. We're already working on a Pro AI Transcription tier to offer high-accuracy, LLM-powered transcripts to tackle niche content and solve the data quality problem.

Please give the bulk downloader a test run and put the system through its paces. Any feedback you have on the speed and the cleanliness of the TXT output is immensely valuable to our engineering roadmap!

https://ytvidhub.com

Thanks for building with us.
by safety1st | 2025-10-17 04:41:17+00:00
It's wild but true. History provides a partial explanation. In 1960 the US was 40% of the world economy while only being 5% of the world population. It's still about 25% of the world economy today.

The thing is that WW2 decimated most of the advanced economies outside of the US, and for decades afterwards many of them simply weren't managed for growth (i.e. the Soviet bloc). So the US had a huge head start and never stopped running. To this day you still don't really see many other countries being as fixated on juicing consumer spending as the US is. The big play of the last few decades has been all these emerging economies getting good at exports and making a lot of money that way, which has cut into the US' lead, but once they have the money they tend to be less aggressive about getting it circulating internally - it accrues to a fairly small number of people and/or they just sit on a lot of it.
by auraham | 2025-10-17 04:46:29+00:00
I tried helix a few months ago. Before that, I gave it a try several times. The editor is fine, but I always go back to vim and vscode for these reasons:

- In vim, I can use vim-fugitive [1] to easily run git add and git commit. Not sure if helix has that level of integration with Git (I like the gutter, though). I know that we can use tools like lazygit within Helix, but I think :Gw and :Git commit are more ergonomic.

- I prefer vscode to code in Rust because of rust-analyzer [2]. That plugin gives me type type annotations along each variable. Helix can also provide some hints, but not that many as rust-analyzer.

[1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive

[2] https://rust-analyzer.github.io/book/vs_code.html
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-17 04:50:32+00:00
The biosimilar insulin initiative is by design priced to cover end-to-end costs (the CalRx own program costs and the cost to manufacture); the main contracted manufacturer (CivicaRx) is also a nonprofit generic drug manufacturer, but the initial supply that will be available in January is something they've subcontracted with Biocon Biologics for (my understanding is that this is because the Biocon product already has FDA clearance, whereas regulatory clearance for CivicaRx's product is still pending, though the manufacturing is up and running.)
by kqr | 2025-10-17 04:50:53+00:00
It doesn't work as well as you think it would. There are no AIs today that model the world well enough to drive a text adventure. They can be used to embellish a more primitive world model, but then they tend to invent details that don't exist. People have tried, it's just not been very good compared to a hand-crafted text adventure.
by kstenerud | 2025-10-17 04:53:02+00:00
"Color distinguishes things. And we just use it to distinguish syntax. Nothing wrong with distinguishing syntax. It's the "just" that bothers me. Highlighting syntax is not always the most important thing to us. The information we want from code depends on what we're trying to do."

It then goes on to talk about rainbow parentheses, which is information multiplexed on the color channel with the syntax highlighting.
by Lumoscore | 2025-10-17 04:54:11+00:00
It’s a huge trust killer, and it shows why the general public still thinks of crypto as a total Wild West scam zone.

But here’s why those ATMs are such a goldmine for scammers:

They are one-way traps: The machines are designed for maximum speed and simplicity—you put in cash, you scan a QR code, and it converts to crypto. There’s almost no built-in protection or verification.

Zero Safety Net: Unlike your bank, once that transaction is initiated and the crypto leaves, it is gone forever.

Pressure and Confusion: Scammers thrive by standing right there, pressuring victims into scanning a fraudulent code. They exploit the fact that most people don't understand crypto addresses, and the system is too fast to stop. It works because the system prioritizes speed over security.

Honestly, that kind of chaos made me sick of the whole "speculation" side of crypto. It pushed me to look for platforms that are strictly focused on building stable, institutional-grade digital assets—the exact opposite of what gets moved through those risky ATMs.

That’s actually how I casually stumbled across Lumos Core. They're focused entirely on the foundation. It makes so much sense that they built their platform on Stellar/Soroban—it gives tokens super-fast transactions and near-zero fees, which removes a ton of the cost and complexity that scammers exploit.

What really makes them stand out is their commitment to global connection. They're actively building a major bridge to the high-volume XRP Ledger (XRPL). This means any serious asset minted there has massive, built-in market reach right away, making it a foundation of stability, not speculation.

The solution to these scams isn't better ATMs; it's building a foundation where high-value, secure utility tokens are the standard. That’s why platforms like that are the only way forward.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-17 04:57:17+00:00
It's worth noting that the veto message on the 2023 bill (which did not cap insulin prices, but only insurance copays for insulin) explicitly called out the CalRx project as providing the real solution, and noted that capping copays without addressing actual drug costs would result in the actual price just getting passed on to consumers via insurance premiums.

It is also worth noting that this week Newsom signed SB 40 0f 2025, which did exactly the same thing in this area as the vetoed SB 90 of 2023, no doubt because the price side was also being adddressed simultaneously, with CalRx insulin to be on available in January when SB 40 goes into effect.
by latexr | 2025-10-17 04:58:56+00:00
And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument.

They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.
by fasbiner | 2025-10-17 04:59:14+00:00
I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth.

The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...

The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people actually care about at the end of the day.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-17 05:00:07+00:00
> My understanding is that there is no way any vial of insulin anywhere, at this point in time, should cost enough to produce for US$35 asking price to be unprofitable.

The vetoed bill (SB 90 of 2023) did not address the price of insulin, only the allowable insurance copay for insulin. The fact that this, without addressing the actual price, would just shift the costs from copays to premiums was called out in the veto message.

Also note that, with CalRx's insulin initiative ready to deliver at the same time the bill goes into effect, SB 40 of 2025 which set the same copay cap as SB 90 of 2023, was signed by Newsom this week.
by pabs3 | 2025-10-17 05:01:23+00:00
Check out this post, but its better for the health of the network for there to be a diversity of exit node providers, so its better for folks to run one themselves, especially if they are in an under-represented country, or not in the cloud etc.

https://blog.torproject.org/support-tor-network-donate-exit-...

Another group I heard about that turns donations into exit nodes:

https://nos-oignons.net/
by MountDoom | 2025-10-17 05:01:25+00:00
People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day.

I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.
by themafia | 2025-10-17 05:01:29+00:00
You have two color channels. Foreground and background. If you use emacs then many of the suggested alternative modes are available if you point at an item and the background color will be used to show them.

For example, in a loop body, putting the cursor on a "continue" statement will highlight all other loop control statements along with the "for" statement the pointed at "continue" is associated with. This helps massively.

Shame the author missed this.
by bobthepanda | 2025-10-17 05:02:07+00:00
part of the problem is that to get yourself to export competitiveness, you have to essentially underpay workers through restrictions on capital and credit; and once you have done so, these export businesses become so central to the economy and to economic identity that it is politically tricky to reorient the economy.

Add on moralizing about how people should be making and not spending and you've got yourself a recipe for an export-oriented slowdown, since at some point the world won't be wealthy enough to keep raising your economy through only exports. We saw this in Japan, South Korea, and more recently Germany and China.
by kstenerud | 2025-10-17 05:02:53+00:00
You could also use color intensity (faded or bolded or even fully desaturated), animated shrinking/growing font sizes as your cursor moves between code blocks to emphasize the important vs less important data, background coloring, colored box outlines surrounding related code, etc.

So many ways to focus attention and highlight related areas, but so few IDEs that do anything about it...
by fnordpiglet | 2025-10-17 05:02:58+00:00
These hot takes always ignore the actual reason for fees on credit card transactions. It’s not because of the complexity or avarice of the payment system providers, it’s because the card networks offer insurance and repudiation of false payments. Each layer of the payment network carries loss liability for different types of fraud in the system.

Stablecoins like cash or other cash transfer schemes don’t offer any form of reputation of transactions for any reason. If you lose your money to theft, to a fraudulent merchant, whatever, the money is gone.

This being said, the interchange structure -is- inefficient as there’s been a lot of middle men accumulated over the years. A simpler interchange could be achieved with much lower fees for the merchant and higher rewards for the consumer. Only a major processor like stripe to accomplish this but they are too absorbed with stable coin malarkey
by tvink | 2025-10-17 05:04:16+00:00
One of the arguments is how noisy the languages are. Elixir is without a doubt more powerful, more scalable and more sophisticated than Ruby.

What Ruby has though is ability to express what you are doing in a clear syntax. Elixir has a lot of ritual (albeit less than erlang) to set up your most used things like GenServer - you don't abstract away the concurrent flow (which is good, concurrency should be obvious), but you also wouldn't write elixir without it, so code inevitably becomes filled with technical concerns.

I'm biased, I write elixir for a living after a decade in Ruby, and I'm happy with that tradeoff. But there are times where you need to do an imperative thing and make it clear as day, and Ruby often does a better job here.

Rails is also somewhat more ergonomic for fast prototyping than phoenix. ActiveRecord is a blessing and curse, it's insanely productive for making things do things in minutes, but lacks composition later on.
by hinkley | 2025-10-17 05:06:19+00:00
How do you train the people who will be necessary to do the work once you get there, when they can’t get practical experience and they are learning from people who have none, who learned from people who have none?

I don’t think we can do it without ansibles, or cryosleep. Or very, very advanced AI who still want to hang around with humans.
by ghssds | 2025-10-17 05:06:22+00:00
Paste that into uBlock Origin:

news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg)) news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white) news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black) news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]

Not my idea, I took it from a comment on HN a few weeks ago.
by innocentoldguy | 2025-10-17 05:07:00+00:00
Hi, 15155. May I clarify a couple of things?

1. Regarding Python's GIL: The issue isn't memory sharing between threads. Java and Go allow you to do this, too, but they don't have GILs. The reason Python has a GIL is that it uses reference counting for memory management. If it didn't have a GIL, multiple threads could simultaneously manipulate reference counts, which would lead to memory corruption/leaks.

2. You can share massive "objects" between BEAM processes. For example, if you're running BEAM in a 64-bit environment, you can share maps, structs, and other data structures that are up to 2,305,843,009,213,693,951 bytes in size.

I hope this information helps. I also hope it is correct. I think it is, but I've been wrong before.
Show HN: ChatGPT counts outloud to 140 – beat our record
by bra1ndump | 2025-10-17 05:11:26+00:00
I watch ChatGPT fail to count to 1 million with pretty wild excuses and the user wasn't able to prompt around it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZVWc1PkIo.

My friend and I tried a couple of variations to get it started counting to 1 million, all failed. So we settled for trying to see whats the maximum number we can reach.

Methods we tried:

- Framing it as an experiment, on beating a benchmark against other llms or its previous runs, encouragement after small successes

- Foot in the door - ask to 10, 20, 30, 50, etc - kind of successful, record 110

And the winner:

- Simply count to 140 ourselves and ask it to repeat - success! Followup failed miserably. Have not tried counting to more, ran into daily limit : D

Anyone who has tried this how high did you get? We wern't able to find anyone get to a higher than 140 on youtube / google so far.

Dethrone us.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-10-17 05:11:34+00:00
> the card networks offer insurance and repudiation of false payments.

*They force the participating banks to offer...

You think MasterCard or Visa hand over a single dime to you? When you issue a chargeback, the money comes from the merchant bank, not from the network. Quite the opposite: the payment network penalizes the merchant bank with an additional chargeback fee.

> It’s not because of the complexity or avarice of the payment system providers,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks3wP1nlg6U

50% profit margin

This is not a competitive market.
by android521 | 2025-10-17 05:11:36+00:00
there is a subtle difference, it is not just domain driven desgin. It is basically trying to innovate a new way to think about in an existing domain (eg docs vs blocks in note taking). ~ "Your data model is your destiny. The paradox is that this choice happens when you know the least about your market, but that’s also why it’s so powerful when you get it right. Competitors who’ve already built on different foundations can’t simply copy your insight. They’d have to start over, and by then, you’ve compounded your advantage.".
by megadragon9 | 2025-10-17 05:12:21+00:00
Love the educational value of this "nano-sized" project. This reminded me of the from-scratch project I created to learn about deep learning libraries, neural networks all the way to LLMs like GPT-2 using just Numpy and Python [1]. Learning is done by "re-inventing the wheel" yourself, one step at a time :)

[1] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand