MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cesarb | 2025-10-03 23:38:47+00:00
> Some payment providers ask up front to simplify the flows as it's not totally trivial to determine what sort of card it is

And because the same card can be both. At least here in Brazil, most bank cards have multiple uses (credit, debit, ATM) in the same card. AFAIK, they're separate applications within the same chip, and the terminal has to select which one to use before starting.
by brewdad | 2025-10-03 23:39:13+00:00
The causes of homelessness are plentiful. Some, perhaps a majority I don't know any exact figures, would be helped by simply giving them money. Others are suffering from mental health crises and/or drug addictions that must be dealt with first before they can have any hope of taking care of themselves when given the money to support themselves.

This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
by koverstreet | 2025-10-03 23:39:45+00:00
> Please please don't forget I want you to succeed - that's why I bunged nearly $800 your way in this endeavour - but I'm not the only person who thinks you come across as completely immune to critisicm, even when it's constructive and from your supporters.

You have to understand, I get an absolute _ton_ of "constructive criticism" from people who basically are assuming everything is going off the rails and are expecting massive, and unrealistic changes; for bandwidth reasons if nothing else. I have to stay focused on the code and getting it done.

> Right now that "community effort" is looking a bit unlikely, eh ?

Actually, the big surprise from the DKMS switch is just how much the community came together to make it happen.

This project has looked like a one man show for a long time, and the core of it probably always will be for the simple reason that there are precious few people with the skillset required to do core filesystem engineering; that requires a massive amount of dedication and investment of time to get good at, there's a hell of a learning curve.

But there's still a lot of people with the willingness and ability to help out in other areas. People have been since even before the DKMS switch, to be honest, it's just that a lot of it is boring invisible but extremely necessary QA work - and that stuff is work, and people have helped out a lot there.

You have to be involved in the community, in the IRC channel to see this stuff going on. It's really not just me.

And now with the DKMS switch, a lot more people jumped in and started helping, and that's how we were able to get every major distro supported before the 6.17 release. That happened _fast_, and only a small fraction of the work was mine, mostly I was just coordinating.

Honestly, looking back, I don't think I could have planned this better - the timing was perfect. We're nearly done with stabilization, so it was the right time to start focusing more on distro integration and building up those working relationships, and the DKMS migration was just the kick in the pants to make that happen. Now we're pretty well positioned to get bcachefs into distro installers perhaps six months out.

The community is real, and it's growing.

(I would still _fucking love_ to have more actual filesystem engineers though, heh).
by da-bacon | 2025-10-03 23:40:07+00:00
Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.
by danabramov | 2025-10-03 23:40:12+00:00
Here's another article answering this question: https://overreacted.io/open-social/. The one you're commenting on links to it in the first paragraph with "if not, read this!" for that exact reason--I can't explain the motivation and technical details in the same post, or to repeat the same explanation from post to post.

Here's a tldr if you don't want to read the entire thing: https://overreacted.io/open-social/#the-big-picture
by sgnelson | 2025-10-03 23:41:57+00:00
And of course it's flagged. Because the use of technology built from companies funded by VC has nothing to do with Hacker News and Ycombinator.

Dang and company are such a joke (yes, that's a direct violation of the rules, maybe it'll get their attention) for allowing these sorts of stories to be flagged.

The idea that this is only about "politics" or it's "controversial" and thus should be hidden from view is such a copout. These are the important stories that should absolutely be discussed in a place like this.

Save your breath in replying: "well, it might make people upset and we want to have nice conversations here." And whatever other platitudes arguing for censorship of obviously important topics that deal directly with the technology, companies and employess that frequent this site.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-03 23:42:21+00:00
>My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition

They need to run the goddamn country.

Whether it's liberal white women with their whole foods and Starbucks or conservative men with their 100k pickup trucks the morals and political whims of "people rich enough to not get fairly instantly screwed if they make bad decisions" have been a disaster for this country.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-03 23:43:32+00:00
Unironically yes, the most intuitive designs you'll find are on linux.

Keyword: intuitive. This is the problem. People who have seen stuff before have way too much baggage and preconceived notions. People who have used MacOS before, and especially Windows, struggle on linux.

Because linux isn't that. And, heavy on the Windows here. Pretty much every way that Windows does stuff is stupid, unintuitive, and poorly thought out. It is truly the black sheep of Operating Systems. It does stuff different just cuz. Just to fuck with you.

Want to add a ? or a . in a file name? What about name it CON? No. Why not? Fuck you, that's why, this is Windows.

But it's not actually the black sheep, because it's the most popular desktop OS. So people move to Linux or MacOS and they're anticipating Windows weirdness.

Like, they'll open up a web browser and download a random EXE to install a program and then be mad it doesn't work. When the much more obvious thing, opening up a software center and searching for what you want, WOULD work.

Seriously, Windows and MacOS can learn a lot from KDE, Gnome, and their associated applications.
by conartist6 | 2025-10-03 23:43:52+00:00
Feels like a thick layer of AI-generated glaze on what's basically just another no-code platform... except this one with the innovation that it's actually a book that you buy?

While the copy sounds like complete fluff-n-puff, I honestly believe almost all of it is right, both about what's coming for the future of coding and the role that visual "lego" programming will play in it.

There's just one really major thing the author got wrong: the reason visual programming hasn't (yet) seen broader adoption. The reason is that each visual programming tool consists of one language married to one editor. Who wants to re-learn a whole new editor each time they need to work in a different language?
by freetime2 | 2025-10-03 23:44:08+00:00
I'm not sure what they have in mind for supporting offline payments, but I think that Japan's FeliCa-based [1] electronic money systems (Suica, iD, etc) are pretty impressive. They are most typically used to pay for transportation, but also widely accepted at stores, vending machines, etc. Balances are stored on the card, and it's very fast to use and seems secure for the most part. Recently it's also available on any smartphone or smartwatch with NFC. Japan was pretty slow to adopt touch payment for credit cards, so for a while it was my favorite form of payment.

Transit cards have a pretty low charge limit compared to credit cards - Suica balance is limited to ¥20,000 for example (although for cards that are backed by a credit card, I think the limit is higher). And now that Japan has fully embraced credit card touch payments, FeliCa-based systems are losing market share to Visa, Mastercard, etc.

But it really shines for applications requiring speed (i.e. a turnstile in Tokyo station) or offline payments (a vending machine in a park somewhere).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa
by craftkiller | 2025-10-03 23:44:49+00:00
javascript interpreter*

They are only talking about one javascript engine (node). They didn't test any other engine or go into the implementation in node. For all we know, this might just be a poorly optimized code path in node that needs a little love, but the author didn't bother doing any investigation.

Looking at the linked github issue, jsc doesn't have the performance penalty. It would have been interesting if the author had investigated why and shared that with us.

If this article is about hoisting then this is a well-made high-effort high-value article. If this article is about performance then this is a low-effort low-value summary of a github issue they read.
by stmw | 2025-10-03 23:45:01+00:00
Having spent quite a bit of time on this in the past, a few things: 1. there has not been enough adoption of Data Oriented Programming (DOP) vs OOP, and how things like COM or CORBA (RPC essentially) are different than loosely-coupled REST (XML-RPC or some of SOAP or say Kafka) - 2. they "failed" in the sense of not taking over the world, but they were very successful in taking share of the world, and are still used widely, as others pointed out 3. there is an unfortunate tendency not to study data interoperability and instead repeat the past - which makes it hard to "build on the shoulders of giants" 4. there are some specific technical issues in encoding and tooling that hampered adoption of the specific ones you cite (MSFT platform constraints for some of them, OMG CORBA licensing, XML syntax and ecosystemc complexity friction, JSON ascendancy but without structure, etc.)

Could do a whole API AMA on this.
by boramalper | 2025-10-03 23:45:07+00:00
This reminds me of Mondex:

> Mondex was a smart card electronic cash system, implemented as a stored-value card and owned by Mastercard.

> Mondex allowed users to use its electronic card as they would with cash, enabling peer-to-peer offline transfers between cards, which did not need any authorization, via Mondex ATMs, computer card readers, personal 'wallets' and specialized telephones. This offline nature of the system and other unique features made Mondex stand out from leading competitors at the time, such as Visa Cash, which was a closed system and was much closer in concept to a traditional payment cards' transactional operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex
by crazygringo | 2025-10-03 23:45:43+00:00
If I'm understanding correctly, this was not AI in any sense.

This was collaborative filtering. Which is great and useful, but it's just simple statistics. You can write it in a SQL query a few lines long.

Or you can run more robust models using SVD (singular value decomposition) to reduce dimensionality and enable a form of statistical inference. I can't tell if Ringo/Firefly were using that or not. (If you have enough users, and a relatively limited set of objects like musical artists, you don't need this.)

But nobody calls these AI -- not now and not at the time. They're very clearly in the realm of statistics.

So the article is fun, but not everything needs to jump on the AI train, c'mon.
by toplinesoftsys | 2025-10-03 23:46:35+00:00
Sorry to hear you are disappointed.

The book itself IS the documentation. In fact, there is a "Hello world!" example of Pipe diagram in the book, which can be downloaded for FREE from Amazon Kindle or Apple iBooks.

Regarding the non-readable language of our article - we will fix the problem by polishing the language. Sorry about that. However, I would like to note the fact that article is hard to read is evidence contrary to AI generation which would definitely generate a pretty polished text.

For your convenience, we just added a link with a PDF of a book preview - please find it at the end of the posting.
by hn773746483 | 2025-10-03 23:48:38+00:00
Completely disabling Windows Update is very difficult, much more involved than simply disabling a service or two or a registry key.

There's multiple services dedicated to monitoring / "repairing" windows update, scheduled tasks to enable those, and further tasks to repair everything completely if anything is modified.

And if all of that is disabled... there's a single exe which "helpfully" re-enables and re-creates all of the necessary scheduled tasks and services, which gets called by the service manager automatically: "upfc.exe"

Renaming / getting rid of this stops WaasMedic & other services from respawning.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-03 23:49:40+00:00
Letting the western desert states push federal regulation of water fixtures onto the rest of the nation was a huge mistake. There's no reason that the myriad of river supplied municipalities (who then treat and return that water so there's no net loss) in the east can't have absurd toilets with 20gal flushes and shower nozzles that exfoliate if you get too close.
by specialist | 2025-10-03 23:50:09+00:00
Is this guilt by association? eg The roster of that Abundance Festival?

I've read the book. Ditto the criticisms. Heard the interviews.

My "abundance" take away is a rejection of neoliberalism, austerity, Hayek, etc. That it's akin to Green New Deal, Build Back Better, etc.

Am I wrong?

We need 3.5m (?) new homes, mass transit, upgraded grid, 4Tw (?) of additional renewable energy generation (plus their batteries).

Right?

I don't care how it gets done. I don't care what labels (pejoratives) are used. I don't care who profits.

I just demand it gets done, sooner than later.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-03 23:51:24+00:00
> The issue Mozilla faced wasn't that it wasn't safer than C. It's that it was not safe enough for their needs.

I would agree with this for most use cases. My main qualm is lumping together C and C++.

It's like lumping together Rust and JS, because they're both memory safe. But Rust is WAY more safe. JS is, overall, an extremely footgunny language.

In my view, the jump from C to C++ is about the same as the jump from Rust to JS, potentially even bigger.
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 23:51:32+00:00
> If you’re claiming the IPC is an unreliable source, you need a reliable source to back you up on that. (And neither article actually cites any data that would undermine the IPC’s case.)

I think the most detailed rebuttal to the recent IPC claims is this one[0] backed by the COGAT[1] published aid data. There are other responses to prior IPC reports that go into more methodological details[2] as well. The impression I get overall is that the IPC is largely just cherry picking incomplete data to create a false narrative[3]. IPC forecasts also basically never end up being accurate historically either.

[0] https://govextra.gov.il/media/orumgksl/politics-disguised-as...

[1] https://gaza-aid-data.gov.il/main/#AidData

[2] https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/transparency-and-m...

[3] https://govextra.gov.il/media/sftjdsg2/cogat-humanitarian-ef...
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-10-03 23:51:43+00:00
> Their acceptance rate is in the 25% range. Clearly the demand is there, so why is there a "fiscal situation"?

They are projecting multiple years of declining federal investment in education and research which made up an important portion of their budgets.

They also would rather cut or shrink classes / labs, etc. than loosen academic or admissions standards because their institutional reputation is very important and decided by such things.

> You don't need Waygu beef and massages in order to teach students.

I went to one of the top (and most expensive) schools in the US. I never once saw Wagyu beef or massages offered to students.

The fiscal situation, again, is because of increasing government clampdown on academia. The Trump admin just a few days ago circulated a "compact" it wants universities to sign which would mandate all science degrees be tuition free and int'l student admissions be capped at 15% of the whole student body. Such dramatic lurches and demands can be hurled any time by this admin so schools cannot afford to be caught off guard anymore
by chmod775 | 2025-10-03 23:51:45+00:00
Nice comment. Too bad it's immediately proven wrong by reality and hard numbers. Also as a side note: We were talking about ultra wealthy, not people with some wealth.

For the US as a whole only about 10-15% of startup capital ultimately comes from private investors (of which only some are ultra wealthy). The majority comes from institutions (so ultimately mostly from pension funds)[1]

Ycombinator obviously also sources capital from institutional investors, though we do not know to what degree.

Can't wait to find out where we're gonna move goalposts now - please don't keep me in suspense.

[1] https://www.pragmaticcoders.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/P...
by martin-t | 2025-10-03 23:52:44+00:00
> ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ misses the point

It's meant to express that our "democratic" governments use the same tools as dictatorships. For example, every time somebody in a position of power (not even just politicians) gets shot, other people in power say "ViOlEnCe DoEsN't BeLoNg In PoLiTiCs". Completely forgetting how many of today's democracies were created by widespread acts of violence against previous oppressive governments.

In fact, many countries celebrate their revolutions and their assassinations of dictators. So violence clearly does belong in politics, under some conditions. But instead of openly talking about those conditions, they are trying to brainwash the populace into docility.

---

(Tangent:

For example, reasonable people today agree today that by the end of the war, Hitler deserved to die, whether by assassination, execution, or suicide. But he was just a politician. In 1933, his party got 40%, he was a popular politician. So when was the line crossed from "violence does not belong in politics" to "Hitler is a dictator and mass murderer and must be shot"?

The reality is that once a person becomes dictator he immediately increases his own protection and surrounds himself with people just as bad or worse than him. So it's not just more difficult to kill him, it's also less practical. Reasonably people today say that Putin deserves to die but should not be killed because he purposefully made sure anybody in the line of succession would be even worse than him.)

---

Back on track, it's my belief that a government which is truly dedicated to remaining democratic and making sure the power comes from the people would make sure that the population is armed to a sufficient level that if a hostile takeover from within happened, the population would be able to successfully revolt and restore democracy.

And this is more true today than ever. Abusive governments used to have to employ people to spy on other people. They needed a certain ratio of sympathizers or the system would fall apart. Now much of it can be automated. The ratio of sympathizers a dictator needs is much lower than it used to be and potentially violent revolt can be detected much earlier and each invasion of privacy like Chat Control moves the needle towards resistance being harder and harder.

So those who believe violence does not belong in politics today should be very well aware than it might be necessary against the government tomorrow but it'll be impossible if nobody has guns and privacy to organize with other people who to use those guns. And yes, the price is some terrorist attacks. I am OK with that.

The level of surveillance which would stop a pressure cooker bomb at a public event or a lone gunman or a car ramming attack is completely unacceptable to me.

In fact, you will notice that most recent terrorist attacks would not be stopped by Chat Control. What would be stopped is organized resistance. That's a feature, not a bug.
by OJFord | 2025-10-03 23:53:01+00:00
UK perspective:

- bank transfer

- bank transfer

- cash

- cash

- direct debit

- bank transfer or PAYE

- direct debit

- standing order (recurring bank transfer)

- direct debit

- card

- ? You pay your employer what you were paid for jury service? Bank transfer I guess, but also probably illegal

- would likely be deducted on payslip (because tax & accounting implications of below market value gift) or via a third-party that would most likely accept card

- free
by majewsky | 2025-10-03 23:54:33+00:00
You are correct that this is indeed a mostly unsolved problem. In chapter 15 of "The Mythical Man-Month", Fred Brooks called for all program documentation to not only for how to use a program, but also for how to modify a program [1] and, relevant to this discussion, for how to believe a program. This was before automated tests and CI/CD were a thing, so he advocated for shipping testcases with the program that the user could review and execute at any time. It's now 50 years later, and this is one of the many lessons in that book that we've collectively not picked up on enough.

[1] Side-note: This was written at a time when selling software as a standalone product was not really a thing, so everything was open-source and the "how to modify" part was more about how to read and understand the code, e.g. architecture diagrams.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-03 23:54:51+00:00
It's not a "servant", it's a service.

Why don't I cut my own hair? Because I'm shit at it.

If you went to a barber, and you sat down for a haircut, and they handed you a pair of clippers, would you go back? Fuck no!

The problem with having customers do their own checkout isn't that the fat and lazy customers have to get off their fat asses. No. It's that customers are unbelievably shit at that.

Have you noticed that, despite there being, like 10x as many self checkout lanes than before, the lines are longer than ever? Go ahead and do the math on that. Not only are people doing more work, they're paying more for it too, and it's a much worse service. Lose, lose, lose. Unless you're the corporate overlords.
by sebastos | 2025-10-03 23:55:30+00:00
Ah yes, The Lord of the Rings, an allegorical tale about how it is always wrong to wage war. Anduril, the flame of the west, refers of course to an evil sword wielded by an evil king who wrongly stands up to protect the people of middle earth against the forces of Mordor (a misunderstood and vibrant economy that is merely protecting its own interests). It can be so frustrating when people misread Tolkien's unsubtle, moralizing polemic for some kind of expansive mythology with more than one thing to say.
by twothreeone | 2025-10-03 23:55:32+00:00
In Germany, there is the Electronic Cash (or newer versions called Girocard) which is similarly smartcard-based for the offline use case, but pairs with a regular debit card for online use [1]. Apparently, not that many people use the offline functionality.. it also has a somewhat low daily limit (though I think those are in place for some online transactions such as getting cash as well).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cash