MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dist-epoch | 2025-10-05 09:55:45+00:00
I asked because I noticed this strange cluster (for me) of people which want to ban some things like gambling or social media algorithms because they are exploitative and addictive, but who also want to legalize drugs. I had a feeling you might be in it.

Stranger, some of them want to ban/make it harder to distribute drugs "legally" through doctors (OxyContin, Sackler family scandal) because doctors might be monetarily incentivized, but then they also support complete drug legalization, including for the same drugs (fentanyl). This position is not even internally consistent, in this case fentanyl was "legalized" close to what they seem to demand, just gated by a doctor.

I don't have a clear position, but I don't think I would support legalization of "hard" drugs (anything above marijuana/MDMA). I can't see any positive, the negatives are clear, and it impacts the whole society (I will respect your freedom until it impinges on mine).

I am pro 2nd amendment, but I also believe the State should maintain it's monopoly on violence. Otherwise it's Mad Max world. The way the 2nd amendment is stated (prevent tirany) would not work anyway today, the military power of the State is vastly larger, the "militias" will never stand a chance against Police/Army/Cyber/... So I am pro guns just as far as personal protection requires (so no rocket launchers).
by eimrine | 2025-10-05 09:55:51+00:00
What can be more appealing than reading any of the greatest books ever? You can have unlimited number of them for free nowadays. You can dive really deep in anything. You can download, I don't know, all 114 books by Noam Chomsky for free, you can have hundreds of Math books, you can read such the books which make consuming information from media unneeded.

What can be more interesting than downloading 1Tb of books and just reading them every morning and evening?
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-05 09:56:11+00:00
I stopped buying anything significant from Amazon three years ago when I realised I was spending more time trying to understand where my packets allegedly delivered to a neighbour actually were than it would have taken me to just go buy the damn thing in a store. And that’s in Europe.

The research is also completely useless nowadays. 90% of what you find is just people reselling stuff they bought on AliExpress and reviews are all fake.
by andriesm | 2025-10-05 09:56:12+00:00
You're right, depending on what someone's position is. If someone full on HATES capitalism, then I don't think it's a strawman. But if someone is an average mixed economy guy, sure then it would be an unfair strawman I agree. Also it's a bit tongue in the cheek, because I got a bit tired seeing a lot of anti-capitalist rants here in HN comments that likely come from iPhone socialists typing this while living lives absolutely blessed by the fruits of capitalism. It's prettt easy to disagree about the amount of capitalism we want in our society, but to be anti-capitalist? Seems weird and hypocritical if you are a highly paid tech worker that uses most of his/her money for their own benefit, or otherwise personally acting very "capitalist" in your own life but wishing everyone else to act more socialist.
by poppobit | 2025-10-05 09:56:16+00:00
I said I clean up chats weekly, but honestly, I also delete small or casual ones right after they’re done. So the “weekly cleanup” takes maybe a minute total.

I think whether to keep chats depends on your goal. I use AI mainly as a tool for work or quick problem-solving, so I don’t need to preserve long conversations. But if someone uses AI more like a friendly companion, I totally get why they’d want to keep the history.

When I get a really good answer, I save that text elsewhere and still delete the chat. That’s why my ChatGPT sidebar rarely has more than about 20 chats.
by lemonlearnings | 2025-10-05 09:56:38+00:00
Dont fuck with electricity. I think the intuitions people have are based on home installations with RCDs, fuses and earthing and proper cabling before it gets to that socket. You then plug in a distribution to draw 100w for your devices and maybe the occasional 2kw for the vacuum cleaner for 5 minutes if too lazy to use another socket. Yoy not running full house load through it all day.
by olliem36 | 2025-10-05 09:57:41+00:00
I think the best way to explain this is to provide an example.

Scenario: A B2B fintech company processes chargebacks on behalf of merchants, this involves dozens of steps which depend on the type & history of the merchant, dispute cardholder. It also involves collection of evidence from the card holder.

There's a couple of key ways that LLMs make this different from manual workflows:

Firstly, the automation is built from a prompt. This is important as it means people who are non-technical and are not necessarily comfortable with non-code tools to pull data from multiple places into a sequence. This increases the adoption of automations as the effort to build & deploy them is lower. In this example, there was no automation in place despite the people who 'own' this process wanting to automate it. No doubt there's a number of reasons for this, one being they found todays workflow builders too hard to use.

Secondly, the collection of 'evidence' to counter a chargeback can be nuanced, which often requiring back and forth with people to explain what is needed and check the evidence is sufficient against a complicated set of guidelines. I'd say a manual submission form that guides people through evidence collection with hundreds of rules subject to the conditions of the dispute and the merchant could do this, but again, this is hard to build and deploy.

Lastly, LLMs monitors the success of the workflow once it's deployed, to help those who are responsible for it measure its impact and effectiveness.

The end result is that a business has successfully built and deployed an automation that they did not have before.

To answer your second question, dynamic routing describes the process of evaluating how complicated a prompt or task is, and then selecting an LLM that's 'best fit' to process it. For example, short & simple prompts should usually get routed to faster but less intelligent LLMs. This typically makes users happier as they get results more quickly. However, more complex prompts may require larger, slower and more intelligent LLMs and techniques such as 'reasoning'. The result will be slower to produce, but will be likely be far more accurate compared to a faster model. In the above example, a larger LLM with reasoning would probably be used.
by j-pb | 2025-10-05 10:00:59+00:00
If "any amount" means millions of concurrent connections maybe. But in reality we've build thread based concurrency, event loops and state machines for decades before automatic state machine creation from async code came along.

Async doesn't have access to anything that sync rust doesn't have access to, it just provides syntactic sugar for an opinionated way of working with it.

On the contrary, async is very incompatible with MMAP for example, because a page fault can pause the thread but will block the entire executor or executor thread.

I'd even argue that once you hit that scale you want more control than async offers, so it's only good at that middle ground where you have a lot of stuff, but you also don't really care enough to architect the thing properly.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-10-05 10:01:32+00:00
Well, in most .NET shops around me:

> The development and deployment tooling is so closely tied to VS that you can't really not use it.

Development tooling: It's 50-50. Some use Visual Studio, some use Rider. It's fine. The only drawback is that VS Live Share and the Jetbrains equivalent don't interoperate.

deployment tooling: There is deployment tooling tied to the IDE? No-one uses that, it seems like a poor idea. I see automated build/test/deploy pipelines in GitHib Actions, and in Octopus Deploy. TeamCity still gets used, I guess.

It's true though that the most common development OS is Windows by far (with Mac as second) and the most common deployment target by far is Linux.

However the fact that there is close to no friction in this dev vs deploy changeover means that the cross-platform stuff just works. At least for server-side things such as HTTP request and queue message processing. I know that the GUI toolkit story is more complex and difficult, but I don't have to deal with it at all so I don't have details or recommendations.
by keiferski | 2025-10-05 10:04:26+00:00
I think it’s fair to say that the Catholic opinion is very much against the type of widespread gambling that is prevalent today, especially in the sense of it having negative social effects.

I don’t think that is hypocritical, more just nuanced. Church bingos aren’t putting people into poverty.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06375b.htm

Your critique of my initial comment seems to be hinging on the single phrase of gambling itself. I just meant the commonly used sense of the word, today, which IMO implies the aspects that the Catholics label as negative. (I.e. most people don’t call bingo a gambling activity.)

But sure, Catholicism has a nuanced view and it’s inaccurate to say they are against gambling in itself.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-10-05 10:06:10+00:00
It's quite rare I communicate via email anymore, (outside of work where it is still the main medium). I like the (relatively) open/decentralised nature of it, but I can't deny that chat apps like WhatsApp have a good UX for casual group discussions. Not to mention that all of my friends use WhatsApp, so I would struggle to use email as my primary communication method even if I wanted to.

It means I kind of wonder what my personal email is for, other than a means to sign up to third party websites. There have been a few threads about RSS lately and it seems a lot of HNers hate email newsletters. I don't have a problem with them and if I'm receiving content on a fixed schedule, like once a week or even once a day, I think it's a good medium. I even get my RSS feed updates by email.

Other than that, the top of my personal inbox right now is mostly marketing emails, notifications (like "we have changed our T&Cs", "you have a new message on LinkedIn" etc) and "what's on" emails from local theatres, cinema, etc (which of course is also marketing, but it's marketing I've specifically asked to receive).
by globular-toast | 2025-10-05 10:06:42+00:00
Seeing the final picture made me think of something: one of my "life hacks" is to not accept cables that are too long. I used to think the longer the better, and just coil it up or something. But long cables just get in the way and collect dust etc.

If something is going to be considered permanent, cut that cable down to length. Either buy shorter moulded cables, or learn to wire cables yourself. Too often have I left a cable long "just in case" only for it to get in the way for years to come.

For patch cables it's easiest and best to buy moulded cables that fit your rack. For things like power cables (extension leads etc.) it's easiest to wire them yourself (at least, in the UK where our plugs are designed to be wired by anyone).
by tamnd | 2025-10-05 10:08:09+00:00
I've been preparing these notes for 20 years, and now it's finally time to put them online. Please judge them by their content, not by whether they were "LLM-assisted" or not. All the books are licensed under CC-BY-SA, and I intend to keep sharing more with the community free of charge. If you find any errors, please open an issue or submit a pull request, and I'm happy to fix them. https://github.com/little-book-of/c/pull/4 (for examples, this one) I know many of these books still need polishing (fixing bugs, improving wording, etc.), but I'm glad that some people already find them helpful. It really saddens me when people dismiss the project as just "AI slop." I've poured a lot of time and care into it.
by jfyi | 2025-10-05 10:08:28+00:00
Funny, because one the libraries I was using at the time went hyper commercial (javafxports). Java burned me on two fronts at the very same time and lost me. Ymmv I guess. It's always a good time to try something new anyway... I also moved to kotlin on android and couldn't be happier with it, it's a clearly superior language.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-10-05 10:08:28+00:00
> I don’t get it. I have been doing something similar for a month with opencode, is the new thing that the new sonnet model is fine tuned to call these tools “better” or simply that they have improved the devex to accomplish these things?

They fine tuned 4.5 to have `clear_tool_uses` marker tools that it understands without regressing the quality of future responses. You will however pay for the cache invalidation hit anyways, so it would need some evaluations how much this helps.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-05 10:08:33+00:00
Gambling is addictive because it gives you a dopamine rush. That’s why people gamble because it’s actually enjoyable.

I personally don’t see the argument for categorising it as immoral on the basis that’s it’s not useful. The same could be said about plenty of other enjoyable things.

However exploitation is clearly immoral. That’s where I have issue with gambling. Gambling operators don’t get rich thanks to the average users but because addicts give them much more than they should. That’s clearly immoral be it from a casino, a gambling website, or micro transactions in mobile game. Every companies which profit from that should be held accountable including Apple and Google which are clearly complicit.
Show HN: MetricsWave – own your metrics, ditch Google Analytics
by falcon_ | 2025-10-05 10:10:01+00:00
I built MetricsWave as an open-source alternative to Google Analytics.

It’s a self-hosted platform where you own all your data — no tracking scripts, no vendor lock-in, no sending usage data to Google.

The backend (Laravel) handles custom metrics, counters, tags, alerts, and an API for ingestion.

The frontend (React) provides real-time dashboards and visualizations.

Everything is open, extensible, and designed to be run on your own infrastructure.

Right now it supports event ingestion, dashboards, team roles, and alerting.

Would love feedback from HN on architecture, missing features, and scaling concerns.

- Backend repo: https://github.com/metricswave/backend - Frontend repo: https://github.com/metricswave/frontend
by ninjin | 2025-10-05 10:10:24+00:00
True, but it is worth mentioning that since Amazon Japan dropped using established delivery services and went with their own gig-based one their service has taken a drastic turn for the worse: Claims of having ringed the bell, despite not having done so; packages left outside, without having allowed them to leave them outside in the settings; big envelopes rammed into mail boxes and hanging ~1/4 outside, because they could not be bothered to use the delivery lockers; absolutely mad parking and driving with their "delivery cars"; impolite behaviour when delivering at your door; etc. With Japan Post and the regular delivery services I have never seen any of these things. Sure, Amazon fairs better than elsewhere, but even Japan is not immune.
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-10-05 10:12:50+00:00
1Password used to be good 10 years ago, but not anymore. A couple of days ago, there was a post about Electron based apps that slow down macOS Tahoe (due to older versions of Electron using an undocumented API). When I ran the script on my laptop, 1Password was on the top of the list.

> 1Password.app: Electron 37.3.1 (Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Versions/A/Electron Framework)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437112

Edit: Judging by the downvotes, it looks like there are a lot of electron lovers here. Why the hate for more efficient native apps? Are bloated binaries, janky UI and lower battery life, features? :)
by kotaKat | 2025-10-05 10:13:00+00:00
Easy: Amazon missed the mark and started piling on all the useless bullshit on top of what they used to do, veered far out of their lane, and started becoming a media and software production company instead of just selling books.

Now I can't get anything delivered to my house within 2 days or less because I'm punished as a rural customer, but they can sure as hell send me letters every 2 months complaining I haven't touched my Prime Video.
by devjab | 2025-10-05 10:13:06+00:00
Having worked with C# professionally for a decade, going through the changes with LINQ, async/await, Roslyn, and the rise of .NET Core, to .NET Core becoming .NET, I disagree. I certainly think that C# is a great tool and that it’s the best it has ever been. It’s also relies on very implicit behaviour, it is build upon OOP design principles and a bunch of “needless” abstraction. Things I personally have come to view as anti-patterns over the years. This isn’t because I specifically dislike C#, you could find me saying something similar about Java.

I suspect that the hidden indirection and runtime magic, may be part of why you love the language. In my experience, however, it leads to poor observability, opaque control flow, and difficult debugging sessions in every organisation and company I’ve ever worked for. It’s fair to argue that this is because the people working with C# are bad at software engineering. Similar to how Uncle Bob will always be correct when he calls teams out for getting his principles wrong. To me that means the language itself has a poor design fit for software development in 2025. Which is probably why we see more and more Go adoption, due to its explicit philosophies. Though to be fair, Python seems to be “winning” as far as adoption goes in the cross platform GC language space. Having worked with Django-Ninja I can certainly see why. It’s so productive, and with stuff like Pyrefly, UV and Ruff it’s very easy to make it a YAGNI experience with decent type control.

I am happy you enjoy C# though, and it’s great to see that it is evolving. If they did more to enhance the developer experience so that people were less inclined to do bad engineering on a thursday afternoon after a long day of useless meetings. Then I would probably agree with you. I'm not sure any of the changes going toward .NET 10 are going in that direction though.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-10-05 10:13:14+00:00
So how do you do structured concurrency [1] in Rust i.e. task groups that can be cancelled together (and recursively as a tree), always waiting for all tasks to finish their cancellation before moving on? (Normally structured concurrency also involves automatically cancelling the other tasks if one fails, which I guess Rust could achieve by taking special action for Result types.)

If you can't cancel a task and its direct dependents, and wait for them to finish as part of that, I would argue that you still don't have "real" cancellation. That's not an edge case, it's the core of async functionality.

[1] https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...
by dotancohen | 2025-10-05 10:14:11+00:00
> the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians

Nothing excuses the slaughter of thousands of civilians - but if you really believed that like I do then you would direct your anger at Hamas and UNRWA, not Israel. Hamas and Gazan civilians poured over the border and slaughtered people. Burned babies to death, beheaded adults, left fetuses with knives in their heads. Phoned home to brag to parents "I just killed ten Jews with my bare hands". It's all recorded - by Hamas themselves!

Not to mention how many Gazans killed by IEDs and failed rocket attacks in the Gaza strip, and how Hamas stoots at people fleeing buildings and areas that the IDF warned they are targeting. Or shooting at people collecting humanitarian aid from distribution centres instead of paying Hamas for it in markets. Or their human shields. Every one of those dead is counted against Israel because in Muslim culture, a martyr dies for a cause no matter which side's hand killed them. And even with those deaths incorrectly attributed to Israel, the civilian:combatant death toll in the Gaza strip is lower than any conflict that NATO or UN forces have ever fought in - by NATO and UN numbers themselves.

> in a tiny strip of land that poses NO fucking existential threat at all to the overall security of Israel?

That tiny step of land was educated by UNRWA to believe that the highest honour in their society is to kill Jews. There is ample video evidence of children stating this as their life goal, and parents stating they want this for their children. That does not justify killing them, but it demonstrates that when they do start killing us there is no easy tactic to calm the situation. They used to infiltrate our communities, we built a wall. We tried moving out of the strip and living further away, they start shooting rockets at us. We build defensive interceptor rockets at extreme cost, they put over the border en mass to put babies in ovens, rape wowen and even in one case I know of an man, enter medical facilities and execute the entire staff and patients. All documented by Hamas themselves.

You need to decide if you feel as strongly about protecting civilians as you do about destroying Israel. Because if you really feel that your ambition is to protect civilians (or at least to defend their cause online) then you need to reevaluate your position on the current conflict. Not because Israel is perfect, but because Israel is fighting to save human life and the Gazans are fighting to destroy it.

I have yet to even mention the hostages, dozens of whom are still in Gaza including people I know personally, which itself is justification for contributing the war no matter the cost to the aggressors. And when the aggressors decide that the civilians of the Gaza strip have suffered too much - the civilians they as the governing body are charged to protect - they can release the hostages and the war will be over.
by wisidisi | 2025-10-05 10:14:44+00:00
I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes.

Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.
by SvenL | 2025-10-05 10:14:49+00:00
Something messengers made easy is photo/video sharing. This might be also a little bit tricky with email.

Also most messages I write would be just the subject line (“on my way home”). Bigger topics I would rather have a call than writing them.

But generally the points made in the post are valid and it’s nice to see that it is working for the author.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-05 10:15:50+00:00
I daily-drive an M1 MBA and a ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 running Linux (Bazzite), and the experience (in terms of convenience and reliability) is identical for the most part. In fact I actually prefer the screen on my ThinkPad, the 1200p OLED display is just so much more crisper and vibrant, it's been great for gaming and media consumption.

In saying that, the touchpad experience on the MBA is a touch better, and of course, the battery life is much better on the MBA (as is the thermal effeciency).

In spite of these minor shortcomings, I'm super happy with my ThinkPad in terms of just how stable and reliable it's been under Bazzite/KDE, like never once have I had any issues with the suspend-resume functionality - something that even Windows machines struggle with every now and then.

If only the Snapdragon ThinkPads had first-class Linux support like the x86 ones do... I reckon they can come pretty close to the MacBooks in terms of battery life, unfortunately they're not quite there yet.