MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atmavatar | 2025-10-31 00:50:01+00:00
There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.

It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.

I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.

As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
by altairprime | 2025-10-31 00:50:34+00:00
As someone who isn’t afraid of reproducible binary blobs but would absolutely pay attention to a failure-to-reproduce report from an advocate otherwise, I’m disappointed to see you failing to do so here. If you’re afraid and not willing to prove or disprove your fears yourself, then that negates your arguments to reject binary blobs categorically, rather than conditionally as I and others in this thread are accepting. So.. of this isn’t an argument about whether this project is safely using binary blobs, it’s about propagating the belief that binary blobs are never acceptable; then while normally I would dig up proof like you seek or make it myself, proof has no bearing on beliefs and I’d best not.
by simondotau | 2025-10-31 00:50:55+00:00
To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.
by Retric | 2025-10-31 00:51:56+00:00
The same action can break multiple laws. Unlawful discharge of a firearm is a crime, but it can also kill someone and thus break a different law. https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03107.htm

Here we don’t know which specific laws were broken because we lack details, but the companies definitely signed a contract agreeing to commit fraud.

Anyway, the comment I responded to had “require an intention to harm to a victim” it’s that aspect I was addressing. My point was the transmission of information itself can be harmful to someone other than the recipient of that information. So the same act fulfills both aspects of fraud (deception + criminal intent), and also breaks some other law.
by tomhow | 2025-10-31 00:52:23+00:00
The comment was downvoted and flagged by several other community members so I don't seem to be out of step with community sentiment on this. I can accept that you sincerely felt it was an important thing to write, but all we can go on is what it looks like on the page, and what it looks like is trying to activate reactions in people with out-of-context controversy.
by laszlokorte | 2025-10-31 00:52:31+00:00
Say you want to do obj.child.foo[3].bar += 2 but without mutation, but instead all the data is immutable and you need to do a deep copy along the path.

Lenses are an embedded dsl for doing this via syntax that reads similar to to the mutable variant. Additionally it allows to compose many of such transformations.
by shwaj | 2025-10-31 00:52:49+00:00
Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.

And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
by array_key_first | 2025-10-31 00:53:53+00:00
> "Oooh, nothing works, ooohh, we're going to die"

I mean, to be fair, this is the actual situation with nuclear weapons.

There's nothing you can do. You just... die. Everyone. There's no magic bullshit the US can pull out of it's ass to prevent it. One singular nuclear warhead can be enough to eradicate the entire population in the US.
by kccqzy | 2025-10-31 00:53:54+00:00
In my comment above I specifically did not expect the user to learn and understand everything, just the ability to ignore it. Handbrake has good defaults and the user would be successful if the only thing they do is: open the file and the press the green button.

And scared is the word used by the original author in the title. I want to understand that emotion. I don't need someone to tell me we can't learn everything.
by gpm | 2025-10-31 00:54:37+00:00
> Since jj does not have branches, it sounds like we are forced into the rebase environment?

No, I tend to use rebase by default (because I like linear history) so its the language I use but it's equally valid in both git and jj to merge via merge commits instead of rebases.

While JJ doesn't have a concept it calls branches, it has all the same semantic power of branches. The difference here is just that git insists on each leaf commit in the source control tree being tagged with a name it calls a branch, jj is perfectly happy to have leaves in the source control tree where you haven't given them a branch-name.

> This sounds like merge conflicts are "shifted-left"? Today we see merge conflicts when a PR is opened and devs fix as needed. With jj it sounds like they couldn't push until the merge fix is resolved. Many times it's not important to deal with that straight away and the dev can continue to get their task done, see builds and results for their changes, etc...

The behaviour here is the exact same between git and jj. If both you and a coworker push to the same remote branch you have to handle conflicts before pushing with either VCS. If both you and a coworker push to different remote branches and then you submit the change through a pull request you see conflicts when you try to merge the branches (or a reasonable forge like github will test merging behind the scenes and surface it early).

> Is this "shift-left" of conflict resolution an accurate way to describe jj's approach / philosophy?

No. jj never shifts conflict resolution left. JJ does sometimes shift conflicts right, allowing you to defer fixing the conflict until later.
by boltzmann-brain | 2025-10-31 00:55:01+00:00
> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time

I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.

We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.

I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.
by joshribakoff | 2025-10-31 00:55:11+00:00
High level: hit github api, feed code to llm, display results in web app.

If you want to learn web apps start with the docs, eg. Official react docs or even just learning vanilla JavaScript if you don’t know it.

Start with little pieces like hitting the github API and displaying some json in the terminal

You could also just start prompting an llm to scaffold a project for you and then trying to debug whatever issues come up (and they will)
by pixelpoet | 2025-10-31 00:55:24+00:00
I've actually thought about that, and looked a little into canonical/idiomatic ways to implement a DSL in Zig, and didn't find anything small and natural.

I just find it intellectually offensive that this extremely short-sighted line is drawn after ints and floats, any other algebraic/number types aren't similarly dignified.

If people had to write add(2, mul(3, 4)) etc for ints and floats the language would be used by exactly nobody! But just because particular language designers aren't using complex numbers and vectors all day, they interpret the request as wanting stupid abstract Monkey + Banana * Time or whatever. I really wish more Language People appreciated that there's only really one way to do complex numbers, it's worth doing right once and giving proper operators, too. Sure, use dot(a, b) and cross(a, b) etc, that's fine.

The word "number" is literally half of "complex number", and it's not like there are 1024 ways to implement 2D, 3D, 4D vector and complex number addition, subtraction, multiplication, maybe even division. There are many languages one can look to for guidance here, e.g. OpenCL[0] and Odin[1].

[0] OpenCL Quick Reference Card, masterpiece IMO: https://www.khronos.org/files/opencl-1-2-quick-reference-car...

[1] Odin language, specifically the operators: https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#operators
by josephg | 2025-10-31 00:55:52+00:00
> It seems to me that async io struggles whenever people try it.

Promises work great in javascript, either in the browser or in node/bun. They're easy to use, and easy to reason about (once you understand them). And the language has plenty of features for using them in lots of ways - for example, Promise.all(), "for await" loops, async generators and so on. I love this stuff. Its fast, simple to use and easy to reason about (once you understand it).

Personally I've always thought the "function coloring problem" was overstated. I'm happy to have some codepaths which are async and some which aren't. Mixing sync and async code willy nilly is a code smell.

Personally I'd be happy to see more explicit effects (function colors) in my languages. For example, I'd like to be able to mark which functions can't panic. Or effects for non-divergence, or capability safety, and so on.
by tanelpoder | 2025-10-31 00:58:53+00:00
If anyone is interested in reading about a similar ”local-NVMe made redundant & shared over network as block devices” engine, last year I did some testing of Silk’s cloud block storage solution (1.3M x 8kB IOPS and 20 GiB/s throughput when reading the block store from a single GCP VM). They’re using iSCSI with multipathing on the client side instead of a userspace driver:

https://tanelpoder.com/posts/testing-the-silk-platform-in-20...
by tsoukase | 2025-10-31 00:58:54+00:00
Moderna's covid vaccine was a state-of-the-art, low side effect one that I was jealous of. I had taken the almost same one of Prizer without problem. They made a miracle in just months while the regular vaccines have a decade long pipeline.

But a drug company has to produce new products if she wants to survive. m-RNA tech, although promising in theory and the beginning, couldn't produce a life saving block buster product and now the parent company might die or be buyed out.
by acdha | 2025-10-31 01:00:26+00:00
We did get good returns but that was because other units did very well. It’s not a given but still too likely that they’d botch AI products but still be profitable due to ad sales continuing to grow. I do think AI has better than average chances, though, because it seems to have scared their senior management enough to do their jobs: from outside, everything appears to radiate “this can’t fail” in a way they haven’t had since the 2000s.
by silisili | 2025-10-31 01:00:54+00:00
On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.

On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.

I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
by zhivota | 2025-10-31 01:03:17+00:00
The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.

The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
by digdugdirk | 2025-10-31 01:03:18+00:00
^^^ This aspect of the arcana one is required to keep in working memory is an issue that's glossed over far too frequently. I understand that git is a developer focused tool, but requiring a user to keep a constant mental burden in working memory completely bars non-developers from using git in any legitimate way.

I'm not a welder or a metalworker, but I do know how to weld. I use a welder a handful of times per year when I need/want to. Welding is dangerous, and achieving excellence is a difficult and long road. But I can use the same tools as a pro and still get a few pieces of metal stuck together without having to relearn and restudy the whole system each time something goes wrong.

I haven't used jj in anger yet, but I think it might at least be approaching that style of developer tool.
by mystraline | 2025-10-31 01:05:14+00:00
Please.

Do you really honestly believe that the USAID spent $5M a year telling Sri Lankan journalists how to use non-gendered language?

That was a front for US-lead initiatives in a moderately opposing country. It was to funnel funds to destabilize what the USA didnt like.

And to be fair, good. The USA rested on its laurels for too long. Bout time they have to face the democracy they 'spread' is just fascism.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-31 01:05:53+00:00
Well yes but even a no forever would be revisited under the right circumstances.

But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.

What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
by f33d5173 | 2025-10-31 01:07:00+00:00
The issue is that downloading a software, for most people, implies an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task. If I'm going out of my way to download something, then I'm probably willing to learn a few knobs that give me more control. Hence why I suggested that such a person would rather use a website.

This is really just my read for why this sort of software isn't more common. Go ahead and make it, and if it ends up being popular I'll look the fool.
by lawrencechen | 2025-10-31 01:07:50+00:00
If your goal is to make something useful, I think the fastest way is probably to build a CLI only version since you can theoretically render heatmaps and make a task manager in a CLI form factor. And your background in Java/C# helps here.

Use Claude Code or Codex for everything, learn how to prompt well. >90% of cmux and 0github.com was written by LLMs. Most of it was just me asking the LLM to implement something, testing it to see if it works, and if it doesn't, I'll ask the LLM to write logs, and I'll paste the logs back to the LLM. Ask gpt-5-pro for architecture choices, like what tech/dependencies to use.

But if your goal is to learn React, I'd recommend going through the official getting started documentation, it's pretty good.
by tombert | 2025-10-31 01:10:15+00:00
I grew up using Windows but have been using Linux and Mac almost exclusively for the past fifteen years; the only exposure I get to Windows is when I have to play tech support for my parents [1].

I hated OS X when I first used it. A lot, actually. I didn't consider leaving my job over it (I couldn't have afforded it at the time even if I had wanted to), but I did think about trying to do an ultimatum with that employer to tell them to buy me a computer with Windows or let me install Linux on the Macbook (this was 2012 so it had the Intel chip). I got let go from that job before I really got a chance (which itself is a whole strange story), but regardless I really hated macOS at the time.

It wasn't until a few years later and a couple jobs after that I ended up growing to really like macOS, when Mavericks released, and a few years later, I actually ended up getting a job at Apple and I refuse to allow anyone to run Windows in my house.

My point is, I think people can actually learn and appreciate new platforms if they're given a chance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45708530
by joecool1029 | 2025-10-31 01:12:05+00:00
Depends on what you need but for SMS bandwidth.com was great. They always knew their shit when we spoke to them. They were just not interested in really small accounts. We quickly realized twilio was worst of the major options and built on Nexmo as alternate (which was fine until vonage bought them and didn't really understand the products or market, maybe it's better under ericsson ownership now, don't know left the space).

When I get text spam it almost always originated from twlio or formerly their subsidiary zipwhip.
by cy1414569 | 2025-10-31 01:12:37+00:00
Step into the next generation of storytelling. Veo 3.1 brings cinematic precision to AI video generation — now with 1080p resolution, multi-shot storytelling, native audio, and enhanced character consistency. Whether you're a filmmaker, educator, or brand creator, Veo 3.1 gives you the power to turn text prompts into visually stunning, emotionally engaging videos — complete with smooth lip-sync and realistic motion. Key Highlights: Multi-shot storytelling for dynamic scenes Native audio for natural soundscapes Consistent characters across shots Cinematic presets for instant visual polish 1080p output with professional-grade clarity Google Veo 3.1 isn’t just an AI video generator — it’s your creative partner in bringing imagination to life.
by archi42 | 2025-10-31 01:13:30+00:00
If you missed physical objects, they did not do ftir with fiducal markers, I guess? There were some nice demos back when that was novel, like over a decade ago.

Some of the tables I saw at trade shows (e.g. E-World in Essen) this year also had them. On one you could place 3d printed power plants and various energy storage systems onto a map. To adjust their output, you could turn them like a knob. The company sold a management system for small grid operators, which then reacted to those demo inputs.

> The product is a concept that I want to work more than it, historically, has.

Sad but true. But then they don't exactly fit into the usual living room. However, as specialized board game tables are getting more popular every year, we might yet see a market for smart variants emerging long term. Not a huge chance IMHO, but larger than zero.
by hammock | 2025-10-31 01:14:03+00:00
> officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

> The terms of the Nimbus deal would appear to prohibit Google and Amazon from the kind of unilateral action taken by Microsoft last month, when it disabled the Israeli military’s access to technology used to operate an indiscriminate surveillance system monitoring Palestinian phone calls.

I don’t understand the connection between these two things. The article seems all over the place.
Show HN: Write one primary AI config file; Export it to all AI Coding Assistants
by piratebroadcast | 2025-10-31 01:14:04+00:00
I made this free macOS app and want to see what y'all think:

Simplify your AI assisted coding setup. Write one primary instruction file with 'Agent Smith' then easily export it to your Gemini, Claude, and Codex AI coding assistants.

Simplify your AI-assisted coding setup. Write one master instruction file with Agent Smith, then export it directly to your project root for your Gemini, Claude, and Codex AI coding assistants to read.

Agent Smith lets developers create unified configuration files for all their AI coding tools. Instead of maintaining multiple prompt templates or setup notes, you define a single “Master Instruction” file per project that standardizes your coding environment across assistants.
by churchill | 2025-10-31 01:14:17+00:00
Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.

Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.

Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
by wildzzz | 2025-10-31 01:14:27+00:00
Canva has a lot of premium features. The free version is good enough for most people but Canva makes their money on the companies paying for enterprise licenses. Canva is now looking to sell Affinity to those same enterprise users as well. Adobe gained massive market share due to how easy it was to pirate their suite. Canva is looking to try things a different way. Offering it for free will gain a lot more users than only those willing to pirate it. Once Affinity is common on every creative's resume, it becomes that much easier of a sell to enterprise that they need Affinity in their shop as well.

Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-31 01:14:52+00:00
One thing seems pretty clear from the papers and technical information is that the product is not really aimed at the current approach that is used by mainstream AI models in the first place (where random numbers are far from the bottleneck and sampling from a distribution is generally done by either picking a random starting point and then having a neural net move towards the 'closest' point or by having a neural net spit out a simplified distribution for part of the result and picking randomly from that. In this approach the neural net computation is completely deterministic and takes the bulk of the compute time).

The stuff they talk about in the paper is mainly about things that were in vogue when AI was called Machine Learning where you're essentially trying to construct and sample from very complicated distributions to try to represent your problem in a Bayesian way (i.e. trying to create a situation where you can calculate 'what's the most probable answer given this problem'. In this approach it's often useful to have a relatively small 'model' but to be able to feed random numbers predicated on it back into itself to be able to sample from a distribution which would otherwise be essentially intractable to sample from). This kind of thing was very successful for some tasks but AFAIK those tasks would generally be considered quite small today (and I don't know how many of those have now been taken over by neural nets anyway).

This is why I say it looks very niche and it feels like the website tries to just ride on the AI hypetrain by association with the term.