MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by autoexec | 2025-10-17 02:14:25+00:00
The wet dream for companies is to set your prices based on your personal data. They don't need to collude with competitors when every company can just can use facial recognition or pull data from your cell phone to query your income, purchase history, personal demographics, etc. in real time from data brokers and jack up the prices you're being charged accordingly.

Companies have been trying to get discriminatory pricing off the ground for a very long time but one of the major hurdles besides the costs involved in the initial technology installation has been the fact that the public tends to react strongly against it. Stay vigilant and push back against the idea that different people should be charged different prices for the same items based on their personal data.

Companies like Wendy's and Kroger have been forced to walk back their surge pricing plans and Walmart insists they won't do it even as they install the digital price tags and facial recognition technology necessary to put it in place. This is an area where people's actions really can make a difference, as long as companies don't get away with slowly conditioning us to accept it.
by tharkun__ | 2025-10-17 02:15:23+00:00
Now how do you get your company / do yourself the hiring of those people in such a way that you can basically just have a team of people like this work with PMs to build their ideas?

I like doing this FS journey myself but am stuck "leading teams" of FS/BE/FE mixes and trying to get them to build stuff that I clearly understand and would be able to build with enough time but all I have is a team of FE or BE people or even FS people that can't just do the above. You need to be very involved with these people to get them to do this and it just doesn't scale.

I've recently tried AI (Claude specifically) and I feel like I can build things with Claude much quicker than with the FE/BE/FS people I have. Even including all the frustrations that Claude brings when I have to tell it that it's bullshitting me.

Is that bad? How do you deal with that? Advice?
by j3s | 2025-10-17 02:16:14+00:00
Paul Erdös once stopped using amphetamines for a single month, and couldn't manage to maintain his interest in math _at all_. and this writer claims that it must have been his talent and natural interest? lol

"lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"?

i dispute that there exists a singular path that everyone should strive to follow - after all, some people follow their interests and go bankrupt as a result. some people take medication to help cope with the realities of their own capabilities. that's life.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-17 02:18:50+00:00
Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money. Some random anime facts YouTube channel can also print money if enough people watch it. Cartoons? Make some Tom and Jerry memes and enjoy. People print money by making videos reacting to stuff, basically professional HN commentators posting hot takes in video form.

Totally absurd if you ask me but that's the reality we live in. Advertising completely fucks up all the incentive systems in society.
by repiret | 2025-10-17 02:20:02+00:00
I agree that biometrics are in the same ballpark as low-entropy passwords, which means their security relies on avoiding offline attacks. My ATM card is protected by a 4-digit pin. That's perfectly secure, because the ATM network won't let you enter a wrong pin more than a single-digit number of times before locking the account.

Windows Hello allows you to log in with a 6-digit pin. That's perfectly secure, because the TPM lets them design a system where you can't do an offline attack on the pin. Too many wrong entries and you'll need to use your password.

I doubt there's more than two dozen bits of entropy provided by finger print readers or facial recognition authentication, but you can make an acceptably secure login experience with it because, again, the TPM lets you prevent offline attacks.
by rurban | 2025-10-17 02:23:48+00:00
Just look at Swiss TV dramas. They are a unwatchable, even worse than those of their neighbors. So why is their TV so bad, when they do have much better authors than their neighbors? The movie films are a bit better, but only a bit.

I blame the TV producers, which sank into the social causes pudding. There cannot be any good art if everything is checked and balanced. Death by committee. In Germany they had similar problems but got out of this mess.
by mattglossop | 2025-10-17 02:24:11+00:00
I'm building a consumer fintech platform - a space with a high trust barrier. We've been doing a ton of content to build trust and presence through short form video (TikTok/Insta), as well as a personal finance newsletter we run 3x/week (in URL). We also have several personal finance related calculators on our website.

All of these elements we've hoped would act as lead magnets, but success has been mixed.

We've grown to 3,000+ subscribers for the newsletter and have a decent open rate (~30%), but converting readers to users has been difficult. A couple dozen readers have converted.

To people out there building consumer platforms, what has worked really well for lead magnets these days? Anyone in consumer fintech particularly - your perspective would be much appreciated! Thanks!
by 6510 | 2025-10-17 02:26:29+00:00
I was simply trying to use real numbers to compare with the story about Elbonia. Turned out the US is a really special place.

> to be in the top 10% of US earners, you need to earn nearly $149,000 annually.

> According to the same research, those in the top 5% earned at least $352,000.

https://www.unbiased.com/discover/banking/how-much-income-pu...

I have no idea how to calculate the flat tax now. The words "nearly" and "at least" make it even more confusing.
by georgeburdell | 2025-10-17 02:27:41+00:00
I was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning.

To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.
by iamdeedubs | 2025-10-17 02:28:21+00:00
In my experiments with SpecKit I was always left wondering "when does it merge all this specs into a single ground truth". I never got there and it felt like a huge missing step.

Now I'm left trying to define/design what a "spec" for communication between humans and coding agents would look like, to power what Birgitta called spec anchored.
by Graziano_M | 2025-10-17 02:29:28+00:00
Maybe you were! I got the clock working well but none of the register modules worked correctly. I asked in the subreddit and apparently it’s asked a ton because Ben keeps a lot of stuff floating and for most that doesn’t work. I don’t mind having to do it but it’s annoying to have to find extra parts and extra annoying having to try to have it fit in the original footprint so that each breadboard still fits together as in the videos.
by psadauskas | 2025-10-17 02:31:29+00:00
A weaker government would not be able to prevent corporations from doing whatever they want. A strong government makes for a richer target for corporations to lobby to allow them to do whatever they want.

It doesn't matter what size government we have, we need one that's just slightly larger than the corporations and is geared towards preventing the corporations becoming to powerful. We _need_ regulations and antitrust, but I don't know how we maintain that. An educated populace would help, but how to prevent the corporations from propagandizing that populace into weakening the government in the corporations interests? This is the situation we've been in the last 50 years.
by rectang | 2025-10-17 02:31:52+00:00
When I was in Jr. High, we had an Atari 400. Mostly I used it to play Missile Command and Star Raiders, but it also came with a BASIC cartridge.

In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name 10 times and then exits.

The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long. I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took hours... then I hit "run".

Nothing.

I couldn't debug it. Not only did I not really understand software, I didn't have a checkbook — hell I didn't even know what "balance your checkbook" meant.

We didn't have the exorbitantly expensive Atari floppy disk drive, nor the cassette drive, so I couldn't save my work. Still, I left that BASIC cartridge in there for several days, foregoing my games, because I didn't want to lose my investment.

Eventually, I turned off the computer and the program disappeared forever.

I didn't program again for 20 years.
by efortis | 2025-10-17 02:33:03+00:00
~2008 a friend at a consulting co. showed me how they drafted UIs in Excel.

Having seen that, in 2015 I began working on a UI drafting software for that kind of technical designers. We ended up getting rid of the layout thinking overhead while drafting. They call it Content-First Design.

If you'd like to try it it's free: https://uxtly.com
by incognito78211 | 2025-10-17 02:34:47+00:00
I worked for a food delivery company (Uber Eats / Doordash / Deliveroo / Just Eats / GrubHub — one of them), and while I can't argue with what you are saying, the company wasn't making any money either. I think after 5-10 years of working there they finally managed to make like 20 pence per order. No one is winning with food delivery, not the restaurant, not the rider, not the company.

We would have loved to have reduced the % taken and pay our riders more, but customers wouldn't pay it — they'd just go to Uber instead.

Oh the hypocrisy of people picketing in the streets against gig work but not willing to pay more than 3 or 4 bucks for their food to be delivered... I found it incredibly frustrating because we truly weren't the bad guys. Sigh.
by DanHulton | 2025-10-17 02:34:52+00:00
This is a well-written report, but... Does anyone NOT know this? I've deleted all my social media and actively try to limit my news ingestion and none of this, not the facts nor the conclusions, was novel to me.

I honestly don't think the problem is that people don't know, it's that a) nobody's doing anything to stop it (at least not very effectively) and b) a whole lot of people are doing their utmost to support it.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-10-17 02:37:09+00:00
Found a 2014 thread where 10-18% of the test harness time was spent booting the interpreter for the 13,000 required instances. The deeper thread was showing some 500-700 seconds of test time was just the interpreter overhead. The original point of the article was how much worse the overhead was in Python3 vs Python2.

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-May/134528...
by repiret | 2025-10-17 02:38:22+00:00
Passwordless boot with a TPM means the software can control what secrets it gives out. Yeah, if you boot to a desktop operating system and auto-login as an admin user, that doesn't leave things very secure, but that's not the only scenario.

Consider a server. It can have an encrypted hard drive, boot with the TPM without a password, and run its services. In order to steal data from it, you need to either convince software running on the server to give you that data, or you need to do some sort of advanced hardware attack, like trying to read the contents of DRAM while the computer is running.

There are other use cases too, like kiosks, booting to a guest login, corporate owned laptops issued to employees, allowing low-entropy (but rate limited) authentication after booting, to name a few.
by droolboy | 2025-10-17 02:38:54+00:00
When I was in my first year of junior high they had formal dances. But for the (cooler) nerdy kids with no dates they opened up the computer room. One of the older kids had a big floppy he brought from home. On it he had a simple QBasic RPG. If you ran into an enemy it would start an RPG battle and all the graphics were made from 2D arrays. It was awesome! It blew my mind and I spent the rest of the year learning and building my own. Great times! Thanks!
by AnonC | 2025-10-17 02:39:01+00:00
> I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!

What is your definition of “cheap” and how many books do you consume compared to movies and TV shows on streaming services? You also haven’t stated which categories of books are cheap and are better value for you. Others may not have an interest in Storm Archives or something that’s interesting to you. There may be people interested in reading a lot of nonfiction alongside some fiction. Individual interests vary a lot.

Someone using only one streaming service may probably be getting thousands of hours of entertainment over one year.

Such comparisons also don’t account for regional price variations and availability.
by hyperrail | 2025-10-17 02:41:32+00:00
Font sizes and families are also a relatively little-used way to visually distinguish things in a code editor.

Years ago I used to work on C++ code in a commercial editor called Source Insight [1]. At its default settings, it would do things like:

1. Show function and class names in HUGE fonts in declarations and definitions, so you always knew what was a declaration as opposed to a use

2. Show nested parentheses with the outermost parens being biggest and getting smaller as you got further in

3. Show comments in a proportional sans-serif font instead of a monospaced one so that you could tell where the comments were even if you have color blindness

Those features, along with having a C++ parser and code relationship visualizer much faster than the Visual Studio of the day without having to parse ahead of time (a la ctags), made Source Insight a near standard in my company. I still miss it on occasion.

[1] https://www.sourceinsight.com/feature-details/
Show HN: min. – lightweight AI-native inbox for teams
by zizhouwang | 2025-10-17 02:42:54+00:00
I'm a control freak, the thought of having AI auto-replying to emails is ridiculous. Every founder I've met are the same way, just typing the words "Put your support/sales on auto-pilot" makes me cringe. I built min. to help me and my teammates with emails. Who should read it, who should reply, when to follow up, etc.

min. is:

- A simple email interface to manage both private and team inboxes.

- An AI-native inbox that sorts and prioritizes messages into custom labels and folders.

- A replacement for patchwork of CRMs, helpdesks, and spreadsheets with just… email.

- Conversational agents (follow-ups, scheduling, nudges), deployable in two clicks.

min. is not:

- A hands-off inbox that auto-replies to everything for you. (e.g “put your support/sales on auto-pilot!”)

- Built just for speed - min. for teams who care about delivering an A+ experience with every interaction.

- Awkward, because it works exactly how you expect emails to work, 2 way syncs with Gmail.

2min demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKtzNL72P34

Live demo: https://app.getmin.ai/demo

DM me or shoot an email to hello@getmin.ai if you want to join the beta. Cheers!

Eric
by 8bitsrule | 2025-10-17 02:43:05+00:00
Conceivable. And not just that far back. It's been thought that Beethoven's deafness was largely the result of the way wine was stored back in the 18th century.

And what did we learn from history? "The federal government banned the use of leaded pipe and solder in new plumbing systems in 1986, but many remaining pipe networks in older cities and homes predate the policy; the EPA estimates there are still 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country." - https://greenyplace.com/when-did-they-stop-using-lead-pipes-...
by Supermancho | 2025-10-17 02:43:15+00:00
> It's a piece of cake to create a deployment and everything is controlled through the one cli, mix.

* It is not, despite your own familiarity. Erlang is in worse shape, using rebar3 ofc

* There is no central package management. I want to know what library to include that will do X (or a selection of choices), if it's not in https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir, I basically have to crawl github. (Lua has the same problem).

Past some toy projects, most people abandon these languages for more mature ecosystems.
by twosdai | 2025-10-17 02:43:57+00:00
I think some of the best knowledge is reports like this one. The report gives you the feeling of being so obvious when you read it. But the actual claims and facts themselves and their certainty (Some issues have just moderate confidence, others have high) have a lot of credibility and deep analysis.

Additionally the collection, framing and analysis of these events in this intelligence level format using professional techniques and sharing them with the public is good. Multiple sources from different people legitimize and idea and promote it to being more understood. While people (myself included) focus a lot of novelty of ideas, I think novel ideas are the outlier and there is a real need for work like this where data is curated, and analyzed and a simple but clear narrative can be created for readers.

My takeaway from a report like this isn't meant to serve as a "Newsflash" type post where its informing the public of some grave threat we didn't know about. Its to analyze a known trend, provide data and give a deeper level of insights that is digestible to a regular person so they can be more informed about an issue.

For example I didn't know Donald Trump issued 5x the amount of executive orders this presidency than his last. I know he issued a lot, but that figure is new to me.
by tomcam | 2025-10-17 02:43:57+00:00
Usenet was great early on, but near the time of its acquisition it was suffering from the same problems we see now on all social media sites: trolls, objectionable content, power-hungry mods, the works.

All these problems are writ much larger now because the net is like a million times as popular as back then. No social media site can survive on free moderators and without membership fees unless the rent gets paid somehow.

I assert HN requires less "rent" from us users than any other equally successful social media site.
by jdminhbg | 2025-10-17 02:44:13+00:00
> These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.

There’s no reason to think that you need to evaluate individuals to have a reason to let them go. I might be the best iOS developer in the world but if I’m working for a company that doesn’t need a custom iOS app, they should lay me off.
by vunderba | 2025-10-17 02:45:06+00:00
By the time I was a kid, most of the x86 computers I was exposed to were running DOS with the included QBasic IDE so I never had to worry about things like this.

However, we had old stacks of Compute magazine [1] lying around with BASIC source games printed out - and I remember initially being confused as to why all the line numbers were separated by intervals of 10...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute!
by AnonC | 2025-10-17 02:46:54+00:00
> Was It Worth It?

> To read one book? No.

> To prove a point? Absolutely.

> To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes.

The dedication on this endeavor is admirable. I quite enjoyed reading it even though certain things were new to me (structural similarity index).”

Posting the code on some code sharing platform (not GitHub, where it could probably be taken down quickly) could be a logical next step.
by mgh2 | 2025-10-17 02:47:08+00:00
Strategy:

> As of now, Apple isn’t actively developing additional touch-screen Macs. Instead, it’s waiting to see the market’s reaction to the touch version of the MacBook Pro, the people said. This follows a typical strategy for Apple, which offers new features on its top-end devices before bringing them down-market.

> There have been concerns within Apple that touch-screen computers would cannibalize sales of iPads. But tablet growth has already slowed in recent years, and touch screens have increasingly become must-have features for PCs.
by rurban | 2025-10-17 02:48:01+00:00
Did you check how hospitals or governments treat sensitive patient data? They are transported in clear (no TLS) over the net from the hospital or ensurers databases to the practitioners. Not on 80, but still just plain DICOM XML. With full names and all the sensitive data. That's a bit more insane IMHO.

The new German ecard patient system is also trivial to hack, as shown multiple times on CCC. As long as no one goes to jail, they will continue like this.
by schrodinger | 2025-10-17 02:49:22+00:00
Most of that money goes towards the driver, last I checked in on unit economics. It costs quite a bit of money to pay a person to go to the restaurant, wait around, and then bring it to you — far more than the "delivery fee" that you see and that customers would pay.

Customers are cheap and they're (partly) to blame. My theory is that Amazon conditioned people to view delivery as a free commodity and pizza places who had delivery baked into their model cemented it.

So if Doordash listed a delivery fee that covered their true cost of delivery, customers would balk. So they instead have to find creative ways to get enough. Maybe it's changed and Doordash cracked the secret, but when I'd looked into it years ago these companies barely got by — many of them actually losing money.
by proofstories | 2025-10-17 02:49:25+00:00
We recently interviewed the founder of a company doing 5-figures in MRR which was a white-label social media API powering 250K+ accounts currently that's been in business for 1.5 years. Both founders are still working full-time jobs, but they’ve grown to consistent five-figure MRR in under two years.

Here are some of the learnings from the interview:

1. Validate with users who are paying

They never ran a landing page test or built a waitlist. Instead, they solved their own problem (posting across multiple accounts) when they realized their competitor product was charging thousands of dollars. They had friends in the e-commerce space ask for access. Those friends paid even when the product was rough. That signal was enough validation to continue to invest in this project.

2. Cold emailing

They built lists through Apollo and SEO tools, & sent thousands of emails. The format of the email was kept simple: a short intro, proof they were a legit company, and a 3-touch follow up. No long copy led to conversations. The conversion rate is currently at: ~2% from email sent to paying customer.

3. Reddit

The team spends time daily in relevant threads answering questions, giving advice, and only mentioning the product when it makes sense. They approach reddit with a value based approach, when they deliver value first and plug the product second. He mentioned it was easy to spot threads that feel disingenuous and to avoid that if possible.

4. Live chat for pre-sale

They run a live chat platform on the site and most buyers actually initiate the chat first, asking for details about features. That quick back-and-forth often flips them into paying customers once they realize that their needs are met.

It also provides them with the ability to handle objections, highlight their quick response rates & offer deals or free trials to reduce friction.

5. Free month to remove migration risk

Instead of asking people to pay right away, they offered one free month of the Pro plan. It gave time for new customers to connect accounts and test end to end without worrying about long setup processes. By the end of the month, most converted to a paid plan.

Hope this helps when going to market!